Bring on the Meteor

Several months ago, before a considerable period of inactivity, I posted a blog titled Social Justice Jackasses, which was basically me rambling about stupid politics for a few paragraphs, going on about Ghostbusters being sexist [not], Battlefield 1 being sexist [not], and Milo Yiannopoulos' suspension from Twitter being a bad thing for freedom of expression and for Twitter as a company [actually not not]. I actually enjoyed writing that mess, but one thing I didn't like was its very stupid name, a name I slapped on it when I couldn't think of anything better at the time. The new name is, I feel, much more interesting, and good lord has some really stupid shit happened in the downtime, including one of the most hilarious political events to happen in the last few years, and I'm in the mood for another ramble, so let's begin this feast of stupidity.

So, the most racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic, whatever other buzzword means you qualify for the basket of deplorables ophobic candidate in the history of America, Donald Hitler Trump, won the 2016 election. Sorry for the mocking, but in all honesty, to see just how utterly worthless those stupid buzzwords have become brings a smile to my face, as does the bitching and crying from the mainstream media and the SJW dimwits who had all their money on Hillary. Like the EU referendum, I went to bed thinking the side I wanted to see win would lose, and just like Brexit, the result I was for won, I'm not ashamed to admit that I am very glad that Trump won the White House, it's a relief that a war mongering corporatist sellout didn't win, and while some of Trump's ideas, both including and excluding the ones he's currently back peddling on, are stupid, his message of 'Make America Great Again' certainly resonated more with me than Hillary's stupid rainbow pandering 'Stronger Together' nonsense, I say that as a Brit, therefore as someone who didn't have a vote in the election. His victory, just like Brexit, represents a rejection of globalism and the political establishment, which is my main reason for liking Trump, it's good to see the culture shifting away from the plague of identity politics, and the pathetic buzzwords they use lose all of their power, and it seems that they really are stupid, because even now, after he won the presidency, these morons are still going with their Trump is Hitler bullshit. And like how the Remain bitches blamed old people here in Britain, the Hillary bitches went after all the white people, not realising that targeting a racial group is textbook racism, but you know, intersectionality and oppression and all that nonsense, isn't that right, Laci.

Now that my general thoughts on the Election are out of the way, I'll get into why I brought it up, a little musical called Hamilton. Donald Trump's VP Mike Pence went to a performance of Hamilton, and after the performance, one of the actors; a Brandon Victor Dixon, addressed Pence and asked him to listen to a message, a message that has started a shit storm on the internet. Having watched the video of the message, I can say it's a message that, in and of itself, isn't inherently bad, protecting and respecting people's rights is, as I will cover later, something I am very much in favour of, and as an individualist, I believe that everyone is entitled to their human rights, regardless of what colour their skin is or what is between their legs. The issue I take with this situation is more the place, and the delivery. it wasn't addressed to the whole theatre, it was addressed specifically to Mike Pence, a man who apparently thinks you can electrocute the gay out of people, I don't know if that's true, but given that he's a republican, I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt. I could be able to give this a pass if Donald Trump didn't vow to protect LGBT people from what is currently their greatest threat, the blatantly Homophobic ideology of Islam, which Merkel and Trudeau and, before she lost, Clinton, seem dead set on importing as much as they can. In addition to that, when questioned about gay marriage, Trump described it as a done deal, which, if that's true, means that electroshock therapy for gays isn't coming to America any time soon. In that regard, the message addressed directly to Pence seems to be coming more from a place of ideology than of objectivity, which isn't good. This is all me now, but I think that the theatre is a place for telling stories, you can have a message if you can tell a story that is engaging and interesting, it's why I still like films by Joss Whedon, and games by Neil Druckmann, even though the pair of them are ardent Feminists, and I hate feminism with a passion.  But when the message is expressed in a way that doesn't add to the story, or takes precedence over the story, or in this case, just literally gets its own bit at the end, I take issue, just as I would take issue if at the end of Uncharted 4 or The Last of Us, Druckmann came out and started telling me about the importance of gender equality in gaming. I personally think that this address was delivered in a place and in a way that it shouldn't have been, as it compromised both the message and the story. I don't think Trump is right that the theatre should be a safe space, but I do agree that it should be a special space, where the mind is challenged not by a direct political message, but by the mix of intrigue and emotion that drives a good story.

Now onto something less intelligent, the terrible racism of Dead Rising 4. So, Dead Rising 4 is fast approaching, and I'll be honest, I have little interest in playing it at launch, I played Dead Rising 3, and it was alright, and I will almost certainly pick up Dead Rising 4 in the future, but for right now, I'm fine with my Titanfall 2 and my Gears of War 4 and my Bioshock Collection. But even with my lack of interest in the game itself, slap a buzzword on something and I'll probably come sniffing. This time the buzzword is racist, because Microsoft sent out an email that, as you can see, reads NNNNGGGHHHAAAA. Now, to a normal person, who knows Dead Rising is a game about zombies, this looks like a classic zombie moan, because it is one, it's just a bit less wordy than BRAINNZZZ. But to some people, it's a deliberate allusion to a certain word that us pasty crackers aren't allowed to say, you know what word. By this point, to be honest, I don't get mad at these people very often anymore, I feel bad for them usually, because to see racism and sexism literally everywhere, even in places where it is very, very clearly not, like how far apart a man's legs are when he sits, or how cold office air conditioning is, or, in this case, seeing a racial slur in a harmless email, your life must truly be miserable if you see nothing but bad everywhere you go, as a somewhat nihilistic fellow myself, I know the feeling, seeing the bad in everything I mean, not seeing racism where it just doesn't exist. There is someone in this situation I am mad at though, Microsoft, the spineless, kowtowing little cunts, who haven't seemed to have got the message yet that when an SJW calls you racist, that doesn't immediately make you a racist, it makes them stupid. Microsoft went and apologised, which now makes Microsoft the stupid ones, you don't apologise when you did nothing wrong, and you didn't, you apologised because you're scared of the slings and arrows that will come your way if you don't, which is something you should never do with SJW's, because once they smell blood, they'll go in for the kill, they pull the buzzword card again, and they go braver and harder, until they have their dicks firmly all the way up your arse. Microsoft should not have apologised, they should have held their ground, and, though they obviously can't say it in such a direct manner, tell people offended by their harmless email to fuck off, sod the backlash you'll get for being racist, the rational people who don't see racism everywhere won't come after you for being pussies, and they're the ones who'll probably buy an Xbox One and play your games, not the SJW's who are too busy being offended by everything to have a bit of fun. I know what I'd do, put 'now with even more NNNNGGGHHHAAAA' on the Xbox One version's box, just to drive it home that you won't kneel to a bunch of hypersensitive moral busybody bullies.

And now for the thing that made me want to do this ramble, I guess you could say I was #triggered by the fact that my country is on its way to being George Orwell's worst nightmare. It seems that government efforts to control the internet just refuse to die, like a racist zombie they just keep rising again and trying to eat you, whether it's SOPA, the great firewall of China, or now the Investigatory Powers bill, which was proposed by none other than our current PM Theresa May, who is really dragging her feet on that whole Article 50 thing, but I digress, and would require UK internet providers to record the internet activity of the people it provides internet to, and compiling that data that can then be accessed by the police. I've had a few Facebook spats with people who argue the supposed merits of compiling data on citizens using the internet, they say it will be used to catch terrorists and child abusers, so I did some mathing. Let's be honest, the demographic that poses the greatest threat when it comes to terrorism in the west is Islam, obviously not all Muslims are terrorists, but it does seem that a few of them do get a sudden urge to strap bombs to themselves. According to the 2011 census, which is the most recent number I could find, 4.5% of the population of the UK are Muslim, that's a couple million people, let's break it down a bit more, of those 4.5%, polls I could dig up suggest that up to 20% of them have sympathy for the 7/7 bombers, that in and of itself should be alarming, but it's still a tiny number of people overall, a few hundred thousand at most, making up less than 1% of the total population, even if that number is wrong, at the absolute worst extreme end of this spectrum, the number of Islamic terrorists is capped by the Islamic population in the UK, which is still only 4.5%. Is 1%-4.5% a big enough percentage to justify spying on 100% of UK internet users? I'd argue no, not even close, in fact I'd go as far as to say that when people say the bill can be used to catch terrorists, they're either ill informed, or liars. Because me, my family, my co workers, my friends, I have a very hard time believing that any of them have dreams of being a terrorist, but yet they all use the internet, so their providers would be archiving their activities, keeping tabs on the sites they visit, the searches they make and the messaging apps they use. Being a bit comical for a second, I wouldn't want my friends and family to know what porn I watch, so why would I want the government to know that, why would I want the government to know everything I'm doing on the internet. One right I think all people are entitled to is the right to privacy, and for very obvious reasons, this isn't very friendly to people's privacy, which makes me less than excited. Another argument that came up in the Facebook spat was that it's only the internet. And that's how they do it, they don't take your freedoms out right, they take little bits, they chisel away at it, telling you lies like we need to catch the terrorists, promising you security in exchange for privacy. I remember once Scotland Yard suggesting that people should put cameras in their homes to catch burglars, which is Orwellian and stupid. But here's the thing, now everyone already has cameras, on them most of the time, and they also use that camera to access social media, google random stuff, and watch Youtube videos, what's next, phone companies are required to compile data from people's phone cameras, and hand that data over to the police with no need for a warrant, this shit has happened before, is it hard to imagine them trying something like it on a large scale, on a country wide scale. And another primary concern I have, as well as privacy, is intimidation and blackmail, what if they start tracking specific web pages, they start archiving everything, and then you say something they don't like, and, going back to porn, they decide that it would be a terrible thing if your friends and family found out you watch Dwarf porn or vegetable fetish porn or whatever weird shit you're into, this doesn't just apply to porn, it can apply to gambling, dating, shopping etc., but you get the point, what's stopping the police who have this data from abusing the power that the data gives them, using it to intimidate people, something the police isn't exactly innocent of doing. Given the utter debacle that reared its head in Rotherham, and how the police were, at best indifferent, and at worst complicit, in the abuse rings, and how people who tried to blow the whistle were smeared as racists and attention seekers and intimidated into silence; it wouldn't be a matter of if they intimidate people, it would be a matter of when.

Principally, I am concerned with the protection of people's individual rights, and I loathe with a passion, people who would like to take those rights away, whether that be the right to freedom of speech in the case of the regressive left, freedom of religion and movement in the case of religious zealots, the right to vote in the case of greedy elitist Bureaucrats, or the right to privacy in the case of the snooping big government. And admittedly, being one person, with a very small reach here on my tiny blog, I can't make that much of a difference, but while I can still enjoy my freedoms, I will, because saying something is better than saying nothing.