Nero has some important observations that those in other communities attacked by the SJW Left should take to heart:
In all of the distracting, hysterical, evidence-free and unfair allegations of misogyny and bigotry hurled at supporters of GamerGate, the consumer revolt that continues to surface outrageous misconduct in the video games press, something is being forgotten.
GamerGate is remarkable—and attracts the interest of people like me—because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.
Industry after industry has toppled over, putting up no more of a fight than, say, France in 1940. Publishing, journalism, TV… all lie supine beneath the crowing, cackling, censorious battle-axes, male and female, of the third-wave feminist and social justice causes.
But not gamers. Lovers of video games, on seeing their colleagues unfairly hounded as misogynists, on watching journalists credulously reporting scandalous sexual assault claims just because a person was perceived to be “right-wing” and on seeing the games they love attacked and their very identities denied and ridiculed, have said: no. This will not stand.
The key, as he points out is here: “Because hard-core gaming is overwhelmingly male—don’t believe cherry-picked statistics that tell you women now make up 50 per cent of gamers; they don’t, in any meaningful sense—and because those men are often of a stubborn, obsessive, hyper-competitive and systematic bent, it has produced an army finally capable of launching offensives against the censors—using the censors’ own tactics, such as advertiser boycotts, against them.”
Keep in mind the Four Fs of Victory. Fight, Follow, or get the F— out of the way. And if you’re a concern moderate who has “concerns” or is “worried” or thinks one tactic or another might be “counterproductive”, shut the F— up.
As history clearly shows, you’re the one who is counterproductive.
Jessica Valenti is one of the most successful and visible feminists of her generation. As a columnist for the Guardian, her face regularly appears on the site’s front page. She has written five books, one of which was adapted into a documentary, since founding the blog Feministing.com. She gives speeches all over the country. And she tells me that, because of the nonstop harassment that feminist writers face online, if she could start over, she might prefer to be completely anonymous. “I don’t know that I would do it under my real name,” she says she tells young women who are interested in writing about feminism. It’s “not just the physical safety concerns but the emotional ramifications” of constant, round-the-clock abuse….
Once a woman is singled out by a men’s rights group such as A Voice for Men, the misogynist Reddit forum The Red Pill or even just a right-wing Twitter account like Twitchy, she is deluged with hatred. The barrage, in addition to scaring its target, serves as a warning to onlookers. Jill Filipovic, a senior political writer covering feminist issues at Cosmopolitan, says she recently tried to persuade a friend to run for office. “There’s several reasons why I wouldn’t want to do it, but one of them is that I follow you on Twitter, and I see what people say to you. I could never deal with that,” the friend told her.
Many people can’t. Last year, abortion rights activist Lauren Rankin pulled back from writing online and, for the most part, from Twitter because the threats and insults were becoming so wearying. She continues to serve on the board of the reproductive rights nonprofit A Is For and faces off against antiabortion protesters as a volunteer clinic escort, but she no longer engages publicly. “I don’t like the idea that it seems like I was scared or intimidated away from the Internet,” she says. “But I think I’ve recentered why I do what I do, in ways that I can maintain my mental sanity. Unfortunately, that really doesn’t involve the Internet as much.”
Filipovic, the former editor of the blog Feministe, says that, although her skin has thickened over the years, the daily need to brace against the online onslaught has changed her. “I doubt myself a lot more. You read enough times that you’re a terrible person and an idiot, and it’s very hard not to start believing that maybe they see something that you don’t.” She also finds it harder to let her guard down. “I have not figured out how to spend all day steeling against criticism — not just criticism, but really awful things people say to you and about you — and then go home and 30 minutes later you’re an emotionally available, normal person.”
Meanwhile, the creator of Feministe, Lauren Bruce, no longer has an online presence at all. “I had to completely cut that part off in order to live the rest of my life,” she says. “In order to work, have a nice family and feel like I was emotionally whole, I could not have one foot planted in a toxic stew.”
#GamerGate has them on the run. They can’t take the heat. What they call “harassment” and “abuse” is seldom anything more than free speech answering free speech. They have a right to speak their piece, and we have a right to speak right back. We have a right to speak back with all of the contempt, disdain, and loathing that we feel for their insane and societally suicidal ideas.
Open up your hate and let it pour over them. Don’t think for even one nanosecond that they don’t deserve it every bit of the criticism, of the contempt, of the disdainful dismissal that overwhelms them. They are trying to destroy Western civilization. They are trying to destroy marriage and civil society. They are advocates of child murder. They are advocates of a philosophy that makes National Socialism look merciful and Communism practical and Fascism coherent by comparison. Do not hold back. Speak back twice as hard. Speak back until they fall silent.
Women are particularly susceptible to shame. So shame them relentlessly. Shame those who agree with them. Mock their white knights who rush in to save them. Above all, dignify their views and voices with all the respect you would show to a particularly noxious fart in an elevator.
A day after he engaged in multiple Twitter arguments and called Penn State students “pitiful,” ESPN suspended Keith Olbermann for a week. The global sports network released a statement Tuesday announcing the news, saying Olbermann’s actions were “completely inappropriate and [do] not reflect the views of ESPN.”
So much for saving the news media from the Brian Williams crisis.
Hope is of real value as a chronicle of a career. For even though Bob Hope’s work is no longer capable of holding the attention of modern audiences, it is still interesting to learn the details of how he turned himself into a star and then managed to stay on top of the mass-culture heap long after most of his less-driven contemporaries had vanished from sight. But Zoglin, for all his admirable thoroughness, inexplicably fails to emphasize the central fact about Hope and his career—one that not only goes a long way toward explaining why he was so successful, but also why we no longer find him funny.
Simply: He wasn’t Jewish.
What was missing from his style? Even though Hope was a first-generation European immigrant, there was nothing remotely ethnic about his stage manner. He was among the few successful WASP comics of his generation, and despite the fact that he hired such Jewish writers as Larry Gelbart and Mel Shavelson, the jokes they penned for him lacked the sharp ironic tang of Jewish humor that is to this day one of the essential ingredients in American comedy.
During World War II, when Americans shared both a common culture and an iron determination to prevail over their common enemy, such a comedian could speak for millions of listeners from coast to coast. But that America no longer exists, and the Americans of the 21st century demand more from comedy than mere reassurance. That is why Bob Hope is forgotten today, and will remain so. All he had to offer were punchlines that no longer have punch.
As one commenter mentioned, this appears to be an attempt by the Dutch Teachout to curry favor with the inward-focused aging Jews who read Commentary and think Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce are the epitome of humor. Hope held up a hell of a lot better than either Allen or Bruce have, and Allen isn’t even dead yet. Let’s face it, the funniest thing Allen ever produced was his self-parodying, quasi-incestuous marriage.
I’ve never been able to stand what is described as “Jewish humor” myself; I disliked it long before I had any idea that the stupid sort of sex-and-toilet “humor” produced by the likes of Mel Brooks and the whiny tedium of Woody Allen had anything in common, let alone were claimed by a particular ethnic heritage. Later, I tried watching “Seinfeld” and completely failed to see what was supposed to be funny about Jerry Seinfeld whining all the time.
Joan Rivers could be amusing in small doses, but one of the main things I’ve noticed about “Jewish humor” is that it seems to have a strong tendency to beat a joke to death. “Hey, did you think that was mildly amusing? Let me repeat it three more times and that will make it HILARIOUS, right?” Well, no. That’s actually one thing I wish non-comedians would understand. If you told a little story and you found the reaction to be underwhelming, don’t repeat it. It’s not going to be any more amusing the second time.
Now, I’ve always assumed there was a great divide between those who found Monty Python amusing and those who thought Benny Hill was a riot. “Jewish humor” strikes me as being more akin to an American form of Benny Hill, as it tends to involve a lot of mugging and sexual themes.
Then again, the second-funniest comic in the world, Frankie Boyle (Simon Evans, two of whose clips are below, is the funniest in my opinion), utilizes a lot of sexual themes, although usually in a very dark way. “Watching gymnastics is just pedophilia for cowards.” But there is an enormous gap between that sort of black humor and Woody Allen whining to his therapist or Mel Brooks’s masturbating cavemen. I remember people talking about how funny Brooks’s History of the World: Part I was so I rented it one night; I don’t think I made it more than 15 minutes before ejecting the tape from the VCR in disgust. Keep in mind that this scene is supposed to be THE most HILARIOUS one from the movie. Notice, in particular, the repetition I mentioned; The very lame joke on French pronunciations is hammered home no less than TWELVE times at the very start. Yeah, that’s just fucking brilliant. Then contrast that sort of production, complete with writers, sets, and actors, with the following examples of Simon Evans utilizing nothing more than a microphone.
Of course, it’s pretty much pointless to view comedy as anything but subjective, something that is much more apparent when you live in continental Europe. German humor is freaking ghastly, it’s like black comedy without the comedy. Italian humor is bawdy and straightforward; they simply don’t recognize sarcasm at all. French humor is similar to Italian humor, although a bit more relaxed and less silly, and I haven’t figured out Spanish humor yet. It’s no surprise that English humor has such an impact on American humor; it’s not because they speak the same language, but because it’s broad-spectrum humor that is often appreciated by non-English speakers.
“I’m just a comedian goes first!” I would have loved to see Evans skewer the Jon Stewart Show, as Stewart, unlike Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, can be funny, but like Russell Brand, hides behind his comedian’s mask whenever his serious arguments fall short.
UPDATE: I found this pair of Twitter exchanges to be more personally amusing than the entire oeuvre of either comedian mentioned:
Vox Day @voxday I’m curious how anyone could have ever thought Woody Allen was amusing. The only funny thing he ever did was bang his ugly stepdaughter.
Jackie DeLister @JackieDeeNJ Yes, Annie Hall won the Oscar for no reason -_-
Vox Day @voxday So did Titanic. And it had more genuine laughs.
——–
Vox Day @voxday And who finds Mel Brooks funny? This is said to be the funniest scene of his funniest movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3e8Qw9hhs … It’s BRUTALLY stupid.
Jackie DeLister @JackieDeeNJ @voxday Are you anti-Semitic?
No wonder the mainstream media fears comments. This may also explain why so many trolls consider themselves to be self-appointed blog police. Although I doubt they have much effect here:
Ionnis Kareklas, Darrel D. Muehling, and TJ Weber, all of Washington State University, found that the comments on a public-service announcement about vaccination affected readers’ attitudes as strongly as the P.S.A. itself did. When commenters were identified by their level of expertise with the subject (i.e. as doctors), their comments were more influential than the P.S.A.s.
Online readers may put a lot of stock in comments because they view commenters “as kind of similar to themselves,” said Mr. Weber — “they’re reading the same thing, commenting on the same thing.” And, he added, many readers, especially those who are less Internet-savvy, assume commenters “know something about the subject, because otherwise they wouldn’t be commenting on it.” The mere act of commenting, then, can confer an unearned aura of credibility.
That news may be especially disturbing to those already skeptical of comments’ overall quality. Dr. Kareklas and his team were inspired by Popular Science’s decision to get rid of the comments sections on its website; other publications, like Pacific Standard, have done the same. And Tauriq Moosa memorably wrote at The Guardian that the comments section “sits there like an ugly growth beneath articles, bloated and throbbing with vitriol.”
If only those nasty online peasants would shut up, stop interfering with the flow of propaganda, and recognize that communication is supposed to go one way!
The article appears to ignore the obvious fact that most sites permitting comments are communities of a sort, and commenters, being members of that community, are often familiar with the other commenters and therefore know how much stock to put in the credibility of another commenter. I put stock in a commenter for the same reason I put stock in a media site, which is to say, his past performance. Why wouldn’t one trust a known expert, with whom one is familiar, more than a public service announcement from an institution known to be corrupt?
Seriously, it just doesn’t. Hitler finds out about Brian Williams’s proclivity to, shall we say, exaggerate his experiences:
While the best line concerns Sofia Vergara and Kate Upton, I genuinely cracked up at the last one. Watch the whole thing. Williams is done after this. There is no way he can possibly come back from it; literally everything he says is going to be immediately transformed into parody.
It would have been vastly more entertaining had Thor come out of the closet. The Fabulous Thor! His outfit was always a little camp anyhow. Turning him into a grim transgendered feminist fighting to impose equalitarian thought control is as boring as it is offensive:
Thor a woman? It’s hard to believe the most macho, overtly masculine character in the comic canon could possibly be reimagined as a broad. But that’s almost certainly precisely the reason Thor was chosen: as a fuck-you to so-called nerdbros from the achingly progressive staff of today’s comic book establishment.
This has led to some questions from comic book fans. Questions such as: will Wonder Woman turn out to be a tranny? Is the Incredible Hulk only incredible because he endured cruel fat-shaming as a teen but didn’t let his size define him? And shouldn’t Spider-Man be a gay latino?
That last one’s not a joke, by the way: in 2011, Marvel unveiled a bisexual Spider-Man that was half-black and half-latino, called Miles Morales, to the consternation and confusion of ordinary comic book fans, as part of its Ultimate series of character reboots. We’re told “erasure,” whereby people’s pasts are scrubbed out by those in authority, is a social justice issue. Well, right now there’s erasure going in the basic, canonical biographies of some of Marvel’s most cherished superheroes.
Captain America, too, is changing: he’s becoming black. Changes like this are designed to provoke readers, and they do–not because readers are racist or sexist, but because they understand that certain characteristics are intrinsic to certain characters. James Bond and Captain America are obviously white. It is a part of their personalities. Thor is obviously a man; to suggest otherwise is daft.
What sticks in the craw of the fans I’ve spoken to about female Thor is how utterly transparent the political posturing is behind the change. There is no good literary justification for making Thor a woman, they say–and the results have been execrable. You can write intelligent satire about masculinity without making a classic masculine icon into a girl, an observation that seems to have escaped Marvel’s writers.
Of course, what all of these transformations most strongly indicate is the fact that Marvel believes women and minorities to be totally uninteresting. Not only does it highlight the fact that women and minorities can’t create their own characters, but even pro-intersectional white men can’t manage to create them in a manner that interests anyone, least of all women and minorities.
It’s exactly the same thing as a communist government taking over a capitalist society. They don’t understand how it works or why it works, they can’t create it or maintain it, but they can certainly manage to run it into the ground.
This comment from the SJWs at IGN is hilariously inapt:
“Not only do these scenes subtly acknowledge and render inert the concerns voiced by real life detractors, but they also paint the character in a stronger, more resilient light.” — IGN
Subtle? The only way Marvel could have handled it any less subtly was if Thor spent the entire issue reading The Vagina Monologues with Gloria Steinhem at Wellesley.
As a number of news sites eliminate their comments sections altogether, Tablet, a daily online magazine of Jewish news and culture, is introducing a new policy charging its readers to comment on articles.
As of today, a reader visiting the nonprofit site that is otherwise paywall-free will have to pay at least $2 to leave a comment at the foot of any story. The move is not part of a plan to generate any significant revenue, but rather to try and change the tone of its comments section.
Tablet has set up commenting charges of $2 a day, $18 a month and $180 a year, because “the Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion, allowing vocal—and, often, anonymous—minorities to drag it down with invective (and worse),” editor in chief Alana Newhouse wrote in a post published today.
Charging for comments might work at a truly elite site like the New York Times. The level of exposure and the ability to associate one’s opinion right underneath a Paul Krugman column would be valuable to certain parties; I would have paid for such a comment-ad back when RGD came out myself.
But even at a site of modest popularity such as this one, the proposal would make no sense except as a roundabout way of banning comments without being seen to do so. This is one of the more prolifically commented sites in the blogosphere, but how many people here would pay $180 per year to comment here? I’d guess around ten or 20 people; Nate might pay that just to eliminate all the commenters from AG.
The problem is that the discourse would then be strictly limited to the same small group of people, it would become an insulated and repetitious conversation with an audience; it would become a form of conspicuous performance art. And does anyone doubt that trolls like Andrew Marston would even hesitate to cough up whatever it cost in order to buy a captive audience for his delusional meanderings?
As is the case with writers who calculate their lost sales by counting pirated copies, Tablet clearly fails to realize that someone who is willing to comment for free is not synonymous with someone who is willing to pay to comment. The latter tend to be a very small subset of the former.
They have really dragged out this Sarkeesian thing considerably further than I ever would have imagined. It’s beyond parody at this point.
It’s a long-established tradition for TV shows to draw inspiration from real-life events. NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” is no different, and Wednesday, February 11, sees the crime drama series tackle Gamergate in an episode entitled “Intimidation Game.” The plot centers on the online harassment and kidnapping of a game developer, Raina Punjabi, modelled on controversial feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian.
NBC’s trailer opens with Punjabi discussing the threats she’s received with police. She is set to attend an important game launch but has become the victim of an online harassment campaign. Punjabi insists that she will attend the launch, however, because not only is it a massive international event but also she refuses to give in to online hordes of anonymous, misogynistic trolls. During the conversation, terms like “swatting,” “doxxing,” and “dark net” are referenced, with one detective pointing out that online threats are “not covered by free speech.” The dialogue is embarrassingly clumsy, written for an audience not familiar with Gamergate or the more complex workings of the internet.
This is so ludicrously absurd. What is next, NCIS featuring a three-part episode that involves the murder of a neurotic transvestite who calls himself Brianna Who? An epic fantasy HBO series entitled “The Saga of Yamanamama”?
Anyhow, I hope the bad guys are a team that involves a guy in a wheelchair, a television actor, and a handsome, athletic, forty-something game developer and novelist. That would be amusing.
Sure, Brian Williams may not have been shot at, or seen any dead bodies, but when he tells you that vaccines are perfectly safe, the economy is growing, and Vladimir Putin is about to invade France, you can have absolute confidence that what he is saying is true:
On Wednesday night, the world we live in became a confusing and unfamiliar place and most of us wandered the land not knowing what to believe when Brian Williams admitted that he was never in a chopper that was hit by RPG fire in Iraq in 2003. Brian was actually safely traveling in a different chopper. How can we believe anything now that Brian Williams has dribbled out lies to us? When Brian Williams says, “Good evening, I’m Brian Williams and this is the Nighty News,” do we know for sure it’s the evening and that it’s a good evening and that his name really is Brian Williams? Is that picture of Brian Williams’ supposed bulge a picture of his actual bulge or did he just stuff his khakis with the sack he keeps his lies in? Everything is squint-worthy now!!!
After getting called out on the lie he told, Brian said in Wednesday night’s broadcast of the NBC Nightly News that he “misremembered” the whole thing. Here’s Brian Williams’ apology in case you missed it:
Since Brian Williams admitted to “misremembering” the events of that day in Iraq, the media has been digging up and looking for other possible lies told by Brian Will-lie. The New Orleans Advocate says that while reporting in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, Brian claimed to have seen a dead body floating in the French Quarter. But apparently, the French Quarter did not flood during Hurricane Katrina and remained pretty dry. Brian also claimed he got sick with dysentery after accidentally drinking floodwater, but a local health expert doesn’t remember anyone coming down with that shit. Basically, everything is a lie. Was Brian Williams even in New Orleans and Iraq? He was probably just reporting in front of a green screen. Has he even been in a helicopter? Riding in a helicopter while playing Call of Duty doesn’t count. Is Brian Williams real? Are we sure he’s not just a hologram made by NBC?
An NBC News source tells Page Six that he’s not going to be suspended or punished in any way.
Williams can’t even tell the truth about things that he experienced directly. So why would you believe anything that he, or any other talking head, reads to you off a teleprompter?
