Tag: SJW

A happy ending

It’s always nice to see a happy ending where the SJW ends up unemployed, bitter, and alone. Perhaps more SJWs should consider looking into that diversity they cherish and reading up on the concept of “karma” and “minding your own business”. You may recall how Adria Richards got a programmer fired at a tech conference, but what you may not know is that the story had a just and happy ending. From The Guardian:

On 17 March 2013, Hank was in the audience at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, California, when a stupid joke popped into his head, which he murmured to his friend, Alex.

“What was the joke?” I asked.

“It was so bad I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “It was about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle – a ridiculous dongle. We were giggling about that. It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”

A few moments earlier, Hank and Alex had been giggling over some other tech in-joke about “forking someone’s repo”. “We’d decided it was a new form of flattery,” Hank explained. “A guy had been on stage presenting his new project, and Alex said, ‘I would fork that guy’s repo.’” (In tech jargon, to “fork” means to take a copy of another person’s software so you can work on it independently. Another word for software is “repository”. Just in case you wanted to know.)

Moments after making the dongle joke, Hank half-noticed the woman sitting in front of them stand up, turn around and take a photograph. Ten minutes later, a conference organiser came down the aisle and said to Hank and Alex, “Can you come with me?” They were taken into an office and told there’d been a complaint about sexual comments.

“I immediately apologised,” Hank said. “I knew exactly what they were talking about. I told them what we’d said, and that we didn’t mean for it to come across as a sexual comment, and that we were sorry if someone overheard and was offended. They were like, ‘OK. I see what happened.’”

And that was that. The incident passed. Hank and Alex were shaken up – “We’re nerdy guys, and confrontation isn’t something we handle well” – so they decided to leave the conference early. They were on their way to the airport when they started to wonder exactly how someone had conveyed the complaint to the conference organisers. The nightmarish possibility was that it had been communicated in the form of a public tweet. And so, with apprehension, they had a look.

They found a tweet from a woman, called Adria Richards, with a photo of them: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles. Right behind me #pycon”.

Anxious, Hank quickly scanned her replies, but there was nothing much – just the odd congratulation from a few of her 9,209 followers for the way she’d “educated” the men behind her. He noticed ruefully that a few days earlier Adria Richards had herself tweeted a stupid penis joke. She’d suggested to a friend that he should put socks down his pants to bewilder security agents at the airport. Hank relaxed a little.

A day later, Hank was called into his boss’s office and fired.

“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” Hank said, “then I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears but…” Hank paused. “When I got in the car with my wife, I just… I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”

That night, Hank made his only public statement. He posted a short message on the discussion board Hacker News: “Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have three kids and I really liked that job. She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.”

Ten months later, I was sitting opposite Adria Richards in a cafe at San Francisco airport. She seemed introverted and delicate, just the way Hank had come across over Google Hangout. She told me about the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle. “Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.

“You felt fear?” I asked.

“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

Which was why, she said, even though she’d never before complained about sexual harassment, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos”. She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”

“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”

“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”

    ‘He’s a white male,’ Adria said. ‘I’m a black Jewish female. He said things that could be inferred as offensive to me’

I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been at a tech conference with 2,000 bystanders.

“Sure,” she replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”

“Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired, but you must have felt pretty bad.”

“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different… I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”

On the evening Hank posted his statement on Hacker News, outsiders began to involve themselves in his and Adria’s story. Hank started to receive messages of support, and then insults, from men’s rights bloggers. He didn’t respond to any of them. At the same time, Adria discovered she was getting discussed on a famous meeting place for trolls: 4chan/b/. “A father of three is out of a job because a silly joke he was telling a friend was overheard by someone with more power than sense. Let’s crucify this cunt.” “Kill her.” “Cut out her uterus with an xacto knife.”

Someone sent Adria a photograph of a beheaded woman with tape over her mouth. Adria’s face was superimposed on to the bodies of porn actors. Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if she was fired. Within hours, she was fired.

‘‘SendGrid threw me under the bus,” she later emailed me. “I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.’’

The death threats and rape threats and racist insults continued even after she was fired.

“Things got very bad for her,” Hank told me. “She had to disappear for six months. Her entire life was being evaluated by the internet. It was not a good situation for her at all.”

“Have you met her since?” I asked him.

“No,” he replied.

Ten months had passed since the day Adria took that photograph, so I asked what he thought of her now. “I think that nobody deserves what she went through,” he replied.

“Maybe it was [Hank] who started all of this,” Adria told me in the cafe at San Francisco airport. “No one would have known he got fired until he complained… Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?”

I was so taken aback by this suggestion that at the time I didn’t say anything in defence of Hank. But later I felt bad that I hadn’t stuck up for him. So I emailed Adria. I told her what he had told me – how he’d refused to engage with any of the bloggers or trolls who sent him messages of support. I added that I felt Hank was within his rights to post the message on Hacker News, revealing he’d been fired.

Adria replied that she was happy to hear that Hank “wasn’t active in driving their interests to mount the raid attack”, but that she held him responsible for it anyway. It was “his own actions that resulted in his own firing, yet he framed it in a way to blame me… If I had a spouse and two kids to support, I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference. Oh, but wait, I have compassion, empathy, morals and ethics to guide my daily life choices. I often wonder how people like Hank make it through life seemingly unaware of how ‘the other’ lives in the same world he does, but with countless fewer opportunities.”

I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life? “I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”

“Give me an example,” I said. “So you’re in your new workplace [Hank was offered another job right away] and you’re talking to a female developer. In what way do you act differently towards her?’

“Well,” Hank said, “we don’t have any female developers at the place I’m working at now. So.”

“You’ve got a new job now, right?” I said to Adria.

“No,” she said.

SJWs speak jabber whack

It doesn’t matter if they are anti-Sad Puppies or anti-GamerGate, they are the same sort of liars who will say anything in order to try to discredit the other side. One “Cat”, who may or may not be Cat Rambo, the vice-president of SFWA who recently announced her candidacy to lead the organization, has been running around sites ranging from Larry Correia’s and the Mad Genius Club to Mike Glyer’s File 770, trying to tell everyone she knows what Sad Puppies, and now #GamerGate, are really about. She’s actually jabber-whacking about how Larry Correia’s Book Bomb sold nearly 2,000 novellas and pretty much ensured that the Sad Puppies recommendations, if they are nominated, will be the most widely read nominees on the Hugo ballot.

To get bestseller status you have to start from somewhere and you are using the book bombs to give that start to certain stories that can’t get it on their own. Thus diddling with the bestseller lists, as I said. Meaning the Sad Puppies themselves know that bestseller is not simply a mark of quality.

As for the quality of the Sad Puppies noms, I read them all, and they ended up where they deserved, quality-wise. If “Opera Vita Aeterna” was the best the Sad Puppies had to offer, the Hugos have hardly been missing out on “quality” to this point. (Pro-tip: “quality” stories do not name the woman character after her chest. Not even if there is some marine with a similar nickname for deniability’s sake.)

I see what the Sad Puppies claim they are doing. I just don’t actually care; talk is cheap. Last year’s results make it pretty plain what they’re really doing.

I know what Gamergate is really about, because I pay attention to what they do and who they attack, and who they don’t. Attach Gamergate to your cause if you like being associated with rape and death threats against women who dare to speak about videogames. But in that case you probably shouldn’t get mad when someone points out what you have done.

(Pro-tip: There are no female characters in “Opera Vita Aeterna”. Nor are there any Marines. As it happens, it is a fantasy novelette about a monastery. This tends to raise some serious doubts about Cat’s ability to read, let alone accurately ascertain the quality of what she has nominally “read”.) There were several responses, one of them mine.

You don’t know a damn thing about it, little Kitty-Cat. Because, if
you did, you’d know that I am the Leader of #GamerGate and the link
between #GamerGate and Sad Puppies is considerably more direct than you
believe it to be. #GamerGate is Sad Puppies on nuclear steroids. Everything is bigger.
Literally Who, Literally Who 2, and Literally Wu are scam artists that
make John Scalzi look like a paragon of probity. And you don’t even know
what the issues are.



But here is the similarity. GamerGaters declare we will play the
games we want to play and make the games we want to make. If you don’t
like that, go away and make your own games. Sound familiar?


Ravenshrike added:

You do realize that both the Goon Squad and the GNAA, the two biggest ‘professional’ troll organizations on the internet, have admitted to being active in q/ggate correct? As well the only death threat traced back to an actual person was traced back to a Brazilian clickbait journalist, basically another professional troll. So attempting to throw around guilt by association when I

1. am not active on twatter
2. Can process the fact that assholes on the internet lie about who they are and what they believe in on a regular basis
3. am not interested in bringing up similar arguments about MZB and SD

Being a typical SJW, Cat didn’t have the sense to recant or retreat, but instead doubled-down:

Sorry guys, Gamergate got into the regular news. And now we all know
it’s not about ethics in journalism, it’s about targeting women who dare
to make games, or talk about games, with rape and death threats. 

Ah, the “regular news”. As in Brian Williams, the hero of Baghdad. I pointed out a few obvious facts, such as that Cat was not only a blatant liar, but her lies didn’t even make sense.

  1. Most of the “death threats” and “rape threats” were fake. They never happened.
  2. All of them happened months ago. Last fall. When was the last “rape and death threat”, Cat?
  3. GamerGate is an active group that consists of tens of thousands of
    individuals. Many of them are professional game developers like me. What has #GamerGate been doing for the last six months if there have only been a small handful of supposed
    threats last fall, most of them of dubious legitimacy?
  4. A number of game journalists, some of them influential, have lost
    their jobs. Joystiq closed. Gawker lost over a million dollars in ad
    revenue and “reassigned’ two of its top people. Do you think this is due
    to “rape and death threats”? Or serious problems concerning “ethics in
    journalism”?
  5. Several game journalism sites have adopted ethics guidelines. Do you
    think this just might have something to do with a little ethical problem
    in gaming journalism?

I was the second nationally syndicated game journalist in the USA. I
have written for numerous leading game industry magazines, including Computer Gaming
World, Electronic Entertainment, and Develop. And I can tell you, with
100 percent certainty, that in 2014 there was a MASSIVE ethics problem
in game journalism. And there still is. Any serious game developer will readily
tell you as much.

What are your game industry credentials? What are your game
journalism credentials? What do you know about it beyond watching CSI Law and Order:
SVU?

Entryism in progress

Robert Conway at Reaxxion asks if  Magic: The Gathering adding a transsexual character is a problem:

Magic the Gathering has been a mainstay in geek culture since the 90’s, so it should come as no surprise that people are making a big deal about the addition of a new trans character, Alesha, Who Smiles At Death. The announcement came in the form of a short story on Wizards Coast’s website entitled The Truth of Names, and is not actually indicated on the card itself. In fact the only text besides the card’s ability is a quote: “Great death with Sword in hand”. The art doesn’t necessarily give you the impression that Alesha is a trans-person either.

The card’s back story, as detailed by writer James Wyatt, discusses a clan of people who earn their names in battle. The tale depicts an Orc who fights for the Mardu clan, which is lead by Alesha. During the battle the Orc questions Alesha’s gender, after failing to kill a dragon and claim his own name. The story goes on about the battle and eventually ends with other warriors detailing deeds that deemed the Orc worthy of the name. However at the end the Orc admits he has yet to figure out who he is and willfully acknowledges that Alesha is in fact a woman.

Certainly this news has caught the attention of SJW-friendly meadia such as Kotaku (archived link) and of The Mary Sue (archived link). To put it simply Nathan Grayson thinks it’s “pretty darn cool”. Not everyone is on board with it. Several IGN users have voiced their concerns as I’m sure many of our readers will do the same.

The answer is, ABSOLUTELY YES, it is a problem. It is a very serious and ultimately fatal problem that will eventually kill the game dead. It is a problem of such gargantuan and epic proportions that the only rational thing to do is to immediately stop playing Magic: The Gathering, and stop purchasing any of its related products, until the Alesha, Who Smiles At Death card is publicly withdrawn. The card is the gaming equivalent of a small but malignant melanoma.

One might as reasonably ask if the original decision to permit women to read Bible verses was a problem for the Anglican Church. Or if the original income tax, which was introduced with a maximum rate of 7 percent and affected less than 1 percent of the U.S. population was a problem for US taxpayers.

The point is not whether the addition of an overtly propagandistic SJW element immediately breaks the game. The first step never does. That’s because the first step is always only symbolic, a testing of the waters to see if the invasion of the SJWs is going to be resisted or not. When it is resisted, of course, there will be endless protestations of how it is harmless little thing, how it is “just this one brick”, and hand-on-heart vows of how there is, of course, absolutely NO intention of building a damn brick wall in the future.

The time to smack down the SJW entryists is when the camel first sticks its nose in the tent, not when it is already fully ensconced and defecating all over the carpets.

A SJW Hugo slate

JASON SANFORD IS CAMPAIGNING FOR HUGO AWARDS! I REPEAT: JASON SANFORD IS CAMPAIGNING FOR HUGO AWARDS! Call the Thought Police! Alert the Social Justice Media! Sound the Raciss Siren… oh, wait a minute… never mind, it’s all right, he’s got his SJW card.

Best Novels

  The Mirror Empire: Worldbreaker Saga 1 by Kameron Hurley. See my original review of the novel.
    
    The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. This is why we need translated fiction! This novel, which spans recent Chinese history as it revolves around a strange case of alien contact is one of the best hard science fiction novels I’ve read in years. Can’t wait to read the next book in the trilogy.
    
    Defenders by Will McIntosh. Just when I thought I’d read every type of alien invasion and military SF story out there, along comes Will McIntosh with something new.
    
    Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. Wow. That’s all I could say after reading this novel, which explores what happens when first contact happens in Lagos, Nigeria. I’ve always loved Nnedi Okorafor’s amazing ability to create true-life characters which both resonate with readers and stories and twist you into new directions — and Lagoon does this and far more in superb ways. Unfortunately, the novel is hard to find in the USA (I had to order a copy from the UK). The USA release is slated for later this year.
    
    Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. If I could, I’d nominate the entire Southern Reach series as one complete work. See my original review of the series.

He’s got a woman (check), a Chinese man (check), a white man (tsk tsk), a black woman with an African name (check, check, check), and another white man (seriously? Bad SJW!) Alas, poor McRapey. Too white, and for the first time in his life, too male.

But where are the Native Americans? Where are the Hispanics? Where is the transgendered handicapable lesbian Baha’ist from Papua New Guinea? Why does Jason Sanford hate Mexicans and Indians and Belgians?

Anyhow, I now look forward to seeing all the Hugo voters who pointed and shrieked at Larry Correia treat Jason Sanford in precisely the same manner. Don’t you? In the meantime, you can play SJW bingo! See if you can find all five!

  • “explores this topic in a unique and interesting manner.”  
  • “An all-too-rare fictional look…”
  • “a subgenre which until recently limited itself in unacceptable ways.”
  • “opens our eyes to new realms of possibility and imagination.”
  • “beginning an amazing journey as an author…”

My favorite part is the way Sanford uses the word “amazing” four times. But remember, he’s a PROFESSIONAL writer, people. Don’t try this at home.

    Be the dragon

    At Alpha Game, I comment upon the importance of being the dragon, not the self-styled paladin and self-appointed dragon-slayer. But one part of the Loneliest Paladin’s twitterstorm was relevant here for its illustration of rabbitology:

    MikeBrendan @MikeBrendan
    Things I don’t get: why Ghaters would rally around Vox Day. Dude is the epitome of loser.

    MikeBrendan @MikeBrendan
    Not only did Vox get kicked out of SFWA for being a racist homophobic sexist dipshit, he took sixth place on a five person ballot.

    Note that insufficient popularity with a small and specific group is equated with being “the epitome of loser”… by someone with no friends and not much of a life. Success, in the rabbit’s world, is something that depends entirely upon the level of acceptance by the warren. Everything else is irrelevant.

    Rabbits don’t understand that wolves respect strength and loyalty, even when exhibited in causes of no interest to them. Rabbits fear strength and have no loyalty, so the concepts are alien to them. They genuinely can’t understand the concept of standing up for someone because that someone stood up for you, even if you don’t like him, respect him, or want anything to do with him. For all that they are herd animals, they are not team players; in their own way they are more ruthlessly self-serving than the most ideological self-sovereign libertarian.

    And speaking of rabbitology, see how the rabbits cry when their warrens are invaded and they learn they don’t possess the power they flaunted so foolishly:

    GamerGate set out to writes its own story in Wikipedia – and to spread the dirt about the women who were its targets. These efforts were blocked by established editors under established Wikipedia policy. In retaliation, GamerGate planned an operation to get rid of its opponents – the “Five Horsemen” active in preserving objectivity and in keeping scurrilous sexual innuendo out of the encyclopedia. As a side-game, GamerGate also launched efforts to promote the idea that “Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy of some Jewish academics to control the media.

    The original GamerGate operation targeted the “five horsemen:” Ryulong, NorthBySouthBaranof, Tarc, TheRedPenOfDoom, and TaraInDC. All were sanctioned in the draft decision.

    For months, these Wikipedia pages have been an escalating scene of daily – indeed hourly – conflict.

    The Purge

    Yesterday, ArbCom announced its preliminary decision. A panel of fourteen arbitrators – at least 11 of whom are men – decided to give GamerGate everything they’d wished for. All of the Five Horsemen are sanctioned; most will be excluded not only from “Gamergate broadly construed” but from anything in Wikipedia touching on “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.”

    By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia. Liberals are the new Scientologists as far as Arbcom is concerned.

    No sanctions at all were proposed against any of GamerGate’s warriors, save for a few disposable accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned. The administrator who wrote, regarding Zoe Quinn’s sexual history, that

        I know other other allegations exist but will not state what those on WP are because that would be a BLP violation at the current time.

    was not even mentioned. The many brand-new accounts who arrived in December with no Wiki experience, but possessing a curiously detailed knowledge of Wikipedia policy jargon, are unmentioned, save for the fact that the decision rests almost entirely on their proposals.

    The extensive evidence of off-site collusion, which Wikipedia considers so improper that evidence must not be discussed on wiki but rather submitted in confidence, appears to have been entirely ignored. (I submitted such evidence myself, but received no acknowledgment or thanks; I have been told that much additional evidence was submitted.)

    Notice how the upset rabbit appeals to “established editors and established policy” (better described as activist editors and self-imposed customs), despite the fact that the editors concerned were quite clearly VIOLATING Wikipedia policy, and doing so rather egregiously. What appears to have happened is that Wikipedia is finally beginning to act against the SJW thought police who make a practice of attempting to define the public narrative by exerting personal ownership over particular pages of interest.

    The importance of rejection

    esr explains why it is vital to categorically reject the premises and principles of the SJW shriekers:

    Whenever I see screaming, hate-filled behavior… the important part never turns out to be whatever principles the screamer claims to be advocating. Those are just window-dressing for the bullying, the dominance games, and the rage.

    You cannot ameliorate the behavior of people like that by accepting their premises and arguing within them; they’ll just pocket your concessions and attack again, seeking increasingly abject submission. In one-on-one relationships this is called “emotional abuse”, and like abusers they are all about control of you while claiming to be about anything but.

    Third-wave feminism, “social justice” and “anti-racism” are rotten with this. Some of the principles, considered in isolation, would be noble; but they don’t stay noble in the minds of a rage mob.

    The good news is that, like emotional abusers, they only have the power over you that you allow them. Liberation begins with recognizing the abuse for what it is. It continues by entirely rejecting their attempts at manipulation. This means rejecting their terminology, their core concepts, their framing, and their attempts to jam you into a “victim” or “oppressor” identity that denies your lived experience.

    The identity-jamming part maradydd clearly gets; the most eloquent sections of her writing are those in which she (rightly) rejects feminist attempts to jam her into a victim identity. But I don’t think she quite gets how thoroughly you have to reject the rest of the SJW pitch in order not to enable their abuse.

    This is the challenge of #GamerGate and Blue SF and Hacker culture and the Androsphere, to say nothing of a myriad of other singular interest groups. We are opposed to precisely the same thing, precisely the same phenomenon, sometimes even the very same individuals, and yet, because we don’t share interests, we tend not to recognize that we share the same enemy. We have the numbers, and yet we fail to ally and support each other cross-interest because most gamers couldn’t care less about fiction and most fiction readers are not hard core gamers.

    The Orwellian imperative

    I was thinking about why the SJWs make such a mission of celebrating sexual aberration as normal and elevate the acceptance of those who are deluded about their sexual identity as secular saints as a moral imperative.

    In addition to the way in which it reveals the intrinsic illogic of the SJW Left – on Alpha Game, I observed that the logical Left’s position would be that it was a tragedy Joshua had to kill himself rather than permitting someone to legally kill him – it occurs to me that their linguistic demands are another example of their Orwellian imperative.

    By weakening the independence and strength of individuals’ minds and forcing them to live in a constant state of propaganda-induced fear, the Party is able to force its subjects to accept anything it decrees, even if it is entirely illogical—for instance, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of waging war, the Ministry of Love is in charge of political torture, and the Ministry of Truth is in charge of doctoring history books to reflect the Party’s ideology.

    That the national slogan of Oceania is equally contradictory is an important testament to the power of the Party’s mass campaign of psychological control. In theory, the Party is able to maintain that “War Is Peace” because having a common enemy keeps the people of Oceania united. “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want. “Ignorance Is Strength” because the inability of the people to recognize these contradictions cements the power of the authoritarian regime.

    In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

    In other words, if you are willing to call a HE a SHE, if you are willing to address Joshua as Leelah, you are willing to pretend that XY is XX or XX is XY, you are signaling your intellectual slavishness and that you will be willing to declare that WAR is PEACE, FREEDOM is SLAVERY, and 2+2=5 upon demand.

    Of course, to paraphrase one AG reader’s observation, if Joshua Alcorn had really been a woman, he would have taken 30 Advil in a failed suicide attempt.

    Astroturfing 101

    Rule No. 1: Post BEFORE screencapping:

    A Spacedad appears! @SuperSpacedad
    Yes Gamergate, it’s clearly other people making you look bad and not your own fault. Here’s your bottle and bonnet

    Exposing Jihad @XposingJihad
    @SuperSpacedad Wouldve been more effective you hit post before screencapping

    Isn’t it fascinating how we’re still supposed to believe #GamerGate is all about harassing a few individuals despite the fact that no one has mentioned them in weeks? The SJWs are so desperate for evidence that they have to manufacture it themselves.

    Remember, rabbits always lie. They have no sense of honor or self-respect.

    UPDATE: Speaking of fascinating, we have a real rabbit here. Never heard of the guy before, so he must be blocking #GamerGate en masse while simultaneously trying to spoof us.

    You are blocked from following @SuperSpacedad and viewing @SuperSpacedad’s Tweets. Learn more

    Anti-game is anti-human

    A fascinating article on the anti-GamerGate focus on narrative and how that anti-game perspective is intrinsically anti-human:

    Life doesn’t have innate structure, even if you can awkwardly cram cylindrical tropes through square holes to try and illustrate relationships between things you experience and media you consume. But this gets even worse when examining other media. Films and novels are heavily rooted in narratives, because they must have a plot to carry them forward, excepting some very experimental films. Some songs carry a narrative, but you can’t have music that’s just someone talking. That might qualify as poetry, but even some poetry isn’t narrative, merely descriptive. You can have music without a narrative, and for centuries this was the most popular form of music. Likewise, games are another medium which can exist without any narrative at all. Just as music can be art merely for the composition, a game can be beautiful for its game mechanics.

    A classic game that can qualify as art based on nothing but core mechanics.

    One of the major problems with game criticism—the “subjective” kind that many detractors say is unacceptable—is that it is rooted in Narratology. Instead of focusing on the mechanics, and commenting on how well they work together, critics focus on the narrative and what the mechanics mean for the story, not what the story means for the mechanics, or even if the developer had the intention of making such a statement.

    Personally, I love it when a game merges story and mechanics. In fact, I think the best way to tell a story is through mechanics, and not exposition or traditional narrative delivery. But that concept has been rejected by critics, opting to use Narratological deconstruction and insisting that this is the only way to evaluate media. When games naturally don’t pander to this benchmark, they receive failing marks. There’s a bigger reward for developers catering to this cabal of “journalists” than for catering to the actual audience. When the standards of the reviewer and their audience differ so greatly, the reviewer cannot be said to speak for their audience. Despite this flawed approach, proponents of New Historicism insist that all media must be evaluated this way. It conveniently allows them to cite Post-Structuralist reasoning to defend themselves from criticism of their methodology, since the reviewers subjective opinion and any conjecture they can express are consider to be at least as important as the media being judged, no matter how self-evident it is that the reviewer has missed the point.

    Papers, Please tells a compelling, interactive story using its mechanics.

    To a degree, it’s inevitable that this outlook supports “experimental” titles that don’t really fall into the bounds of “games.” It’s not a medium they’re capable of properly digesting, so content has to be restricted to something they can process. Funny, you never hear the opposition supporting non-narrative films, but they do support games that are top-heavy with narrative. It’s not actually about something “new” or “better.” It’s about something “different.” Labeling it “experimental” is the only way it can get a pass in the wrong industry. If held to the standards of a medium it actually belonged in–one with Narratological standards–it’d fall apart.

    Ultimately what these ideas boil down to is an overarching philosophy called Anti-Humanism. This social theory comes as a reaction to Humanism, and the belief that it was too idealistic. While Humanism is all about free will, placing humanity and human actions at the center of life, and using rationality and reason alone to reach moral decisions, Anti-Humanism detaches humanity from inherent meanings (via Post-Structuralism) to “de-center” subjects and remove their agency. In other words, you yourself lack free will, since you’re a product of the world around you, and working towards an ideal self is futile. Interestingly, Nietzsche (credited as a “founder” of Existentialism, a philosophy that places great emphasis on human agency and the absurdity of life) often criticized humanism for being a form of “secular theism.” Anti-humanism finds itself equally religious in practice, but with a much more oppressive set of goals.

    Gaming is the natural enemy of anti-humanism. When you play games, you yourself have personal agency. Only a player truly has free will inside of a game. You are playing by a ruleset, but you have choice within that ruleset, and likely have goals and motivations. These are informed by your situation and by the gameplay systems, but some of the highest-praised games have allowed you to set your own criterion for success, and provided you with a system open enough to facilitate that. Many strategy and 4X games are good examples of that. The belief that all humans are free and equal is a core tenet of Humanism, which Anti-Humanists reject.

    The idea that the average individual has agency, of course, is anathema in the world of the Social Justice Warrior. Because then he would be responsible for his actions… and his failures.

    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