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.
Damn, bolded instead of blockquoted.
@christopher
…Except that has nothing to do with the post. Did you even read it? David never mentioned anything about all men hating women in this post. I’ve never seen it from ANY of his posts, actually. I’ve never heard it from anyone, actually.
Also
“yet being told that if they don’t feel personally feel guilty for every injustice that has ever happened to women, they are part of the problem”
Yeah, I’ve never heard anyone say that men should feel guilty for the actions of other men. Oh wait, I have, I hear it a lot from anti-feminists claiming that feminists say it.
Unless you seriously think ‘men should speak out against sexism too’ is the same as saying they should feel guilty. Or you think saying ‘men are generally more privileged than women’ is saying men should feel guilty, in which case you know nothing about how the term ‘privilege’ fits into discussions about inequality (like most people who throw a fit whenever they hear the word ‘privilege’, actually).
Also, rofl, ‘gender war.’ That’s certainly not how I view gender equality, but it definitely seems to be how the manosphere views it.
Has anyone noticed the #menimisttwitter is trending with all of the awful mra b,s,
@fromafar2013
I’m afraid that I did not draw the Khajiit there. Just found ‘er.
@tinyorc
Noooo! It’s just hard to type with these. Fur does not type well. 🙁
I didn’t get Skyrim for the longest time, though, because I have a Mac. And I game on it. *gasp!*
Thankfully I got Crosssover working again.
Sounds like this: http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-dont-support-feminism-if-it-means-murdering-all,37301/
… Good God, that “Gender Allies” site actually exists. Don’t bother, the first three “Articles” are “#NOTALLMEN,” rape apologia and “Feminists are evil and violent towards men and MRAs are friendly and helpful towards women.” Bog-standard reality denial.
Allman.
I’m not sure if they’re saying, “Hey, bahbee- I’m all man!” or if it’s Allmen = “all men” = I’m an everyman / the voice for men, etc.
I’m betting on the latter.
THESE TROLLS ARE THE VOICE OF ALL MEN CRYING OUT IN DESPAIR!
WHY OH WHY WON’T WE LISTEN?!?
WHY OH WHY WILL WE NOT CAST ASIDE OUR HISTRIONIC MISANDRY AND GUILE AND SEE THE TRUTH INHERENT THEIR LOGICAL MANLINESS?!?
Ohhhh, what vile wenches!
Ohhhh, and what vile wretches, caught in our feminist lies!
OH, THE HUMANITY!
There will come new trends and Instagram shares,
And selfies of young women with their duck-faced stares;
And tweets of friends in bars, singing at night,
And food porn of burgers cooked just right,
FemFrequency will post its latest piece,
Social Justice Warriors fighting for change will never cease;
And not one will miss “the war,” not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, not them not me,
if GamerGate perished utterly;
(Thanks to Arctic Ape for inspiration.
Source:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains)
proxieme:
It’d be better if he was Christopher Notallmen.
weirwoodtreehugger – this is part of their “we are defending western intellectual ideals” ocean of horseshit, trying to claim that they’re the inheritors of the mantle of geocentric enlightenment principles or some such obvious crap. It always reminds me of the neo-Confederate white supremacist losers talking about how the “white race” built the cathedrals of Europe – while they themselves are just an uneducated, unemployed dipshit who isn’t “superior” to anything. You know, almost like there’s a gigantic overlap between the two.
Wow, Mr Allman sure is breaking ground by knocking down all those horrible strawfems that think all men are misogynists/rapists/etc. What would we do without you to sit both “sides” (hmm seems like you’re only criticizing women/feminists here, but I’ll take your word for it) down and really think about how irrational they’re being in all of this?
*single tear rolls down cheek*
And here we are IGNORING the faint and feeble cries of this man.
We spit out venom upon this broken soul, this Masculine Avatar who has split open his breast and shown us his heart, his soul, his weak and final attempt and stopping this war – at bringing these two genders, pitched in heated battle, together.
He is All Men.
He is the Every Man.
And we kick him even as he reaches his trembling hand towards us.
Oh, shame.
OHHHHH, INFAMY.
****
I could go on, but I’m done with it.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that that’s a hefty part of their internal monologue.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics also has a lot to say about these reactionaries:
“The paranoid spokesman, sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization… he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics
“We seek to open a dialog between the MRAs and the stawfeminists in our head.
Naturally, we’re right about everything”
Mr Allman if I were you I’d take a closer look at the topic and purpose of this site. David doesn’t make this stuff up, its pretty hateful stuff being posted on men’s rights and pickup artist websites. See blogroll. He quite heroically finds it and blogs about it in a mocking way because it is patently absurd and offensive. I looked at your link, I get it but you need to look a little deeper. It looks like you heard about this site and didn’t look any further before posting your comment. You have a lot to learn.
I suspect a true monument to the “millions of gamer dead” would be a heap of crusted, crumpled Kleenex and empty lotion bottles.
This piece of nonsense is a bad parody of a famous speech delivered by Winston Churchill in WW2. The clown who wrote it probably realised that this would not be apparent to a mostly American audience, and no doubt hoped that his source wouldn’t be identified.
So it’s basically an extended demonstration of Godwin’s Law – for example, the “sink into a dark age” bit referred to the nihilistic barbarity of Nazism rather than, er, Zoe Quinn – and one which manages to severely butcher some of Churchill’s finest oratory in the process. It’s an insult to those who fought and died in WW2.
You can find the full speech by googling the opening words “What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over”.
This is the casualty record for my great-grandfather who died in WWI:
http://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/1608742/CUMBERS,%20FRANCIS%20HENRY
He will be one hundred years dead next May. He never saw his wife again, never saw his two children grow up. They never even found his body; all there’s left of him is a name on a memorial in Ypres. And there were millions of others like him.
To all those GamerGaters throwing around grandiose and febrile war analogies, I sincerely encourage you to go fuck yourselves.
Traveled to chanland for a brief time, a new world for me. I found them talking about how they might have lost the MSM battle for now but they will fight on and be around in 2016, even 2020. There was talk of getting Republicans on their side. Well, they got Breitbart, for what that’s worth.
I’m just constantly amazed at the keyboard machismo.
May I just say how insulted I am at this rhetoric of brave gaming souls dying a thousand deaths daily? I have a military serviceman in my family. Who served in Afghanistan and lost people he knew and saw things that he doesn’t want to talk about and can’t handle crowds anymore. He’s talked about trying to identify body parts and humans looking like hamburger. Real soldiers face actual final death. They don’t get to respawn at the last fucking checkpoint. War is not a goddamn game. This gator asshat insults the memory of everyone fallen in actual combat.
If we were badduns we would post all their offensive ‘games are real life’ spiels to actual veterans of actual wars. But luckily we are not the badduns so I have to imagine the epic take downs.
That allman is one of the most pathetic trolls I’ve seen. C’mon now. Try harder.
I’m just amazed at their tenacity. Back when I was a young lad, the whole point of trolling and being internet savvy was to remain detached from controversy and emotion. If you actually started taking things seriously and got mad, you failed.
To see 4chan/8chan of all places, the central hub of trolling, fall into taking all this shit to such an extreme… it’s bizarre, to understate it. They fell for their own bait, hard.
@Mezza – “Yeah, I’ve never heard anyone say that men should feel guilty for the actions of other men. Oh wait, I have, I hear it a lot from anti-feminists claiming that feminists say it.”
Wait a minute. The notion that “if you benefit from a system of oppression then you share guilt for that system of oppression even if you don’t personally take part in it or even approve of it, and the only way to avoid that guilt is by actively fighting against the system that benefits you” absolutely is supported by lots of social justice activists. Anyone familiar with social justice activism has heard is familiar with this.
In that sense, there absolutely are plenty of feminists who declare that a hell of a lot of “men should feel guilty for the actions of other men”. Yes, there is the implicit caveat that this doesn’t apply to (the minority of) men who “actively fight” against sexism / male privilege, but they damn well do include a heck of a lot of people who might not be sexist themselves but are (in their eyes) silent about the acts of sexism that surround them and which directly or indirectly benefit them.
I can’t speak for this Christopher guy, but there are a lot of guys who hear that argument and see the simple and obvious implication that they are among those who share that guilt. They think “I’m just a regular old white-cis-hetero-guy doing ‘normal’ shit who certainly wouldn’t claim to be an ‘activist’ who actively fights against the system. Therefore, even though I didn’t harass or stalk or rape anyone, this person is telling me I ‘share guilt’ with those who did. Shit. I don’t like the implications of that. This person can go fuck himself/herself.”
So, yeah, they may be mistaken but they are understandably mistaken.
@ kirbywarp
Yeah, I keep expecting all the old school channers to start spamming them with CRY MORE macros. That’s part of what makes the whole thing so hilarious. Even Encyclopedia Dramatica is on board with the wah evil gaming industry doesn’t love gamers enough crap and I’m just shaking my head going damn, guys, you fail at being too tough for anyone to get to.
@daintydougal
Thank you for speaking up on behalf of your loved one, this is the second thread that has made me think hard about how war veterans could be feeling about this rhetoric. I have no connection to armed services but feel anger myself.