I realize that most of you are probably feeling as Rooshed-out as I am, and would like to move on to posts with a very low percentage of Roosh content, if any at all.
But I feel I would be remiss not to bring to your attention a post by our old friend, the urban cowboy/white nationalist (on paper) Davis M.J. Aurini, published on Roosh’s Return of Kings site on Friday. Entitled “Why International Meetup Day Was Cancelled,” it is perhaps the dumbest thing anyone has yet or will ever write on the subject.
Mr. Aurini starts off by positing the existence of a vast, Australia-wide media conspiracy against his buddy Roosh, a conspiracy showing the “extreme cunning” of the enemies of all that is good and true:
During Gamgergate [sic] it was revealed that the gaming press were coordinating behind the scenes, deciding which topics would be discussed and promoted, and which ones would be censored and dropped into the memory hole. Given that on February 2nd six nearly identical articles were published throughout the Australian press within hours of one another, all describing Return of Kings as a “Rape Group,” it is a near certainty that the Australian press is similarly controlled by collusion between the reporters on secret message boards.
Emphasis mine.
His proof of this conspiracy is a blurry image showing that a number of Australian papers RAN ARTICLES ABOUT ROOSH WITH IDENTICAL TITLES on the same day.
Which might be evidence of a vast conspiracy amongst Australian journalists except for the fact that all of the newspapers in question are owned by the same media conglomerate and regularly run the exact same articles as one another, much in the way that newspapers across the US regularly run identical stories by the Associated Press.
Indeed, if you look carefully at the blurry proof Aurini offers as proof of conspiracy, you’ll see that some of the papers in question also ran identical articles on what Myers and David Jones — apparently big Australian department store chains? — are planning to do to usher in a new fashion season.
I’m pretty sure that even the most cunning SJWs could not dream up a conspiracy so deliciously eeeevil that it would require not only media manipulation of news about Roosh but also unanimity of coverage on Australian department store fashion as well.
Don’t anyone mention this to Aurini, but I have proof that NEARLY IDENTICAL “WIZARD OF ID” COMICS are running today in newspapers around the world! COLLUSION AT ITS MOST NEFARIOUS!!!
Aurini then offers this, well, unique explanation of the behavior of Roosh’s enemies, which for some reason involves flocks of lizard people.
The behaviour we’ve witnessed over the past week is perfectly explained by flocks of narcissists, organized online, exercising vicious cunning with a human’s capacity for abstract thought. They are the metaphorical lizard people, dressed in skin suits, unreasonable and unrepentant.
Lizard people, you say?
Their goal is pandemonium. So long as it is chaotic, degraded, cheap, infectious, and ugly, they will endorse it, and they will use any tactic to achieve it: violence, lies, false philosophies, and pretend victimhood. They will be crying and vulnerable one moment, and coldly murderous the next. They are vicious, they are legion, and they’re organized as only animals who have known sin could possibly be.
We see you.
So apparently Aurini has discovered peyote?
Aurini continues bumbling his way through more failed metaphors, at one point declaring that
Through introspection we will hear the voice of our conductor, and learn what song it is that we are meant to sing.
After saying a whole lot of nothing, he winds up the piece with a warning for all of us lizard people who’ve been so darn mean to poor old Roosh.
A final word for all of those who attacked us, slandered us, and threatened us; we, the men who would defend you against those who would enslave and exploit you; we who fight, not for ourselves, but for the future.
Alas, Aurini’s “final word” is actually several hundred.
We will remember who you are, and we are a larger chorus than you know.
That ex-boyfriend who stole your heart? One of us. That charming married man at your office, with the beautiful wife? One of us. That wise mentor who helped you more than you’ll than you’ll ever know? One of us.
Huh. I rather doubt that the lesbian cultural history professor I had as an advisor in grad school — if anyone was ever my mentor, it was probably her — reads Return of Kings.
The battle for civilization will be neither quick nor easy. We will win, but not without great struggle and many casualties amongst those who refused to pick a side. So remember something: when you or your womenfolk are being viciously assaulted and raped by third world savages whom you defended while decrying us—or by some gestapo thug, whom you empowered to oppress us, their breath rancid with garlic and rotting teeth—
That is the future you chose by standing against men of virtue.
Yep, another far-right fantasy of a righteous apocalypse that will put all of us SJWs in their place. I’m just a little surprised to see Aurini — a white nationalist Holocaust denier who has more than a few kind things to say about Hitler — depicting the Gestapo as the bad guys.
David Icke read Aurini’s column, shook his head, and thought, “This clown’s gone off the rails.”
@Bernardo
Hey, no problem, glad to help!
I must confess with shame that I haven’t read any of Oesterheld’s works *hangs head in shame*
El Eternauta is mostly regarded as his top work, though, and its main character has *some* points in common with Mort Cinder.
The story of Eternauta is usually considered a metaphor of politics, with an alien invasion representing the State taking arms against the citizens (as happened often during the 20th century in Argentina), and the resistance is always in groups rather than one big hero saving everyone. It is also a fine critique of the use of terror to run societies based on violence.
If you like his other work, I think you should definitely take a look at this one, in fact I’m already thinking I should, too!
I think we’re going to have to be patient with Civ 6 — Firaxis just released XCOM 2, after all!
And it is glorious. Never before have I ragequit with such a profound sense of can’t wait to play again jitters.
@Bernardo:
I second Luzbelitx, reading El Eternauta is a must if you have the chance. Too bad there’s not an English version yet, because it really would be a fine recommendation for anyone in this site!
@Luz:
Do it; you’ll love it, I’m sure. While you’re at it, I also recommend you to look out for the book “Mas Allá de Gelo”, which collects many of his short stories; most of them are priceless. Even Clarke, Asimov and Bradbury could learn a thing or two from him (at least in my opinion, of course).
XCOM 2 seems promising, but the framerate chug is nigh unforgivable. I see no reason why my box that runs Mass Effect and Dragon Age smoothly should be choking on an XCOM game. XCOM EU runs incredibly smooth, so I don’t know why they went so overboard with the graphical upgrades.
Between that, and the fact that I’m sharing XCOM 2 with my brother, I’ve decided to finish XCOM Long War instead.
@ Luz
Thanks! I guess I’m going to go for it, the story sounds like it’s gonna be right up my alley, and I’ve read about the eery prescience with which he predicted a lot of aspects of Argentinian society under military dictatorship nearly twenty years before the fact. I’m always interested in good pop culture’s entanglements in politics and history, so I’ll probably add this to my slowly growing comic book collection.
@Orion
Long War is still a project of mine. Need more time.
Also for time reasons, I could only dip a toe in XCOM 2, but it’s great! I had the same framerate problem despite a quite new computer, not the superduper rig, but good enough. It helped me a lot to reduce Ambient Occlusion and AA to the minimal setting (FXAA and Tile AO); you can also disable it entirely without much of a loss in graphic quality.
I think, though, that this should be patched; everybody seems to have that problem.
@ Kreator:
Thanks, will do. I’ll also look out for the stories, although it seems from your comment that those were not translated into English. I also can’t find a German translation.
I stopped at Civ 4. To me, that’s the canonical Civ.
That said, I was a big fan of Alpha Centauri, so Beyond Earth is something I should probably check out.
Stop living in fantasyland, Aurini. Your followers are like you and Roosh: most of them are unmarried and unpartnered; none of them possess charm or wisdom.
(Or happiness.)
Oh yeah, petty complaint about the new diplomatic system. I’ve sort of been working on a sponsor mod for my own entertainment, and the new diplomatic system means so… much… typing…
You need praise and condemn lines for every single thing they have an opinion on. That’s a lot, and I’ve been kind of reaching on getting a character-appropriate condemn line for some of them.
Don’t. At least not with the expectation to get something similar to AC. I agree that it’s not “Civ V in space”, but it’s closer to Civ V than to AC.
Their obsession with HR is telling. Most employees won’t have to deal with them much beyond things like routine paperwork regarding benefits or tax forms.
If you’re dealing with HR a lot, it’s because you’re antagonizing your co-workers or managers or you’re harassing someone or otherwise violating company policies.
The only people who I ever see railing against HR are harassers and victims of harassment. 3 guesses which group manurespherians fall into.
Oh yeah I saw this on Saturday. As I wrote, Aurini is as good a writer as he is a documentary filmmaker. I stand by that.
@Bernardo:
You’re welcome, and you’re right, I doubt that book has been translated 🙁 That said, since I’m such a fanboy and I don’t know when will be the next time I’ll be able to bring up Oesterheld in some sort of proper context… Here I have one of my favorite texts from that book, which was thankfully short enough to translate for everybody’s enjoyment:
Science
Somewhere in the vast sands of Mars there’s a very strange and very small crystal.
If you pick up the crystal and peek through it, you’ll see the bone behind your eye, and deeper inside lights that go on and off, sick lights that don’t manage to burn, they are your thoughts. If you then press the crystal in the direction of the middle axis, your thoughts will acquire dazzling clarity and accuracy, you’ll discover at once the key to the whole Universe, you’ll finally be able to answer even the last why.
Somewhere in Mars that crystal can be found.
In order to find it we must examine the endless sands grain by grain.
We know as well that, as soon as we find it and try to pick it up, the crystal will disintegrate, we will only have left some dust between our fingers.
All that we know, but we search for it anyway.
Also, I for one welcome our metaphorical reptilian overlords.
@ Kreator
That is so cool, thank you so much! What a beautiful vignette. Really, thank you, that made my day.
@ artor
nutter (n.)
“one who gathers nuts,” late 15c., from nut + -er. Meaning “crazy person” is British slang, 1958, from nut + er. Nuttery “mental hospital” is attested from 1931; earlier it meant “place for storing nuts” (1881).
nut (n.)
Meaning “crazy person, crank” is attested from 1903 (British form nutter first attested 1958; nut-case is from 1959); see nuts.
nuts (adj.)
“crazy,” 1846, from earlier be nutts upon “be very fond of” (1785), which is possibly from nuts (plural noun) “any source of pleasure” (1610s), from nut (q.v.). Sense influenced probably by metaphoric application of nut to “head” (1846, as in to be off one’s nut “be insane,” 1860). Nuts as a derisive retort is attested from 1931. Connection with the slang “testicle” sense has tended to nudge it toward taboo. “On the N.B.C. network, it is forbidden to call any character a nut; you have to call him a screwball.” [“New Yorker,” Dec. 23, 1950] “Please eliminate the expression ‘nuts to you’ from Egbert’s speech.” [Request from the Hays Office regarding the script of “The Bank Dick,” 1940] This desire for avoidance accounts for the euphemism nerts (c. 1925).
I love etymonline.com. For when you don’t have access to the OED’s etymology tables, there’s etymonline!
Just realized that Aurini meant conductor in the sense of ‘one who directs an orchestra’. I’ve been trying to figure out how trains fit into this mess for hours.
@dreadnought:
First: One presumes that your online name has nothing at all, no nothing! to do with this statement.
Second: Although ship-of-the-line is indeed a great tech, and I love the sight-and-speed bonuses you get with Exploration (civ 5 social policy tree), the Great Lighthouse, and with playing as Elizabeth, I tend to go Dido. The free harbors mean every coastal city has a money-making capital connection from the moment I invent the wheel. The re-investment of that money from early times means I get to the renaissance and early-industrial earlier than other civs. I can focus first on science buildings since I’m already getting a bit more gold than I would have (and 25% of a city’s early gold isn’t going to be more than 3gp anyway), I incur vastly fewer money-upkeep costs from roads – saving at least 3g per inland city (when I make any inland cities at all), saving the 2gp for harbor maintenance for coastal cities, and saving all those turns working which the workers can put into other tile improvements and all those hammers which can go into other buildings.
Really, I think Dido is the bomb, b/c I believe in the power of compound interest.
However, there’s a mod out now I want to try that introduces a new civ based on the Wabanaki. No free harbor, but the special building is a lighthouse that also functions as a harbor – so, hey, free harbor if you build a lighthouse. Doesn’t give it to you from the instant you make the city, but still pretty good. On top of that, they have a unique tile improvement (a fishing village, I think). It can only be built on land that borders water, but captures adjacent coast tiles, lake tiles, and land-that-boarders-water tiles. I haven’t tried it yet, so i don’t know if it captures inland land tiles that are adjacent to rivers, but it might.
In any case, the ability to snatch up territory (not infinitely – the fishing villages cannot be built adjacent to a fishing village, and must be built on a tile already in your territory) combined with the ability to get early and easy access to harbors combined much of what I like about Dido with much of what I like about the Shoshone.
Of course, you never get to stuff “Carthago delenda est” down Caesar’s throat, but then you can’t have everything.
As for peaceful game + naval tech ===> total warmonger…
…isn’t that what everybody does? Isn’t that where we got the saying:
I read those snippets, and this is the only thing I imagine could have been going through Aurini’s head:
http://i1307.photobucket.com/albums/s598/Paradoxys3DS/delete%20later_zpscawqahe8.jpg
And I feel so dirty and cringy. *shudder*
We need to chip in so we can get Aurini this shirt.
There’s a special place in Hell for me and it’s called the motherfucking throne.
#SintoWin
I laughed so hard I coughed up more phlegm. How very dare you entertain me so while I’m still sick?
@Miss Andry
The shocking twist is that our new metaphorical reptilian overlords is ourselves! DUN… Dun…dunnn…
How will humanity save itself from a group of humans who are metaphorically lizard people dressed as humans which makes them a part of humanity so effectively humanity is struggling against itself? Visit ROK to read more pseudo-intellectual piffle to find out!
@GhostBird
Well, trains would certainly make his screed more entertaining.
Hey, that means it’s up to us to do the job?
http://ericdye.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Challenge-Accepted-Meme.jpg