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:
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:
: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:
http://media.tumblr.com/05b50cfbddac574d4d3d2e610dcb45f6/tumblr_inline_nc5jb3zzg01sbi1vp.png
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.
http://www.leigh-smith.org/mediac/400_0/media/sufget.jpg