We are now at the point where kids who are graduating high school will have experienced no global warming during the entirety of their lives — eighteen years and counting. It will be interesting to see which has had the greatest effect on them, the ceaseless propaganda that the world is getting warmer at an alarming rate, or the temperatures they have experienced. It will be quite a dubious accomplishment if you can convince an entire population of something that would be so easily debunked based on just their personal experience. Yeah, I know the weather in any given location is not climate, but then these kids aren’t all in one location and for them the entire world is but a mouse click away.
Elsewhere, it is almost as if they give everyone an intelligence test and then the ones who flunk it the worst are allowed to run for office. Kirsten Gillibrand wants Congress to be comprised of 51% women because she is a woman “they focus on finding common ground.” There is no explanation as to why this would be a good thing. Regardless of whether it is or isn’t, it also belies what most of us know from personal experience. As a small business guy the most vicious fight I had to break up between employees was between two women who were fighting over where to set a table. And the vindictiveness between women was always worse than with the men. I never had a guy wage a campaign to undermine another guy, but I had lots of women who tried to get ahead by pulling someone else down, or who just wanted to ruin someone else regardless of whether it ultimately inured to their benefit. Whereas the guys most common misbehavior tended more towards dumb-assery.
There is a nice article by James Delingpole in The Spectator (not to be confused with The American Spectator which we no longer link to since you can’t trust they will tell the full story anymore) about how gamers are shocked that the social justice warriors are now assailing the one place where they could run to escape what is being done to them in real life. There is a nice line in there about how:
Gaming is the last bastion, the Helm’s Deep of freedom of expression.
Ahem, we would of course like to think that Helms-Deep.us is the Helm’s Deep of free expression, but given Grand Theft Auto made $1 billion in the first week after it was released and we are still somewhat shy of our first billion I will reluctantly have to concede the point. Now if anyone would like to buy something through our Amazon link…
I think part of the irony here is that women often complain that men retreat into video games and do not wish to interact with them, to which I can only remark, “you don’t say?” They have made real life interaction so painful and so fraught with danger and potential pitfalls that it is no wonder that fantasy seems preferable. And it really is a noble response to the circumstances. Men are bigger and stronger. They could easily restore balance by force. But instead they turn the other cheek and retreat in the hopes the social justice madness will burn itself out.
But I think with this invasion into even these sacrosanct grounds, this one last redoubt, this Helm’s Deep of free speech and escapism, that the time for a coordinated and effective response is at hand. To me anyway that is what gamergate is about. You can’t watch football because if someone employed by one of the teams commits a crime it is due to the masculine culture of football. You can’t play video games without being bitched at because the person who created it has committed some thought crime in the eyes of the idiots who write the gaming magazines whose goal is to see people rewarded based on their membership in the right groups rather than on the quality of their work (and that is really the impetus of it all).
The common thread through all of these odds and ends is that there are people who wish to take what you have without having to earn it. The particular means they choose just changes depending on what is most handy — climate change, misogyny, quotas — any will do as long as you hand over your wallet. But the most ironic thing about it is that if men were really as eager to hold onto power, and were really all of the things they are accused of being, then none of these tactics could never actually be effective.