The Hallmark of Bad Writing

Stranger Things has come to its inevitably ignominious end. But at least it left us with one epic meme.

The writing in Hollywood has never been very good, and it’s always been completely delusional. But we’re definitely reaching a new nadir, when the writers and the directors can’t even pay attention to the context of the current scene in their absolute focus on inserting their insane propaganda into their creations at the most inopportune possible moment.

It’s very much like when the director decides that the best time to go for some really gut-wrenching emotion is right in the middle of a violent combat action. For some reason, the enemy completely fails to take advantage of the fact that everyone has laid down their guns and is standing around the one member of the party who actually got hit so that they can meaningfully emote for a minute or two, before they rejoin the battle, successfully inspired by their grief and rage.

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Too Doggone Funny

One of the most self-righteous SJWs in science fiction is getting cancelled over her use of AI in writing fiction:

Perhaps the biggest possible scandal among the BlueSky crowd is the use of AI. Traditional publishing has worked itself into a frenzy over the technology tool, and people are out looking for, in many cases, literal blood from people who utilize it. Now, Mary Robinette Kowal is under fire after admitting to using the tool in her latest DEI sci-fi screed.

The world first heard of Mary Robinette Kowal as she was brought into Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Excuses podcast as a co-host. The men there wanted to virtue signal by bringing in a female with feminist leanings as a “new perspective” for their audiences. The show’s tone soon changed from fun to something different, but it propelled Mary Robinette Kowal to some prominence in the industry.

Most of Kowal’s work appeared to be romances billed as sci-fi, for which she started winning the award circuit for her outspoken feminism with the John. W Campbell award for best new writer. Her clout in the industry increased, and soon, her award nominations did as well.

Like many writers in the elites, there’s little information on how much she’s sold or what kind of readership she’s cultivated, but a string of award wins and nominations a mile long.

Eventually, she parlayed her awards into a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) presidency, where she began the decline of the professional organization into the embattled social club it is today.

Only the old school readers will remember this, but she’s also the woman that John Scalzi confessed to not-creeping on back in the day before serving as his Vice-President. Anyhow, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with writing with AI – I’ve now completed five books with it already, including two that will be absolutely groundbreaking, plus three very high-quality translations, including from Japanese and into French.

But the SJWs hate it, mostly because even vanilla AI writes better than they do. Like every other tool, AI is going to separate the writing elite capable of mastering it and turbo-charging their work from the slow-witted hacks who wouldn’t know their Murakami from their Murakami or their Kawakami from their Kawakami.

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Banned from Facebook

I’ll admit it, it was a real surprise to discover this in my email today:

Your account has been permanently disabled

Hi Vox,

You can’t use Facebook because your account, or activity on it, didn’t follow our Community Standards.

More than 180 days have passed since your account was disabled, so you can no longer request a review.

Learn more about why we disable accounts by visiting the Community Standards.

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

This was a surprise, mostly because I stopped using Facebook around four or five years ago. I haven’t logged into it and I certainly haven’t engaged in any activity on it. But I suppose when you’re dealing with dark lords, it’s definitely best to be wary and stay well on the safe side by eliminating the very possibility that it might cross a dark lord’s mind to make use of an unsuspecting platform for dark and nefarious purposes.

I can’t blame them for taking precautions.

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Diversity Uber Alles

This is a very clear and cogent example of the way convergence eliminates an organization’s ability to perform its core functions. You might quite reasonably assume that the Python Software Foundation’s prime objective is to produce Python software. And you would be wrong.

It is also a convincing demonstration of the need to keep the SJWs very far away from an organization’s mission statement.

In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding, and navigating the intensive process was a steep learning curve for our small team to climb. Seth Larson, PSF Security Developer in Residence, serving as Principal Investigator (PI) with Loren Crary, PSF Deputy Executive Director, as co-PI, led the multi-round proposal writing process as well as the months-long vetting process. We invested our time and effort because we felt the PSF’s work is a strong fit for the program and that the benefit to the community if our proposal were accepted was considerable.

We were honored when, after many months of work, our proposal was recommended for funding, particularly as only 36% of new NSF grant applicants are successful on their first attempt. We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the PSF’s values, as committed to in our mission statement:

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.

Given the value of the grant to the community and the PSF, we did our utmost to get clarity on the terms and to find a way to move forward in concert with our values. We consulted our NSF contacts and reviewed decisions made by other organizations in similar circumstances, particularly The Carpentries.

In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community.

Note that the need “to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI” and to “promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language” both take a back seat to facilitating the growth of a diverse community.

Which is why, eventually, the only thing left to the Python Software Foundation will be the diversity and the ruins that are the inevitable consequences of social justice convergence.

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The Importance of GamerGate

The Billionaire Psycho reminds us of “the most important event you are not allowed to discuss”:

GamerGate is maybe the most important event of the past 20 years which never receives mainstream media coverage. Lomez will be publishing an in-depth history of GamerGate, to serve as an official record going forward, and that’s crucial as part of building a foundation for a new culture — fighting the narrative war over how history is remembered, how history is interpreted, what events are recognized as significant and influential moments in culture, and how Western identity is defined.

GamerGate was only possible because a generation of incompetent Leftists inherited an empire built on propaganda that came without a legible instruction manual. Leftists forgot how to run their imperial machine. Video games sedated young white men, funneling their energy into a simulation of achievement, an illusory power fantasy of digital significance. Leftists forgot that porn, video games, movies, junk food, and other passive consumption activities primarily existed to prevent young white men from doing anything useful with their lives. And this zone of sedation was viewed as another industry to conquer so that DEI activists could bully the video game industry into providing overproduced elites with fake jobs.

This event was important for several reasons.

GamerGate exposed American Sharia laws. It unveiled the shibboleths, religious taboos, and blasphemy codes which were considered more important than Constitutional protections on “free speech”. A gulf emerged between written laws, and selective enforcement.

GamerGate was maybe the first time in 50 years that Leftists suffered a real, measurable defeat.

It functioned as a generational awakening: a catalyst that activated a decentralized army of shytpoasters, bloggers, podcasters, streamers, journalists, and RW activists.

It mapped out in real-time the architecture and OODA loop of the Leftist hivemind, providing empirical data on how the swarm intelligence perceives, coordinates, reacts, propagates… and suffers damage.

It educated critics of the hegemonic monoculture that rules the Global American Empire.

But I think the most important aspect of GamerGate was that it disproved the narrative illusion that everyone more or less accepted as conventional wisdom, the bedrock of the uniparty worldview. Before GamerGate, it was taken as a self-evident fact that America was a capitalist country, and that all of the evil in the world was caused by Wall Street corporations chasing “shareholder value” and advancing “the profit-motive”. Capitalism and racism were the invisible demons which could be used as scapegoats for anything bad that ever happened at any point and at any place in American society.

Leftism could do anything it wanted, no matter how dumb, destructive, intrusive, or evil — and then blame capitalism and racism for the consequences.

This illusion was shattered by GamerGate.

First of all, as an Original GamerGater, I can testify that Lomez’s history, while welcome, is almost certainly going to be incomplete and missing some very important details. I’m 99 percent confident that he doesn’t even know who GamerGater #1 is, because there are only a small handful of people who do and Lomez isn’t speaking to them and he hasn’t spoken with me either.

This doesn’t mean his chronicle of the public history and his analysis of the public events and the observable consequences won’t be accurate, but he isn’t going to be able to understand the hows and whys of what happened because he isn’t talking to anyone who was actually there in the early days of what was then called the Quinnspiracy.

And the Billionaire Psycho is correct to point out that what is now obvious today, namely, the total disinterest of the international corpocracy in things like customers, revenue, and profit, were first exposed to the public by GamerGate. Now, the corporations even admit it openly, as the former CEO of Ford admitted that his company invested excessively in electric vehicles even though car buyers clearly indicated that they didn’t want them.

Former Ford CEO Mark Fields openly acknowledged that the industry charged ahead with massive EV investments, overlooking what consumers actually wanted. Fields, who led Ford from 2014 to 2017, pointed out the misstep during a discussion on the rapid buildup of EV production. “Over the last couple of years, the automakers really went full bore in putting in capacity for EVs,” he said. This aggressive push came without enough thought to buyer preferences, leaving companies like Ford and GM facing unexpected market realities.

Now the corporate games industry is dying, although the indy game development community hasn’t been this healthy or this profitable since id Software was putting out shareware and Fenris Wolf was developing technology showcases for Artist, Creative, and Intel. And while GamerGate didn’t fix the problem, it did accomplish the very important task of diagnosing it and making it known to a large section of the public.

For those of you who weren’t there, here is the timeline of the start of #GamerGate from my perspective.

  • 11 August 2014: Depression Quest released on Steam.
  • 16 August 2014: The Zoe post. Mundane Matt puts out a video discussing it.
  • 21 August 2014: My first post about Kotaku and the Quinnspiracy
  • 27 August 2014: Adam Baldwin coins the hashtag #GamerGate
  • 28 August 2014: 17 game journalists run very similar articles asserting the irrelevancy of gamers.
  • 17 September 2014: Milo breaks the news of a secret GameJournoPros mailing list.
  • 21 September 2014: Milo exposes the entire GameJournoPros list.
  • 15 July 2015: Mike Cernovich, Milo and I host #GGinParis. Le Monde covers it.

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Rediscovering Van Creveld

But there is more to social justice and social justice convergence than simple feminization:

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies…

he Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP. We assume that these institutions will continue to function under these completely novel circumstances. But what are our grounds for that assumption?

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

If the Great Feminization poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it. The answer depends on why you think it occurred in the first place.

The author is entirely correct to be concerned about the consequences for every industry in which women become the majority, because all of those industries will cease to be able to perform their primary functions. We’ve already seen that, for example, in elementary education, where predominantly female teachers working under female principles and female-majority schoolboards cannot teach schoolchildren how to read, write, or do arithmetic.

As we are observing in real time, female-dominated politics are not compatible with civilization because women have different priorities and perspectives than those required for its construction and maintenance. A feminist society, if left unchecked to its own devices, will look very similar to the average African society before European contact. The episode of Survivor in which the two tribes were divided by the sexes is a very vivid example of this.

But the author is confusing the symptom for the disease. Women are more akin to the vector of the disease than the disease itself, as can be observed from the way in which men who are social justice warriors are every bit as incompetent and even more insane than the women are. The disease is ultimately spiritual and eventually ends in either societal collapse, pyramids dedicated to child sacrifice, or both.

The good news is that a) converged societies will inevitably fail, b) women’s commitment to feminism and social justice will vanish as soon as the government funding fails, and c) men stop supporting female influence over them.

This is a unique moment of history, and it is already observably coming to an end.

The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.
—Bill Simmons

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ESR Speaks With Authority

Now this is an area in which the man definitely knows whereof he speaks. Listen to him.

I’m about to do something I think I’ve never done before, which is assert every bit of whatever authority I have as the person who discovered and wrote down the rules of open source.

After ten years of drama and idiocy, lots of people other than me are now willing to say in public that “Codes of Conduct” have been a disaster – a kind of infectious social insanity producing lots of drama and politics and backbiting, and negative useful work.

Here is my advice about codes of conduct:

  1. Refuse to have one. If your project has one, delete it. The only actual function they have is as a tool in the hands of shit-stirrers.
  2. If you’re stuck with having one for bureaucratic reasons, replace it with the following sentence or some close equivalent: “If you are more annoying to work with than your contributions justify, you’ll be ejected.”
  3. Attempts to be more specific and elaborate don’t work. They only provide control surfaces for shit-stirrers to manipulate.

Yes, we should try to be kind to each other. But we should be ruthless and merciless towards people who try to turn “Be kind!” into a weapon. Indulging them never ends well.

Granted, I said much the same in SJWs Always Lie back in 2015, but then, I do not have the authority in the open source world that ESR does. If you want to keep your organization functional, always apply these three rules:

  • No codes of conduct
  • No human resources department or employees
  • No tolerance for thought police

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Kimmel is Back

As expected, Disney didn’t wait very long before bringing Jimmy Kimmel back.

Jimmy Kimmel’s return to late-night TV is set to be a ratings disaster after 70 ABC affiliate stations said they would not be broadcasting Tuesday’s show.

Nexstar said Tuesday morning it would not be screening Jimmy Kimmel Live! on the 32 ABC stations it owns, Variety reported, joining fellow broadcaster Sinclair who already announced their decision. Sinclair’s stations include KOMO in Seattle and KATU in Portland – two liberal enclaves whose locals are natural Kimmel viewers and likely vital to his success. The company owns a total 38 ABC affiliates.

That means close to a third of ABC’s 230 local-level stations will not run the network’s flagship late-night show, which was pulled off air last Wednesday. Kimmel’s show will also be drained of vital advertiser cash that would have been spent had his show been screened on the affiliates as usual.

The thing is, Kimmel’s show was already a ratings disaster, so that’s clearly not something that concerns Disney. For some reason, 10 years after the publication of SJWS ALWAYS LIE, conservatives still believe that converged corporations care about profit.

But as Kimmel’s restoration proves, again, profit is not their primary concern.

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