Tag: SJW

Confirming convergence

It doesn’t really matter if a company backs down on its convergence due to a backlash. The point is, the mask has slipped.

The National Trust has reversed a decision to bar volunteers from public-facing duties at a Norfolk stately home if they refuse to wear rainbow sexual equality symbols.

Staff at Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk were offered behind-the-scenes roles after saying they were “uncomfortable” wearing multicoloured badges and lanyards for a “Prejudice and Pride” event marking 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

The decision came after a new film made by the National Trust revealed that Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, the hall’s last owner who bequeathed it to the nation, was gay.

The land and home conservation charity said on Saturday that wearing the badges was now “optional and a personal decision” for volunteers and staff. A trust spokesman said: “We remain absolutely committed to our Pride programme, which will continue as intended, along with the exhibition at Felbrigg. “owever, we are aware that some volunteers had conflicting personal opinions about wearing the rainbow lanyards and badges. That was never our intention. We are therefore making it clear to volunteers that the wearing of the badge is optional and a personal decision.”

On a not-unrelated note:

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Now, I’m not going to slam people that have taken a step in the right direction. On the other hand, I’m not inclined to trust them either. The fact is that converged or not, they’re simply not as bad as YouTube and there are no unconverged options.

So, I will resume posting select Periscope and other videos there. But I will be relying upon a more reliable service for Voxiversity.

Reminder: don’t talk to the media

Jon Del Arroz didn’t listen.

I didn’t listen to @voxday. I gave an interview to unfriendly media. They trashed the shit out of me. Listen to Vox. I knew better. Fortunately, it’s a site that has less traffic than my blog, and so I won’t give them the satisfaction of linking and giving them clicks. Most won’t ever see it.

The fact that there are exceptions does not mean the rule does not exist. The default position must always be “don’t talk to the media”. You may think you’re prepared to take the heat, you may think you will somehow outwit them, but I can assure you, you are not and you will not.

See, here’s the thing. I’m already on the ADL’s list of 36 Hitlers. I’ve already been trashed around the world, everywhere from Le Monde and Entertainment Weekly to the Guardian and the New Zealand Herald. After 16 years of sporadic efforts, the media has exhausted all the tricks in its usual repertoire without being able to discredit or disqualify me. My friends and family openly joke about me being the epicenter of galactic evil, and I’ve made it very clear to all and sundry that I don’t give a damn what they may think of my opinions one way or another.

But you haven’t been through that crucible. You’re not as emotionally antifragile. You’re not as psychologically inured to what people think of you and your opinions. You still have friends and family and acquaintances and co-workers who would be horrified to see you described publicly as a Nazi, a racist, a sexist, a white supremacist, an anti-semite, and so forth. And that is what the media will do to you, no matter who you are, because that is what they do to everyone they don’t like.

So, don’t talk to the media.

The sickness in Hollywood

It goes back further than you might expect. And includes figures you probably did not suspect.

“RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK”
Story Conference Transcript
January 23, 1978 thru January 27, 1978
George Lucas (G), Steven Spielberg (S), Larry Kasdan (L)

G — We have to get them cemented into a very strong relationship. A bond.

L — I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don’t have to build it.

G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

L — And he was forty-two.

G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.

S — She had better be older than twenty-two.

G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

G — It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.

G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…

S — She has pictures of him.

G — There would be a picture on the mantle of her, her father, and him. She was madly in love with him at the time and he left her because obviously it wouldn’t work out. Now she’s twenty-five and she’s been living in Nepal since she was eighteen. It’s not only that they like each other, it’s a very bizarre thing, it puts a whole new perspective on this whole thing. It gives you lots of stuff to play off of between them. Maybe she still likes him. It’s something he’d rather forget about and not have come up again. This gives her a lot of ammunition to fight with.

S — In a way, she could say, “You’ve made me this hard.”

G — This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It’s not as blatant as we’re talking about. You don’t think about it that much. You don’t immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. “I was jail bait the last time we were together.” She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, “I was fifteen years old.” Even if we don’t mention it, when we go to cast the part we’re going to end up with a woman who’s about twenty-three and a hero who’s about thirty-five.

S — She is the daughter of the professor who our hero was under the tutelege of. She has this little fragment of the map.

G — He doesn’t have to have the fragment in hand. All he has to do is get a copy of it, make a rubbing of it.

L — (this section is not clear, something about the fragments and how he gets them)

Something is broken

Nicholas Nassim Taleb is underwhelmed with the state of the UK intellectual sphere after his encounter with “historian” Mary Beard:

The BBC did some kind of educational cartoon on Roman Britain and represented “diversity” in terms of someone looking African in the show as representative of “diversity” at the time. Any dissent from the statistical errors made by the politically correct police is treated as apostasy.

What was meant to be a “typical” of Roman Britain by the BBC: flowing quotas of political correctness backward in time.

  • Representativeness heuristic. The picture was portrayed as representative (playing on the representativeness/avalability heuristic in the minds of children). Some people backtracked later by saying it is was not common but not impossible, which is where I shout “BS!”
  • Anecdotal vs Statistical. The backup is mostly anecdotal from cherry picked stories. We find nothing beyond traces of sub-Saharan genes in areas where Roman legions were located (France, Gaul, and even Spain, where most of it came much later from the Arab trade). Show the picture to a French or Italian person and tell him “this is the typical…” and watch the insults.
  • Fuzzy classification. Even the researchers who deal with physical remains miss the point that people from North Africa looked no different from Spaniards, S. Italians, and Greeks. Punics/Phoenicians we now know looked Canaanite, just like a Southern European. Berbers looked like mountain berbers today. So representing “diversity” should focus on the difference between locals and Romans, not within Romans. It would be like mixing English and Spaniards/S. Italians, which makes sense.

The reclassification “when it fits” is nothing short of fabrication.

Mary Beard, of course, fled from the obvious consequences of her own arguments when I pointed out to her that her advocacy of ethnic diversity, combined with her observation that the Roman mass rape of the Sabine Women was “a way of creating a mixed society”, amounted to an implied endorsement of the mass rapes of Rotherham.

English academics are third-rate intellects, which, sadly enough, puts them a leg up on most of their American counterparts. That being said, I still have a lot of respect for Ms Beard, whose take on history is certainly original, if nothing else.

I know I’m definitely looking forward to her first book on Carthaginian history, which promises to be truly ground-breaking in light of her discovery of considerably more ethnic diversity there than had been hitherto suspected.

Anything but God

Star Trek can tolerate anything, except the concept of a deity:

Star Trek: Discovery‘s producers apparently feel that the word “God” has no place on the bridge of a Federation starship. Series star Jason Isaacs was admonished for ad-libbing a line indirectly invoking a deity, which the show’s producers viewed as fundamentally against Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the future.

Discovery, the long gestating Star Trek prequel TV show, is finally debuting in September, and details are beginning to emerge about the series’ story and characters. Set ten years before the events of the original Star Trek TV show, the series will follow Commander Michael Burnham (The Walking Dead‘s Sonequa Martin-Green), who is now known to be Spock’s half-sister. The show will chronicle an important event in Starfleet’s history that will heavily involve the Klingons.

Discovery has made some unexpected choices so far, regarding which traditional elements of the franchise it’s eager to embrace and which one it feels comfortable discarding. A new story from Entertainment Weekly showcases perhaps the most unexpected choice yet, as Captain Lorca (played by Harry Potter veteran Jason Isaacs) was told he couldn’t ad-lib a line including the word “god”. Here is the anecdote in question, from EW‘s report.

The director halts the action and Lorca, played by British actor Jason Isaacs of Harry Potter fame, steps off the stage. The episode’s writer, Kirsten Beyer, approaches to give a correction on his “for God’s sakes” ad lib.

“Wait, I can’t say ‘God’?” Isaacs asks, amused. “I thought I could say ‘God’ or ‘damn’ but not ‘goddamn.’ ”


Beyer explains that Star Trek is creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a science-driven 23rd-century future where religion basically no longer exists.


“How about ‘for f—’s sake’?” he shoots back. “Can I say that?”


“You can say that before you can say ‘God,’ ” she dryly replies.

Star Trek is a show for atheists and pedophiles. Now they’re openly pandering to the former; it won’t be too terribly long before they start pandering to the latter.

YouTube restricts “extremist” content

And by extremist, they don’t mean what you might think they mean:

YouTube has been working on ways to manage offensive and extremist content that do and do not violate its policies, and some steps it has taken include AI-assisted video detection and removal as well as input from more experts. Today, in a blog post, the company provided more detail about its ongoing efforts.

First, its machine learning video detection has been hard at work and during the past month over 75 percent of videos taken down because of violent, extremist content were done so without the help of humans. This system has helped YouTube remove twice as many of these sorts of videos. The company has also started working with a number of non-governmental organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, the No Hate Speech Movement and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “These organizations bring expert knowledge of complex issues like hate speech, radicalization, and terrorism that will help us better identify content that is being used to radicalize and recruit extremists,” said YouTube in the blog post.

For videos that contain “controversial religious or supremacist content” but don’t violate any of YouTube’s policies, they’ll now be placed in a “limited state.” YouTube said, “The videos will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized, and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes.” It says that the limited state will start being applied to desktop versions in the coming weeks and will hit mobile versions shortly thereafter.

YouTube said that these changes are just the beginning and it will be sharing more about its work in the months ahead. “Altogether, we have taken significant steps over the last month in our fight against online terrorism. But this is not the end. We know there is always more work to be done,” it said.

They actually mean people like Dr. Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. And, one has to presume, the 36 individuals on the ADL’s hit list.

A professor in Canada who refuses to use gender-neutral pronouns and criticizes social justice issues was banned from using his Google and YouTube accounts Tuesday, regaining access hours later with no detailed explanation provided.

Professor Jordan B. Peterson of the University of Toronto disputed Google and YouTube’s decision to lock him out of his accounts, according to correspondence obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Please tell me what principle I have violated,” said Peterson in his email to Google upon discovering that he was locked out of his account. “I have not violated any terms that I am aware of and have not misused my account.”

The psychology professor has over 350,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, which he uses as a platform to post his lectures, interviews, and Q&As.

“We understand you’ve recently been unable to access your Google account, and we appreciate you contacting us,” said Google in a response. “After review, your account is not eligible to be reinstated due to a violation of our Terms of Service.”

But Google did not provide any details regarding which rule the professor violated.

The changes are just beginning….

Vid.Me is SJW-converged

It is now evident that Vid.Me is not a possible replacement for YouTube. They are not a serious service, and actually appear to be even more converged than either YouTube or Twitter.

We’re writing to let you know that we’ve reviewed your application for verification, but unfortunately we won’t be able to verify you at this time.

We’re still a small team, so we can’t give you detailed feedback on why your application wasn’t approved, but here are some common reasons:

    Haven’t met the minimum follower threshold of 50

    No cover photo, profile avatar, or videos uploaded

    Limited interaction with the Vidme community

    Not adhering to the Vidme rules

Also, sometimes we make mistakes. We’re imperfect carbon-based lifeforms.

For the record:


Voxday
7 videos
1,006 views
99 video points
270 followers
Joined Jul 24, 2017

Here are some of the people they verified at the same time they denied me verification, which is required for access to the settings that allow for creating subscriptions:

Midgeman
4 videos
9 views
8 video points
2 followers
Joined Jul 21, 2017

SayMo
180 views
8 video points
11 followers
Joined Jun 23, 2017

Casanova
0 views
0 video points
9 followers
Joined Aug 01, 2017

I also discovered that their settings don’t permit giving external supporters from Patreon or wherever access to the premium content, so it wasn’t going to be an option anyhow unless and until they got their act together with regards to that feature. So, thanks very much to all of you who followed and helped me determine that Vid.Me is not a viable option for anyone on the Right.

Needless to say, I will not be making further use of their service. It’s not a problem, though, as I already have several alternatives; this simply happened to be the first one that was recommended to me.

Update: I’m not the only one.

QNTKKA‏ @Qntkka
They would not verify me because of my content. They are MORE SJW than YouTube.

When “bestseller” lists don’t list bestsellers

The impossibility of social justice convergence in action:

The influential German news magazine Der Spiegel has deleted from its bestseller list a book that one of its own editors had pushed up the rankings, after it was found to be “antisemitic and historically revisionist”.

Finis Germania, or The End of Germany, collects the thoughts of the late historian Rolf Peter Sieferle on the position of Germany, including how it deals with the Holocaust. The book is currently at the top of Amazon.de’s bestseller chart and this month it entered Der Spiegel’s bestseller list, which many bookshops use as a basis for promotional displays, in sixth place.

Finis Germania is missing from the list in this week’s issue of the magazine. Many bookshops have followed suit and are not displaying the title.

Susanne Beyer, Der Spiegel’s deputy editor, said Finis Germania had been omitted because the magazine considered the book – posthumously published by a small house, Antaios, known for its far-right leanings – to be “rightwing extremist, antisemitic and historically revisionist”.

Since Der Spiegel understood itself as “a medium of enlightenment even on historical subjects”, Beyer continued, the magazine had decided not to help advance the sales of such a book.

Social justice prevents every institution and organization from fulfilling its primary purpose. In this case, Der Spiegel now has a “bestseller list” that comprises a list of books that are not bestsellers. This is why Castalia House will become a dominant publisher without anyone who is dependent upon the mainstream media ever even realizing it.

A failure of SJW

In an announcement that will surprise precisely no one in the Alt-Tech movement, Twitter has ceased to expand its user base:

Twitter shares tumble as it reveals it has added NO new users in the past three months. Twitter had 328 million average monthly active users (MAU) in the three months through June 30, unchanged from the previous quarter.  Analysts were expecting 328.8 million, according to financial data and analytics firm FactSet. Shares had run up some 40 percent since mid-April as Twitter investors bet on another quarter of growth after the microblogging service reported adding 9 million more monthly active users than expected in the first quarter.

Apparently the SJW-run Trust & Safety Council is engendering neither. And I note that 800,000 is pretty close to the number of people who are now on Gab. Apparently Alt-Tech can have an impact on the social media giants even before they launch serious bids to replace them.

They’ve learned nothing

They are still lying about GamerGate, Trump supporters, and the Alt-Right.

The use of humor, irony and the destabilization of the truth is important. For years, my friends and I dismissed assholes in video game chat rooms spouting hateful rhetoric as performance artists and comedians. They didn’t mean anything by it, we told ourselves, they were just trying to get a laugh or a reaction.

“It is an extremist movement built on destabilizing meanings, making people distrust their senses and doubt reality, and deny responsibility by pretending to be joking or just playing,” Cross said. “Gaming culture, which has long shielded its native abuses by cleaving to the idea that it’s all ‘just a game’ was an ideal seedbed for this classic fascist two-step.”

It’s a tactic we’ve seen Trump employ repeatedly both on the campaign trail and in his presidency. Aside from the violence, the nasty rhetoric and the death threats, this destruction of objective truth is the biggest threat Gamergate and the alt-right represent — they make us doubt our senses and our sensibilities.

Which is why we have to fight. I love video games and, for years, I’ve muted or ignored the vile communities festering there. Most of the people, and I believe most of the men, playing video games aren’t racist, sexist or mean. But for too long, gamers have allowed the worst of us to represent the entire community. For too long, we’ve muted the racists instead of challenging their ideas. For too long, we turned the other way when someone creeped on women on the Counter-Strike server.

We can’t afford to do that anymore. We had the opportunity to shut these bastards down for decades and we didn’t and now they’ve spread from the chat rooms, message boards and online shooters into the real world. They’ve shut down public speeches, tortured journalists and run politicians out of public life.

Fans of video games watched the birth of a new fascist movement and we didn’t even realize it. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we have to do our part to stop it. When you’re playing a game and someone’s acting like an ass, let them know. If someone threatens to gas the Jews or rape a female player, report them. If you’re brave enough, engage with them and try to dismantle their ideas.

If we don’t fight them online, and now, we may have to fight them in the streets.

It’s amusing that they are still pretending, nearly two years later, that they haven’t been fighting us online and in the media as viciously as they know how. It’s a little less amusing, though not at all surprising, that they are not honest about the way we are simply using their tactics against them.

Regardless, we know them. They do not know us. They simply refuse to acknowledge the truth about either us or themselves, which only works to our advantage.


If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
– Sun Tzu

To paraphrase something I wrote around the time I published SJWAL, both their history and their rhetoric is incoherent. They have to cling to the idea that their enemy is stupid – to do otherwise would risk harming their fragile self-esteem – but somehow this “abysmally stupid” opponent is a dangerous risk. This can only be explained by attributing the danger to evil that goes well beyond the pedestrian variety, and reaches the level of disturbing malignity.

So, they choose to believe in a very stupid, very malignant enemy rather than an intelligent and legitimate opposition. Needless to say, this violates the first principle mentioned above, which is to know your enemy. And they can’t afford to be sufficiently honest with themselves to do that.