Reaxxion, the world’s crappiest right wing woman-hating excuse for a video game site, has now officially responded to my post revealing that a GamerGate manifesto they recently published was literally a repurposed John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents.
Whether the, er, “author” of the post was trolling, or just the world’s least subtle plagiarist, it was a giant embarrassment for Roosh and Reaxxion. And so, in the course of a nearly 1000-word post, Reaxxion “ethics officer” announces that they’ve shitcanned the author – and congratulates the site for its heroic bravery for throwing out a writer who copied his entire post from an old John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents.
That’s all well and good, because journalists aren’t supposed to copy pretty much their entire posts from a John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents. If you’re an editor and catch a writer doing this, you’re supposed to send that writer packing. (Remember Stephen Glass?)
But Roberts ignores what is really the most interesting and revealing thing about the whole incident, which is that a writer copied his entire post from an old John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents – AND NO ONE NOTICED UNTIL I POINTED IT OUT.
And why is that? Because the hysterical anti-communist rhetoric of the original ad sounds pretty much identical to the ridiculously over-the-top rhetoric that’s characterized GamerGate from the start. And it’s rooted in the same sort of reactionary politics.
Which is itself even more embarrassing than the plagiarism itself.
The John Birch Society, if you don’t already know, isn’t just a right-wing group. It’s a group so far to the right that even the National Review has denounced it. As a Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report notes that for years those on the left and on the right basically saw the Birchers as “the political equivalent of an addled uncle sent down to the basement rec room to drink, rant and hopefully pass out” before he had a chance to thoroughly embarrass the whole family by saying something truly dreadful.
I found the Bircher’s newspaper ad in a newspaper from 1966. At that time, the Birchers were fierce opponents of the civil rights movement in general and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular, labeling him a tool of the communists. As the SPLC report notes, Birchers feared that “the African-American freedom movement was being manipulated from Moscow with the goal of creating a “Soviet Negro Republic” in the Southern United States.”
Of course, the Birchers saw communists hiding behind every tree and under every bed. Indeed, the group’s founder, Robert Welch, was convinced that even President Dwight Eisenhower was a treasonous Communist puppet, and that LBJ was plotting to turn the United States over to the Communists even as he sent troops to fight against the Viet Cong.
So congratulations, GamerGaters, you’re now as officially ridiculous as the John Birch Society.
It might be a good idea to reflect a little on your life choices.
No, kittehs, you’re thinking of women being arrested for having had miscarriages, which is rare but it happens. There was a case in Utah and one in Florida fairly recently, I think, neither of which are very surprising places to hear about that kind of nonsense.
Begins? Begins???? A zygote/blastocyst/foetus isn’t made from a collection of inert chemicals which magically becomes alive. We are all of us, as well as all the living things around us, part of a gigantic, continuous heritage of life.
As far as a foetus becoming a person, which is what I think you’re getting at, there are two issues. One is consciousness and biology generally. All the information we have so far indicates that a foetus from say 26 weeks to full-term has much the same mental status as a person in a coma as well as being in real danger of not surviving ouside the woman’s body. There simply isn’t enough oxygen in their system to support substantial brain activity. A foetus becomes a baby with a functional brain when they get their oxygen directly from their lungs rather than someone else’s bloodstream. After they’re born.
But all of that is really irrelevant, it’s just biology. The other “person” issue is the bodily autonomy issue. Even if a foetus had exactly the same qualities and functionalities and status as a child or a full-grown adult, they’d have exactly the same right to demand that a woman risk her health and her life to provide life support for that individual.
None.
If she decides to do it, it’s entirely up to her. If she initially agrees but finds the task too onerous, she can change her mind. If she decides that she won’t agree to it at all, then that’s her decision. Hers. No one else’s.
Yes, we have gone way past that. Women are being arrested for failure to produce a viable human resource in several states. They have also been forced to undergo c sections and been incarcerated for seeking prenatal care and confessing to having used drugs in the past. Most laws have been improperly applied to poor women forever in the US. One creepy sheriff wanted spontaneous abortions reported to him within 24 hours so we mailed him tampons with red ink on them. Effing asshat.
Right Wingnut
No it’s not. It’s specifically aimed at women, that doesn’t mean men can’t benefit from it. For instance, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is aimed at girls, but that hasn’t stopped grown men from liking it.
Genitals =/= Sex. Please don’t be transphobic.
And drop the “But I agree with you!!!” bullshit. You obviously do not. You’re being extremely disingenuous and it’s getting rather dull.
When someone “doesn’t share the same beliefs” as me, that’s fine. When they use those beliefs that I don’t share to say that they think women shouldn’t have bodily autonomy is where I get snippy.
And no one is “personally injuring” you. No one has come to your house and broken your kneecaps. Your feelings are hurt because we didn’t give you asspats for being an “awesome feminist”.
Because they’re held to higher standards than “Because I say so”, which include years of testing and theorizing and rigor. They test, test, and test again, over and over to make sure that they’re correct. It isn’t “But I think fetuses are people!” and that’s that.
And yeah, if science comes to a different conclusion, then we will discard the old facts-that-are-no-longer-facts and move on to the shiny new facts. Because science, bitch. That’s how it works.
If something is proven false, we move on. We used to think the world was flat and everything revolved around it. Now we don’t because we’ve proven that’s not true. Boom.
No, I said that some people don’t feel comfortable with men being feminists, but would rather have them as allies (and allies that don’t try to say they’re feminists and then insist that women don’t have bodily autonomy because a clump of cells is more important than they are, and then insists that women are wrong and they’re not really feminists because they don’t agree. Fuck you).
What I said was:
Don’t cherry-pick my arguments. I bolded the important bit you seemed to have forgotten to read right after you got your underpants in a twist. Feminism benefits you, but it’s not directly meant to help you. It’s women first, because they are more disadvantaged than you.
And stick the flounce this time, please.
Right Wingnut
No, because the teenager is already birthed, and is capable of thought and life outside of the womb.
It’s not a matter of simple age, it’s a matter of physical development. A fetus is not as physically developed as an already birthed (and aged) teenager. A fetus needs to live in a womb (in almost a parasitic fashion) until it’s physically developed enough to be birthed.
“Spontaneous abortion” is the medical term for miscarriage. “Induced abortion” is the kind that’s done on purpose.
Wow, and *I’m* the one whose handle is “Unimaginative”.
That line is birth. Inside the womb, it’s a fetus. After it’s born, it’s a baby.
gillyrosebee – I was conflating “miscarriage” with “spontaneous abortion” in the sense of it being effectively the same, rather than the stage of pregnancy, I think. At any rate, women have been arrested for pregnancy-not-carrying-to-term-and-resulting-in-live-baby.
.
mildlymagnificent
That makes a LOT more sense than what I said! May I use this response in the future?
Unimaginative – oh good, thanks!
Wasn’t there a high school in Texas where someone found a fetus in a trash can and they had helicopters circling and the sheriff interrogating people? I’m like… wtf is WRONG with these idiots?
IIRC, eventually school staff figured out which poor girl had miscarried in the bathroom and got the sheriff to call off the dogs, but it was just beyond ridiculous. Miscarriage is commoner than headlice. Sheesh
ParadoxialIntention
Go right ahead.
(I’m not sure that it’s all my own work anyway. I’ve learned a lot from other people.)
AAAAH now I’m imagining miscarrying headlice!
Re: miscarriage/spontaneous abortion, I have an (admittedly somewhat thinly founded) understanding that “spontaneous abortion” is the one that happens much earlier in the potential pregnancy, and can consist of what seems as a slightly heavier period, while a miscarriage is what happens at a later stage of development and is usually more substantial.
But it’s a distinction that makes little difference for our purposes and I’m honestly not sure why I felt the need to try to make the distinction, sorry.
Sorry, bad turn of phrase
gillyrosebee, no probs!
ceebarks – eh, no worries. Even if I am now reliving that “cockroaches bursting forth” scene from the first Creepshow film, thankyouverymuch.
Not surprisingly, it tends to be poor women of color arrested for a miscarriage. They also tend to drug test poor WOC during labor using a test that often returns false positives and then using the test results to take custody of their babies away. It’s horrible and until they start doing it to middle and upper class white women, nobody will care.
Oh, and is it just me who keeps thinking that brown pumice stone on the left in katz’s comment looks like a chocolate cookie?
Miscarriage is simply the polite euphemism for the clinical term abortion. The pregnancy aborted sounds bad and peeps can’t tell if you are a good girl who lost their pregnancy or a bd girl who got rid of it and cripes on a cracker that shit is effing important to asshats.
Cookies. I thought you were offering troll house cookies.
WWTH, I am shocked, shocked I say, that this disproportionately hits poor women of colour.
I’d offer the troll cookies if they were actually made of pumice.
Let’s not have this “debate” over abortiom in every thread. Right Wingnut, I’m putting you on moderation.
Huzzah!
@kittehs
Same here!