Tag: philosophy

Flawless Victory

But, but, Benny’s been told since he was a boy that he is “smart as a whip!” In addition to being a midwit’s idea of a smart person, Shapiro has always been a sell-out, and he’s not even within a standard deviation of me. There is a reason he contents himself with beating up on low-IQ college students, but has always run like a rabbit from a debate with me, or Milo, or any of his many intellectual superiors in the media space.

It is amusing to see him using rhetoric of my coinage, though. As one wit on SG suggested, no doubt we’ll soon be hearing him tell us what a “Sigma” he is. I despise the Littlest Chickenhawk, but I don’t hate him. To the contrary, I pity him, because I know for a fact that he never wanted to be what he eventually became. He’s rather like Gaiman and Scalzi, a mediocrity who was ultimately willing to take the ticket in order to achieve his ambitions, only unlike them, he knew ahead of time what it was going to cost him in terms of freedom and self-respect.

Kate Moss once famously said that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. In like manner, there is no success or fame that feels as satisfying as freedom and self-respect.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Value of Awards

One of the woman creators I follow won two Eisners (the comic book equivlanet of an Oscar) and can’t get her work published; she has to work as a cleaner, scrubbing floors.

If you ever wonder why I’m so contemptuous of awards and the people who assiduously pursue them, this is one reason why. Awards are politics. That’s all they ever are, from elementary school to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The fact that Michael Jordan won fewer MVP awards (5) than NBA titles (6) is all the evidence you need to understand that; on merit, he should have won at least 8, according to the Sports Guy.

There are hundreds of reasons to complain about the internet these days. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Just know that the internet never, in a million bazillion katrillion years, would have allowed Michael Jordan to lose the ’93 and ’97 MVPs. He should have won seven, not five… You know what? Jordan should have won eight MVPs. My bad, MJ. I counted wrong.

Also, ahem, Wes Unseld.

People try to cite the fact that no one buys award-winning diversity books and comics as evidence of oppression and marginalization, but that’s backwards. The awards not only mean nothing with regards to quality, they actually send a negative signal now to everyone who isn’t interested in reading either a) a lecture or b) the sort of story that is of absolutely no interest to them.

The reason so many award-winning writers, such as Neil Gaiman and Neil Scalzi, have imposter syndrome is because they are imposters. A mediocrity who has collected a few manifestations of mainstream approval is still a mediocrity.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Corpocracy Devours Itself

I thought the most informative aspect of this IBM employee’s critical rant about the former tech giant is the way it reveals how the corpocracy ends up devouring itself once it makes the shift from production to services. We’re presently seeing this transformation take place in the game space, as the corpocratic-“game developers” seek to capture customers and feed upon them over time rather than simply make good games and sell them to gamers.

And the larger corporations, of course, can’t survive by feeding on individual consumers, so they have to predate upon smaller corporations, locking them into “service contracts” and keeping them dependent upon their increasingly inferior technologies. The inevitable results are exactly the opposite of the theoretical benefits of so-called “capitalism”.

I have been at IBM for a couple of years now and I honestly question why any of us are still here, pretending that this company is going to turn it around. Our best days are long gone and what we are witnessing is the slow, painful death of IBM yet we are still on this sinking ship.

IBM Cloud is an absolute joke. It accounts for an extremely tiny fraction of the market and only because most companies that use it are trapped with IBM’s legacy systems. They’re not using it because it’s good but because they have no choice. We bought Red Hat for $34 billion because we dropped the ball so hard on cloud. Why build innovative cloud solutions when we can just acquire something decent and slap our logo on it? Our hybrid cloud strategy is merging old systems with slightly newer systems. Most of our cloud revenue comes from services, consulting, and managing cloud infrastructure AKA getting paid to help other companies figure out our legacy technology.

This is mostly why Global Services is our biggest revenue stream. We basically sell the solution to problems that IBM products make. Our strategy is to sell complexity and eventually that company spirals into integration nightmares so they crawl back to IBM consultants to fix it.

IBM makes billions from just keeping system Z mainframes on life support because they are the backbone to so many major institutions. We can charge a ridiculous amount for software fees for enterprise software and they have no choice but to pay up in order to stay alive. The complexity and cost to move off these systems that have been built for decades is too high and we exploit that tremendously with insane maintenance fees.

This is exactly how our software licensing works too. We just lock companies into proprietary software hell for decades because our core software products like DB2 and Websphere have become deeply embedded in the infrastructure of large organizations. Companies are trapped when we charge high maintenance and support fees and they have to shell out for upgrades they barely need. ELAs are traps designed to squeeze as much money as we can possibly can.

We fail to integrate our acquisitions within our corporate strategy. We just have a mix of cloud platform extensions, AI solutions, and industry specific solutions. We are not innovating ourselves. This is more to help our consulting sales than it is to make a competitive product strategy.

watsonx is a desperate scramble to pretend that we are in the AI market. Everyone knows that we’re not coming up with anything innovative. We are just riding off the coattails of Meta and other open source models just like what we did with Red Hat. No one new will ever adopt watsonx. This is again targeted for our legacy customers who are trapped. It is all just mostly repackaged algorithms and models that everyone is already doing.

Our workforce rebalancing efforts aka our cost cutting strategy by offshoring and replacing highly-paid employees with lower-wage employees has ultimately damaged our long-term profitability. Employees feel less motivated and valued when we see our peers get laid off for cheap labor in India. Employee motivation, experience, and collaboration are crucial for overall productivity and long-term success, but we do it value any of that. It’s all for the short-term profit gains, which again will be overtaken by the long-term negative impact of declining productivity.

Our future is collapsing rapidly. We are holding onto legacy contracts and mainframe lifelines but once those clients migrate off, IBM is left with nothing but scraps. Microsoft, Google, AWS will destroy us as cloud AI leaders and eventually, they will also perfect mainframe-to-migration tools and our mainframe clients with jump ship. I envision we will be sold off as pieces or die all together.

So again, I ask: Why are you still here? IBM is draining your energy and trapping you in an endless cycle of bureaucracy, outdated tech, and corporate nonsense. Do you truly believe that watsonx or IBM Cloud will save us? There is no growth or innovation and you will either be patching up legacy systems, trying to sell dead AI products, or stuck in consulting purgatory. We are not turning it around. Get out while you can and develop skills in modern technology and work somewhere where the future is bright.

TLDR; IBM monetizes on confusion, legacy systems, and corporate inertia. We sell tech to trap companies in it, then charge them forever to keep it working. The only reason companies are with IBM is because the cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying and we make billions just off that equation. There is no bright future.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Dangers of Selling Out

Football Outsiders went from a high-quality and influential site to extinction in barely 12 months thanks to selling out to some Canadian financial pirates:

Football Outsiders was founded in 2003 by Aaron Schatz. What began as his passion project grew into a fully fledged website for advanced football analytics and statistics such as DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average). Football Outsiders went on to strike partnerships with ESPN and became a popular source for hardcore football nerds and casual fans alike. In 2018, Schatz sold Football Outsiders to a company called EdjSports. He stayed on as editor-in-chief, and, according to longtime Football Outsiders writer Mike Tanier, the site continued to operate as normal.

Then, in September 2021, Champion Gaming, co-founded by Simmonds and Hershman, entered the picture. It acquired EdjSports, and Football Outsiders along with it, in late 2021 as part of a “reverse takeover,” a way for private companies to go public quickly without having to go through an Initial Public Offering. As part of the deal, Champion Gaming merged with a shell company called Prime City One Capital. According to a news report from the time, “the group closed a funding round of $3.65 million (CAD $4.62 million), giving it a roughly $12.3 million post-money valuation, and it is on track to begin trading in a few weeks.”

Champion Gaming had ambitions to expand beyond NFL coverage. It struck a licensing deal with Inpredictable, an NBA analytics website run by Mike Beuoy, and partnered with SharpRank, a sports betting resource. The terms and status of these partnerships are unclear; Beuoy and SharpRank did not respond to queries. Champion Gaming also brought on Chris Spagnuolo to oversee content (for a particular microgeneration of sports media consumers, Spagnuolo is best known as the guy who left Barstool Sports after writing a blog calling Rihanna fat), and hired ESPN’s Katie George to be a brand ambassador and create video content. Spagnuolo declined to comment. Defector was not able to reach George for comment.

By the summer after the takeover, changes at the top of the company were underway. In June 2022, Simmonds took over from Hershman as CEO; Wickham took over as CFO; and the company’s president, Chief Innovation Officer, and director all resigned. The company framed the changes as an exciting new chapter. Of Simmonds’s ascent to CEO, Hershman said in a press release, “Given his previous experience as a public markets CEO and his extensive background in online gambling, the board of directors and I determined that his leadership of the Company would be both ideal and appropriate to steer us going forward as we build a leading sports content and data intelligence business.”

But by the fall there were signs that the company was floundering. According to financial documents filed in November 2022, which are publicly available through Sedar, Canada’s securities filing system, the company had little cash flow and was carrying significant debt, especially relative to its revenues. In the first nine months of 2022, Champion Gaming reported $969,789 in revenue and $5,619,803 in losses. (All monetary figures cited in the filings are in CAD.) As of Sept. 30, 2022, the entire company had only $55,776 in cash, with even less coming in. As of the same date, the accounts receivable, meaning revenue the company accrued, but which they still needed to be paid, was only $13,911. On page six of the same filing, the company wrote: “These material uncertainties cast significant doubt as to the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

We were never going to sell out, but rest assured we have learned our lesson about the importance of staying in your lane and focusing relentlessly on what you do best. My answer now to the people both within and without the community who tell me “you know, you should do X” is very short and unmistakably negative.

No short cuts. No outside assistance. No wild ambitions. Just the slow and organic growth that comes from steadily improving quality and value. Castalia History is the only sort of growth we want; it’s now very nearly as large as the Library subscription and all four of the first books have sold out whereas none of our competitors can say the same of most of their recent books with similar print runs.

DISCUSS ON SG

In Defense of Garden Gnomes

It’s not an argument that I’d hitherto contemplated, but anything that defends garden gnomes while attacking modern art is obviously correct in my book.

It was only with the rise of the Avant Garde and specifically subsidies for those artists that this magical category of “Kitsch” comes about in which all the folk arts and lower-class aesthetic sensibilities as dismissed not by an aristocracy that feels noblesse oblige, but by ethnic and class enemies who need to discredit and exclude the productive national majority ethnicity from their own institutions, so that they, the capturing ethnicity and interests, might extract the tax dollars and institutional prestige the productive classes themselves generate.

Now you might say “that’s cute but do you really care about Garden Gnomes and dogs playing poker that much?”

No but I REALLY care about realistic historical depictions in art, and the national character and mythologization of my people. And the SECOND you let these parasites get in and declare the national majority’s folk art is somehow illegitimate or aesthetically bankrupt, something they’d never say about the absolute WORST minority art (No black, jewish, muslim, latino, queer, lesbian, communist, or any other EVER gets accused of kitsch no matter how inept, propagandistic, or downright dumb their art is), the second you give them that power, they use it in every single instance against any work that might moralize, uplift, or express the values of the ethnic majority or middle-class.

This is the reason your architecture is ugly, this is the reason sculptures only depict sexual degeneracy or political corruption, not heroism, this is the reason every approved artwork that isn’t a legacy holdover (which their paid activists destroy) exists in some way to actively offend, “challenge”, or “discomfort” the productive classes who actually make society run.

When’s the last time a museum curator proudly said they’re displaying a work to “Challenge” the black community? To “discomfort” the Jews? That offending the queer community is necessary to start a dialogue?

Never.

Because the purpose of art is not “contemplation” or “challenging assumptions” it’s aesthetic warfare to moralize or demoralize enemy peoples and communicate the dominance hierarchy, either through aesthetic mogging or humiliation.

That being said, I’ve never been a fan of that 70s macrame home art one would sometimes see on displayed on wooden walls or the classic velvet Elvis. But the idea that Thomas Kincaid’s pretty paintings are somehow less artistically worthy than Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs is obviously and intrinsically false.

DISCUSS ON SG

Guilty as Charged

The sad little freaks on Reddit are claiming that I have used the Gaiman allegations to promote my views. And I suppose that’s true, to a certain extent.

Some prominent TERF and far-right commentators (notably Julie Bindel, Graham Linehan, Vox Day, and Jon Del Arroz; feel free to add more) have used the Gaiman allegations to promote their views. Bindel has even linked to this subreddit. Please scrutinize these sources before sharing them.

And what are these views that I’m promoting? They’re pretty straightforward.

  • Men who sexually assault women should be held accountable, both personally and professionally, for their actions, no matter who they are or how much you like them.
  • Celebrities who abuse and mistreat their fans should be called out and held accountable for their actions. This is especially true of celebrities who happen to have young fans.
  • Neil Gaiman is a literary mediocrity who substitutes research into folklore for genuine originality or creativity. While he has a modicum of writing ability, his primary talent is relentless self-promotion.
  • Neil Gaiman is merely one example of the manufactured “successes” in the publishing industry. John Scalzi is a lesser example. I consider their “success” in selling books to be as genuine as the even greater successes of L. Ron Hubbard, Katie Price, and Hilary Clinton.
  • Terry Pratchett wrote the only funny parts of Good Omens, and despite them it wasn’t a very good book.

I wouldn’t think those views are terribly controversial, given how they are quite easily confirmed, but then, these are people who struggle to discern the difference between a man and a woman.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Final Stages of Feminism

Feminism has always been an obvious self-negating political philosophy. I have repeatedly pointed that out in a few of my supposedly controversial statements that should not be controversial at all, because everything that I have said on the subject is observably and confirmably true in every respect.

  • 2012: Feminism is the only ideology that is more intellectually incoherent than communism and more societally suicidal than the Skoptsy.
  • 2014: Feminism is less coherent than communism and more murderous than National Socialism. That is because it is, quite literally, an ideology concocted by madwomen. Feminism is, quite literally, insane. Any woman who calls herself a feminist is identifying herself as a woman with mental health issues.
  • 2023: Feminism never made any sense. It was another seductive, but destructive Jewish ideology that was more incoherent than communism, more bloodthirsty than nazism, and more histrionic than fascism. Its eventual collapse was always inevitable.

Always the Horizon points out how feminism is already entering its end stages:

Feminism in its modern form exists due to two primary driving influences.

  • The boredom of housewives in the 1950s and 1960s
  • A corporate interest in doubling the workforce thereby halving pay for workers

Both are coming to a head as feminism in its modern form has been nothing but detrimental for the general population. Women’s empowerment became a trade of slaving away in for your family to slaving away for your boss in the corporate office. The contract between genders has effectively been scrapped and women are suffering from severe mental illness while many men have given up on relationships entirely.

Feminist ideology has been evil from the very start, but the fruits of its destruction are now plainly visible to every one. In a world where women can’t work, a lot of women will protest for the right to work. In a world where almost all women must work to survive and can’t afford the time for a family of their own, you can bet that there’s going to be a backlash…

Here stand we now, at the conclusion of the first quarter of the 21st century bearing witness to all of the fantastic achievements of modern feminism. Women can vote. Women are expected to slave away for their boss in an office. Women displace men at universities on behalf of equity over equality. Racial relations are worse than they’ve been in nearly 30 years and angry old hags screech about female objectification while young girls dye their hair purple and objectify themselves on OnlyFans for a quick buck. The gender contract is broken and dating is worse than it’s ever been. Women are more mentally ill now then ever before in history, and men are more disengaged in our society since we started measuring. Truly the feminist golden age… The 2020s express a complete victory of that ideology.

We are already starting to the beginning of the popular cultural revolt. There’s an entire trend on short-form-video where young women express their exhaustion with modern work and dating culture. Go to school. Go into debt. Get a white collar job. Become a Girl Boss [TM]. Then get married, have kids if you want to. Slave away for your employer for 30 years barely-paying-the-bills and retire.

In a world where working full time barely pays for a small apartment, much less a family, selling young women on going into the work force is getting a lot harder. The equity push is also not providing a whole lot of benefits as young women learn that being a man is hard and being expected to do that for 40 or 50 years is pretty miserable. Especially for young women that want to start a family, or build an actual home and community for themselves.

More importantly, women aren’t bored any more. The rise of social media is itself going to be the end of feminism whether women choose to admit it or not. Whether feminists choose to admit it or not. One of the main drivers of women entering the work force was, let’s be honest, suburban boredom. It was one thing when women had to work in the home as much as men had to work out of the home to stay alive. It was one thing when women were able to form communities and entertain themselves with petty local drama while the men were away doing survival things… With the rise of social media, both men and women are finding new outlets for their personal needs. 

As one of the building blocks of Clown World, feminism was always one of its Achilles heels. And as with other rhetorical Clown World concepts such as “freedom” and “democracy”, the lies inherent in the concept are now so obvious to everyone that the historical allure has been replaced by disdain, confusion, and a very reasonable fear of missing out on the good things in life on the part of every woman who is capable of paying attention to the world around her.

DISCUSS ON SG

There is No “Imposter Syndrome”

People are often advised to “fake it until you make it”, but speaking as a publisher, I see a surprising number of people who never quit faking it even after they achieved a modicum of success. The main reason for “imposter syndrome” is that there are a lot of imposters out there.

Not all self-doubt is unwarranted. And to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, the urge to perform is not a reliable indicator of talent.

DISCUSS ON SG