Tag: SJW

SJW will not protect you

Not even relentless virtue-signaling is proving sufficient to save the alleged sexual harassers in comics:

I understand that Group Editor of the Superman comics Eddie Berganza has informed staffers at the DC offices that Buzzfeed is about to publish an expose feature all about him and allegations that have been made against him regarding sexual harassment.

In 2012, Bleeding Cool reported the story that such an incident was alleged to have taken place in a hotel lobby at WonderCon in Anaheim.

I received multiple reports that the subject of the original post was DC Comics then-Executive Editor Eddie Berganza and the woman was a comic book creator in her own right, a partner of a regular DC writer, and an occasional convention reporter for Bleeding Cool.

She did not want to be named back then – she was afraid it might damage her work prospects and wanted to move on, and we respected that. But a few weeks later Bleeding Cool was able to name Eddie Berganza as the man allegedly responsible.

We later learnt that a number of complaints against Berganza had been made over previous years, including this one. During this period, he was demoted from Executive Editor to Group Editor, and reportedly banned from attending comic conventions for DC.

Between the Marvel-destroying SJW Brian Bendis moving to DC and Berganza’s slow-motion departure, this is really shaping up to be a tremendous vacuum for Alt★Hero to begin filling next spring.

And whether the accusations are true or not, this insidious environment is merely one of the many reasons you are very unlikely to ever see me at a comic convention. Can you even imagine how many female SJWs would be lining up to go public with their claims that I killed them, dismembered them, and raped them with their own severed limbs if I was foolish enough to so much as let them shake my hand?

Meanwhile, SJW convergence continues to kill the comics.

Sales of comics and graphic novels to comic stores declined 11.12{666e5e86189a1fe5e2247551e7a4443f43206d2d8b82140cfc9efd38c8e16ed5} in October in comparison to the year ago period, according to information released by Diamond Comic Distributors.  Comic sales were the entire source of the decline; comic sales declined 15.74{666e5e86189a1fe5e2247551e7a4443f43206d2d8b82140cfc9efd38c8e16ed5}, while graphic novel sales were up 2.37{666e5e86189a1fe5e2247551e7a4443f43206d2d8b82140cfc9efd38c8e16ed5}. Year-to-date sales are down 10.12{666e5e86189a1fe5e2247551e7a4443f43206d2d8b82140cfc9efd38c8e16ed5}, overall, with comic sales down 9.93{666e5e86189a1fe5e2247551e7a4443f43206d2d8b82140cfc9efd38c8e16ed5} and graphic novel sales down 10.55{666e5e86189a1fe5e2247551e7a4443f43206d2d8b82140cfc9efd38c8e16ed5}.

Even more interesting, unit sales were down 20.27 percent year-on-year.

Another Twitter suspension

Your account (@voxday) is currently suspended. For more information, please visit Suspended Accounts.

I can’t say the Trust & Safety Council were particularly helpful, as they did not provide any explanation why or ask me to remove any tweets. I can still access Twitter from that account and see my notifications, but can’t actually tweet anything. It’s just as well, I have too much to do to waste time on social media anyhow.

We apologize for this momentary disruption in the Daily Meme Wars, which will resume tomorrow in an email-only format.

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More harassment at NPR

The head of National Public Radio tried to bury the harassment charges against his top editor.

The left-wing Washington Post reports that NPR “leaders were aware of at least four complaints against” Michael Oreskes, NPR’s top editor, prior to his resignation last week after two allegations went public. With charges of a cover-up floating about, NPR chief Jarl Mohn has taken a four-week leave for what he says are medical reasons.
The brewing NPR scandal comes down to the left-wing news outlet’s decision to keep Oreskes on, even though top management knew of four harassment allegations against him, according to the Post.

To make matters worse, the Post reports that in just the last ten days, five more NPR staffers claim to have been harassed by Oreskes.

Going forward, the problems for Mohn and the taxpayer-subsidized NPR are quite obvious. By not acting appropriately and/or effectively enough to end Oreskes’s alleged behavior — meaning serious disciplinary action or termination — the alleged victims piled up. The possible liability issues ramifications here are the stuff of trial lawyers’ dreams…and taxpayer nightmares, for we subsidize this apparent den of executive harassers and enablers.

The details of the seven(!) NPR allegations are not yet known. We do, however, know something about Oreskes’s alleged M.O. via reporting last week from the Post. This includes unwanted kisses, proposals for a “room service lunch, a creepy personal ad, and using the promise of employment to keep the women on the hook.

For the overall national, establishment media, this is also bad news. In just a month, no fewer than eight members of the elite media have been hit with allegations that range from harassment to misconduct to assault. In many of those cases, we have been told that “everyone knew,” but no one did anything.

On top of NPR and the New York Times, other news outlets embroiled in this growing scandal include NBC News, MSNBC, ABC News, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, and Mother Jones. The prominent names include Matt Taibbi, Mark Halperin, David Corn, and Leon Wieseltier.

While this very same establishment media excoriate Fox News over that network’s alleged harassment problems, they were all covering up much, much worse behavior allegedly committed by their very own over the course of decades.

I believe a brilliant, bestselling political philosopher has written, bestsellingly, about the tendency of a certain class of individuals to cast aspersions on others that would, by rights, more accurately describe their own behavior.

The cancer spreads in comics

This is MOST EXCELLENT news for the future prospects of  Alt★Hero.

Brian Michael Bendis, one of Marvel’s most prolific writers, is moving over to DC Comics. The news broke this morning via a tweet from DC Comics, which read, “We are beyond thrilled to welcome Brian Michael Bendis exclusively to the DC family with a multiyear, multifaceted deal.”

From Bleeding Cool:

The word is out and it hit with a bang. Brian Michael Bendis, who has been writing continuously for Marvel Comics since 2000 has signed an exclusive contract with DC Comics. But why. No doubt there will be PR-friendly soundbites with the words “challenge”, “fresh start”, or “a whole new universe of characters to play with” but from involved sources, Bleeding Cool has been able to put together this timeline. All of this is unofficial, of course.

Much of it was spurred by the Marvel Comics Writers Summit that occurred last month just before New York Comic-Con, which we dubbed Fear And Loathing Before NYCC 2017.

But first, what was going on with Bendis at Marvel? He was writing Jessica Jones, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Defenders, Spider-Man, Spider-Men II, Invincible Iron Man and Infamous Iron Man. He had written the Civil War II crossover event. But he deliberately stayed well away from Secret Empire. His books didn’t crossover with the big event, and Guardians only did when he left.

However his books weren’t getting the big numbers like they used to. And a number of them were subject to being later than usual. His contract was up, the likelihood of getting a raise was low. The Marvel Comics Creative Committee of which he played a strong part no longer had any influence on the films, after Kevin Feige at Marvel Studios stopped reporting to Ike Perlmutter but to Disney instead. Bendis, who wrote the first of the Marvel end credit scenes with Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury in Iron Man, was no longer a part of that mix. Bendis had written pretty much every Marvel character he was interested in – and there was no chance of Marvel publishing a Fantastic Four comic now.

So, the Marvel Comics Writers Summit, before New York Comic Con. We mentioned how the issue of increased diversity of Marvel Comics and how to deal with negative reaction towards that, was a significant aspect. I am told that Brian Bendis, creator of Miles Morales and Riri Williams, had quite the disagreement with David Gabriel, whose interview with Miles Griepp for ICV2 regarding diversity at the publisher needed repeated clarifications.

That there was a decision made to give the title called simply Spider-Man to the Peter Parker iteration of the character in 2018, rather than the current Miles Morales, which would become Miles Morales: Spider-Man again, a battle Bendis thought he had previously won for Marvel Legacy.

That Gabriel told Bendis that diversity doesn’t sell. The counter to that being, what does at Marvel aside from Dan Slott’s Amazing Spider-Man and Star Wars?

We’re thrilled too. If Bendis succeeds in doing for DC Comics what he did for Marvel, the resulting vacuum is going to create an even bigger opportunity for alternative comics than we had previously imagined. Consider some of the comments by comics fans there.

  • Hope that Bendis won’t destroy DC like he did Marvel.
  • Most of what I’ve picked up from dc over the past two years has been a worthwhile read. But I’d given up on marvel, in part because of how many series they’ve let bendis ruin. I’m really hoping dc doesn’t pick the trash from marvel and end with the same bad books and terrible sales numbers.
  • DC went crazy! Bendis sucks!!!
  • Marvel is on a downward spiral, and Bendis doesn’t want to be caught up in it. That, and he just doesn’t have the pull he once had.

Jon Mollison has some related thoughts at Castalia House:

The flailing death throes of Marvel Comics represents only the latest softening of the permafrost. The phenomenal success of Alt★Hero represents the most obvious green shoot, but the most important sign of the coming spring is the reaction of fans to both events. No longer content to turn their backs on the cold and sterile offerings, comic book fans are turning up the heat and demanding better.

With the vast array of forces aligned against the common man, it is more important than ever that fans step back and reassess the history of the medium. Pushing back against the winds of winter and preparing the ground for the coming planting season takes some thought and effort, to be sure. But the rewards are well worth the effort. To that end, let’s turn the weapon of deconstruction around and use it against those who would replace genuine virtue in comics with the empty simulacrum of Diversity Uber Alles.

Mailvox: convergence kills the cons

A former conference speaker who is still very much in demand explains why he doesn’t even attend technology conferences anymore. Sounds like we don’t just need #AltTech, but #AltCon as well.

These technology conferences are usually run by community-minded people, not corporates, by people who devote themselves to the endeavor, enter into huge financial risk and often wind up losing money at the end of it. Yet this kind of over-the-top virtue display is becoming increasingly common. Once upon a time I seriously considered launching a conference myself, but there’s no way I’d expose myself to this kind of drama, which is almost guaranteed now.

These tech community controversies fall into 3 broad categories:

1. Not enough speaker diversity.
You’re guaranteed this kind of outrage now if you don’t have 50{b05c51a15f0a42d8e7dd687f4cc4bfffd66a97ee173a2742c6182468204332c9} or more women speakers. I’m certain the bar will move once parity is achieved and you then need PoC, then trans, then … You even have popular speakers now making statements like “I won’t speak at a conference or be on a panel unless there are least 50{b05c51a15f0a42d8e7dd687f4cc4bfffd66a97ee173a2742c6182468204332c9} women and PoC” such as this fellow. ElectronConf is a hilarious example of this controversy. Electron is an important and rapidly growing technology. It’s what applications like Slack, Skype and Brave and many other desktop applications are built on. It’s an open source project run and owned by GitHub. They announced their first conference in 2016, got speaker proposals, and even did a blind speaker selection, but ended up with all male speakers, which is obviously not surprising to the rational observer. This kicked off a controversy. The conference was initially postponed, then went dark and completely disappeared. It’s supposedly back again for 2018 and calling for speakers, but there is no reason to assume the same thing won’t happen again.

2. I won’t speak if X is speaking!
Identify a problematic speaker on the list along with yourself and make a big show of how you are cancelling your talk because you won’t appear at a venue that promotes problematic Mr X. Often the timing is guaranteed to give the organizers an aneurysm. Nodevember in Nashville in 2016 was a great example of this. Doug Crockford, a well-respected old-guard from the JavaScript community,  literally wrote the book on JavaScript best practices that was a reference for many years–JavaScript: The Good Parts, was on the speaker list but had recently caused conference controversy for “slut shaming” because he was making a technical point and referred to the “old web” as “promiscuous” and the “new web” as “consensual”, the case being that he was equating promiscuity with something negative. Kassandra Perch, a typical screechy non-contributing SJW who creates controversy wherever she goes, pulled out and made a scene. She was backed up by the usual Twitter suspects in that community and caused a headache for the organizers. The organizers then had a falling out because one took it upon himself to disinvite Crockford immediately, while another organizer stepped down in protest of the first guy’s unilateral action and released a public statement about it. All hell broke lose. This is a conference organized by individuals, who invest their own time to make a fun community thing and have to go begging for sponsorships to make it happen. Somehow they survived and are still doing it each year.

3. A man looked at me! Reeeeee!
This used to be a common tactic as a tool used to justify and introduce Codes of Conduct as a standard practice at conferences in the first place, before they were pushed into our code repositories. There is rarely evidence of actual wrongdoing, just hearsay, and often even that hearsay is a head-scratcher. Now you can’t run one of these without a CoC, you just won’t get sponsors because they’ll be targeted if you don’t. See LambdaConf as the last non-CoC conf that has now introduced their own, a bit less SJWized version in an attempt to have one but not completely submit to the narrative. Now that all the conferences have CoCs, the screeching is about supposed violations that aren’t correctly handled. They are either pure virtue-signaling or an attempt to undermine the unconverged organization committee. It’s not surprising that this current controversy is around a conference in eastern Europe where they are less attuned to SJW culture and don’t properly understand how to feed that dragon. They probably stepped on a tripwire and alerted this individual that they hadn’t fully signed up to the narrative. The non-West suffers the most from this and comes because they see a need to invite Western big-names to attract ticket sales.

As that guy you interviewed in SJWs Always Double Down said, tech community conferences were the initial gateway for SJW convergence of open source, and my assessment is that they’ll be the canary in the coal mine for the costs that convergence will eventually extract from open source. Tech conferences are becoming too risky to organize. The rules around what is acceptable, who you can have speak, ratios of acceptable groups to feature in your speaker lineup, and so forth, are just too hard to understand as the SJW standards mutate over time. The financial risks are huge and you have to rely on large sponsors to fund your events; ticket sales don’t do it. But your sponsors are flighty and will withdraw at the first hint of controversy. Quality speakers are becoming increasingly difficult to book and the ratio of knowns to unknowns will deteriorate too far to attract sufficient ticket sales. Particularly when you have to insert so many token speakers who don’t contribute to the attractiveness of the conference, and will sometimes even detract from it.

Of course women and other minority groups in tech will bear the greatest cost. The rest of us will just have fewer venues to meet with our peers and hear about cutting edge developments in person. But women, PoC, trans people, etc. are already being promoted at significantly higher numbers than they exist at large in tech with the bar being set very low to make this happen. Low-quality speakers from these minority groups are all too common. The same names keep appearing and people wonder why because they never seem to have anything interesting to add. Non-technical soft talks are becoming too common, and nobody wants to go to a tech conference to be moralized at, but it’s now standard practice.

The tech community at large is being presented with artificial evidence that these minority groups are simply full of low-quality and non-contributing individuals. Then we’re told that that this is caused by rampant sexism, racism, and transphobia in tech. I don’t believe this is true but I wouldn’t blame regular conference attendees and video watchers from concluding that their non-white, non-cis, non-male peers are indeed of lesser quality considering the anecdotal evidence being force fed to them. There are great women, PoC, trans, whatever, people in tech, but the high-quality ones exist in proportion to their numbers overall. And those overall numbers are small. For all the reasons that James Damore was chastised for pointing out.

The science fiction is settled

The SF-SJWs never learn, never change, and fail to realize that the changes in the distribution system means that their ability to play gatekeeper has ended.

You see, all this introduction about SF being about Change, and defining that change as the emergence of narcissistic navel-gazing natterings is just so that he can call anyone who doesn’t embrace that as neanderthalic bigoted throwbacks.

Instead of discussing the content and the quality of the stories, some people made derogatory comments [about] the race, gender, sexual orientation, and behaviors of other authors. These were comments that were rooted in bigotry. I should point out here that bigotry is not an expression of hatred as much as it is a demonstration of fear, insecurity, and cowardice. It’s natural to fear the unknown — real courage is embracing it.

God help me, but I’m gonna invoke Vox Day. “SJW’s Always Project.” And here’s the perfect illustration of DARVO and Gaslighting. Since the Puppies were always about the quality of the stories, and Gerrold’s side has always been about denigrating writers on the basis of their race (if white), Gender (if male), sexual orientation (if straight), etc. He’s managed to swap the sides in this statement, trying to claim the moral high ground, and in the process ceding that the other side had it. As an old white male himself, Gerrold had best tread carefully among his fellows, since he’s terribly short on intersectionality points.

And that, perhaps is the real point of this essay. One which he inadvertently makes himself, if you’re not viewing it through SJW lenses. He must maintain his cred that he’s one of them.

There’s an old Russian story about a Communist party meeting, and when the party chairman’s name is mentioned, it is required to stand and applaud his name. The clapping continues and continues, loudly and uproariously because nobody wants to be the first one to stop clapping. After ten or fifteen minutes, the audience is in agony, but nobody dares to stop out of fear. Simply put, because even though it gives everyone else the excuse to finally stop, the first to stop is never seen or heard from again.

This is the danger of playing the Virtue Signaling game. And he goes right out and illustrates this as if it were proper thinking.

Larry Niven has wisely said: Never throw shit at an armed man. Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man. In fact, one could distill this into a much more general rule. Never throw shit. Never stand next to anyone throwing shit.

This is profoundly good advice. There has been too much shit-flinging. Monkeys are good at it, but human beings have made it an art form. Some of us enjoy shit-flinging so much that we forget we’re human beings, we become fecal trebuchets.

Now this is extraordinary advice, considering the speaker was the Master of Ceremonies at the single greatest celebration of shit flinging in the entire history of SF Fandom (One of his claims to fame in his bio at the end of the piece). This is a classic example of “Let’s stop after I get my last shot in.” Of course, on the internet, nobody gets the last word, not even me.

So again, he’s projecting his sins upon others. (Also, he missed the point of the Niven quote.)

And why? Because for the next few screens worth, he goes on and on about one single idea. “So let’s have this conversation be about remembering our essential humanity — and what we must do to preserve it. It’s this simple. If someone is throwing shit, verbal or otherwise, silence is interpreted as agreement.”

Fine, this is why I am not being silent, because he has been at the forefront of the gang denying people’s essential humanity. And this goes back to well before the Hugo Wars. He blocked me on Facebook ages ago when I took offense to one of his many (since purged) screeds about how Republicans should be put to death that came up on a liberal friend’s feed. The list of shit he’s thrown, and shit he’s been silent and complicit about is long and horrid, and I’m sure he feels smugly satisfied about every single turd.

But there’s the root of it. This is why he has to make this point calling everyone who disagrees with him in the slightest misogynist, racist, and homophobic. Because in SJW-land, you HAVE to. If you miss one Two Minutes Hate, then your silence is interpreted as agreement, and they will attack you twice as bad for being a traitor to the cause.

It is satisfying to see that more and more people are beginning to see what I was trying to tell them from the start. There is no compromising with this people. It is not possible. They cannot be fixed, and their behavior can only be influenced by force and fear. They are fundamentally damaged and their behavior is driven by internal processes rather than reactions to external influences, so one can no more talk sense into an SJW than one can convince a person with tuberculosis to stop coughing.

And is there a word that male SF-SJWs love more than “fecal”? It’s a dead tell.

The real Hitler

I don’t know about you, but I cannot WAIT to read historian Mary Beard’s latest historical discovery! She is truly amazing! I expect the BBC will be announcing a new documentary based on it any day now.

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Of art and the artist

It is interesting to observe that when SJWs insist that the art MUST be judged in light of the artist, it is merely another example of how they are projecting:

Like Hitler, Jeanneret wanted to be an artist, and, as with Hitler, the world would have been a better place if he had achieved his ambition. Had he been merely an artist, one could have avoided his productions if one so wished; but the buildings that he and his myriad acolytes have built unavoidably scour the retina of the viewer and cause a decline in the pleasure of his existence.

One of Jeanneret’s buildings can devastate a landscape or destroy an ancient townscape once and for all, with a finality that is quite without appeal; as for his city planning, it was of a childish inhumanity and rank amateurism that would have been mildly amusing had it remained purely theoretical and had no one taken it seriously.

A book has just been published—Le Corbusier: The Dishonest Architect, by Malcolm Millais—that reads like the indictment of a serial killer who can offer no defense (except, possibly, a psychiatric one). The author shares with me an aesthetic detestation of Jeanneret, and also of his casual but deeply vicious totalitarianism; but, unlike me, the author both has a scholarly knowledge of his subject’s life and writings, of which the perusal of only a few has more than sufficed for me, and is a highly qualified structural engineer. Mr. Millais is able to prove not only that Jeanneret was a liar, cheat, thief, and plagiarist in the most literal sense of the words, a criminal as well as being personally unpleasant on many occasions, but that he was technically grossly ignorant and incompetent, indeed laughably so. His roofs leaked, his materials deteriorated. He never grasped the elementary principles of engineering. All his ideas were gimcrack at best, and often far worse than merely bad.

To commission a building from Jeanneret was to tie a ball and chain around one’s own ankle, committing oneself to endless, Sisyphean bills for alteration and maintenance, as well as to a dishonest estimate of what the building would cost to build in the first place. A house by Jeanneret was not so much a machine for living in (to quote the most famous of his many fatuous dicta) as a machine for generating costs and for moving out of. In the name of functionality, Jeanneret built what did not work; in the name of mass production, everything he used had to be individually fashioned. Having no human qualities himself, and lacking all imagination, he did not even understand that shade in a hot climate was desirable, indeed essential.

The artists, authors, and architects of the modernist era have much to answer for, and they are answering for it in Hell. The best tribute that we can pay to them is to tear down their buildings and destroy their sculptures while pointing relentlessly to their paintings and books as preeminent examples of what no man should ever do.

An ugly man can produce beautiful artwork, but those with ugly souls can neither recognize nor create beauty. They can only destroy.