Tag: #GamerGate

In which we are informed #GamerGate has taken “its most disgraceful scalp yet”

For many people, Gamergate isn’t really a thing anymore. For the most part, it has receded from the headlines — we’re more than a year past the period of peak thinkpiecery on Gamergate, online harassment, and how the two intersect. But that doesn’t mean some of the group’s more enterprising members have stopped rabidly going after anyone they think is promoting an SJW (social-justice warrior) narrative or messing with their previous vidya.

For a particularly gross example, look no further than a piece of news that just dropped (part of a Twitter thread that starts here):

    Today, the decision was made: I am no longer a good, safe representative of Nintendo, and my employment has been terminated.
    — smol pterodactyl (@alisonrapp) March 30, 2016

Over the last few months, many of these gamers have turned their ire on Rapp, a young marketing employee at Nintendo who, as Patrick Klepek wrote in a comprehensive and well-reported article in Kotaku, “has been accused of somehow being a driving force behind the supposed censorship of that company’s games.” Rapp, it should be said, doesn’t even have anything to do with localization at Nintendo; she’s been targeted simply for having been “outspoken on Twitter about online abuse against women in gaming,” as Klepek put it. In the course of digging as deeply into her past as possible to find ways to discredit her, some gamers found an undergraduate thesis she wrote in 2011, and it seriously exacerbated the campaign against her.

In her thesis, Rapp laid out a highly academic case for why the U.S. shouldn’t pressure Japan, where the sexualization of young teens has long been entrenched in certain corners of the culture, to adopt child-pornography laws similar to our own. It reads like pretty standard-issue undergraduate cultural relativism. Anyone familiar with these arguments — even those inclined to think it’s fair to judge someone based on academic papers they wrote in college — would know that Rapp wasn’t condoning child pornography, but rather making a more nuanced argument about American cultural imperialism and so forth (she also argued that child pornography doesn’t cause people to abuse children).

These nuances were lost, perhaps willfully, on a group of Gamergaters and their allies, who quickly used the thesis and various old tweets of Rapp’s to launch a campaign to tar her as a defender of child pornography.

Ah, pity the poor SJWs. We aren’t correctly nuancing their defenses of child pornography. We aren’t treating them fairly. We are digging deeply into their pasts. We are contacting their employers. We are targeting their sponsors.

I wonder where we learned to do that? I wonder why we have adopted these terrible tactics?

They began this cultural war. Now they’re whining that someone is finally fighting back. If you’re not engaged yet, you should be, because they are coming after you just as surely as they are going after gaming, comics, the universities, and everything else.

Read SJWs Always Lie if you haven’t already. It’s all in there.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Kotaku has rushed to the defense of the indefensible:

Rapp specifically mentioned the GamerGate today as being agents of her
harassment, but it was never clear whether one particular group was
after her.
My reporting suggested
some people had taken tactics used by harassers during GamerGate and applied them here.

Parents are calling on Nintendo to fire SJW and pro-pedophile Alison Rapp:

Nintendo is facing calls to sack a feminist employee who penned a highly controversial academic essay questioning whether it was morally correct to censor child pornography.

A number of people have taken to Twitter and urged the the Japanese firm to fire Alison Rapp, who works as a product marketing specialist for Nintendo of America and has been responsible for promoting some the family-friendly firms’ most famous games.

In 2012, she published a paper discussing child pornography in Japan, which has come under international pressure to tighten its laws on the depiction of underage sex.

Rapp, who wears a ring through her nose and tweets using the language of combative modern feminism, then drew the attention of male activists, who dug out the old paper earlier this year and began discussing it in Reddit threads and publishing articles on Medium.

Now anger has boiled over onto social media, with one furious parent calling for a boycott of Nintendo to “let them know we love our children more than to support someone like Alison Rapp”.

You know, I don’t think the SF-SJW support for pedophiles is going to go over any better than Alison Rapp’s has, once the mainstream learns about it.

It’s really remarkable how many of these Nazi Rapist movements pervade the creative arts. I mean, we have been reliably informed that the Sad Puppies are neo-Nazis, the Rabid Puppies are neo-Nazis, Roosh has assembled a band of rapists around the world, and now CometCon has cancelled a #GamerGate panel including well-known Spanish #GamerGate Life artist Kukuruyo because Nazi. Kukuruyo explains:

Ok, i’ll explain as best as i can. The event Cometcon wanted to organize a debate about gamergate, and i was the main proponent. I wrote a text here about a month ago looking for people to participate in the debate so you may already know this.

The debate was at first going to be with several people invited to disscuss about it, but we didn’t find anyone against GG who wanted to participate. So we changed it to a small introductory talk, and then i would debate people from the public.

But then, a spanish webcomic artist known as RataUnderground (he does a comic called art 88/46) discovered it and sent them an email telling them we were going to do a nazi rally, that we were sexist and all the usual stuff. His fans and artist friends also talked the organization asking them to cancel the debate. *aparently it was not an email but a tweet telling them we are a harrassment campaign against feminists and then comments flowed from there until the “nazi rally” stuff.

Now, the organization is not really at fault. I know many of them, they wanted to do the debate, and they don’t like the attack on freedom of speech, but they also didn’t expected the backlash they would get, and they wanted to stay out of politics.

Following that i wrote to some of those artist in twitter to reprimand them for taking down the debate instead of debating me. I have asked all of them why they want to take down the debate instead of refuting me, if what we say is so easy to refute, but none of them seem to have an answer for that.

There’s a shitstorm right now on my twitter feed about that, with people from GG discussing with their fans and friends, but as you may guess, it’s all in spanish. But i can tell you that it’s going as usuall. Instead of arguments, they just say that we are misogynist and nazis, and that’s it. There’s a few people i have managed to debate a bit, but with no avail. Every time i refuted something they said they just moved goalposts and thats it. We even offered to make a skype debate to one of them, who was a journalist, but he refused because we were not important people oO.

Notice how the SJW tactics never, ever change? SJWs always lie. Perhaps it is time for GamerGate and other anti-SJW movements to begin their own con, from which SJWs are explicitly and specifically excluded.

I’ll talk to Mike and Milo. Perhaps instead of another GG meetup, we’ll discuss founding #GamerGateCon.