Tag: #GamerGate

An apology to GamerGate

SJWs always lie, and sooner or later, the honest non-SJW is eventually going to realize that so long as he, or in this case, she, pays enough attention:

My name is Sofie Liv, i’m a young woman from Denmark, I love playing video games and sometimes review them.

And I feel like I owe you all the greatest apology. I’m ashamed, and I want to apologies. I can only apologies for myself so here goes.

We all know about the Zoe Quinn and Sarkeesian thing that happened so long ago. Back then as I was just minding my own buisness with my web review show, reviewing the nerd things I love so much on the Agonybooth, I was given information that these women had been threatened, that they had been driven into misery, that gamergate was behind all of it, that all these second grade photoshopped images were proof of it, that these women were doxxed and got rape threats on a daily basis.

And like a complete sucker, I bought it! I suckered it up, I bought into it, and I am ashamed. No part of me would believe that someone would downright lie about rape threats, it didn’t even occour to me that they would lie about their own mental state, because no part of me could ever believe that someone would lie about those things.

Then slowly arguments started crawling up, I raised my eyebrow at quite a bit of the things Sarkeesian openly said, I had to point out. “That isn’t right.”

At that point I had taken a new stand… I am not with Sarkeesian, but neither am I with Gamergate, I think they both did wrong. Still, stupid me hadn’t done prober fact checking, but just taken peoples word for these things happening.

So many people in my circle, so many people following me pointed to the harrashment of these women as plain fact…. I now know this is untrue. Now I have finally done the prober actual research and found the sources, and I know i’ve been lied to… and as a sucker I suckered it up. I called Gamergate things, hinted at you guys being imoral, I switched from reviewing movies to review another medium that I love, video games, and called it a stand against the idea women can’t be gamers… an idea I now know, doesn’t even exsist!

Now my game reviews has been turned into a stand up against the Sarkeesian ideals, because now I actually feel it’s important to stand up to her and call her bullshit for what it is… It’s bullshit. She’s full of bullshit, and I can only apologies that I bought so easily into it as a brain dead sheep.

What I want to say with all of this is that, I think you people have done absolutely fantastic. In spite of all this bad rep you still managed to stand up and stand true to what this is actually about.

Apology accepted. This is why it is so important for us to stand our ground. This is why it is so important for us to speak the truth, and keep speaking the truth, whether anyone believes us or not, whether the media calls us names or not, and whether people offer us friendship and approval or not.

The one thing SJWs absolutely rely upon is honest people NOT calling them out. They don’t expect to convince everyone, they merely want to silence anyone who threatens their false narratives. So stop playing along with them. Stop sitting there in mute disapproval of their lies and misrepresentations, stand up, and declare “that is not true!”

SJWs are the sons and daughter of the Father of Lies. They are the People of the Lie and they can only be defeated by the Sword of Truth.

Anti-GamerGate bomb threat

Fortunately for the world, I can assure everyone that the 8th Wonder of the World, Nero’s hair, is safe:

The
event began at 9:30 pm and the local bar appeared to be having a good
time until approximately 11:30 pm when the local police received a
report from an unknown source about a bomb threat at Local 16. The
threat was made over Twitter according to the local police station. This
led to an evacuation, which took place at approximately a quarter after
midnight. Sources at the location that left prior to the evacuation say
there was no knowledge of the threat prior to their departure at about
11:45 pm.

The whole affair was initially run as a fire drill, and everyone was
able to get out without much issue, allowing the police to search the
premises afterwards. By all accounts and video footage, the people were
all calm about the events as it was on going.

After the investigation was done, everyone was allowed back into the
bar and, according to people at the event, there were several free
rounds. There is no information on who made the threat, and anyone calling
for investigations of particular people are being premature at this
moment in time.

This was the threat, which someone promptly archived:

I have multiple bombs planted around the area #GGinDC is being held in. If #GGinDC is not evacuated within the next hour, it will detonate.  

A number of people seem to think Arthur Chu was somehow involved, but I find it difficult to believe that he could be that stupid.

A misstep on the long march

David Futrelle’s jumping on my failure to properly articulate my statement on what I believe #GamerGate to be is a good example of why the written word is reliably more powerful in the medium- and long-term than the visual medium:

Yesterday, I wrote about Vox Day’s extravagantly evasive — yet highly revealing — interview with David Pakman. But the interview also featured a few striking moments of candor. One of these came when Day — a sometime gave developer as well as the biggest asshole in Sci Fi — offered his answer to the question: “What is Gamergate really about?”

Suggesting that the issue of “corruption in game journalism” was little more than “the spark that set the whole thing off,” Day declared that

    what Gamergate is fundamentally about is the right of people to design, develop and play games that they want to design, develop and play without being criticized for it.

Which is an. er, interesting perspective, as there is in fact no “right” to be immune from criticism.

If you write a book, if you make a movie, if you post a comment on the internet — you should be ready for it to be criticized. Because that’s how free speech works. That’s how art works. And that’s how ideas work.

It’s too bad David Pakman didn’t jump on that or I would have corrected myself. But Futrelle is absolutely right for once. I shouldn’t have phrased it that way. It was a mistake. What I should have said, and what I believe, was this:

What GamerGate is fundamentally about is the right of people to design,
develop and play games that they want to design, develop and play.

Period. Although I will add that it would certainly be nice if we could simply design, develop, and play games without being harassed in the process. Now, as is normal for the average SJW, Futrelle hasn’t really thought this through beyond the chance to momentarily try to portray me as being anti-free speech. (DISQUALIFY!) It’s not a cheap shot, given the quote I handed him, but it is a silly one, because I have twelve years of evidence demonstrating that I am fairly extreme on the pro-free speech side, whereas Futrelle is considerably less staunch in that regard.

Of course, they will keep saying “you said it” and “no takebacks”, or as PopeHat rather absurdly tried to insist, “you can retcon all you like”. But that would only convince people if I had no previous statements on free speech, not to mention one of the more lightest moderating policies of any popular blog.

And it’s very easy for us to turn this particular line of attack around on them. In response, I asked Futrelle the following question:

A question for you re your two articles. Do you support the right of gamers to tell women they should not develop games?


It should be interesting to see what his response is. And if he fails to respond, well, that will be even more telling. The important thing to keep in mind is that no one exchange is final. There will always be tactical mistakes, missteps, and dead ends. They will happen, so don’t try to hide them, just admit them, clarify, and move on.

At the root, of course, this is just more SJW word games. When game journalists attack gamers and game developers, they call it criticism. When #GamerGate responds in kind, they call it harassment.

UPDATE: Futrelle responds, knowing perfectly well how one could hammer him for the statement.

David Futrelle ‏@DavidFutrelle
@voxday They have the right to say it, though not to threaten or harass; others have the right to call them out for their misogyny.

Now, if I were an SJW, this would be my cue to point and shriek that “MISOGYNIST DAVID FUTRELLE SAYS WOMEN SHOULDN’T DEVELOP GAMES!” But I’m not and I won’t bother, because it doesn’t matter.

Help the Honey Badgers

The Honey Badgers were kicked out of Calgary Expo, apparently for the thoughtcrime of supporting GamerGate by selling GG t-shirts. Here is another chance to strike back at the SJWs:

The Honey Badger Brigade is now seeking legal advice to hold the Calgary Expo staff accountable for their acts of abuse and discrimination against us. We have made attempts in the past week to diffuse the situation by attempting to contact Mr. Kelly Dowd, owner of the Calgary Expo. We have received no response.

On April 17th 2015, the Honey Badger Brigade was forcibly evicted and our booth ordered removed, despite our operating well within the rules of the Expo and it’s policies of conduct. We were not given a chance to dispute the alleged complaints. The organization violated its own stated policy in the process and has released conflicting claims regarding its reasons for our removal.

Those claims indicate that we were removed due to our Men’s Rights Activism and unpopular view of modern feminism. Therefore it is our belief that the actions taken by the Calgary Expo staff were of a political nature and contravene the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in particular freedom of conscience, freedom of thought and freedom of association.

If so, this eviction was based in discrimination, an act that has defamed and abused us. While we would prefer to settle this outside of a courtroom, we are prepared to take every legal action needed to ensure that ourselves and other future exhibitors will be treated equally, and without such a denial of their fundamental human rights.

All funds submitted to this fundraiser will be used for legal costs and costs directly related to our ejection from the Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo. We will be keeping track of expenses and providing expense reports as we’re able.

If you’re a member of the Dread Ilk, Rabid Puppies, or #GamerGate, I’d encourage you to start a little coffee fund. Nothing much, maybe save your change or devote $5 per month to support the little causes such as these that are going to continue to arise. If we all do that, and judiciously apply this financial ammunition, the force multiplication of doing it at the same time at critical junctures can have a disproportionate impact.

I’m not going to bring up every little thing, but if one seems particularly useful or hits in a critical area, I will bring it to your attention. The Honey Badgers are significant because they are being attacked primarily to prevent the GamerGate virus from spreading into other potentially anti-SJW women’s groups.

Remember, the SJWs always focus their ire and their fire at the weak links and the inroads. That’s why they put pressure on the likes of Annie Bellet, not Steve Rzasa or Tom Kratman, to withdraw from the Hugo shortlist. If we can continue to knock them back at those points of resistance, they’ll crumble much more rapidly than they will from steady, constant pressure.

The virus spreads

Now #GamerGate is spreading into fitness and media. It’s a pity David Pakman didn’t stick to the topic at hand, as I made a prediction about #GamerGate that is already beginning to come true. The anti-SJW offensive is spreading out from games into books and other industries.

The SJWs took the cultural high ground. But due to their being centralized, they have a very limited ability to respond to the 4GW tactics being utilized by the various #XGates.

Pakman Show interview

Not the greatest performance by me. I was taken more than a little by surprise, as I thought we were going to be discussing GamerGate and the Hugo Awards, not op/ed columns I wrote 10 or 12 years ago and didn’t even recall immediately.

But that’s how they play the game. I’m not the least bit upset or annoyed about it. I could have shut it down once it became clear that David Pakman had set up a bait-and-switch, but I was interested to see just how far he would take us off subject. I find it amusing that the headlines are focused on my supposedly “controversial statements” when saying that some races are smarter than others is no more debatable than saying that some races are taller than others.

And I am not stating unequivocally that homosexuality is a birth defect for the obvious reason that we don’t know with any degree of certainty that it is an immutable condition determined at birth. But if it is, then what else would you realistically call a condition that significantly reduces the odds that a creature will be able to propagate its genes?

Anyhow, the interview turned out to be an obvious hit piece, as Roosh demonstrates with this screencap of the original video title.

And just to be clear, I was told this would be an interview about #GamerGate and the gaming industry.

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 4:30 PM
From: VD
Subject: show appearance

Message Body:
You tweeted at me and asked me if I would appear on the show. That’s fine, you can contact me via this email.

Regards,
Vox

Terrific, would love to set something up. We do our interviews via skype
video. If that works in principle it would be great to set something up
for sooner than later. Would you be available this Friday at 11am
eastern time? I’d love to discuss your views on gamergate and just more
broadly how you general views inform your views on gamergate and the
gaming industry. It will be a casual discussion, likely 25 or so
minutes, just between you and I.


best,


David Pakman
Host / The David Pakman Show / www.davidpakman.com

And then there is this:


6h6 hours ago

Today’s interview with is up. He admits to sex without consent, says gay is a birth defect, more
From the interview (17:30)

Vox Day: Have you always obtained absolute formal written consent every time you’ve had sex?
David Pakman: No.

A statement by the Literally Wus

Try to read this statement about RavenCon with a straight face. I dare you:

A statement from Frank Wu and Brianna Wu about RavenCon

This weekend, we are both invited to be guests of honor at
RavenCon. Every time we’re asked to be GoHs at a convention, we consider
it a huge responsibility. We take our work as guests seriously – both
in representing the convention, and participating in programming in a
way that is entertaining to attendees. Our long track record of
professionalism speaks for itself.

The toll that the hate
group Gamergate has taken on our family has been well documented in
press, interviews and documentaries. Brianna has received 83 death
threats in the last 8 months, and Gamergate regularly disrupts her
speaking invitations at colleges. We’ve tried to stand firm to our
beliefs and march forward.

Sadly, the same reactionary anger has
spread into the science fiction community with the hijacking of year’s
Hugo awards, deliberately sabotaging them for bitter, regressive
political purposes. Many of the forums that orchestrate harassment
against Brianna and other women in the game industry have avowed
supporters of the Hugo hijacking, many of whom participated in the
voting and strongly support Vox Day.

What makes RavenCon
particularly uncomfortable for us is that a number of those attending
directly orchestrated or benefited from the hijacking. We’ve heard
numbers as high as six.

Frank Wu has won four Hugo awards. They
are near and dear to our family. And we agree with John Scalzi, Connie
Willis, George R. R. Martin and others about the travesty this has been.
The hijackers have contempt for the awards while also desperately
wanting the legitimacy they feel it would grant them.

To put it
bluntly, attending this con makes us tremendously uncomfortable. But we
agreed to attend, long before Gamergate, and we will follow through with
that professional commitment.

Neither of us wish to discuss the
Hugo hijacking with any person responsible for this atrocious action.
Both of us would consider it a professional courtesy if you didn’t
attend Brianna’s Gamergate panel tomorrow.

Let’s all enjoy what
brings us together, rather than focus on what brings us apart. There’s
plenty that science fiction fans can agree on. We hope we can all enjoy
RavenCon.

Frank and Brianna Wu

I know when I hear about John Flynt, the first thing I think about is his “long track record of
professionalism”. Not about his pretending to be a woman, his pretending to flee his house, his being caught autoharassing, his failure as a game developer, or his ludicrous, but modestly successful attempts to promote himself as a victim of misogyny. As for the 83 claimed death threats, I would assume Mr. Flynt himself likely accounted for at least 80 of them. But it would be interesting to hear someone count how many lies Mr. Flynt tells in his #GamerGate panel; I’d put the over/under north of 30.

And I’m guessing every single one of these six logical fallacies so often relied upon by SJWs will be on display.

Kicking Puppies makes Vivian sad

I wonder how many SJWs have the wits to grasp what that picture indicates? In any event, there are two more SJW responses worth noting this week, including another heartfelt soliloquy from David Gerrold as well as an absolutely revelatory response by John Scalzi.

David Gerrold first writes an open letter to Brad Torgersen:

You have hurt the Sasquan committee. These are people who have spent years planning, campaigning, bidding, working, preparing, and anticipating the best convention they can imagine. You don’t know what goes on behind the scenes of a convention, how many moving parts there are, how many people have to rise to the occasion. There’s programming, guest relations, membership registration, con suite, green room, sound and video, tech of all kinds, finances, insurance, security, special needs, cat-herding, and more. Everyone who takes on one of those jobs does so out of a love of the field — and everyone who was looking forward to a party is now hurting because there’s a turd in the punch bowl — and you are perceived as the guy who dropped it there. You and Larry Correia.

And you have hurt all the fans who will be attending, all the fans who wil be following events online. Instead of the convention being about a celebration of our common interests in SF, it is now about you and Larry Correia and a few others associated with you. You have pulled the convention off purpose and you have hurt the fans who wanted to have a good old-fashioned happy Worldcon. There have been many of those.

You have hurt your colleagues in the field. There are people who have declined to be award presenters. Others have asked to have their works removed from the ballot. You have hurt the integrity of the awards.

And then promptly deletes Brad’s response to his open letter:

And once again, Brad Togersen misses the point. I’ve deleted his msgs. I’m done with you, Brad. At long last, have you no decency? Have you no shame?

Do they still wonder why we laugh at their disingenuous calls for “honest dialogue” and “debate”? I thought Brad’s response was considerably longer than it needed to be. “We don’t care” would have sufficed. Although I suppose it is amusing to see that Gerrold still doesn’t realize that what he thought was a punch bowl has been a toilet for a decade.

Speaking of deletions, Johnny Con first made fun of sexually abused children in the process of attacking Larry Correia, then belatedly deleted his post.

[On second thought, this was not well-argued and I’m withdrawing it until I can more fairly and accurately make the point I want to make. Will update when I do. In the meantime, note to self: Don’t write screeds when operating under lack of sleep — JS]

But not before I happened to notice this interesting big of psychological projection: “Day is a perfectly lucid person. He’s a fine con man, in other words, and Correia and Torgersen fell for his con.“

The choice of words is revealing. It was nearly a year ago when I wrote about SF’s biggest con artist: “Sure you’re smiling, Johnny. That’s why you stopped reporting your
annual numbers in 2013. That’s why you shut down your Quantcast reports.
That’s why you don’t post a traffic meter anywhere on your site. That’s
why you threatened to quit SFWA…. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find your constant
snake oil salesmanship genuinely amusing. You’re the Bernie Madoff of
science fiction and you’ve got the Participation Hugo to prove it.”

To say nothing of two more Hugo nominations than Arthur C. Clarke, and seven more than Iain Banks and Terry Pratchett combined. As it happens, thanks to the Dread Ilk and the Puppies, I am rapidly approaching the 2 million monthly pageviews that Johnny Con falsely told Lightspeed Magazine he had back in 2010, when he actually had 305,000. The difference is that if I say I have two million monthly pageviews, you can be 100 percent certain that I do. I do not lie on the Internet. It is very, very stupid to lie on the Internet. Johnny also let Larry Correia have it for Larry’s refusal to let little
Johnny be friends with him despite Johnny’s repeated overtures.

Also, can we please now stop pretending that this whole Puppy nonsense began for any other reason than that once upon a time, Larry Correia thought he was going to win an award and was super pissed he didn’t, and decided that the reason he didn’t had to be a terrible, awful conspiracy against people just like him (a conservative! Writing “fun” fiction!), as opposed to, oh, the voters deciding they just plain liked something and someone else better? Can we stop pretending that a fellow who practically begs people to nominate his work three years running, hiding the begging behind an oh-so-thin veil of “let’s stick it to the SJWs!” doesn’t desperately crave the external validation that he thinks the award will bring? Can we stop pretending that this is anything other than a grown up child stomping his feet, screaming look at me, look at me, loooook at meeeeee? Because, come on, folks. We’re well past the point of genteel here. Let’s call it for what it is.

(And yes, I know, Correia declined his nomination for the Hugo this year. Let’s talk about that for a minute, shall we. It takes a very special sort of fellow to allow himself to be on a slate to get nominated, marshal people to nominate him for the award as part of a slate, and then decline — and write a big ol’ puffed-up piece about why he was declining, social justice warriors, blows against the empire, blah blah blah, yadda yadda. Yes, nice he declined the nomination and let someone else on the ballot. But it’s a little like wanting credit for rescuing a baby squirrel when you knocked the baby squirrel out of the tree to begin with.)

To be clear, the Puppy nonsense now isn’t just about Correia really really really wanting validation in the form of a rocketship; Day’s stealing the Puppy movement right out from under Correia and Torgerson has changed things up quite a bit, and it’s certainly true at this point that this little campaign is about a bunch of people trying to shit in the punchbowl so no one else can have any punch. But at the beginning, it was Correia hurt and angry that someone else got an award he thought was his, and deciding that it was stolen from him, rather than being something that was never his to begin with. And I’m sorry for him that it didn’t go his way. But actual grown human beings deal with disappointment in ways other than Correia has.

Correia can bluster about this all he likes; he’s a lovely online bully, and certainly he wishes to project that he’s a Tough Guy Saying Tough Things, Toughly™. But, eh. If he was actually who he wishes he could project himself as, the Sad Puppy thing would have never happened. And, ironically, he would be better positioned to win the awards he craved, because he wouldn’t be seen as a petulant whiner about such things. As it is, all we can do for him now is let him show us on the cartoon face pain chart how much Worldcon hurt him, and offer him soothing hugs until all his pain goes away.

See, if only Larry had only treated Johnny Con more nicely, then he would have won the award that he so badly craves. Why won’t he be friends, why?

Puppies on NPR

KW listened in and heard NPR doing their usual bang-up job on Sad Puppies. For me, the most intriguing aspect of the media coverage has been the near-complete lack of interest in actually talking to anyone involved in the actual news-making activity. I mean, I am about as cynical a media skeptic as it is possible to be, and yet somehow, these journalistic incompetents haven’t even managed to rise to my very, very low level of expectations.

Weekend NPR show “On the Media” spent 15 minutes on the Hugo awards controversy, starting at about the half-way mark (30 minutes)

Arthur Wu was the expert interviewed.  He did some amateur psychoanalysis of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies groups.

This was tied to GamerGate, and shortly after mentioning death threats and harrassment, Vox Day was re-mentioned as active in both controversies.  One might conclude, if one was a sloppy thinker, that Vox Day has made death threats.  They non-judgmentally mentioned your blog is among the most often blocked by workplace filters for hate.

Larry Correia was interviewed, or a clip reused, and John C Wright was brought up and invalidated as a right wing has-been whose prose now includes Randian divergences into poltical polemics.

They must have read PopSci, because they almost quoted their line:

“…Vox Day is … on the record as supporting the Taliban’s attempt to assassinate Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousifazi, finding it “scientifically justifiable.””

“Disco Demolition Night” was also brought up.  Apparantly, Disco hate, Sad Puppies, and GamerGate are about fear of castration.

NPR “All Things Considered” teased that they were going to cover Sad/Rapid Puppies as well, but the website does not help out yet.

I don’t really object to their futile attempt to pile on. What this tells us is that the SJWs are uncommonly concerned about losing control of the narrative. And in their point-and-shriek frenzy – and that is all this is – they are bound to overreach themselves and their exaggerations will reach ludicrous proportions as they essentially play a high-tech version of the telephone game.

I won’t be surprised if I’m accused of being a self-admitted member of the Taliban by the time this feeding frenzy reaches its peak. The other thing this tells us is that they are afraid of me. It was remarkable how Damien Walters, who normally likes to work VOX DAY and LARRY CORREIA into everything, didn’t even mention either of us in his initial Hugo column. The media only likes to expose unsophisticated and unsympathetic enemies to the masses, but I am entirely comfortable with the media and not inclined to fall into their patently obvious traps.

That means they are left talking about me, without going to the source, and relying upon dishonest people to give them the straight story. And while they’ll convince the SJW choir, as well as mostly indifferent people who can’t bother to pay attention, at least 9 out of 10 people who discover me as a result are going to immediately notice that I am not even close to what they say I am.

So, I expect this to be not only a net positive, but a significant net positive. I grew up watching Ronald Reagan, after all, and the man not only survived, but thrived on absorbing everything the media could possibly throw at him.

One thing that will be useful, though, is to dig into the identity of each hit piece author. We’ve already tied several of them to Tor Books; the original Guardian hit piece author is published by Tor Books and was in contact with John Scalzi. And we know about both Heer and the PopSci guy as well.

Once we have the complete dossier, we’ll be able to draw a clear picture of how their media operation works and then go about exposing it. Remember, wu wei is all about the art of bending with the wind. Right now it is time to let the wind blow. But that’s all it is, is wind.