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!
Yeah, here in the northern Southern United Snakes, the only trains I see are hauling bulk cargo, and the only caboose I see regularly is parked outside the Children’s Museum in Oak Ridge.
His most recent faux scandal was trying to get poll workers on the record cheating. He failed but he did get some vidya showing people doing perfectly legal things he is pretending are crimes.. This was just last month.
@titianblue
I knoooooooooooooooooooooooooow. I came here to post this same exact question! WTH!?
Zoiks! I hadn’t heard about that one. He really is cruising for a conviction, and one of these days he’s gonna get it.
In the meantime, women would be well advised NEVER to work with him. He is at least as creepy as Jian Ghomeshi, and somewhat better at covering his ass.
Me, I try to charm through massive amounts of sarcasm. 😉 That aside, I think that Chick is best (read: only possibly) appreciated with the kind of irony that’s made Ed Wood Jr. an immortal film icon, only nowhere near as lovably harmless. I find Chick’s stuff to be a weird combination of quaint schoolmarm and LSD-inspired bonkers in terms of style, but his message of smug, hate-filled lying is just too offensive to make me consider the style elements innocuous enough to fully enjoy as unintentional art.
I think I started playing D&D in elementary school in 1976 after having bought the box set at a yard sale and diving into it with both feet. My parents were more concerned along Tom-Hanks-In-Mazes-and-Monsters lines than my Grandmom’s OMG-Satan-Worship concerns. I definitely take Cassandra’s point that the nerdy interests themselves weren’t the source of the bullying, but it certainly included explicit associations to them, associations I wasn’t the one making. That was simply my experience, as it happened. But the whole reason I brought it all up was to make the point that none of that shit matters now. I’m not 8 anymore. Neither are GGers, most of them anyway – not that you’d know it.
Given their obsession with boobs and the failure of real women to offer them up on command I think they’re more stuck in high school than in elementary school.
Good use for shoulder pads – they make awesome animal ears when attached to headbands. I’m fairly sure I used them for a makeshift costume one year…
@cassandrakitty: are you serious? You’re saying that because you and your one friend there didn’t get bullied for JUST playing D&D, clearly there was something wrong with the kids who got bullied that brought it on themselves, like being “socially awkward”. Which I can’t tell if you mean that as a dogwhistle for ASDs or if we’re now pretending that “socially awkward” is other than a class feature of being a teenager. Regardless, “well it never happened to me that way so if it happened to you, you invited it somehow” arguments are shit regardless of where you spray them.
The problem is not that these jerks got bullied. It’s that they decided being bullied was proof of their special snowflake status as Better Than Everyone and that they coped by BECOMING BULLIES. They simply decided, in their minds, that the treatment they received would have been perfectly fine as long as they were the ones on the giving end. And they point to their own bullying as moral justification for it.
Please point out where she said this because otherwise your rage spew is way out of line. She never said that his awkwardness justified the bullying.
American Psycho is one of my favorite movies — yes, I know, lots of gendered violence, BUT! It was adapted, brilliantly, by two women (director Mary Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner) into a scathing comedy of manners directed squarely at the “me” generation of late boomers in the 1980’s. It’s awesome and I quote it like mad. Hence…
https://imgflip.com/i/e6l4q
and
https://imgflip.com/i/e6lg8
Or hats! Are furry plushie hats still a thing, or is that all over now?
Or she was saying that bullies pick on who they perceive as an easy target. Which is true. That’s not the fault of the bullying victim or anything, but that’s how bullies operate.
Has mythago’s reading comprehension always been this poor?
WordPress ate my post, probably because too many links so
https://imgflip.com/i/e6lit
and
https://imgflip.com/i/e6kac
Also
https://imgflip.com/i/e6l5t
and
https://imgflip.com/i/e6l9l
How’s everyone been? I’m just over uni assignments, crawling out of my hole and blinking in the sunlight
https://imgflip.com/i/e6m1n
@b.tom.darga
Yes, but GG started out with the intent to a) spam 4chan with the story of how a woman had sex with a dude and not with another dude and b) harass her for it. Read the logs. It’s in their own logs.
Meanwhile SJW started out with the intent to… make the internet a less awful place for everybody…?
CLEARLY both sides in this one are equal and we should totally hear them out as such. Clearly.
I don’t follow the Twitters, as it were, but has there been any kind of movement to flood #NotYourShield with replies such as, “I’m a white, ciscet, middle-aged man with ‘nerdy’ hobbies, and I am #NotYourShield, #GamerGate.”
Pref with egg avatars on fresh accounts, of course, although I’d accept stock photos of obese men with headphones greedily eating Doritos – or reworked Vivian James faces.
The inevitable rage meltdown would be inspiring, I wager.
@cassandrakitty:
Whatever the reason was that other kids didn’t like you, it was never about the geeky interests.
Replace “other kids” with “girls” and you’ve got the reason why bitter geek/gamer boys are so invested in the idea of fake geek/gamer girls, and why they fiercely audit any woman who claims to be a geek or gamer, looking for signs she’s faking it.
It’s very sad in a way, because if you’re an awkward, geeky teenage boy who goes through adolescence without ever having a girlfriend (and therefore feeling like a loser), it must be hugely comforting to be able to say, “well it’s because I like sci-fi and videogames, and girls don’t like that stuff, that’s why they’re not interested in me”. No wonder they flip their shit when they encounter women who like geeky stuff for its own sake. How dare women nerd out over Star Trek and stay up till 4am playing videogames! That means the hobby was never the problem. That means that there are way more variables involved in determining whether or not Joe Everynerd gets a girlfriend, and some of those are completely out of his control. That’s far too scary to contemplate – so b***h must be faking it.
@Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III, the buttered toast one was fabulous!!!
@cassandrakitty: could you please drop it with the victim-blaming? As someone who got bullied extensively, I can tell you this: the only reason kids get bullied is because they have the misfortune of being stuck with bullies and they can’t leave. Also: being bullied is not good for your social skills. It’s not that kids get bullied because they’re socially awkward, but they lose their confidence and become socially awkward because they get bullied.
I’m happy for you that you didn’t get bullied in school. But kindly STFU about your theories about bullying, because you have no idea what you’re talking about, and your comments are really triggering.
Can I just say this about GG
I think Jimmy Wales is a sheer genius because in no less than a tweet he has proven to GG how ridiculous a leaderless hashtag movement is at any semblance of organisation and direction, thus undermining any argument of collective good or division of true and false scotsmen behind a single banner.
In a TWEET, under 140 characters and that isn’t even all of it.
If that pure schadenfreude wasn’t enough, his action was effectively trolling the internet’s biggest collection of asshurt trolls. Oh delicious irony! sweet sweet irony!
@ Cyberwulf
Yeah, it’s easy enough to see where both the desire to blame this one simple thing for everything bad that happened to you or everything you wanted to happen that didn’t, but the problem is that if you do that and are then confronted with something that proves you were wrong (women who play games 10 hours a day, female sci-fi authors, men who share your hobby who superficially look like exactly the kind of jocks who you always assumed hated you because you were into gaming and sci-fi), how do you process that? For a lot of people the answer seems to be that you don’t, you just try to make the thing that’s challenging that comforting belief go away, sometimes by sending it death threats on Twitter.
I was bullied for a while when I first went to boarding school. It was because my family was originally working class, and most of the kids around me were upper class. Maybe try taking your own advice and not assuming that you know someone else’s life story?
@Sir Rugglesby
All your Mythy memes are very strong but the cigar one is the real winner.