Re: Guest Post - ACE 2018

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Ah yes Bertolt Brecht, the Steve Bannon of his day.


Posted by: Cryptic ned | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 8:57 AM
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I missed the emoji thread, is this how we're supposed to do it?


Posted by: 📖🔥? 🐂💩 | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 9:02 AM
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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????


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 9:04 AM
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3: I would guess Adrian Cheok, the program committee chair, who seems like a charming guy.


Posted by: potchkeh | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 9:20 AM
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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.


Posted by: Cryptic ned | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 9:29 AM
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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.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 9:42 AM
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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.


Posted by: AcademicLurker | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 9:48 AM
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"show up to speak at a video games conference"

Stupid keyboard.


Posted by: AcademicLurker | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 9:49 AM
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I wonder what sensors they have on the exhaust pipes.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 10:01 AM
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Gam/er/gate?

Yes, Bannon has quite a lot to say about ethics in video games journalism.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 10:10 AM
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Or no sex with a self-driving car.


Posted by: Ginger Yellow | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 10:13 AM
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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.)


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 10:14 AM
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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.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 10:15 AM
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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.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 10:40 AM
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The video game player demographic is totally going to ruin the shirtless, muscular, gay porn thing the Nazis used to have going.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 10:44 AM
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Gamers are his people, definitely. #notallgamers, but still...


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 10:54 AM
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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.


Posted by: Cyrus | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 10:55 AM
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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.


Posted by: Chet Murthy | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 2:41 PM
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7.2: Sex *in* a self driving hire car by the last people to use it before you, another reason to eschew them!


Posted by: dairy queen | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 6:35 PM
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Michael, could you at least clean my seat?


Posted by: Opinionated K.I.T.T. | Link to this comment | 11-19-18 6:43 PM
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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.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 11-20-18 5:40 PM
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Did they stop using sheets there?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 11-20-18 5:48 PM
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You only need some straw, a counterpane, and a partner.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 11-20-18 6:47 PM
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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!


Posted by: JFK | Link to this comment | 11-20-18 6:57 PM
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I have questions about the metric on which the contest is judged.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 11-20-18 7:17 PM
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So, no Bannon after all: http://www.montanakaimin.com/news/breaking-bannon-unavailable-missoula-debate-cancelled/article_027611f2-f7dd-11e8-94d6-d3994d81b475.html


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 12- 4-18 12:27 PM
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"a keynote speaker at a joint conference on sex robots this month"


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 12- 4-18 12:29 PM
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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.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 12- 4-18 12:36 PM
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is breaking bannon the new breaking bad


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 12- 4-18 9:56 PM
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Athenian Parrhesia

Also known as "contrarian's disease"?


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 12- 4-18 10:00 PM
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