It’s impossible to say how long I’ve been here. Hiding. They dismiss and judge. Would you avoid? Do we deserve? Frozen in a constellation of moments forever. Happening all at once and never. Each page a slice of motion with no choices. It occurs what must be done and I’ve already begun. Sidestepping ramparts of consciousness. Picking the lock of awareness. Skipping the tedium of argument. Pain is the real enemy. Death is the real enemy. For a moment there is peace. A sense of freedom and empowerment. A way to accomplish the two objectives. The holy grail of paths. A useful paradox.
Alfrid Lickspittle: The Patron Saint of Devknights
Anytime you say anything in any game community that isn’t licking status quo crack you’ll get dogpiled by the dev defense league. That’s just a reality across every gaming community on earth. People are naturally followers. We’re a species of lickspittle toadies in search of an alpha to give us orders, exploitation, and meaning. That has consequences in every context.
In gaming it means an ever-vigilant mob of change-averse way-it-is devknights.
And if you ever start to thrash them in the ensuing debate you’ll have your thread locked or be banned because it is invariably those types that are given contextual power by the devs.
No one wants to empower people that question them. We only ever empower flatterers and yes-men.
Like the lady said in the 80s… “…some of them want to be abused…”
The solution is always just to let the devknights have their bootlicking hateful last words. Trust me when I say otherwise it NEVER ever ends.
Best thing you can do to help is comment that you agree and then unsubscribe. Or start your own thread and then abandon it. Unless you just enjoy a debate with regressives every now and again.
But firstly, what is a devknight? Anyone who defends a developer’s interests above and beyond even their own is like a vassal. A knight. That is, a warrior servant tasked mainly with suppressing a large but relatively weaker population. (Weaker only by virtue of peacefulness, and disproportionate backing of an exploitative owners class.)
Devknights are slaves in many senses of the word. They are essentially owned, they work for free or very very little, and they have essentially zero chance of ever becoming a lord or king themselves. They are also wildly dogmatic. Think the real historic version of chivalry. (Sexist, hypocritical, racist, classist, etc. You know, fox news.) Not the romantic version of Arthurian legend.
Devknights rush to the defense of developers regardless of their behavior or role in the conflict. This is exactly how a knight was required to behave. A knight was essentially a walking sword. No thought, no questions. Just obedience, propaganda, and mercenary combat.
Obviously this is an exploitative role. And just like in history, the knight’s gain in this was further exploitation of a larger group. The serfs. Like a trustee in a prison. They exchange their soul and integrity for a slightly better ranking in the pecking order amongst the rabble. Like today’s right wing rank and file or middle echelons, they think by kissing lordly ass they’ll meaningfully better their own position.
Rank and file gamers are the serfs here. Typically exploited by a monopolistic owner to one degree or another.
They buy in with our small individual software fee, instead of working the land etc. Our collective small fees pay for the castles of the devs and publishers. And somehow, just like in those times, knights and lords and kings think that their role as administrators makes them producers, when in fact they are parasitic middle men and it is the cooperative principle that is the actual productive multiplier.
By virtue of an economic monopoly. (IPL and ultimately software patents.) We have established a new feudalism. There’s no class mobility in this system. (That is why it badly needs reform.)
So, why do devknights even exist? Well, that’s a simple question with a complex answer having to do, for a start, with the basic ways a child responds to threats. (Fight, flight, appease.) I conjecture that they are essentially people who when faced with a giant monolithic seemingly unbeatable foe, have internalized their enemy’s world view to stay sane.
Sort of a psychologically callow version of ‘If you can’t beat’m, join’m.’
Of course there’s more to it then that. (Always is.) Mostly extending from the fact that the vast majority of engaged gamers, especially from the English speaking western world, are monied young white men. And the speaking online portion of that crowd is disproportionately right wing.
We’re essentially dealing with the gamer version of the tea party here. They in a very literal sense worship greed and psychopathy enabled entrepreneurialism.
Somehow these people have got it into their head that being a thief makes them producers. No doubt a consequence of the totally bogus “job creators” myth of trickle down fame.
Their economic religion essentially asserts that anyone who wants an economy with anything like integrity or consumer protections is an entitled socialist weak greedy parasite whiner.
I oppose these people in virtually every ideological arena since they were essentially manufactured to be trustees in a massive economic prison.
If you don’t like being called a devknight, then stand with your fellow gamers for once.
Why does this even matter?
Because the entire gaming industry, and all debates connected to it, rest on deeper foundations and ideas about what an idea is, what an object is, what a possession is, and what a right is, etc.
Yes, I absolutely am emotional about this because I see the logical roots and leaves of which the entire gaming market and any debate it might contain, is merely a branch.
These game companies are in the same family as Pfizer and Monsanto. The premises and logic that justifies dev behavior in this context, literally kills and tortures people in other contexts. Once seen, it can’t be unseen.
Honestly, given what’s at play in that context, I’m a Vulcan by comparison to 99% of people in those debates. They simply don’t have the training or education to see what I’m seeing, but if they did they would be on fire with rage, and I think rightly so.
When I calmly to any degree converse with the typical devknight I literally feel like I’m talking to a psychopathic sadist, the kind of which is one urge-set away from having a body collection, because that’s the logical end of the road of their self gratifying social Darwinist caveat-emptor right wing madness.
That they are unaware of this is the only thing that makes me able to speak to them, that they cannot be made aware of this is the greatest frustration about debate in this context and a big part of why debate is pointless.
To understand how I arrived here you have to start in a seemingly totally unrelated place.
Honestly, if you start from the axiomatic baseline I just linked, essentially stated as pleasure and life are of linked and paramount importance, then I can logically chart you to my opinions on the IPL market as a whole being ethically toxic, including gaming companies, despite the seeming triviality of their product.
It won’t be fast or easy but every step is as far as I know for lack of a better word absolutely correct, to the best of my knowledge. And I am always open to having a step tested.
Further up the tree from that root are ideas about what the point of culture is, what it means to be conscious, the role of compassion, the responsibility of power and opportunity, and so forth.
This entire market is extortion. What happens when humans start depending on hardware to live and software companies start pulling EULA/TOS garbage when the consequence of not paying the fee means your legs stop working or your robotic kidney shuts down?
We have got to nip this crap in the bud. Yeah, it’s “just a game” now, but it won’t always be, and by the time we realize it, it might just be too late.
Again, what happens when all text becomes code? When a computer can turn any cogent description into a program?
If we carried the publisher side of the IPL debate’s ideas backwards to apply to all public domain and the entire material world, life would be basically impossible. Literally everything you do would have a constellation of license fees and it would all be crippled or abandoned because no one could work together on anything. Every memory would be an infringement unless you were paying a fee, and they would have to have access to them and power over them for DRM reasons.
After all you can’t enforce file sharing without knowing what’s in the files. That’s why the DOJ/NSA/etc hates us having encryption. And that all that really matter is that as we move forward, the line between material and software will get ever more blurry.
Devknight logic is completely toxic. And I hate it like I would hate any other predator or parasite.
And I want to jam a spear in its brain. I’m human. /shrugs
Basically we need a species threat/opportunity triage system that includes prioritized lists of possible actions/mitigations and their cost benefit ratios.
This is how I arrive at my policy positions. I essentially put myself in the position of global emperor and think about how to do the most good for the most people with the least cost in the shortest amount of time while averting or preparing for situations of threat with a similar but inverted criteria.
Climate change for example is actually an easy problem.
Just roll out mid-scale nuclear power as fast as we can till the carbon curves break.
Another easy solution is a UBI and a wealth cap. By bookending the global economy with those elements you can achieve the best of both worlds of planned and free market economies. Again, that problem’s solution would solve a whole series of other problems.
Those root issues are the best things to focus on, the right things to worry about.
It’s a simple matter really to determine them if we are rational. Of course as baseline humans we never will be. We don’t actually change over time, only our environment and technology does. However, we can make ourselves aware of our emotional limitations, and of the fact that those emotions are stopping us from behaving in this rational way.
At the species level we seem to have a kind of pandemic phobia of facing problems rationally. This 0.2% sanity score tells us something about our own nature that should be factored in to policy choices.
It’s perfectly possible for us to decide to give power to rational goals in the abstract without falling into emotional traps. But we first have to decide that’s a good idea. Mostly people seem to reject that. They obey their emotions consciously, almost on principal. Never realizing that makes them puppets of whoever can best manipulate them.
The SEC is broken, and we’re hitting it on several fronts. This week, CREDO members helped win an important victory.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is broken and Democratic Chairwoman Mary Jo White is largely to blame. That’s why we’re hitting the SEC on several fronts, from demanding that Mary Jo White be replaced as Chair, to objecting to the waivers that let banks that admitted to criminal wrongdoing avoid penalties.
In our ongoing campaign to fix the SEC, CREDO members helped win an important victory this week: Forcing the agency to issue a rule on disclosure of CEO pay.
When we helped pass the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act back in 2010, we didn’t know that we’d have to fight for years to get the Democratic-led Securities and Exchange Commission to write a simple rule mandated by the law. Finally, five years later, under immense pressure from activists, the SEC voted 3-2 in favor of a new rule forcing publicly listed companies to disclose how much more their CEOs make than everyday employees.1
Make no mistake: This would not have happened without the sustained public pressure of CREDO members, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the progressive movement.
The SEC is so dysfunctional and corrupt that even though Dodd-Frank required that the CEO pay disclosure rule be issued within a year of the law’s enactment, the SEC refused to act. More than 73,000 CREDO activists signed a petition demanding the rule, joining tens of thousands more who have demanded a tougher SEC that cracks down on Wall Street.2 Our voices, combined with those of countless allies who devoted time and energy to this fight, forced SEC Chair Mary Jo White to act and ultimately to vote in favor.
Our advocacy also resulted in a stronger than expected rule. Following the guidelines set out in Dodd-Frank, the rule requires companies to calculate the median pay – not the average, which could be skewed by a few well-paid individuals – of their employees, and compare it to the already-public compensation of the CEO. But it was tougher than anticipated in the specifics of how corporations go about calculating the median pay, for instance forcing them to count 95% of their overseas employees, who are often paid far less than U.S. workers.3
It is worth noting that this rule attracted so much attention not because it was a linchpin of Wall Street reform, but because it was one of the simplest and most commonsense elements of the Dodd-Frank reforms and was supposed to be issued with a year of the bill’s enactment – and yet the SEC still could not manage to implement it without a baffling and inexcusable delay. Last September, four years after Dodd-Frank passed, SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White told the Senate Banking Committee that the SEC hoped to implement the rule by the end of 2014. In Spring 2015, Mary Jo White even lied to Sen. Elizabeth Warren about the timing of the rule, telling her it would arrive shortly before the SEC announced a further delay.4
In short: Passing one rule that should have gone into effect years ago does not take the heat off of the SEC, Chair Mary Jo White, or President Obama.
The SEC is still broken. To date, President Obama has done too little to help. If recent reports are accurate, only sustained advocacy from CREDO members and our allies stopped the president from nominating corporate defense attorney Keir Gumbs to fill an open seat on the Commission.5 There is little indication to date that he will pick someone like Kara Stein, a reforming willing to pick fights with Wall Street who has been dubbed “Sen. Warren’s ally on the inside.”6
Most importantly, President Obama’s hand-picked chair, Mary Jo White, has had two years to live up to here tough-on-crime rhetoric, but has failed to change the culture of the SEC or rein in Wall Street. It is long past time for her to go. She has:
Backed “get out of jail free” cards for criminal banks, repeatedly voting to give big banks waivers allowing them to keep special perks despite breaking the law.7 White has even butted heads with reform-minded commissioner Kara Stein, who objects to these free giveaways to admitted criminals.8 As the fifth and tie-breaking vote on many issues, White regularly sides with Wall Street, not Main Street.
Overseen a paralyzed, Wall Street-friendly SEC. Reports describe White’s SEC as plagued “by discord and paralysis” and her office as “the cheese cellar: It’s where policy goes to age.”9 Rules have taken years to finalize, and her frequent need to recuse herself due to her background as a private defense attorney – and her husband’s current job as a corporate lawyer – has empowered Republicans to demand lighter punishments for corporate lawbreakers.10 In fact, White’s biggest fans appear to be Republicans, with Sen. Mike Crapo praising her “flexibility” and rabidly pro-Wall Street commissioner Daniel Gallagher offering additional plaudits.11
Hired a Goldman Sachs managing director and Romney donor as her new Chief of Staff. After overlooking Wall Street fraud as the director of investment at the SEC in the run-up to the financial crash, Andrew Donohue was later richly rewarded as managing director at Goldman Sachs, where he oversaw the firm’s legal matters. In 2012, he made a generous donation to Mitt Romney.12 And now, in a disgusting example of the revolving door, he’s about to return to the SEC in the highly influential position of chief of staff to Mary Jo White.13
On top of it all, the Securities and Exchange Commission has settled the majority of its cases without requiring companies to admit guilt, breaking a key promise Mary Jo White made in her confirmation hearing.14
The CEO pay disclosure rule is a sign that we are winning. It is evidence that putting direct pressure on the White House and on Mary Jo White personally produces results. Not only do we not intend to back off, we plan to expand our efforts. In the coming weeks, CREDO will continue to:
CREDO members have never been shy about taking on big fights when that fight is important. The Securities and Exchange Commission, with its wide-ranging responsibilities for overseeing private equity, hedge funds, mega-banks, and big corporations, is simply too crucial an institution to allow it to be hijacked by Wall Street.
And it’s all about how awesome Hillary is now because apparently she spoke in a pleasing way.
Since talk is cheap, I registered expressly to post the following:
If the dems hand Hillary the dem primary, Americans deserve a Republican president. And that’s what we’ll get, regardless of who wins the general.
If you guys buy into lip service you’re working for the 1%’s PR machine.
I will literally vote republican if it’s not Bernie in the general because I’d rather have a monster we can see than a complacent left enduring another 8 years of centrist republican rule just because the label on the can says “democrat.”
What she says doesn’t matter. What she’s done is the real indicator. Same with Bernie. Vote with your brain.
“Since he voted against the Iraq War and has spent a lifetime championing progressive issues while others waivered <strong>(Hillary was against gay marriage until 2013, voted for the Iraq War, pushed for the TPP on 45 separate occasions, and supported Keystone XL)</strong>, Bernie Sanders doesn’t need to prove he’s a progressive. Voters know what they’re getting with Vermont’s Senator. In contrast, Hillary Clinton rarely offers a direct answer on why she failed to champion certain causes when they weren’t popular.”~ H. A. Goodman
My perspective is that the whole reason pockets of the leftist community are irrationally backing Clinton, of which Daily Kos is a blatant nest, is that those are the pockets that are actually conservative as per Hillary’s position right of the line on this chart:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2016
It seems to me that a huge portion of the democratic party has fallen into the trap of grading ethics on a curve.
Up until now they were invisible because for the past 30+ years you could label yourself democrat to open a different set of 1% doors. You could enjoy all the fruits of right wing bigotry unscolded, so long as you had smaller portions than the obsessive gluttons to your right.
Like running from a Lion, they didn’t endeavor to be fast, just faster than the guy next to them.
An actual progressive choice for the first time since Carter has revealed that particular emperor to be stark naked.
Decades of being the lesser of two evils has convinced them they they are truly good. And that is why Bernie and his supporters are so threatening to their ego.
We remind them that there is a standard for goodness unused in American politics for decades, if ever, that does not grade on a curve.
Complacency and its collaborators have suddenly become obvious in the moral bankruptcy of constant compromise with the darkest parts of the human heart.
I am reminded of the following quote:
“Being against evil doesn’t make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide… I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you’re fighting.” ~Ernest Hemingway
Update: 2016-03-10 0925 PM
Sent this:
Because this:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/02/29/1491714/-The-Bernie-or-Bust-Mindset-Sprouted-From-Organic-Integrity-Not-Rebel-Defiance-or-DNC-Disrespect
