Talking to the Devil

Or, as it happens, to the Supreme Dark Lord. This is the controversial interview that The Huffington Post found too hot to handle.

I have written on Political Correctness and the need for civil discourse.

For my next look at the culture wars, I talked to controversial alt-right figure Vox Day: game designer, science fiction author, and Amazon-bestselling political philosopher, who some claim to be an inspiration for Donald Trump’s No Apologies strategy.

He’s written about taking the vote away from women, blamed the lack of woman science fiction writers on poor science education in universities, been involved in #Gamergate and disrupted the venerable Hugo science fiction awards, among other things.

He’s been a regular target of feminists, social justice warriors and left-wing activists. For all that, it is hard to know how seriously he takes some of his positions and how much he is angling for a reaction. I asked Vox that we don’t get into personal attacks. Let’s pretend we’re at a Sunday picnic with nice people.

Vox, thanks for joining me. Can you tell us how you came to be a well-known opponent of the social justice left?

It was initially the result of ideological opposition within the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to my nationally syndicated column, specifically one I wrote concerning an attack by Susan Estrich on Michael Kinsley.

You were called a misogynist, racist, anti-Semite. It got very heated.

It did. Before long, multiple writers at The Guardian were writing articles about what a terrible, awful, very bad person I am. Media outlets from NPR to the New Zealand Herald were joining in the fun. All that did was introduce me to new readers and turn my little blog into a juggernaut.

You say a lot of things that seem outrageous. To what extent are you winding people up?

Not at all. Everything I advocate has a solid basis in science, reason, and history. I find that it is mostly my tone of open contempt for my intellectual inferiors that tends to upset them.

As Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos have repeatedly shown, the big SJW-converged sites can try to no-platform the Alt-Right, but all that accomplishes is to cause people to abandon those platforms and go in search of more compelling content and more interesting characters.

And sometimes, they even seek the truth.


Never far from controversy

Allum Bokhari publishes an article about The Complete List of SJW on Breitbart:

Sci-fi author, game designer, and provocateur Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) is never far from controversy. His latest project, a crowdsourced attempt to catalogue every social justice warrior (left-wing political activists known for their intolerant attitudes) in existence is no exception.

The project, called “SJWlist,” describes itself as a resource to “help SJW-converged organizations locate and identify Social Justice Warriors they wish to hire or otherwise support.” However, critics of Vox Day are calling it a blacklist. Even some opponents of SJWs have distanced themselves from the project.

The 200-strong list already features some of the most notorious names in the world of social justice activism. It includes Australian feminist Clementine Ford, known for getting a man fired over a Facebook comment; Melissa Click, known for her attempt to use physical force to expel a student journalist from a public demonstration; and Randi Lee Harper, known for inciting reputation-destroying internet mobs against her political and personal rivals.

Given SJWs’ penchant for destroying the lives and careers of their opponents, Vox Day’s defenders argue that tracking their activities is a relatively mild response. Day’s recent book, SJWs Always Lie, instructs opponents of the regressive left-wing activists to always “punch back twice as hard,” and defenders of Day argue that this is precisely what SJWlist is doing.

It’s a very fair and balanced article, presenting both the pros and cons, but it is clear from the comments that most people on the right support the list, some of them very enthusiastically. The counter-arguments have to date proven extremely weak and unconvincing; no one has any ideas at all how to stop the SJWs from running roughshod over people other than “be nice to them and hope they’ll stop”.

I can only conclude they haven’t read SJWAL yet, because that is absolutely terrible advice akin to the Swedish government telling Swedish women to tell a migrant intending to rape her “stop” in an authoritative manner. These moderates have no tactics, they have no strategy, they have nothing but wishful thinking to offer. Which is why I usually just ignore them and you should too.

And some have asked about the new SJW doxxing campaign called SocialAutopsy, which is now on Kickstarter. The SJWs behind it have already been added to the list, and if they follow through on their plans, their pages on the SJW List will perfectly reflect whatever tactics they use.

What the SJWs fail to realize is that they lost their ability to influence us once they managed to make us unhireable one way or another. No SJW-influenced organization will ever hire me for anything, and I realized that back in 2008. But having reached that realization, I also realized that I was now free of any employment-related constraints on my actions. As it turns out, there are far more people who are not SJWs and their numbers are growing every day as SJWs increasingly attack moderates and even leftists who fail to submit, or even keep up, with their dynamic Narrative.

The fact that SJWs fear being on the SJW List is an indication that not only are their intimidation tactics failing, they know they are failing. And that scares them, because SJWs Always Project and they fear others doing to them what they have been trying to do to others: discredit, disemploy, and destroy.

UPDATE: BC explains the problem with her position to Status 451 in the comments there.

Look, when the Germans started using poison gas in WWI, the British, French and other allied forces did not tsk tsk disapprovingly and show themselves to be the better people in order to convince the Germans through example to stop using such dastardly tactics. No, they used poison gas right back against the Germans, and did it even more effectively. Please note that this did not turn them into Germans.

The result? Everyone stopped using poison gas.

In the Culture Wars, holding oneself above the fray and showing that you are a better person has a consistent record of losing on nearly every issue for the past 60+ years. It doesn’t work. It is time for different tactics, to fight fire with fire, so to speak.

If you are not willing to fight the good fight, so be it. At least stop turning your guns on your erstwhile allies because… *gasp* …they are using effective tactics that work.


The Second Law in effect

Anti-GG writer Jesse Singal points-and-shrieks at the SJW List at New York Magazine. Needless to say, being the author of the Second Law of SJW, I am entirely unsurprised.

Ever been worried that you might accidentally hire or interact with a “social-justice warrior”? SJWs, as they’re known to the free-speech warriors of gaming message boards, look and often act like anyone else — until they start screaming about lesbian rights in the middle of a meeting. Luckily for those concerned, there’s now a list of known SJWs. Because, generally, making lists of people based on their political and social alignments has worked out well in the past.

On Saturday, the far-right writer Vox Day (“The Jews in Europe are doomed because they spent the last 70 years undermining European nationalism and supporting the transformation of European population demographics”) noted in a blog post that it would be useful to create a list of known SJWs, or social-justice warriors.

And now, voilà, such a list has materialized in the form of a helpful wiki that Day himself likely created (it links to his book, SJWs Always Lie, as well as to his original post). The author cutely implies that the list should be used by SJWs to hire like-minded folk.

I’ve interacted online with many people who fly the anti-SJW flag, including plenty of GamerGaters. They’ll tell you that they didn’t start this fight — it was brought to them by SJWs invading their cultural spaces. These anti-SJWs, of course, have no political agenda of their own: Their views are common sense, and by definition apolitical. They simply want SJWs to stop trying to make everything about wacky far-left politics. Anti-SJWs are for free speech and, unlike SJWs, righteously opposed to the idea of lobbying to get people with unpopular views fired (well, sometimes). They are also sick of how SJWs are constantly trying to launch online shaming campaigns, which they, the anti-SJWs, are opposed to (well, sometimes).

Anyway. Creating an enemies list composed almost entirely of progressive and feminist voices seems like a really smart way to express these sentiments and show the world just how reasonable and commonsensical and apolitical anti-SJWs are.

The amusing thing about SJWs attempting to write hit pieces like this is that they simply don’t know very much about the relevant topics. He’s trying to make my opinion on the future of European Jewry sound controversial, perhaps even anti-semitic, when it happens to be more or less shared by, among others, the Prime Minister of Israel.

And I’m not being cute when I say that I genuinely hope that SJW-converged organizations will learn about the SJWs featured on the list and hire them. From the anti-SJW perspective, there is literally no better outcome.

That’s some great journalism there too. He writes of “a helpful wiki that Day himself likely created”. He could have simply done 10 seconds of research and he would have learned that I did not create it, and that all of the content has been created by the Dread Ilk, not me.

UPDATE: The SJW journalists are belatedly beginning to realize that not everyone is quite as enthusiastic about social justice as they are:

Tess Townsend ‏@Tess_Townsend
This is f-d up. Combing for quotes to harass folks is the opposite of promoting any kind of speech period.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
We don’t have to comb for SJW quotes, Tess. You do it for us. Now stop harassing me.

And who said anything about promoting speech anyhow? The SJWs identified can still push their Narrative and pursue people’s jobs if they wish, it’s just that, for better or for worse, everyone is going to know precisely what it is that they have done.

UPDATE II: Jesse Singal tries to check all the boxes. He doesn’t care, but I do, but he was only joking, but I’m a crybaby. It’s like an object lesson in Gamma. 

Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
TIL @voxday is a delicate, sensitive soul It’ll be okay man 🙁

 Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
I triggered Vox Day. He’s upset. His response is longer than my jokey post

Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
.@peterb @CountUlairi @voxday yeah that’s what gets me a/b it. Was such a mild post! If you have ANY self-esteem that shit rolls off you

Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
tfw you’re Vox Day and you’ve been triggered by a brief mildly critical blog post and the only person you can tag in is…Mike Cernovich

Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
Rare video footage of Vox Day responding to a brief blog post mildly critical of him

Roran_Stehl ‏@Roran_Stehl
why do you guys (i.e. you, @Popehat or @scalzi ) care about that person? I fail to see his relevance.

Jesse Singal@jessesingal
I don’t! He freaked out that I wrote the mildest blog post ever. It is funny! Don’t mistake it for caring about.

The best part: his “jokey post” is 332 words. My response to it is 147 words. No wonder SJWs hate STEM.


The fence-sitter’s lament

Status 451 makes it clear that they are NOT on our side:

As many will now be aware, a certain person whose handle makes an unfortunate monogram has entered the LambdaConf controversy.  Like many on the SJ side of this long-running conflict, he appears to be making his living as a culture war profiteer, only by selling books rather than consulting services to monetize the tribal conflict he has stoked.  Now, just like some on the other side, he is compiling a targeting database of ideological enemies.

Lately the use of mobbing and ostracism tactics by SJ advocates has been a matter of much concern for me and for this blog. However, we must make it clear that our interest is in opposing these tactics and the mentality of total cultural war they arise from, rather than siding with the opposing tribe.  They’d be just as vicious if they had equivalent influence, as VD’s McCarthy-esque enemies list illustrates.

This is ridiculous. Criticism is not merely irrelevant, it renders the critic irrelevant, when it is not accurate.  I don’t fight the culture war because I am a “culture war profiteer” or because I expect anyone to agree with me, I fight it because the SJWs in science fiction and gaming were not content to leave me alone to write my books and columns, or design and develop my games, in peace.

These are ignorant words from someone who hasn’t been seriously targeted for discrediting and disemployment yet. And when she is, I expect she’ll come running and crying to those like me, who are willing to stand up and defend those who have been attacked for nothing more than their beliefs.

The SJW List isn’t about belief. It is about action. Every single person on that list belongs there, and is there for a sound and solid and documented reason.

Now, if Status 451 can recommend more effective tactics, I am entirely willing to listen. What I am not willing to do is give any credence or respect to someone who considers themselves above the fray, or believes that leading by example, or being the better person, will lead to anything but submission to the SJW Narrative.

But she is wrong. We have no desire to denounce her or even think about her at all. We don’t want moderates and fence-sitters and equivocators. Nor do we shoot at them. Unlike the SJWs, we ignore them. So let her run to her refuge. The only reason it will survive is because there are men and women who are willing to stand, take the heat, and take the battle to the other side.


Alt-Tech and Alt-Society

Eventually, the Alt-Right is going to transform into an entirely alternative society. The reason this will happen is due to the totalitarian nature of social justice. Notice that I used the term social justice, and not SJW.

Social justice inherently requires totalitarianism because it demands both total convergence and total compliance. This is why SJWs are just as likely to attack Stephen Fry as they are to attack Curtis Yarvin despite the vast ideological and identitational differences between the two men. The sin both men have committed are the same: a refusal to submit to the current social justice Narrative.

The reason societies devolve into civil war, split up, and eventually segregate is because it is no longer possible for one group to live in close quarters with another group. And it appears we are rapidly approaching the point where SJWs and non serviams can no longer occupy the same social media space because the latter are not permitted, as The Ralph Retort reports:

I had been trying to spend more time on the subreddit I setup lately, which is called SJWsAtWork. After Twitter suspended the account I had made for it, due to false spam reports, I kinda got out of the habit of posting stuff over there. Last night, I made a new account (@SJWAlert) and then went to post some new stories on SJWsAtWork itself. One of those was a link to Vox Day’s new site, SJW List. I had no idea this would be a controversial move, but it ended up getting my entire Reddit account suspended.

Honestly, Reddit is sort of a shithole, so I’m not too broken up about it. Still, I’m kinda pissed for the small community we have going on over there. I’m still going to continue posting with my new account, and I will get put back on the mod team by one of the other mods, but it’s just annoying. There was no sort of warning at all, just a straight permanent suspension.

The Alt-Right is still taking shape. But unless it develops the Alt-Tech and successfully creates its own alternative technological and infrastructural institutions, it will suffer the same fate as other minority groups that have been subjugated and forced to choose between submission and elimination.

Reddit isn’t the only SJW-owned institution to act this way. Facebook just no-platformed A Voice For Men yesterday as well:

The A Voice for Men FaceBook page was unpublished by FaceBook today. No reason was given other than a generic inference that we were in violation of their community standards. I find no reason to believe that this means anything but the fact that we were in violation of their feminist based rules for speech.

This does not yet mean an Alt-Society is necessary. We can still drive the SJWs out, and indeed, their insistence on converging the organizations they infest significantly improves our chances of reclaiming control of society so long as stop supporting them and we keep them out of the new institutions and organizations. That is why they are so terrified of the SJW List and that is why they have been attacking it relentlessly almost since the moment of its creation.

Stop using Facebook. Stop using Reddit. Stop using Wikipedia. Only use platforms that play fair – say what you will about Google, but they are not in the business of no-platforming and silencing people – and start building and supporting and using alternatives to the fully converged platforms.


Takeover attempt at Eagle Forum

Phyllis Schlafly alerts the media:

“At 2:00 pm today, 6 directors of Eagle Forum met in an improper, unprecedented telephone meeting. I objected to the meeting and at 2:11pm, I was muted from the call. The meeting was invalid under the Bylaws but the attendees purported to pass several motions to wrest control of the organization from me. They are attempting to seize access to our bank accounts, to terminate employees, and to install members of their own Gang of 6 to control the bank accounts and all of Eagle Forum.

“The members of their group are: Eunie Smith of Alabama, Anne Cori of Missouri, Cathie Adams of Texas, Rosina Kovar of Colorado, Shirley Curry of Tennessee, and Carolyn McLarty of Oklahoma.

“This kind of conduct will not stand and I will fight for Eagle Forum and I ask all men and women of good will to join me in this fight.”

Always be wary of those who are eager to help. And don’t give them power simply because they are useful. Entryism takes places in various forms and in every organization, from the children’s church to the Catholic hierarchy. SJWs are the worst entryists, but they are not the only ones.

It is interesting to observe that the Eagle Forum entryists are all female.


Does Ben Shapiro belong on the SJW list?

The readers at Instapundit are divided on the subject:

Aigghh
Ben Shapiro? You doing Vox Day’s dirty work now Glenn? What’s next? Going after Nick Searcy for his kid? Join in with him saying Sarah Hoyt’s not an American?

ChicagoRefugee
As the link on SJWList documents, Ben Shapiro has publicly stated that “racists” should be hunted down and hounded from their places of employment. Targeting people for unemployment because you disagree with their views? Sounds like a SJW to me.

Richard McEnroe
Ben walked through a crowd of screaming, cursing antisemites to confront them at CSUNLA. What have you done lately?

ChicagoRefugee
What I haven’t done is publicly advocate for a SJW witch hunt against my philosophical and/or political opponents. Which is why he’s on the list and I’m not.

Rad4Cap
“Why am I on the list?

You were added to the list because you publicly called for someone to be fired, disinvited, shunned, no-platformed, or otherwise punished or silenced for refusing to submit to the SJW Narrative. The particular incident is linked to your name in the list.

There are three criteria for inclusion on The Complete List of SJW:

  • Self-identifying as a Social Justice Warrior
  • Publicly advocating the disemployment or no-platforming of an individual for failing to submit to the SJW Narrative
  • Being a journalist and publishing articles that support the SJW Narrative or an SJW attack campaign. “

Crawf
Ben is saying people should be anathema for their views. Does he extend that to socialists or just racists? Socialists murdered 100,000,000 or more during the 20th century — shouldn’t being a socialist be as obscene as being a racist?

I have to admit, I don’t think of Ben Shapiro as an SJW, I think of him as a cuckservative. The two are entirely distinct specimens. However, given that Shapiro has publicly endorsed the most SJW of tactics for one of the five primary SJW ideals, I think his presence on the list is absolutely justified unless and until he publicly recants his support for hunting down racists, punishing them for their opinions, and excluding them from employment.

After all, the purpose of the SJW List is to inform prospective employers who will be a good little SJW and support the organization’s purpose of seeking the highest abstract standard of social justice, and I think it is clear that Ben Shapiro would make an absolutely ideal employee for any converged organization.

That is intrinsically anti-American and anti-Constitutional activity. Regardless of what you think of racists, they have the same right to work and to enjoy free association that you do. One of the reasons SJWism is not merely totalitarian, but will inevitably lead to violence is that they stupidly insist on backing their opponents into a corner from which they must either fight or submit.

Since many, if not most people will never submit to the SJW Narrative or to SJW authority, they thereby seek the very violence they claim to decry and oppose. And if they were more capable of dialectic or had longer time preferences, we might even believe they do so on purpose.


SJWs are already crying wolf

As I mentioned in SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, SJWs are all offense, no defense. They can’t take ANY heat, or even the simple, factual documentation of their public statements and actions:

I work in a datacenter and we have just received an abuse complaint (at 1:30 in the morning) from Tim Chevalier regarding the website SJWList.com – a site hosted by one of our clients – claiming it, “Incites harassment and violence against individuals.”

He’s asking us to “take appropriate action according to our acceptable use policy” meaning take it down, which, knowing our client, probably won’t happen. But anyway… the abuse emails are submitted to every person on our team, so I can’t just ignore it and have it go away, but I’d just like to let it be known that this type of backlash is occurring. They are trying to use GG’s tactics against it.

This is who submitted the abuse report to us. He works at Google, apparently.

This sort of counterattack is precisely why I told everyone to keep things absolutely factual and very tightly and narrowly defined on the SJW list site. If you are stupid enough to justify or rationalize the inclusion of anyone whose presence on the list is even remotely questionable, it’s going to be portrayed as incitement or harassment or rape or something equally false.

So, do not explain, justify, rationalize or add anything that involves the words “since” or “because”. Stick to the cold, hard, and objectively verifiable facts that do not require any context or agreement with your opinion.

And clearly, someone needs to add Tim Chevalier to the list for his deceitful attempt to have the site taken down by filing a false report of inciting harassment and violence.

In the meantime, the front page is locked down and a number of admins have been appointed, so there won’t be much trouble handling the griefers. You can still create new pages for individual SJWs and admins will add them to the list on the front page once they’re created.


SJW attack on Jim Butcher

This is one of the many, many reasons that an alternative to SJW-run Wikipedia is badly needed. To the admins’ credit, at least it has been tagged as “persistent vandalism”.

It seems to have less to do with his inclusion on the Rabid Puppies list than it does with some SJW activist with a particular axe to grind at a literary celebrity’s expense, but it tends to demonstrate that anyone, no matter how publicly apolitical, is subject to SJW attack.

Personal life

Butcher was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1971.[1] He is the youngest of three children, having two older sisters. He lives in Independence, MO, and has one son.

[Information about Butcher’s personal life redacted.]

Following Spencer’s lead, the moderators of the /r/dresdenfiles sub-Reddit proceeded to threaten any posters making negative comments regarding Butcher with a ban and deletion of their content.[3]

Many Reddit users protested, alleging that the moderators’ actions constituted censorship, a practice that is generally regarded as anathema by artists, authors, and others in the creative fields.

In response, the /r/dresdenfiles moderators proceeded to codify their censorship by requiring users meet certain requirements prior to being able to post comments and also that new users or users with ‘unpopular’ points of view must have their comments approved by a moderator before publishing.[4]

On or around April 9, 2016, several of Butcher’s fans posted an open letter requesting that Butcher comment on the North Carolina transgender law. Other fans requested that Butcher adopt a more public stance, similar to the actions of Bruce Springsteen.

There have been many concerns by Butcher’s fans that Butcher’s books were not friendly to LGBT issues.[5][6][7]

The /r/dresdenfiles moderators proceeded to delete and censor all comments regarding Butcher’s views on LGBT issues, under the posture that those comments were “spam” or “shitposts.” [8]

The /r/dresdenfiles moderators proceeded to post in other sub-reddits regarding LGBT issues and political issues in order to discredit the legitimate concerns of Butcher’s LGBT-friendly fans. [9][10]

This is the great challenge of crowd-sourcing, as we’ve already seen on The Complete List of SJW. The problem is less the purely destructive vandals, who are easily anticipated and blocked, than those who see an opportunity to hijack the platform and try to use it for their own particular interests.

It would be good if we were also able to identify people like the vandal responsible for adding this to the page about Butcher.

As a general rule, if it is even necessary for you to explain your position, let alone rationalize or justify it, it does not belong on a wiki. The moment you find yourself telling someone “well, this is okay because”, the moment you even use the word “because”, just stop and give it up. If it’s not so absolutely obvious that there is no need to explain it, then it does not belong.

If you’re going to contribute to The Complete List of SJW, an excellent place to find SJWs is to look for quotes in articles by SJW journalists. For example, this pair of articles by SJW journalist Tess Townsend, who is running interference for the LambdaConf no-platform campaign, exposes several SJWs. They will readily hang themselves by their own words through their endorsements of no-platforming people on SJW grounds.

Also, Cynic in Chief: a) email me and b) lock it down now. We need admins.


That was quick

You know The Complete List of SJW is going to be important, because the SJWs are already starting to criticize and vandalize it. Time to lock it down, Cynic in Chief. Email me for some admins.

My suggestion is to protect the main page so only admins can edit it, protect the existing pages that have decent proof of SJW already, and have the admins add the new pages to the main page as they come in.

Also, block the vandal’s account. Be a hard target.