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.
Woah, woah, woah David, i’d be careful what you admit to liking. If there’s something gamers hate more than women, feminists or SJWs (or whatever the boogeyman of today is), it’s people liking things they don’t (see: any discussion involving Call of Duty on any gamer forum, ever).
I also thought their meme thingies couldn’t get any worse after the last couple of attempts, but now the gaters choose the frickin’ Imperium as their poster child? *Facepalm* If the gaters are the Imperium, what are we? Tyranids? ..Wait, that actually works strangely well within their fictional narrative.
(Btw, long time no see! I hadn’t visited this place for a while but i’m glad to see it’s still going, and with a few names I recognise still around! I think the last time I was here was back before the name change, around the time of the incident where everyone suddenly decided to have cat avatars. Good times).
That bitcoin thread is AMAZING. It’s like the finest wine and cheese and smooshy kittens all in one. Just beautiful.
The next time someone starts talking about bitcoins I might even hold off immediately laughing in their stupid faces! Oh it’s amazing. I want it to go on and on.
I didn’t realize that the noble logic and truthiness of white male cishet gamers who haven’t left their parent’s suburban tract house basement in years was responsible for our very sun. Here I thought that billions of years ago, some stars died and the matter eventually coalesced into a new star. Here I thought that matter also coalesced into smaller bodies that would be become planets and those planets started orbiting the sun because of it’s considerable gravitational pull. I had no idea gamergaters have been bravely fighting for truth and ethics for 4.6 billion years. The greatness is humbling. They invented gravity. What have I done with my life? I guess I’ll have to stop being a feminist now. Where do I turn in my scented candles and hard chairs?
And YOU are the one fighting a real war? At least they don’t distort the truth like you. Maybe hit the damn gym and quit drinking mountain dew by the liter.
Yeah… really, there aren’t many ‘left-libertarians’ these days. Before they got some cachet in political circles, libertarians were often viewed as being what happens when you go so far to the left or right that you come out the other side. But once they got some attention, the term got co-opted for basically a far-right agenda; they occasionally make a feint towards things like marijuana legalization, but for the most part, they’re just blanket lassez-faire business policy enthusiasts.
This is a battle for “all mediums and media”! That’s something that all persons and people should be concerned about.
But he read some fantasy novels with medievalesque settings and watched some sword and sandal movies. That means he is an expert in sword fighting and pretty much a veteran of old timey battles. How dare you criticize him? Just be careful because said fantasy novels mean he is also an expert on wizardry and witchcraft. I wouldn’t want you to be turned into a toad or anything!
So, are they referencing the Sword of Truth series? Seems like the type of shit they’d like – the book series being the shit, the TV series was actually decent. But the books… Richard Rhal is an asshole and the sword is used for terrible things and ugh. That being said… I really wish these guys would realize that we’ve always been here and right now there is no great war only developers finally noticing us and acknowledging our existence. After… YEARS.
Dude’s attempt to win over the bitcoin dudes on Reddit is the funniest thing I’ve seen so far this week.
Note that the only part of this that’s true is that gamergate is a thing that exists and that took off a few months ago. The hordes of young democrats turning libertarian? No, most libertarians become Republicans when they grow up and misplace their copy of Atlas Shrugged. The civil war on the left? Not actually happening. I mean, I’ve laughed at some of the sillier things to come out of Tumblr with the rest of them (“Don’t eat Mexican food if you’re not Mexican, it’s appropriation” was a favorite), but that’s not a civil war, that’s one group of people rolling their eyes at another group of people and going “look, that’s just silly”. No bloody battlefields, no dying a thousand deaths daily, just people not agreeing with each other.
Also what do you want to bet that their super seekrit mailing list designed to control all newspaper content is just journos being subscribed to the AP news feed?
@magnesium
LOL at the guy failing to be his own shield. But I seriously want to send old pagan finnish curses (if only I spoke finnish…) on this asshole for getting Moomin tattoos. The fucker doesn’t even know Tove Jansson was a feminist and pacifist and Moomins are about fucking tolerance and equality for fucks sake.
@Xanith
GarbleGhast is a movement. Except when it isn’t. Except when it is.
@andiexist
Yeah, I figured both sides in that war were equally filled with racist assholes so it wasn’t really the best analogy, but “SJWcloak” made me giggle too much to not post it. XP
@Bernardo Soares
One of the furries he drew? Fluttershy from MLP. Dude doesn’t have much awareness of subtext even when that subtext is the title of the Goddamn show.
(I only looked for two or three seconds at most, but that shit burns itself into your brain…)
I wondered how that sort of thinking became so common on the Internet for the past decade or so as it seemed so contrary to being decent and compassionate until Rational Wiki pointed out that libertarianism appeals tremendously to entitled, privileged teenagers who equate “freedom” with “no restrictions on me personally—everyone else fuck off!” And so we get GamerGate from that sort of thinking.
It just goes to show that they have no concept of politics existing off the internet. I work for a progressive org. There’s no civil war because of gamergate. In fact, I have no idea if any of my coworkers even know what gamergate is. I’ve never even discussed it with any of them. Gaters really have no idea there’s a world outside of the internet and/or video games do they?
Rabukurafuto,
The demographics of self identified libertarians are in fact young, white, and male.
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/30/libertarians_are_even_whiter_and_wealthier_than_the_gop_partner/
They really don’t. Also, they don’t seem to understand that in the real world people can disagree about some things and agree about other things and decide to figure out a compromise and/or just not talk about the stuff they disagree about because both sides agree that working together on the stuff they do agree about is important.
The more I see from these guys the more I think it’s an arrested development issue. Emotionally they never seem to have gotten past that the whole world is against me so I’ll just go sulk in my room and also fuck you mom you can’t tell me what to do adolescent phase.
Tau, because
a) space commies
b) “the greater good”
c) only multi-species faction (besides Chaos, but that hardly counts).
Hitting someone with a shield is pretty reasonable actually, but parrying it with a sword is dubious.
cassandrakitty:
I know, it’s such delicious schadenfreude. It’s also like a microcosm of everything GamerGate – even this one dude can’t keep his arguments straight when people are asking really basic question like “How is a negative review a sign of corruption?” and “In what way is gaming not a free market?”
“The final battle for logic and reason in the modern western world!”
Is there a stronger word for histrionic? I can’t think of one.
These videos, the songs (OMG the songs!!), and the pointless outreach to Tumblr and ?bitcoin all smell like desperation to me. I know that the harassment and disgusting behavior continues and the best person posting under the GG meme can’t do anything to change it now, the shit is on their shoes no matter what. They have to keep the energy going somehow because without it, what do they have left? It makes me think of a bunch of little kids playing in their clubhouse making signs for the door saying “Keep Out Or Else!”
Or else what? Or else I’ll make a really histrionic YouTube video!! I’ll write a Tumblr post that will convince everyone to be on OUR side! It’s almost pathetic but I have no pity for fools.
Another apropos quote from Orwell’s essay:
“The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of… words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the lines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”
But it’s all about ethics in gaming journalism, right?
Not sure I’d call the results of that PRRI data “overwhelmingly young”. According to that report, libertarians have 62% of their population under fifty, US census has the general population at 68% under fifty.
“White” and “male” are obviously spot-on tho.
No surprise there. If there is anything I learned from libertarians it’s that they care only about keeping a status quo because they tend to already be at the top.
Best comment from the r/Bitcoin thread:
@WWTH
Oh noes! I’ve been playing the wrong games! All those hours playing Wii tennis and Sim City, and all that got me is the ability to defeat Venus Williams at Wimbledon and design perfect metropolises. Opponents who spend their free time picking up imaginary sword skills are UNSTOPPABLE!
@Cyberwulf
Yes, and even more tasteful given that tomorrow is Veterans Day/Armistice Day/Remembrance Day. It’s not the least bit tactless, co-opting, and disrespectful to compare themselves to the men and women who genuinely served and sacrificed for their countries.
Someone should design a war monument to all the “millions of gamer dead”. Perhaps a majestic, solemn pyramid constructed of “Street Taco” Doritos wrappers, next to an empty chair with a permanent indent (memorializing the Unknown Butt). Or an unplugged game console. I’m getting teary-eyed just thinking about it.
I gotta say something here. I’m a fifty-one year old woman who was a total geek in school – I was too smart, too fat, too everything and excluded from every “cool kid” circle and tormented from 1st grade through high school graduation. I was teased, humiliated, spat on, isolated, you name it – all the things the ‘gaters claim to be. No boyfriends, no dates, no friends until high school, no status. I was into science fiction and got shit about that, too. (video games were barely beginning then – it was the era of Pacman and Asteroids. I even remember Pong.) As I hit puberty, I finally started to get mad, and dragged my self-esteem out of the center of the earth by telling myself that there was nothing wrong with me, there was something wrong with THEM.
And yet, I never bothered trying to hurt or threaten anyone else. Wasn’t even tempted. So they can’t say I’ve never been in their shoes, because I have. I just didn’t walk the low road in those shoes.