Tag: SJW

The cost of SJW convergence

ESPN is paying it, having lost 4 million subscribers and $350 million in the last year:

In the past five years ESPN has lost 11,346,000 subscribers according to Nielsen data.

If you combine that with ESPN2 and ESPNU subscriber losses this means that ESPN has lost over a billion dollars in cable and satellite revenue just in the past five years, an average of $200 million each year. That total of a billion dollars hits ESPN in the pocketbook not just on a yearly basis, but for every year going forward.

It’s gone forever.

That’s not just bad, this is downright cataclysmic.

And it’s getting worse.

In the past year ESPN lost 4.159 million subscribers, that’s another $350 million in lost revenue across the ESPN family of networks.

Now, tell me again how all the cultural programming and SJWfication and ideological propaganda in the entertainment media and the advertising industry is just business. Tell me again how it’s not driven by ideological fanatics, but hard-nosed businessmen just ruthlessly chasing a buck the best way they know how.

And then I’ll explain to you, very slowly and in words of not more than five syllables, that those hard-nosed, buck-chasing “businessmen” are observably losing literal billions as they continue to tear away at the foundations of Western Civilization: Christianity, the family, the rule of law, and the white race in the name of Tolerance, Equality, Progress, Inclusiveness, and Diversity.

Talking SJWs with Tom Woods

What exactly is the ideology of the “Social Justice Warrior”? What do you do when you’re targeted by one, whether at work or in general? Vox Day — popular blogger, author, SJW slayer, and polymath — joins me for background and strategy.

Tom Woods was kind enough to have me as a guest on Episode 703 of his podcast, Social Justice Warriors: Who They Are and How to Deal With Them. Tom is a sharp guy and I always enjoy speaking with him.

Of course, we were discussing the book that has been a political philosophy bestseller for nearly a year now, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. As its first year of publication comes to a close, it is still a top 2 book in the category, trailing only Plato’s Republic.

Which reminds me. How many people here would be interested in reading annotated editions of classics like the Republic or Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which would consist of the text with my commentary on the text woven into it. We could even do it with other classic works and commentators; I would love to have a copy of Clausewitz’s On War annotated by Martin van Creveld. I’m not promising anything, as I have three – no, four – books I’m already writing, but it’s an idea that might be worth exploring.

SJWs: the larger game

A review of SJWAL by TBC Book Review:

Gamergate is a consumer revolt against progressivism, but many, perhaps most Gamergaters are quite progressive. You could say more or less the same thing about Counter-Jihad figures such as Tommy Robinson or Milo. To Vox Day, these are all potential or actual allies.

The fact is, most will heal themselves from progressivism in steps, the two major ones being:

  1. The progressivist revolt against various aspects or consequences of progressivism.
  2. Becoming a reactionary: as an aesthetic revolt against ugliness, out of virile pride, and through metaphysical conversion.

BUILDING AN SJ-PROOF WORLD, ONE STEP AT A TIME

This is, without question, the most remarkable aspect of what Vox Day is doing, and of which SJWAL is just a component.

According to his theory, organizations not designed to resist social justice convergence will eventually undergo convergence, thus becoming incapable of performing their original function and creating market opportunities for competitors or new entrants.

This is the time to be ambitious.

Project Big Fork is proceeding apace, and on schedule, the occasional hiccup notwithstanding. The launch of version 1.0 and the public kickstarter to fund 2.0 is still expected to take place in September. However, we will likely have a new, and equally significant, announcement, in three weeks or so, that concerns another aspect of the socio-technological high ground. About which more anon, but feel free to speculate as you see fit.

We can’t fix or cure SJWs. Only God can do that. And while we can’t trust moderates or liberals in positions of leadership, we can certainly welcome them into our ranks if they are willing to follow our lead.

The challenge is to avoid mistaking the enthusiasm of the convert for the good sense of the individual who was wise enough to not be hoodwinked or misled in the first place. What worked for the Apostle Paul is very unlikely to work very well in any situation where there is no literal Road to Damascus encounter with the living Son of God.

For an example of what not to do, see the Republican Party and the neocons. Or, alternatively, the conservative movement and the conservative media.

Vox’s First Law in action

The Left has three insults and one joke. The insults:

  1. You’re stupid.
  2. You’re evil.
  3. You’re irrelevant.

The one joke:

  1. Do you know that guy? He’s stupid.

It’s painful to see left-wing comedians attempt to do political humor. Guess what Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump have in common?

You guessed it. They’re stupid. You can literally take old jokes about Gerald Ford, change the name to Donald Trump, and they’ll be the same as today’s jokes about Trump. And these people genuinely believe they are the smart ones.

Why banning diversity makes sense

If I ran a con of any kind, I would forbid all discussion of “diversity”. These idiot SF-SJWs have no idea how incredibly boring they are. No wonder no one is interested in reading their books except for each other:

Readercon isn’t exactly a bastion of racial diversity. And this panel was far from the only one this weekend to go downhill when attempts to bring up race and how it intersected with the panel discussion were met with less than adept reactions from white panelists.

I look to the newer fans in the audience and try to draw them into the conversation every single time I panel. So many new faces (particularly of color) were at Readercon this year. For many of them the problem wasn’t, “Well, Readercon only talks about books,” so much as it was, “Readercon seems unwilling to talk about books in a way that includes people like me.”

No one is perfect. No one can ever be perfect. But if con spaces are going to survive, if they are going to attract new attendees, then everyone involved, including panelists, has to be conscious of how they are engaging with each other and with the audience. New attendees can easily decide to spend their money and time at corporate-run media cons. It won’t be as intimate, they might not build the same friendships, but they will also be navigating spaces that are far less fraught. I go to Readercon because some dear friends run it, but for the last 4 years I have had at least one panel go sideways. At some point I will do the math in the moment, wish my friends well, and stop going if Readercon doesn’t get better for me and people like me….

As a community, we have to be willing to have the harder conversations, to have the nuanced discussions, to understand that someone wanting to apply an intersectional lens to a discussion isn’t the enemy but the one trying to make things more inclusive. Are the conversations at sci fi cons changing? God, I hope so.

If I’m on a panel that addresses craft, humans, sexuality, gender, robots that are treated like humans, or whatever else a panel description might contain, I’m going to do my best to broaden the discussion. To talk about the ways that race, class, etc. can impact the topic at hand.

Let’s suppose instead of a rabid diversity advocate, we’re talking about a rabid Trump advocate. This hypothetical Trump advocate is absolutely convinced that Trump is desperately needed in order to Make America Great Again. And now suppose that the Trump advocate is on a panel at a science fiction convention.

If I’m on a panel that addresses craft, humans, sexuality, gender, robots that are treated like humans, or whatever else a panel description might contain, I’m going to do my best to broaden the discussion. To talk about the ways that Donald Trump can impact the topic at hand.

What would Donald Trump do about aliens? How would Donald Trump address the issue of robots? What does Donald Trump have to say about sexuality?

Now, how many people would be happy to have the Trump advocate on the panel? How many would want to invite him back?

Milo permanently banned from Twitter

After writing the review of Ghostbusters to which I linked the other day, Milo ended up getting into it on Twitter with actress Leslie Jones, who he eventually referred to as “a black dude”. It was funny, of course, because Miss Jones is a large, unattractive black woman who looks more manly than Michelle Obama.

After Leslie Jones – @lesdogg on Twitter – tried to hit back at him and other critics of the movie, she got piled on by the Alt Right and others; her cries of “racism, racism” were met, in the Alt Right’s usual wont, by pictures of bananas, gorillas, and other rhetorical memes, which caused Miss Jones to double down on crying victim.

So, Twitter perma-banned Milo on the grounds of “incitement to harassment”, even though Leslie Jones is the only individual who actually engaged in any incitement, as can be seen in this pair of tweets.

Leslie Jones ‏@Lesdoggg  Jul 18 Manhattan, NY
Exposing I hope y’all go after them like they going after me

Leslie JonesVerified account ‏@Lesdoggg  Jul 18 Manhattan, NY
bitch I want to tell you about your self but I’m gonna let everybody else do it I’m gonna retweet your hate!! Get her!!

Even the New York Times is on it, in its inimitably dishonest way. Twitter Bars Milo Yiannopoulos Over Torrent of Abusive Comments.

It appears the next task after Big Fork launches is an obvious one. No worries, it’s been part of the plan from the beginning.

Linguistic racists

Language SJWs are parochial monolinguistic English supremacists whose campaign to degender the language is intrinsically racist and indubitably offensive:

There is apparently a powerful movement afoot among the no-gender-in-anything crowd to replace the venerable gender specific singular pronouns “he” and “she” with sexually neutral but normally plural “they.” The debate over the pronouns was recently discussed in a Huffington Post piece entitled “It’s Time to Embrace the Singular ‘They:’ A Humanistic Pronoun,” written by the appropriately named Maddie Crum, the “Cultural Editor” for Huffpost (honest, I am not making this up!)

Corporate America and many in academia have long embraced using a form of “they” in grammatically challenged sentences like “Everyone is entitled to their opinion” but Crum goes much farther than that, providing as an example of her preferred usage “My friend ate a bagel. They beamed with perfect joy.” She never quite explains why “they” singular is “humanistic” but she describes the proposed ascendancy of “they” as the linguistic equivalent of “tearing down gendered bathroom signs” and eliminating other “dividers and stand between men, women and people who identify as non-binary.” One commenter on her piece refers to the emergence of an “identity-sensitive lexicon.” And for those who still doubt, Crum notes that the “verbally gracious” singular “they” was awarded the “Word of the Year” prize by the world renowned American Dialect Society! Crum also observes sagaciously that using “they” instead of the sexist pronouns provides anonymity on the internet.

So, are German speakers to begin referring to Das Frau and Das Mann in addition to Das Madchen? It would certainly be easier to replace Der Die Das Die, Den Die Das Die, Dem Der Dem Den with Das Die, Das Die, and Dem Den.

That would actually work, whether the Germans were amenable or not. But in Italian, where there is no Neuter, are we to refer to il macchino for the car or la libra for the book? The same goes for French, where not only the gendered “the” would need to be changed, but the suffixes as well. Shall we say le femme or la homme?

Frankly, the whole thing smacks of cultural supremacy and racism. We should probably listen to Ben Shapiro, hunt them down, and hurt their careers.

“A horrifying mess”

The verdict is in: Grrlbusters is even worse than anticipated:

For months, controversy has swirled around the new “Ghostbusters” movie. The trailer was reportedly the most hated in YouTube history, for what that’s worth (or not worth), which led to some pundits saying some of that hate was rooted in sexism.

Others said the fact the Leslie Jones character wasn’t a scientist and seemed to have a role that called for her to play into stereotypes smacked of racism.

Of course, people were voicing these opinions without having seen the entire movie. Well, I have seen it — and while I believe the concerns about racial stereotypes were overblown, “Ghostbusters” is one of the worst movies of the year for multiple other reasons, including:

Bad acting.

Uninspired directing, editing, cinematography and music.

Cheesy special effects.

A forgettable villain.

A terrible script.

SJWs always destroy everything they converge.

Convergence at Penguin Random House

This announcement is, I think, very promising for Castalia House, its readers, and its supporters. The stars are coming into alignment for Castalia to become bigger than any of us had ever imagined:

Penguin and Random House merged three years ago, in 2013, and today Penguin Random House’s CEO, Markus Dohle, sent an anniversary letter to employees in which he congratulated them on their hard work, but more importantly, detailed how that work is affecting people throughout the world.

“Along this road, we have continued to write our story, telling the world who we are, what we do, and why we do it,” Dohle wrote. “Equally important is how—especially in today’s dynamic and complex world, with unprecedented societal events impacting all of us.”

“Publishing is undeniably a force for good,” Dohle continued. “But working in an industry that is inherently a service to society, we risk subscribing to the notion that this is enough. It’s not. We ought to do more—and we can—by taking advantage of our capacity as Penguin Random House to drive positive social, environmental, and cultural change, locally and globally.”

Allow me to remind you of a certain quote that you may find to be relevant in this circumstance.

“Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens should be made in the utmost degree to converge.”
 —John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 1861

The only substantive changes Penguin Random House is going to be making will be negative, to their bottom line and their share price. The entire mainstream publishing industry has “dinosaur buggy whip” written all over it. It’s astonishing that they can’t seem to see it yet.

SJW-convergence in Star Trek

Who would have thought that Star Trek, which has always been at the forefront of SJWism, could be further converged?

In the summer of 1968, George Takei attended a pool party at the Hollywood Hills home of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The actor, then 31 and famous for his role as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, swam up to his boss and “had a conversation with him, a very private one. I was still closeted, so I did not want to come out to him.”

Nevertheless, Takei — who announced he was gay in 2005  — was fully attuned to the gay equality conversation gaining momentum at the time. He felt it was a topic worth exploring on the socially minded science-fiction series, which had previously tackled issues like the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War through keenly observed allegory.

But the show had recently seen its lowest ratings ever, with an episode featuring TV’s first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, which NBC affiliates in the South refused to air. While sympathetic to his star’s pitch, Roddenberry felt he was in no position to take those kinds of risks.

“He was a strong supporter of LGBT equality,” recalls Takei, now 79. “But he said he has been pushing the envelope and walking a very tight rope — and if he pushed too hard, the show would not be on the air.” Alas, the show was canceled the following season anyway.

But Star Trek has lived long and prospered for studio home Paramount, spawning six TV series and 13 feature films. True to its title, the latest big-screen outing, Star Trek Beyond, has gone where none have gone before: Star John Cho — who assumes the Sulu mantle for the third time in the reboots — has told Australia’s Herald Sun that the character is revealed to be gay….

Except Takei wasn’t overjoyed. He had never asked for Sulu to be gay. In fact, he’d much prefer that he stay straight. “I’m delighted that there’s a gay character,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.”

Takei explains that Roddenberry was exhaustive in conceiving his Star Trek characters. (The name Sulu, for example, was based on the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines, so as to render his Asian nationality indeterminate.) And Roddenberry had always envisioned Sulu as heterosexual.

Straights attempting to virtue-signal on behalf of gays do their best, but they never get it right. I don’t know a single gay man who likes the Saint Gay couples that pervade Hollywood entertainment or think they are anything but dressed-up suburban married couples, about as convincing as urban fantasy’s kick-ass kung fu waifs, science fiction’s men with tits, and the Magic Negroes who like nothing better than to defy gangbangers and help out white folk in distress when they aren’t busy philosophizing, providing moral instruction, or being President.

One would think, at some point, someone would have asked George Takei, or at least understood that there is an insult implicit in the idea that he could not act.