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.
alaisvex, I adore that scene. Louis Renault is my favourite character in that film, ratbag though he is. 🙂
Shameful confession here; I used to be pro-life myself. There are many, many reasons why I changed that opinion, but one of the ones that was most compelling to me, on the other side of the fence, was that the issue isn’t one of life and death, it’s a matter of bodily autonomy.
Fully grown and developed humans, with lives and loved ones of their own, can be in a state where their continued existence depends on being able to subsist off the body parts of another, in the case of organ failure. People every day die because they cannot find an appropriate organ donor for them. And here’s the kicker: the government and law cannot require someone else to give up a kidney or a section of their liver or some of their bone marrow, or even something as minor as donating blood, to save the life of someone else. The idea of being dragged into a hospital against your will to have your body pulled apart for the sake of someone else’s survival is a concept that should be repulsive to almost anyone. Yet pro-lifers constantly make the same argument for the sake of fetuses.
Personally I wonder about a future where we move beyond sexual reproduction and pregnancy. A new way to reproduce, where sex is recreational. That and increasing our capacities to love more easily.
Why do the trolls always missex me?
Dude, I don’t care who you want to think I am stay the fuck out of my uterus. And everyone else’s.
Dave, can we give him a challenge? He has to write a 500 word essay about why he is a misogynist, and why misandry would be a far better option? Or just use the phrase “women are people” in every sentence, that would be awesome too.
*AND* he has to post pictures of llamas.
“One creepy sheriff wanted spontaneous abortions reported to him within 24 hours so we mailed him tampons with red ink on them. Effing asshat.”
Yes please
OMG no, Shaun, we don’t want a teal deer from that pillock! D:
It’s the nym that confuses ’em. After all they’re not going to read comments properly, and maybe find out that yes, you are in fact a woman.
(I’m half expecting one to tell me I’m weird for having a gravatar of myself sitting in bed. Now that might be fun!)
Meanwhile, llama!
http://www.watertownllamas.co.uk/images/photos/040910/030.jpg
The “what counts as a person” question is a legitimately difficult one, but as far as the abortion discussion goes, it’s just a distraction anyway. Pro-lifers switch freely between personhood versus unique DNA versus ability to feel pain versus consequences for actions as convenient.
This thread, too? Cripes!
All that I’m going to say on the subject (apologies if I’ve been ninja’d – I am not reading more of this) is that one human being can not force another to sustain zir own life. It does not matter when life starts after conception, it does not matter if embryos feel pain, and it doesn’t matter that every bloody zygote has unique DNA. No one can squat in someone else’s body without permission. If we can’t force people to do something simple and relatively painless like donate blood, we certainly can’t force people to house other people inside them without consent.
BLERGH! I’m done.
Miscarriage and stillbirth are just polite words of abortion. If the fetus dies prior to viability we call it a miscarriage. If it occurs after, we call it a stillbirth. Spontaneous abortions can happen at any time during pregnancy.
Just found this thread again and damn, son, that was a quick transition from “I am being oppressed for my totally non-misogynist beliefs” to “stupid sluts who should have kept their legs closed”. BTW, I called you sweetie, not honey. Honey is a term of affection, sweetie is reserved for those occasions where one is patting a very silly child on the head and sending him off to go sit at the kiddie table until he’s learned some table manners.
Run along now, sweetie-pie.
Also the bit about the embryo that’s gotten out makes it sound like the facehugger from Alien is trying to tear its way out of John Hurt’s abdomen. Probably not the imagery you want to go with when you’re trying to convince the little ladies that pregnancy is their destiny, dude.
The one thing that really pisses me off with the pro-fetus-life zealots is that they ignore all the possible negative consequences of pregnancy on the woman. And not uncommonly, women are diagnosed with cancer after they become pregnant. A subset of those women opt to refuse treatment in order to continue with the pregnancy. And then there’s all the medication that pregnant women are told not to take so they have to suffer headaches, nausea, etc “naturally”.
Then if anything is “wrong” with the child, the mother is blamed for what she ingested/inhaled/injected, or didn’t ingest/inhale/inject, while she was pregnant.
I was wondering if that troll would be all “rights for the alien” as well. Poor baby alien just trying to be born!
They Gish Gallop so hard around those points you’d swear you hear the William Tell Overture playing. That or Yakety Sax.
And, just for giggles, here’s Napoleon riding a penguin:
http://youtu.be/oVRKg33lhFg
Russia never stood a chance.
re: separating sex and birth –
If you’ve read Lois McMaster Bujold, it’s a major theme in the Vorkosigan books – the impact that advancing medical technology including widely available contraceptives and “uterine replicators” have on a highly patriarchal society.
Holy Monkey how did I miss this?
” “Three-fourths of women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner”
So the other ~25% might be doing it for reasons other than convenience…?”
So now people starving to death and being homeless” is now “inconvenient”? And women having “problems” with their partners are seeking to flee abuse in many cases, so now avoiding abuse is “convenience”? Remove head from sphincter STAT.
So, basically, my take on troll is “I respect women and think they should care for the baybeez but not ever be trusted to make their own decisions wrt baybeez and sex and their own bodies, except maybe figuring out how their legs close because if they could do that the world would be much happier”. Am I far off?
Also, when you’re working with a bunch of “3/4s say this, 3/4s say this,” you can’t know how those overlap unless you look at the source. So hey, it could be 100% that cite reasons of convenience!
Suggested reading for troll: “The Fresco” by Sheri S. Tepper.
Content warning domestic violence, rape, sadism.
Also “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall” same author.
Content warning domestic violence, rape, racism, police and court brutality, child abuse, CSA.
@kirbywarp: exactly, the troll cannot do maths or statistics. What a surprise.
Hey! I happen to be re-reading The Fresco right now!
In the US where the forced birth proponents have made significant progress depriving women of health care over the past fifteen years, according to the 2010 census, the maternal mortality rate went up for the first time ever.
I haven’t got The Fresco yet. I should, though…