…and he decided to enlighten (endarken?) the masses with two great endeavors.
One was to write a comic book about superheroes who fight SJWs. OK, silly, but go ahead, make your story about people with superpowers bopping evil immigrants and antifa.
The other was to…start a university? An online university? A…Voxiversity?
All right, he’s got to be fucking with us. You have got to watch this thing: It’s an animated pop-up book. It opens to “Religion and Philosophy”, which features Vox Day in ridiculous fantasy spiky armor and a spiky throne and a skull. Because of course it does. That’s exactly how we advertise the philosophy department at my university. It’s also precisely how I picture John Wilkins.
Page two is “Male-Female Relations” which features another fantasy warrior-man and a playboy bunny standing atop a pile of nubile women who are dead or something. I guess it’s his alternative to a women’s studies department. I take it he’s going to be teaching gender caricatures.
Page three is “History, Immigration, and War”, with a gigantic suit of golden armor wielding a huge flaming sword. Popping up out of the top of the suit of armor is a tiny Trump-head wearing a baseball cap, like a tiny pimple atop an engorged, inflamed, veiny testicle. In the background, a horde of Pepe the Frog cartoons are driving tanks.
Cut to a dead-eyed, middle-aged man who introduces himself as Vox Day, and assures us that tens of millions of people will want to watch the series of videos he’s calling “Voxiversity”, which the social media giants are trying to silence, so you should send him money.
You are reading my description and refusing to believe this could possibly be true — it’s got to be some kind of over-the-top joke. But no. Watch the video. I was underplaying the cheesiness.
Nobody takes this bozo seriously, do they?
Because for some people there just aren’t enough sources for unintentional, sad comedy these day.
The history and immigration page is pretty much purloined from warhammer 40k. Why is that right wing Americans can’t understand British satire?
gijoel @2:
Because American tabletop wargames are too multicultural?
When the spiky armor, throne and the skull are ready to send, just email me for the address.
why not? Trump did it and manged to avoid jail time for outright fraud.
obviously the US justice system is a cheap date now.
because they don’t understand ANY satire.
or irony, for that matter.
“History, Immigration, and War” uses Warhammer 40,000 imagery. This venture does not appear to be criticism or transformative art, so I am wondering if this is actionable by Games Workshop. Any legal beagles around?
gijoel @ 2;#
Because, like right wingers the world over, they think satire is some kind of evil commie conspiracy most likely, and so read everything that superficially appears to fit into their world view on surface value only. If it makes you feel any better, there are also far Right idiots in the UK who read 40K’s Imperium as some kind of idealised vision of a future society, and that despite people all around them telling that that it is satire all the time.
Remember that right wing authoritarians are the hero of their own personal narrative.
Holms @ 7;
That image very clearly steals Games Workshop’s artwork and misappropriates its intellectual property, and seems like an ideal opportunity for GW to use its infamous stable of attack lawyers for good. That said, I have been seeing this image and variants of it popping up in the slimier corners of teh interwebs since the US election campaign, so I don’t think it is clear who originally created it and so who should be the target of such action. Vox Day hasn’t even been original here, but instead has purloined the intellectual property violation of another Christo-fascist buffoon.
The beginning of the video looks like one of those pay to play Android games, visually enticing but ultimately devoid of content unless you shell out lots of money. Then it transitions to a slimmer version of my boring Republican uncle who doesn’t have money but wishes he did, so he votes Republican to keep his hands on the money he may someday have.
@8 No, no it doesn’t but I’m not in the least bit surprised.
This is basically Alex Jones’ formula. Create a vile content to fear-monger people and attract the racists and the sexists, then add some large dose of stupid to drive away those who can actually think a little bit and keep those who are stupid. Now congratulations, you can sell them whatever crap you think of.
So mere mortal SJWs and are so terrifying to Vox Day that he wants/needs superpowered heroes to take them down. And the person his superpowered hero saves in his trailer is a blond (presumably blue-eyed) little girl, too? I’ll give him this: He knows his audience.
“Watch the video…”
And screw up my YouTube logarithms? No thank you. I get enough shady suggestions as it is.
Satire test for American readers: Here is UKIP leader Nigel Farage http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/?p=136637&print=1
birgerjohansson, @#16; Oh, come on, that’s really not fair. Even as a native Brit, I often have a very hard time telling the difference between satire of Farage and actual Farage.
You know, this actually reminds me of something:
The old RPG Mutants and Masterminds actually had a super-Klansman in it as a supervillain (seriously, his supervillain costume with just a KKK robe). The game designer’s notes said that the character was included so he could be the kind of villain players could repeatedly beat up without feeling bad about it.
The Latinist in me is rebelling at “voxiversity”. Come on, the x in Latin is (barring a few Greek import words) a contraction of cs, so in compounds vox becomes voci-. If you’re going to play on the prestige our culture affords Classical languages you might at least bother to understand how they work.
I mean, yes, there is plenty more here to be appalled at than the inelegant use of faux-Latin, but the rest is beneath contempt.
@Tabby Lavalamp:
Yeah, the suggested videos are super annoying. It is sufficient to check out just a few scumbag videos and then you are bombarded by more stupid suggestions. Luckily it runs out and it does not last for a long time.
If you want to trigger Theodore Beale, all you have to do is call him a jackass (although perhaps the modifier “ignorant” may have played a role).
As a result of that one insult, VD became so upset that he became obsessed with John Scalzi for more than a decade.
That’s triggerativeness!
#18: See also Watchmen. Alan Moore was rather subversive there. The original gang included Hooded Justice, a guy in a hood with a hangman’s noose. Rorschach, the guy a surprising number of people squee over, was an unpleasant, filthy sociopath. Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, the big “hero”, was a eugenicist mass murderer and was coded as pretty Aryan.
Superheroes weren’t much different from supervillains to Moore.
#21: Well, also it helped that Scalzi is far more popular and sells far more books than Theodore Beale, and also isn’t regarded as a fringe nutcase with an obsession with flaming swords by the general public. Acute envy probably plays a bigger role than “jackass”.
I know quite a lot of the GW creative teams and authors, despite 40K being ultra violent, militaristic sci-fi they are, with only a handful of exceptions, the most liberal minded group and several have despaired at the Vox/Alt rights appropriation of their entirely satirical/darkly warning creation of a fascist theocratic super power.
The fact that none of these ass clowns get it explains not only their stupidity but the paucity of their creative skills.
Professor Poopyhead @22:
Yeah, Rorschach was intended to be an unsympathetic character; Moore was surprised by his popularity. But he wasn’t much different from action movie heroes of the era: running around killing bad guys in “cool” ways while making witty one-liners.
auraboy, #24
The thing that amuses me when I see people trying to appropriate a picture of 40k’s Emperor of Mankind for some kind of fascist signalling is how little they understand of the context. It’s always one of those Crusade-era or Heresy-era portraits, showing the most propagandistic and grandiose aspect the Emperor used at the height of his power. They either forget or never knew that these images were conceived as a direct contrast to how the Emperor is more usually portrayed – as a pathetic desiccated corpse, kept in a an agonised state between life and death by arcane machinery, his dreams of a progressive, enlightened and united humanity utterly in ruins thanks to his own hubristic mistakes.
@Owlmirror:
For those of you who don’t reread that thread with a wistful sense of nostalgia, here’s Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s summary of Theodore’s tour de force:
Nick B here is either a VD sockpuppet or one of his earlier dread ilk. The reason one can’t tell which is that Theodore’s writing is famously a performance of “his flawed cosplay as an intellectual”, and his followers cargo-cult intellectualism as performed by Teddy. It’s messy, but you’d never confuse any of them for a good-faith interlocutor, because they’re far too incompetent to fake that.
@Owlmirror, PZ, Feline:
I think what most sets Beale off is the lack of respect. He likes to think of himself as a Very Important Person and an underappreciated genius who will some day ‘show them all!’ Instead, he’s the sort of person who does well on IQ tests but then shows such massive Dunning-Kruger that he refuses to believe he needs to expand beyond that, and his greatest achievements have involved riling up his attack dog followers who wish they were as ‘successful’ as him to sic them on someone else. He’s very much the ‘stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like’.
Mostly he just gets pissed off when people point out that not only does the emperor have no clothes, he can’t actually describe what the clothes are supposed to be in anything other than dog whistles.
(Which is a long way of saying that I think ‘jackass’ may actually have been more wounding, because Beale seems to desire respect more than anything else, even if he has to get it through fear. Not that envy isn’t also a part of it, because he sees these people who disrespected him also get more respect than him, so obviously there’s a conspiracy!)
(One thing I recall from reading that thread some time back was that, when Scalzi first showed up, he was actually somewhat on Beale’s side: he said that Beale’s history of horrible statements online shouldn’t by itself be enough to remove him from the Nebula panel. Of course, then Beale’s ego ensured that he opened his mouth enough to stuff both feet into it…)
Quite right, which just shows what a complete twit Teddy is. The only people he will not alienate are his fawning bootlickers, and they are, well… Entirely what they are.