Reaxxion, Roosh Valizadeh’s embarrassment of a gaming site, recently published am apocalyptic GamerGate manifesto under the title ā#Gamergate Is A Critical Battle In The War To Save Western Society.ā
In the manifesto, posted by someone calling himself Allan Quatermain ā presumably not his real name ā 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 SJWās 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, āstruggleā 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 ācommunist menaceā 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 āJohn Birch societyā replaced by āGamerGateā and āCommunistā replaced by āSJW,ā and a few other references changed here and there.
That bit from Quatermain’s essay I quoted above describing how SJW’s allegedly āseek always and everywhere to bring about more interference, less individual responsibility and an amoral way of doing things?ā
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.
… Also, how come so many recent threads have devolved into religious arguments? I know we have a huge representation of different religions and beliefs here, everything from atheism to Mormonism to Buddhism to paganism, and it’s usually really quiet on that front. o.O
I’m an atheist (not the “movement” kind) and frankly I’m tired of this conversation. This is clearly not the place for it, so I’m not sure why people are so determined to have this be the space in which we reenact the atheist vs theist war of every year so far this century.
If everyone on all sides could just drop it that would be lovely, but there seems to be about as much chance of that as of all the governments of the world suddenly taking climate change seriously.
@M.
I don’t know how this one emerged, but the post where Vox Day equalled feminism to Satanism was a religious debate waiting to happen.
I don’t know what’s up with the religion argumenting, so I’m just going to stick to the things I do know what’s up with.
Namely, I’ve never inspected my eyebrows so closely in my life, until this thread.
I have no long hairs, but my eyebrows start a little amorphously. And I found three little short hairs trying desperately to escape the boundaries of the proper eyelash zone into the unibrow zone.
They’re trying so hard, these three little hairs.
It’s almost adorable, but I also kind of want to kill them now that I am aware of them, but they’re just trying so hard!
I don’t get any hairs in the unibrow zone, but I do get the occasional hair trying to grow below the rest of my eyebrow in a way that looks messy, so I pluck those.
Does anyone else have brows that are naturally pointy at the outside corner? People occasionally ask me if I pluck them that way and lol no, plucking the occasional stray below the main part of my brow is as much effort as I’m willing to put into things.
I stand with cassandrakitty on changing the subject. As much as I like genuine debates where people share and learn about each other’s belief systems, it’s starting to get stale now.
So…We should do a build-a-story on…something. Roosh applying for a job?
This one started because of a passing reference to “militant atheists,” which is a sore point in the atheist community (at least, the one I’m part of).
But whatever. I usually bolt when thread arguments start, but this one I thought I had something worthwhile to contribute to. Since it’s argument itself that’s annoying folks, I guess that was a bad move.
Sorry about that.
Also, to whoever referred to their eyebrows as caterpillars, I immediately imagined two bushy brows slinking off of someone’s face. Thanks for the giggle.
*Shuffles out of the office men’s room with his trousers around his ankles* Whose job is it to wipe bottoms around here?
Seriously, folks, whenever this argument breaks out everyone just ends up angry with each other, and no new resolution is ever reached, it just goes dormant until the next time the argument starts up again. Eyebrows, dammit!
You mean that you don’t regularly go on cruises on ships that you suspect will sink just so that you can make men more disposable? Tut tut tut. You need to misander better!
But in all seriousness, historians have thoroughly de-bunked the women and children first myth, as David wrote about here: https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2012/04/15/a-titanic-mistake-new-research-sinks-the-women-and-children-first-myth/. And even if we assume that this was once standard practice on ships, we have to acknowledge that it hasn’t been in recent years. Hell, I’ve seen traditionalists complaining about the MV Bulgaria sinking in 2011 and how it proves that feminism is bad for women because the movement has stopped men from being chivalrous. So, if we’re following their logic, shouldn’t Karen be thanking feminism for making men less disposable, in ship disasters?
@sunnysombrera That was me. I imagine their lil caterpillar heads looking this way and that while I’m trying to make an expression.
I also have a unibrow… and not the three hair kind. A true unibrow. I don’t let it grow out, though. When I was in my early teens my hairdresser aunt made me wax my eyebrows, much to my dismay. The change was so intense my friend’s dad asked if I had gotten contacts – I’ve never had glasses.
Re: eyebrows:
Oh, no, I’m not talking a stray hair here or there. My Mr has grand, Peter-Capaldi-esque brows, though rather than being uniformly dark they have dark brown, light brown, blonde, red, and (recently) grey interspersed (he’s a calico person) – about half of which want to strike off on their own and start a facial hair revolution and have to be brought back into civilized society via regular trimming.
They’re bloody magnificent.
Buuuut I’ll freely admit that that may be a fairly idiosyncratic opinion.
(No unibrow, though. The two are almost violently independent from one another.)
@alaisvex:
Yes, but the problem is that Karen has her own logic she’s following. Anything that has at least one benefit to women must be caused and wanted by feminists, so therefore feminists must want chivalry and “women and children first” to be policy, and therefore they want to kill all men. Or something.
Thing is, when one person has power over another, they are expected to use that power for good. If a situation comes up where a choice has to be made between lives, the person in power generally gets the choice and is expected to sacrifice themselves before others. So parents would be expected to want their kids to get on the lifeboats before them, if a choice had to be made. Pretty sure this concept is far older than any sort of feminism.
When men were assumed to have the power in society, that means they would also have been expected to be last on the life boats. This would be considered the noble choice. In an equitable society, though, the choice won’t be between men and women, but along some other power dynamic. It would be acceptable for a woman to decide her husband should get the last seat, and the husband wouldn’t be shamed for not filling his role as a man.
So yeah… chalk this up to yet another thing that MRAs blame feminists for while feminists actively work against it.
Re: religious debates:
This is up for another two weeks or so:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04knt4h/episodes/guide
So at least there’s that.
I get bugged about ‘militant atheists’ for the same reason I get bugged about ‘militant feminists’. It’s a hyperbolic tag used to delegitimize the labelled group. Are there plenty of arrogant and asshat atheists? Yup, and I don’t associate with them for that reason.
Also what Kirby said.
Given the example of the lifeboats, if only one of the adults could get on but all of the children could I’d insist that it be my husband – he’s the better swimmer and is stronger overall. He, and therefore the kids, would have a better chance of surviving if something (else) went wrong.
(Re: Children getting priority: I’ll hold that the powerful/powerless dynamic should still apply…plus, adults have had more of a chance to do things.)
But since I hate boats, we’re probably ok on that front (though I have told him that in the case of the zombie apocalypse, he should take the children and run if I can’t keep up).
GamerGate is already ideologically aligned with John Birchers as it is. It’s a lot easier for me to believe a lazy plagiarist Gater re-purposed an old anti-communist essay than it is someone infiltrated Reaxxion and tricked Roosh.
Also why does Reaxxion have two Xs in it, two Xs is the female chromosomal pattern.
Man, I don’t know what happened to Matt Smith’s eyebrows. He had some in his premier episode:
http://bowjamesbow.ca/assets_c/2010/04/matt-smith-eleventh-hor-thumb-542×301-126.png
But at some point his caterpillars must have crawled off for greener pastures:
http://imageserver.moviepilot.com/matt-smithv2-matt-smith-rexjpg-4nnunzp0-matt-smith-as-the-riddler-is-an-inspired-piece-of-casting.jpeg?width=2048&height=1536
After four or five years of No Eyebrows, Capaldi’s eyebrows loom over my television screen like the Diamond Cliffs of Planet One.
http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100621192840/tardis/images/5/54/Planet_One.jpg
I think to get the “sh” sound.
And also BECAUSE IT’S EXXTREME!!!!
/late 90s
Dangit, the second image only made a link.
If we’re changing the subject can I just ask why I got a sudden intense craving for cigarettes? I quit more than six years ago!
Nicotine is evil š
See, one X would look like a misspelling, three Xs would look like porn, more Xs would look silly, so it has to be two! I’m sure it’s misandry somehow.
Sorry, I should’ve reloaded before posting–convo had already moved on. Just ignore my prior post.