Today, the most pretentious, and also probably the most ridiculous GamerGate video I’ve seen so far.
Over black-and-white footage of assorted video game shooters, the YouTuber who calls himself PowerIndustry tries to provide a bit of inspiration to his comrades in the virtual trenches who have chosen, as he puts it, to “stand and fight.”
For those who can’t make it through the whole nine minutes– and there may be more than a few of you – here’s Mr. PI’s basic argument.
Be warned: his sentences can get a little long and convoluted and at times he doesn’t seem to know what the words he’s using actually mean. Roll with it.
He starts off with a description of GamerGate that might strike you just as a teensy bit overwrought.
This is a war. A war of the dialectics. A battle not just for the culture of gaming, for ethics in journalism, but perhaps the final battle of logic and reason in the modern Western world. Gawker, Kotaku and all the other political hacks know that they will have to break us and this movement, for if they do, with the most powerful medium at their disposal, they will be able to broadcast and control all intellectual ideas and messages for their corrupt and vile ideology, and video games, along with all mediums and media, will sink into a dark age not since seen or heard of, made only perhaps more sinister by the pollution of the pseudo-intellectualism that may very well dominate all it touches for generations.
Yes, that second sentence there was 92 words long.
But if we hold strong upon this war, if we endure upon the hit pieces and lies and fight back, if we remain sovereign and strong and respond with a resonating and sustaining yell of “no, not one step further” then not only will they be driven back to the idiological darkness from which they came but a new dawn shall shine its light back upon reason, back upon truth and honor. And not only will ethics return to journalism but the cultural Marxists who seek only to control and oppress those they pretend to speak for will find themselves for the first time in ten years on the defensive and the war taken to their front.
He goes on in this vein for some time, before finishing up with what he intends to be a rousing pep talk.
To you weary, who wonder now as I drivel on as I always have, wonder whether you will have the strength to continue, or if our battle has been in vain, and that soon GamerGate may plunge into darkness I say to you this: Do not despair. The shield of deception and lies has never once stopped even the weakest parry of the sword of truth, for it is truth that has driven back the darkness from the primordial age, it has turned huts to nations and nations to civilizations, it has pumped electricity into your home and put the sun at the center of the solar system, it has brought the world closer to becoming the sons of gods we were meant to be, [?] apes that we but a few million years ago closely resembled. …
Truth will prevail, as long as there are men who are willing to carry the light.
In his mind, the evil enemies of truth and gaming have
made a fatal miscalculation.
They have forgotten that we are gamers. That we on a daily basis fight and die a thousand deaths in a humiliating and ego-shattering fashion for perhaps a single taste of glory.
Or perhaps just a taste of Mountain Dew.
We are a breed that will fight a thousand wars for a chance of a single victory. … We will not stop fighting until the final boss falls at our feet.
He continues on with more of this “never surrender” nonsense, but I think you’ve probably gotten the gist of it. And I find myself too annoyed to keep transcribing.
Why? Because, Mr. PowerIndustry, YOU ARE NOT FIGHTING BATTLES, You ARE NOT FIGHTING WARS. You’re NOT SWINGING A SWORD OF TRUTH.
You are SITTING ON YOUR ASS PLAYING VIDEO GAMES.
You’re not defending TRUTH and REASON from the evil cultural Marxist Gawkerites. You’re HAVING A COLLECTIVE TANTRUM BECAUSE SOME VIDEO GAME JOURNALISTS CALLED YOU A BUNCH OF BABIES.
Which, by the way, YOU ARE.
Look , I enjoy video games too, including Call of Duty and other first person shooters.
But fucking hell, dudes, VIDEO GAMES ARE NOT REAL LIFE. REAL LIFE IS NOT A VIDEO GAME.
There are no “millions of gaming dead.” They’re PIXELS ON A SCREEN.
Your “movement” for “Truth” and “Reason” started off as a harassment campaign aimed at a female game developer. And at its heart it remains a harassment campaign today, albeit one with a somewhat wider range of targets and some nobler-sounding rhetoric.
Which often ends up sounding as ridiculous as this risibly bombastic little video does.
But the REAL problem with this video isn’t just that it’s ridiculous; that’s pretty much the only thing that makes it watchable.
No, the real problem is that it’s fundamentally dishonest as well. Its vague and pompous rhetoric is designed to hide what GamerGaters are actually doing in this “war” of theirs – that is, trying to ruin the lives and livelihoods of game writers (and critics and developers) who’ve gotten bored with hackneyed sexist tropes and endless Call of Duty sequels and who’ve dared to say so publicly.
In his famous essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell tried to figure out just what made so much political writing so very bad. “As soon as certain topics are raised,” he noted,
the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.
That of course is a perfect description of the rhetoric in PowerIndustry’s little video.
Orwell realized that this kind of bad writing didn’t just stem from a lack of imagination. No, he argued, political language sinks into clichés and vague writing generally because, in so many cases, political writers are trying to obscure the ugly realities of politics with pretty rhetoric.
In our time [he was writing in 1946], political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. …Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. … Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Obviously GamerGaters aren’t razing villages or throwing peasants off of their farms. But they are harassing and in some cases terrorising their chosen enemies in the name of “Truth” and “Reason” and “Ethics.
And while few pieces of GamerGate are quite as ridiculously bombastic and overblown as “For Those Who Stand and Fight,” much if not most of GamerGate rhetoric is as fundamentally dishonest in its attempts, as Orwell would put it, to defend the indefensible.
Most of us outside of GamerGate can see this propaganda for what it is. Which is perhaps why so much GamerGate propaganda – including this video – is intended primarily for internal consumption, as a way to shore up the flagging spirits of new activists and convince them what they are doing is a noble thing.
The best way for us to fight rhetoric like the rhetoric in this video isn’t with detailed rebuttals but with laughter.
So mock on, comrades, we have a culture war to win! With your help, and a little luck, we can defeat GamerGate and plunge western civilization into a new dark age just in time for Christmas.
Oops, typed Messa instead of Mezza and now my comment is awaiting moderation… I am not all there today, sorry!
Pasting my comment:
@libarbarian
“You think that would have been the lesser wrong?”
…Are you honestly implying that, between “outing a suicidal trans woman, thus placing her at risk of both suicide and potential assault” and “using kickstarter money for something you didn’t promise to use it for”, the latter is worse?
What the fuck? On that note, why are you even still here? You’ve been trying to stir shit up for the past few posts, including earlier in this one.
The WarNerd on ISIS: http://pando.com/2014/11/10/the-war-nerd-farewell-islamic-state-we-hardly-knew-ye/
This part reminds me of GamerGate: “there’s a grudging kind of pity that comes over you after you’ve spent a day looking at foolish twitter feeds by people who actually think that a new Islamic State storefront in some little Syrian town is a sure sign that the reign of a universal, triumphant caliphate is nigh.”
Thus Spake Zarawhiskeyhammer:
In a way, you’re right. The privileged have always thrown temper tantrums and claimed they are being “attacked” when others inch toward equality. And for at least a century, they’ve insisted that although they’ve lost all those other battles against greater equality for more people, they’re totally gonna win this one for sure. Then they lose again, and a generation later, nobody wants to admit they sided with the reactionaries at the time.
I’d suggest you find a core for your politics other than being “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop”. That hasn’t been working out so well for the standers-athwart-history. “Let’s turn back the clock, to those mythical days when everything was perfect!” is useful enough in the short term, but in the long term, it seems like reactionary fervor always gives way to the enduring belief that we can genuinely make the world better. As a little Jewish barber put it, “We want to live by each other’s happiness — not by each other’s misery.”
This is ….p u r e gold!
Thanks for the ROFL
@Mezza
Why am I still here? Because I like this site and usually drop by at least once a day. I happened to see someone refer to the AP/CS story in way that seems to indicate he/she feels that the ethics were clear-cut and obvious. Personally, I think they were cloudy and so I asked if he/she really thought it was as clear-cut as it appeared that he/she did. “Stirring up shit” indeed.
@libarbarian
You’d have more luck trolling if your username wasn’t literally “Libertarian barbarian,” partially because the Libertarian Party is just the Ayn Rand wing of the Republican Party and partially because it’s really easy to remember a name like that between threads.
At least you’re more subtle in this one, I suppose. Last time you were about as subtle as a rhino with no bowel control duct taped to a neon yellow train.
@libarbarian
Since you seem to be agreeing with the “Kickstarter fraud is worse than outing a suicidal trans woman” thing…
I am thirding the “why are you still here?”
Because if you really thing fraud is worse than something that could result in someone’s death, you do not belong here. Except *maybe* as a troll to be batted around. We *are* cats, right? Cats in ferret in David Futrelle in commenter suits?
Whichever, you’ve shown your deed to the bridge.
😛
libarbarian:
Are you seriously trying to argue Pinsof was somehow justified in outing a trans woman? Are you really, seriously arguing that outing someone on public media without their permission is somehow an ethically ambiguous action rather than a “clear-cut and obvious” wrong thing to do?
jmv:
Did you actually read that Time article you linked to?
This is what Leigh Alexander concluded:
You’ll notice a very distinct difference in content, thesis and tone from PowerIndustry’s video. Mainly, Alexander isn’t making some overblown call to arms, while PowerIndustry is.
@libarbarian, yes, I do think it would have been a lesser wrong, because if I had to choose between “exposing fraud” and “protecting the life of a vulnerable person”, I choose second one every single time. If I was in a position where I knew a vulnerable person was committing Kickstarter fraud, I would bring my evidence directly to Kickstarter, get the campaign shut down with a general apology issued (“It has been brought to our attention that this campaign was in violation of Kickstarter Terms of Service, etc. etc.) and ensure all the contributors get their money back. That way, no one’s out of pocket and a trans woman retains her privacy. ETHICS.
@tinyorc
No, see, you can only pick between one or the other. There’s no way you could expose wrongdoing while not invading someone’s privacy and posting sensitive information about them. Hasn’t Gamergate taught you anything? /s
I don’t think it’s that. I think they don’t have the maturity and backbone to handle the failure and disappointment that always precedes success . Why else do you think they throw such tantrums when someone talks badly about their “movement”? They can’t handle shit.
Oh also, UPDATE. The petition was a success! Dapper Laughs has been denied a second TV series and as word of him goes around, I think more and more venues will refuse to host him (Cardiff University cancelled his gig after his “gagging for a rape” joke). He tried giving money to a homeless charity once and they rejected it, which says something.
@ Sparky – I think M. has the key here. If Libarbarian is in fact a libertarian, that explains it all. Libertarians’ sense of morality never grows beyond “how does this affect me personally?” Libarbarian can imagine himself getting ripped off by a fraudulent Kickstarter, so that’s horrible. A trans person committing suicide because they were outed is nothing to do with him, so it doesn’t matter.
Yes. Take your seat next to the people who opposed the emancipation of slaves, women’s suffrage, integration, the end of apartheid, minimum wage, the 40 hour work week, the end of child labor, and the people who are still opposing gay marriage, abortion rights, and the people who still support the death penalty.
Such proud company you keep!
That said, while I think there is basically no justification for publicly outing a trans person under any circumstances, the nature of journalism does often force journalists in sticky ethical conundrums where they have to juggle the individual’s right to privacy with what the public need to know. Journalists and publications often have to make tough ethical decisions that don’t have a clear-cut “right” answer. That’s why learning about ethics is a big part of journalism training.
That’s also why it’s so hilarious that GG’s rallying cry is just ETHICS IN GAMES JOURNALISM, as though ethics is a quantifiable substance that can be added or subtracted to things. It’s like “Guys, what ethics? What ethical stance are you taking here? WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY ETHICS?”
Meanwhile, Eminem is showing his ass again. http://gawker.com/eminem-wants-to-punch-lana-del-rey-in-the-face-like-ra-1657333649
Because violence against women is so edgy! *eyeroll*
1) Regardless of my handle used for commenting on blogs I am not a libertarian. Reading too deep into stupid blog-comment handles is kind of foolish, right? Should I assume @tinyorc is tiny and/or an orc? Is @M REALLY a Ranger? What is his animal companion? Come on!
2a) I do not think that “exposing a fraud” is clearly or necessarily worse than outing a trans person. AP didn’t just stumble on some fraud and decide “fuck it. I’m outing this person”. He had actually taken a lead in urging people to donate to CS based on her lies and therefore felt complicit in the fraud when she told him about it. Those people, who thought they had donated to save someones life were asking him why the thing had been suspended and what the hell was going on. Yes, in hindsight and from a distance it looks like simply telling Kickstarter would have been enough, but considering he himself was dealing with feeling betrayed by a ‘friend’ and then feeling responsible for bringing other people into a bad situation ….
2b) Having dealt with a person who used threats of suicide to manipulate people (and it wasn’t just cynical – the guy did kill himself eventually) I have serious reservations about assigning responsibility to 3rd parties for the suicide attempts of suicidal people. I have VERY serious reservations when the “responsibility” is being assigned not for engaging in a campaign of malicious harassment but rather for a single act that consisted in telling the truth to people who had, in fact, been lied to.
I keep on coming back to the page hoping for a new article about Gamergate’s latest antics, but when I think about it, I can’t imagine anything happening that’s stupider than what’s already happened.
How about a new Sarkeesian Effect set of videos? In this one, Jordan Owen meanders his way over to justifying Paul Elam’s “I will vote not guilty for every rapist regardless of the details if I am put on a Jury” thing. Still watching, though, so we’ll see if there are any other fun things.
ETA: Finally talking about where the money is going.
There’s also a second Patreon trailer, where Aurini finally explains what the “Sarkeesian Effect” is (provoking harassment, then using that harassment to get money, essentially) before revealing all the persecution he and Jordan have been facing in a talk about donations. But he’s totally not trying to get people to donate, no sir! It just means that, since the MSM isn’t fully supportive of them, there must be lots and lots of truth to uncover.
Ugh… no idea how to link to a specific video rather than a playlist… The video I’m talking about is the one just before the top of the playlist at this time: “#TheSarkeesianEffect: Informal Update, FOIA Request, Celebrinando Guy.”
All mediums and media?
Shit just got real.
Such a charmer isn’t he? This comment in response to his spiel of disturbing lyrical nonsense pretty much summed it up for me,
“This is just a bunch of dumb words that decided to hang out together.”
@sunnysombrera,
Hurrah! *does misandrist dance of joy*. Although ITV’s stance a couple of days earlier that Dapper’s “humour is more risqué but… his unique brand of banter and brash charm is neither sexist or degrading to women” makes the refusal to renew now seem somewhat hollow.
@libarbarian
You’ve attempted to ‘stir up shit’ in other posts before, so fourthing the overall feeling of “why are you here?”. The ‘ZQ is just as bad as EG’ debacle in particular comes to mind, in which you got your arse handed to you multiple times. If you’re going to react so defensively to everything you personally don’t agree with, this may not be the place for you.
FWIW, I thought “libarbarian” = “library barbarian”, but in hindsight I guess that “librabarian” might be better for that…
…though then one assume that he’s a Libran barbarian…
…though a balanced barbarian might be interesting…
*wanders out, not entirely sure what she’s on about*
Well, on the plus side, Jordan finally admits he “jumped the gun” about anita not contacting the police way back. Also on the plus side, there’s some beautiful petty sniping about not being able to hear what Aurini said when he walked in to the room in the background. X_X
And on the super plus side, apparently there’s this “Celebrinando” dude who’s been dropping, to quote, “big bombs about Anita Sarkeesian,” like that she’s a fundamentalist Christian or that she’s confused about here sexual orientation, claims which Jordan calls “juicy.”
The twist? He’s the dude that was sending death threats that gamergate exposed.
And now I’m watching Jordan talk slow, irritated english to this guy with a bunch of spanish subtitles. O_O Is he saying the guys a loon? Nope! Just that the guy is being annoying, not helping, and making obvious claims.