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 clichĂ©s 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.
@andiexist
Gender identity disorder is the formal medical/psychological term for being transgender is it not? I’m saying that it’s not fraudulent of this person to claim her condition was threatening her life if it was in fact making her suicidal. It’s not like she said she had a life threatening condition but was really just getting a nose job or elf-ear prosthetics, which is what you’d think from the outrage of the Gaters.
Operation “where are these losers coming from?” commence! There have been so many of them recently.
@cassandrakitty
GamerGate trolls always crash posts about GamerGate. Even in sites they’re supposedly boycotting. It’s like asking where cockroaches come from.
chaltab, not an expert on the subject but I think many trans people and allies consider calling your identity a ‘disorder’ is problematic, implying that there’s something wrong with it and the desirability that it is ‘fixed’, etc. But I’ll let people more informed than me to explain it better.
As for the so-complicated-ethical-conundrum, yeah it’s pretty obvious that not endangering a vulnerable person’s life by exposing their privacy to a hostile environment (how many things you think they have done wrong being irrelevant) has several times more priority than protecting others’ economic interests what on earth are you thinking??
I suspect these are all coming from one particular source, though, since they’re all following the same script. Like the attempt to take over Tumblr with confusing posts about hair dye, but with a different target.
This rant looks like someone perfected an Elizabot by feeding it conspiracy nut manifestos. Dialectic? Marxist? These words are used not as if by someone who knows what they mean, but just a vague inference that they go somewhere in the monologue.
seranvali,
Nice to meet you too. I agree that being feminist comes with the territory, as you say, of being a female members of the armed forces (especially the Army – the best, obviously, heh). I do not understand the whole “first person shooter” video game thing or whatever it’s called. I have no desire to play it. I am thankful I have never had to serve in combat. My buddies who have have told me “stay out of combat if you can.” If I shoot anything I would rather shoot real rifle on the range. That’s hard enough for me, I tell you. Those gamers are clearly under an illusion if they think themselves soldiers, because being a soldier is more about integrity. “Duty” means things like acting righteously, keeping your mouth shut, and being selfless. A good Army-oriented video game would be about knowing how to pack your ruck to go to the field, helping your buddies, f****ing showing up for formation on time, taking care of your gear, etc. and *staying motivated* when you’re tired, hungry, thirsty, and hurt. Also, do those shooter games make you f***ing clean your weapon? Is there some algorithm that measures how much digital carbon build-up is in the working parts of whatever rifle they have (sorry, don’t play Call of Duty…guess it’s all WWII, so those would be Garands, I suppose?). It amazes me how I can be accused of betraying traditional gender-normative masculinity when my accusers ignore some of the basics of that identity themselves. I bet there are more feminist, anti-misogynist men who are against rape, who think women have complete right over their own bodies, who like women whether they’re friends or lovers, and who can change a tire, build and fix things, maybe have been a soldier, airman, sailor or marine or whatever and who like girls who can do all those things too than there are MRAs whining about the loss of masculinity. I am against violence except in cases of self-defense but I admit sometimes I want to say to MRAs saying we “maginas” are betraying masculine identity: “Heh, yeah, well, I bet I could kick YOUR ass…..”
So the campaign was shut down before she was outed? That makes his actions even more despicable.
@Libarbarian:
Weird, in the world I live in, fraud generally gets solved without doxxing. In fact, I can’t think of a fraud cause that got solved by doxxing.
Odd that your kind is absolutely incapable of grasping that. It’s as if you defend doxxing only because you want transfolk get doxxed and killed.
…I did miss a good troll take-down here. Warms my soul.
Of course, you never, ever, ever out someone. I think the extra crap thing with the journalist in question is that not only what he did, but also the “WHAT A TWIST!” quality about it–“not only is she a woman in gaming, she’s a lying woman in gaming–but wait, there’s more! She’s a transwoman in gaming who also happened to lie–just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it did! WHAT A TWIST.”
“Ethics in gaming journalism” my lumpy butt.
It also baffles me that the idea of outting a transperson is totally ok to these people, but they still throw temper tantrums about neck beard, basement-dwelling, Mountain Dewritos drinking, fedora wearing, woman hating sterotyping of GGers.
Happy Veteran’s Day!
As a vet of 8 years in the USAF with no war experience (1979-1987), these folks with their war analogies kind of make me cringe but mainly I feel they’re just ridiculous.
Even though I worked in admin and communications, I have more relevant experience and training than a bunch of FPS gamers who can’t even file updates to regulations or type up a classified file destruction form. Let alone set up a cordon entry point for a real Broken Arrow scene.
Wait, aren’t these the same people who flipped their shit when violentacrez was named on Gawker? Either revealing people’s personal information when writing about them is OK or it isn’t, you can’t pick and choose depending on whether or not you like the person whose private information is being revealed, and their posting child porn is a better justification for doing so than whatever the gaming drama of the week is.
Even though Chaltab was using outdated and problematic terminology without realising it or meaning to (@Chaltab: “Gender identity disorder” is being phased out in favour of “Gender dysphoria” for the reason Andiexist mentioned), their basic point was sound – Chloe did tell the truth about it being life-saving surgery.
My grandfather was in the Spanish American War, one of my grandmother’s brothers was in WWI, father and uncle in WWII, one brother was career Air Force, I was career VA.* Somehow, we don’t think of ourselves as a ‘military family’, but I’ve known about the costs of war my whole life. I remember rubbing Ben-Gay into my dad’s back and seeing the huge scar from where the field medic cut out the bullet (and the small scar on his chest from where the bullet went in). What these ratbags are doing is revolting and disrespectful, and almost everyone but them can see it.
They are part of a war, that much is true, but not the one they seem to think. And they’re definitely not on the side they’re claiming.
*Twenty four years in a VA hospital’s prosthetic department teaches you a lot about what war can do to the human body and mind.
@chaltab
I’m willing to accept that you probably mean well, but being transgender is not a “condition.”
Also, the thing about her “condition” making her suicidal is rubbing me the wrong way in more than just the “condition” wording. I’m… not sure exactly why. Are there any trans folks around at the moment who want to weigh in on this? (If you haven’t already. I get ninja’d a lot. :P)
@M
I’m afraid that I’m a bit more wary of xir, given the quantity of trolls we’ve been getting. I hope I’m not jumping to conclusions too much?
Once again, could we be spared the trans terminology fighting here? It’s not the place for it.
@kittehserf
Okay. It seemed like a bit of a red flag, but you are much more experienced at judging red flags, so I will shut up now. 🙂
It’s more about the fact that this isn’t the place for trans matters dominating the conversation. We’ve had two major blow-ups on this blog because of that, and the atmosphere leading up to it was toxic, with regulars walking on eggshells while one or two people policed every damn word. I am not willing to see that happen again.
Hey twincats – be proud of your service. That admin and communications was and is serious sh*t, and you served during the height of the Cold War. Hell, it’s not like the operational units you were supporting weren’t out there flying REAL missions preparing for a real war that very well could have happened. We’re lucky it didn’t. Every Cold War era veteran should be proud. Bet you remember being on edge when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, or like when they shot down that Korean jetliner in 83. The Cold War was real shit, baby. Thanks for your service. Real life cordon entry points for those broken arrow situations…damn. Makes me shudder and my airborne ass used to jump out of y’all’s C-130s.
I tried giving this a listen but had to give up after the 92 word sentence. At least in Orwell’s book, Emmanuel Goldstein’s rants were only a TWO MINUTES HATE.
G’day XanthĂ«!
You’re stronger than me – I can never bring myself to listen to dudebro crap. The transcripts are more than enough.
How many pages was that one speech in Atlas Shrugged again? A friend of mine counted at one point.
Well, since brevity is the soul of wit, or something to that effect, it only makes sense that d00dbros and Randian heroes would need to ramble on and on and on and on and on.
Cassandra – I don’t know, but when I read the Necronomicon* I made a point of reading every word.
I don’t recommend it.
*I call AS the Necronomicon of political fiction. And that is TOO a word, autocorrect!