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.
@Sunhawk
I had something in that vein happen in a stupid twitter spat a couple weeks ago. Like some Gater was saying they were a TWOC and had been harassed by cis-women in WoW or something. I said that was a shitty reason to support a sexist hate campaign and this person replied that “I’m sorry you think TWOC-safety is a shitty reason but it’s important to me.”
Which I’m like, what? I wasn’t going to tweet she’s lying about her identity without any evidence but what the hell does TWOC safety have to do with GamerGate? There’s certainly no positive correlation there, and we know that channers think that’s a perfectly ethical tactic: try and shame more privileged ‘SJWs’ by accusing them of being racist/transphobic/ableist/ whatever. It’s too bad they’re not all as clumsy as that idiot on /r/Bitcoin, but what kills me is that they think everyone is as fucking shallow as they are, and that we’ll stop calling nonsense nonsense simply because a marginalized person is saying it.
Ewww…now there’s an image I’ll be trying to brain-bleach out of my head all night!
Aww. I read the transcript before I (attempted to) watch the video.
The words look like something that ought to be overacted by a guy pacing up and down in front of an army. Properly overacted, too. I don’t mean some guy waving his arms, I mean full-scale unholy offspring of Jim Carrey/Nicholas Cage overacting.
And then I watched the video, and it’s just this bland monotone. Son, I am disappoint.
Bina, they probably think this might happen to them if they wash.
http://youtu.be/ApN73TUVMEU
Gamer Gate’s battle plan:
First they fight you
Then they laugh at you
Then they ignore you
???
Victory!
Lol….a “dark age” where women aren’t treated like shit…..as opposed to a new enlightenment where women are slaves and straight, white men have all the power and not just a measley 99% of it…..because evil femidykenazicunts played dirty to get that 1% and should be punished so the noble white cock can stand as a the new eye if provenance.
You know, I really ought to troll MRA sites….I think might be able to write as pretentiously as they do.
*dies laughing*
I need to try to read this again later, that’s as far as I got before my brain ‘noped’ right out.
I’m what the MRA’s call a “magina” if there ever was one. I believe that patriarchy exists and should be dismantled, I believe that rape culture exists and should be changed, and I like feminists. Every woman I have dated has been a feminist and my female friends are feminists. If there was ever a guy who meets their “magina” definition, it’s me I guess. I also served as an infantry soldier earlier in life. I enjoy physical fitness and scholarship. I still serve in the Army Reserve. And more recently, while the gamer idiot Dave cites was writing this stuff about dying every day I was training with my Army Reserve unit – many of the men and women I serve with have seen real war and real dead. Those MRAs do not know what masculinity is and they do not know what real strength is. I have seen it in men and women who have fought real wars. I have seen real courage and conviction and fat-ass misogynist dip-shits sitting on their chairs playing video games talking about their sacrifices seems contemptible. I recognize, though, that their right to speak contemptible things and the rights of you all to call them out on it is why I wear the uniform. (And, by the way, should anyone wish to ask me how I think I can be against patriarchy and still serve in the U.S. military – that is another discussion and certainly one worth having, but I’ll allow the moderators to determine whether this venue or another one is the appropriate one, should anyone wish.)
THE GAMER (apologies to Rupert Brooke)
If I should die, think only this of me:
Why the $&@#% can’t I get past this level?
Adam Baldwin has horked up is one helluva hairball.
Hm, the strikeout tag on that comment did not work.
“has horked up” should be struck out. We now return you to your regular comment thread, already in progress.
@gmccammon5:
(looks like the main tag to do strikethroughs is now >del<…
test)awwww…. >del<… messed up the html codes…
…
Ok then. Time for bed!
Oh, man! I do not know whether to laugh or cry or just be grateful that these dweebs are stuck in their fantasy worlds in their mother’s basements and not out there…you know….doing something.
Really, if they put as much effort into acting on their weird values in the real world as they do on trying to convince everyone that their games concerns ARE real world, we would be in trouble.
NOBODY expects the…GAMERGATE INQUISITION! da da DAAAAA!
All hail Python! Monty, of course.
No one expects the Gamer Inquisition!
Our chief weapon is doxxing, doxxing and fear!
Our two chief weapons are doxxing and fear and irrational hatred of girl cooties!
Our three weapons are … 🙁
Oh, nevermind, I’ll just go sit in the comfy chair for a while.
Eee, those trolls were mean. If you need to level up, you might want to try the Pyramid in the north instead. It leads to some of the biggest amounts of XP you can find in the game in one spot 🙂 Just dance around the scary snakes.
@Totalbiscuitthingy:
I honestly stopped following them a bit earlier than the pro-GG tweets, though sadly it was hard to avoid them with some GGers using his support as a trump card.
They had a cooptional podcast with jontron, where one of them seriously claimed, while Gamergate was going strong and Sarkeesian/Quinn were getting threats en mase, that *defending women in such situations was the easy way out*. And the others nodded along.
That was when I utterly lost it. That and the claims that JonTron was totally not sexist because he said so.
“Ah, my good sir. I was meandering round the public square, musing solemnly to myself and whatnot, when suddenly I became a mite investigative.”
“Investigative, sir?”
“Disquisitive.”
“Eh?”
“I’d like to root out some corruption.”
“Well, we here at #gamergate take pride in taking out corruption. What would you like?”
“Hmm, let’s see. How about a little… light philandering?”
“I’m. a-fraid we’re fresh out of light philandering, sir.”
“Oh, never mind. How are you on insider trading?”
“I’m afraid we never have that at the end of the week, sir, we get it fresh on Monday.”
“Tish tish. No matter. Well, stout yeoman, a few cases of larceny, if you please.”
“Ah! It’s been on order, sir, for two weeks. Was expecting it this morning.”
“‘Tis not my lucky day, is it? Aah, buying votes?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Selling votes?”
“Normally, sir, yes. Today the van broke down.”
“Ah. Embezzlement?”
“Sorry.”
“Theft?”
“No.”
“Any extortion, by chance?”
“No.”
“Blackmail?”
“No.”
“Sexual favors?”
“Ah! We have sexual favors, yessir.”
“You do? Excellent!”
“Yessir. It’s… ah…… It’s a bit suspect…”
“Oh, I like it suspect.”
“Well, it’s very suspect, actually, sir.”
“No matter. Fetch hither the amour impropriety sil vous plait! Mmmmwah!”
“I… think it’s a bit more suspect than you’d like it, sir.”
“I don’t care how frikken suspect it is. Hand it over with all speed.
“Ooooohhhhh…..”
“What now?”
“The cat’s taken it.”
“… has he?”
“She, sir.”
“… You do *have* some corruption, don’t you?”
“Of course, sir! It’s a movement dedicated to corruption, sir. We’ve got –”
“No no, don’t tell me. I’m keen to guess.”
“Fair enough.”
“Uuuhhh… Nepotism.”
“Yes?”
“Ah, well, I’ll have some of that!”
“Oh! I thought you were talking to me, sir. Mister Nepotism, that’s my name!”
“I see. And does your son also work here, by chance?”
“Why, how did you guess, sir? He does the accounting!”
“Never mind… laundering?”
“Uhh, not as such.”
“Pilfering?”
“No.”
“Racketeering?”
“No.”
“Conspiracy to Proffer?”
“Not *today*, sir, no.”
“… Ah, how about bribery?”
“Well, we don’t get much call for it around here, sir.”
“Not much ca– it’s the single most popular type of corruption in the world!”
“Not ’round here, sir.”
“… and what IS the most popular corruption ’round here?”
“Conspiracy of the media, sir.”
“IS it?”
“Oh yes, it’s staggeringly popular round the chans, squire.”
“Is it.”
“It’s our number one best seller, sir!”
“I see. Ummm… Conspiracy of the media, then?”
“Right sir.”
“Alright. Okay. ‘Have you got any?’ he asked, expecting the answer ‘no’.”
“I’ll have a look, sir. ……. nnnnnnnnnnno.”
“It’s not much of a movement against corruption, is it?”
“Finest on the net!”
“Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.”
“Well, it’s so clean, sir!”
“It’s certainly uncontaminated by corruption.”
“You haven’t asked me about falsification, sir.”
“Would it be worth it?”
“Could be…”
“… *sigh* Alright then. Have you… got any falsification?”
“No.”
“Figures. Predictable really, I suppose. It was an act of the purest optimism to have posed the question in the first place. Tell me:”
“Yes sir?”
“Have you, in fact, got any corruption here at all?”
“Yes sir.”
“Really.”
“No, not really sir.”
“You haven’t.”
“No sir. Not a scrap. I was deliberately wasting your time, sir.”
“Well I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take away your free speech.”
“Right-o, sir.”
“*sigh* What a senseless waste of activism.”
(I apologize so hard for the length)
@Rabukurafuto (even though it was a page ago, couldn’t respond to it on my phone)
I don’t really see the “Humanity, fuck yeah” thing as that. It strikes me more as either playing with alien invasion tropes or an affirmation of humanity in the face of the awful shit parts of it do. Shit like gamergate, which I’d guess is met with derision and mockery by the particular 4chan board where that meme is common (haven’t checked). Those guys have zero problem being called basement-dwelling nerds, love to mock video games, and by imageboard standards are downright progressive and open-minded. I’ve seen them respond to sexism with derision and outright hostility and to feminist messages with something to the effect of “Yeah you’re right, I’m tired of that crap too. Now let’s talk about some games.”
Of course it’s an imageboard, so they’re still dicks. They’re just vastly more self-aware about it.
@ kirbywarp – the length was necessary to fit the whole sketch in!
Very well played, indeed!
David, I love your site and I appreciate what you do, but could your next article pretty please be about something that isn’t friggin’ GamerGate? What’s the latest word on Julien Blanc? Is Roosh completely broke and living with relatives yet? Has Vox issued another narcissistic rant about John Scalzi recently? Please, just anything, ANYTHING, except FREAKING GODDAMN GAMERGATE.
kirbywarp wins the internets! Whoop!
Kirbywarp: Certainly awesome and necessary 😀
So, I thought that “Christopher Allman” was a reference to “Not All Men,” but then I googled his name to find his blog.
TW:
I saw that that is also the name of a man who recently pled guilty to kidnapping, raping, and murdering a pregnant woman while she was out jogging.
http://www.wlky.com/news/man-who-admitted-killing-pregnant-jogger-to-learn-his-fate/25830444
Not sure if our Christopher Allman knew that and chose the name on purpose, but it seems suspicious.
aebars, gotta say I agree with you! I have had it up to here with bloody GamerGate.