Tag: SJW

Rhetorical discourse with an SJW

A dialogue on Twitter, prompted by my tweeting a paraphrase of a quote from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, specifically her explanation of how destroying men’s values is the first step in exerting control over them:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Build up John Scalzi and you’ve destroyed SF. Hail Anita S. and you’ve destroyed game review. Glorify Lena Dunham and you’ve destroyed TV.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
How are any of these things destroyed by differing perspectives? Are they that fragile?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes, that difficult and fragile. Kill Man’s sense of values and you kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
If a man’s sense of values of killed by a single differing opinion, either his values or weak or the man who holds them is.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
You’re totally missing the point. It’s about the STANDARDS. Fuzz the definition of “inch” and no one knows how tall anything is.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
That sounds very rigid and a self-defeating philosophy if one is interested in expanding knowledge.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
You don’t seek to expand knowledge. You’re just a deceiver who seeks to tear down and DISQUALIFY. You’re not fooling anyone.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
You clutch your brittle twig and I’ll ride the waves lifting us higher.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Look at how many lies you’ve tried already. 1) false dichotomy, 2) “single opinion”, 3) “self-defeating”, 4) “expanding knowledge”

Vox Day ‏@voxday
And wrapping it all up with a false accusation and an appeal to progress. You are classic SJW scum.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
Do you love life?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Don’t try to retreat to false dialectic after that racist rhetorical performance. It doesn’t suit you.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
racist?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes, obviously.

Sam Fredericks ‏@Wyldawen
How?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
First you’ll have to explain how completely redefining standards and awarding mediocrity is “a single differing opinion”.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Fredericks promptly disappeared after that. You can learn a lot from this dialogue, a lot that is useful for future engagements with SJWs and other rhetorically minded individuals.

First, notice how he begins with a question, and a dishonest, passive-aggressive question at that. That is how I immediately knew he was not an honest interlocutor, even though I answered his question in the same manner as if assuming he was. You always want to draw the SJW in deeper and force him to commit, even when you know, beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt, what he is.

Second, he tries another passive-aggressive dig, this time in falsely characterizing the subject and setting up a false dichotomy. Remember, SJWs always attack; they don’t know how to defend their own positions due to the contradictory and oft indefensible nature of them. They HAVE to stay on the attack if they are going to come out on top and they know it.

Third, after I point out how he has failed to understand the point, he doesn’t back off, but immediately switches to another attack, this time one that involves him claiming the philosophically superior position. What he wants is for me to defend myself, instead I point out, for the first time, that he is lying. Notice how he doesn’t even defend himself against his lack of interest in “expanding knowledge”, which is a non sequitur anyhow, but doubles-down, this time implicitly appealing to a nebulous, yet inevitable progress that is superior to the “brittle twig” of having traditional standards.

Observe that at no point has he made any attempt to actually make a coherent, rational case. It’s all pure rhetoric, all meant to put him on a higher plane that permits him to pronounce judgment on me.

After I openly call him out, he suddenly retreats, realizing that I am aware of his game. He tries another approach, this one prosecutorial, despite it being a non sequitur even more egregious than the first. Then, I drop the r-bomb on him. Notice that he can’t ignore this one. He doesn’t mind being called a liar, he doesn’t mind being called out as SJW scum, he doesn’t even mind it being pointed out that his argument is incoherent rhetoric, but he can’t ignore the r-word. It’s magic, you see. Magic rhetoric.

Suddenly, for the first time, he needs to ask questions and have things defined. And that’s when I kick him in the teeth, pointing out that he’ll have to start defining all of his many rhetorical claims before I define my single rhetorical claim. There was no need for me to define any of the other assertions I made, because they are all coherent and explicable. But the racist charge makes no sense, which tells him that I not only recognize the game he is playing, but understand it and can play it better than him.

Which is why he throws in the towel and vanishes. After which, Aquila Aquilonis ‏comments in his stead: And that is how a Native American takes a scalp on Twitter. #DreadIlk

#GamerGate crushed Gawker

Nero reports on the costs to Gawker of attacking #GamerGate:

The cost to Gawker Media of its ridicule and viciousness toward video gamers was “seven figures” in lost advertising revenue, according to the company’s head of advertising, Andrew Gorenstein. In addition, founder Nick Denton has stepped down as president and editorial director Joel Johnson has been removed from his post and will probably leave the company, reports Capital New York….

And now here is a chance to kick the SJW while he’s down. An Ilk suggests action:
A few of us were inspired by that stupid Change.org petition that got GTA5 banned to try to use the same tactic against Gawker’s biggest revenue sources. I figure it may be especially effective to kick them when they’re already reeling from the previous damage we’ve done, while Hulk Hogan’s suit and their insurance company threaten to bleed them further. The petition is here: Get Google and Amazon to stop advertising on Gawker Media.

We’d
like to spread this around and get the signature count up before
posting it in the usual GamerGate avenues (ie our Twitter accounts,
8chan, KotakuInAction), so that anti-GamerGate won’t know it’s happening,
and won’t realize that it’s coming from us or be able to respond to it until it’s too late for them to do anything about it.

They’re down. Kick them hard and keep them there.

Hunt the trolls

Or the trolls will hunt you:

“I wanted to work towards a tech industry that exhibited true tolerance of everyone and allowed free expression, but Shanley and people like her have made it impossible,” Dickinson says. “The people in the tech industry who actually contribute to innovation need to realize that if they don’t fight back against the Shanleys of the industry, they’ll be allowing people like her to kill the goose who lays the golden eggs.

“[Former Mozilla CEO, forced out of his job for his objection to gay marriage] Brendan Eich is the canonical example. If they can force him out they can force anyone out, no matter their technological contributions.”

There are problems not only with Shanley Kane’s brand of feminism, which is sociopathic and divisive in the extreme, but with her approach to argument, too. It’s not just that she doesn’t like men discussing women’s issues. She doesn’t even like other women discussing them, complaining when she is not treated as the de facto authority on women in the technology industry, despite her loathsome treatment of everyone around her.

Another good article from Nero. Of course, it is pretty easy to deal with SJWs. You simply have to refuse to give them any ground. Don’t accept their assumptions, don’t allow them their assertions for the sake of argument, don’t accept their appeals to fairness or equality, and above all, don’t give them the inch that permits them to take the mile.

No matter how much they hate you, they will soon go in search of easier, weaker prey. Look at how every single SJW who used to attack me regularly has fallen almost entirely silent where I am concerned, despite there being considerably more people who read me now.

Something is wrong with these people

VERY wrong. PZ celebrates the decision of a publisher to stop marketing books to boys, as are his few remaining readers:

  • Holy crap. Somebody did the right thing for a change. I am blown away.
  • What do I think Lego should do? I think they should make half of all
    their future minifigs women. Construction set? Half the construction
    workers are women. Airplane set? Make one of the pilots a woman and one
    of the flight attendants a man. Police set? Not just a token woman, half
    women. Half the crooks, half the cops, half the bystanders. How hard is
    that?
  • Best news I’ve read all week.
  • This was enough to draw tears from me today.
  • My hubby the engineer bought electronics kits for our kids, and it was the oldest daughter who loved them. She happily joined him on any science project while her siblings ran off to do other things. She’s 37 now, and holds degrees in engineering, computational neuroscience and neurobiology. She’s been working for the NSF on a project to interest more women and minorities in STEM.

That last comment is my favorite. She has three degrees, but instead of actually doing any science, engineering, or biology, she’s using them to work in marketing. And what do you bet she hasn’t given her parents any grandchildren?

SJWs are much worse than useless. They are active participants in the ongoing implosion of civilization.

Sic semper cæcis

If you don’t feel even the smallest touch of schadenfreude about this man’s alleged murder, you’re either a saint or a self-deluded SJW:

David Ruenzel knew, better than most, about the white privilege that killed him. As a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of his favorite topics was rooting out racism. And how white racism is permanent. White racism is everywhere. And white racism explains everything.

This mantra of the Critical Race Theory and the Southern Poverty Law Center applied to all white people because, even if they were not personally cracking the whips, or breaking the skulls, white people benefited from a racist system that did all that — and a lot more.

Ruenzel was writing about white privilege for the Southern Poverty Law Center as far back as 1997 — long before it became the rage at college campuses, newsrooms, churches, high schools and even grade schools.

By the time of his death, Ruenzel had accumulated many of the trappings of the white privilege he exposed: The job. The home. The intact family. And most importantly in his case, white privilege endowed Ruenzel with an expectation of safety in the Oakland neighborhood where last week two black people are suspected of killing him.

One would like to imagine that the progressive white equalitarians would wake up before they get themselves, and large quantities of other people, killed, but the lesson of David Ruenzel informs us that we shouldn’t count on it. It’s rather like the aid worker who was raped in Haiti; not even a callous denial of her appeal to racial brotherhood and subsequent rape was enough to convince her that black skin does not render one morally unaccountable.

Listening to the equalitarians and taking them seriously is a very good way to get yourself beaten, raped, or killed. Because eventually, objective reality asserts itself, and it asserts itself all the more cruelly to those who willfully pay it no heed.

Speaking of cruelty, granted, it may be the artist in me, but I rather like to think that before he was gunned down, David Ruenzel explained to his killers, a little indignantly, that he was a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center and that what they needed to understand that he was on their side. Of course, what he didn’t understand, and now will never have the chance to understand, is that it doesn’t matter.

Ironically, the only way David Ruenzel’s death will have any meaning at all is if people reject his foolish philosophy as a result of it.

SJW review of games

It seems to me that just as we have a useful metric for dividing Blue SF/F from Pink SF/F, it would be helpful to have one that allowed people to summarize, in a single number, just how SJW a game is. Here is an initial pass at a points list, with 0 equaling not at all SJW and 10 indicating full SJW.

+1 has homosexual or bisexual character
+1 per token Black/Hispanic/Asian
+1 has Magic Negro and/or Saint Gay
+1 contains left-wing political message
+1 core plot concerns left-wing political message
+1 protagonist or sidekick are kickass waifu
+1 female developer mentioned in marketing and PR (see: J. Raymond, Z. Quinn)
+1 takes shots at Christianity or traditional Western morality

Any ideas for improvement? I was considering “+1 produced by Bioware”, but that seemed too obvious and redundant.nt

SJWs are out to destroy games


That’s not hyperbole. That’s not an exaggeration. That is exactly what their long-term objective is; that’s what they mean by asserting that the game industry needs to be “transformed”. They can deny it it all they like, but there is absolutely no question that their true objective is to prevent gamers from being able to design, develop, play games without their approval.

If you want to see where SJWs want to take the game industry, look at the publishing industry, where the company that publishes “Beautiful Me:
Essential Health: Strong Beautiful Girls” has announced “we dropped the ‘For Boys’ from the series name [Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys] and we all agree here at Abdo that it was a very smart idea”.

Give into the SJW entryists and soon it will be deemed as out of bounds to make games for boys as it already is to publish books for boys.

Fashion is the new science

The AAS releases a formal statement concerning men’s fashion:

The following statement was issued on 19 November 2014 by the Executive Committee of the American Astronomical Society on behalf of the AAS Council:

The past few days have seen extensive international discussion of an incident (known online as #shirtstorm or #shirtgate) in which a participant in a European Space Agency media conference wore a shirt with sexualized images of gun-toting women and made an unfortunate remark comparing the featured spacecraft to a woman. Viewers responded critically to these inappropriate statements, especially jarring in such a highly visible setting (one in which very few women appeared), and the scientist apologized sincerely. But in the meantime, unacceptable abuse has been directed toward the critics, from criticism of “over-active feminism” to personal insults and more dire threats.

We wish to express our support for members of the community who rightly brought this issue to the fore, and we condemn the unreasonable attacks they experienced as a result, which caused deep distress in our community. We do appreciate the scientist’s sincere and unqualified apology.

The AAS has a clear anti-harassment policy, which prohibits “verbal comments or physical actions of a sexual nature” and “a display of sexually suggestive objects or pictures.” Had the offending images appeared and comments been made under the auspices of the AAS, they would be in clear violation of our policy.

If I were a scientist, I would immediately resign from any organization that was releasing statements on fashion, much less had a formal policy on what I could and could not wear.

I’m sure it will surprise no one to know that the president of the AAS is a female SJW. The sad thing about this isn’t that most women care more about clothes and politics than science; we already knew that. What is both tragic and observable is that even women who are professional scientists care more about clothes and politics than science. They aren’t merely an embarrassment to their sex, they are the epitome of a humiliating shame to it.

It can’t possibly be true that “unacceptable abuse has been directed toward the critics”. Whatever abuse they received not only was well-merited, but didn’t go nearly far enough because they deserve shameless mocking for the rest of their pathetic lives.

And this is why you don’t let SJWs into any organization to which you belong. Because this is what they do.

The yellow art of pygmies

Sarah Hoyt explains both the short-term triumph of the SJW pygmies and their eventual return to insignificance, particularly in science fiction:

No elite that is as schizophrenic as they are can long stay in power. Their narrative being so anti-reality requires those seeking to join them to abase themselves to such a degree (like some gang members who have to commit a heinous murder to join) that the only the most craven will do so. These are also, for whatever reason, often not the most competent at whatever the field is.

They’re not often, like Chelsea Clinton, so guppy-stupid that even all the attempts to advance them and hand them “accomplishments” for existing fall flat (as did her career in TV.) But as generations go by and each generation picks the new luminaries based ONLY on loyalty to the party line, the quality of performance and competence keeps going down.

Take New Wave in our field. Its practitioners often held strange views of life, strange enough to repel the hoi polloi and those who bought the bulk of the books, but by and large, I challenge you to read them and not see the craftsmanship and the talent (with a few exceptions, of course.)

However those who came after them were a little less talented and trained. This was the period back in the nineties when I considered myself fortunate for finding writers who weren’t actively off-putting, and could only ever find one or two that I considered to rise above . And the current crop of establishment darlings, particularly the young ones (again with one or two exceptions) are cringingly bad or at the very best cringingly trite (which would be endurable without the encomiums to their Earth shattering originality.) Even the establishment can find no better reason to shower awards on them than the oft-repeated claims of vague discrimination and saying that women are overdue for recognition.

Like any elite that is incompetent at what its supposed to do, this means that they create a crisis that invites their replacement. In science fiction, where I’m concentrating because I know it better, (though arguably parallel processes are taking place in all other fields) they might have tottered on another generation or two, with each selling less, until the advances for first novels were zero and publication meant nothing except to the academics who need publication.

Fortunately Kindle intervened. Because indie publishing came into a vacuum and served underserved readers, it’s blooming against the wilting of traditional publishing.

The New Wave writers were intentionally pissing on their forebears, but in the process they were creating yellow art in the snow. Their work was, of course, ephemeral, insignificant, and devoid of any meaningful commentary on the human condition or long-term value, but the pictures were pretty enough until the snow melted, at least if you ignored how they’d been created.

Their descendants only saw that their forebears were urinating, and quite wrongly concluded, “hey, I can do that!” They promptly did the literary equivalent of unzipping, cutting loose, and shouting “look at me, I can haz pee!” Or in the case of McRapey, “look at me, I can haz blow job! Because ground forces!”

The diversity crowd is even more pathetic. They can’t even manage the literary equivalent of unzipping first, instead they just wet their pants then give each other awards for their incontinence, crowing: “I is womyn! I is black! I is queer! I make water too!” And, as John C. Wright notes, they actually take pride and pleasure in taking their golden autoshowers:

If you are looking at a landscape covered with a thin gruel the hue of oatmeal, gray, tasteless, neither cold nor hot, dripping over telegraph wires, leafless trees, dusty lanes empty of traffic, collapsed houses, and the corpse of a small dog, and seeing a group of deformed pygmies and midgets decreeing immense victories and accomplishments in the fields of civic engineering and architecture, you would assume them to be an enemy of whoever once lived in the now ruined landscape. You would not assume they lived in that landscape and wanted it gray. And your assumption would be wrong.

There are few things that I find more amusing than looking at the Amazon rankings for the award-winning SF novels of the recent past and comparing them to the winners from 30 years before. Guess which novel was published in 2013 and is the most-awarded novel in science fiction history, and which one was published nearly 50 years ago.

  1. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #14,910 Paid in Kindle Store
  2. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #1,757 Paid in Kindle Store

Book 1 is Ancillary Justice, “a story about pronouns and modern feminist piety, utterly unimaginative and bland”. Book 2 is Dune, “a story about messianic politics, ecology, expanded consciousness, genetic destiny and the role of man in the universe.”

And just because I am a cruelty artist:

  1. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #16,680 Paid in Kindle Store
  2. Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
    #19,115 Paid in Kindle Store

One is the recently published sequel to the landmark, award-winning novel, that was described by one enthusiast as “the most important book Orbit has published in ages.” The other is the recently published Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War.

Mrs. Hoyt is absolutely correct about the pygmies’ poor long-term prospects. No one outside their weird little cult wants to bathe in their stinking urine.

Isolati!

Several people asked me to address what superficially looks like yet another SJW isolation attempt, as Vunderguy asked John C. Wright for his “take” on me:

I’ll just up and say it then. He seems to me to be something of a white supremacist, even though he’s about as white as I am, or at least, draw those kinds of people towards him.

Now, I like Vox in a lot of ways. He’s even more non-PC than Matt Stone, Trey Parker’s, Larry Correra’s, and Andrew Klavan’s gay managa-whatever-the-frenchy-word-for-four-is’ love child and the ways he can get under the enemy’s skin is admirable… but he seems to have trouble separating the culture a people group has from the people group themselves and seems to equate the genetics of that people group too closely with the behaviors of that people group… even though, as an admitted minority, he’s one pretty smart cookie. I mean, you’d have to be to be able to be such an isolationist that you give up on America and move to Italy with a family to support… even though that’s even closer to where the first bangs of destruction will begin, but whatever.

To top it all off, like I said, a lot of the people that tend to comment on his site are nowhere near as awesome as the people that comment on yours, and by that I mean that a lot of the commenters on his site seem to be what Alfonzo Rachel would call, ‘Noe-Confederate Libertarians’ and/or the kind of people who believe we had no good reasons to intervene in Vietnam, Iraq, and probably WW II (I.E., the kind of absolutist pacifists that find no use for Just War Theory).

Furthermore, Vox supported Ted Cruz’s plan to get a bill passed that would enable congress to strip the citizenship of people who went to go join ISIS… even though anyone with any knowledge of history, like he’s SUPPOSED TO BE, would know that such a bill would just erode our republic faster like the laws put in place by ‘that RINO Neo-Con George W’ that every self-professed Libertarian likes to bash, and enhanced by Obama.

Furthermore, Vox supports #NotYourShield for the whole gamergate thing, and that hashtag is pretty darned racist, and I mean LEGITIMATELY racist, and not in the faux-racism that Vox’s ‘Magic Negro’ statements about Obama and Ben Carson were.

He also thinks that the west started the current crises in the Middle-East, even though he admits that it was Muslim aggression that started started the crises on a more macrocosmic scale in the middle-ages, which strikes me as double-think despite any empty rhetoric of, ‘War is Peace,’ that might be hurled at me.

First, let me point out that my opinion of Mr. Wright as a science fiction writer may be high, but it is an informed and soundly grounded one. Second, I am not a “white supremacist”, I am a civilizationist. Many people seem to forget that in addition to my BS in economics I also picked up a BA in East Asian Studies, studied in Japan, and in fact still speak some Japanese. I am a fan of higher civilization in its various forms, but the fact is that European civilization was, and is, the height of Man’s accomplishment. The main reason I live in Europe and not Japan is the timing of the post-Heisei boom bust.

The reason I “have trouble separating the culture a people group has from the people group themselves” is because the two cannot be separated. They are not the same, but they are intertwined. Americans often find this difficult to understand because their culture is very young and shallow, and because they ceased to be a people, to the extent they ever were, over a century ago. Genetics affects culture, which in turn affects genetics, in an ongoing process that no one is even close to being able to successfully divide and analyze. One of the benefits of being multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and familiar with multiple cultures is the ability to see what aspects are easily transmitted and which are not. There are still aspects of Japanese culture, hell, there are still aspects of Italian culture which I do not grasp despite my intimate familiarity with them.

As for anyone still trying to defend the failed military interventions in Vietnam and Iraq, well, that speaks for itself. Whether one looks at them from a moral or a military perspective, they were catastrophes.

I do support Ted Cruz’s plan to strip citizenship of ISIS members, just as I will support the eventual plans to strip citizenship from those who hold other citizenships. Such acts will not “destroy the Republic”, to the contrary, they will make the possibility of an undivided nation possible. The Republic was destroyed when it became an occupying Empire established by force under Lincoln; the South was, and is, a conquered nation which is no more a voluntary part of the Union than the West Bank is a voluntary part of Israel.

#NotYourShield is not the least bit “racist”, but is rather the refusal of Native Americans like me or other ethnic minorities, to permit SJW white people to speak for us using our name. We will speak for ourselves, they do not speak for us. The only thing that is racist is the SJW’s attempts to silence us and turn us into ventriloquist puppets. I am astonished at Vunderguy’s implicit assertion that white SJWs have any right to tell Native Americans what their permitted opinions are and at what they are to take offense or not.

There is no question that Western interference in the Middle East sparked this third great wave of Islamic expansion. Vunderguy earlier tried to question my knowledge of history, and yet here shows his own. There is absolutely no double-think here, merely observable cause and effect. Just as Islamic aggression sparked the Crusades, Western interference sparked the current global jihad. The expansionary jihadist spirit was always there, but it was quiescent until it was disturbed by the West.

People are often trying to get Larry and John to disown me in much the same way they have tried to get me to disown Roosh and Roissy. One might ask oneself the important question: why? It is, I think, a testimony to our collective effectiveness and impact we have on how people are thinking that so many attempts are repeatedly made to isolate and DISQUALIFY us.

But why do I so often, as another commenter observed, “get singled out”? I suspect that is because unlike Larry and to a lesser extent John, I annoy and embarrass the conventional Right almost as much as I infuriate the Left. I simply have no loyalty to any ideology except the truth as I perceive it to be and I don’t respect the Right’s pieties on race and other controversies any more than I respect the Left’s. But you don’t have to like the truth in order to accept it is legitimate when presented with correct logic and relevant science.