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.
Hi pals. Long time, no comment. I stopped frequenting WHTM because stuff got way too real for me. Never fear! I started painting and stopped reading as much and all is well.
But I want to share my two cents here.
Working in the gaming world was the reason I found this blog. I was the Token She-Manager with Real Live Lady Parts at my not-so-friendly neighborhood GameStop. After being exposed to harassment by customers and staff on a daily basis in the name of REAL GAMERZ, I hit the Internet to see if I was the only one as appalled by the horrible state of gaming culture. David had written one or two articles about it at that point–this was over a year ago, and the cesspool that is GamerGate was but a rage-filled twinkle (tear?) in the eye of some jerkface. I wasn’t alone. It was nice. It was enough to keep me going at my store…for a while.
Aside from my store being robbed at gunpoint for a next-gen console and a copy for Just Dance 2014, amassing a handful of stalking “regulars” who felt free to comment on my body, ask to cut my hair or for sexual favors, and offer me drugs, being questioned about my validity as a gamer because I don’t play CoD, and ultimately walking out on the job because the store manager told me that I couldn’t hack it in the illustrious field of retail management because I have ADHD, the nastiest thing about the whole ordeal was this:
The crap that is in this video? 3 out of 5 of my customers thought exactly the same garbage and felt secure enough to espouse that wisdom–usually talking over me to a man, because lord knows Lady Parts would never understand such a holy war.
I have intentionally followed GameGate as little as possible because I lived it before it had a name–even as a tiny player on the lowly retail side of things, my year at GameStop was more than enough sexist rage to last a lifetime. While videos like this one seem hilariously over the top, it has been my experience that this sort of Holy War thinking is frighteningly common within the “hardcore gamer bro” core.
Annnd that’s a little more than two cents, but there you have it. Back to sewing six bazillion seed pearls on to my last minute veil for my wedding on Friday. Apparently having ADHD doesn’t just disqualify me from the sparkly, shiny world of GameStop lower management, but from getting DIY projects done on any sort of respectable time table.
libarbarian:
“As far as I’m aware, she was raising the money for personal use.”
Oh dear, letting personal relationships influence your reporting. Not very ethical at all.
“I’m sorry to all those I encouraged to donate to this campaign. I was clearly not aware of the fraudulent nature at that time. However, while I know a lot of people are feeling angry and cheated, I believe the person responsible has suffered more than enough fallout from this and is currently recovering from a suicide attempt. I urge everyone to respect her privacy and not turn this into a witch hunt.”
LOOK AT ALL MY ETHICS GO.
libarbarian:
This isn’t about assigning responsibility for suicide, it’s about not piling more punishment on top of someone who has tried to take their own life. And suicide aside, do you have any idea what rates of violence against trans women are like? I’ll give you a clue. They are staggering. For many trans women, privacy is quite literally a matter of life or death, and respecting that line is exactly kind of “minimize harm” ethics journalists need to employ, regardless of their personal feelings.
Again, how does that justify publishing sensitive information that might endanger someone’s life?
In totally unrelated, beautiful news from the world of gaming:
http://www.themarysue.com/bioware-marriage-proposal/
*weeps*
(Not meant to derail, but posted because it seemed like something you all would appreciate.)
Silly billy! M is obviously a 1ST EDITION Social Justice Ranger. Zie doesn’t get an animal companion. Fancy not knowing that! You’re obviously not a REAL nerd. (/sarcasm)
On the other hand, M deals her level in bonus damage to trolls. Oh hey, isn’t this your splanch?
@ libarbarian – Are you still trying? Seriously, there is no magical combination of words that will get us to agree that outing a suicidal transwoman was anything but the obviously wrong thing to do.
> 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”
Neither of these verbs/verb phrases require prepositions, and even if they did, that preposition would sure as hell no be “upon.” If you’re going to resort to overblown rhetoric, at least overblown it correctly.
I never said it “justified” it. I don’t know what I think about that situation. I think the situation is fucked up and there isn’t any clear-cut right answer. I think that posturing like there is, and pretending that it’s obvious to anyone who isn’t a moral ogre, is really cheap and easy when it’s not you who has to make any decisions.
There are things that outrank “thou shalt not out a trans person” on the scale of moral imperatives. I don’t know if “thou shalt not keep silent about an ongoing fraud” is one of them but I certainly don’t think it is obviously not – especially when the trans person is the one committing the fraud and therefore bears responsibility for putting herself in that position to begin with. I suppose it depends on the size of the fraud and the number of people and the damage done to them. It’s a judgement call that is easy to snipe at from the sidelines and after the fact.
“He could have just reported it to IndieGoGo and kept his mouth shut”. Maybe – but you don’t know that would have ended it! If the whole issue was shut down on the hush-hush (as the first one was), what would stop her from doing a second? Any of you in that circumstances would have thought of those things too and considered how you would have some responsibility for future damage that you could have prevented.
But by all means continue to feed your pretensions to moral superiority by pretending that it was clear and obvious and that you would have definitely made the right decision in his place.
Now, in all fairness, sometimes a nym is just a pretty sound. I mean ‘ConflictAvoidantCynicalMiddleAgedNurseWithTrustIssues’ sounds a little unwieldly, but is a much better descriptor for me than my usual nym.
Fine. Will do. Bye bye now.
@libarbarian: I don’t know the details about this “fraud” thing, but I don’t see how it could be justified in any way to out this person, no matter what they did, as doing that just seems downright evil and unnecessary. Also, one wouldn’t know if reporting it discretely would work or not unless they actually tried to do so
“was clear and obvious”
Yes, not endangering people’s lives, not doxxing people to the public and simply reporting possible fraud that isn’t of particular public interest to the actual relevant place is indeed clear and obvious.
It takes a tremendously awful person to stray from the clear and obvious choice here.
But there was a clear-cut wrong one, and outing a suicidal trans woman was it.
Not posturing. Not outing a suicidal trans woman is obvious to anyone who isn’t a moral ogre.
True. But not many.
Then you are a moral ogre.
“She was asking for it!”
Very easy. Because it was so obviously wrong.
…and then we would have considered the future damage that we could be responsible for if we outed a suicidal trans woman, and realize that that, at least, was obviously the wrong answer.
Not pretensions. Whatever our failings, we are morally superior. To them, and to you. Because while we may not have figured out the right answer, we would certainly have known that outing a suicidal trans woman was the wrong one.
But by all means, continue to search for the magic words that will make this something other than horribly wrong.
I’m not the only one who hears a sad trombone noise every time libarbarian comments, right? Poor little trollbaby, he’s trying so hard and failing so badly.
Also, this personal obviously needs an editor. I am feeling generous, so I will pitch in.
Original text:
“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.”
Suggested edit:
“They have forgotten that we are gamers. That we, on a daily basis, fight in a humiliating and ego-shattering fashion.”
Second (and perhaps more accurate) suggested edit:
“They have forgotten that we are a white, cis-gendered male gamers. That we, on a daily basis, pick fights on Twitter and parade our righteous sexism in a humiliating fashion for perhaps a single chance at preserving our easily-shattered egos.”
Case in point: Libarbarian, whose ego seems quite severly bruised.
Macha: Well, overinflated balloons are easier to pop…
Libarbarian is boring me.
Question: if the person in question is suffering from gender identity disorder to the point that they’re suicidal, then how is that NOT a life-threatening condition?
@libarbarian
There is only one crime she could commit where her genitals would even matter. She has not committed it. Her being trans has nothing to do with fraud, and therefore should not come up. Even if it was to buy things related to being trans.
Instead of outing her, just say she was planning to buy/had bought “personal items” and be done with it.
Oh, and on the suicide thing? Yeah, my abuser did that one too. It even worked for a while. Nobody’s obligated to stay with someone like that or be manipulated by threats of suicide, but yes, YOU ARE FREAKING OBLIGATED TO REFRAIN FROM OUTING SOMEONE IF THERE IS ANY OTHER OPTION.
You are not-so-cordially invited to remove your head from your posterior.
@chaltab
I do hope you are not attempting to say that being transgender is a disorder. If you are saying that, then I am perfectly willing to do a two-for-one deal on a surgical procedure to remove your head from your posterior.
Freemage: And yet they still go out with merely a whimper.
This is old and probably already posted somewhere, but for all the evo psych trolls who think misogyny is inevitable or that men must be dominant: http://www.themarysue.com/evolutionary-online-misogyny/
@Macha
If I walk away because I am bored you will interpret that as “going out with merely a whimper” and it’s proof that you “won” … something. If I rage and rage then it’s just me losing my shit and that’s also proof that you “won” …. something. I suppose I could just apologize for my wrong-think and beg forgiveness which would mean that you “won” … something.
Damn, being a “me too”-er on an internet forum is a pretty good gig. You always win. Shit! Why didn’t I think of that??!!
@weirwoodtreehugger – “Libarbarian is boring me.”
Ah, see that almost makes me want to continue. However, I am also booring myself, so I’ll resist.
Toodles. Until next time.
@ libarbarian – if I say ‘you win’, will you go away? I think it’s worth a try…
You WIN!!!!!!