Vox Day – Delingpole World

Magicgate – the Ugly Story of How Social Justice Warriors Ruined an Innocent Collectible Card Game

This is the story of Magicgate. Yes, another scandal, but one that for a change doesn’t involve any actual rape or sexual harassment… only game players who like pretending to be witches and wizards.

Like Gamergate, it concerns ordinary people who just want to be left alone to enjoy their hobby.

Ranged against these ingenus is an orcish horde of bullying, preening, self-righteous Social Justice Warriors who believe that everything — even an innocent collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering — should be played and policed according to their viciously intolerant politically correct rulebook.

Even if, like me, you’re not among the 20 million people who play Magic: The Gathering, what I hope you’ll appreciate is that this is a story that should concern us all.

By the end, I hope, you’ll feel as angered as I am by this ugly, scary power grab by the regressive left. And I hope you’ll want to join me in making your voice heard by hitting the people responsible where it hurts most: in their bank balance.

That means the companies which own and profit by Magic: the Gathering. That means you, Hasbro toys. And you, Wizards of the Coast.

I want you to realize that playing games is not a left-wing thing or a right-wing thing but an everybody thing.

I want you to realize that it is not the business of games manufacturers to discriminate against or punish players for their political opinions.

I want you to realize that your miserable sordid scheme to bully everyone who plays your games into sharing your SJW values is not remotely liberal but authoritarian and fascistic.

I also want you to realize that we have got your number: you try to claim the moral high ground, yet your entire business model is based on the kind of predator capitalism I’m sure you’d be the first to condemn if you weren’t getting so rich off of it.

You have a captive market of often vulnerable, socially maladjusted young men for whom your game is their social life, their passion, almost their entire world. And you exploit their addiction mercilessly with regular releases of new card sets, sold in packages costing around $100, which they can’t afford not to buy and trade because it will limit their gameplay. OK, fair enough, that’s how capitalism works, more or less. Except you’re a monopoly provider, so you’re abusing your monopolistic power — which for most leftists, and indeed most conservatives is a big no-no. Plus, I understand from Magic: The Gathering players that your product quality is getting worse and worse, with poorly printed artwork, damaged cards inside new packs, or ones that warp shortly after opening. So it really does show some chutzpah, I must say, to rip off your customers and treat them like shit — then to insist that, “Oh, by the way, we reserve the right to tell you scumbags how you must think as well…”

Like Gamergate, Magicgate is a classic example of what Andrew Breitbart meant when he used to say that “politics is downstream from culture.” Sure Trump is doing great work, fighting the good fight in the White House. But ultimately whether our civilization thrives or withers depends not so much on what happens in DC or Westminster or Brussels or the United Nations as it does on what happens in the broader culture of our ordinary, daily existence.

Read the rest on Breitbart.

This Cambridge University SJW Tried to Get Me Fired Just for Reading a Book About Nazi Germany

Like pretty much every male I know of my generation — I’m tail-end Boomer — I’m fascinated by the history of Nazi Germany.

I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. Many of my teachers had fought in it. As a child, I played with toy Eighth Army and Afrika Korps soldiers. I read the collected works of Sven Hassel. I watched every classic WWII movie there is to see from The Longest Day and Patton: Lust for Glory to The Great Escape and Cross of Iron.

Later, I interviewed numerous war veterans — commandos, paratroopers, RAF bomber pilots — for a couple of novels I wrote. I also joined a group of re-enactors one frozen December at Bastogne, where I met genuine Battle of the Bulge veterans who thanked us for help keeping the memory of what they did alive. And I often took my children to the Imperial War Museum in London to gawp at the Jagdpanther, the Focke-Wulf, and the 25-pounder, so that they too would understand both the excitement and the sacrifice experienced by the “Greatest Generation.”

But now some silly girl from Cambridge University thinks this interest is dangerously offensive — and actually tried to get me fired for it.

No. I couldn’t believe it either. But here’s what happened.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

The Head of Saatchi Just Surrendered to the Social Justice Warriors. Bad call…

Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty

The Social Justice Warriors have claimed their biggest scalp.

Kevin Roberts, the top ad agency boss suspended from his job as chairman of Saatchi earlier this week for failing to show sufficient enthusiasm for promoting “gender equality” has now quit and apologised.

This was totally the wrong move (as I’ll explain in a moment) but I totally get why he chose to jump.

Which remotely self-respecting achiever would wish to prostitute his talents at a company which valued political correctness more highly than the bottom line?

Which alpha male could endure having to answer to blow-dried ponces like Maurice Levy, the smoothy-chops, silver fox French surrender monkey from Publicis Groupe who cravenly threw Roberts to the wolves rather than standing by his talent?

Which reasonable human being could possibly stomach having to work in a business so pullulating with grisly feminist harridans and emasculated Social Justice Warriors that merely telling the truth about the very obvious differences between men and women has become a sackable offence?

Just to recap, let’s remind ourselves what Kevin Roberts did to get himself into trouble.

At the weekend, he was invited by Business Insider to agree that there was a gender diversity problem within the advertising industry.

It cited the following evidence:

All of the six major advertising agency holding company CEOs are men. A survey conducted by The 3% Conference in 2014 found women make up 46.4% of the advertising industry, yet only 11.5% of creative directors within ad agencies are female.

But Roberts refused to play the game.

Women, he argued, mostly don’t want the top jobs men covet not because there’s a glass ceiling or because there’s institutional sexism but simply because women tend to have different priorities.

Roberts – clearly a forthright character who doesn’t believe in career-safe platitudes – said:

“So we are trying to impose our antiquated shit on them, and they are going: ‘Actually guys, you’re missing the point, you don’t understand: I’m way happier than you.’ Their ambition is not a vertical ambition, it’s this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy. So they say: ‘We are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by’. I don’t think [the lack of women in leadership roles] is a problem. I’m just not worried about it because they are very happy, they’re very successful, and doing great work. I can’t talk about sexual discrimination because we’ve never had that problem, thank goodness.”

What’s obvious from that statement is that Roberts is bending over backwards not to sound chauvinistic. He isn’t celebrating male machismo, aggression and overweening ambition: rather he is claiming to be embarrassed by it. Hence the phrases “antiquated shit” and “idiotic dinosaur-like men.” Women, he is suggesting, are actually a lot more sensible and better balanced than men.

But still, it isn’t enough to let him off the hook.

Using tactics straight out of the SJW playbook, the (female) journalist relays Roberts’s unexceptionable observation to a feminist campaigner called Cindy Gallop, whose speciality appears to be whining on social media about sexism in the workplace.

“I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business,” declares her Twitter profile.

Gallop – refusing to accept the outrageous calumny that not all the female species want to behave like blokeish thugs and blow stuff up – provides the requisite rent-a-quote.

“The best response to that is to throw it open to the industry, and ask the women and men of the ad industry, all around the world, to tweet at @krconnect to let him know whether they think I’m ‘making it all up’.”

If you’ve read Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie you’ll know this is a classic technique of the regressive left.

Read the rest at Breitbart.