Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

recent posts

about

An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Plain old conceit

  • Vassily Grossman’s Noisy post-Soviet Interlopers

    I have begun reading Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal, his story of an encircled Soviet army formation written in the summer of 1942. Although it was his first novel from the war, I have only come to it after reading Stalingrad (originally published as For a Just Cause in 1952) and Life and Fate, which…

  • Gender Critical Feminist Praxis Harasses Natal Women: An Application of Bayes’ Rule to Bathroom Exclusion

    No doubt many of my readers are aware that there is a stream of feminism, which calls itself “gender critical”, that rejects the idea that transgender women are women and aims to “protect” cis women from having these women in women-only spaces. In the 1970s and 1990s this manifested as an internecine feminist turf war…

  • My Year in Gaming

    The year comes to an end, and as I do every year I turn my mind to the year’s successes, its excessive slaughters and magical high points: a review of my year in gaming. Unfortunately 2018 was something of a year of false starts. I began the year by ending my Mutant: Year Zero campaign,…

  • Under the Rule of Awful Men

    They’ve taken the throne They’re under my skin Patience won’t be the end of me They’re thick as thieves … Beware little girl, The world’s full of bad men Beware little boy, The world’s full of bad men – Bad Men, the Eden House Trump’s latest disgusting faux-pas, in which he told a 7 year…

  • Australian Conservatism’s Existential Crisis

    Recent events in Australian politics suggest to me that Australian conservatism’s ideological conflicts are coming to a boil. For my foreign reader(s), the situation is roughly this: The Liberal party (actually our conservative party) had a contest for the leadership of the party which was ostensibly between a right wing nutjob, Peter Dutton, and our…

  • Strange Revelations About our Orange Overlords

    By now the series of indictments and convictions of Trump’s hangers-on are old news, but there are some things about these stories that I am finding really mystifying, and/or confirmatory of the suspicions I have always had about super rich people. Trump’s hangers-on give the appearance of being super-rich, and they’re all attached to the…

  • But unlike black women, centaurs do not exist: Revisiting the Tuvel Transracialism Controversy After a Year

    The New York Times reports on a sexual harassment scandal at New York University, with a bizarre twist: a lesbian feminist philosopher, Avitall Ronell, has been found guilty of sexual and physical harassment of a gay postgraduate student. As is typical of these cases, the graduate student waited until he got his PhD and a…

  • The Foundation for a Smoke Free World: Big Tobacco’s Latest Sleazy Trick

    In September 2017 Philip Morris International (PMI) – one of the world’s largest cigarette companies – introduced a new foundation to the world: The Foundation for a Smoke Free World. This foundation will receive $80 million per year from PMI for the next 12 years and devote this money to researching “smoking cessation, smoking harm…

  • Is Transracialism Okay?

    Trigger warning: Long rant; gender and racial theory; I may use the qualifier “cis-” in a non-ironic way[1]; Since saying “male genitalia” or “female genitalia” is apparently bad, I may use the words “cunt” and “cock” to refer to the things they refer to; Aussie pride; excessive footnotes[2]; dead naming of dead dudes[3]; anti-Americanism; as…

  • My 2015 Gaming Year in Review

    Another year has come to a close, and as I relax on the laziest day of the Japanese year, I naturally think about all the great gaming I have done over the past year, and my plans for next year. Although I only have one gaming group, which we loosely refer to as Team WTF,…