Camestros Felapton

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Reading Vox Day So You Don’t Have To: I forgot this was a series

I basically forgot to finish this bunch of posts about the Krypto-fascist nonsense that is “SJWs Always Double Down etc etc” by repeat Hugo failure Vox Day.

This post is a conclusion but because the book itself is so dull I’m forced to borrow a funnier example from Mr Day’s blog.

As I’ve discussed previously, Day takes the term rather silly term “SJW” and proceeds to suck out of it nearly all meaning. While still resting on visual stereotypes of the ‘Social Justice Warrior” as strident, rainbow-haired feminists, his main targets for the accusation of “SJW” are just ordinary everyday people in neutral to right-leaning settings. Because he needs his minions to be paranoid and in a constant struggle with “SJWs” then SJWs need to be everywhere. So as a kind of re-incarnated witchfinder general, Vox proceeds to find not only reds-under-the-beds but SJWs in evangelical churches or rightwing publications or anywhere and everywhere his target audience might engage in human contact.

How absurd can he make this? Well, to my surprise, there are limits and poor Vox actually had a bit of a backlash from his comment section the other day.

Now note, this is a topic around which I have zero (possibly negative) interest – the hiring of a coach for a college football team.

The said post is here (archive version but close to current) https://web.archive.org/web/20171128211816/http://voxday.blogspot.com.au/2017/11/sjw-veto-at-ut.html

Observant readers will spot that the blog post title is “Social Media Veto at UT”, whereas the URL title is “sjw-veto-at-ut”. Use of Google cache reveals the former version:

voxsjwbackdown

The “SJWs” were “shrieking” over “Greg Schiano” because:

“Schiano has a controversial reputation, in part due to his time as Penn State’s defensive backs coach in the early ’90s under former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for sexually abusing young boys.”

Even Vox concedes that:

“I’m not a particular fan of Schiano, as I wasn’t impressed with his performance in Tampa Bay”

So a lacklustre coach with a tarnished reputation receives an unwelcome reaction from fans of a sports team. Where among that does a rant about “Social Justice Warriors” come into it?

I’m reminded of Dr Ben Goldacre’s description of UK Tabloid the Daily Mail:

“The Daily Mail, as you know, is engaged in a philosophical project of mythic proportions: for many years now it has diligently been sifting through all the inanimate objects in the world, soberly dividing them into the ones which either cause – or cure – cancer.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/dec/08/cancer.dailymail

Vox is engaged in a similar exercise in extreme ontology to divide each and every fuss about something into either an example of

  • whiny SJWs being whiny and destroying civilisation because they are so evil and lefty…or….
  • a valiant struggle of brave souls against the forces of SJWs even if it doesn’t seem much to do with them.

Unhappy with how Marvel is directing it’s comic books? Well, the great fascist sorting hat says that is an anti-SJW crusade regardless of what your opinion is or that you are objecting to how a major corporation is acting.

Unhappy with the choice of coach for a college football team because of his past association with a convicted child abuser? Well, the great fascist sorting hat says that is lunacy and you must be one of them evil SJWs.

You can retrospectively sort of work out why one and not the other but it is hard to spot in advance.

As it happens, this particular example finally managed to fall within the margins even for Vox’s comment section – with several of his minions befuddled about the taxonomic status of this particular kerfuffle. Vox eventually changed the first paragraph.

One commenter trying to unravel which is which:

“The thing we need to watch for is that this wasn’t an SJW mob. This was a #GG-style consumer/fan revolt, which the Sports Media is trying to run a narrative that it was a SJW mob. This might be either a strange blip or a watershed moment, but this is something we need to watch closely. Is this a cover tactic to appease the Left? Is this tactic to hide the #GG approach? Is it just Sports Media trying to cover that the UT fans weren’t happy for quite legitimate reasons?”

Or, you know, it could have just been people objecting to something they didn’t like rather than part of some grand scheme.

And thus we end with a moral: Anti-SJWs Always Live in a State of Intellectual Anxiety and Ontological Angst. Hmm could be snappier.

camestrosfelapton

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18 responses to “Reading Vox Day So You Don’t Have To: I forgot this was a series”

  1. I suppose there must be Social Justice Warriors / Rainbow-Haired Feminists somewhere who watch/care about football. I don’t know any.

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    • Lot of female football fans aren’t afraid to die their hair team colors and manage to believe in the evil tyrannical concept that people of different genders should still be respected as people. Plus this is college ball, isn’t that just a hotbed of liberal attitudes? Anecdotally I’m an American football fan and oddly the most liberal folks I know watch it while my hardcore conservative in-laws don’t watch sports at all and haven’t ever, though they’ve got a few opinions on players who kneel.

      Besides the Social Justice Illuminati controls everything and the entire NFL is really just a trick to get people to support breast cancer foundations, just like how the Coors Light mountains trick people into believing global warming, and the engine noises at Monster Truck shows cover the subliminal messages about responsible gun control.

      Liked by 5 people

  2. Please remember that ‘football’ has entirely different meanings on this side of the pond; I speak with the pride of the woman who spent watching the 1973 League Cup Championship final between Norwich, my team, and Spurs, at Wembley, in the Spurs end of the ground, usually thought to be a likely fatal choice.

    I was wearing a lime green PVC floor length raincoat, my straw boater was covered in the Canaries insignia, and I was, of course, wearing my yellow and green Norwich scarf. And there I was, surrounded by the hardest of the hard core Spurs fans who were exceedingly baffled as to why I was in their territory. The answer – it was the only ticket I could get – proved my fan credentials, though probably also proved that I was bonkers.

    And at the end they lined up to shake my hand, and told me lies about Norwich’s performance which had, in truth, been bloody awful, to cheer me up, as well as inviting me for a pint or three. I took them up on the offer.

    I don’t think Vox is capable of understanding that sort of interaction between vastly different people is something not only to be welcomed but encouraged.

    And Vox is far too cowardly to ever do what I did that day; he couldn’t do it…

    Liked by 3 people

    • This. One thing I love about football (European definition) supporters is how diverse they are. Football is where the university professor sits next to the steelworker, because they are both fans. When the local club is playing, I see elderly ladies in designer clothes, their team scarf awkwardly slung over their Hermes silk scarves (and if only Hermes made football scarves, these two would be happy). I see the young Muslim couple and she’s wearing a hijab in the team colours. I see the Syrian refugee in his second-hand football jersey, already a fan of the team in his new home (which is, coincidentally, how I ended up a Queen’s Park Rangers fan of all things). And coincidentally, at my university, which was so leftwing it was nicknamed “the red university”, football was so important that we never scheduled against the matches of the local team. And during a World Cup in the 1990s, someone received updates of the current match (Germany and England were both important) via text message and announced them to the whole class with the approval of the professor.

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      • I’ve grown less hostile to football-soccer since being in Aus. I hated the obligatory nature of it in England and the expectation that I’d have an opinion and a team.

        In SE Asia there was also that expectation that if you were English you’d be ready for a lengthy conversation about events in the Premier League. 🙂

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      • I’m a casual fan of the local team, i.e. I follow the results and am happy when they win. Then, when I was an exchange student in London, I watched BBC news on Saturday. Of course, there were football results. I waited to see how my team had played, but of course there were only Premier League results. So I thought, “Okay, there will be no results for my team, so i will have to find an English team to be a fan of.” I decided to pick a London based team, since I was in London. So I looked through the results table, dismissed Chelsea, Arsenal and Crystal Palace and was about to become a Tottenham Hotspurs fan, when my eyes suddenly noticed the name “Queen’s Park Rangers”. “That’s great”, I thought, “I’m only two tube stations from Queen’s Park, so I’ll become a Queen’s Park Rangers fan.”

        And QPR played horribly that season. They lost all the time and dropped out of the premier league by the end of the season. Still, that’s the story of how I became a QPR fan.

        Liked by 1 person

    • Whereas in the oval ball game (rugby) the fans tend to sit in amongst each other with very little issue. Well apart from all the Australian fan’s faces tripping themselves at Murryfield last weekend 😀

      I’ve been watching the NFL as UK coverage allows for 20 odd years too. Dyed hair in the Black Hole at Oakland Colosseum is only the start of it. Mostly they look like they’ve been at an extreme cosplay convention.

      Football football, I’ve largely lost interest since you can’t get any coverage of the Scottish leagues on terrestrial.

      Liked by 1 person

  4. I will never understand the obsession with watching millionaires chase each other around a field, but oh well.

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  5. That’s where they draw the line, huh? Not at child-molesting Senate candidates.

    I have a question and don’t want to trawl through Beale’s site to find an answer: What does he mean by convergence or SJW-converged?

    Thanks for the link to the archived page, because I got a chance to see that ridiculous photo of him on the cover of his new book-shaped object. Gotta be something you can do with that.

    Liked by 2 people

    • As far as I can tell it means any company with a functioning HR Department. By converge it he means taken over by whatever is defined as an SJW is at this moment and appears to be the media, ESPN, NFL, Google, Amazon, most social media, most technology companies, etc. It’s one of those baffling conspiracy things where it’s explained that ‘they’ somehow manage to be trying to destroy everything so grrr be angry about that, but they also control almost everything so be happy ‘they’ are destroying things, but also ‘they’ are weak and ineffective so can’t destroy or be successful although that sort of contradicts everything else.

      Sort of like when a cult leader says you can’t trust anything but them.

      Liked by 2 people

  6. “The logic of the witch hunter is simple. It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins’ day. The first requirement is to invert the reality of power. Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings. The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters. ”

    – Curtis Yarvin

    Yes, I know he’s a neoreactionary, yes, I am aware that this puts him pretty far opposed to you, politically. The quote is nevertheless one of the most insightful things he ever wrote, and applies perfectly to Vox. See also: everything Vox has written about pedophiles and how they’re lurking under every rock, as well as every single time Vox starts raging about “gammas” – also known as “people who’ve criticized Vox, that Vox thinks he can disqualify” – or “people Vox thinks he can accuse of doing things he doesn’t like about himself”.

    Pointing somewhere and shouting “A witch! Burn!” is the main thing he does, anymore.

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