Wargaming and misogynistic attitudes according to Wired

 So I read this article about how horrible men are to those few women who dare to play tabletop wargames, even though they would flock to the hobby if they were allowed to.

Upon reading the article you can't help but realize how utterly ridiculous this whole victimhood-search has become.

First of all: are there total assholes in wargaming? Well, there are total assholes everywhere, so that is a given. However, is it fair to generalize the whole hobby based on two or three jerks? 

I guess the answer is yes. I will keep that in mind the next time some fuckwit kills a lot of people in name of Islam. 

Apart from this interesting idea, the examples the poor female wargamers bring up are not exactly cases of gatekeeping and misorgynistic attitudes, as they claim them to be.

Have you been to tabletop wargaming events? No? Well, allow me. Imagine a place with huge tables filled with tiny little plastic soldiers and monsters, terrain, weird dices and whatnot. The attendants are 99.99% male, mostly white, usually socially awkward (you know the people you normally bully in high school because they are total nerds). Some have questionable personal hygene. What connects them is the love of the game and the lore -they are extremely passionate about minor issues; imagine how papal councils must have been in the Middle Ages trying to decide if Peter sat right next to Jesus or two seats away during the Last Supper (and burn the losers of the debate at stake), and you have an idea about the dedication here.

The few females you see are usually spouses or mothers who were dragged there without their consent, and are forced to endure this whole experience. There are very, very few women who are actually interested in playing and painting these stupid little minis; and I am quite sure the reason is not because men don't let women play with little toy soldiers. The stereotype of the husband trying to hide how much he spent on his latest Raptor squad is there for a reason. Also: if you want to make sure that that troublesome sexy girl who keeps hitting on you leaves you alone, you just tell her you play Warhammer. It is the perfect female-repellent. Works better than sandals with socks.

Anyhow, do you see why people would not assume immediately that a member of the fairer sex would actually like to play the game or know anything about it? It is not because they won't allow women to play. It is because in their experience no women would want to play the game. In fact, if you tell them, that you are a woman and you have a 2000 point Blood Angels army (painted), I am sure you will get so many unsolicited marriage proposals, you won't know what to do with them.

You see, people will stereotype because this is what we do. It helps everyday life; it is a survival mechanism that is older than our species. It is not sexism and it is not racism. And it is not just those evil wargamers. Do try to bring your child as a male to a playground, and see where you get. If you survive with some well-meant but quite insulting pieces of advice about how to do this whole parenting-thing, you can count yourself lucky. They might even call the cops on you because, having a penis means you might be a creep or worse. (But that, of course, is not sexism. Of course.)

Or do this in any femaled dominated profession/hobby. Go there as a male and see how women react to you. You are not the regular demography for that particular setting, so people will struggle to place you. And not because they hate men, either. Creating a story about this non-story to depict how evil and racist certain groups of people are (who are inevitably white and male in these stories) is just bad journalism. (They pulled the same thing with gamers and Star Wars fans, too.)

Shame on you Luke, and shame on you, Wired.

Somewhat unsettling cases of inequality

 

The Social Justice Warriors normally jump on any and all differences in outcome as a proof for oppression. Well, not any and all, because somehow the fact that working class white boys (and white boys in general) underperform in schools, or men are overreprensented in workplace deaths, suicides, homelessness, and all that jazz, is conveniently ignored, or are explained away by the absolutely moronic "the Patriarchy hurts everyone". (So why is it called patriarchy?)

There are two very interesting articles I ran across lately in this very topic. The first is a Swedish article demonstrating that men face discrimination in female-dominated workplaces. (And they were the only group shown to be discriminated against in this experiment.)

The second is a more serious one demonstrating that men do not get the appropriate help from mental health support services. The prevailing "wisdom" is that men are too macho (you know, Patriarchy) to ask for help. This paper demonstrates that they do ask for help, they just do not get it, hence the high number of suicides.

So there you have it. No Guardian op-eds, no US Senators bringing it up, no WHO reaction, no outrage. While SJWs keep saying that compassion is not a finite resource, and that it is not a zero sum game any time some moronic Republican senator brings up some hair-brained whataboutism about how white men are literally the only persecuted group (which is also an idiotic thing to do), they very much dispense with it selectively. Perhaps compassion is a finite resource.

What is white privilege if you are poor?

 Well, have a read. This chap has the galls to explain a poor white guy why he is privileged by his skin. Quite an interesting little mental gymnastics laced with condescension. (Not to mention weird little jumps in logic, but who am I to criticize him, right? I should just check my privilege.)

I guess this is how you get the race war going... you, as a privileged, rich guy explaining away to a poor person why he is privileged over, let's say, a black lawyer who makes more money than his whole extended family combined. (Perhaps it is April fool's day? It did feel really surreal reading the article.)

Why should we not erect statues of living people?

      Well, in recent years, toppling of statues have been very much at rage -after all, why not judge historical people based on contemporary standards? It makes perfect sense, so off with those long-dead evil white men!

Also, why not erect statues of living people just to show how virtuous we are? For example, Greta Thunberg?

Let's forget about Greta herself - it is not about her per se. But can anyone spot what the problem is with this?

Well, I will help. First, it is very strange that living people get statues. That is just... wrong.

Second, and this is more important: how do you know she will not say or do something tomorrow, next year, two decades from now for which you will want to cancel her immediately? Then what? Are you going to remove her statue immediately? Are statues now just temporary political statements? In this case paper mache would be a better medium.

Hm? Nobody thought about this? Are everyone so involved with identity politics that they can only think of the present? Some sort of goldfish-mentality this is as Yoda would say)

(Bonus questions... Shall we periodically topple statues of everyone because they failed -or will fail- to live up to our future's standards?)

Cancel culture eating itself (The curious case of Hemal Jhaveri)

 There are plenty of reasons to criticize about the "mainstream media" as it is today; it is pandering to the lowest common denominator, it is permeated by ideology, it has becoame an outrage machine, and it essentially killed journalism...

Well, and it is also very happy to silence any voices that go against the cultural zeitgeist -which is mostly a very much leftist, and very much based on identity-politics. BBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, The Guardian, Huffpost... etc. are not interested in journalism any more - these media outlets are only interested in finding facts (or distorting them) that fit their agenda. Which is a problem. A serious one. 

Cancel culture is a part of this -although it is not an exclusive weapon of the Left, it has to be said. But it is a bit bigger problem there, I would argue. Getting banned from Hollywood, like Gina Carano was, or from the "mainstream" if you "misspeak" carries a bit more weight than getting kicked out from a right-wing media outlet.

Anyhow, normally, when something horrendous happens that resembles a terrorist attack, certain people will jump the gun, and usually rush to conclude that it must have been Muslims before the facts are clear. These people are rightly condemned by certain other people (usually from the Left), that they use a tragedy to further their own agenda, and usually this agenda is quite racist.

It is interesting to see, however, that when a mass-shooting happens, these Left-leaning people suddenly forget these -very much laudable- principles, and jump the gun to blame white men before the facts are clear, and the victims are still warm. And there were a lot of them -an issue on which the above mentioned news outlets kept very silent about, and about which right-wing media outlets had a field day of gotcha's. Both are toxic both are unhelpful. (Although you can't blame Fox News for cheering, to be honest. Finally they can point fingers at the evil liberals victimizing them...)

This time a woman actually lost her job because of her racist tweet. What is more, she keeps playing the victim, going on the usual narrative built on privilege and permanent victimhood. (A "mistake", obviously. Ask Gina about mistakes; her tweet was not even that controversial, although, like any tweet making comparisons with anything and Nazi Germany, it was really stupid.) It is worth reading her ramblings trying to justify herself.

What is a hopeful sign, however, is that perhaps the grasp of identity politics on our everyday life is loosening. I don't think she would have been fired even two years ago due to her being a not-white not-male person and this causing considerable anxiety in the senior management. Maybe common sense will slowly sweep back into the public discourse.

Antisemitism in Hungary

 When you read about antisemitism in Europe, Hungary always comes up in online conversations: the accepted wisdom (for whatever reason...) is that Hungary is a very antisemitic country. The fact that there are hardly any incidents (-and none of them were violent, compared to the "non-antisemitic" UK), does not really matter.

Interestingly, certain rabbis have a very opposing view to this narrative. Perhaps we should listen to them.

Female hunters and how to claim victory over the Patriarchy

 

Apparently women can hunt. Who would have thought? Seriously, here we are, sitting in our male privilege, telling women to go to the kitchen, and boom, a news like this happens.

Damn. It is a good thing that all these popular science portals present it in an easy-to-digest way, already positioned for fitting into the narrative of identity politics so popular nowdays, posted on their facebook pages with short tags, like "sexist scientists". Or with "The idea that men always hunted and women gathered in ancient hunter-gatherer societies is a myth."

Well, of course it is a fucking myth. It is a myth you just made up, because a cursory glance at the academic papers and wikipedia will tell you that the whole issue of sexual division of labor was not viewed in this simplistic, "Patriarchic" manner by all those sexist, white male scientist people. Let's also ignore the fact that present hunter-gatherer societies (you know, what researchers used as the closest available to model how early humans lived) also very much have gender roles present (as the author of the original paper admits). Let's also ignore the fact that it is not actually a clear-cut evidence, and 'a few female hunters' does not equal to the sweeping generalizations even the study's authors are making (which is kind of telling about their findings... somehow I do not believe they can be partial when they say things like this: "Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow ‘natural.’ But it’s now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different — likely more equitable — in our species’ deep hunter-gatherer past". This sounds like some activism mixed with science to me. I would also like to get an explanation how this "genderization" happened in all known stone-age level societies present on this globe.) To be honest, even some common sense thinking would tell you not to expect strict gender roles in a society that is balancing on the edge of survival: whomever can, will hunt. Nobody will tell a female hunter not to hunt when she brings home an elk.

But this, of course is beside the point. Let's ignore the decades-long scientific discussion. What we need is articles showing how we stick it to the Patriarchy, so people who have absolutely no fucking clue what science is can happily share it on their facebook, generate clicks, and, as a side-effect fight the gender wars which are only deepening the fissures in our societies. (Just reading those posts will melt your brain, by the way. People did find a way to inject some anti-European -anty white under a more palpatable name- sentiments there as well if the whole male-female discussion was not enough for you.)