Author: Robert Mariani

Send me a tweet: @robert_mariani Email me: rjmariani0 AT gmail DOT com

GamerGate and the incentives of threats

The GamerGate fiasco has brought with it the ugly phenomenon of internet threats. If we are to take our assumptions from the media narrative, then the side that is correct at the end is the one that received the most threats, and has capitalized best on these threats.

The incentives to make threats are literally less than zero. There are only disincentives. Anyone with reasoning abilities can see this, particularly based on the proportion of anti-GG coverage devoted to the threats.

Progressives simultaneously understand and do not understand this. There have been a number of blunders where “threats” turned out to be bogus, with obvious intent to stir up public hatred for GamerGate and initiate a spiral of silence by making #GamerGate feel dirty on the tongue of most.

There are astronomical incentives to appear to be a victim of threats. This truth has been leveraged many times in the form of fake threats.
fake threats

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Two-dimensional spectrum of political media

Update: An updated version of the chart can be found here.
This is an effort to chart where media outfits fall not only in terms of left-right slant, but their how restrained or bombastic they are.

Factors on the “Reasonable/Restrained – Insane/Bombastic” spectrum include:

  • What they cover: Covering trivial/overcovered matters makes you negative and covering important things pushes you towards positive.
  • Clickbait and listacles = negative.
  • Level-headedness of tone = positive.
  • Attack-style pieces = negative.

Factors on the “Left – Right” spectrum include studies of trust and bias, as well as self-description and consensus among those who suggest placement on the chart to me. You can pinpoint the “left-rightness” of an outfit by looking at where the first letter is, not the middle or last letter.

  

political-grid-the5

If you want something added or think something is out of place, leave a comment or send a tweet to @robert_mariani.

The USA still has the world’s worst corporate tax rate

I published a blog post at FreedomWorks on international corporate tax rates — and how far we’ve fallen behind everyone else.

The Tax Foundation has recently published a report that analyzes the tax policy of the thirty-four Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) member countries, which are more or less all of the advanced economies in the world. The results are jarring. The United States ranks 32 out of 34 in terms of the competitiveness of our taxation – only Portugal and the Socialist-led France rank lower than we do. The main factor in in this embarrassment is our bush league corporate tax rate. The Tax Foundation makes it clear: “The United States provides a good example of an uncompetitive tax code… The largest factors behind the United States’ score are that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world and that it is one of the six remaining countries in the OECD with a worldwide system of taxation.”

While the rest of the world has been reforming its tax codes, the United States has been left in the dust. The last major change in the US occurred in 1986, and since then, OECD average corporate tax rate has practically been cut in half. Corporations are leaving our shores, as Logan Albright pointed out, and our uncompetitive policies makes investment a bad idea in the first place.

American-Beauty-computer-prison

American Beauty and false liberation

I am pretty sure that behind American Beauty’s is an exercise in the Buddhist understanding of liberation. Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey, is a jaded middle-aged suburban man, unhappy with his job and his marriage. At this point, the viewer might be led into thinking that American Beauty is typical Hollywood fare where the protagonist has to discover himself to defy lame old suburbia. This, thankfully, is not the case.

Lester does try to pursue his desire and experience all the novelty the world has to offer. Is he going to find truth and love and all that? He thinks so, and it seems like that. In that iconic scene, Lester fantasizes about Angela (Mina Suvari) with falling red rose petals falling. We see the color red used similarly throughout the film as a symbol for defiant passion. The Real Estate King, Buddy has red advertisements, and he is having an affair with Lester’s wife, who is defying the repression of suburban expectations. The free, directionless spirit of red is highlighted with the scene where the plastic bag is dancing on the wind in front of a red wall. Red is perhaps the color of the energy that defies civilization itself, in all of its beautiful and irrational glory.

When Lester is presented with the opportunity to have sex with Angela, she reveals that she is a virgin, despite her pretenses. Angela represents the insatiability of desire – even when she is totally his, Lester remains unsatisfied. He doesn’t even want her now, thinking of her as an innocent child. His fantasy of satisfaction set the bar far higher than could be reached.

The attempts to engage passion lead to bad results. This is ultimately expressed by the neighbor, Frank, in a homoerotic-turned-violent moment with Lester. Rather than the repression imposed by his environment, Frank’s repression derives from his futile attempt to control that which cannot be controlled, whether it be his son, society, or his neighbors. Lester is shot dead and achieves some sort of analog to Nirvana. He is free from the meaningless context that he existed in and also free from the consequences of destructive passion, yet can appreciate beauty without attachment. Before credits role Lester sees past his delusional fantasy of this young girl, with the music playing with its lyrics “castles burning” alluding to Lester’s false expectations of the “American Beauty” burning away to reveal the unglamorous interior.

The suburban grind is a prison, but so is bohemianism. They are competing systems of trying to sate insatiable material appetites. Breaking out of routine and expressing yourself by dancing on a table, or something, doesn’t save you. Hollywood was wrong. Liberation isn’t a carefree journey of self-fulfillment

Liberation hurts.

shining bear

Want to see something really scary?

The horror genre is much bemoaned for its tendency toward artistic bankruptcy. Filmmakers are content to adhere to cliché in the form of gore, scare chords and contrived suspense. If these cinematic temptations are defied by a sophisticated auteur who understands the nuances of audience manipulation, the result is a film to be remembered. Indeed, meticulous attention to detail is among the most celebrated aspects of Stanley Kubrick’s legacy. Even for a Stanley Kubrick film, the production of The Shining was long and painstaking. The film took almost a year to shoot at 51 weeks, while it was only intended to take 17 weeks, and it had very long workdays — rewrites of the script would happen several times a day.

The sense of space is a basic subconscious instinct that all human beings have and rely on every day. This is the pressure point that Kubrick chooses to strike at in order to disorient and ultimately disturb viewers on a level that conventional horror technique cannot approach.

An obviously intentional example of this is the scene where Halloran is leading Wendy through the kitchen. The Steadicam precedes them as Halloran winds through counters and tables, taking twists and turns that that camera and the gaze of the audience moves with. Ultimately, we see him from behind opening the freezer with his right hand – we cut to the camera inside the freezer, and Halloran is seen opening what is supposed to be the same door with the other hand, and the door is now hinged and swinging from the wrong side. When they exit, they, the door swings from the original hinging, giving the impression that they are on the same side of the hall, but this time the kitchen is flipped in front of them and they walk towards it in the wrong direction. In the scene where Jack is interrupted by Wendy, we have a depth of field shot there is a chair clearly in-focus behind Jack. The camera cuts to Wendy then to Jack, and the chair is gone. Geoffrey Cocks notes in the documentary film Room 237 that this disappearance could have been intentional, or could have been just been a continuity error. A third intriguing possibility is that it could have been a continuity error that Kubrick chose to keep. A similar phenomenon occurs with the typewriter changing colors between shots. The third possibility raises interesting insights into the nature of The Shining and of choices in films in general, where even films with meticulous production are fertilized by the unintentional. The interior of The Overlook hotel itself is replete with physical impossibilities, which are, in line with the movie being a psychological horror, instinctually disturbing on a less than conscious level to the viewer. The constant spatial challenging of the psyche is noted by Juli Kearns in Room 237:

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Intellectual bullying and the postmodern discourse of GamerGate

The discrediting of voices in intellectual discourse is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, when a person holds a position that is indefensible and plain wrong, they should either accept that they are wrong or have their soapbox revoked. Most of the time it isn’t this clear. Different opinions are held by disagreeing parties, and silencing dissenting voices requires tactics that are a little more underhanded. The tactic of dishonestly re-framing a viewpoint into something outrageous in an attempt to discredit those who hold the viewpoint is known as intellectual bullying.

Black_box bulling

This is a powerful tool. With enough voices dishonestly insisting that someone holds all those beliefs that everybody hates, the person in question will either be shamed into silence or suffer from character assassination. The black box takes an honest input and produces a dishonest output. But what goes on inside the black box? I am going to try to explain that, both in general and specifically for the GamerGate controversy.

A lot of of the tactics of the anti-GamerGate intellectual bullying campaign were famously codified in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  The ideological guerrilla warfare tactics encouraged in that book and others like it include character assassination, isolation, and ridicule. Ad hominem attacks are implicitly encouraged, because people are easier to hate than abstract ideas. Strawman arguments are particularly effective – rather than addressing actual arguments, so one should ignore the points of those who disagree with you and respond to something else.

I initially scoffed at the prospect of Cultural Marxism being real, because in common parlance among conservative pundits, it’s used as a stronger pejorative in place of “political correctness.” Despite what the noise around the provocative term might sound like, Cultural Marxism is not Alex Jones-style paranoia. From the beginning, Marxism rejected positivism – positivism meaning the belief that mathematical logic and scientific experimentation are the sole authoritative sources of knowledge. This should be interesting for the reader who has heard of Marxism being scientific socialism. To Marx and Engels, scientific was merely a nice sounding word that meant that their socialism had a philosophical methodology behind it. This is true: Marxism does have a methodology, it’s just a non-rationalistic methodology.

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