Ah yes Bertolt Brecht, the Steve Bannon of his day.
I missed the emoji thread, is this how we're supposed to do it?
We will never let ourselves become "burned" like the Nazi anti-free speech book burning. Our commitment to free speech is mighty and unbreakable, in the spirit of famous free-speech heroes, such as Socrates, Erasmus, John Milton, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor Timothy Garton etc
We will never bend, we will never break, we will never bow to the angry anti-free speech academic mobsters. We fight for the cause of free speech and for one of the cornerstones of Western Civilization. We look forward to see you at the academic debate with our esteemed Keynote Speaker Mr. Stephen Kevin Bannon on December 11th at the University of Montana.
Who wrote this? WTF????
3: I would guess Adrian Cheok, the program committee chair, who seems like a charming guy.
Who can forget when Bertolt Brecht left from the Nazi government after leading its propaganda efforts, and started triumphantly touring the world spreading the ideology of the ruling government he brought to power, only to have his free speech crushed when his speaking engagements were occasionally cancelled because the provincial people disagreed with the Nazis and thought academic conferences unrelated to Brecht's expertise were not the proper venue for Nazi government propaganda. That must be what made Brecht flee Nazi Germany in fear of his life, as Adrian Cheok presumably now believes Steve Bannon is planning to do.
4: Thanks! Quite charming, indeed! It appears that he emulates the prose style of his Fearless Leader.
On Twitter, attendees criticized Cheok's presentation. Upon seeing the tweets, Cheok unleashed his anger at one female scholar in particular. "Even a 10 year old could understand my talk. SAD and DUMB!" he tweeted. "No wonder she works in a LOW RANK university!" he said in another.
Bannon kind of puzzles me more than the rest of his ilk. People like Milo Whatsisface are pretty open about the fact that they just want to make a living being professional trolls. But Bannon occasionally acts like he believes he's a man of Deep Ideas. If you actually believed that, why would you show to speak at video games conference? Gam/er/gate?
Anyway, sex with robots is passe. Surely this year's technolibertarian hotness is sex with self-driving cars.
"show up to speak at a video games conference"
Stupid keyboard.
I wonder what sensors they have on the exhaust pipes.
Gam/er/gate?
Yes, Bannon has quite a lot to say about ethics in video games journalism.
Or no sex with a self-driving car.
7: He recently showed up at a "conference" of 12 geriatric people. You go where the bills are paid.
Video games are culturally relevant, have tons of money behind them, and, yes, are a breeding ground for regressive elements. The children will learn fascism from pe/wdi/epie and his ilk.
(If this is going to be a quasi-video game thread, just want to mention that I picked up Into The Breach over the weekend and fell in love with it. The gameplay's very different, but its well-balanced optional rules, reward of careful consideration, acceptance of failure, and ever-present tension reminded me enough of FTL to look it up and find that yes, it was developed by the same people.)
Seriously, video games is a hobby that attracts a lot of young, socially awkward males with free time on their hands. That makes an enticing demographic for Nazi recruiters.
I let my kids watch videos of funny gaming situations on YouTube but then heard about how it will start autoplaying nazi propaganda if you let it choose the next videos so I'm monitoring it more closely.
The video game player demographic is totally going to ruin the shirtless, muscular, gay porn thing the Nazis used to have going.
Gamers are his people, definitely. #notallgamers, but still...
7: Big Ideas with some kind of a populist bent. Looking down on video games as an art form is "elitist", a.k.a. liberal. When religious conservativism was a big part of the right-wing coalition, it leaned anti-gaming for moral panic reasons. (There was a fair amount of bipartisan consensus about this. Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman had a lot to say about Mortal Kombat and Doom.) Now that the right-wing coalition is based on hate for women, minorities, and leftists, there's big upside and no downside to being pro-gamers-as-a-movement.
AcademicLurker, to add to what DaveLMA said:
Link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/
Steve Bannon learned to harness troll army from 'World of Warcraft'
Before Steve Bannon oversaw the conservative Breitbart News Network and, subsequently, joined then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign, the chief political strategist became a player in Hollywood and ... World of Warcraft. ... [snip] ... In describing gamers, Bannon said, "These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power. ... It was the pre-reddit. It's the same guys on (one of a trio of online message boards owned by IGE) Thottbot who were [later] on reddit" and other online message boards where the alt-right flourished, Bannon said.
Green postulates that Bannon's time at IGE was "one that introduced him to a hidden world, burrowed deep into his psyche, and provided a kind of conceptual framework that he would later draw on to build up the audience for Breitbart News, and then to help marshal the online armies of trolls and activists that overran national politicians and helped give rise to Donald Trump," Green writes.
7.2: Sex *in* a self driving hire car by the last people to use it before you, another reason to eschew them!
Michael, could you at least clean my seat?
Sex *in* a self driving hire car by the last people to use it before you, another reason to eschew them!
It is possible to hire a non-self-driving car and still have sex in it. Also I have some news about hotel rooms that you aren't going to like.
You only need some straw, a counterpane, and a partner.
I can beat that, I once got a handjob in the back row of a bus of Boy Scouts. Not provided by a Boy Scout, my girlfriend came on the trip.
Beat that? Came on the trip? Brilliant!
I have questions about the metric on which the contest is judged.
So, no Bannon after all: http://www.montanakaimin.com/news/breaking-bannon-unavailable-missoula-debate-cancelled/article_027611f2-f7dd-11e8-94d6-d3994d81b475.html
"a keynote speaker at a joint conference on sex robots this month"
That Warcraft thing sounds like Bannon burnishing his mystique. According to the WaPo article he was vice chairman of a company that worked in conjunction with MMORPGs, and was brought on partly to burnish its reputation when he was already a Hollywood financier; it goes on to say he helped find them some PE financing, which could mean he learned the bare minimum about the business to effectively market it, or could mean he did some content-free schmoozing among existing connections.
is breaking bannon the new breaking bad
Athenian Parrhesia
Also known as "contrarian's disease"?