Tag: media

Mark Kern banned by Twitter

World of Warcraft developer Mark Kern kicked off Twitter:

Twitter has joined Facebook and Reddit in Silicon Valley’s post-Orlando hall of shame. They’ve become the latest social media platform to censor users for discussing this weekend’s Islamic terror attack.

The victim is Mark Kern, a highly prominent video game developer who worked on the original edition of Blizzard’s highly acclaimed World Of Warcraft, who was suspended from Twitter earlier today.

Kern currently runs the League For Gamers, a consumer advocacy group fighting censorship and moral panic in the video games industry. Kern, who had more than 61,000 followers on Twitter prior to his suspension, was a frequent critic of the platform for its drift towards censorship over the past two years. Now he’s been censored himself.

Unbelievable. The thought police are running completely amok in the wake of Orlando. Too much dangerous thinking!

UPDATE: And after stories on Breitbart and Drudge, he’s back.

4GW in Orlando

Glenn Reynolds contemplates the Orlando shootings and gives a shout out to William S. Lind in USA Today:

In the wake of the Orlando shootings, people are trotting out the usual
post-massacre talking points about gun control, terrorism, etc. But the
solutions aren’t so easy. Gun control is much stricter in Europe, but that hasn’t stopped mass shootings like the ones at Charlie Hebdo’s offices or at the Bataclan concert hall. (It’s also very strict in California, but that didn’t stop the shootings at San Bernardino.) Talking about gun control is mostly a way of avoiding a tough problem.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, was quick to tweet out that this vindicates his positions: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” But Trump’s proposal of a temporary moratorium on immigration of Muslims to America wouldn’t have prevented shooter Omar Mateen’s actions. Mateen wasn’t a recent immigrant but a  U.S. citizen born of Afghan parents, and he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group, according to a Department of Homeland Security report cited by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

The thing is, proposals such as gun control are basically peacetime remedies, which don’t apply in time of war. But traditional wartime remedies might not work, either, because this is not a traditional war.

Instead, what we are facing is what William S. Lind calls “fourth-generation warfare.” Or maybe it’s even fifth-generation warfare: We’re not fighting armies. We’re not fighting guerrillas. We’re not even fighting traditional terrorists. Instead, we’re fighting an opponent who turns apparently law-abiding citizens (Mateen was licensed as a security guard and thus had passed background checks) into killers without anyone noticing. They’re not actually “lone wolf” terrorists; they’re more like human drones, attacking distant targets on command without warning.

While I disagree with Reynolds on the root of the problem – the problem is Islam’s physical presence in the West, not merely addressing “the jihadist strain of Islam” – it’s good to see him bringing a more sophisticated modern take on warfare into the public discourse. There is simply no way a conventional military approach, much less a conventional police approach, is going to suffice to address the challenge being posed by the third great wave of Islamic expansion.

It will take time for people to realize that this is an existential crisis for the West, as existential crises are, by their nature, much larger in scope than the average person can readily comprehend.

But, as those who have read the 4GW Handbook know, the answer to 4GW is either a) eliminating the fish by draining the sea, or b) more effective 4GW utilizing a better light infantry. It will be several years before either option will be on the table, but the sooner they enter into the conversation, the better.

Nothing is safe

The anti-SJW faction of #GamerGate is proved correct once again. It’s not about the subject at hand, it’s about whatever the Narrative happens to be at the moment. SJWs will attack anything and anyone they deem offensive. Forget video games, comics, and tabletop, even pigs are a potential battleground as far as SJWs are concerned.

One day I embarked on what I believed to be a simple, innocuous project: provide a list of cute little pigs being cute little pigs. Around the internet, these creatures have a few interpretations. Some call them micropigs (also known as mini pigs), believing them to be a special breed of animal that stay the size of a tiny piglet.

Some believe the whole micropig idea to be a hoax. From my research, I found the reality of the micropig to be somewhere in the middle. Sure, there were specially bred pigs that were smaller than their massive farm-dwelling counterparts, but they certainly didn’t stay baby-sized. They were, however, gosh darn cute in their younger years, so I decided to make a list of them being adorable while making sure to include a caveat that what you see is not, in fact, what you always get if you purchase a micropig.

I then added a few pictures of micropigs at an adult size for good measure. At the end of the day, though, I had the comfort of knowing that no sane person would look at a listicle of cute pigs and decide to purchase one the same day without, you know, doing a slight bit of research before throwing a few thousand dollars at a breeder.

I trusted in people’s ability to make smart decisions for themselves. When it comes to writing things on the internet, that is not a good decision….

Almost immediately, my list of cute pigs was seen by some very vocal people as a damaging portrayal of the micropig myth that leads to the abandonment and death of pigs around the globe every day. I was a monster, I had created a monster, and I should be shamed publicly for my creation.

The comments began, as they always do, on Facebook. The traffic for the piece was, at the time, record shattering for the site. But as the post started spreading, the comments started accumulating. Some genuinely appreciated the article for the cuteness it provided. Some tagged their friends to enjoy the cute pictures.

But some were enraged. Some worked in animal shelters that had pigs abandoned by people who thought their pet would stay a baby forever, but some were simply fighting the good fight for all people everywhere. I was wrong and, fueled by the ever-intoxicating assumption that they were right and needed to teach the world why I was wrong, they went on a tear.

They needed to save the public from themselves and, most importantly, from me, a caption writer on a listicle website.

Was I taking this too personally? Here’s the thing: When people are angry on the internet, they get personal. And they get mean. And boy, do they get creative.

Soon, people weren’t just commenting on the article. They found me on Facebook, on my photography website, and on Twitter.

 SJW delenda est. Identify and eject them without hesitation wherever you find them.

Blinded by the white

Walter Hudson explains how you can understand the very-bad, very-evil, and let us not forget, RACIST Alt-Right on PJ Media:

In some ways, the civil rights era of the 1960s ended in tragedy. Important strides were made toward empowering minorities with equal political rights and moving the American culture toward greater alignment with its founding values. But there was a dark side. Communist agitators infiltrated the movement and perverted it from one pursuing equality to one seeking to undermine American institutions. Today’s Democratic Party would be unrecognizable to the likes of JFK or LBJ.

In a similar way, the alt-right has begun the process of corrupting and fundamentally transforming the Republican Party. They have leveraged both the aggression of the racialized left and a widespread dissatisfaction with the political establishment to embed themselves parasitically within the party. It is as Michael van der Galien describes:

    … These people have nothing to do with conservatism. More precisely, they represent the complete opposite: conservatism is focused on individuals; they are focused on groups or, as they call them, tribes. They’re collectivists, and racist collectivists at that.

Similarly, the communist agitators of the 1960s had nothing to do with liberalism, as anyone familiar with the classical variety knows.

In summary, we’re dealing with an amorphous and decentralized movement of white racialists who have taken on a benign-sounding new name in an effort to market themselves as somehow respectable. They have infiltrated the Republican Party under the cover of anti-incumbency and conservative frustration with the status quo. They cloak their overtly racist ideas in high-sounding language referencing “the American way” or “American culture” — which really just means the white race. Whether Donald Trump has conscientiously appealed to them or not, his candidacy is viewed as a beacon signaling that they may creep from the shadows and stake a claim in the mainstream.

This is a vile movement that must be recognized, removed from the Republican Party through some form of biopsy, and cast back into the dustbin of history from which it escaped. The actual American way requires it.

It’s not a terrible comparison, but he makes two very serious mistakes. First, the Alt-Right is not parasitical upon the Republican Party. We are not part of the Republican Party and we have not infiltrated it.

We are, rather, replacing the Republican Party in much the same way the Republican Party replaced the Whigs. We have nothing to do with what they call conservatism. We are not conservatives. We do not value much of what they value and we do not wish to conserve whatever it is that they think they are conserving.

Unlike Mr. Hudson, the Alt-Right knows its American history. The American way is white. The American culture is white. I am only part-American, and I can conclusively say that American (white) culture is different than American Indian (red) culture and Mexican (brown) culture,  the other two cultures to which I have, in part, inherited.

Second, the Alt-Right is nationalist, it is not merely a white identity movement. We support free association for all nationalities and we oppose the propositionalists of every stripe, whether they are (((melting potists))), (((huddled massers))), born American elsewhereans, or Ein Welt, Eine Rasse, Eine Regierung globalists.

In any event, it is encouraging that PJ Media is so concerned about the Alt-Right. It means that they know people are fleeing cuckservatism and becoming more and more conscious of the signal importance of identity in the current year.

This comment was amusing:

3 ways to understand cuckservatives:

1) We’re not racists.
2) Please don’t call me racist.
3) Take my money, take my country but please stop calling me a racist!

Feeling the pressure

I won’t go so far as to say Trump choked, as at least he didn’t apologize or retract his comments about the Mexican judge, but he does appear to be feeling the pressure more than he did previously:

“It is unfortunate that my comments have been misconstrued as a categorical attack against people of Mexican heritage. I am friends with and employ thousands of people of Mexican and Hispanic descent,” Trump said. “I do not feel that one’s heritage makes them incapable of being impartial, but, based on the rulings that I have received in the Trump University civil case, I feel justified in questioning whether I am receiving a fair trial.”

Trump added that he’s “watched as the media has reported one inaccuracy after another concerning the ongoing litigation involving Trump University.” The statement doesn’t amount to a repudiation of his earlier comments, but it shows a tacit acknowledgment that he should tamp down his rhetoric.

Media-to-English Translation: he didn’t give us enough to properly nail him, but we’re going to see what we can make of it anyhow.

It’s tough when you suddenly feel that you’ve got something to lose. Someone in the Trump camp needs to remind him that he’s been at his best when free-wheeling and damning the torpedoes. He can survive any number of PC-violating gaffes, but the one thing that can definitely cost him the election is a failure of nerve.

The challenge is that he’s now got all sorts of advisers who are telling him to tone it down, to play the moderate, and to try to appeal to people who are never going to support him anyhow. He will have to find the self-confidence to blow them off and play the game his way.

More SJWs for the SJW list

Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post went running to the ADL because mean people tweeted memes at him.:

Jonathan Weisman Verified account ‏@jonathanweisman
Anti-Defamation League assembles high-powered team to look at racist, anti-Semitic harassment of journalists

 The high-powered team:

  • Danielle Citron, Lois K. Macht Research Professor & Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and expert on online harassment
  • Steve Coll, Dean of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
  • Todd Gitlin, Professor and Chair, Ph.D. Program, Columbia Journalism School
  • Brad Hamm, Dean of the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
  • Shawn Henry, retired Executive Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
  • Julia Ioffe, GQ Contributor and freelance writer
  • Bethany Mandel, New York Post and Jewish Daily Forward contributor
  • Leon Wieseltier, Contributing Editor at The Atlantic and Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy at The Brookings Institution

They’re going to make a list and check it twice. Of course, we make lists too. They should probably be given their own category as the ADL’s Journalist Police.

I almost pity them. Almost. How long do you give it before all of them shut down their social media accounts?

No free passes anymore

Journalists are astonished to discover that the subjects of their investigations can and will strike back these days:

Seeking to shine some light into the dark world of Internet trolls, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster asked members of her audience to share their experience of encounters with Russia’s “troll army,” a raucous and often venomous force of online agitators.

The response was overwhelming, though not in the direction that the journalist, Jessikka Aro, had hoped.

As she expected, she received some feedback from people who had clashed with aggressively pro-Russian voices online. But she was taken aback, and shaken, by a vicious retaliatory campaign of harassment and insults against her and her work by those same pro-Russian voices.

“Everything in my life went to hell thanks to the trolls,” said Ms. Aro, a 35-year-old investigative reporter with the social media division of Finland’s state broadcaster, Yle Kioski….

The hardest blow, Ms. Aro said, came early this year when a Finnish-language news site, MVLehti.net, which is based in Spain and mostly focuses on vilifying immigrants, dug up and published court records that showed she had been convicted of using illegal amphetamines in 2004. She had been fined 300 euros.

The website’s headline: “NATO’s information expert Jessikka Aro turned out to be a convicted drug dealer.” It also posted photographs of Ms. Aro dancing in a slinky outfit at a nightclub in Bangkok….

Ilja Janitskin, the founder and head of MVLehti, who is based in Barcelona, Spain, said in response to emailed questions that he had no connection with Russia other than his surname. His political views, he said, are closer to those of Donald J. Trump, not Mr. Putin.

He added that he had become interested in Ms. Aro only after she accused his website of “distributing Russian propaganda.”

I have zero sympathy for these idiots. For decades, they have been attacking, exposing, and attempting to publicly humiliate those their masters have told them to target. I’ve been the subject of more than a few hit pieces myself, everywhere from NPR and New Republic to the Guardian.

But now the Internet has leveled the playing field, so when someone lies about me, I can immediately set the record straight, or if I choose, launch an investigation into them. Notice how Aro is complaining about being the target of a man who only knew about her because she attacked him in the first place.

Shades of Scalzi and the SF-SJWs. Some people simply don’t understand that if you shoot at people, they will not only shoot back at you, but they have the option of continuing to do so long after you’d prefer a ceasefire. Remember, once you start something, you give up the ability to unilaterally decide that it’s over.