Tag: SJW

Magic: The Convergence

James Delingpole observes convergence at work at Wizards of the Coast

This is the story of Magicgate. Yes, another scandal, but one that for a change doesn’t involve any actual rape or sexual harassment… only game players who like pretending to be witches and wizards.
Like Gamergate, it concerns ordinary people who just want to be left alone to enjoy their hobby.

Ranged against these ingenus is an orcish horde of bullying, preening, self-righteous Social Justice Warriors who believe that everything — even an innocent collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering — should be played and policed according to their viciously intolerant politically correct rulebook.

Even if, like me, you’re not among the 20 million people who play Magic: The Gathering, what I hope you’ll appreciate is that this is a story that should concern us all.

By the end, I hope, you’ll feel as angered as I am by this ugly, scary power grab by the regressive left. And I hope you’ll want to join me in making your voice heard by hitting the people responsible where it hurts most: in their bank balance.

That means the companies which own and profit by Magic: the Gathering. That means you, Hasbro toys. And you, Wizards of the Coast.

I want you to realize that playing games is not a left-wing thing or a right-wing thing but an everybody thing.

I want you to realize that it is not the business of games manufacturers to discriminate against or punish players for their political opinions.

I want you to realize that your miserable sordid scheme to bully everyone who plays your games into sharing your SJW values is not remotely liberal but authoritarian and fascistic.

I also want you to realize that we have got your number: you try to claim the moral high ground, yet your entire business model is based on the kind of predator capitalism I’m sure you’d be the first to condemn if you weren’t getting so rich off of it.

Great. Now we’re going to have to get into collectible card games…. Although, more seriously, if there are any hardcore – and I mean hardcore – Traveller fans who are interested in providing assistance to an RPG-related project that is not Alt★Hero-related, please email me with LBB in the subject.

Anyhow, to return to the subject, I’m pleased that the two books in The Laws of Social Justice series are helping people understand these actions by SJW-converged corporations and put them in the proper context. Because these actions are not mere happenstance and they are all connected by the same twisted vision of reality and civilization.

Really, it’s about that extremely creepy, insidious and dangerous phenomenon which Vox Day anatomizes in his latest book SJWs Always Double Down: the thing he calls “Convergence.”

Convergence, essentially, is the SJW equivalent of those parasitic wasps which lay their eggs inside other insects. The eggs then hatch and the hapless host body is devoured from within.

Obvious victims of this include organizations like Facebook, Apple, and Google, which increasingly put the values of “social justice” before more conventional free market goals like customer service and the bottom line. And, indeed, before more traditional values like freedom of speech or individual rights.

But almost no institution is immune.

Indeed, every institution and organization is vulnerable. Be sure to SJW-proof yours.

The SJW perspective

I’m linking this The Last Jedi review by an SJW so everyone understands that SJWs really do get off on destroying what you love. They’re not stupid, they’re not clueless, they are literally unrestrained evil.

The Force doesn’t really care who you are. Nobody is the chosen one. Concepts like Destiny and Mysticism are hubris. Legends are problematic. The cycle of the empire vs the rebellion repeats in the first order vs the resistance and the ideologies of both sides are inherently flawed. It’s a machine. And the only way to be free is not to join. The past must be destroyed. The Jedi must end. We have to stop fighting what we hate and start saving what we love.

My favorite scene in the entire film is when Luke takes a torch to the Jedi Tree because he’s going to finally burn it all down. He’s going to burn the Jedi texts and end it. Then he hesitates. So Yoda appears as a force ghosts and does it for him. Yoda basically tells Luke to stop being so dramatic. Even in his attempt to hide from the past and close himself off from the Force, Luke is deifying the Jedi order. And Yoda tells him straight. None of this is really important. And then in a sublime moment commiserates with this former padawan by reminding him that when you’re a teacher, you’re agreeing to be the thing that your students move beyond. You get left behind, that’s part of the deal. Woof!

I mean, how great is that moment?

So yeah, when a movie takes the concepts that have been central to Star Wars and tears them down some people are going to react badly. I get that.

But God, how I loved it.

They don’t “miss opportunities.” They don’t “fail to understand.” They don’t “just not get it.” They genuinely live to shit on you, your values, your morals, your faith, your culture, and your children. They are purely destructive and there is no place in any civilized society for them.

And they know it, which is why they derive pleasure from tearing civilization down.

They are the rejected Muslim suitors throwing acid in the faces of the girls who rejected them. They are the gammas muttering spitefully about sexual proclivities of the pretty cheerleaders and ponytailed soccer players whom they will never attract. They are cowards insistent that not only are there no heroes, but that heroism is impossible.

This is all you really need to know about SJWs: “The only way to be free is not to join. The past must be destroyed.”

The negation of all that is beautiful, good, and true is the heart of the SJW.

The Lost Jedi

5-day revenues
TFA: $325,438,146
TLJ: $261,820,146
-19.6  percent

Day 5 revenue per screen
TFA: $9,038/screen
TLJ: $4,786/screen
-47.1 percent

Unexpectedly, both the average critic’s rating (92{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70}) and the average audience rating (54{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70}) on Rotten Tomatoes are falling as time goes on. At this rate of decline, the audience rating will be below 50{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70} inside a week. To put into perspective what a bomb this movie is, it took The Force Awakens 18 days for its revenue/screen average to fall below the $4,786 figure hit by The Last Jedi on Day 5.

Other than the massive opening weekend, TLJ is performing much more like a Marvel movie than a Star Wars film, which is the first sign that its domestic box office might actually end up reaching less than HALF of TFA’s $936,662,225. In fact, if we simply add how TFA did after Day 18 to TLJ’s five-day total, that suggests it will bring in less than $450 milllion domestically, well short of the $750 million it was expected to make. Given the terrible reviews, it may not even hit $400 million.

TL;DR: SJW convergence is expensive.

UPDATE: the media is belatedly beginning to notice that TLJ is a failure by Star Wars standards, even though they can’t understand the reason for it.

Monday’s box office numbers turned up a new glitch in the numbers for “The Last Jedi.” Even the Disney experts must have been surprised. “Jedi” took home $21.5 million on Monday, an important night for adult filmgoers.

But two years ago, “The Force Awakens” reaped just over $40 million on its first Monday. It’s almost twice as much.

There’s a feeling that “Jedi” is soft at the box office. I don’t know why. It’s just as good if not better. And it has major plot developments for “Star Wars” fans.

So this afternoon’s report on Tuesday numbers will be scrutinized closely. “Force Awakens” did $37.3 million on its first Tuesday. Will “Jedi” compare favorably? Stay tuned…

No, no, it did not. Instead of comparing favorably on its first Tuesday (Day 5), TLJ compared very disfavorably, coming in 42 percent south of its predecessor at $20.3 million.

UPDATE: TLJ is rapidly approaching freefall territory.

Day 6: $16,900,000 (-65.6{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70} from Day 6 TFA)
$3,993 per screen (-67{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70} from Day 6 TFA)

Moviegate: a review of THE LAST JEDI

Considering what the Star Wars movies cost to make, one almost wonders if Disney simply paid them all off. What other reason is there for them so thoroughly tongue-polishing what the fans are increasingly observing is a stinking SJW monstrosity:

This film is horrifically boring, disrespectful to its source material, painfully pedantic to hollow philosophy, and without any discernible heart for what makes Star Wars special. The flippant way the characters are handled distracts from the experience all the way to the end of the film. The humor is out of place and falls flat (George Lucas’ prequel fart jokes were funnier).

I’m pretty sure the director was urinating on the fan base with that Leia scene (yes, you know the one) and the ‘out of range’ in a vacuum farce. Johnson completely disrespects everything Abrams built in Force Awakens, destroying great characters and interesting questions. Mark Hamil gives a stellar performance even as Johnson tanks the character into tit-suckling, Skype-kamikazi yogi. Yoda’s awkward appearance gives us Johnson’s patricidal philosophy that rejects the filial piety that infused earlier Star Wars source material, which is the same philosophy he gives Kylo Ren’s character: we only have our identity insofar as we progress beyond our predecessors. As Yoda torches the Jedi sacred texts, so Rian throws the Star Wars series into this bonfire of a catastrophe.

Finally, a word about the critics. The universal critical acclaim for this movie is utter malpractice. There is no galaxy in which the pacing of this movie is acceptable, even if you agree with Johnson’s subversive strategy (I get it critics, you go to a lot of movies and you are tired of Joseph Campbell’s archetypes). The movie slowly meanders from empty motivation to empty motivation before giving us an empty hologram that disappears. You failed to assess this. Additionally, even though you may resent the Star Wars fandom for its enthusiasm and tradition, you should have the intellectual imagination to note that fans of the source material would be put off by what Johnson has done. I don’t know if it’s the big party, the media ownership reach, or the sub-par education the opulent years if the US gave us, but something force-skyped the brains of our critics to turn them off when reviewing this film.

I have to admit it, I am enjoying this. I despise all things SJW, but I particularly despise the SJW-corruptions of things I used to love. I intensely dislike things that disrespect their source material, and Disneyfication is now a byword for that contemptible form of disrespect.

Note that even when we published Corrosion as a parody of The Corroding Empire, what we published was a significant improvement on the original. To the extent that one can even use that term for anything that McRapey wrote.

It should be the last Jedi

Cataline reviews THE LAST JEDI:

This one sucked, don’t see it.

I could end my review there but I suppose you want a little bit more than that.

I intend to deliver many, many spoilers in this review because the producers of this heap of shit have gone to some lengths to destroy a favorite of my childhood.  I can’t believe I’m fucking saying this but, “George Lucas, all is forgiven!  Come back to us, I beg you!”

This was a cavalcade of boring, cliched awfulness in every way available to it.  I’m not saying that because I’m a contrarian Alt Right asshole.  I’m saying that because every word of that is true.

A couple of days ago a commenter Shitlord Numéro Uno said…

Wait, so you think the force awakens is a good movie? Holy dear God.

Compared to this, it absolutely is.  This is the first of the fully SJW Converged Star Wars movies.  Force Awakens just tried to score some Diversity Points here and there. But Last Jedi positively panders to the SJWs.  From the Body Positive Asian Chick.  The lectures on social inequality on Rich People Planet.  To Benicio del Toro’s monologue that was heavy on nihilist equivocation   This movie turned around, bent over for the SJWs and announced that Star Wars was open for business.  Upside this surrender to all things SJW, guaranteed that critics would prostitute themselves and give it positive reviews.  And they did but we’ll get to that at the end of this article.

The Last Jedi will make money but I would be shocked if it doesn’t kill the franchise in the end.  The fanbois are over-committed to Star Wars and will try  to convince themselves at it doesn’t suck. Now the SJW fanbois will have to pretend that it was really important that Star Wars hands out boring ass lectures for the price of admission but for the rest, the backlash over Last Jedi will make the one over Force Awakens look like a case of very mild buyers remorse.

The writing is incredibly weak.  The tone is inconsistent.  It’s boring as hell for the most part and all of the mysteries set up in the last movie got swept under the carpet.

Lets take a look at it, shall we?

I can’t say that I’m even remotely surprised. Disney ruins everything; was there really any doubt that they could manage to ruin Star Wars in an even more thoroughly professional sense than George Lucas’s amateurism ever permitted?

Critics: 93{9a996019c711e78922037ddc236e8e30d6b42c40f34cfa785ada7e9abef6c172}, Audience: 57{9a996019c711e78922037ddc236e8e30d6b42c40f34cfa785ada7e9abef6c172}.

Yeah, you know what that means.

SJW as far as the eye can see

One of the most SJW-converged corporations on the planet just extended its tentacles even further:

Disney on Thursday announced a deal to acquire many parts of Twenty-First Century Fox for $52.4 billion in stock. The company will get Fox’s movie studios, network Nat Geo, Asian pay-TV operator Star TV, stakes in Sky and Hulu and regional sports networks. The acquisition bolsters Disney’s plans to become a dominant streaming service platform, making it a bigger threat to Netflix.

“The more desirable content they have, the better they will be able to compete in terms of trying to sell a subscription offering at a time there’s so much competition for subscription-based services,” said eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna.

Bob Iger will remain Disney’s chairman and CEO through the end of 2021, at the request of the board of directors of both companies. Disney emphasized the importance of Iger to integrate the acquisition, saying in a statement that “extending his tenure is in the best interests of our company and our shareholders.”

On the plus side, there isn’t much at Fox to ruin. On the downside, this acquisition puts the SJWs in an even stronger position in the cultural war.

This is why it is so important to start and support independent endeavors such as Castalia House and Alt★Hero. Because if we don’t, there will be no alternative to the converged content being piped directly into everyone’s brains like a metaphorical Matrix.

Speaking of which, we need ten more beta testers. If you’re a gamer and you’re interested, please email with ELVETEKA in the subject. Old school Karateka-style arcade action.

All your hashtag are belong to us

The Guardian whines as GamerGate continues to resonate:

That was fast. In this #MeToo moment, feminism has been coopted by both people who don’t understand it and by people who oppose it. Worse: it’s now being used against people who are feminists and allies.

The most recent example comes from Mike Cernovich, the alt-right conspiracy theorist who led the way on the Pizzagate hoax that claimed senior Democrats were involved in a child abuse ring in the basement of a Washington DC restaurant. That whole ruckus should’ve given MSNBC pause when he went after one of their regulars.

Cernovich recently orchestrated a campaign to pressure MSNBC to fire contributor Sam Seder over a joke he made in a 2009 tweet. The network did fire him – only to then rehire him after a backlash against their decision.

If you have ever been exposed to jokes before, you’d know the tweet was sarcastic. It mocked people whose defense of Roman Polanski from child rape accusations rested on the fact that he was a ‘great artist’. It was an anti-rapist rape joke, like the kind that Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer and even Jay Leno later told about Bill Cosby.

We’re now at the point where people are being canned for jokes, by people who don’t get the jokes, don’t get feminism, don’t get that maybe there should be some proportion in this thing, and don’t get that right-wing men with a public record of misogyny might not be your best guides through all this.

Even if Seder’s joke was bad and made in the wrong spirit (which, just to be clear, it wasn’t), if we’re going to fire everyone who has made a non-feminist remark we’re pretty much going to clear all the offices everywhere of almost every man and quite a few women.

That’s why people who’ve been thinking about gender politics and women’s rights should be in charge of this moment. We need to be led through this by people who’ve experienced harassment and denigration and discrediting. People who’ve spent years listening to others and who have been thinking about the dynamics, ethics and consequences of these things before.

Yeah, so, about that… SJWs have never been able to learn that anything that cuts their opponents can, and will, be turned around and weaponized against them.

 

Mailvox: SJWs really do always lie

A note from a reader of SJWAL who discovered that SJWs really have to be encountered to be believed:

Just wanted to thank you for your invaluable insights in SJWAL… I got roped into joining my HOA board a year and a half ago after the former president rage quit due to resident’s being angry with her behavior. She actually recommended me as a replacement. I think she actually thought I was an SJW and that she was going to be able to control me since all my interactions with her were friendly agreements in the interests of trying to get her away from me as fast as possible. She is retired so she has plenty of free time and has always been the neighbor that snoops in everyone’s business and selectively complains about neighbors she does not like violating minor rules. She had been working on updating the community rules book when she quit and the rest of the board wanted to allow her to stay on the rules committee. Whenever the topic came up, I said “that is fine, but she does realize that the board can vote to accept, reject or modify her proposed rules.”

Flash forward this summer and she is still working on the rules with no end in sight. The board has turned over through resignations and only myself and one of her minions remain on the board. The other 3 board members and I agree to place a deadline on the rules committee. To spare you the gory details you don’t care about, the committee submitted a proposal on time after much complaining about deadlines.

The board was in the process of reviewing it and suddenly she started meeting, in secret with her minion and working on proposed modifications. We had a board meeting and her minion submitted her proposed changes, we voted on each one individually and some passed and some failed. The next day we get an angry email from her about how we were violating the law if we did not write the rules the way she had proposed. That she as a member of the rules committee she should have been invited to the meeting and included a PS that said the email was to voice her objection to our proposed rule because it was illegal – it’s not – and she didn’t want to be implicated if the association were sued by a concerned resident.

I wrote the response and made clear they were my opinions alone. I informed her she was not invited because the rules committee was dissolved after the deadline voted upon. I pointed out where she was wrong about the things we rejected and asked her to cite relevant law on the things she was claiming were illegal. I finished the note saying I, personally, did not appreciate the veiled threat in the post script.

She wrote an response to the whole board about how she was crying just reading my “hateful” email. She doubled down and claimed she had legal opinions to back up her assertion. She complained about how it was disrespectful of us to put a deadline on her and the other committee members etc. etc.

Next morning I decided to respond. I prefaced the email saying I wasn’t going to go point by point with her because I didn’t think it would be beneficial. I then stated that I was going to state three things without malice or ill will towards her. The first thing was stating that respect is a two way street and asked her to honestly consider why she has unresolved conflicts with multiple neighbors (the number is close to 30{84e33cb3079486242e497491211df3d205f46b3a0e51fcdbcd64cea5b9aea06c} of the neighborhood).  The second statement was that I would pray that she finds peace and contentment in her life because in 7 years I had noticed that these were things she struggled to achieve (she is a churchian). The third was the simple statement “I will not be bullied”.

I get the reply later that morning. “Stop harassing me immediately” She references her email sent to the whole board about not wanting emails and I wasn’t respecting her wishes. Then the bingo moment “I call this harassment, especially because I am a woman”. She then threatens to contact the police and have her and her husband make sworn statements that I am harassing them if I ever speak to or email either of them again.

I was a little taken a back by this at first, reread my emails and realized they were tame and fact based, and was thankful for the fact that I sent copies of all correspondence to the board immediately before sending to or after receiving anything from her. I have 2 board members solidly backing me independently sending me emails that had the same sentiments of “good job, it’s time someone confronted her” and “you were much kinder than I would have been”. The same two initiated separate motions to the board about not allowing her to participate on any committees again, and seeing if there is anything we can do about her threatening a board member.

The fundamental mistake, of course, was giving this SJW the chance to have any input on the rules after she stepped down from the board. But this is a pretty textbook situation, from the board members naively failing to anticipate the SJW’s bad behavior to everyone being surprised by the shameless lies and counterattacks that to which an SJW who feels threatened invariably resorts.

Fortunately, the emailer was prepared, although it was a complete waste of time to babble about respect and prayer and personal lives. I suspect the emailer may be a woman, because women are usually far too concerned about that sort of superficial virtue-signaling trivia. But the important thing is that she also made it clear to the SJW that she was not going to submit and accept the SJW’s false narrative. It was also good that she copied the rest of the board on everything; notice how the SJW tried to conceal her direct communications with the emailer from the other board members.

It’s not difficult to defeat SJWs once you learn to identify and anticipate them. With a little patience and foresight, you can readily trap and expose them to the benefit of naive third parties who still think SJWs are some sort of fictional bogeyman.

Happy Converged Christmas at Tor

This is hilarious. The Macmillan executives who just shut down Pronoun have got to be eyeing serious cuts at Tor Books in 2018. At least Pronoun did what it was supposed to do.

Black Excellence: Honoring Kwanzaa through Science Fiction and Fantasy

It may be the holiday season, but for many people that goes beyond just Christmas or Hannukah. In my case, it means honoring my ancestors and culture through Kwanzaa. I’ve celebrated Kwanzaa alongside Christmas for nearly two decades now. While I no longer go through the whole ritual of lighting the mishumaa saba (seven candles) in the kinara (candleholder) or setting out the mazao (crops) and kikombe cha umoja (unity cup) on the mkeka (mat), I still try to honor the Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) on which Kwanzaa was founded. One of the ways I do that is by spending the week of Kwanzaa focusing on work created by African Americans, from television to movies to comics to books to businesses and beyond.

It’s always amusing to see people pretending to care about fake holidays for fake Americans. As for me, I like to celebrate Black Excellence during Kwanzaa by watching Serena Williams defeat an white girl half her weight in straight sets while listening to Puff Daddy’s greatest hits, after which I read one of SFWA Grand Master Samuel L. Delaney’s beautiful tales of true gay love between man and underage boy.

It’s a very special time of year.

The NFL doubles down

I suspect the NFL is eventually going to regret signing up for more Goodell:

The Commissioner finally has a new contract. Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the NFL’s Compensation Committee has informed all owners that a new contract for Commissioner Roger Goodell has been executed.

The memorandum to all owners explains that a “binding contract extension has been signed by the Commissioner and by Arthur Blank, on behalf of the League entities.” The memo also cites the existence of a “nearly unanimous consensus” among the owners in favor of finalizing the extension now.

The answer to problems caused by SJW is always more SJW.