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.
Point one: TotalBiscuit is a giant coward, an obnoxious blowhard, and a man without the shame most of us are born with. His last blog post absolutely reeks of, “Oh, shit, I’m losing my audience, better try to find some middle ground and trick them into believing I’m not a huge piece of rotten feces.”
Point two: At least the dude in this post knows he drivels on. The first step towards repairing a problem is accepting its existence, and holy cow does that problem exist.
Kirbywarp: That was just amazing. Thank you. Still laughing.
Two awesome things:
1) What GG threads on Reddit are really all about, color coded for your convenience.
:large
2) The Twitter user who posted this: Marxist Illuminati. His avatar is Vivian James wearing a hammer and sickle. (le gasp!)
@kirbywarp
http://i.imgur.com/J5yVoXu.gif
@Bogdan Cvetkovic
For all their ethics… The only unethical behaviour they actually found was within their own ranks. Brilliant.
Correction: Posted there, not found. If I remember correctly it wasn’t even them that called TotalBiscuit out originally.
Ok, I’m late here, but there’s some pretty funny stuff on that bitcoin reddit. I especially like the part where the gamergater proposes they join forces with the bitcoiners, secretly, like under the table. And the bitcoin dude is like, “you are aware this is a public forum”. It’s too funny!
See that video just makes me picture literal Social Justice Warriors, with like, swords and stuff.
I knew I had to see this video when the box art for Doom was used there.
Also, it’s funny how these people keep insisting that we keep politics out of gaming and that this person in particular is railing against “cultural marxism” and “the radical left” while also mentioning and showing Bioshock Infinite, which is quite possibly THE MOST RADICAL LEFT GAME EVER.
Seriously, you kill racists and privileged white people all the time in that game.
And then there’s the Metal Gear series. And Oddworld. And Spec Ops: The Line…
I could go on forever. Political games with a left-leaning angle have existed for a very long time so it’s quite obvious Gamergate doesn’t care about politics, just feminists and women. Gamergate lost before it began. 😛
My Grimrock 1 party will have these character names:
Social Justice Warrior, Social Justice Knight, Social Justice Rogue and Social justice Mage.
=D
Totally love this page, Commenters and article, but what about David Kalac at 4chan people?
kirbywarp, standing ovation!
I tried to engage with a GGer in good faith on Twitter the other night (because I am really genuinely fascinated to find out what makes them tick) and they told me that Kickstarter fraud is worse than outing a suidical trans woman for the sake of a story. (This was an example of collusion – from two years ago, mind – because said journalist was then blacklisted by a number of gaming publications.) I can assure you that I was shocked – SHOCKED – to find that a member of the last bastion of ethics in gaming journalism thinks money is more important than the preservation of a human life.
After that, the conversation quickly lapsed back into “Industry professionals talking to each other is collusion!” and “Comment moderation is censorship!” It’s seriously like they’re all just reading from the same script without giving a second’s thought to the words they are saying.
Inspired by many on this thread – and with deep, deep apologies to the shade of Laurence Binyon.
That is actually really, really scary. A friend of mine told me of how his gay friend encountered a bigot in person who screamed at his face, “You faggots aren’t going to take over New York!” or something of that nature. My friend concluded that such people are frankly disturbed. They are definitely not someone you would want to push off the deep end.
The MRAs, GGers, and extreme reactionaries of all types we encounter around here are like that bigot. Thankfully they are only behind a computer screen, but they are still troublesome. The amount of dehumanization they do is frightening.
*Facepalm*
I wonder if they actually realise that as soon as they get onto their little screeds that they start using the kind of language that they hear and see in their games. I find this very amusing. They’re so gormless and ill educated that they can’t even write their own sentences but need to borrow them from their games. They go off into reams of badly written, pretentious bombast that be copypasta, they’re so hackneyed.
Yeah, I’m going to join the condemnation of the appropriation of of war deaths.
My grandfather fought in WW1 and survived, my two uncles fought in WW2 and didn’t.
Looking through random shit on the internet (well, Twitter), it looks like TB is backpedaling a bit.. unfortunately “back” meaning back to his centrist apathetic position from where he can label both sides as “just as bad as one another”. Not sure if this was already posted:
http://blueplz.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/i-spoke-to-david-rosen-of-wolfire-and.html
On the upside, I saw this on TB’s Twitter as well:
http://belarr.com/bakercat/
Does the millions of dead include games where you get a couple of lives, what about saved games where you go back because a boss killed you, does that mean you die more than once?
Oh the humanity.
Pavlov’s House:
I can see how their appropriation would be reallyreally annoying. They don’t have a clue and these idiots never will. They think of themselves as soldiers because they identify a bit too heavily with their characters and they’re into bad English and self aggrandizement.
Of course you can be a feminist and a soldier. In fact, if you’re a female soldier it kinda comes with the territory.
Anyway, it’s nice to meet you.
Actual quote from Kotaku in Action
“If we have porn on our side there’s absolutely not a chance in hell were gonna lose.”
You know, if you think that dying in a video game is such an ordeal, maybe you don’t like video games as much as you think you do.
Keep in mind TotalBiscuit’s wife has clinical depression or something like that and that he’s recovering from cancer which he thinks was brought on by too much stress from harassment by internet trolls. It’s a testament to his ego that he can still bring himself to support internet trolls in harassing a woman who made a video game highlighting depression.
@tinyorc
So if you had gone out of your way to urge people to donate money to help someone get life-saving surgery, you would have just kept your mouth shut after you were told that the entire story was a lie and that the money was actually going to be used for something else — something that some of those people whom YOU are responsible for getting to donate might not have wanted to contribute to? You think that would have been the lesser wrong?
Thus Spake ZaraShadetheDruid:
Ahh, yes, Hegel’s Bluff.Sure, some people say we should eat all kittens, and I don’t agree with that. But those people who say we shouldn’t eat any kittens ever are just as shrill and militant as the eat-all-kittens people. Can we all just play nice and agree that half of all kittens should be eaten?
@libarbarian, how on earth does that relate to tinyorc’s Kickstarter discussion in any way?
Seriously, wut.
@libarbarian
“You think that would have been the lesser wrong?”
…Are you honestly implying that, between “outing a suicidal trans woman, thus placing her at risk of both suicide and potential assault” and “using kickstarter money for something you didn’t promise to use it for”, the latter is worse?
What the fuck? On that note, why are you even still here? You’ve been trying to stir shit up for the past few posts, including earlier in this one.