By David Futrelle
So Graham Linehan — the fomer comedy writer turned humorless transphobe — is having some second thoughts about Gamergate, and he wants the world to know all about them.
Linehan recently went on a podcast called TRIGGERnometry (no, really) to explain, among other things, his new and “revised feelings” about the sadly not-completely-dormant cultural counterrevolution that liked to pretend it was a crusade for game journalism ethics.
Back in the day, he told the podcast’s two hosts, he, like most of those opposed to Gamergate, thought that the supposed “consumer movement”
was a hate campaign aimed at women in the gaming industry that was … employing hings like swatting … Because it was women being targeted my anger reflex had gone up … and I just jumped into it … .
But now the scales have lifted from his eyes and he now thinks that maybe some of Gamergate was actually a good thing.
“What it really was,” he continud,
was a confluence of millions of different things happening at the same time … and I now realize there were a lot of young men [in Gamergate] who were much closer to the truth of what was happening in colleges and stuff that I was, [and] who realized that there was this censorious liberal canceling kind of culture that was really dangerous you know …
But alas, these noble free-speech warriors
were all mixed up with with with the real right-wingers and people like [Milo] Yiannopoulos who who it seemed to me was very cynically cashing in and trying to try to recruit young men into the right.
It’s weird how all the Nazis lined up with what was otherwise a blameless crusade for free speech, huh? It’s not like the free speech stuff was just a disingenuous PR thing and the whole Gamergate enterprise was rotten to the core or anything.
Anyway, Linehan also regrets that some of the women he defended back in the Gamergate days turned out to be — the horror! — trans.
“I thought I was defending women,” he remarked, “and … I was defending blokes.”
Now, because of the whole “free speech” thing and also the “defending blokes” thing, Linehan says he thinks he “may have made a few mistakes in the Gamergate time.”
This interview isn’t the first time in which Linehan has made clear that he’s changed his tune on Gamergate. In a tweet last month, he declared that
I realise with some embarrassment that some of the people I supported during gamergate were the kind of people I thought we were fighting.
And last week he picked a fight with Gamergate bete noire ANita Sarkeesian, accusing her of “male pandering” because she supports trans rights.
In case you’re wondering exactly what he’s going on about, the “other group of men” he’s talking about are trans women.
If Linehan thinks he’s going to pick up a lot of new fans amongst the perma-Gamergaters who inhabit web forums like the Kotaku in Action subreddit, he’s going to be sadly disappointed. In a Kotaku in Action thread on his podcast appearance, the locals are mostly hostile.
“Don’t be fooled,” notes one commenter. “He ran out of friends on the SJW side of things over TERF drama and now he wants new ones.” After spelling out Linehan’s assorted crimes against Gamergate, the commenter concluded that “he made his bed and can go get fucked on it.”
In a followup comment, the same commenter suggested Linehan would only be welcomed into the Gamergate fold if he brought them dirt on other anti-Gemergaters.
Glinner can go get fucked unless he crawls on his ass over broken glass for us and leaks all the shit that he and his evil littermates were doing behind the scenes in ’14.
“Dig your own pit, Glinner,” wrote another. “This one doesn’t have room enough for your ego.”
Still another commenter offered a more detailed analysis:
It’s because he got cancelled by tr***ies when he dared agree with J K Rowling publicly. He is since basically out of the job. So now he is all about “freedom of speech” and anti-SJW when he is a SJW himself.
Same with the TERF, they were all about silencing “misogynistic gamers” until the bat shit crazies silenced them. Now they are forced to ask right wing think tanks to lend them some places to congregate and talk because nobody on the left wants to let them do talks in public places anymore.
Tough crowd, huh?
Political realignment is a bit more difficult than one might think.
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The horse and sword and shield avatar is so apt, since Graham is just like those dudes who are super into their folklore version of chivalry. Have you met those guys? Their chivalrous act involves a lot of door opening and condescension and expecting you to thank them for being so nice to ladies, such a rare thing these days, you know. And then one time you’re like “I can carry my own bags, thanks, Thom,” and he’s like “Fuck you, you bitch,” and you’re like “I thought you told me you were the only man left in the world who is nice to ladies,” and he’s like “You’re no lady.”
Graham has always only extended his “allyship” to a certain subset of women (cis ones who are really really nice to him), and he’s happy to keep kicking more and more of us out of that club unless we bitches start acting like ladies and suck up to him.
OT, but this seems important: Michigan cancelled a legislative session to avoid another threatened protest in the capitol building by heavily armed men. So I guess the message is that terrorism works, at least if you’re white. This is certain to embolden the armed right, and not just in Michigan. Expect more of the same.
Time for Michigan to do all their legislating remotely.
Canada already is doing a lot of its legislating remotely. The current setup has a mix of limited in-person sessions with a small number of people sitting apart (some form of in-person sessions are constitutionally required if they want to actually have Parliament be open) with virtual sessions so everybody who isn’t within driving distance of Ottawa can also take part. And a lot of committee meetings are being done entirely remotely because there’s no legal requirement for anybody to be in the same room anyway.
The Conservative party tried to block it, but when every other party agreed that in-person meetings multiple times a week was a bad idea, that wasn’t going anywhere.
(And, honestly, given how much of the core Conservative power base is in the Prairies anyway, you’d think they’d be happy about being able to attend from home. Scheer’s just being bloody contrarian.)
Not muscle-daddy enough.
Ok, I forced myself to watch some clips from the podcast. The ending was especially incomprehensible, he went off on a weird tangent about the Cambridge Five and that somehow segued about porn and how trans* porn stars with pigtails are destroying children’s sexuality (a bit creepy that he’s clearly spent time thinking about children’s sexuality). He sounded even more out of touch with reality than usual, it seems like he really is breaking down.
End clip:
https://twitter.com/maleallyman1/status/1260773927963459584
Jenora Feuer, I wonder why Scheer is playing tough guy right now. The Conservatives aren’t going to change their minds and say “Hey, Andy, you’re a better guy that we thought, the tough leader we need. So let’s forget that whole leadership thing and keep you around.” And the caucus isn’t going to support him getting too intransigent and forcing an election, because they know they’ll pretty much certainly lose again.
I am sad about Nina Paley. Her animated Sita Sings The Blues was funny and smart, something that helped me when I was going through a breakup. Why she went this way …
Linehan’s downfall is particularly saddening considering how movingly he & his wife spoke during the campaign to repeal the Constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland about their own experience with a fatal foetal abnormality. To see him reduced to… wherever tf he’s at now, it’s hard to believe it was the same guy.
His trajectory reminds me of another Irish public figure, John Waters (no, not that one ?) Back in the ’80s, Waters was a firebrand young journalist excoriating the conservative nature of Irish society & the undue influence of the Catholic Church on it. Then in the 90s, he abruptly flipped, started espousing MRA talking points (likely as a result of his partner, the singer Sinéad O’Connor, being awarded custody of their child after their relationship broke up), and hanging out with paleo-Catholic groups like the Iona Institute. His most recent wheeze was a High Court case with another journalist-turned-conspiracy-monger, Gemma O’Doherty, questioning the constitutionality of the COVID-19 lockdown measures, which was thrown out by the Court in no uncertain terms:
(Nelson voice) Ha ha!
A glimpse of Glinner’s future, perhaps?
David introduces the quote from Graham:
So, uh, this can be difficult to parse. Let’s run this through GoogleTranslate, shall we?
After all, what does “acting like Nazis” mean, anyway?
@Crip Dyke
It think “acting like Nazi’s” is just double speak for “actually being Nazi’s and claiming to do it ‘ironically’ for the lulz but secretly not being ironic at all”.
In my book it’s the same logic as saying that “I’m fucking a Chicken Ironically”. Aside from being the sort of claim I wouldn’t buy for a long retired Canadian Penny for; it doesn’t matter if your doing it “ironically” or not. Even if you say that your “fucking a chicken ironically”: you still fucked a chicken.
Graphic allegory I know, but Nazi apologist excuses and bs is a real gear grinder for me.
@Naglfar
Okay, iguve. Wtf is on his androgynous avatar’s cheek. A booger? A bandaid? A bizarrely stylized pipe?
@Demonhype
I’m not sure myself. A very large mole?
When he changed it he didn’t really say much about it other than that there was an option to add pigtails (he’s a bit obsessed with pigtails) and that he could have said his pronouns were she/her.
It’s almost certainly a bandage. He’s wearing it for “charm points”, a superficial and often feigned flaw which draws attention and makes one seem vulnerable. Other charm points include a medical eyepatch, a slight limp, stumbling, stuttering, cutesy verbal tics, a pacifier worn around the neck, a small stuffed animal one takes everywhere, a chronic cowlick (“ahoge”), a crooked incisor tooth (“yaeba”, there are Japanese people who get cosmetic surgery to have a yaeba on purpose), and so on. Usually it’s a “girly” thing, but not always.
Sunk cost perfectly explains Glinner, thanks mammotheers. In fact, it’s really the only thing that does.
Also, I tried watching those clips that @Naglfar linked to and I just cannot. It’s literally, physically, painful. I made it to one minute on that Cambridge spy one…
@Snowberry
Ah. That makes more sense. Thanks for the clarification.
@Mish:
Yeah, I’m sure you’re right … at the very least in significant part.
Unfortunately, Graham is now back on Twitter. I thought he was refusing to delete the tweets in protest, but it appears somehow he’s gotten back on. Hopefully soon he gets himself permanently banned, but seeing how Twitter tolerates bigots I’m not holding my breath.
After Linehan returned to twitter, Shaun brutally murdered him:
https://twitter.com/shaun_vids/status/1261724298353487872
I wish we could embed tweets here.
Between this, and the recent allegations within the Brit GC community, it feels like a major fracturing is going on. It might snap some people out of the militancy of the GC mindset, but some are definitely pushing out further to the right. I can totally see Linehan going full MGTOW once the TERFs finally punt him. It’s just a matter of which horrid right wing subculture will have him.
Could well end up with the white nationalists, given the intersection of transphobia and white supremacy in Brit TERFdom. Maybe we’ll see his byline on Breitbart UK down the track. Nothing would surprise me, really.
The funniest thing about all this is that “feminist” Graham Linehan is apparently ignoring the fact that GamerGate has always been, first and foremost, an anti-feminist group. The mere fact that they embraced Jack Thompson when he went after Anita Sarkeesian is proof positive that they will even sell out the very act of gaming in order to own the feminists. If Linehan wants in the club, he will need to disavow feminism and frankly I think he’s just about ready to do that.