Tag: SJW

The most hostile work environment on the planet

James Damore’s lawsuit is making it clear to everyone just how toxic the work environment is at Google. It is so extreme that even Rod Dreher has taken notice of the lethal convergence.

7. ‘Discourage them all throughout the industry’
“If we really care about diversity in tech, we don’t just need to chase serial offenders out of Google, we need to discourage them all throughout the industry,” a lengthy internal post on Damore read. “We should be willing to give a wink and a nod to other Silicon Valley employers over terminable offenses, not send the worst parts of tech packing with a smile …”

8. ‘I will hurt you’
Damore’s memo prompted another employee to post this quote: “I’m a queer-ass nonbinary trans person that is fucking sick and tired of being told to open a dialogue with people who want me dead. We are at a point where the dialogue we need to be having with these people is ‘if you keep talking about this shit, i will hurt you.”

9. ‘Relies on crowdsourced harassment’
Google encourages employees to enforce unwritten norms by harassing and ostracizing those who break them, according to the suit, and by allowing employees to create “blocklists” on their communications systems. “[Google] relies on crowdsourced harassment and ‘pecking’ to enforce social norms (including politics) that it feels it cannot write directly into its policies,” the suit states.

11. ‘You’re being blacklisted…at companies outside Google’
Google manager Adam Fletcher wrote in 2015 he would never hire conservatives he deemed hold hostile views. “I will never, ever hire/transfer you onto my team,” he wrote. “Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit or technically excellent or whatever. I will actively not work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up. You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” he added. “You might not have been aware of this, but people know, people talk. There are always social consequences.”

It’s really rather remarkable how completely out of control the big technology companies are. And it’s going to be even more remarkable to see how fast they collapse once the artificial circumstances keeping them afloat change. They are like hollow, cancer-ridden giants and I expect that several of them will vanish as soon as the debt-equity bubble pops.

Convergence tends to metastasize after a company hits its peak. We’re seeing this in industry after industry, and particularly in corporations whose executives start to believe their position is unassailable.

Who needs truth?

A seriously converged professor attempts to square the circle by claiming that social justice warriors are the true defenders of free speech and open debate:

Do universities still educate their students or does political correctness hinder genuine intellectual development?

The political polarization that has divided the nation escalated last year on many campuses. Evergreen State in Washington witnessed a virtual campus takeover by left-wing student activists, leading to the departure of two prominent professors. NYU’s Jonathan Haidt argues that the leftist turn on campus, especially as expressed in the “social justice” orientation of the humanities and social sciences, poses as great a danger to society as the hyper-partisan politics of Fox News.

To Haidt’s point, a scandal erupted in the fall in Canada when Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate teaching assistant for an introductory communications course at Wilfrid Laurier University, played a video clip in which Jordan Peterson, a controversial professor, declared his refusal to address trans students by their preferred gender-neutral pronouns. Shepherd claims she was showing the video neutrally, just to start a debate about grammar usage, but she was reprimanded by her supervisors in a now-infamous meeting that she recorded and released to the media.

One prominent commentator, while decrying the seeming censorship evinced by Shepherd’s ordeal, likened Peterson’s challenge to current campus orthodoxies to the skepticism practiced by Socrates — just the kind of thing that should lead to increased knowledge. Indeed, many now insist that healthy skepticism and free inquiry, the supposed heart of the Socratic method and what Haidt labels the “disinterested pursuit of truth,” are in dire need of a revival in the academy.

I’m not so sure.

In fact, in important ways the social justice approach — which emphasizes the dynamics of power and oppression — that many fear has taken over the humanities and social sciences at its best is actually an improvement over the “disinterested pursuit of truth” and more in line with the Socratic method. In fact, rather than constituting an attack on knowledge, the social justice lens reflects new ideas generated by academic disciplines and experts within them, and generally encourages expanding our knowledge and opening up subjects to new perspectives, much like Socrates advocated.

Translation: we’ll write fiction, call it definitive, and you’ll like it, you outmoded relics with your outdated affection for “truth”, “history”, and “science”.

George Orwell would not have been even remotely surprised. SJW Konvergenzsprache is real-world Newspeak. And this namedropping appeal to “Socratic dialectic” is pure pseudodialectical rhetoric from the Aristotelian perspective.

As the old Italian admiral told me, in the end, it always comes down to Aristotle vs Plato.

Mountain View quakes with fear

Google’s Colin McMillen FEARS FOR HIS LIFE because my ideas are so terrible, my mien is so frightful, and my gaze is so lethal that my mere existence on the same planet puts specific Googler’s lives in clear and present danger!

Indeed, the mere act of emailing the Supreme Dark Lord clearly amounts to recklessly endangering human lives. Or rather, it would if SJWs did a better job of passing for human. You know they’re going to blame the next earthquake in the Bay Area on me. But then, who is to say that they would be wrong to do so?

It must be quite the little witch hunt they have going there. Of course, if they ever do discover the various sources of the leaks, I’m pretty sure that at least one identity will absolutely shock them to their core.

Panic in the NFL front office

I wonder what their excuse will be this time?

The NFL had a disastrous weekend when it came to ratings. Numbers have been down all season and it was more of the same for the wild-card games. The biggest surprise was that the best game (Panthers-Saints) had the biggest decrease year over year. Yes, markets were a big factor, but that was a competitive and entertaining game. Here’s the breakdown:

Titans-Chiefs (14.7) was down 11 percent versus last year’s Raiders-Texans game.

Falcons-Rams (14.9) was down 10 percent versus last year’s Lions-Seahawks game.

Bills-Jaguars (17.2) was down 10 percent versus last year’s Dolphins-Steelers game.

Panthers-Saints (20.4) was down 21 percent versus last year’s Giants-Packers game.

Hmm… so, what could possibly explain that surprise? What is different about the people down in Louisiana and North Carolina than the people in New York City? Aren’t they a little more likely to be patriotic and to serve in the military?

This is a classic case of the consequences of corporate convergence.

A virtuous irrelevance

This is what it sounds like, when a moderate moderates:

Ethan Van Sciver@EthanVanSciver
TFW Vox Day condemns me and @DiversityAndCmx and as “moderates.”

?

Ethan Van Sciver@EthanVanSciver
Extremists: Our hobby isn’t your cultural battleground.  You’re ruining comics.  Go away.

SJWs ruined comics. A single very specific type of extremist ruined comics. There are literally scores of varieties of extremists who had absolutely nothing to do with what has happened in the comics industry over the last three decades. As for me, how can I possibly have contributed to their ruination when I have been a professional comic book writer and publisher for all of one single day? Of course, the one comic I have written is an Amazon bestseller and hit the top 10 of all comics and graphic novels yesterday….

Nevertheless Van Sciver is wrong, because his hobby has become a cultural battleground and it has been one for longer than my own hobby of computer gaming has. And he is bound to fail, as per Sun Tzu, because he knows neither himself nor his enemy.

In less than one year, I expect that I will be a considerably more significant figure in the comics industry than Van Sciver. Not because I’m more talented, because I’m not. Not because I’m smarter, although I am. Simply because I understand the dire situation his heavily converged hobby is presently in and I am doing something about it, as the following review demonstrates.

UPDATE: Van Sciver allows that maybe, perhaps, Alt★Hero might not necessarily suck because politics. It’s not as if Animal Farm and 1984 were artistic failures, after all.

Secular Blasphemy @SecBlasphemy
Why can’t a right-wing comic also be a good comic? And Alt-Hero raised nearly a quarter mill, making it very clear what political direction it had. ‘It’s going to be right-wing!’ is a shock to absolutely no one involved.

Ethan Van Sciver‏@EthanVanSciver
Yes, I know. Look, I’m buying it. I’ll read it. If it’s good I’ll say so.  It’ll be interesting to see if this publishing venture survives this market past the money raised to start it up.

Fair enough. All I ask of the doubters and skeptics is to look at what we’re doing and judge it by the same standards they judge everything else. Look, we know, we absolutely know, that the SJWs are going to trash it to the greatest extent they believe they can do so without looking absurdly stupid. The best we can hope for from them is silence, which you will note is exactly how they greeted the literally unprecedented success of the crowdfunding campaign. And how they greeted the very successful launch of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #1: By the Book.

If you don’t like the art, that’s fine. If you genuinely think the story is boring or the characters are vanilla, so be it. If you think the politics overwhelm the story, hey, your mileage may vary. If you dislike me, get in line behind Google, Tor Books, Worldcon, and the SFWA. But, for your own sake, be honest about what it is that you don’t like, even if the only thing you don’t like is the fact that I’m the creator.

And as anyone who has read my fiction – as opposed to my non-fiction – knows, I’m not at all afraid to present different and opposing viewpoints in a realistic and sympathetic manner. I don’t do so to curry favor with the other side, but because I think it makes for more interesting and more compelling storytelling.

UPDATE: Actually, looking at his art, he’s pretty damn good. I wonder if he might like to work with Chuck Dixon? We can certainly provide him with better writing than DC is presently inflicting on him.

UPDATE: Ethan, I’m not pretending not to be mad at you. I’m not mad at all. I’ve even got a considerable quantity of work for you at a healthy page rate if you want it. And I’m not talking about Alt★Hero either.

Wait, the sword cuts BOTH ways?

The Hollywood Left belatedly realizes that there are no conservatives in Hollywood to be affected by the campaign against sexual harassment.

When Hollywood’s most prestigious organization, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) — the group of nearly 7,000 actors, directors and other industry types who dole out the Oscars — expelled Harvey Weinstein on Oct. 14, audiences applauded. But by acting so swiftly, a mere nine days after the New York Times first reported allegations of sexual assault against the movie producer, the outfit now finds itself facing a dilemma.

Put simply: What to do with the rest of them?

“Harvey opened the floodgates,” said one male Academy member. “Now the Academy’s drowning in a tide of s—t. They don’t know what hit them.”

What hit, of course, were more alleged horror stories about so many other members: Kevin Spacey assaulting multiple young men, Dustin Hoffman sticking his hands in women’s pants, director Brett Ratner forcing himself on actresses. Ben Affleck seen on video groping a female host on “Total Request Live.” Screenwriter James Toback accused of sexual misdeeds by nearly 40 women. (As of this past Tuesday, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said it is considering criminal charges in five cases against Toback. He, Spacey, Hoffman and Ratner, deny the claims against them.)

“[We] can’t regret [kicking out Harvey] because [we] didn’t really have a choice,” said one male member of AMPAS’ board of governors. “Some members were quite vehement. But [we] didn’t have time to really weigh out the repercussions.”

The emergency meeting to deal with Weinstein was conducted by the 54-member board of governors — which includes Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg and Laura Dern — after it received a Change.org petition with 100,000 signatures calling for his ouster.

“But they didn’t give themselves time to plot out how to deal with this going forward,” said one prominent female AMPAS member. “Kathleen Kennedy [producer of the ‘Star Wars’ series] and some other female governors panicked and felt compelled to act. They thought [Weinstein] could hurt AMPAS’ cred. Some of them did admit this was a slippery slope. But I don’t think they imagined how slippery. It’s definitely caused some problems and fights among the board members.”

I give it about six months before the media declares that anyone who cares about sexual harassment, rape, and child abuse in Hollywood is a) alt-right, b) sexist, c) homophobic and d) anti-semitic. We’ve already seen from Cat Rambo, the SFWA, and Worldcon that SJWs will tolerate even the most vicious sex criminals rather than accept the imposition of any moral standards on the deviants in their midst.

Glenn Reynolds makes a salient point: Remember, they’re not making a big deal about sexual assault in Hollywood because they found out about it. They’re making a big deal because you found out about it.

They all knew. They didn’t care until they realized the public was onto them.

A lamentable failure to leap

DC comes under fire for taking a more practical approach to diversity by trying to develop new heroes instead of having them wear the old ones like a skinsuit:

Damage DC

Ethan “Elvis” Avery just wanted to serve his country. Instead, he’s been changed into a monster! Tasked as the government’s own living, breathing ticking time bomb, Ethan retains no control when the monster takes over. The beast is cheaper than a nuclear warhead and twice as  effective, and Ethan fights to rein in the damage he unleashes when it springs free for one hour a day. With everyone around him in danger, Ethan struggles to contain the DAMAGE he inflicts on the DC Universe.
Silencer DC

She’s one of the DC Universe’s deadliest assassins…and you’ve never heard of her. Super-strong, highly trained, armed with devastating and stealthy metahuman abilities, the Silencer is virtually invincible. Or at least she was. After decades as Leviathan’s chief assassin, Honor Guest put in her time and managed to get out with her skin intact. Now she lives a normal life with a normal family in a normal house on a normal street. But the past has come back to haunt her in the form of her old employer and a deadly new mission…and Talia Al Ghul won’t take no for an answer.

Sideways DC

During the events of DARK NIGHTS: METAL, high school junior Derek James accidentally fell  through a rift into the Dark Matter dimension! Now, as Sideways, he can create rifts in midair to leap through dimensions at will! But with that much power comes great liability—and tears are starting to form in the fabric of the space-time continuum…

The Terrifics DC

Bound together by fate, and united by the spirit of exploration and hope for tomorrow, the Terrifics are bound from the Dark Multiverse of Metal! When Mr. Terrific, Metamorpho, Plastic Man and Phantom Girl find themselves literally bound together by a tragic accident, our team of unlikely allies must rely on one another to make their way back home. But a startling revelation on their return trip brings them face to face with a new mystery: Where in the universe is Tom Strong?

Worst of all, all of the writing and art credits on these new books – which frankly sound pretty generic – are all men. But SJWs need not fear! The Great Converger, Mr. Brian Bendis, is here!

Kare wa modoranakereba naranai

SJWs strike Japan:

A Japanese TV programme has sparked accusations of racism and cultural insensitivity after a comedian painted his face to impersonate Eddie Murphy.

The New Year’s Eve show featured celebrity comic Hamada appearing in a Beverly Hills Cop skit with his face blacked up.

Using makeup to lampoon black people – a practice known as blackface – is seen by many to be deeply offensive. Protest over the show have grown over the past days.

US-born writer and columnist Baye McNeil – who is black and has lived in Japan for 13 years – drew attention to the show on Twitter, arguing that black people were “not a punchline nor a prop”.

Seen by many… outside Japan. In related news three months from now, Baye McNeil’s visa expired, he was unable to renew it, and was forced to return to the United States.

The costs of convergence

The end of season statistics are in for the NFL. Average viewership per game.

2015: 17.9 million
2016: 16.5 million
2017: 14.9 million

That is a 16.8{1a9740d54aaadd1290ec59721f654a3d9aaf924aeae0d9d35ee2fe84bc4370ea} viewership decline in two years.

The NFL appears well on the way to follow the course set by Marvel and NASCAR, which amounts to about a 50 percent decline in ten years. Given that there are 256 games in a season, that loss of three million viewers per game represents 768 million lost game-viewings.

Convergence is costly.