A Conservative Perspective On: *Current Events* *Sports* *Movies and TV* *Popular Culture* Follow Me On Twitter: @drawandstrike
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
ATTENTION PEASANTS: THE SHOW TRIALS HAVE BEEN CANCELLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE!
In his book, 'Vision of the Anointed: Social Policy As A Basis For Self-Congratulation', Professor Thomas Sowell discusses four stages of failure that necessarily follow when social 'experts' or 'activists' attempt to bring about changes in a group or culture that result in failure.
THE FOUR PATTERNS OF SOCIAL POLICY FAILURE
“STAGE 1. THE ‘CRISIS: Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a ‘crisis’ ….Sometimes the situation…has in fact already been getting better for years.
STAGE 2. THE ‘SOLUTION': Policies to end the ‘crisis’ are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and ‘simplistic,’ if not dishonest.
STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z.
STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as ‘simplistic’ for ignoring the ‘complexities’ involved, as ‘many factors’ went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently, [but wrongly], predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors.”
In response to a consumer revolt among gamers that is popularly referred to as #GamerGate, Social Justice Activists in coordination with enablers in the gaming media made an attempt to drive gamers away & replace them with casual mass market consumers. Probably the most overt example of this was Leigh Alexander's column that appeared at GamaSutra during the coordinated rollout of the 'Gamers Are Dead' talking point. It was entitled "'Gamers' Don't Have To Be Your Audience'. 'Gamers' Are Over."
For several months, anti-#GamerGate and the social justice activists seemed to believe they were making headway in implementing this new policy for gaming culture. Gamers were supposedly being driven off and marginalized while being replaced with a far larger and more acceptable audience. As time has passed, it's become apparent they were deluding themselves.
We all voted, Bob. You're off the Island!
Now anti-#GamerGate has reached Stage 4: they have to explain why their attempt to abandon gamers & replace them with the broader mass market audience has failed. They have to explain why gaming journalism sites are adopting the ethical and transparency disclosure rules they've claimed were unnecessary. The need for ethical transparency & disclosure by gaming journalists was the subject of my last column, which you can find here. What about the attempt to marginalize gamers? Mass market consumers who only buy and play games casually do not engage with gaming media on anything more than the most casual of levels. Even if #SJW's got total control of the gaming media, because mass consumers don't read gaming blogs, don't interact on gaming message boards and don't attend GameCons, they wouldn't really have more of an influence on casual game consumers at all when it came to changing or molding their beliefs and their behaviors. Succeed in putting out games that preach radical extremist #SJW views on race, gender and class and what will happen is the mass market of consumers out there who don't agree to or accept those views will stop buying your games. Attempting to deliberately bypass those most passionately involved consumers closest to your industry to reach the mass market beyond them is a very difficult proposition.
Yet this is exactly what the social justice advocates in gaming media attempted to do in response to #GamerGate; dump the closest group of passionate consumers of the industry & trade them in for another audience. In what universe could this have possibly worked? The goal of social justice radicals is to create a monolithic collective that all shares the same views. Or at least, one in which it's members only dare to publicly EXPRESS the same views. All the ships sail in the same direction in complete harmony. Because the ships that won't have been sunk or driven off. In response to GamerGate's call for more ethical openness and transparency, the #SJW response was to attempt to jettison what it viewed as a small, troublesome subset that was unimportant in light of the need to begin going after the far larger mass gaming market. The stunning blind spot is their belief that people OUTSIDE gamer culture will be more open to accepting the #SJW radical views & politically correct scolding aiming at changing their behavior. They aren't. News flash to the #SJW's out there in the gaming media: Pay attention to the next two pictures. These people.....
aren't any more interested in adopting radical extremist #SJW views on gender, race or class than..... these people.
YOU'RE WELCOME. No, no, don't thank me. It's what I do!
The fatal mistake McIntosh,Sarkeesian, Alexander and their type of social justice activist have made is that the broader mass market of gaming consumers out there isn't any more receptive to the #SJW extremism & radicalism than the gamer culture is. This is why the attempt was doomed from the start. And this is why #anti-#GamerGate is now at the stage of making excuses over their failures.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
WHY #GAMERGATE HAS WON, IS WINNING, AND WILL CONTINUE TO WIN
If you followed the GamerGate controversy since it's inception, you've probably heard numerous times that the people who comprise GamerGate are 'losing', that they 'have lost', and have been 'soundly defeated'. This is not true. GamerGate has helped to change how many of the big gaming media sites report on the industry.
Gaming Media Sites That Have Changed Their Ethics/Disclosure/Transparency Policies Since GamerGate Began:
1. Escapist
2. Joystiq
3. IGN
4. PC Gamer
5. Kotaku
6. Polgyon
7. Destructoid
If some want to call that a record of defeat, well OK then! There are several separate issues involved in GamerGate:
1. The sometimes super-close relationships between gaming industry people and the gaming media journalists who cover them. In the area of product reviews this close relationship could cause problems. On top of being super-chummy with some of the people who's games they write about, journalists could also be compromised through favors and gifts bestowed upon them in exchange for favorable treatment. It's understandable to a point that people who make and sell games and people who loved games so much they decided to make their living writing about them would have a lot of common ground and friendships would develop. But as the games industry grew over the past two decades into a multi-billion dollar industry, it became paramount that the gaming media journalists demonstrate their ethical independence from the people they write about. It became necessary they demonstrate their coverage of the industry on behalf of the consumers was strictly impartial and not granting favors to any friends they have in the business.
"What do I get if I report that your game doesn't suck?"
Gaming journalists who function as little more than public relations flacks for their friends in the game publishing business are like political reporters who become too enamored of a certain politician & start slanting their stories in the politicians favor while missing no opportunity to criticize his competitors for office. Such a journalist is misrepresenting the political race to his or her readers because personal preferences and lack of objectivity have corrupted the coverage.
"Holy crap, we paid SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS for *this*?!"
Too many times over the years gamers who trusted what they thought was an impartial review of a new game spent their hard earned money on what turned out to be a bad product. Gamers discovered they had been suckered by what was in fact a press release for a favored game developer written by a fan boy who had lost all objectivity due to a wave of free games and other products showered upon him/her by a gaming company looking for positive press for their upcoming releases.
"Good decision. Your 2 star game just became a 4 star.
Nice doing business with you."
GamerGate is a consumer revolt where the people who buy the games are demanding disclosure of every favor, every free gift, every friendship or prior working relationship a gaming journalist has with the subject of their stories. After all, a political reporter who wrote a glowing puff piece about a politician without disclosing they had once worked on that person's staff would be reprimanded for an ethical lapse. Yet as GamerGate exploded on the scene, the idea that gaming journalists needed to be transparent and disclose prior relationships, friendships, and gifts from the companies & people they reported on was met with derision, laughter and even mockery. It was claimed there was no need for any such transparency. That response smacked of fear and desperation.
2. Social Justice activists who see video games as a missionary field in dire need of their 'help'.
"Once we're done transforming the video game culture into something we can actually stoop to liking, the rest of you can thank us!"
The last few years gamers noticed a marked change in tone in the way many gaming journalists covered the industry. Coverage of video games began to become overtly political, as media reporters often began focusing on perceived racism, sexism and other faults that video games were supposedly rife with. While there's certainly nothing wrong with a discussion of political themes in video games every now and then, it was noticed the discussion of such themes, as they cropped up more and more frequently, was pretty one sided and sounded a lot like advocacy. Nobody ever got around to asking gamers if they wanted to start having long, protracted discussions in the media about short skirts and lack of minority characters in the video games they played.
Gamers got the distinct impression that those in the gaming media were preaching down at them and the more they signaled they weren't interested in this overt politicization of their medium, the more strident the preaching got. As the controversy grew, gamers discovered there were advocates of using the gaming media to advance 'social justice', and these advocates weren't shy about calling for censorship of anybody who disagreed with their agenda. Now that the curtain was rolled back, it had become clear gaming media was being used as a platform - or a soapbox, to be more accurate - for pushing for certain radical feminist & progressive views. After getting a taste of how these activists treated those who disagreed with their views once they were dragged into the open, gamers derisively labeled them 'Social Justice Warriors' or SJW's for short.
"I'm the only one allowed up here. I get to talk, you don't. So shut up."
Gamergate opened up a second front at that point, calling for the gaming media to divest itself of the SJW's that had infiltrated it & were using media to push for particular political points of view. As GamerGate moved onward, it became clearer why there was such resistance from the start to adopting open and ethical transparency guidelines in gaming media. It was increasingly apparent that the SJW's preferred doing their important work behind the scenes, out of sight, working on and influencing a small handful of people in the gaming industry to provide them with a top-down soapbox from which to preach to the unwashed masses.
Now that the lights had been turned on and the curtain rolled back, SJW's realized this placed them in the position of having to actually debate their agenda with the audience, instead of talking down to it from a pulpit. Since many of the radical and extremist feminist & racial views held by SJW's are complete bullshit, it quickly became apparent why they weren't interested in honestly convincing others to adopt their views. They much preferred simply being handed a position of authority behind the curtain & presenting their views unchallenged and without honest debate to an unsuspecting audience. The first six months of Gamergate can be summed up thusly: SJW's who had been using gaming media from behind the scenes to advocate for their political positions unchallenged howling 'Ignore the man behind the curtain!'
It didn't work.
Gamergate is winning because it is successfully encouraging gaming media into adopting open and transparent ethical rules that solves both problems listed above. Gaming journalists will have to disclose their relationships & interactions with the gaming companies who's products they cover and critique, while at the same time the social justice advocates will now be forced to openly discuss their agenda and argue for it on a level playing field.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
The 2014 'Too Good To Fact-Check' Awards!
This past year could be called the Year of Too Good To Check. Time and again the mainstream media got caught rushing coverage of hoaxes out the door because they were too good to check, they advanced favored narratives just so darn awesomely well. It's become obvious it doesn't matter if the supposed outrageous event was real or not. The important thing is that the Social Justice Warriors advance their pet causes on all fronts. 2014 was the year it became obvious that 'truth' doesn't matter any more, all that matters is that certain parties advance their agendas by any means necessary. "Oh hey, sure it was a hoax, but notice that our hoax started a much needed public conversation on this issue! So it was a net positive, people!" As long as the Progressive Left's narrative advances, who cares if it was a hoax that kept things moving in the 'right' direction? From it's actions this past year, the DNC Media certainly doesn't. Let's take a trip down memory lane: this past year's events where the media was constantly found to be advancing hoaxes and frauds because it advanced an agenda they wanted to push. 1. Fake cop harassment of Muslims video
Look! Real Live Islamophobia At Last! And From A Police Officer No Less!
After years of warning about 'Muslim backlash' and 'growing Islamophobia' in America, the media has searched high and low looking for some actual evidence to present of this 'growing threat'. You know, so they can keep warning the rest of us about it. Recall in 2006 NBC News tried to gin up some Islamophobia by sending men in Muslim garb to a NASCAR event with camera crews hoping to catch some real live anti-Muslim backlash on video. http://sports.espn.go.com/rpm/news/story?seriesId=2&id=2398619 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2006-04-06-dateline_x.htm
Unfortunately for the 'Narrative That Refuses To Die', NASCAR fans were pretty cool about Muslim fellows walking around in their midst. After years of disappointment at the failure of Americans to engage in overt Islamophobia, you can imagine how the media reacted when the above video went viral. Not only was it a case of obvious anti-Muslim backlash - it featured a New York City police officer! Only after it went viral did the duo who made the video get around to admitting the 'cop' in the film is actually an actor following their direction.
Rolling Stone's story: Link: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-20141119 What Sabrina Rubin Erdely presented as factual in that article was this story: a freshman at UVA was gang-raped as part of a regular fraternity initiation ritual right inside the frat house and then the university didn't really do anything about it. A lot of people's bullshit detectors went off of course on hearing the details, but for the first month the Social Justice Warriors managed to hold off the skepticism by loudly screaming "RAPE APOLOGISTS!!!" at anybody who dared question the story. Unfortunately that soon stopped working.
The lawsuits are gonna be SO awesome. Looking forward to seeing you on Court TV, Sabrina!
Rolling Stone was forced to admit that no real fact checking at all was done on this story. They deliberately made no effort to contact the accused. Read the entirely self-serving 'correction' that appears at the front of Rolling Stone's article in which the managing editor tries to desperately sell the idea that not contacting any of the accused was totally the right thing to do n' stuff.
Feminists from a group called Hollaback! got the bright idea of creating a video of what they saw as an urgently growing problem: men catcalling women on the streets of New York.
10 hours of walking around New York City was distilled into a 4 minute video in which a white woman appeared to be endlessly harassed by Black and Latino men. The feminists at Hollaback! apparently never realized they were in fact racists until other Progressives helpfully pointed this out to them. Link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/10/29/catcalling_video_hollaback_s_look_at_street_harassment_in_nyc_edited_out.html This led to all kinds of fun among the Progressive Left that ended far too soon. Probably the best thing to come out of the HollaBack! catcalling video was the numerous parodies it inspired, such as this fantastically funny one: 10 Hours Of Princess Leia Walking In New York City.
5. Fake drunk girl in public video
What happens when a very attractive young woman appears to be almost falling down drunk and approaches random men on a public street for 'help'? That was supposedly the theme of this 'social experiment' video that was evidently inspired by the earlier HollaBack! catcalling video. People watching the video were horrified as young men repeatedly kept trying to lure her off the street and into their nefarious clutches. It seemed to verify plenty of feminist tropes about predatory males vs. vulnerable females. And then the facts were revealed: Link: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/drunk-girl-viral-hoax-video-785463
It turns out none of the encounters seen in the video were spontaneous; the videomakers enlisted the men for what they claimed was a 'comedy sketch' and fed them lines to use as they interacted with actress Jennifer Box. None of them realized they were in fact going to be presented as examples of sexual predators in a 'social experiment'. And now for the coveted "Liar" and "Fraud" of the Year Awards!
Liar of the Year: Dorian Johnson
Dorian Johnson's account of the shooting of Michael Brown at the hands of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson does not match the available evidence at almost any point whatsoever. Link: Dorian Johnson's Statements About Michael Browns Last Moments Johnson claimed Brown never assaulted Wilson or tried to grab his handgun. He claimed Brown was shot in the back while running away, and then went on to claim the fatal shots were fired into Brown as he stood passively with his hands up, trying to surrender. Most of the eyewitness testimony & the forensic evidence of the case directly contradict Johnson's version of events. When an actual credentialed forensic pathologist examined the evidence, not only was Brown not shot in the back, he also wasn't shot while standing still with his hands up in a surrender posture. The forensic evidence demonstrates that despite Johnson's lying about it, Brown did indeed reach into the vehicle and try to seize Wilson's handgun, resulting in at least 2 shots being discharged inside the SUV. Link: What the forensic evidence says about Michael Brown’s death
The autopsies done on Brown also demonstrated he was not shot in the back, as Johnson claimed he was. Even as Ferguson went up in flames around him Johnson insisted on sticking to his version of the shooting, portraying his friend as the victim of a violent, profane cop who picked a quarrel with them for no reason. I hope he can sleep at night. Fraud of the Year: Shawn Parcells The Curious Case of Non-Forensic Non-Pathologist Non-Nothing Shawn Parcells How Did This Fraud Manage To Insert Himself On Center Stage Of The Michael Brown Case?
Parcells begins his presentation around 15:29 of the video
What if I told you a guy with no formal forensic training managed to pass himself off to the entire nation as a forensic pathologist & used a nationally televised press conference to sell a false narrative that drastically affected a divisive racial case that resulted in half of a town being burned down and looted?
Yes, this actually happened. It happened in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.
Parcells' presentation begins at around 15:29 of the video linked above. He doesn't speak long, but then again he didn't have to. He makes two main points in that presentation:
1. In his 'expert' opinion, Michael Brown was likely shot in the back and
2. In his 'expert' opinion, Michael Brown was shot down while he was standing still with his hands up in the air.
A moment that should live in media infamy
Parcells did his damage in August, operating with impunity because nobody at the time investigated his background. It wasn't until late November, more than three months later, that the lies began to be uncovered.
CNN first began asking questions about Parcells in this November 27th report:
On Dec. 2nd, Radley Balko at the Washington Post posted this damning report on Parcells that laid bare just how badly the entire country had been taken in:
As it so happens, the very first words out of Parcell's mouth at that nationally televised press conference was a lie:
"First of all, I'm Professor Shawn Parcells."
Not true. Parcells has never been on the faculty of any college or university anywhere. Washburn University in Topeka Kansas, where Parcells claims to be an Adjunct Professor on his LinkedIn page, says he has never been on their staff in any capacity.
It turns out to be a certified forensic pathologist, one must have a medical degree before undergoing formal forensic training. Parcells has reluctantly admitted he does not have any medical degree. How reluctant was this admission? Read this exchange he had with a CNN reporter:
When CNN visited Parcells in his Overland Park, Kansas, home, he presented a photo of himself onstage at what appears to be a graduation ceremony at the New York Chiropractic College.
“I got a master’s degree in anatomy and physiology, with clinical correlation,” he said.
Asked where his diploma was, he replied that it was on the way. “It’s coming,” he said. “They mail it to you.”
The next day, at another on-camera interview, the conversation went like this:
CNN: So that master’s degree in New York, you have that degree?
Parcells: I will have it next month, yes.
CNN: I don’t mean the piece of paper. I mean have you been conferred that degree?
Parcells: Yes, I will. Next month.
CNN: Right now, as we speak, you have that degree?
Parcells: No, I do not.
Don't miss the full import of what happened here: a complete fraud got up there invested in an national audiences eyes with medical science acumen he didn't really have and he used that false respect to add credibility to a racially inflammatory false narrative.
Al Sharpton does what Al Sharpton does: he gets there first and then uses the national media to rush the most racially inflammatory version of what happened out the door to the public. We expect that. We've seen it enough times now to know how this works.
But what Parcells did was far worse. He took that racially inflammatory narrative and he gave it the forensic science 'stamp of approval', which is exactly the last thing that should have been done.
It *looked* as if a respected, credentialed forensic pathologist has just backed up Dorian Johnson's account of the shooting of Michael Brown. The moment Parcells stated that Brown 'could have been' shot in the back, and then raised his hands up to show the position he believed Brown's hands were in during the fatal hail of bullets, Dorian Johnson's lies got a huge credibility boost in front of a national audience.
One can only wonder as the nation watched half of Ferguson go up in flames or be looted, if Parcells even spent a second reflecting on his role in selling the 'hand up, don't shoot!' myth.
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