#GamerGate Manifesto Translated into English
Courtesy of somewhat_brave
This graphic by somewhat_brave on Reddit pretty much nails it. (Click here to see a larger version.) When #GamerGaters talk about “ethics” in journalism, this is pretty much code for “journalists shouldn’t be allowed to say anything critical of us!”
And in case you missed the all-Cat version of the manifesto, here it is again:
Posted on October 18, 2014, in #gamergate and tagged #gamergate. Bookmark the permalink. 69 Comments.
“GamerGate” is a joke.
That manifesto still scares me shitless.
Then it has served its purpose. The whole culture that #GG rose out of relies on fear and intimidation.
I’m grading a bunch of intro philosophy papers on ethics right now. One of their most common defects is that they wander off into rhetorical excess trying to express just how much they think something is good/bad, and end up never getting around to saying why they think that.
The writer of this manifesto has a similar problem; he gets so caught up in his grandiloquent excoriation/approbation that he never actually gets around to adding any meaningful content. The translation is wonderful because it’s all the manifesto author has managed to say.
I would like to build a satellite that would fire copies of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” at people from orbit.
That was the most irritating and self-aggrandizing thing i have ever read in my life.
Nothing like plain English to cut through the bs.
Y’know, it actually does read better in English than it does in the original Whiny Space Alien.
I second “Politics and the English Language”. Smart as I am, I found it extremely difficult to cut through the duckspeak to the actual meaning; my brain fogged over from all the purple word-salad verbiage. But I did grok that it really comes down to “We’re gamers and you’re not, meow, ‘cuz you disagree with us which makes you suck, meow, so get your cooties out of our treehouse, meow meow meow.”
I like the roundabout way it takes to say “We want games to be free (of stuff we disagree with)” and “We want to think for ourselves (as long as everyone agrees things are okay as they are now)”.
My hat is off to whoever distilled the (atrocious) meaning of all that inane gibberish. They’re a braver soul than I am.
Originally I thought it was just whiny and pretentious, but now I can see why you would think that. The verbiage is part of the fear mongering, to make the Enemy as big and scary and possible and to cloud your judgment. Basically, it’s designed to scare and confuse you.
@Bogdan – I know it’s designed to do that, and for people who have been harassed or otherwise mistreated by this group of people it is terrifying because this is kind of like a religious chant wherein they condone their behavior. Like patting eachother on the back and saying “GO FOR IT. :D”
Ugh. I have so much to say on that manifesto but I will limit myself to two things:
1. If you want something to be considered art, it has to be subject to critique. It can be argued that the critique is inherent in making art art. You can see that in the different ways we talk about things we consider art (like music and painting) and things we don’t (like sports and hobbies). A lot of art comes from critiques like Realism being a critique of Romanticism and Postmodernism being largely made of criticism. If you don’t want video games to be critiqued like an art, they don’t get the title of art.
2. You can’t just cut out what makes a person an individual and for many people, things like gender, ethnic identity and sexual orientation are what makes them who they are. I have a hard time imaging myself as me if I were to change those aspects. Obviously, we are all humans and these differences shouldn’t divide us but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Some suggestions. “We are gamers” and “we are alive” need translations into English as well because “we are gamers-except for the Nazis, MRA’s, washed up actors and political flaks who have never played a computer game in their life” is more accurate, and “we are alive” is incomplete. The second half of that sentence should read “except for the sockpuppets”.
I disagree with one part of it, although overall I think it is excellent. Where the manifesto* states “We reject the Industry of Outrage** and it’s*** guilt-based economic model, which parades fabricated martyrs and calculated victimhood…”
– I don’t think this statement is simply that people who say they are (GG) victims are bad
– I think they reject the notion, a priori, that anyone can be a victim of GG.
My evidence for my interpretation is the number of fecking delusional comments from GGers about how it’s all about ethics and integrity. That means, in their hivemind, they see that the people negatively affected by GG deserve it. Ergo, these people are not victims at all.
They don’t see what they are doing as any time of crime. Only “crime” has victims. This is reading from the MRA psalmbook, where there aren’t rape victims because she led him on, or she’s a liar, …
* why do they keep coming up with manifestos. Haven’t we had enough manifestos from spress murdering MRAs? Guys, this is who you associate yourselves very strongly with by intersecting misogyny and having a manifesto. Think about it, you brave free thinkers.
** fecking random MRA capitalisation.
*** fecking MRAs and their inability to correctly possessively apostrophise.
Yea, manifestos on hate movements are always terrifying. They’re too useful to help “organise” people who are disorganised individuals and work in a way similar to cult rules. It creates a rallying cry that people can throw their weight behind, without actually having any face to the movement.
Sorry for the use of an ableism word in there, it should be “the number of fecking comments ungrounded in any lived reality, and easy shown to be disprovable, from GGers…”
I look at Pallygirl’s post and realized, why does that phrase “Industry of Outrage” look so suspiciously familiar? And then it hit me! Yep, there is an “industry of outrage”, an obscenely profitable one too. And what’s it so profitably outraged about! You guessed it: liberals! progressives! secular humanists! feminists! SJWs! Not to mention ebola! and Benghazi! and zomg Obama’s not an American! Of course the Right-Wing Media Outrage Machine has all sorts of people mocking it, especially the late-night comedians. GamerGate just hasn’t gotten big enough in the RWMOM to come to the attention of the late-night comedians.
And I realize I also recognize the tone of voice MRAs say “SJW” and “social justice warrior” in. It’s the same tone of voice conservatives use when saying “liberal” and “progressive”. For what is a Social Justice Warrior but a Fightin’ Liberal? (As a matter of fact, I do have a book called Fighting Liberal, written by one. I ought to dig it out of my bookcase and read it sometime.)
I think the reason they keep referring to their targets as “literally whos” isnt so much for the plausible deniability (because NO ONE is falling for that shit) but to dehumanize them to make their terrorist bullshit easier
@Dennis: yes, their use of well-worn phrases to set the attack pack onto someone else indicates they’re MO is limited to classical conditioning (in the strictly behavioural psychology sense).
Which makes them as much free thinking as Pavlov’s salivating dogs.
*their. I think my recent nap has whacked my thinking processes.
@pallygirl (speaking of which):
They can’t help spewing out these manifestos because, just like so many other conservatives here in the U.S. of A., they believe themselves radical! and revolutionary! as they take on the Evil Liberal Feminist Establishment that wants to oppress their Men’s Rights with Big Government. They probably also chuckle to themselves at the fact that “manifesto” contains the word “man” and think, “Take that, HERstory!” It’s like they’re simultaneously ’70s radicals (which is when the MRM started) and ’50s Cold Warriors crusading against Godless Communism; they’re completely unaware of the contradiction that’s so glaringly obvious to me.
Hmm, never considered that before… (Note: typo corrected. :) )
Actually, it strikes me as a particular attitude very common among US conservatives and reinforced by the evangelical church: if I assert it on faith, it is by definition true. Stephen Colbert famously called it “truthiness”. I first became familiar with it when I learned about the creationist war against science back in the 1980s; it’s why, when pitted against science education in court, creationists have not won a landmark decision since the Scopes decision in 1925 (which held for 62 years, but still).
Yeah. The level of ambiguity of meaning, fuzzy logic and tribalism on display could be used to justify any action, no matter how awful. This sort of confused language is what allows horrible people to still believe they’re the good guys. This is what lets them avoid just coming out and saying “We think harassment is cool if we don’t like someone.” See also: redpillers, MRAs, Dark Enlightenment choads, et al.
Can you imagine what these people would do if they held power?
Yeah. This is the depressing part for me. Either they don’t realise how many women are going to hear extremely unpleasant echoes when Gaters say “She’s making it up for attention!” or they just don’t give a fuck. When you’re dismissing as fabricated harassments and threats online with exactly the same words that countless women have heard used against them to deny and gaslight their experiences of sexual assault, all the “GamerGate is for women in gaming! We’re not sexist!” defences ring pretty hollow.
Exactly Orwell’s point.
A correction: I should have put that last part of my summary like this:
On the plus side, arguing with GamerGaters has gotten me in touch with a bunch of cool people on twitter.
One dude’s wife is actually writing her phd on the cultural context of RPGs which is fucking awesome.
Also, there’s a graphic going around with a breakdown of all the tweets and who tweeted them. Apparently all of #gamergate was only 350 accounts, while #stopgamergate was like five thousand.
Yeah, I’d never have found Katherine Cross if it wasn’t for the Gators, so thanks guys!
Oh also, you know that anti-bullying fundraiser the Gaters were pushing as proof they can do good things and their critics are unfairly dismissing them as trolls? Take a good look at their mascot, Vivian Games (phonetic play on “vidya games”) in the fundraiser pic:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0IEf9_CIAAxARh.png:large
Green and purple, right? [TRIGGER WARNING for rape if you click the link] It’s a long-running [x]chan joke meant to associate those colours with an animated gif featuring one Dragonball Z character raping another. “Daily dose” for short.
So even when they’re trying to swing good PR they can’t help but be assholes. And then deny the link when people call ‘em on it, as if it wasn’t an easily confirmed fact.
Oh dang it, for once WP didn’t embed when I wanted it to. Nothing skeevy at the image link, but here she is anyway:
Charmers, huh?
Meanwhile: Black guy defends GamerGate in the name of Black identity politics while waving his male-privilege flag high in Black Nationalist language. His explanation for GG? White liberal identity politics. He claims all white liberals are in league with the SJWs persecuting men. And of course he makes all the standard GG defenses. Even when confronted with a link to a WHTM post on Zoe Quinn, his only response is to claim he’s being silenced by white people. Thus proving my belief that identity politics, whether MRA or Black Nationalist, is inherently right-wing, which is also why we don’t see very many of the man-hating ’70s kind of radfems the MRAs have always mirrored anymore.
As he posted this on Daily Kos, which is as one commenter put it “a very SJW-friendly site”, naturally he got called out. One commenter quoted his very first comment, on a post about Elliot Rodger, which got heavily hide-rated for being, in its original context, quite offensive. And of course he ignored the commenters trying to point out to him that GG has always been about not just male but specifically white male privilege all along. Some ended up calling him a troll.
I should point out here that Black Nationalism has a long history of misogyny, as does the rest of the extreme (Stalinist and terrorist) left outside the radfems. Most of us on the Left have outgrown the radical rage that failed to bring down the System in the ’60s and ’70s and have embraced our rational Enlightenment heritage (which, interestingly enough, he actually references). Some, alas, have not. For us, social justice means equality for all. For them, not so much.
@strivingally: And I thought green and purple were the Joker’s colors. The supervillainous Clown Prince of Crime and a rape gif don’t strike me as the kind of things “good guys” would want to associate with. “Love that Joker!”
(Raises eyebrows)
I don’t think you understand either feminists or MRAs nearly as well as you think you do.
Eh, straw radfems, Dennis.
Green and purple and silver/white were the colours of the suffragist movement before the Joker was ever dreamed of.
I feel like my mother during one of those parties is days of yore (the 70s) when radfems roamed the earth vowing to fuck men’s shit up and shoot up all the hot guys at the local frat house (note to Dennis – this never happened). Like “oh dear, someone just peed in the punchbowl, how awkward”.
Ooh, who’s a happy little data point? *grins*
…I mean, there’s likely socks on both sides, but hey, still good news.
Not like I…don’t have a sock or two at places…just lying around in case I get really bored.
(No I would never harass people. I only flame someone who clearly arrived to troll and already showed hostility. I have ethical standards!)
(Being so full of fairy dust and unicorn farts that people want to bludgeon me senseless? That seems pretty harmless, though…)
Feminist Separatism was a thing…but don’t have sufficient knowledge of it to speak about it.
I do know there were some intentional communities made, and I do know I’d like to read a good history of it, because I’m curious about such things.
And then lesbian separatism became just like the MRAs, because fuck logic, and context, and also history books while we’re at it.
(Not snarking at you, btw, blahtastic – it was an interesting time, definitely worth reading about).
I was told it was green, white and violet to stand for Give Women the Vote. Or is that apocryphal?
@cassandrakitty: I know that extremists were never mainstream in the women’s movement. But they had a much higher profile in the ’70s for two reasons: 1) because of the revolutionary atmosphere of those days, when flaming radicalism was in vogue; and 2) because the Cold War was still raging and the Establishment and its MSM needed something “commie” to use as a weapon against feminism, so they promoted the stereotype of feminists as bra-burning lesbians who want to destroy men. By what I’ve read of and from MRAs so far, this is at least semi-consciously the phantom they’re crusading against (the unconscious one being of course mommy), the “domino theory” that female equality is really a “Trojan horse” for female supremacy. Though it was the Internet that gave them their megaphone, they have their roots in those days. It’s the period, for instance, that Warren Farrell wants to live down (i.e. when he was openly defending pedophilia). Back then, it was the most radical feminists to whom the media gave the megaphone, intending of course to discredit the far more numerous people fighting for female equality. Today everybody ignores the very few remaining extremists, the old relics and angry teenagers.
Actually, I date my own feminist, socialist, and liberal roots to those days, though I was just an autistic kid then and despite my later libertarian and Ayn Rand phases. I was something of a college radical in the ’80s, and 9/11 began my journey full circle.
You do realize that you’re splaining the history of radical feminism to a radical feminist, right?
On behalf of the women who came before me, fuck you for the “old relics” comment. Those women changed the world.
I was an adult then and you are repeating the revised version of history.
Thanks for mansplainin my activism to me.
You’re not only talking down to radical feminists here, you’re talking down to at least one person who is moving far more to that position than liberal feminism.
Cut the ageism and ‘splaining, Dennis. It’s not a good look.
Not to mention that nobody who had a Randroid phase is in any position to be critiquing anyone else’s politics in general.
Also, if you were in college in the 80s, we’re probably contemporaries, so you’re perilously close to old relic age yourself.
I was about to get all “get off my lawn and go read a history book” and then I realized that if he was at college in the 80s Dennis must be older than me. Better work on that ageism, dude, otherwise it’s going to bite you in the ass some day in the not too distant future.
You relic ninja, you.
(reads comments posted while I was writing the last comment)
Yes, the radfems were fringe (they were a faction of a New Left already fading into irrelevance) and largely made of straw, but we know who made the straw and why. We may not have ever met a straw feminist — I know I never have — but I can see them haunt the minds of the “men’s rights” set and conservatives generally. It’s there that the straw feminists live and always have, in fact as long as there’s been feminists.
Ah, the obsessive history geek had to come out one of these days…
@kittehserf @kim: Green and purple as colors of the suffragist movement? Hmmm… Not that those *chan types would ever suspect…
Who knew that actual people who really existed could be made out of straw? Please, Dennis, tell us more about this medical marvel.
(Or not, my patience for splaining is limited no matter how silly it is.)
Wtf Dennis? Does mummy need to do the work of explaining why your comments about the radical feminist movement would be offensive EVEN IF YOU WERE “RIGHT”, or are you going to save us all some valuable time and rethink that?
Yes! I has ancient ninja power!
Dennis, it might help if you didn’t do the same dismissal of radical feminism and radical feminists, the same straw-feminist rubbish, that the MRAs are. Talking as if those gobshites’ ideas had any bearing on reality isn’t helpful.
Bear in mind, too, the whole attacking women for being too old, or too young, or too noisy, or too anything, is standard misogynist fare. This shit is what was being thrown at the suffragettes.
Are you seriously claiming that you know better than the women who were there? You are mansplaining the revised history. AGAIN!
Okay, I’ll cut the history thing if it sounds so much like the “mansplaining” I criticized in my post with the link. I had in mind the decline of the old New Left. Funny how labels age. And yes, I’m going on 50.
I had a Camille Paglia phase too. Fortunately, I recovered. I’ve been moving toward more radical positions as I age, socialism mainly but feminism as well. Interestingly, it was an Objectivist who ultimately sent me on my leftward journey: Chris Matthew Sciabarra, a professor at New York University and the author of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, but most importantly a teacher of dialectics. Understanding dialectics is what led me to realize just how wrong Rand really is. Now I’m studying Marx.
Speaking of Rand, did you know Ayn Rand Institute head Yaron Brook is evangelizing Objectivism to the MRAs? Rand did declare herself a male chauvinist on US national TV, after all…
Oh dear. You phrased that as a question, which means he’s going to respond, probably at great length and with even more historically inaccurate rubbish.
I’ll just be over here trying to figure out if there’s a way to upgrade my straw stuffing to goose down, since it’ll be winter soon and even eeevil man-hating radfems need to keep warm.
I’m at a loss to see where criticising radfems gets us in this thread, given that the whole fecking point of feminism has been to get men to see women as fully human. Not every arsehole in feminism has been a radfem, and not every radfem is an arsehole. The two appear to be unrelated.
Unlike both the MRM and GG, both of which have a vitriolic arseholeness as their raison d’etre.
Waiting to speak only after being spoken to, bringing a plate, and dressing neat and tidy got us nowhere for decades.
And I apologize. I feared I would descend into something like this. Autism gets me into trouble again…
I’m pretty sure that autism doesn’t automatically lead to ageism, or to regurgitating anti-feminist cliches.
You are entitled to your opinion. I think it wrong of you to blame autism for calling old women like myself relics. That is my opinion.
Yeah, I can understand autism causing you to keep talking when you should stop, but doesn’t explain being wrong in the first place.
You’ve bought into the anti-feminist defintion of what radfem means Dennis. I suggest you go educate yourself.
To clarify – the splaining, yeah, I can see how that might be an autism issue so no problem, you now realize it’s annoying people, end of story and move on. Calling radfems “man-hating”, though, or dismissing the opinions of older women and teenage girls as irrelevant? That’s just standard issue sexism, and that’s what people were actually calling you out for.
Higher profile? No, there weren’t two reasons. There was just one. It was entirely an invention of MSM. I Was There on the marches and at the meetings.
Sure there were a few women wearing grubby overalls and safety pins for earrings, but most of us were wearing ordinary jeans, skirts and trousers with maybe a bit more tie-dye pattern than you might see at a Sunday School picnic. People who didn’t know us, and people who did know and work with us, accused us of being man-hating, pinko, lesbian, radical, prudish promoters of Disgraceful! sexual libertarianism. Never mind the internal inconsistency. The myth about burning bras appeared within days of the event at which no bras were burned.
The “radical” criticism was, right from the start, confected out of whole cloth by reporters and editors, and lots of religious and other killjoys, looking to find the very worst things they could say about ordinary women wanting fairly ordinary things.
Just as it was back in the days of the suffragists.
Some things never change.
Considering how totally shit things were for women, and how much their was to fight against, any vocal, visible, uncompromising feminism was going to get called radical. The context of the times is what people soooo conveniently forget in quoting Dworkin or any of the main writers then and saying “Oh how horrible they were, they hated men!”
Re: the manifesto, I think “we are alive” translates as “and we ALONE are alive”. Only gamers have feelings, thoughts, and agency. They are unique snowflakes in that regard. Their concerns take precedence over all else. The subhumans don’t matter. It’s OK to harass critics, SJWs, and women, since they’re not really “alive”.
I mean, otherwise, it’s an incredibly stupid and redundant thing to say.
And may I formally delurk to say “thank you” to all the “older” feminist and Radfem women on this thread who did and sacrificed so much and worked so hard for all women’s options, rights freedom and safety in those decades. It is not a small thing and it’s heartbreaking to see the legacy and history attacked and erased from so many quarters. You deserve so much more.
@kittehserf
*shakes head*
Oh, kittehserf, haven’t we discussed this already? Context is misandry! It’s utterly unreasonable to expect misogynists and other unsaviory dirt you might find stuck on the sole of your shoe to treat history as a continuum and social patterns as patterns instead of individual, unrelated events. Except when finding things that can be given a misogynistic spin and drawing an imaginary pattern that shows that women are inherently bad.
/sarcasm
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
That’s a very thoughful way of putting it. I merely got the feeling it’s just another melodramatic way of saying “the eeeebil librul feminazi are totes trying to destroy us (since that’s what leftists want to do, because they’re eeeebil), but we are standing up for our right to harass, threaten and silence women free speech and integrity! They’ll never have our freedommmmm!!!eleventy!!!!!”
I might be jaded, though.
@humourlessRadicalFeminazi:
Welcome! Have a Welcome Package!
http://artistryforfeminismandkittens.wordpress.com/the-official-man-boobz-complimentary-welcome-package/
Anarchonist, I know, I know, I am misandering again, with that dreadful word, CONTEXT!
But I feel safe that I shall gain some small measure of approval from the Feminist High Council and maybe get a bonbon if I keep it up.
(Your comment had me laughing aloud, which is a good way to wind down for the night!)
humourlessRadicalFeminiazi, hi and welcome!
Want a present, gamers who’re not assholes? Well, enjoy. Apparently this guy Hideki Kamiya is the creator of Bayonetta, and gamergaters were tweeting at him and trying to get him to support the gamergate tag. He was not impressed. Sample.
“So many insects. Summer vacation in your countries again?”
More here. Click the link to his original response too!
http://takeshihongo.tumblr.com/post/100333043940/konkeydongcountry-brook-montypla-gamer
I just assumed, “We are alive,” was a response to the slew of articles saying, “Gamers are dead” that came out when all this started.
@Anarchonist – yeah, there definitely is a melodramatic, defiant, fist-in-the-air intent behind the “We are alive” statement. They’re trying to rally the troops behind their anthem. But given their black-and-white thinking, and their way of always defining themselves in opposition to their opponents, I couldn’t help seeing the subtext there. “We are alive….and you are not.”
Also, my 1980s relic-brain keeps translating “We are Gamers” as “We are Devo”.