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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not a “crackpot conspiracy theory” to believe Crist is a closet case, and that his marriages were merely camouflage. This kind of gossip has long been widespread in Florida political circles. But this wasn’t why Tea Party conservatives hated Crist in 2009, when the then-Republican governor of Florida dishonestly secured the endorsement of both the state party chairman and the National Republican Senatorial Committee 15 months ahead of the 2010 GOP Senate primary. With Tea Party backing, Marco Rubio surged ahead to beat Crist, who eventually became a Democrat. (And the exposure of corruption of the state GOP apparatus sent some people to prison.) When Joy Reid started gay-baiting Crist in 2007, however, Crist was seen as a “rising star” in the GOP, and smearing him as a closet homosexual was obviously an attempt by Reid — then as now a partisan Democrat — to sabotage the career of a Republican.
The issue is not whether Joy Reid is a “homophobe” any more than the issue is whether Crist is gay. Indeed, I have argued that much of what is condemned as “homophobia” is neither wrong nor harmful. The real issue is that Reid is dishonest — a Democrat Party hack, masquerading as a journalist — and that she is an unscrupulous hypocrite, willing to do whatever she can to hurt Republicans, even if it means acting in direct contradiction to her own party’s alleged “principles.”
(In fact, Democrats have no principle other than the pursuit of power.) Furthermore, Reid’s behavior illustrates Vox Day’s Three Laws of SJWs:
A reader writes about how convergence ruled his church:
The first time I corresponded with you was last year, in which I asked advice about a church which brought in a San Francisco 49er for one of their sermons. The entire point of the sermon was to lecture the congregation on how Colin Kaepernick was doing God’s work by kneeling for the anthem– not scriptural in the least. They followed a pattern of social justice convergence: firing pastors who were more scholarly in biblical works, hiring a woman to preach once a month, bringing in a more “diverse” congregation intentionally to replace the faithful. My wife and I walked out on the church and never returned. The advice you gave was to take charge of the spiritual matters of my family, as a man should, and on my end, as I’ve turned to Him, God has bestowed us with blessings beyond anything I could have imagined this year.
However, the converged church is not faring so well. They used to be one of the largest churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, and by all accounts they are failing hard. Attendance has dropped drastically. They’ve lost most of the actual “doers” on their staff to other churches. They’ve replaced most paid staff with volunteers who aren’t as competent. The church used to have its own coffee shop which it has now closed down because it no longer can sustain itself. In the space of one year since veering off into social justice, it has destroyed itself.
Social justice leads to complete ruin every time. Thought you might like an update.
I can’t say I’m surprised. The death knell is the female preachers. I don’t know why, exactly, but once a church reaches that point, you can rest assured that it isn’t coming back.
In the culture war engulfing America, there are many fronts. Some are apparent to everyone, such as the purging of right-wing figures from Facebook and Twitter. But a less well-known battle is being waged in science fiction publishing, where a steady convergence in the industry has all but eliminated straight white male authors from the catalogs of the major sci-fi publishers.
California is known as a bellwether state. Political, cultural, and demographic trends tend to appear in California first before metastasizing throughout the United States. It is not an accident that both no-fault divorce and Valley Girl uptalk both happened to have their roots in California.
In the same way, the comics industry can be considered something of a bellwether industry, at least when it comes to the culture war. Even before the university campuses descended into social justice lunacy, the two industry giants, Marvel and DC Comics, hired executives who promptly turned their companies into left-wing propaganda factories.
The extent of the convergence cannot be exaggerated; it is literally worse than you can likely imagine. From a transsexual Thor to a gay Hispanic Spider-man, from tedious lecturing and hectoring to homosexual marrying and villains celebrating girl power with heroes in lieu of fighting them, the culture warriors in comics have insulted their fans, rejected their roots, besmirched their heroes, and befouled and befattened the formerly beautiful.
Read the rest of my new monthly column on the culture war at Dangerous.
I don’t see how the University of Tennessee football program is likely to benefit from its decision to back out of hiring my fellow Bucknellian Greg Schiano because people were shrieking about it on social media:
As detailed by SI’s Bruce Feldman, the University of Tennessee on Sunday backed out of a deal to hire Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano as its next head football coach. The two sides reportedly signed a “memorandum of understanding” or MOU. As explained below, an MOU for a college coach is a formal record of the understanding between the coach and the school as to the key terms and conditions under which the university would employ the coach. Could Schiano sue the university for breach of contract, fraud or other claims? If all of the necessary parties signed an MOU, the answer would be yes.
Tennessee’s football program is in disarray after a season in which the team finished 4–8 and winless in SEC play. Earlier this month, the school fired head coach Butch Jones. The firing was not a surprise, but that the school would target Schiano—best known as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Rutgers before his time in Columbus—to replace Jones was surprising.
Schiano has a controversial reputation, in part due to his time as Penn State’s defensive backs coach in the early ’90s under former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for sexually abusing young boys. In a 2015 deposition for a civil suit between the school and its insurance company concerning the payouts to Sandusky’s victims, another former Penn State assistant coach, Mike McQueary, testified he had heard through another coach that Schiano had recounted witnessing Sandusky molest a boy. In interviews with media, Schiano has denied the allegation, and he was never charged or otherwise implicated by any other party in the lengthy litigation of the Sandusky scandal.
I’m not a particular fan of Schiano, as I wasn’t impressed with his performance in Tampa Bay, but what high-caliber coach is going to want to go anywhere near Tennessee now? It’s been established that the authorities will bow promptly to the whims of the sufficiently vocal, so what coach smart enough to have options would want to go anywhere near that maelstrom of lunacy?
You may recall that last week, I posted an image of a GI Joe cover that many of you doubted could possibly be real. Well, it was. And here is an interview with the current writer of GI Joe, Aubrey Sitterson, with Bleeding Cool, which may prove to be more than a little informative. Note how this line was practically paraphrased from SJWAL’s description of the purpose of narrative propaganda: “It’s speculative fiction, right? So why not use it to conjure up a better world?” BC: Some Joe fans take issue with a person of your political persuasions writing GI Joe. Tell us why that’s actually a good thing.
AS: I’m a socialist, and that’s been a tough pill for some folks to swallow. That’s in part because in this country, the military is almost universally seen as a right wing institution, but that’s actually far from a universal sentiment. There are too many countries to list where the military has fought off right-wing coups or fundamentalist takeovers, or even where the military has sided with socialist insurgencies. In South American history, it’s not even uncommon for socialist activists to become soldiers themselves! It’s a common Marxist refrain, but that’s because it’s true: The military has revolutionary potential.
There’s nothing inherently right wing about the military, it’s just how the military has generally been used in United States history. One of the big questions I posed to myself, especially writing this book in the midst of Trump taking office and the rise of the alt-right, was figuring out what a socialist GI Joe book would even look like. After a lot of thought, it came down to tweaking not only our general perception of the military’s goals, but also the methods by which it achieves them. A socialist military doesn’t exist to further enrich the monied classes or enforce property rights or promote imperialist agenda. Instead, it has a far simpler, far more noble goal: Protecting and empowering people.
The book is designed to be aspirational, so I tried to write Joe as an idealized military – what the military would be if I could wave a magic wand and make it so. That’s why GI Joe became an international organization, one more concerned with protecting the population of the planet than promoting any single country’s interests, and also a big part of why we switched all of the Joes over to using laser weapons. It’s speculative fiction, right? So why not use it to conjure up a better world?
Using lasers also solved another big problem with doing a leftist take on GI Joe: Guns. I love gunporn action flicks as much as anyone, more than most, honestly, but what flies in John Wick or Commando simply ain’t appropriate in GI Joe, which is, at its core, and in my favorite incarnation, decidedly a kids’ property. I grew up watching all kinds of stuff that glorified gun violence and while I don’t think it broke me as a person or anything, that kind of material definitely contributes to the exaltation of firearms. And in 2017, with what feels like near-constant mass shootings, fetishizing guns in a children’s property isn’t just gross, it’s wrong.
That’s the behind-the-scenes reason on why the Joes use nonlethal lasers, but there’s also an excellent story reason as well: If the Joes are the best in their chosen fields, and they’re all working together…why would they even need to kill people? The Joes are strong and capable enough that they can afford to be nice, to give people the benefit of the doubt, even if doing so puts them at risk. And truthfully, that’s the very definition of a hero. BC: You’ve been the target of what we’ll call “backlash” for some of the changes you’ve made to GI Joe, but GI Joe as a property has been, in a lot of ways, progressive since the ’80s. In that respect, what parts of that legacy did you build on for your take on GI Joe?
AS: “Backlash” is a nice word for it, right? Though they’ve thankfully calmed down now, I was getting death threats for more than a month. One of the most perplexing things about that whole situation (outside of how someone could get so upset over a comic book that they’d threaten someone’s life) was that GI Joe has been progressive since the very first issue of Real American Hero. War was never something to be celebrated in that book — it was a sad necessity, albeit one where heroes could be elevated through valor. And that progressive trend was continued in the Sunbow series a few years later, with a level of gender, ethnic and racial representation that was simply unheard of at the time. And while the Joes were a diverse group of friends, the Cobra villains were, by-and-large, homogenous white males. That’s shockingly progressive for smack dab in the middle of Reagan’s America.
GI Joe is, at its core, a progressive concept, so I didn’t have to go in and do any heavy lifting. Instead, it was all about figuring out ways to continue that trend, but in a way that’s appropriate for 2017. Our new Salvo is a great example of that, albeit one for which I continue to catch a lot of heat from a certain vocal minority of Joe fans. Making Salvo a Samoan woman served a couple purposes. First, it gave us another international Joe for our newly international team. Changing the character’s race and gender not only gave us some Polynesian representation, but also helped us dodge some problematic visual associations, as Salvo’s original look (bald, heavily muscled white guy with giant guns and a shirt that says “THE RIGHT OF MIGHT”) reads as… a little too alt-right. It also presented an opportunity to introduce a different body type into the group, which I thought was important.
So, the SJW definition of a hero is “someone who is strong enough to be nice and give people the benefit of the doubt, even if doing so puts himself at risk.” That explains the SJW position on immigration, does it not? Okay, so that’s the shot. Now here is the chaser, a news item posted later that same day by the same comics news site, Bleeding Cool.
There’s still more than a week before the December 5th final order cutoff for retailers to order Scarlett’s Strike Force, the new GI Joe series launching out of IDW’s First Strike super-mega-crossover event. But before all the orders are in for the first issue, set to hit stores on December 20th, the book has already been canceled by IDW.
“Unfortunately, IDW told me early this month that Scarlett’s Strike Force was being canceled after issue #3,” writer Aubrey Sitterson told Bleeding Cool in an exclusive interview. “And with up through issue #4 already written, that means ending on a pretty outrageous cliffhanger.”
Since the first issue is more than a month away from hitting stores, with time yet left for retailers and fans to order it, it might seem premature for the book to already be canceled, but Sitterson relayed the reason he was given by his publisher, as unlikely as it sounds: “IDW told me they made the decision due to low sales.”
Good riddance! IDW appears to be figuring out that SJWs are a cancer a little faster than either Marvel or DC is. Of course, IDW has considerably less margin for error, since they aren’t being propped up by their movie-licensing revenue. UPDATE: No, my assumption was incorrect. Apparently IDW has learned nothing from this incident and the decision was imposed upon them from above. “IDW stood by Sitterson (he did keep his job as the writer after all). Their initial support statement was only retracted after Hasbro allegedly got involved.” Snicker-snack….
