Star Wars: Tie Fighter 1994 LucasArts

Throughout literature, film, and any other telling of the Arthurian legend there is usually a hard line stance taken on characters or ideas being indisputably good or evil.  The heroes and villains are on conflicting sides of a fundamental and absolute morality despite reality often being much more complicated.  The Star Wars franchise followed this school of thought- casting the Empire as the evil and soulless reflection of Western history’s teaching of the axis powers of World War II.  It parallels the post-French Revolution narrative that all democracy is good and all imperial reigns are heinous and wrong.

It is because of this that we can remember LucasArts’s 1994 PC flight simulator Tie Fighter as such a refreshingly bold and surprising experiment in a world of video games where the narrative is always fixated on “the good guys.”  In Tie fighter, you are- from start to finish- fighting on behalf of a faction that the movies portrayed as dark and merciless dictatorship that is completely void of humanity.  No change of heart in your character halfway through (as in this year’s disastrous Battlefront 2), no surprising twist- you’re essentially waging war with all that is good and just in the galaxy.  It’s one of the first and possibly few games that take this perspective, and – for one of the first times for a mainstream game of this caliber-  Tie Fighter gives the player a unique chance to embrace the understanding that morality is often a form of perspective.

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Danzig Liberates Concertgoers

A growing trend among some metal and rock bands is the aggressively enforced ban of cell phones during live performances.  While their motivations are not unlike those of Metallica at the height of the Napster controversy (as these bands want their only live footage to be sold at dying retail stores in the form of $40 DVDs) they are actually doing their fans a great service by mitigating the amount of millennial vanity happening in the live concert environment.  Nobody likes the hipster douchebag belligerently sticking a phone in front everyone’s view to pad his YouTube stats, and young people are better off liberated from the soul consuming cell phone screen for awhile.

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The Ivory Tower’s Troikas

mayan-pyramid

New York University professor Michael Rectenwald was put on paid administrative leave for his controversial Deplorable NYU Prof Twitter account that exposes how the Ivory Tower uses social justice warring and identity politics as methods of social control. His reprimanding proved him right.

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Response to “Time to do away with Manhood”

A still from "The Obsolete Man"
Article by Daniel McCormick; read the original article at The Guardian

A tenet of Christian faith is the idiotic concept of original sin, whereby it is understood we are all born with sin and must be faithful servants as punishment, in order to then be made well. This is a core belief of potentially billions of credulous people all over the world who claim fellowship with Christian death cults. These untold billions demonstrate the power of an illusion, and specifically the ability of a carefully crafted lie to take root and flourish through disinformation, misrepresentation, and argumentum ad passiones. In like manner, the modern feminist recognizes the power of a seductive lie and has taken this titillating concept of original sin and hammer forged their own bastard child. Original victimhood they bemoan, whereby it is observed that man is created sick and must faithfully serve woman in order to be made well. A predictable move for a supremacist, politico-pseudo-religious, ideology, as the claim carries with it the corollary that unless prostrating in servitude man won’t merely become but literally is a nemesis and bane to social order and progress. What is worrisome then, is in considering the absolutist, fatalistic, authoritarian will from which they seek privilege, and the credulous nature of the majority they which to use to attain this privilege.
 
For a considerable length of time feminism has been generally obsolete in the US, functional but directionless. To keep the menstrual machine relevant over the last few decades, during the modern dearth of social injustice, seeds of its ideological untruths have been sown in the popular consciousness by exploiting politeness. An obvious avenue because intelligent humans tolerate free speech regardless of how it makes them feel, and this tolerance comes at a price. For behind these soft campaigns of Stalinist censorship lay a many headed beast of manufactured victimhood gnashing its teeth in hunger for the credulous. As awareness raising becomes pleas for special privilege, as misrepresented social problems become calls for political action, the beast becomes less obscured behind the crumbling facade of benevolence. Because they are not vying to improve society, nor are they battling institutional injustice. No, today they are pushing for the legislation of morality and opinion and seek to censor, slander, and demonize all that would disagree. Because what Caucasian, alpha, manly men like myself are alleged to be guilty of is not actually anything we’ve done but, as we are told, we are guilty of thought crimes, of language crimes, and guilty of simply being the gender and skin tone we happened to be. This is part of a perverted guilt complex feminists have incorporated from the religious by which feminism proclaims to be able to reeducate and save males through their revealed wisdom (e.g. Catholic flimflam). From which I can only conclude that when a person’s standard for evidence is tantamount to Inquisition grade hearsay there is little to differentiate fanatical absolutists from each other.

I realize the female gender still has some legitimate first world grievances even today: women aren’t funny, cosmetics are expensive, beauty is temporary, but these problems are not institutional. Likewise whatever problem feminism has with masculinity is also not covered by government statutes. That’s because the problems as perceived by feminist theory have become so irrational and illusory and based on perpetuated biases that they shovel their own graves. I’m reminded of an old Twilight Zone episode (06/02/1961 – “The Obsolete Man”), which is a philosophical dialogue on absolutist fanaticism, and authoritarian ruthlessness. This episode ends with the antagonist facing the same sentence he’d inflicted on others, and closing with Rod Serling addressing the viewer.
“Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete.”
Thus, I maintain feminism is obsolete.
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How #metalgate is totalitarian thought control

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Totalitarianism 2.0 doesn’t look much like the former version. In the past, a dictator in uniform — like socialist and diversity advocate Joseph Stalin — would command secret police to enforce speech codes. Now, government sits back and allows a vast media establishment to enforce political ideas which just so happen to coincide with the goals of government: more control of citizens and ideological obedience, which makes government stronger.

As Jonathan Chait writes in New York Magazine, “political correctness” is an attempt to control thought by excluding all but one side of the debate:

But it would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon. Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity. A year ago, for instance, a photographer compiled images of Fordham students displaying signs recounting “an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.”

While on the surface this does not seem consistent with government objectives, it quickly becomes a servant to power, arguing from its good intentions to demand increasing amounts of control and often, violence. As Stephen Kinzer writes in the Boston Globe, yesterday’s civil rights and human rights advocates are today’s warmongers:

Now, several decades after the human rights movement traded its outsider status for influence in Washington, it is clear that this has produced negative as well as positive results. The movement has become a global behemoth. Sometimes it functions as a handmaiden to the power it was once dedicated to combating.

The most appalling result of this process in the United States is that some human rights activists now regularly call for using force to resolve the world’s problems. At one time, “human rights” implied opposition to war. Now some of the most outspoken warmongers in Washington are self-proclaimed human rights advocates.

Chait’s view is that this trend toward SJW hipster activism is in fact forming a parallel to the bad old days of 1940s totalitarianism:

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to. The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones.

In effect, as Jonathan Frum writes in The Atlantic, political correctness represents the self-radicalization of liberalism toward a totalitarian mindset. We can clearly see this in #metalgate and #gamergate, where SJW hipsters have crushed not just dissenting voices, but any voices that fail to parrot their own agenda.

The reason they target metal is that metal is chronically disobedient. We do not like illusions, metalheads, and we did not buy into the “peace and love” of the 1960s which culminated in ex-hippies getting into office and authorizing drone strikes on suspected extremists. We did not buy into the “just follow Jesus and Gordon Gekko” outlook of the 1980s, nor the 1990s dogma that all was going to be right through globalism, McDonald’s and peace. We see human society for what it is: an ugly tussle of animals competing to put their favored illusion above the rest, all while ignoring the majesty of reality as it is.

Remember how the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) acted back in the 1980s. First they said they wanted to stop “dangerous” content about sex and drugs, and suddenly, any album with swear words on it got the infamous warning label. This encouraged record stores to card you for buying the album, to not stock the album, or to put it in a special section. A few years later “censored” versions of Metallica and Cannibal Corpse albums could be found in your average record store, with conspicuous bleeps editing out the words that we shouldn’t hear, to the detriment of the music (often not in key).

It’s easy enough to ignore #metalgate right now because it may not affect you directly. But the important point is that it intends to. SJW hipsters behind the incursion into metal that provoked #metalgate want to censor your words and mine, not just avoiding bad stuff as they claim, but forcing you to repeat “good stuff” as they envision it, to the exclusion of anything else. If this isn’t totalitarian thought control, nothing is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moJOeKvK6Yw

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