Tag: #GamerGate

A lesson learned

Since I hammered Ken White of Popehat for his howler on the UN report on “cyberviolence”, it only seems fair to point out that unlike an SJW, he did not double-down:

I was right in saying that we need to scrutinize any specific proposed laws or policies that arise from this report. But I was wrong to downplay the rhetoric as mere rhetoric, and to say it was premature to criticize it. On a more serious look, the report’s rhetoric suggests an effort to use the language of violence to cover non-violent and protected conduct. That is of particular concern since it is directed at the UN….

I screwed up. I didn’t blow a closing argument or put the wrong pacemaker in someone or crash a car, but I offered my thoughts without exercising due care. The easy reason was that I rushed, because I was busy. The harder reason is that some of my attitudes colored my approach.

I expected that the report would not be read, that its contents would be overstated and distorted, and that it would be treated as an open and explicit call for censorship because of the people involved with it. I wasn’t wrong to think that. But I was wrong to let that thought stop me from a more careful examination, and to allow myself to breeze by the implications of the rhetoric while looking for the specific proposals that weren’t there. If I had looked at it from a “is this rhetoric bad or not” standpoint, instead of a “imagine the reaction to this” viewpoint, I would have gotten it right.

People have been getting suckered by the Left’s “it’s only rhetoric” and “it’s just this one brick” for over a century now. That’s how the income tax got started. That’s how Britain joined the European Union. If there is one lesson to be learned from White’s mea culpa, it is this: rhetoric is not irrelevant.

Rhetoric is a form of persuasion and it is MORE effective than logic, science, data, reason, and dialectic for the vast majority of human beings. It is never to be dismissed lightly or ignored, not even by the dialectical thinker, because the manipulation of human emotion is one of the most powerful means of inspiring human action.

Furthermore, one should never assume that facts are either true or false on the basis of how one feels about the individual supporting or opposing it. Even the Devil can quote Scripture, after all. But if someone is known to be dishonest, or an SJW, or affiliated in any way with the United Nations, one should always take the time to carefully scrutinize any assertion they make as well as any source they cite.

Nero eviscerates PopeHat

The Popehat project–endless, tedious, insufferably smug posts about
minutiae–only really works if you read your own goddamn sources.

Top tip for bloggers whose raison d’etre is smugly correcting others: actually read reports before posting about them.

Milo is referring to this amusingly clueless post by Ken White, in which the inveterate champion of free speech flirts with abandoning his principles because a) he doesn’t like #GamerGate, b) he doesn’t like certain GamerGaters, including me, and c) girls had feelbadz! It’s a pity, because the guy has done some genuinely good work defending free speech in the past, but has somehow failed to recognize that SJWs represent one of the most serious enemies that his chosen cause has ever known.

Ken tried to belatedly explain his failure to bother reading the entire UN report before responding to it in an update.

Further information suggests I was far too benefit-of-the doubt here, which is what happens when you write fast and when you generally despise some of the people involved. Some of this is still right, but regard the conclusions and characterizations with skepticism. Taking a second look. See, e.g., the fact that they cited this [footnote 118] for the video game discussion I cite below. When I’m wrong I’m wrong. Will revisit.

Hey, I think we all understand that there is no time for actually “reading” things or ensuring one is accurately “informed” before leaping to the defense of a woman experiencing feelbads; it is a white knight’s pleasure to destroy his own reputation if by doing so he can save a fair maiden from even a single incident of cyberviolence.

I haven’t read the report myself nor do I have any intention of doing so. I have not hitherto found either the United Nations or Literally Who to be interesting or even remotely credible. But I do find Ken’s excuse-making to be fairly typical of the moderates who are always happy to bend over backward to rationalize the most blatantly dishonest SJW behavior while repeatedly casting aspersions at those who actually stand up to them. And I expect there will be further backtracking on the subject, as I would be very surprised if the SJWs responsible for the report got anything right at all.

“Cyberviolence” is a false and deceptive issue. I have been the recipient of far more “cyberviolence” and death threats than all of the Literally Whos combined, and for much longer; if it is such a serious issue then why hasn’t the UN or Ken White rushed to my defense at any time in the last 14 years?

When I reviewed and critiqued the economics study on immigration and jobs here yesterday and the day before, I gave the benefit of the doubt to the economists whose views on immigration creating jobs opposed my own. I interpreted every statistic and every assumption in a manner that favored their perspective, not mine. That is exactly what you must do if you wish to provide a serious analysis that will withstand objective review. But by his own admission, Ken White gives the benefit of the doubt to those who oppose people he generally despises. And that is why, despite his legal work on behalf of free speech, he cannot be considered an intellectually credible individual.

Case in point:

So there’s a solution to, that you know. Don’t read the blog any more. Unfollow the Twitter feed. Look for someone whose viewpoint is more acceptable to you. Maybe even write it up yourself.

But that’s not the GamerGate way.

Also, note how angry you are, and then look at the original again. I warned that UN speech restrictions are suspicious, I pointed to multiple things to be concerned about, and I even questioned the content at issue — I just didn’t see how crazy the sourcing was, yet. And I suggested that any actual codes that come out of it should be examined carefully.

But none of that is enough for you. You want hate. It’s not enough for you unless I excoriate the people you hate.

That’s why normal people don’t take you seriously.

This is deeply amusing coming from an individual who is literally mentally unstable. How would he know what normal people take seriously? Ken, you’re not normal. You’re not honest. You’re not intellectually rigorous. And you’re not credible. People like me would be delighted to continue to ignore you, but you go out of your way to attack us online, both on PopeHat and on Twitter.

Neither of the two commenters was demanding that Ken hate or excoriate anyone, they were simply expecting him to show at least a modicum of discernment concerning various individuals and institutions widely known to be less than entirely truthful. He failed to do so, and when rightly taken to task for it, he completely mischaracterized their responses.

Of course, it does make a certain amount of sense that he would side with the SJW whack jobs. Birds of a feather and all that. And as we all know, SJWs always lie.

Mount Gamergate

I’m pleased to announce that every Monday, we’ll be running a regular political cartoon created by Red Meat and me. As for the inaugural cartoon, one could probably suggest 10 or 15 other GGers who belong on Mount Gamergate; the thought of there one day being a giant, topless tribute to Mercedes Carrera is certainly amusing. But for me, when I think of #GamerGate, these are the five individuals who first come to mind.

And, of course, if you’d like to see more of our collaborative efforts, you can find them in SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police.

The idea with these graphic memes is to pass them around. They have been a very effective tactic for #GamerGate because they are one-way communication in pure rhetoric. So, if you’re on Twitter or other social media, I would encourage you to do so.

After one year of #GamerGate

Allum Bokhari collects a round-up of statements from GGers, former aGGers, and neutrals:

ADAM BALDWIN
Actor

When I coined the GamerGate hashtag on Twitter, I had no idea what
would follow, but I’m very pleased with the result. For over a year,
gamers have been pushing back against a new wave of political
correctness, media spin, and cultural authoritarianism. Propagandists
tried to declare gamers “dead” — in response, gamers became their worst
nightmare.

Despite the atrocious things said about them in the mainstream media,
gamers have survived, thrived, and conquered. They detest censorship,
language-policing, and the prioritization of politics over good
storytelling. Everyone who believes in creative freedom should support
them.

NICK FLOR
Associate Professor, Anderson School of Management, University of New Mexico

I see GamerGate as the best modern example of how a false narrative can be socially engineered by coordinating the five C’s:

1. Confirmation Bias, leading to the cherry picking of only data that supports one’s position;

2. Composition Fallacy, arguing that a part defines the whole;

3. Clickbait Business Model, incentivizing sensational stories spread through social media;

4. Complicit Mass Media, pushing eagerly any War-Against-Women/harassment story;

5. Collectivism, justifying outrage and action for the “greater good.”

So what is GamerGate? From my one year of observation and interaction on Twitter, it’s simple: gamers pushing for free enterprise and free markets in the gaming industry; gamers asking for a competitive market free of collusion, free of corruption, and free of control of artistic creativity by authoritarians. In short, GamerGate is a freedom movement.

IAN MILES CHEONG
Editor-in-Chief, GameRanx

Ask any gamer or anyone within the game industry what GamerGate means to them and you might get a variety of answers, depending on who you ask.

Over the course of the year, my stance towards the GamerGate movement has shifted. Having initially bought into the “social justice”-approved narrative that all of GamerGate was about the harassment of women, I used to be violently opposed to the movement and engaged in demonizing its supporters, who consist mainly of gamers—including women.

Most gamers don’t much care for political correctness, and the way they speak has been deliberately misinterpreted as bigotry by social justice proponents whose biggest source of angst comes from microaggressions.

The narrative is false, and it’s one I see propped up time and time again to discredit anyone who dissents against what I’d call “social authoritarianism.”

I wasn’t asked my opinion, but had I been, this is what I would have said:

Vox Day
Game Designer

#GamerGate marks an important turning in the cultural war for the soul of the West. It was our cultural Stalingrad. It was our Midway. It marked the first time in decades that a group of individuals collectively stood up against the ongoing SJW onslaught and turned it back.

Embrace your extremists

Nero explains some of the rules of ideological alliances to a moderate:

Winston Churchill once said, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a positive reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” The logic of this should be obvious. Churchill recognized (rightly) that maintaining Britain’s liberal order was worth allying with the devil. No one went to war with the Nazis just because of the tactics they used. They primarily did it because they couldn’t stand the idea of living under a Nazi regime. I can’t stand the thought of living under what Cathy calls the “quasi-totalitarian” Social Justice regime. And I will pay any price necessary to make sure that quasi-totalitarian ideology is defeated and sent back to the urine-soaked faculty lounge from whence it came.

Cathy confuses what is prudent with what is moral when she says that rejecting certain far-right allies doesn’t count as appeasing the Left. Certainly, taking on allies who alienate the vast majority of people you’re trying to persuade is tactically stupid. But purging people when they have done nothing to damage your cause, but happen to have made you uncomfortable because of something unrelated, is simply cowardly. There is a very troubling tendency among many Gamergaters to believe that anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky is somehow “icky” or should be held responsible for the sins of Jack Thompson. This isn’t the early 2000s. Most conservatives have moved on from the stupid anti-video game craze, and the ones who are most loudly on Gamergate’s side generally never bought into that craze in the first place. Refusing to accept support from people who would destroy your ability to maintain your coalition is one thing. Simple bigotry against conservatives because you don’t like the idea of being on the same side as people you laughed at on the Daily Show is quite another.

I agree completely with Cathy re Nyberg, so I won’t respond to this prong. I will, however, only say that Social Justice Warriors take no notice of the difference between “combatants” and “non-combatants,” which is typical of fascists and terrorists. The only way to stop such people from targeting non-combatants is to make them afraid to do so, because they know the retaliation from you will hurt so much more than anything they could do. Mutually assured destruction requires the commitment of both sides to destruction if the other starts something, and it is why we have yet to see a nuclear war. If you want to stop people using bad tactics, the only way to do it is to make them prohibitively costly. And the only way to do that is to use the same tactics with such brutal efficiency that they cry “uncle” and agree to a ceasefire.

As I have noted on several occasions, for reasons unbeknownst to me, moderates are always more focused on firing on their own side than on the enemy. They are also always more open to negotiation and dialogue with the enemy than with their own extremists.

This is one of the reasons why moderates never accomplish anything. Ideally, moderates would stay out of the way, let the extremists lead the charge, and then show up after the victory is won and handle the negotiations using the extremists as leverage.

“Do you want to surrender to me or do I stand aside and watch as my very good friend here follows through on his promise of no quarter?” Accepting surrender is the true and proper role of the moderate. Policing those engaged in positive action is not.

Sneaky little hobbitses

Nero’s reflections after a year of covering #GamerGate:

Despite the common stereotypes of gamers as losers, nerds and shut-ins, gamers proved to be the perfect opponents for cultural authoritarians. The left relies on destroying the reputations of their opponents — but how do you destroy the reputations of people who have been ridiculed as often as gamers? When you’re already hated by the left, the right, and the media, the only way to go is dank.

Gamers also benefited from being one of the few genuine grassroots communities, with few leaders and no official structures. Unlike the tedious “movements” that regularly emerge from college campuses – whether Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) or Slut Walks – the gamers have no radical ideology.

They are ordinary, in some cases really quite apolitical, people, brought together by a shared hobby. They have no grand social objective beyond protecting the medium they love from authoritarian scolds and they cannot be neatly categorised.

The more you try to paint gamers as basement-dwelling straight white nerds, the more paraplegic black lesbian World of Warcraft addicts come tumbling out of the woodwork. (Is that offensive to dykes? I have no idea. Nor would the lesbians in GamerGate give a flying toss.)

One of the features of GamerGate is that it includes people from every background imaginable. A survey on GamePolitics found a broad mix of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Gamers don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, straight, or disabled. All that matters is that you know how to game. They’ll even welcome right-wing bastards like me.

That kind of diversity and tolerance — the genuine kind — frightens cultural authoritarians, not just because they are so mercilessly intolerant to their opponents, but also because it undermines their view of the world. Gaming is that most hated of words in identity politics: a meritocracy. Who you are is unimportant. All that matters is what you know, what you can do, and if you’re being honest with yourself and others about those two things.

It’s interesting to see how many people who actually take the time to listen to #GamerGate, pay attention to the interactions between #GamerGate and our enemies, and learn the substantive issues involved eventually end up declaring themselves full-fledged members of #GamerGate.

So, welcome to the Shire, Gandalf the Gay.

The one thing that the SJWs simply did not understand is that for the average gamer, the gamer identity supersedes all his other identities. Oliver Campbell is a black GAMER. Brixton is a female GAMER. I am a Native American GAMER. The SJWs misapplied their identity politics to the subject; they assumed race and sex, the identities we did not choose for ourselves, were more important than the identity that every single gamer has chosen and made his lifestyle. They focused on the adjectives, never realizing that what we value is the noun.

Meanwhile, the SJWs are, in addition to opposing #GamerGate, standing up for tranny pedophiles. Seriously. And to think there were those who thought I was going too far when I referred to Mr. Sandifer as Peddy Phil.

Harbingers of #GamerGate

Decades before the thought of cheating on Eron Gjoni was even a stirring in Zoe Quinn’s meaty loins, there was this infamous review of Doom in Edge magazine.

If that doesn’t sum up the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence, I don’t know does. To say nothing of the way it shows how the SJW’s instinct, when faced with an acid-throwing Baron of Hell, is to want to make friends with it rather than strafing and shooting a rocket in its face.

What more do you need to understand that SJWs are pure and unadulterated evil? They see a Baron of Hell and think: “He seems nice! I wonder if he will be my friend?”

Speaking of SJWs and GamerGate, this dialogue was so beautiful and succinct that it nearly brought a tear to my eye.

Young Snake @117Baz 4:44 AM – 1 Apr 2015
If #GamerGate hit’s the 1 year anniversary I will dress up in a French Maid uniform and keep it as my twitter profile pic for all time.
Xenimme @Xenimme 9:09 PM – 27 Aug 2015
Get the dress.

It is, as they say, the very toppest of keks.

Happy Birthday, #GamerGate

This is the chapter-heading cartoon for Chapter Eight: Striking Back at the Thought Police, from the #1 Political Philosophy bestseller, SJWs ALWAYS LIE: Taking Down the Thought Police.

From the Dedication:

This book is for all the gamers around the world who simply wanted to be left alone to play their games in peace. You didn’t go looking to fight a cultural war, the social justice warriors in game journalism brought their war to you….

This book is for the thousands of sealions whose names I don’t know, who sent emails and created memes, who persisted and leveled up, and who, in doing so, shattered the SJW Narrative.

This book is for #GamerGate.

Call it justice, call it karma

Regardless, it exists. You may recall Sam Biddle as one of #GamerGate’s primary targets:

Earlier this week Gawker lost “thousands of dollars” in advertising after a poorly worded tweet was posted by one of its writers. Sam Biddle, one of the more sarcastic employees among the sarcastic throng at Gawker Media, tweeted out a joke:

    Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission
    — Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) October 16, 2014

He immediately followed it with:

    Bring Back Bullying
    — Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) October 16, 2014

Naturally, the Twitterverse pounced. While the issue goes into convoluted gamergate territory, it didn’t make Gawker, the intellectual fraternity of the internet that invites people to their parties only to make them buy the booze, look good. Adobe pulled its sponsorship in response to the uproar, which was followed by multiple posts by site editors attempting to explain the situation, apologizing and admitting they “fucked up.”

Now the nerds are shaming back twice as hard.

Grummz ‏@Grummz
Oh hey, the Sam Biddle on Ashley Madison story is trending in the US.

Grummz ‏@Grummz
Sam Biddle had an account on Ashley Madison, but he never inhaled.

It’s okay, he was only on there for “research”. That’s a new one. He registered in 2012 and I’m sure he’ll have the well-researched expose ready any day now.