Tag: media

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.

Surviving the cultural war

Everyday Joe interviews Pax Dickinson, whose job was one of the early casualties of a confirmed SJW attack in technology.

EJ: Was it hard for you to re-enter business after what happened?

Dickinson: I eventually managed to find work at below-market rates through friends and former co-workers, after promising to conceal my identity. I knew I wanted to launch another startup though, and the resultant notoriety from the blacklisting ended up putting me in contact with Chuck Johnson and he had this great idea for a journalism crowdfunding site, I couldn’t possibly turn down that kind of adventure.

Ultimately being blacklisted and fired is the best thing that ever happened to me, due to the high-profile nature I was able to use it somewhat to my advantage. I’ve met so many amazing people because of what happened to me and while it did close a lot of doors for me, it opened some others and the ones it opened are far more interesting anyway.

I think it’s important for me to keep my profile high and make sure everyone sees a guy who has been put through that social justice shaming ordeal come out the other side of it unbowed and refusing to slink away in disgrace. They’ve taken their shot at me and I’m still standing, and now they’re out of ammo and all it accomplished was pissing me off.

EJ: Any advice for surviving an attack like you suffered?

Dickinson: Vox Day’s book SJWs Always Lie is essential and he gets it right. Never apologize. I eventually let myself get talked into giving an apology of sorts, it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have bothered.

I think now that it’s been publicized, there are people who want to help. I’ve talked to a few people who have been fired for their opinions and given them advice. I think those of us who have lost our jobs due to this kind of censorship need to stand together and support each other whenever possible.

The only thing you can ultimately do is try to engineer a career for yourself that is as anti-fragile as possible. People like Mike Cernovich and Vox Day are leading the way and WeSearchr is an attempt to follow in that vein. When we get attacked by social justice warriors it only makes us stronger.

EJ: What’s your opinion of Donald Trump’s presidential run? Do you think he’ll make a difference in fighting Political Correctness in America?

Dickinson: I think Trump is great, and it has nothing to do with his policies. He represents the regular guy standing up and telling the PC gang that we’re not gonna take it anymore.

Win or lose, he’s setting an example to the men of America how to respond to bullshit shaming tactics. The guy is an inspiration, frankly. I hope to see some other billionaires following the example that Trump and Thiel are setting. I get the sense that a lot of the Silicon Valley top CEOs are quietly sympathetic and I hope they find their balls and start pushing back as well before it’s too late. Trump is doing even more important work as a national life coach right now than he would probably be able to do as President.

WeSearchr is very interesting and might have some serious potential in light of the way the culture war is developing. I’m still trying to get my head around the most effective way to make use of it.

A true account of the Milo riot

Mike Cernovich was there for Milo’s speech at Depaul University:

We predicted that 2016 would be the year of the shutdown. But, even I didn’t see this coming. And I was at the Chicago Trump rally that got shut down a few months ago.

So, to show my support, I decided to attend my friend Milo Yiannopoulos’ speaking event in Chicago. What I saw happen there was incredible; and I want to share every detail with you now.

The event was announced about a week prior to when it was to be held. R.S.V.P. was available online in order to secure your seat.

The event also required you sign a waiver. (For those of you that don’t know, this consent form has to do with the ‘triggly puff’ video that appeared from one of his previous rallies.)

My friend Bernard got me signed up. He told me that they would have your name and check you off a sheet when you entered the venue. He also told me that there were some planned protests against the event, but that the protest page stated that it was not intended to shut down the event.

I told him there was no way they would shut it down. Milo was no Trump; he’s not big enough of a target to shut down.

Boy, was I wrong.

Read it all there. It is both informative and substantive, from an eyewitness perspective. It’s also troubling to observe how neither the campus police nor the hired security did anything to interfere with the protesters.

Why Jonah hates Milo

It’s not the plot of a new gay teen drama on Nickelodeon, it’s merely Caleb Q. Washington explaining the intergenerational conflict within the Right:

Liberal Fascism attacked left-wing identity in its very title and cover. It was an attack that demanded rebuttal by the left. In effect, it benefited from the forces which people like Milo Yiannopoulos and, dare I say it, Donald Trump, have explicitly made use of for their advantage.

If The Tyranny of Cliches had been re-titled, and I’m just spit-balling here, “The Left’s Biggest Lies” with a cartoon of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama dressed as Pinocchio, it might have been more of a success.

Milo Yiannopoulos, on the other hand, has risen to prominence (eclipsing Goldberg’s Twitter follower count this spring) by harnessing these very same forces to his benefit. Milo first came to my attention when he dropped the first supportive piece on GamerGate from any well-known news outlet.

The political genius of this was entirely lost on the rest of the right. Becoming the champion of gamers against the worst elements of the left, he forced people on the left to defend their most despicable elements, stay silent, or join him. It forced the left to fight on its own turf.

He’s done the same thing with the zaniness on college campuses. With his speaking tour, Milo has repeatedly stirred controversy. This has led to forcing people on the left to distance itself from the worst of the craziness in a way no other conservative has done.

Milo has reaped huge dividends from this strategy, both as a proponent for the right, and personally.

So, why is there conflict?

The simple answer is that Jonah and Milo are avatars for each side of the generational schism on the right. While not an old man himself, Jonah is their representative. The old men on the right seek to hold the line in a conflict of attrition with the left over disputed ground. The young men seek to fight on what the left thought was safe turf.

This brings us to the specific conflict today.

There are two groups of people on the right Jonah, and the rest of the old men revile. The first are agitators who knowingly say extreme things aimed to upset the old men. They are getting trolled, and are looking bad as a result. The whole point of the activity is to make the old men angry, and in their anger for them to act in a way that turns people off from them. It’s a classical rhetorical move explained by Aristotle. They seek to inspire anger in their targets and succeed. The other group are simply people who take a more extreme right-wing view than is considered socially acceptable.

The old men and Jonah Goldberg hate these people more than they hate the left, as they seek a monopoly of right wing though, and Milo Yiannopoulos has no interest in condemning them. He even delivers apologia for them.

This also explains why I am on Milo’s side, despite being of an age with Jonah. Now, I actually like Jonah. I understand him, and I think his Liberal Fascism was a very good and important book. I even paid homage to it with the cover of SJWs Always Lie.

But being an editor at National Review, Jonah has always been allied with the Old Men of National Review, while I have always been Too Extreme for them despite being identified as the most talented right-wing columnist of my generation by Universal Press Syndicate and being signed as a prospective replacement for William F. Buckley by them.

And wow, did that ever fail!

I am middle-aged, but being a game designer, my heart is with the brash young gamers of #GamerGate, not the aging cuckservatives of National Review. I don’t pretend to be with it – I have no idea what the equivalent of early techno in the 1990s might be these days – and considering how long it took me to recover from an intra-club scrimmage with the prima squadra and having to defend 19-year-old wingers, I am VERY aware of my age these days.

But Jonah, Rod Lowry, Rod Dreher, and other 40-somethings need to realize that we are no longer the Young Turks of the Right, and it is time to either get with the #AltRight and support the up-and-coming new guys or wander off into the pastures of political irrelevance.