The Last Seemingly Legitimate Election

The last few years have highlighted just how little control most Westerners have over their governments. There are plenty of examples in the past though, most notably with immigration where governments either ignore popular opinion or pay lip service to it with token gestures that do nothing to halt the influx. For the “citation needed” crowd, just go and look how popular increased immigration was in Britain before ignoring popular opinion, relentless propaganda, lawfare and eventual demographic changes made it permanent. I’d be you could choose almost any nation and get a similar sample.  For Australia, you could also consider that the government has repeatedly refused a popular plebiscite on the issue. Something I doubt would have happened if they didn’t have good knowledge of what the result would be and that they would also be compelled to act on it. For another minor example, you could observe that the Australian government seems far more concerned with following international law than our own.

Although most still see the system as one that works, I’ve now long been disenchanted with it. And I used to be someone that believed wasting your vote was wrong because it really did matter. I believed that the system worked and that politicians genuinely (for the most part), followed the will of the people. The last time I remember thinking it did work was in 2007 when Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister. He faced John Howard who had been in power for over a decade. I did not like Kevin Rudd then and do not now. I don’t now think much of John Howard either. At the time though, it seemed to me like a genuine political contest decided by real Australians. In short, it was the last election that seemed legitimate even though the side I then preferred lost. Continue reading

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Breaking out of the Cult of Free

For the last few years and especially this one, I have been working on breaking out of what Vox Day has called the “cult of free”. This is something I believe he’s talked about more in his livestreams. This mostly concerns Internet websites and products such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and anything offered free of charge. I’m not sure where it originated but there is the saying that if you aren’t paying for a product then you are the product. And indeed, all the companies above are after your data for various reasons whatever they may say. However what I’ve been doing also extends beyond this. Amazon shopping isn’t free but it is almost always cheaper than everywhere else and they can make these products cheaper partially by making their customers products too. Other services such as Netflix are cheap but considering most of the content, the moral cost is far higher.

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The Grace of God as Training Wheels

This is something I’ve observed in myself that I haven’t seen put in quite the same way though I am sure it has been discussed by theologians. When I returned to Christ — or more truly came fully to him in his Holy Catholic Church — I was given what a steady rush or stream of Grace like being hit with a blast from a firehose. This gift made it easy for me to immediately cease the most immediately dangerous sins I was committing. There was little struggle involved… at least for a while.

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Physiognomy and Public Health

There is a saying among dissident thinkers that “physiognomy is real.” It is something of a meme as the phrase usually accompanies a picture of an ogreish female or effeminate male saying or doing something absurd or ridiculous. This generally provokes a good chuckle as the people tend to look exactly how you would expect with rare exceptions. It was also regularly brought to mind by Andy Ngo’s almost daily posting of Antifa mugshots last year.

Although it is true you can’t always judge a book by its cover, there is something to be said for the value of physiognomy. The topic today comes at it from the perspective of personal health. As public health has been a regular topic for well over  a year now, it seems the people out to look after it would be healthy themselves. Naturally, this isn’t the case.

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The Latin Mass has been restricted because my feelings

A year ago to the day by coincidence, I did a fisking on an article I found which had been published in late 2019 but was so outrageous, I felt compelled to respond. Here we have something more recent from America Magazine and the title alone should give away my interest in responding.

Now I didn’t do more than read the title and skim through the first few paragraphs before deciding to respond to it. Something conservatives and many others on the right continue to fail to comprehend is that the left is driven almost entirely by emotion. They don’t care about hypocrisy, double-standards, facts, logic, blah, blah, blah. They employ these things only when it suits them and  If this article ever deviates from my assumptions, I will readily admit it. Looking through the other topic’s he’s written on over the last five years, I am reasonably confident. On a side note, do people who aren’t already prominent or famous writers really have full-time jobs writing fortnightly opinion columns? I’m working too hard on this blog if this is the case.

If you look at the Twitter profiles of these people (which often represent both the nexus and limits of their thought), you will notice they tend to be preoccupied with leftist politics and the Catholic religion is really only there to be grafted on however poor a fit it is. The author Zac Davis looks to be little different.

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Skin in the Game in Education

The idea of cameras in classrooms has come up recently in the US as part of the ongoing discussion of Crititical Race Theory (CRT) anti-White racism. Here is a short article from Breitbart by John Nolte responding to an article from Huffington Post which I didn’t bother reading. Apparently, public school teachers in America are outraged at the idea of their student’s parents being able to see into their classroom. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with a public education. Accountability is something to be avoided at all costs and teacher’s unions have done a truly commendable job of making sure that they aren’t — especially it appears in America.

Now I want to get the usual stuff out of the way before continuing. Teaching can be a very demanding job and I would say the average teacher (at least in my experience), is earnest and hard working enough. The main problem I’ve found generally is an inflated sense of self-importance. This is partly the fault of society but the education industry is also rife with ghastly self-congratulatory propaganda despite what is an ever lowering bar of educational attainment. As Joe Sobran much more starkly puts it:

“In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.”

Despite what we hear to the contrary, educating children shouldn’t be all that complicated and there are very simple ways education could be improved. As far as silver-bullets go, having cameras in classrooms would be worth a try. Though I don’t think it will happen, the outraged reaction to the suggestion is very telling.

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The Fascinating Backdrop

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Lost in Translation is a 2003 film directed by Sophia Coppola and starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. From 1998’s Rushmore onwards, Murray transitioned into more dramatic roles and this is already one of his best remembered since this transition. The film also launched the career of Johansson who was only a teenager at the time. While it is certainly an excellent film in its own right, the backdrop of Japan became a focus for much of the films audience including this writer.

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A Humble Book for a Humble Man

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Ask Iwata, edited by Hobonichi, Viz Media, May 27th, 2021

Satoru Iwata was the CEO of Nintendo from 2002 until his unexpected death from cancer in 2015. He was only 55 when he died which is very young for the long-living Japanese and a surprise for many people around the world who had become quite fond of him. In noticing his relative youth in death, it is hard to not to also notice his amazing rise to CEO of one of the most recognisable companies in the world when in his early forties. At the time of his death, Iwata had become more than a CEO as he had fostered a close an endearing public persona with his customers and was also well-liked in the industry. The quote from him on the back cover of this book well illustrates this:

“On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”

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Seeing Black America – Part 2

I wrote Part 1 last month and this will be the second and final part.

Before I get into this part, there are a couple of asides I want to add for context.

My early upbringing was in rural Australia and I almost never saw anyone of another race except on television and this was generally from American TV shows. Even when living in a city for most of the 90s, almost everyone around me was White except for very few people of various “token” races in schools and who I would see around the city. Other cities in Australia such as Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane were more “diverse” but my home city didn’t become so until much more recently. I add this because it made Black Americans more of curiosity for me than they would have been for Americans and I did find myself naturally observing them more. As well as this, I was interested in asking them questions that perhaps Americans wouldn’t such as when I asked a girl why she was putting oil in her hair. I honestly had no idea at the time that their hair was naturally frizzy and needed oil to keep straight. After being told, I finally understood how the afro came to be.

The next aside is a show I came across while still at the university that I used to watch with my roommate. This was Chappelle’s Show which had stopped its run but was still very popular among students and the DVDs were passed around quite commonly. I ended up buying both seasons for my brother as a present before I came home later that year.

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E3 is pointless and has been for years

Just over two years ago I wrote a diatribe called ‘The Absolute State of Video Games’ that covered various aspects of the gaming industry. One that I covered towards the end was the increasing irrelevance of gaming media as publishers and developers are now able to deal very directly with their customers through websites like YouTube and Twitter among many others. A number of large gaming websites have gone bust over the last decade and the ones that remain increasingly focus on comics, film, television and popular culture and far less exclusively on video games.

There has also been an increase in political/social activism which I would argue really began around 2012 and became very obvious with #GamerGate a few years later. This was initially thought to be clickbait for their dwindling audiences and while this was somewhat true, it was more than this. Seeing articles like, ‘How I learned to embrace Lesbianism playing Sega Bass Fishing on Dreamcast’ certainly provokes curiosity from potential readers but behind this was a concerted effort to converge the medium as well as the industry. These people were all entryist wreckers whether they were conscious of it or not.

The last time I wrote on this subject, a commenter claimed that this was simply the result of more educated writers taking a more critical eye on the industry. This is an absurd claim as most of these articles are more about the writer than the medium as my thankfully fake but all too plausible example above shows. The topic is less video games but the writer’s own interests grafted awkwardly onto video games. These writers mostly do like video games in much the same way as the average person likes watching television. Their main interests lie elsewhere though and this is simply a vehicle to voice them. And one they will (and do), abandon when the first more lucrative opportunity presents itself. The remaining employees that have a genuine interest in the industry have either acquiesced to the changes to their working environment or are no longer part of it. The genuinely in-depth and thoughtful journalism I’ve read has almost been done by freelance writers and rarely the employed staff.

This transition coincided with these website’s articles becoming little more than facsimiles for publisher press releases. Many articles today (do go look for yourself), are simply embedded tweets, YouTube videos or quotes of press releases with a brief editorial to make it appear as more. Worse still, the writers often hide the information from the headline as a flagrant way to maintain web traffic. This practice is so ubiquitous that I am sure parent companies have insisted on it as a way to prevent the continued loss of readers and advertising.

Why not go straight to the source?

If you’re wondering how any of this can be accurate since many of these websites still exist, well this is largely due to the parent companies just mentioned. They can afford to make losses so as to maintain a presence in the industry. There are only a handful of prominent websites that aren’t owned by a much larger parent media company with several more reliable income streams holding the website up. Nearly every major gaming website would go down within a few years of being cast out on their own and many will anyway.

This brings us finally to E3 2021

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