Tag: SJW

Will they ever learn?

It’s not that I expect everyone to have read SJWs Always Lie. But it amazes me that people are still failing to notice that backing down and attempting to virtue-signal in the face of manufactured SJW outrage only leads to additional attacks:

The furore began when Atonement author McEwan gave a speech to the Royal Institution last week about the representation of the self. He had said: ‘The self, like a consumer desirable, may be plucked from the shelves of a personal identity supermarket, a ready-to-wear little black number.

‘For example, some men in full possession of a penis are now identifying as women and demanding entry to women-only colleges, and the right to change in women’s dressing rooms.’

The Man Booker Prize winner then reportedly clarified his comments to a member of the audience, saying: ‘Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men.’

His remarks prompted criticism from the transgender lobby and he was accused of being ‘backward-looking’ by cross-dressing comedian Eddie Izzard.

Whilst appearing to back down on his views, McEwan’s statement indicates he was surprised by the reaction to his comments. He wrote: ‘In response to a question, I proposed that the possession of a penis or, more fundamentally, the inheritance of the XY chromosome, is inalienably connected to maleness. As a statement, this seems to me biologically unexceptional.’

He went on to condemn discrimination against the transgender community and to say that changing or redefining gender is an ‘extension of freedom’.

‘That the transgender community should want or need to abandon their birth gender or radically redefine it is their right, which should be respected and celebrated,’ he wrote. ‘It’s an extension of freedom and the possibilities of selfhood. Everyone should deplore the discrimination that transgender communities have suffered around the world.’

LGBT charity Stonewall, which last week described McEwan’s views as ‘uninformed’, said yesterday: ‘Although it’s good to see that he has acknowledged the hurt that has been done to the trans community, his comments at the lecture and statement do nothing to help their situation and in fact further isolate trans people and entrench transphobic attitudes.’

But the message is getting out there nevertheless, and so strongly that the SJWs are afraid of it. I did an interview recently that was intended for the Huffington Post, but when the editors there saw it, they spiked it. They are terrified of exposing their left-liberal readers to alt-right ideas, because even when presented with all the usual spin and virtue-signaling, those ideas are proving more convincing, attractive, and in harmony with reality than their dogma.

Beamdog CEO statement on Baldur’s Gate Gate

Trent Oster, CEO of Beamdog, releases a statement concerning Siege of Dragonspear.

I’m Trent Oster, CEO of Beamdog.

First off, everyone here is ecstatic to have shipped Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. Siege represents years of hard work by a dedicated team that we grew from a combination of home grown talent, original Baldur’s Gate modders and former Bioware developers.  Siege of Dragonspear represents more than 25 hours of new Baldur’s Gate gameplay, and more than 500,000 words of writing. I’m proud of our team for launching this great expansion.

We’ve received feedback around Mizhena, a supporting character who reveals she is transgender. In retrospect, it would have been better served if we had introduced a transgender character with more development. This is a lesson we will be carrying forward in our development as creators and we will be improving this character in a future update.

The last few days have showed us how passionately many of our fans care for our games. We’ve had a lot of great feedback from players who love the expansion and are having a great time experiencing the first new Baldur’s Gate story in 15 years. While we appreciate all feedback we receive from our fans, both positive as well as negative, some of the negative feedback has focused not on Siege of Dragonspear but on individual developers at Beamdog — to the point of online threats and harassment.

I just want to make it crystal clear that Beamdog does not condone this behavior, and moreover that it will not have the desired effect as we stand behind all our developers 100%. We created the game as a group, and moving forward we’ll work on the game’s issues as a group, which I believe is exactly as it should be.

We’ve received valuable feedback around some bugs we failed to catch for ship. We’re hard at work right now patching up the issues that slipped through and we’re striving to ship fixes and improvements quickly. We will provide a complete list of the issues we plan to address in our next update. Issues of note we are addressing are:

Multiplayer – We are acting on reports of multiplayer issues and hope to have this fixed in the next update.

Minsc – Minsc has a line which generated controversy. Looking back on the line, we agree with the feedback from our community, it has nothing to do with his character and we will be removing the line.

We hope all our players continue to enjoy Siege of Dragonspear and we look forward to providing an update in the near future.

Regards,
-Trent

This is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. It’s a feeble attempt at damage control. There is no apology for calling critics “small minded”, there is no apology to those who have been banned from the forums, there is no apology for the inept writing or attempting to cram Social Justice Games, as the responsible writer called them, down the throats of Baldur’s Gate fans, and most of all, there is no announcement that the Social Justice Game writer and creator Amber Scott is no longer employed by Beamdog.

This simply isn’t good enough, Mr. Oster. It doesn’t indicate that you understand in any way what the core problem is or why so many fans of Baldur’s Gate were appalled by what your company did with the license.

Here is my advice: get rid of Scott and whatever other SJWs are waging their little cultural war on gamers at your expense, hire some better writers, and publicly assure fans of the series that you will not continue to utilize the Baldur’s Gate license to add diversity, preach about refugees or other current political issues, or advocate for social justice, and I’ll be happy to buy your games.

If we want to get preached at, we’ll go to church. If we want to get lectured, we’ll go to college. A game is no place for SJW culture war campaigns.

This is the damning bit: “we stand behind all our developers 100%”

Too bad. We stand against them. Because they stand against us.

UPDATE: Steam is accepting refunds from those who purchased the game or the Enhanced Editions and are unhappy with Beamdog’s public statements.

Steam accepted my BG:EE refund request after forum ban with more than 2 hrs played

Explained I had more playtime and I was aware of that, and that I would have been glad to eat the mistake had I simply made a bad purchase – but that after being banned on their forums and called a ‘harasser’ for no good reason than disagreeing that I’d had enough of the company.

BAM, refund approved within 30m, despite it being 9:30pm on a Wednesday.

Tomorrow, I’ll be drafting an open letter that contains relevant elements of various digital distribution platforms ToS’ that everyone can copy and send to Steam, Amazon, GoG, GMG, and all the different platforms Beamdog is selling their product on, along with detailed information including archives and screenshots which are now deleted, showing a conscious attempt on the part of Beamdog to manipulate user reviews across various platforms. Which violates EVERYONES policies, basically.

ADDENDUM: This Q&A says it all about SJWs in games. “Killer” is right. From an interview with a former senior writer at Bioware:

What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?

Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn’t have a good story, it’s very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I’m really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly — I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don’t like tactics, I don’t like fighting, I don’t like keeping track of inventory, and I can’t read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition.

If you could tell developers of games to make sure to put one thing in games to appeal to a broader audience which includes women, what would that one thing be?

A fast-forward button. Games almost always include a way to “button through” dialogue without paying attention, because they understand that some players don’t enjoy listening to dialogue and they don’t want to stop their fun. Yet they persist in practically coming into your living room and forcing you to play through the combats even if you’re a player who only enjoys the dialogue. In a game with sufficient story to be interesting without the fighting, there is no reason on earth that you can’t have a little button at the corner of the screen that you can click to skip to the end of the fighting.

Dani Bunton wept.

Mississippi stands firm

The governor doesn’t hesitate to sign a religious liberty bill:

Mississippi’s governor signed a law on Tuesday that allows public and private businesses to refuse service to gay couples based on the employers’ religious beliefs.

Gov. Phil Bryant signed House Bill 1523, despite opposition from gay-rights groups and some businesses who say it enables discrimination. Some conservative and religious groups support the bill.

The measure’s stated intention is to protect those who believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman, that sexual relations should only take place inside such marriages, and that male and female genders are unchangeable.

“This bill merely reinforces the rights which currently exist to the exercise of religious freedom as stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the Republican governor wrote in a statement posted to his Twitter account.

The measure allows churches, religious charities and privately held businesses to decline services to people whose lifestyles violate their religious beliefs. Individual government employees may also opt out, although the measure says governments must still provide services.

“This bill does not limit any constitutionally protected rights or actions of any citizen of this state under federal or state laws,” Bryant said. “It does not attempt to challenge federal laws, even those which are in conflict with the Mississippi Constitution, as the Legislature recognizes the prominence of federal law in such limited circumstances.”

Other states have considered similar legislation. North Carolina enacted a law, while governors in Georgia and South Dakota vetoed proposals.

Meanwhile, Paypal decides it’s a good idea to play politics in North Carolina:

PayPal has canceled its plans to open a new global operations center in Charlotte, following passage of a North Carolina law that prevents cities from creating non-discrimination policies based on gender identity.

The measure also mandates that students in state schools use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender when they were born.

On March 23, North Carolina, in an emergency session, passed the controversial Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act. 

It’s always educational to see how corporations are willing to virtue-signal on certain issues, while cheerfully doing business with some of the worst regimes on Earth at the same time.

And now various governors are getting into the act.

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today signed an executive order banning all non-essential state travel to Mississippi. The order requires all New York State agencies, departments, boards and commissions to immediately review all requests for state funded or state sponsored travel to the state of Mississippi, and bar any such publicly funded travel that is not essential to the enforcement of state law or public health and safety.

Round Two is coming. I don’t know which issue will set it off yet, but it’s increasingly obvious that Round Two is on the horizon. There is no nation any longer, and the sooner the various nations inside the USA go their separate ways, preferably in peace.

A recognizable response

Grimfate notes that Beamdog’s response to the criticism of Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear falls into what has come to be a recognizable pattern:

Usually if there’s a big uproar, the company will try to make things
right, try to save face and hopefully do something to appease those who
have decided not to purchase the game because of it. For example, the
ending of Mass Effect 3. Also, whenever an SJW complains about
something, the company seems quick to address the issue, such as the
butt thing with Blizzard’s latest game. So it’s interesting to see that
when there is an uproar AGAINST the SJW side, the company digs their
heels in, asking people to post positive reviews for the game instead
of, you know, addressing the concerns of their actual and potential
customers…

This is the tell. This is what informs gamers that a game developer is not on their side, and is sufficiently SJW-converged to stand their ground on the basis of SJW politics rather than artistic expression or creative freedom.

If you are the sort of organization that would immediately cave, (or worse, has caved) before a single SJW pointing-and-shrieking racist, or sexist, or goblinist, or geometrist, or whatever the complaint du jour is, you cannot expect people to take you seriously when you suddenly stand firm against tens of thousands of ordinary gamers expressing their disapproval of your design choices. Observe that the review ratings are consistent: 70 to 75 percent of gamers are openly hostile to Beamdog’s “enhancements”.

An SJW complains about a single character’s pose: “OMG! We are SO sorry! We will change it ASAFP! Do you like her new butt better? Is that okay? PLEASE FORGIVE US!”

Tens of thousands of gamers complain about smirking SJW convergence inserted into a beloved series: “Too bad, small minded bigots! You’re just a vocal minority and you’re BANNED!”

Moreover, if you are going to disrespect a much-loved classic of the genre by rejecting various elements of it and “improving” it, you really should understand that you are also rejecting its fans and that more people are going to actively hate your enhancements than are going to enthusiastically embrace them.

It’s a legitimate choice, although I would argue it is a foolish and self-destructive one. And while the developer has the right to make that choice, it is very important to understand that a deliberate choice is being made by someone inside the organization. It’s not like any of this is new, as the memelords well know.

Meanwhile, a longtime fan of the Baldur’s Gate series reviews Siege of Dragonspear:

Creating more content for a game that is in desperate need of a revival at a time when CRPGs are finally coming back into vogue was a great idea, and had I been a game developer, I would have jumped at the chance to do it myself.

Of course I was warned, both by friends and by readers of this site posting in comments on Dragonspear news articles I posted, that the game wasn’t going to be worth the money.

“They hired Gaider, you know what that means”

“Did you see how bad that stream was”

“You know they’ll screw it up.”

Naturally, I didn’t believe them. Call it putting the nostalgia goggles on, but I couldn’t possibly believe Beamdog’s Baldur’s Gate expansion would be anything but a continuation of the same events and personalities that made the original so timeless and memorable….

After five hours with the game, I encountered numerous situations where a
combination of very poor writing and social justice pandering began to
weigh the game down. Technical and gameplay missteps were one thing, but
the sheer amount of modern 2016 Tumblr-level politics turned what was
once a grand medieval swords & sorcery epic into the equivalent of a
emotional teenage girl’s self-insert fanfic.

What a small minded bigot! Nevertheless, it appears the controversy has already broken through and hit the mainstream media:

The problem with Minsc’s dig at #GamerGate isn’t that it breaks the fabled “Fourth Wall.” After all, Minsc is already making a jump through the fourth wall with his delightful pet Spelljammer reference. Heck, Baldur’s Gate is just as happy to reference The Bob Newhart Show and Monty Python as it is murder and betrayal.

Rather, the problem lies in Beamdog’s level of respect — or lack thereof — for a character that is deeply meaningful to an entire generation of gamers. Minsc is the lovable hamster-toting warrior of both Baldur’s Gate titles. His legacy extends into novelization and comic books, and he’s been praised by just about every conceivable gaming publication at one time or another. He’s an intellectual innocent, a gentle giant.

With one quip, they’ve turned that great big teddy bear of a hero into a passive-aggressive tool to insult a portion of their potential customers. It’s a cynical decision, and a needless one. It’s intentionally sarcastic and insulting, stooping to the tactics that people consistently ladle onto anyone who has ever participated in the #GamerGate conversation, without offering any useful rebuttal.

Not only is it grossly out of character for Minsc, it’s a little bit of the Internet’s ugliness that quite simply didn’t need to be there. Where the transgender character is an expression of the developer’s intentions toward inclusion, Minsc’s dig is designed to exclude people with whom Beamdog disagrees. It’s trite, it’s catty, and it makes Beamdog’s other in-game statements come off as posturing rather than sincere.

Beamdog’s response to the controversy hasn’t been extremely constructive and suggests a very loose grasp on the heart of the problem.

The problem is that the amenable authorities think their best interests are served by pandering to the SJWs who put them in their untenable position in the first place rather than jettisoning them at the earliest opportunity. What every leader of an organization needs to understand is that the SJWs within have no loyalty to the organization nor do they harbor any concerns for it. The organization is only of interest to them insofar as it provides them with a vehicle for pushing their Narrative.

Give them the chance, and they will burn it all down around them in the interest of virtue-signaling without even a moment’s hesitation. And then they’ll move on to their next victim.

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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(426 of 879 users found this helpful)

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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(251 of 337 users found this helpful)

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.