A little realization hit me while I was watching videos about #GamerGate recently. MRAs and #GamerGaters really seem to enjoy depicting themselves as cartoon villains. Above, the skull-in-a-Koolaid-pitcher mascot of MRA videoblogger Bane666au.
Below, a screencap from a video by Mundane Matt, one of the movers and shakers behind the whole #GamerGate thing.
Once the smokey skull intro is over, here’s what you look at the rest of the time when you watch one of his videos:
And while we’re at it, the logo for his channel:
When they’re not depicting themselves as evil skulls with creepy eyes, MRAs and other antifeminists like to identify themselves with fictional villains:
That is, when they’re not posing as supervillains themselves:
Oh, hey, it’s our friend Davis Aurini, from earlier today, in an unphotoshopped screenshot from a video of his.
Oh, and here’s a screenshot from a more recent video of his. Note the skull. That’s right: he owns a freaking skull.
I hate to tell you guys, but I think YOU’RE THE BADDIES.
Yes, I know I’ve posted this video before, but once again it seemed very very apt.
oops.
*Prince
Whenever I hear someone say “Machiavellian,” I know I’m talking to someone who, at best, couldn’t be bothered to read any current thinking. “How to govern” is actually a field of study, with lots of information in it, some of it more recent than the 16th century! (this is the Policy in Policy of Madness)
Oh please, I read Plato’s The Republic, and you can’t tell me the field has been updated since then.
It’s better to be loved than feared…you have to sleep sometime.
Actually, more seriously, despots often die in bad ways and are not remembered well by history.
It doesn’t surprise me that the readership of RoK describe themselves as “sociopaths and Machiavellians.” These are the same people that believe being a borderline predator makes you a “real man.”
What I find amusing is that they seem to believe that they’re the “intelligent portion of the population” simply because they have, or appear to have psychopathic traits. According to people like Robert Hare, who have studied such people, psychopaths are usually no different than the regular population when it comes to intellect.
Psychopaths *think* they’re smarter, than everyone else, but that isn’t so. Serial killers, often portrayed as Hannibal Lecter-type geniuses, have an average IQ of 93.
I’m afraid so. Plato is no longer required reading (and I don’t think Machiavelli ever was).
Wasn’t it in the Prince where Machiavelli said that the prince had to love his country more than his own soul? That always kind of suggested to me that it was a cautionary tale, rather than a how to manual. I’ve read House of God the same way, and it was actually enjoyable like that.
If the judgments of other humans mean nothing to you, I guess it’s easy to feel grandiose.
If the average serial- killer IQ is 93, that only makes them a little lower than average. Plus it’s a small population, and possible we don’t catch the REALLY smart ones, so it could be a skewed sample.
Hmm, could be slightly slower due to head injury. My mom and I actually think my dad’s older brother was beaten into brain damage in his early childhood, and that does happen. A huge number of jail inmates were found to have healed skull fractures incurred in childhood when x-rayed as part of a study.
This all leaves out whether IQ is an actual measure of intelligence; I’d argue it’s limited as such and has problems.
Being a female FBI specialist tracking down serial killers could be a fairly cool game plot, I wonder if it’s been done?
With serial killers my guess would be that we just never catch the smart ones, not unless they want to get caught for some reason.
@ cassandra. My guess also.
OMG, that’s true! These guys would probably wig right out if they had to look inward OR in a mirror for any length of time. Just looking at them and reading their shit gives ME the willies. And I’m not a squeamish person…
Depends. If it’s being used in a superficial way by, say, a dating service or a big corporation trying to slot people into narrow categories, it is. But I first came into contact with it through my university’s counselling service during a mental crisis in second year. Found out that I was a fish out of water when my result came out INFP. So I switched majors from Life Sciences to English Lit, and my grades and mental health both prospered. I still credit that test with helping me to accept myself instead of trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.
So, whenever anyone says “Machivellian”, may I hear: “Unable to understand satire”?
I mean, on dealing with manospherians, it’s a safe bet anyway.
I’m so stealing this.
Have you asked the lambs?
I hear they’re notoriously tight lipped.
Bina – I know they give me the screaming heebie jeebies too. Though there’s also a certain amount of “I used to say similar shit when I was sixteen facepalming” on my part.
And blahlistic on a break away … Some tense stick handling at centre ice … Around the troll … Michael McG is in the clear … blahlistic to Michael McG … Michael McG gets the puck … and he shoots! He SCORES!!!!! Michael McG scores!! And the crowd goes wild!!!
blahlistic – As far as I’m aware most of those sort of suspense type games have male protagonists. I’d suggest Beyond Good and Evil for a good suspense/investigation type game with a female protagonist.
That being said I’m a big fan of Silent Hill 2 and consider it to be a fine example of psychological horror and storytelling so your mileage may vary.
I hate to concern troll, but people love villains. I think a better tack would be to stick with pointing out how ridiculous their attempts to look seriously villainous from their parents’ basements are.
They remind me a bit of a creeper I used to date in my early 20s. One who actually broke my naïve little heart when he dumped me. Then, out of the blue two years later, he calls me up as a “blast from the past”. Some fuckin’ blast! I had fun telling him, quite truthfully, that I was seeing someone else, sorry (NOT sorry)! When I think back about it, that dude had a lot of MRA/PUA tendencies about him that I hated and wondered why he bothered to cultivate, seeing as it was all only going to get in the way of life and love for him anyway. Phew…bullet dodged! Hope he’s nobody else’s problem now. He obviously had a lot of unexamined shit in his own head, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Can I just mention that comments like these bother me, because I–in part–identify with them?
Not because I’m misogynist, but because I live with my parents. I find most off putting because lives-with-parents is being used as a signifier of some deeply undesirable traits. I would much prefer if other posters would explicitly state their underlying assumptions rather that leave lives-with-parents as a dustbin for is-a-failure-as-human-being or is-thoroughly-distasteful-for-their-bigoted-opinions.
Bina – I’ve had a few moments like that myself where I’ve run into people from high school and had to back away slowly while avoiding eye contact. Granted I truly would not be shocked to learn that the high school I went to was built on a Buffy style hellmouth. I bounced all over Minnesota as a kid and the school I finally ended up in was by far the weirdest social clusterfuck I’ve ever seen.
I’ll admit there’s definitely a part of me that looks at these gamergate tools and wonders how easily I could have been one of them if this had happened 15 years ago or if I hadn’t had the opportunities I did to learn what a self absorbed shit I was back then.
Oh, I was right on the cusp of getting sucked into the whole FeMRA dumbass mindset when I was a high schooler. Fortunately, I caught myself and landed on the side of “dudes need feminism too, because without it, they’re just insufferable!” It crystallized for me when I wrote an essay on a W.O. Mitchell book. Canadian literature was suffering a real influx of “wimp lit” at the time. Wimps, as seen in CanLit, were basically proto-MRA/PUA jackass characters with no guts but a lot of wind. Women didn’t like them…not because they weren’t macho, but because they were trying to be and had nothing to back it up, like a personality and some kind of moral compass. And what the critics at Maclean’s missed that I found out in my readings is that wimps only grow out of it when they start learning to treat women as people, not accessories. Boom! Teenage feminist got her wings.
You’re not the only one living with your parents (or parent) here, Michael McG. I always have and I’m over 50. I think it’s the “living in parents’ basement” that summons the picture of these trolls, not the fact of living with parents. Or it could be that, being a woman, I don’t identify with that specifically male image at all.
Well, the idea is that the best thing is to be both loved and feared, but since that’s usually not possible, fear is safer because that’s something you can control. But the key is to make sure that you’re never hated. If people are willing to suffer in order to resist you, then you can never be safe – The People are just too numerous.
The problem with the despots is that they never get past the bumper sticker.