Reaxxion, Roosh Valizadeh’s embarrassment of a gaming site, recently published am apocalyptic GamerGate manifesto under the title “#Gamergate Is A Critical Battle In The War To Save Western Society.”
In the manifesto, posted by someone calling himself Allan Quatermain – presumably not his real name – defines GamerGate as
a grass roots consumer rights affiliation of people, men and women of good character, humane consciences, and principled beliefs [who] have voluntarily joined together to combat more effectively the evil forces which now threaten our freedoms, our hobby, our way of life and the civilization we love.
Quatermain described the enemies of #GamerGate in similarly vivid terms. The evil Social Justice Warriors, he wrote,
seek always and everywhere to bring about more interference, less individual responsibility and an amoral way of doing things. On the plain of action, until the SJW’s can be stopped from their subjugation of all western society, there will be no opportunity for us to move forward at all. …
They deceptively appeal to every motivation in human character, from sordid selfishness, to practical politics, to misguided idealism. They have gradually beguiled a lot of very good people into joining the attack on us, until the maligning of #gamergate has probably exceeded in intensiveness and extensiveness that faced by any other organization in all of western history.
I was all set to write an essay describing how the rhetoric in Quatermain’s manifesto resembles the rhetoric of other reactionary, conspiracy-minded movements in American history, drawing upon historian Richard Hofstader’s famous essay The Paranoid Style of American Politics.
But then I started getting a little paranoid myself. While many GamerGaters see their, er, “struggle” in similarly apocalyptic, some of the language in Quatermain’s post seemed weirdly old-fashioned, almost as if he were cribbing from some old John Birch pamphlet on the “communist menace” from half a century ago.
That’s because he was. I pasted a few sentences from Quatermain’s essay into Google and discovered that they did in fact come straight from an old John Birch newspaper ad from the 1960s.
In fact, the whole essay is essentially a verbatim copy of a giant chunk of that John Birch society newspaper ad, with the words “John Birch society” replaced by “GamerGate” and “Communist” replaced by “SJW,” and a few other references changed here and there.
That bit from Quatermain’s essay I quoted above describing how SJW’s allegedly “seek always and everywhere to bring about more interference, less individual responsibility and an amoral way of doing things?”
Well, here’s the original paragraph as published by the John Birch Society in a newspaper called the Reading Eagle in January of 1966.
You can see the entire John Birch ad here.
Roosh, you’ve been trolled, and trolled hard. And none of those commenting on his site suspected a thing.
To the troll behind this, kudos on some masterful work.
Slow clap.
I wonder if there’s any interesting cultural implications in the fact that old school red bashers and gaters (not to be confused with gators, who’re a proud and bitey people) are basically the same thing.
Are we talking about my favourite topic, old newspapers?
1891 – a young woman talks about dating
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article103159413
a young man replies
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article103159686
1894
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article112361328
Young Women.
Do you think you could love the young man who sneers at his mother and sister ?
Do you think you oould love the young man -who does not take the trouble to look his neatest when he comes to see you ?
Do you think you could love the young man who forgets to remove his hat when he is talking to you in the hall or on the verandah ?
Do you think you could love the young man who is never thoughtful of your com- fort, but only of his own ?
Do you think you could love the young man who, while professing love to you, speaks about you in a careless way ?
Of course you cannot! Then don’t.
On the plagiarism thing—I am a grading assistant at my local university. Several years ago I caught one of our students extensively plagiarizing in her essay. When the teacher sat down with her to talk about it, the student burst into panicked tears, because she sincerely had no idea that what she was doing was wrong. She literally just thought that was how research papers worked.
Lord knows how she managed to make it all the way through high school with that idea, but—yeah. Particularly if we assume Mr. Hilarious Pseudonym to be a young dude without much IRL writing experience, there is a chance that he honestly thinks his own minor edits count as a totally legit rewrite, if that’s how he’s been coasting through school.
This is not to let him off the hook for it, but rather to enjoy the idea that this might be an excellent and thoroughly accidental self-troll.
Magpie, I love that young woman’s letter!
How sad that she’d come forward a century-plus and find all too many things the same.
tesformes
Well, from what I understand:
Chloe Segal, another game developer, got into some shit with PayPal and IndieGoGo because of GamerGate. Funds she had raised were seized, and she went to Brianna for help to get people on her side.
Brianna refused, saying she didn’t want to get involved with a situation she knows nothing about, because that would be her neck on the line, not Chloe’s. She says she’ll give advice, but nothing more.
Chloe seems understanding at first, then lashes out at Brianna because she refused to use her followers to help her, being verbally abusive and trying to guilt Brianna into assisting her. (“But I helped you! Why can’t you help me?!” “You’re triggering me!” “I’m suffering more than you!” “If you don’t help me, I’ll make this log public!”, ect.)
The leaked stuff has been archived here: http://imgur.com/yJPWyvH
I highly recommend the read. It really shows what a terrible person Chloe Segal actually is. I felt sorry for her at first, but damn if that didn’t change quick.
That is a truly beautiful work of trolling. Do you think we could convince him to publish a find-replaced version of Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
@tesformes & @ParadoxicalIntention
I read those logs without knowing what they were and regret it since it’s a cringe-inducing personal exchange. I do feel bad for Wu though because she tries to be reasonable and supportive but, oh boy, Chloe passive aggressively, then aggressive aggressively, refuses to accept no as an answer. There’s not much to see there, I have no idea why Chloe released them because Wu does nothing wrong and does her best to remain civil while refusing to give Chloe’s demands and threats. Again, I can’t stress enough how cringe inducing it is, it’s a genuinely painful read.
@ParadoxicalIntention
Just to clarify, I read them those logs earlier today elsewhere without knowing any of the back story. I just reread both our posts and realized it sort of sounds like I read it from your link and was complaining about it. That’s what I get for posting while super sleepy.
Kittehserf – yeah, the more things change….
The letters whinging about women all mention the same things the MRA’s go on about, too. It tickles me.
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“Roosh V’s game site Reaxxion tricked into publishing an old John Birch Society pamphlet as a #GamerGate manifesto”
Is there any difference? I mean, most of the anti-Semite conspiracy theories GG bounced around *were* JBS shit anyway.
Would I have to listen to her talk, because if so, no.
Magpie, that’s what I thought with that “reply” from that young twit. Oh she’s too boring, she doesn’t talk! Oh she talks and I know jack shit about anything! Oh noes!
It says something that spambots have more entertaining things to say than trolls. Though I think “Johnson Fryil” (why does that make me think of Friar’s Balsam?) needs to fix the opening sentence:
“Join the secret
illuminaitifurrinatitemple666 today to get rich, wealthy and famous.”Those newspaper entries are fantastic. Bookmarked them all.
There’s also the, “My bad attitude and manners are everybody else’s fault but my own” chestnut, too.
and that’s about where I zoned out.
evil. forces.
I’m mentally inventing a new game where everyone is given the same snippet of misogynist/racist rant and has to provide a 100 word summary of the whole thing. Whoever gets closest wins. Bonus points for guessing exact words or phrases used in the text.
Wow they like their melodrama.
@DAP:
For it to *still* make sense, it would need to have made sense at some point in the past. Did you have a point to make, or did you just want to drop the phrase “cultural Marxists” into a sentence to pretend that it’s a meaningful concept?
Cassandra:
Personally I shower rather often, mainly because I love being squeaky clean. This preference developed slowly after puberty. I feel it when my crotch and armpits start getting funky (and boy, it happens fast). I’m also rather sensitive to other people’s smells.
I guess it’s possible that some people don’t develop that kind of sensitivity. Instead, they develop a consciousness (or not) on how their hygiene affects other people. Then they would consciously monitor their body odor, just like women in particular often learn to monitor the finer aspects of their appearance.
This would explain why Roosh sees women as the main reason to maintain personal hygiene. It could be even true for him, if he lives alone and doesn’t mind being a little smelly. He might still be actually rather well-groomed when he goes out.
(Apparently, I’m not too sensitive on discussing other people’s crotch sweat. I’ll stop now.)
taking out the melodrama:
“some computer-game players who want to stop other people entering into our hobby”.
taking out the melodrama and adding a pinch of truth:
“some computer-games players led by a core of misogynist arseholes who sent rape/death/mass-homicide threats to women and their families because they dared step outside of the box we mentally put them in in the hope that females and other people different to ourselves would stay away from our precious hobby”.
Would you be prepared to debate Karen Straughan in an open debate?
Boom goes the dynamite.
I too misread Quatermain as Quatermass. Brought to mind the movie where all the people who were genetically alpha started rioting and killing everyone else. I believe it was called “Quatermass and the Slymepit”…
I know for a fact that my Mr does, but (with small children) we often squeeze in randomly timed sexytimes and he’s trying to be considerate.
And we may have slight boundary issues.
“PEG + CAT’S ON! MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!”
My Mr also has to trim these for work (he has to look pretty), but I’ve got to admit that I don’t always alert him to their existence of he’s on vacation…
…until I can say, “I like your swoopy eyebrows. You look like a super villain!”