John C. Wright's Blog, page 46

A note on Gamergate

A note on Gamergate

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

First They Came for the Girls Scouts, But I Said Nothing…

An article too rich not to share from Big Government (http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governme...

The Girl Scouts USA has just ended its 53rd Convention amid sharply declining membership numbers, serious financial problems, cookie boycotts due to the organization’s known ties to Planned Parenthood, and now, the threat that those who want the group to retain its former, traditional values will split off to get the Girl Scouts back on track.

As CBS News reports, for the second straight year, both youth and adult membership in the Girl Scouts has dropped dramatically. Over the past year, the total youth members and adult volunteers declined by six percent, from 2,994,844 to 2,813,997. The past two years have seen total membership down 11.6 percent, and since 2003, when membership peaked at more than 3.8 million, total membership has plummeted 27 percent.

Girl Scouts CEO Anna Maria Chavez attributes the falling numbers to overarching societal factors, such as less financial stability among parents and families, leading to the need for parents to work several jobs with little time to take children to activities or to volunteer themselves.

Chavez said the dearth of volunteer adults has forced some Girl Scout councils to turn away girls who want to join. She added there are approximately 30,000 girls on waiting lists around the country.

“The need for what Girl Scouts has to offer is not decreasing – more than ever girls need our time and our commitment,” Chavez said. “Our challenge is to meet them where they are with enough caring adults to serve them.”

However, as Will Doig at The Daily Beast observes, the Girl Scouts is facing a split between those who believe the organization should return to its traditional values and principles and those who want the group to focus on more “global” concerns and issues, such as “female body image” and how to reduce one’s carbon footprint.

“We’ve got a group of people organized,” says Marty Woelfel, a volunteer with Girl Scouts of Kentuckiana. “I won’t tell you how many.”

According to the Beast, Woelfel and others are prepared to return the Girl Scouts organization to its traditional core principles and activities such as canoeing, archery, fire building, and other wilderness skill building.

Nowadays, girls work toward merit badges for analysis of how fashion blogs portray women, developing a plan to reduce one’s carbon footprint, or how to commit to an “eat local” diet plan that is “sustainable.”

“We listen to and move at the speed of girls, and research shows that today’s girls not only love camping and being outdoors, they also enjoy technology and helping the world while having fun, all of which can be found in Girl Scouts,” says Kelly Parisi, chief communications executive for Girl Scouts USA.

However, as Breitbart News has extensively reported, not all is “fun” at Girl Scouts USA, and Parisi, formerly vice president of Marketing and Communications at the Ms. Foundation, had joined a national campaign during her tenure there to punish the Susan G. Komen Foundation for trying to defund Planned Parenthood.

The Girl Scouts’ ties to Planned Parenthood, abortion, and other “non-traditional” activities include the fact that Josh Ackley – its main media spokesman – also happened to be the lead singer of a “homopunk” band that filmed several controversial videos, including one in which a woman is strangled, and another in which a young man writhes naked on the ground and appears to be masturbating. As Breitbart News’ Austin Ruse reported in January, when Ackley’s extracurricular activities were exposed, the Girl Scouts merely scrubbed him from its media page but still tweeted that “not only is Josh Ackley still employed, no one has been demoted.”

In May of 2013, a Girl Scout-sponsored event in New York City, billed as one to “celebrate women and girls” featured a live screening and panel discussion of the documentary MAKERS, a feminist, pro-abortion video account of prominent women described as “trailblazers.”

The Girl Scouts organization even stepped into designating pro-abortion Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis an “incredible woman” who deserved to be on the list of the 2013 “Women of the Year.” Additionally, on its Facebook page, the organization promoted former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as a woman of “courage.”

The non-traditional, “modern” Girl Scouts organization also hired a “Girl Experience Officer” named Krista Kokjohn-Poehler, who is a lesbian married to Ashley Kokjohn.

Among the internal issues that have led to expressions of public resentment among alumnae and regional councils of the Girl Scouts have been an unfunded pension plan, revenue deficits that have led to the elimination of about one-fourth of the staff at national headquarters, and the closure of some Girl Scout camps and what has been perceived as a shift away from camping and other outdoor activities that were once synonymous with scouting itself.

…

As CBS News observes, as the Girl Scouts’ membership has plummeted, the American Heritage Girls, formed in 1995 as a Christian-oriented alternative, now has over 35,000 members.

Read the whole thing: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/10/20/Girl-Scout-Membership-Plummets-Nearly-12-in-Past-Two-Years-And-Now-A-Split

For those of you too impatient to read: whenever the Leftist take over, they ruin.

No exceptions, no, not one. That cannot be a coincidence. If their behavior was purely random, purely insane, one would think that by the law of averages they would occasionally get something right, do something right, improve someone’s life, bring joy somewhere.

But, no, their behavior is not random. It is deliberately a rebellion against reality, against logic, against free will and in favor of mind control. It can make no one happy because of a simple and obvious rule of human nature: (1) slaves are unhappy when forced to do what their master, but not they themselves, ought to make them happy; (2) and the master, despite his pomp and high position, grows bitter, cynical, lonesome, loathsome and sad, because he must treat the slaves as subhuman, and by dehumanizing his victims, he loses his own humanity himself, and degrades himself into being a monster.  An unhappy monster.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Sci Phi #2 For Sale

An Announcement:

Quite a few New Release subscribers opted for SCI PHI JOURNAL #1 as their free book, so I expect more than few people might be pleased to know that the publisher is permitting Castalia House customers to purchase SCI PHI JOURNAL #2 a few days prior to its official release on November 1st.  The second issue of SCI PHI JOURNAL features short stories, book reviews, and some interesting articles such as “On the Ethics of Supersoldiers” by Patrick S. Baker and “The Making of the Fellowship” by the excellent fantasy essayist Tom Simon. it also contains the first part of a serial, Beyond the Mist by Ben Zwycky, and a history that never-was by John C. Wright, entitled “Prophetic & Apotropaic Science Fiction”.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

A Tale of Two Comments

Please take note of the following two comments:

This one was left here on my journal (http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/10/a-...) by someone who tags himself DaveOn.

He is aggressively defending the beating and robbery of Bristol Palin, or, which is the same thing, smirking at those who say there is nothing funny about a young woman being beaten and robbed. His argument, such as it is, is that it is wrong to criticize Leftists for their sadism on the grounds that, uh, LOOK! SQUIRREL! Or something to that effect.

Actually, and I know bringing facts into these discussions is annoying, if the police witness a criminal act being perpetrated they actually are (at least in the variety of locales I checked via Google) obliged to intervene.

You are correct that they can’t act if a crime hasn’t taken place which makes dealing with stalkers and threats tricky legally speaking, but if they see a fight start they will get involved and break it up.

And, again, facts before I depart, Bristol appears to have been telling porkies. I am sure that in your 20 years as an officer a drunk who committed an assault never ever did that eh?

And this on Vox Day’s website (http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/10/di...) Written by one calling himself Tacitus:

The aggressive condescension and derision of the social justice warriors isn’t meant to produce belief directly; rather it rewards the in-group with the pleasures of malice, punishes the out-group, and gets members of the out-group and potential dissenters in the in-group to shut up, creating an illusion of consensus to which intimidated people who feel outnumbered and outmatched accommodate their opinions.

Please compare the two comments, dear reader. Not only does Mr. Tacitus have Mr. On’s number, he describes him to a ‘T’.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

The New Inquisition

From Handle’s Haus

Haus in December of 2013 was collecting a list of person harassed, fired, bullied or badgered for expressing opinions and making jokes. He is trying to keep the list neutral and evenhanded, but anyone can see where the vast, vast majority of cases are. There is one group that, as a matter of core dogma, is willing to tolerate differences of opinion in others, and live and let live, and there is another that, as a matter of core dogma, is not.

He is too cautious to call it an Inquisition, but he knows and cannot quite say it. An Inquisition, by the way, as a mechanism for expelling members who do not conform to Church dogma is something I regard as a necessity, even noble, if your denomination is not to end up in the flaccid and misty situation of the Unitarians or the Anglicans. (What made the Spanish Inquisition evil was not the Inquisition but the Spanish, that is, the Spanish king, the secular power, enforced a matter of Church discipline. One the other hand Spain was never taken over by Protestants, whose Inquisitions has as many victims or more, but without the benefit of formal and legal checks on abuses of the power.) If you recall your history, the Inquisition had no authority over non-Christians.

In this case, the Progressives are trying to enforce as much as their Inquisition as they can over non-Progressives, and they are inching ever closer to achieving the secular power to make policing your thoughts a matter of law.

Mark my words, call it a law of sociology: any institution without an Inquisition to maintain the purity of its beliefs and principles, eventually becomes Progressive, and institutes an Inquisition to maintain the purity and Progressive beliefs and principles, regardless of any damage to the integrity or existence of the original institution.

As a public service, hoping it does not offend net etiquette, I reprint his whole list to day here, with links:

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

The Social Justice Kitten Calendar

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see all twelve months here:

http://liartownusa.tumblr.com/post/100268870650/liartownusa-has-always-celebrated-online-social

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Master of the Mystic Arts

Time for Some good news for a change.

It looks like there will be a Doctor Strange movie. This is the first comic I ever picked up, and I happened to read it in the 1970’s when the magazine was in the hands of Steve Englehart, Frank Brunner, Marshall Rogers, Jim Starlin, Paul Smith, Sal Buscema, Gene Colan, and especially Rudy Nebres of Conan fame.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Breitbart on Gamergate (with Garrulous Digression)

An article by one Noah Dulis at Breitbart’s Big Journalism too startling not to share:

Supporters of the GamerGate movement have been working tirelessly to hunt down those who would use their banner to cause personal harm—all while the media continues to claim that GamerGate members are either participating in or indifferent to the harassment of women in the gaming industry.

On Thursday, Salon published a column titled, “#Gamergate is really about terrorism: Why Bill Maher should be vilifying the gaming community, too.” In the article, the author correlates GamerGate to the actions of fundamentalist Islamist terrorists: “putting statements from your garden-variety Islamic extremist side by side with the kinds of threats Sarkeesian and others have received, it’s clear these two groups share some similar attitudes toward women.”

While the thrust of the article is focused more on what the author perceives to be a double standard in the treatment of the Muslim community as a result of the actions of jihadists, it furthers the idea that GamerGate is a hate movement with no place in any discussion of transparency and ethics in the gaming industry and press. In doing so, it shows how the media is so invested in demonizing GamerGate that it is silencing the best ally in combating online harassment: GamerGate supporters themselves.

Meet Margaret Gel.

Margaret is an avid GamerGate supporter and has been working along with others since the movement’s inception to protect both supporters and critics of GamerGate from harassment and abuse online. Margaret credits Twitter user @LetsSailHatan for coming up with the platform that has allowed anyone concerned with online threats, doxxing (the revealing of personally identifying information), and harassment to identify and shut down such trolls on Twitter: the #GamerGate Harassment Patrol.

“You show us who’s harassing, attach the words ‘#GamerGate Harassment Patrol’ to the tweet, and we in #GamerGate all report them at once,” Margaret explained. “We’ve gotten accounts suspended in less than 15 seconds this way: it’s VERY helpful for erasing dox that people post of others.”

“Anyone sending threats is not welcome in #GamerGate,” she continued. “We have random people come in and use the tag to send death threats. We don’t want them, we don’t need them, and we are watching to make sure that their crimes are reported to the proper authorities.”

“If you report harassment and include the exact words ‘#GamerGate Harassment Patrol’ in your tweet, it shows up here, and many of us see it,” Margaret explained. “As long as I’m at my desk, I keep a window showing the tag open. All it takes is one retweet and even more people see it, more people report it, and the account gets suspended.”

Margaret herself has been a victim of harassment, having received “two rape threats and two death threats.” She has also been doxxed, but she noted that when it happened on the image board 8chan, the community responded quickly to protect her: “No one else in the thread wanted anything to do with the person posting the dox: they didn’t approve of the posting of dox; they swore at the person who posted my dox.”

“The staff of /gg/, the ones who moderate it, protected me, removing the dox in record time. They deleted my dox in FIVE MINUTES,” she stressed.

Margaret’s experience is hardly unique as a GamerGate supporter. She provided me with extensive documentation of death threats, doxxing, and harassment committed against GamerGate supporters, all of which can be found in a growing catalog at the Twitter account @TheBattleAngel. The point of doing so isn’t to justify a never-ending back and forth of attacks between supporters and critics of GamerGate but to highlight the discrepancy between the media’s attempts to mischaracterize GamerGate based on the actions of extremists while ignoring critics of GamerGate engaging in the same type of behavior. “I’m more infuriated that there are so many people who keep getting death threats, and yet the media keeps on saying that THEY are the terrorists,” she said.

Read the whole thing http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/10/25/While-the-Media-Slanders-Gamers-as-Terrorists-GamerGate-Is-Hunting-Trolls-and-Abusers

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

A Parcel of Their Fortunes

Men’s judgments  are

A parcel of their fortunes; and things outward

Do draw the inward quality after them,

To suffer all alike.

–Antony and Cleopatra. Act iii. Sc. 13.

I want to draw something to your attention, my dear reader. I want you to do me a favor, and think. Think very carefully and very clearly. If you have an immediate emotional reaction, put the emotion aside and just concentrate on your facilities rationality, of judgement, of fairplay, of common sense.

The following clip was aired not on some webcast unseen by anyone, but by CNN, one of the most famed and prestigious of news media outlets. Ponder that for a moment. This does not represent the fringe, but the mainstream.

It is not unrehearsed, not ad lib. Someone wrote the lines for the newscaster, and placed them in the teleprompter. This is not one woman’s opinion, but the corporate opinion of CNN.

I have taken the trouble of finding the transcript, to make what is being said crystal clear. There is no room for evasion here, no place to hide, unless you yourself, my reader, create a hiding place in your head and use some unseemly excuse to distract yourself from the plain fact, to shift the blame, or drown out what your eyes and mind are telling you.

Look! Look at it!

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Feminism Sinks to a New Low

A comment by Jonah Goldberg, which represents my sentiments so exactly that I have nothing to add:

I know that sounds impossible, but I think it just may be true. I won’t embed the video, but you can find it here at Mediaite along with a fuller write-up. Someone thought it’d be really funny/bold/transgressive to dress a whole bunch of little girls as princesses and then have them shout feminist-approved slogans and lots and lots of f-bombs. I could rant for a while about the rich cocktail of stupidity and creepiness of all this, but it really speaks for itself.  And, besides, that’s what they’re going for. I will say that the parents of these little girls should be ashamed of themselves.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.