Watch out, Milo Yiannopoulos, you’ve got competition! #GamerGate has a new journalistic champion — and this one, like Milo, seems to have come straight from central casting, a virtual embodiment of every snooty reactionary preppie stereotype from every bad 80s movie.
A libertarian think tanker and erstwhile journalist with the unlikely name of Mytheos Holt, this new contender has one great advantage over young Milo: as you can see in the photo above, which I have not photoshopped in any way, he appears to be made entirely of wax — which means that unless someone accidentally sets him near a heater he will last forever.
Mytheos’ first intervention in #GamerGate comes in the form of a long opinion piece in the right-wing e-rag Daily Caller that attempts to recast the GamerGater struggle as a glorious resistance campaign to an ongoing #WaronNerds by “Far-Left Feminists And The Media.” Mytheos, who looks so much like an archetypical tormenter-of-nerds, might seem an unlikely GamerGate champion, but he’s a gamer, too, and his piece has been embraced warmly by the GG masses.
Commenters in Kotaku in Action, Reddit’s most influential GamerGate hangout, describe his piece as “excellent,” “insightful,” and “incredibly well researched.”
“Time for #WarOnNerds to start trending,” writes one enthusiastic commenter. “Welcome to the next level, Mytheos,” adds another, “we’re the only people in the history of ever to beat Social Justice, and this train has no brakes.”
The enthusiasm for the article might at first seem a little strange, given that Mytheos starts out by comparing GamerGaters to … a British teenager who earlier this year stabbed some girls in the face:
On February 11, 2014, the Daily Mail reported on the case of 19-year-old Ryan Walker, a thin, bespectacled “wimp” by reputation who, upon being bullied one too many times by some neighborhood girls, attacked them furiously, stabbing one in the face and bashing the other’s head against the pavement. …
And so it was that half a year before it began, #Gamergate was explained.
But the rest of Mytheos’ post reaffirms most of the GamerGate mythos: that it is a fight against corruption, not a campaign terrorizing outspoken women in gaming, and that it actively roots out the harassers in its midst. Above all, Mytheos argues that GamerGate, however rough it might be around the edges, is a justified rebellion against the Social Justice Warrior oppressors.
Mytheos’ indictment of the (alleged) evil leftist nerd-tormenters is as histrionic, and as utterly divorced from reality, as any GamerGate manifesto pasted into a bad infographic:
Along with their furious denunciations of the gaming press, the movement also appears to be fighting a new culture war — one against a new, radical and dangerously illiberal left which marinates in a hideous quagmire of resentment, smugness, vacuousness and contempt for free discussion. This movement prefers the vile ochlocracy of the Twitter mob … celebrates the Maoist public shaming of doxxing, and seems incapable of distinguishing between a .gif and an argument.
In case you’re wondering, ochlocracy means “government by mob.” It pays to increase your word power!
Make no mistake, when it comes to #Gamergate, both the SJWs and the gaming press are facing a backlash that is not only thoroughly warranted, but of their own making. …
America’s nerds are fighting back against what they rightly see as ages of persecution and dismissal by an extreme left wing fringe that they believe has co-opted the very press they used to trust and used it as a weapon of oppression despite claiming to speak for the oppressed. …
Their case is historically next-to-impossible to dispute.
Well, at least until Mytheos actually tries to make such a case. His alleged proof of the ongoing oppression of nerds by the SJW?
- TotalBiscuit, YouTube blabber and “moderate” GamerGater, has been “flamed” by GamerGate critics
- Sam Biddle of Gawker made a couple of joking Tweets declaring that “Nerds should be constantly degraded and shamed into submission.”
- Aaron Sorkin once described the dudes of Silicon Valley as “a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80′s.”
- The Nice Guys of OKCupid blog
Mytheos leans pretty hard on #4, devoting more time and energy to railing against the “feminist cruelty” of the Nice Guys of OkCupid blog (and those who were amused by it) than he does to the alleged “journalistic corruption” that is supposedly the real reason for GamerGate.
Indeed, aside from mentioning Biddle’s Tweets and taking a few swipes at Valleywag, the Silicon Valley blog that Biddle used to work at, Mytheos offers no real critique of journalistic corruption at all. NiceGuys of OkCupid, by contrast, gets more than 600 words, as Mytheos stands up (sort of) for the honor of a group he describes as
dumpy, white, awkward looking men whose primary crime in their profiles was expressing either insufficiently feminist viewpoints … or simply of being sad or angry about their lack of romantic options.
Yep. Mytheos does indeed seems to be suggesting that GamerGate is fundamentally driven by the resentment of “dumpy” white dudes who can’t get a date.
In a lot of ways, his argument is a cruder, and crueller, version of an argument I made about Men’s Rights Activists a few weeks back. In my post, I asked if
the rage that drives so many MRAs come from the same dark place in the psyche as the rage that so many romantically and sexually rejected feel towards their exes? …
Think of the fury many divorced MRAs feel towards their exes and women at large. Think of the self-pitying rage of “nice guys” MRAs in their teens and twenties who feel they’ve been unfairly “friendzoned” by stuck-up women. …
The self-righteous rage of the rejected is a dangerous thing. It’s dangerous when it’s directed at individual women. And it’s dangerous when it’s directed at women at large.
The continuing debacle that is GamerGate, which after all was called into existence by one dude’s long diatribe against the alleged evils of his ex-girlfriend, seems to reinforce this point every single day.
It’s just strange to see a supporter of GamerGate making a similar, if more simplistic, case — and being applauded for it by the very guys he describes so patronizingly as angry dateless “losers.”
NOTE: Make your own Mytheos Holt #NotYourShield memes here! And post them in the comments below!
Apparently this guy is known for trolling the Wesleyan campus paper. And as far as I can tell, no, mytheos, is not his real first name. (May be his middle name, though). Is that doxxing?
Hmm, are you pro or anti gamergate? If you’re anti then yet, it’s doxxing, if not then of course not, silly.
I think next time a female scientist is interviewed she should put on a “KILL ALL MEN” t-shirt just to force MRA’s to defend her since it’s so similar to this case.
@shade the druid:
Boy, you just got to love the unwarranted self-aggrandizing of people who are incapable of either commitment or conviction – as if it is some kind of virtue…
I’ve noticed how many GamerGaters and their supporters, as shown by Tom Darga here, are willing to resort to false equivalency when they know they can’t convince someone that GamerGate is a totally legitimate thing and not just an over-glorified harassment campaign.
Gee, that’s convenient! When you don’t convince others that your side is right, you just cowardly claim that “both sides are equally bad” and assume that’ll make you look impartial than simply disingenuous…even though that’s what it looks like.
Again, it’s rather self-contradictory (if not just hypocritical) that GGers are so willing to claim the harassment of others was “just made up” by the victims – nevermind the documentation proving otherwise – but will then say they are also harassed and doxxed, expecting others to just believe them without much evidence.
I just got into a discussion with a facebook friend who accused me of conspiratorial thinking, right after claiming the Utah State University incident was concocted by anti-MRAs that was “confirmed” by…some anonymous asshole on a message board apparently. As to “prove” GGers were also harassed and doxxed? A Tumblr page.
For fuck’s sake, if I could never hear about Tumblr again in a discussion – it wouldn’t be soon enough. That place has become the place for getting purposefully enraged or to enrage others with how awful some of the comments made on it are. I actively avoid the place, due to such, and yet I have to keep fucking hearing about it from one person or another who puts way too much credit into the site.
It occurs to me that expressing how sad or angry you are about your lack of dating options on a dating website is not a good way to improve them.
@seraph4377
Well, at least it’s better than unsolicited dick pics, I suppose? =P
Amendment: I missed Tom’s clarifications, so I apologize for the assumption I made about his supporting GG.
Presumably the complaints aren’t actually intended to lure in potential girlfriends so much as to hopefully force women to read about how sad your boner is and how it’s all their fault.
I’d mock b.to.darga for pretending the gater crew doesn’t have far more more than it’s fair share of aggressive harassing trolls, but I’m too facinated with the photo of Mytheos. I actually thought it really was a wax sculpture of Patrick Bateman and had a real hard time convincing myself that it’s a real photo of a real person.
@brooked
I thought the same thing. My brain still refuses to read it as a photo of a live human.
I think he’s more the cloned child of Patrick Bateman and Joffrey Baratheon than pure Bateman.
It never fails to amuse me how anyone with an ounce of self awareness or even just sense can go on about SJWs to start with and not realise how mind-numbingly idiotic they’re being.
First of all, using a term that requires an explanation for any outside party is a bad idea, because it creates a barrier for entry to the uninitiated, but then going to the point where on face value the thing you are in opposition to is is a good thing, who can be against social justice?
Having to explain to people why the other people being X makes them the bad guys and not the good guys is just creating an uphill struggle for any but incredibly niche members so it makes no sense at all. But THEY did this, it wasn’t an elaborate false flag or a trick, they started off on that……I know they’re idiots, I know they’re morally bankrupt assholes but for Fs sake, can they be the right level of moron where I don’t feel bad for mocking their idiocy?
How does someone type THIS:
And not think ‘Hmm, am I doing the right thing there…?
My contribution: https://imgflip.com/i/e6egl
@TedtheFed,
The difference is that when they call you a baby-killer, you know it’s false, and when you call them a sexist, they know it’s true.
Cassandra – I can assure you, I was picked on for being socially awkward and being into D&D. 🙂 But this was back in the 70’s where the typical reaction to RPG even as a concept was like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. No one knew what it even was. Points being: (1) no GG yahoo can tell me that they’ve “paid dues” that I haven’t, and (2), more important, that Pocket Nerd is right that giving a damn about having “paid dues” at all is something to grow up and out of, especially in the face of overwhelming evidence that one’s life and circumstances have vastly improved since. Hell, I knew then that in time, I’d be alright. I certainly know it now. That so many GGers fail to do so is astonishing to me.
Yeah, Totalbiscuit is, in my opinion, the worst kind of gater. He *pretends* to be moderate, and then claims that death threats aren’t actually credible because Anita Sarkeesian is still alive, claims that saying something against death threats isn’t needed because they are obviously totally bad…
…then turns around and somehow always finds the time to attack “SJWs” like this, mysteriously right when women are getting massive amounts of death threats.
It doesn’t matter what you say you are, it matters what you do. And when you’re busy bashing people for mildly criticizing a shirt while saying absolutely no peep on death threats, well…
I was a kid who played D&D for a while in the very early 80s and seriously, nobody gave a shit other than my one friend’s fundie mother who was worried that Satan would somehow seduce me via the monster manual. One of the guys I played with, otoh, did get teased about it by the very same people who didn’t tease me, because he was fat and had bad skin and was, you guessed it, super awkward. The other guy who played with us who was cute and funny and good at basketball? Nobody said shit to him about it either.
Again, it’s either “classically nerdy”, or “classically nerdy plus unusual interests plus an appearance that’s easy for bullies to make fun of” that seems to trigger the bullying rather than the interests themselves.
Here’s the thing, though: it could easily be the case that I was picked on because I was a weird kid, and hitting on the D&D was just the form it took because it was an available piece of low-hanging fruit. But people did go after it – not just my Grandmom (and her sensitivity to the persuasive charms of Jack Chick), but especially other kids. That and the Tolkien – did I think I was a magical fairy, and all that kind of thing. But I’m sure if it wasn’t that, it’d be something else. 🙂
Why shouldn’t we publicly shame people who maliciously and ILLEGALLY share personal information and harass people online, exactly?
Anyway, I like how he describes it as “Maoist” – checks off my “compare Feminists to ruthless dictators” bingo square.
If anything, it’s more like 16th Century Europe, in which men who were antisocial drunkards or wife-beaters could be paraded about the streets strapped into a chair, or wearing an iron bridle with pigs ears, in an act of ritual humiliation.
I would dearly love to see that tradition revived for the benefit of Gamer-Gaters, and pour encourager les autres.
My theory is that bullies choose their targets because of personality, or appearance, or the target not fitting in in some other way (kids who’re much less well off than most of their peers are often targeted, for example, and race is often another reason), but in terms of what they harass the other kid about it could be almost anything that sticks out as unusual. So, sure, your sci fi books or the games you play or your braces are often the thing they’ll constantly pick at, but I don’t think those things are the root cause of the bullying, because there are always other kids around who’re into the same stuff who don’t get picked on.
Or rather, the reason that particular target was chosen. The root cause of bullying is that bullies are assholes.
Actually, for a better comparison (and even greater lulz, since the shirt would be even more innocuous), go with “Boys are dumb, throw rocks at them”, augmented with formulas and a diagram for the throw. The MRAs and other anti-feminists hate that shirt. (The “I bathe in male tears” one would be good, too.)
@AltoFronto, I believe he means to say that anti-Gamer Gate people celebrate doxxing, that doxxing is public shaming and is simultaneously comparing it to Maoism for some reason – three separate things. But he’s jettisoned the idea of forming a clear sentence in favour of sounding like a complete ponce.
@WWTH:
I remember those! I remember that story! Eww!
@FifthInterval:
That was a few years after everyone had played D&D. TSR posted almost $9 million in revenue for 1980, and Dr. Holmes’ Basic Set was selling 12,000 copies a month. (scroll down to the TSR Hobbies Sales chart, and back up a couple paras.)
Like, the kid I played D&D with who was bullied all the time, it didn’t seem to matter what he did or took an interest in, other kids would give him shit about it. If he borrowed a book from the library suddenly that was the most mockable book ever, a perfectly ordinary pair of sneakers would become “lol look at his nerdy shoes”, they even made fun of the way he walked. I don’t think it would have mattered what he was into, they’d have found a reason to use it against him.