Tag: SJW

ClarkHat knocks back SJWs

Good to see ClarkHat come out roaring in his first post-Popehat anti-SJW campaign. ESR explains the situation:

 In brief: LambdaConf, a technical conference on functional programming, accepted a presentation proposal about a language called Urbit, from a guy named Curtis Yarvin. I’ve looked at Urbit: it is very weird, but rather interesting, and certainly a worthy topic for a functional programming conference.

And then all hell broke loose. For Curtis Yarvin is better known as Mencius Moldbug, author of eccentric and erudite political rents and a focus of intense hatred by humorless leftists. Me, I’ve never been able to figure out how much of what Moldbug writes he actually believes; his writing seems designed to leave a reader guessing as to whether he’s really serious or executing the most brilliantly satirical long-term troll-job in the history of the Internet.

A mob of SJWs, spearheaded by a no-shit self-described Communist named Jon Sterling, descended on LambdaConf demanding that they cancel Yarvin’s talk, pretending that he (rather than, say, the Communist) posed a safety threat to other conference-goers. The conference’s principal organizers, headed up one John de Goes, quite properly refused to cancel the talk, observing that Yarvin was there to talk about his code and not his politics.

I think they conceded to much to the SJWs, actually, by asking Yarvin to issue a statement about his views on violence. Nobody asked Jon Sterling whether he was down with that whole liquidation of the kulaks thing, after all, and if a Communist who likes to tweet about sending capitalists to “hard labor in the North” gets a pass it is not easy to see why any apologia was required from a man with no history of advocating violence at all.

But, ultimately, they did make the right decision: to judge Yarvin’s talk proposal by its technical merit alone. This is the hacker way.

The SJWs then attempted to pressure LambdaConf’s sponsors into withdrawing their support so the conference would have to be canceled. Several sponsors withdrew (I don’t know details about who; my sources for this part are secondhand).

So far, so wearily familiar – Marxist thugs versus free expression, with free expression’s chances not looking so hot. But there’s where the story gets good. Meredith Patterson and her friends at the blog Status 451 organized a counterpunch. They launched an IndieGoGo campaign Save LambdaConf …and an open society.

The campaign is already fully funded. But I thought some of you in the tech world might like to know about it, and be a part of it. There are many ways to help fund the alt-right’s war against the SJWs, and helping those who are victims of their successful attacks is an important defensive strategy, as it will embolden those who are standing up to them.

And good for LambdaConf for standing by its speakers rather than caving to the SJW-converged sponsors. This is how cultural wars are won, one hard-earned victory after another.

Beamdog vs #GamerGate

Here is a textbook example of SJW entryists ruining an organization through convergence. In this case, I very much doubt the people running the organization even had any idea that their simple and straightforward objective – make an entertaining and enhanced expansion of Baldur’s Gate  – and been subverted to serve the interests of the SJW Narrative.

But Amber Scott’s little declaration of war on #GamerGate didn’t escape GG’s attention, as the reviews of Siege of Dragonspear on Steam and GOG and Metacritic show. Here are three examples from GOG:

just another vessel for SJW propaganda
by installgentoo
Amber Scott, the writer of this game, says that the original Baldur’s Gate is sexist. Captain Corwin, a major NPC, is a single bisexual mother whose daughter calls you out for mansplaining to her.
There is a transgender NPC.
Etc etcIf that’s your sort of thing, then this
review should be useless to you.
But for people like me who don’t want to financially or morally support
the ever more omnipresent liberal lunacy injected in all forms of art,
perhaps you should skip this.

Apr 2, 2016
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Not in the spirit of Baldur’s Gate by Valerie.377
 
While the mechanics of the game are in line with the originals, the story falls short. It sacrifices the narrative and world building of the original Baldur’s Gate in order to break the 4th wall and beat players over the head with messages about social issues with the grace and subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 90’s.

There is no problem with having messages about social issues in a game. The problem comes when one hijacks another franchise, gut out its soul and fill it with vapid maxims and fables in its place. That is one of the surest ways to kill off a franchise, and it is especially odious when it happens to a well-loved franchise.

Want social justice? Sure, but stop hijacking the industry and make your own games. You’re not going to improve the industry, you’re just going to kill it from the inside out.

Apr 3, 2016 | Thanks for your vote! (182 of 223 users found this helpful)

Not Baldur’s Gate.
by Ajaarg
Even
if you don’t disagree with their political agenda, it’s ham-fisted and
very groanworthy. Minsc makes jokes about Gamergate. If that’s what you
want out of your baldur’s gate game, go right ahead. If you would like
to keep baldur’s gate in your baldur’s gate, just keep playing the
originals and don’t waste time on this toilet retread.Side note: Beamdog is locking down any and all criticism on any forum they control or moderate, including Steam.

Apr 2, 2016
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The ability of devs to keep quiet and remain neutral is rapidly vanishing. This is not due to the gamers, but due to the SJWs in their own organizations who will not permit ANYONE to refuse submission to their sacred Narrative. And if you’re foolish enough to permit SJWs to penetrate your organization, this is exactly the sort of thing you have to look forward to – your involuntary enlistment in their cultural war.

And the SJWs are just going to LOVE how you can gain experience by killing a trans character after he bores you, appropos of nothing, with a tedious tale of discovering his true self. I’ll be shocked if Literally Wu doesn’t find a way to insist it’s actually a LITERAL attempt on his life by #GamerGate and “flee his home” again. 

UPDATE: The Beamdog CEO doubles down on Techraptor:

I find the controversy ridiculous.  Yes, we have a transgendered character.  I know a number of transgendered people and they are genuine, wonderful humans.  Yes, we also have a character who cracks a joke about ethics.  The original Baldur’s Gate had a whole sequence about the Bob Newhart show.  If this generates controversy it makes a sad statement about the world we live in.

As for my post on the forums, I merely asked people who were enjoying the game to share their positive feedback. I know our fans can become engrossed in their enjoyment and I really don’t want potential fans to miss out on the series because of protest reviews by small minded individuals.
    
As for Amber’s interview, I also believe in strong female characters and I feel she did an excellent job bringing dimension and interest to Safana with her writing in Siege of Dragonspear. Her “Too bad” comment, I chalk up to a long day of interviews, having personally done such interviews.
    
    Regards,
    -Trent

I guess we know where the SJW rot set in, then. Too bad. Notice how despite their talk of “choices”, you can’t express any disapproval of Mizhena blathering about “the truest reflection of who I am”. There is no 4: Who asked you, you self-absorbed freak?

A scalp is a scalp

In which we are informed #GamerGate has taken “its most disgraceful scalp yet”

For many people, Gamergate isn’t really a thing anymore. For the most part, it has receded from the headlines — we’re more than a year past the period of peak thinkpiecery on Gamergate, online harassment, and how the two intersect. But that doesn’t mean some of the group’s more enterprising members have stopped rabidly going after anyone they think is promoting an SJW (social-justice warrior) narrative or messing with their previous vidya.

For a particularly gross example, look no further than a piece of news that just dropped (part of a Twitter thread that starts here):

    Today, the decision was made: I am no longer a good, safe representative of Nintendo, and my employment has been terminated.
    — smol pterodactyl (@alisonrapp) March 30, 2016

Over the last few months, many of these gamers have turned their ire on Rapp, a young marketing employee at Nintendo who, as Patrick Klepek wrote in a comprehensive and well-reported article in Kotaku, “has been accused of somehow being a driving force behind the supposed censorship of that company’s games.” Rapp, it should be said, doesn’t even have anything to do with localization at Nintendo; she’s been targeted simply for having been “outspoken on Twitter about online abuse against women in gaming,” as Klepek put it. In the course of digging as deeply into her past as possible to find ways to discredit her, some gamers found an undergraduate thesis she wrote in 2011, and it seriously exacerbated the campaign against her.

In her thesis, Rapp laid out a highly academic case for why the U.S. shouldn’t pressure Japan, where the sexualization of young teens has long been entrenched in certain corners of the culture, to adopt child-pornography laws similar to our own. It reads like pretty standard-issue undergraduate cultural relativism. Anyone familiar with these arguments — even those inclined to think it’s fair to judge someone based on academic papers they wrote in college — would know that Rapp wasn’t condoning child pornography, but rather making a more nuanced argument about American cultural imperialism and so forth (she also argued that child pornography doesn’t cause people to abuse children).

These nuances were lost, perhaps willfully, on a group of Gamergaters and their allies, who quickly used the thesis and various old tweets of Rapp’s to launch a campaign to tar her as a defender of child pornography.

Ah, pity the poor SJWs. We aren’t correctly nuancing their defenses of child pornography. We aren’t treating them fairly. We are digging deeply into their pasts. We are contacting their employers. We are targeting their sponsors.

I wonder where we learned to do that? I wonder why we have adopted these terrible tactics?

They began this cultural war. Now they’re whining that someone is finally fighting back. If you’re not engaged yet, you should be, because they are coming after you just as surely as they are going after gaming, comics, the universities, and everything else.

Read SJWs Always Lie if you haven’t already. It’s all in there.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Kotaku has rushed to the defense of the indefensible:

Rapp specifically mentioned the GamerGate today as being agents of her
harassment, but it was never clear whether one particular group was
after her.
My reporting suggested
some people had taken tactics used by harassers during GamerGate and applied them here.

SJWs retroconverging games

I saw that the Enhanced Editions of Baldur’s Gate were on sale at Good Old Games and put them in my cart. However, in between that and clicking through to checkout, a tweet by Escape Velocity drew my attention to this interview with a writer at Beamdog concerning the expansion they’d created in the process of enhancing the original games.

And by “enhancing” them, of course, they mean “converging” them:

“If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that
just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism, [we tried to
address that],” said writer Amber Scott. “In the original there’s a lot
of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like
Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife
and that was played for comedy. We were able to say, ‘No, that’s not
really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.”

“I got to write a little tender, romance-y side quest for Khalid and
Jaheira where you could learn a little bit about how their marriage
works and how they really feel about each other.”

There’s also four new companions, one of whom is gay, one of whom is bisexual.

They loved the games so much they just needed to remake them in their own converged image. Consider this absurd example.

We don’t like that. We won’t play it. Too bad.

SF-SJWs always double down

A PedoFiler defends last year’s lies about the Sad Puppies at the Mad Genius Club while telling new ones about the Rabid Puppies:

As far as people wanting off the list goes, it’s strictly a problem of branding. In branding, perception matters. Perception is everything, and the “Puppy” brand has come to be associated with “cheaters who flooded the ballot with very poor stories” at best and “white supremacists who want to kill gays with tire irons” at worst. You can debate whether you think this is fair, but that’s why very few people want to be associated with “those bad people who want to destroy the Hugo Awards out of pure meanness.”

I agree that Kate did a lot this year to improve things. I read and reviewed all of the puppy-nominated works, and the Sad-Puppy ones are mostly pretty good this year.

But she didn’t do anything to fix the branding problem. The Sad Puppies kept up the same, tired campaign of name calling–the same name-calling that the Rabid Puppies use. They kept repeating the same conspiracy theories. And–unfathomably–they refused to repudiate Vox Day. Given the history, it would take a stupendous effort to disassociate themselves from him–an occasional mild “we’re not Vox Day” is nowhere near what it would take–but making a statement to the effect of “we will not endorse or condemn anyone” was broadly heard as “we really are Vox Day.”

You can argue all day that that’s not fair, but that’s the perception, and in branding, perception is everything.

You might think his omission of the rather important fact that the so-called “branding problem” was entirely based on blatant lies about the Puppies, and me, by people at Tor Books running to the media, was an innocent oversight. But Greg Hullender’s response to Joel Salomen makes it clear that the dishonesty, as well as the sexual deviance, runs deep in the little freakshow.

Joel Salomon   
You’re completely right. Of course, this implies that all those upset at being included in SP4 should direct their ire at the liars who created this false perception of the Sad Puppies brand.

greghullender
It’s a fairly accurate description of the Rabid Puppies, though, and you guys should take some responsibility for allowing the confusion. 

As the Overgrown Hobbit pointed out, it is not “a fairly accurate description”. It is “a damned lie”.

It is considerably more fair and accurate to say “homosexual pedophile and predatory chickenhawk” is a “fairly accurate description” of Greg Hullender than it is to say “white supremacists who want to kill gays with tire irons” is a “fairly accurate description of the Rabid Puppies”. I have absolutely no problem asserting that I have never been a white supremacist and I have never wanted to kill gays with tire irons, or anything else, for that matter. Now let us see Mr. Hullender publicly attest that he has never been attracted to anyone under the age of 18. And let us see the rest of the Puppy-kicking Pedo-Filers do the same.

If they don’t, they will stand condemned by their own silence, just as they stand condemned for the decades of silence in which they have been harboring multiple predators in their community.

Notice how the SF-SJWs shriek that it is unfair to label them as sexual deviants and defenders of pedophilia and child molestation even as they continue to defend the celebration of individuals such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Samuel Delaney, and Arthur C. Clarke, and try to justify their lies about the Sad and Rabid Puppies. The fact is that none of the SJWs who spent last year lying about the Puppies, and calling us racists and Nazis, has any right to complain about being correctly found guilty of their well-known associations with multiple alleged and confirmed child molesters.

Meanwhile, Sarah Hoyt explains the reason for the SF-SJW need to constantly decry, denounce, and disqualify:

I’ve said before that years ago, being mentioned at Instapundit would have meant the end of my career.

It wasn’t a stupid fear.  It was real.  Even though writers can’t control who reads them and likes them, if you’re liked by the “far right” you must be using “dog whistles” — and thus the blacklisting starts.

So those people asking to be removed from the Hugo recommendations which were made by fan vote?  Perfectly logical.  Getting tainted by association is a thing in their circles.

The people proclaiming that we: Larry, Brad, myself, John C. Wright, I don’t know if they were stupid enough to include Kevin J. Anderson and Butcher in that, but definitely everyone else in the list, had “ruined their careers” are right.  For their world and their definition of career.  None of the big four will ever publish us again, except Baen.

They are stuck in the old push-model days in their head.  They think that everyone down the chain will now boycott us.  And they want to make d*mn sure it doesn’t splash on them.

They don’t have the power to intimidate the right into silence anymore, so they are frantically casting about to find other ways to shut us down. But what they simply don’t realize is that they’re not dealing with the frightened, cowering conservatives of the past. They’re dealing with the criticism-hardened, ruthless Alt-Right of the present and we don’t run from conflict with them. We run towards it.

2015 Book of the Year

Bernard Chapin, of Chapin’s Inferno, names SJWs Always Lie his 2015 book of the year:

Reading a book four times is a very rare endeavor for me but it’s a true testament to the value of Vox’s insight. We fight the left here, and SJWs Always Lie is a great “how to” guide for those of you at home. I made two videos concerning the work in the fall but I had a ton of questions to ask him. He’s a very wise guy and it even sounds as if RooshV actively sought out his advice in regards to his immaculate press conference. Roosh’s tactics were completely in line with the rules Vox lays out in the book.

While I’m pleased that SJWAL has been so well-received by so many people, and I very much appreciate the distinction, it is regrettable that the book is necessary in the first place. I look forward to the time when it will be regarded as a curiosity, a historical artifact, and people will wonder if an SJW had something to do with the Whig Party, and what “social justice” might have been.

By the way, Roosh did a hell of a job with that press conference. Because people don’t pay attention to negative accomplishments, most haven’t noticed the way in which it killed the Narrative and completely shut down a global media meme in one fell swoop. It was magnificent. That is something that will need to be analyzed and explicated in SJWADD.

Bernard interviewed me about SJWAL yesterday. And I have to confess, at this point, it is entirely possible that he knows the contents better than I do.

A portrait in projection

The usual suspects are upset about Sad Puppies, albeit for different reasons this time. It’s always something.

Declan Finn addresses the topic with his usual flair:

The level of stupid maybe be getting to me.  The Puppy Kickers — like Damien — seem to be going full on insane.  They’ve apparently decided that they can just spew insults, and it’s reality. Wright will never be a pro writer again because they hate him, and anyone they hate must be blackballed. Brad and Larry are demagogues, because Damien said so — and they “ran away” because Brad and Larry didn’t want to play with this crap anymore.

Then again, these ARE the same people that insist that Brad ran away to the Middle East, because being shot at was preferable to standing up to the great and powerful Puppy Kickers. Yes, there are some idiots who’ve actually stated this, online. In public.

See what I mean about the stupid? It burns a LOT.

Damien doesn’t even seem to consider that, had more of his friends came to play at the SP4 site, they could have taken over the list entirely. But that would have meant engaging with people who disagree with him.

    .@Sinapus Let me make this clear then. I don’t want messages from you or any Sad Puppies. Go away, don’t message me again.
    — Damien Walter (@damiengwalter) March 19, 2016

Yes, because actually talking with people who disagree with him might fracture Damien’s delicate hold on his reality. Besides, he wouldn’t want to be sullied with talking with the subhumans, now would he?

It makes you wonder who the heck are supposed to be the rabid ones here. Because I have to be honest, the level of paranoia that you have to induce in order to turn “Fans like my work” into “IT’S A TRAP” does not say good things about the bubble they’re living in. And Damien’s BS is so thick, he could fertilize acres every time he opens his mouth. His level of schizoid makes me wonder how he could tie his shoes. It’s obvious he has delusions of adequacy.

And of course, SP4 states that it is the exact same thing as Locus Magazine’s recommended list for the Hugos. The only difference? Locus seems to be in Tor’s back pocket, while actual fans out in the real world are voting for Sad Puppies.

Given the 3rd Law of SJW, what do we know about Damien’s accusation? First, that he is bitter. And second, that he believes his own pro writing career is over. After all, the comparison of his own career with Mr. Wright’s can only lead to one conclusion: it’s not Mr. Wright whose career is struggling:


My Lovesick Zombie Boy Band by Damien Walter
7 reviews, 3.1 rating
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #510,062 Paid in Kindle Store
    #557 > Fantasy > New Adult & College 

Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright
16 reviews, 5.0 rating
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,477 Paid in Kindle Store
    #19 > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Fantasy

Speaking as one of his publishers, and one of his smaller publishers, I can testify that Mr. Wright sold more books in the five days since his most recent novel was released than Mr. Walter has sold in his life.

Strength isn’t resolution

Jerry Pournelle shares a fascinating, and inadvertently illuminating, tale about Arnold Schwarzenegger:

I first met him at an agency party (we had the same agent); he was then the strongest man in the world and that and Conan was all we knew about him. He was very pleasant, and by chance the next day he met my wife in Nieman Marcus — it was a pre-Christmas party, and she was shopping for a present for me, we just having made a big sale (may have been Hammer, it was that long ago). He spent half an hour helping her look.

I know other such stories, all true.

He ran for governor as a lark, and when he was elected he got a pretty damn good team together to draft some fundamental propositions and constitutional amendments. They were pretty damned good.

The campaign for governor didn’t get very bitter — most thought he was a joke and the pro’s didn’t bother spending any money smearing him.

But the long knives came out over those propositions. Nurses in uniform at rallies screaming curses at him although most of the health professionals I know thought his reforms were needed and good; but wow did the unions hate them. It was the same all over: organized labor in particular called him the Austrian Hitler. He hated it. It really hurt him — he has a thinner skin than you might imagine. It got uncomfortable at home, too, what with his wife being a Kennedy clanswoman.

So when his propositions failed, he said the hell with it. They want crony government and gemutlicheit they can have it. Never took the job seriously again.

I’m not excusing him; he took the job, and he didn’t resign when he lost interest in it. He spent the rest of his office years making nice with everybody. Sure he became a joke and knew it, but it was better than nurses in uniform screaming NAZI at him.

It’s interesting how many strong and ambitious men – and consider how driven Arnold Schwarzenegger was compared to the average man – nevertheless crumble in the face of concerted opposition. Remember, very few go into politics because they don’t care if anyone likes them or not; they go into politics, and they are good at it, because they crave adoration and adulation.

I suspect this is why the Left is so successful at blunting, even turning, the Right on so many occasions; they know if they shriek loudly enough, and they do it long enough, they can cause their target to give up and quit.

This is also why they are so spectacularly unsuccessful with influencing the Alt Right. We simply don’t give a quantum of a damn about being called evil stupid Nazi racist bastards. We don’t pay any attention to their shrieking; to the extent we listen to it at all, it is music to our ears.

No wonder the likes of Mike Cernovich and Milo and even Rabid Puppies confuse them so much. They genuinely believe that we care what they think, they seriously believe that we somehow, deep down inside, are seeking their approval. And there is no reason why they shouldn’t, because past experience with conservatives, neocons, moderates, and cuckservatives have taught them that we do.

And that is downright funny. Useful as well. I shall have to ponder how we might be able to make use of this false impression in the future.

Terminal convergence

Swedes are forced to cancel their annual virtue-signaling for fear of rape:

The annual virtue-signalling festival known as ‘Earth Hour’ won’t be celebrated in one Swedish town this year, thanks to a sex-crime epidemic sweeping the municipality.

The small Swedish town of Östersund — population 44,300 — is presently living in a state of fear. Police have instructed women to not go outside alone at night following a spate of sex attacks, and police patrol in search of the perpetrators who have so far avoided capture.

There have now been 14 separate reports of sex attacks in the town, with victims ranging from grown women to 10-year-old girls. Police have refused to release details of the suspects they are seeking — as is usual in a country where police took the decision last year to combat racism by not discussing the ethnicities of crime suspects — but victims have described “foreign origin” attackers.

The danger is considered so great the symbolic act of turning the town’s municipal lights off for one hour is considered too much of a risk, and police have requested the event be cancelled. The final decision was taken in consultation with local officers on Tuesday, with Social Democrat spokesman for the local council Ann-Sofie Andersson remarking:

“Earth Hour is a good and important event, but this year we chose to have the street lights on in view of what has happened. We want everyone to feel safe”.

Sweden Television News reports the comments of Chief Constable Stephen Jerand, who said: “We from the police think it’s a very wise move and that the municipality made a good decision. Keeping the lights on creates security and is in line with our common efforts to increase security under current conditions”.

This is the situation one can only describe as “terminal convergence”. It’s when SJWs have so successfully converged an institution that it is no longer capable of performing even social justice functions.