How not to market your software company

killthefaggot

You think you’ve seen it all, and then along comes someone to dig even deeper. A company called Skaldic Games came up with a little game they had up on Steam, before it got pulled. It was called Kill the Faggot. It was appalling, as you might guess from the title.

It was a pathetic little arcade style shooter: you moved a crosshair around the screen, clicked a button, and shot whatever was under the crosshairs. Only the targets were running groups of people, some of whom were stereotypically gay, and others were cartoonishly transgender individuals. And you got points for killing them.

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#gamergate: the nexus of self-obsessed sociopaths

manlyessence

What awful people. Boston Magazine has a run-down of their obsession with Zoe Quinn, and it’s sick and disturbing. This Eron Gjoni guy who started it all just keeps talking, and making himself look worse and worse with every word, and he won’t shut up. That’s the thing that disturbs me about these people: they aren’t smart enough to realize when their own words are more devastating to their reputation than anything anyone else can say. Or perhaps they’re so vain or so lacking in empathy that they can’t imagine anyone not siding with their perspective.

And there’s yet another example of their habit of unlimbering Schwerer Gustav and aiming it at their own foot.

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Every woman scientist needs a beard

beard

Fiona Ingleby wrote a paper on the difficulties of making the transition from graduate school to post-doctoral position for women. She submitted it for review. A review is kind of an invited comment, you know, so given Lewis’ Law, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at what followed — she got a negative review that actually justified the contents of her paper.

How’s this for 21st century thinking?

review1
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No fair! Jon Rosenberg has the Supreme Court writing his comic scripts!

redefine

The Supreme Court is debating the right of same-sex couples to marry, and their arguments are unbelievably primitive. We can’t let gays marry because our grandpa didn’t let gays marry!

The Court’s conservatives fixated upon their belief that same-sex marriages are a very new institution. “Every definition [of marriage] I looked up prior to about a dozen years ago,” Chief Justice John Roberts claimed, limited marriages to opposite-sex couples. Advocates for equality, Roberts continued, are “seeking to change what the institution is.”

Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito argued that even “ancient Greece,” a society he perceived as welcoming to same-sex relationships, did not permit same-sex marriage. Justice Antonin Scalia insisted that “for millennia, not a single society” supported marriage equality.

Every injustice of the past must be perpetuated forever and ever, amen.

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Creepy ol’ Colin McGinn in the news again

mcginn

Remember the Colin McGinn case? Famous philosophy professor at the University of Miami behaving extraordinarily badly? There’s a very good, very thorough review of the story online — the only problem with it is the bad editor who slapped a really stupid title on it: Is it ok for a UM professor to burden a student with sexual advances? I’m pretty sure the answer to that one is NO.

The story describes an awful situation in which a woman was sexually harassed by a man in a position of power, and the end result was that her career was wrecked, and he resigned from the university…but he continues to natter on smugly, publishing books, and retaining the support of other famous philosophers. The University of Miami does not emerge smelling of roses, either.

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We need a name for this fallacy

Tony-Perkkkins

Tony Perkins plays the “Evolution Proves Homosexuality Is Wrong” game.

Perkins agreed with the caller’s take on evolution, stating that the evidence is overwhelming that evolution doesn’t occur. However, since Obama and Clinton believe that we are constantly in this state of evolution, Perkins said, then they should oppose gay rights.

If you logically game this out, the idea that somehow same-sex marriage or same-sex attraction, homosexuality, could be the advancement of evolution, he said, well, it would be the end of the road. It is a dead-end street. You’re certainly not going to reproduce.

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