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!
Famous last words.
Social Justice isn’t a team, it’s a concept. Saying you can beat it is like saying you can fight a war against terrorism. No. No, you can’t, because terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy.
And since the train has no brakes, it’s also a wreck. Was one as soon as it left the roundhouse, in fact.
But hey! I can hardly wait to watch that wreck burst into flames. Which should happen any minute now. As soon as these slow-witted turdburgers realize that they’ve all been slyly, snidely insulted by one of the very same bullyboys who used to pants them in the locker room in high school.
I am not sure if it’s in my place to really coin in on this conversation seeing as I am a new user, though I think this fight regarding “the claims about bullying” is a big misunderstanding from the looks of it from a outsider. I think it would be best to try and not be angry in the replies to the person misunderstanding, even if it obviously hurt when someone thinks you claim you are promoting something you are against. I know at least for me anger in of itself is a big trigger when it comes to certain traumas, and it doesn’t seem like the comment was posted in malice as much as fear or panic (again, to me as a outsider though) due to simply not reading the sentence right and missing the point about “it’s simply about all bullies being assholes”
This seems like a cool community and I hope you guys won’t think I am here to cause trouble or be preachy or anything like that from this comment, I just thought I would bring it up in hopes of this not potentially escalating if there is more replies from other people regarding this and such. I understand cassandrakitty didn’t intend to promote bullying in any way
(also sorry if any of that seemed rather “engrish”, English isn’t my first language and I haven’t slept much the past month or so)
Most of us who were bullied as children and teenagers understand that bullies are assholes. But we’ve grown up and moved on and gotten on with our own lives. Too many GGers haven’t. They’re still stuck in high school, mad at the swirly they just got, mad at the cheerleaders who wouldn’t date them, mad at the girl who actually expects to be treated like a human being and not a piece of meat. I’ve met people with major entitlement complexes, but never with such bitterness attached to it as geeky GGers. It’s astounding and a little scary.
A lot of manosphere anger at women seems to stem from the stuck in high school issue. It’s as if they haven’t even noticed that the whole jocks and cheerleaders versus geeks thing doesn’t really apply so much in adult spaces, or that even that way of framing high school may be more about assumptions taken from movies than reality.
There’s a lot of fixation on the idea that if they can just get the kind of girl who wasn’t interested in the in high school to fuck them then that will somehow fix everything too. The ones who’re particularly obsessed with that idea seem to be the ones who end up being PUAs.
“This train has no brakes.”
That explains the derailing.
Oh wow, FifthInterval, if you bought the boxed set in 1976 at a yard sale it must have been the Little Brown Books, a version I’ve never laid my own personal eyes on.
Should have specified, when I mention the claims about bullying, I am referring to the comment argument regarding cassandrakitty’s comment and the misunderstandings that seem to have occurred due to misreadings of it from a few users. I didn’t intend to accidentally defend GG if it looked like I did and if it did I am terribly sorry, I have no intent to defend people who become active bullies themselves like the GG people
(don’t know if MissyL’s comment was in reply to mine or not, but just thought I would clarify. I will stop rambling now, terribly sorry, please don’t hate me)
I’m not sure if anyone else has already pointed this out, but Holt has actually been dipping his toes in the teppid puke of #GG for a while now. Here is an essay he wrote (part 1!) about how Anita Sarkeesian is all sex negative (against het men!), and that’s not libertarian (feminist?) enough for him: http://www.donotlink.com/bkzx
Falconer: I still have them, too. Them and the geomorph panels, and the monster/treasure assortment. Artifacts, all. 😀
And, apropos of nothing, if there are any GGers reading: I’m checking blog post updates during the load screens while playing Fallout 3, so suck it. 🙂
@nightmarelyre
My comment wasn’t directed at you; I’m sorry that it came off that way and if it upset you. It was simply that the bullying discussion got me thinking about GGers and angry geek men in general, the trauma of being bullied, and how so many GGers seem to have held onto it and are now directing it at women.
FWIW, I was severely bullied in school. Like, people would throw food at me in the cafeteria, and I had no friends severe. Funny thing, I recently ran across an old classmate in professional circles. This was a guy who had always been decent to me. I shot him an email thinking maybe we could have coffee, and I could get some professional insights from him, seeing as how where he is now is what I’m trying to get to. It’s been a week and no response. I found his fb profile, and he had made fun of me on his fb page for saying hello. It brought back all the horrible feelings or worthlessness I held all through high school. I felt awful for a few days and even cried a little. Then I remembered all the amazing things I’ve done, the person I am, and thought, “Some things never change. Fuck this asshole.” And then I giggled and went on with my bad self. A GGer couldn’t do that.
Even in high school, I remember how the outcasts could be bullies to each other just as much as they were bullied. I see echoes of this in adulthood, but usually adults have gained a bit more perspective. At least I thought that until I discovered the scrotosphere.
@cassandrakitty, I’m not so sure about people not being picked on for being nerds. I was a big nerd as a kid always, in the “gifted” program and always, and I wasn’t especially socially awkward or anything, but from 2nd grade on or so, once people caught on that I was a nerd, I was basically persona non grata. I didn’t get a whole lot of shit from kids in school – they mostly ignored me – but I did get a lot from kids in the neighborhood. (Granted, we were poor, but so was everyone one else in the ‘hood – it was just that I happened to be a “weird” bookworm who was into dinosaurs and Greek mythology and computers and whatever.) In terms of other types of differences, I have always been bordering-on-trans, but the other kids, at least the boys, actually tended to treat that as one of my “positives” – “You’re almost not even like a girl at all!” I do think that being smart and nerdy was a big source of being picked on, though, for sure.
I don’t know why there are like five million extra “always”es in that last post.
Can anyone else imagine that guy pulling a David Aurini, with cigars instead of cigarettes and a sinister, cookie-cutter cubicle with an Aeron chair in lieu of a overdone movie-villain lair and some sort of black, rocky throne?
Not to mention that it’s an American (and Canadian?) phenomenon. It has fuckall to do with other countries’ schooling systems.
@MissyL, oh, that person sucked, and I’m glad you brushed that crap off. I don’t think I had a single good school year until… high school (I had a friend! I actually still have that friend!) I went to my high school reunion, but after one of my biggest bullies (zie & zir friends bullied a lot of kids) expressed bafflement at one of zir victims not wanting to come to the reunion (zie had apparently forgotten everything negative about zir asshole kidself), I was glad I wasn’t fb friends with any of them!
I actually think the photo looks more like a wax young Matthew Broderick (and I had to look at that picture for a at least a minute to discern that it isn’t actually wax!).
Isn’t top nice guys of okcupid, kinds old news? I mean, it came out of nowhere about two years ago, then like many viral websites, drops out of site a few months afterwards (at least the tumblr I used to follow I see hasn’t updated since early 2013).
So, in case I’m not mistaken here….the whole lengthy article about a current movement based most of its articles on a tumblr which has been inactive for 18 months.
Holy relevancy Batman! Next article, I’m sure, will point out the dangerous SJW influences of MySpace, aol messenger, and tub girl.
I’m really interested how someone can actually look at history and think “wow, social justice sure was met with little resistance!”.
Oh good! I’m not the only person who saw a resemblance to Matthew Broderick.
As he was in Stepford Wives I think.
“Mythago” and “Girlscientist,” falsely accusing a regular of things that we accuse trolls of using our wording? Yeah, they certainly aren’t the world’s most obvious socks, probably previously banned and and possibly even the same person…
Nah, Mythago at least has been around before, I’m just not sure how she got from the conversation that was happening to the idea that we were victim blaming autistic people via some sort of coded dogwhistle. As far as I’ve seen this community doesn’t do that, and never has. In fact there are quite a few commenters here who’re on the spectrum, and the idea that shitty behavior from men in geek spaces being written off as a result of autism is wrong for all kinds of reasons (not the least of which is that the dudes being sexually aggressive usually aren’t on the spectrum, they’re just trying to use men who are as human shields) has been discussed at great length here.
When was social justice beaten and why is this something to be proud of? They flat out admit that they want things to stay white, male, privileged, and terrible…..