Shit man, next year we're gonna be a decade old. Its also wild that you can trace the line of dominoes from us to the exposure of all the current day insanity, one event and regime-double-down at a time.
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Wait, we're 9? RUN! THE LEFTISTS ARE TRYING TO 'SEXUALLY LIBERATE' US!
It really is funny how just attacking gamers seems to have removed the rose-tinted glasses from many right in time for 2016, who would have thought that calling all gamers scum for liking attractive female characters would end up in the slow ruination of the left's plans.
Why'd you make me do this? I just wanted to play vidya
And the best is yet to come, despite what the doomers here think.
GG was crazy. I lost friends over simply saying there might be some validity to the complaints. I wasn't even waving a GG flag or anything, simply saying maybe some journos were scum, not all accusations of "sexism" made sense, GG was being smeared, and I didn't appreciate cultural invaders. Basically, "It's Okay to be a Gamer."
Same thing about 2016, actually. Even without waving a Trump flag, I lost relationships with friends and family for saying evil warmongering Hillary was an evil warmonger.
It's amazing how they managed to fracture and divide everything so badly, where even opinions that should be so non-controversial, like politicians and journalists are self-serving jackasses who are tearing apart the fabric of society, suddenly became verboten Wrongthink.
Honestly, one of things I find most frustrating about leftists and the left; how they turn on a dime with no regard for history, give no shits about hypocrisy, and the true NPCs don't even remember what they believed last fucking week. Before any 'mah both sides,' yes, the right does this too, but not to anywhere near the same degree. Leftists are masters of historical blindness and quickly changing values to fit their newly downloaded ideology.
The left used to agree with me that politicians were largely scum, journalists served the regime, war was generally bad, (really) treating people equally was good, censorship was bad but free speech was good, and liberty was a good ideal. But overnight, believing in those "liberal" ideals (not exclusively liberal, but ideals liberals claimed to agree with) made you Far™ Right™.
I'd stopped watching TV in about 2008 and stopped following politics around that same time. So I was basically stuck on pre-Obama shitlib politics. The bits and pieces of current events I picked up through osmosis were all filtered through that lens.
In 2012 I was sitting in a restaurant on election night watching people toast Obama somewhat confused why a bunch of "liberals" were celebrating a guy who assassinated American citizens.
Then during Donglegate, Elevatorgate, and then GG I kept finding myself wondering (and sometimes outright asking) why my friends kept supporting such obviously stupid people.
"Why are you trusting what a 'journalist' says?"
"Why was this one rude thing Richard Dawkins said among thousands of rude things he's said actually bad?"
"Why are you trying to define some set of things that all 'good' atheists ought to believe in? I thought the whole point of atheism was finding your own path"
"Why aren't you allowed to make a private joke to a colleague at a conference? And since when are you against 'offensive' jokes?"
"Why are you of all people crucifying a nerd for awkwardly asking a girl out?"
I once heard someone describe this side of things as "most people here aren't conservative or right-wing. They're liberal nerds who expected the system to play by its stated rules and were surprised to learn it didn't."
That reminds me...remember Shirtgate? That poor guy got fucking roasted, for no reason.
The shirt, made by one of his friends, who is a woman.
Guy had just landed a probe on a comet or something but the focus was "Look at how he's dressed" 🙄.
Relevant.
I'd almost forgotten that one. Though I don't remember there being much controversy about it among my friends at the time.
I thought Trump was an insane lunatic and a racist birther, and that his supporters were lowlife, racist inbred hicks. Basically, the standard European opinion when you don't know anything about America and think that you actually get an accurate picture of the country by reading the New York Times.
But whenever I voiced any opinion that strayed even mildly from media orthodoxy, Hillary supporters would level the most vile insults at me for only agreeing with them 95%, while pro-Trump would say things like "I understand that you don't support Trump, but it's at least good that you're thinking for yourself". I started thinking that just maybe these people aren't the bad guys I had been told, and that these other people might be possessed by the demon called the media.
Things have gotten so bad that I can't help but laugh at my earlier thoughts about Trump and his supporters, which even if true, aren't nearly as bad as the situation now.
Probably because the right has no power anywhere. But yeah, 'muh both sides' does not apply because we're dealing with the world as it is, and the problems we find here, and not with the problems of world of the imagination where leprechauns rule and are oppressing us poor humans.
Isn't it a classic? Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Unless you're a far leftist, in which case you believe things practically as absurd as that, without questioning the insanity in the slightest. Again, part of the big problem with the ideology; they actively refuse to see the world as it is, instead focusing on fictional utopianism.
I think we overestimate the role of ideology and underestimate that of conformity. The average far-leftist doesn't believe what he does because of some coherent (or even incoherent) ideology, but because he simply believes what he's told to believe, what all his friends believe, what the media tells him, what his teachers told him.
It might also be more pleasant to believe that. The CIA are the good guys, America is doing good around the world, you have the truth imparted to you by the media, and the only problem is that there are these Trumpians who refuse these obvious solutions.
Belief in solutions rather than trade-offs, described in detail by Thomas Sowell, is a main problem here - and not just with the left. Almost everything is a trade-off. Everything that you believe 'will make the world better' will also make it worse in some other area, just almost never to the same extent.
Leftists are post modernist and neo Marxist. They have no fixed principles. Hypocrisy isn’t a byproduct; it’s their greatest weapon. It’s codified and systemic. Comparing that to the hypocrisy of bad actors on the right is laughable.
i lost a friend for saying i had no sympathy for that fat bitch or quinn because they were known trolls getting what they deserved.
Posted this on Reddit, thought I'd copy it here:
We just wanted to play video games.
I had to remove the announcement where the GG wikipedia article claims that GamerGate was a harassment campaign that caused the Capitol Hill riot. Just to remind you how fucking stupid this all is.
They can lie all they want, but fundamentally it was a consumer revolt against a media that was so corrupt and degenerate it was routinely not only engaging in bullshit "Access Journalism", had abandoned objectivity years ago, was (even at that time) unhealthy in it's obsession with Leftist "Social Justice" zealotry, engaged in blacklisting of dissidents and whistle-blowers, actively harassed people who were calling them out, and censoring any opposition to their unconscionable behavior ... all because Gaming Journalists had seen the writing on the wall years earlier as print media publications were falling apart, and YouTube video walkthroughs and essays were replacing the shocking incompetence, malfeasance, and shilling that Gaming Journalist reviews had been for years.
Yes, a pathological liar (who's real name isn't even Zoey Quinn) abused her boyfriend and traded sex for fluff pieces, but the incestuous and degenerate influence peddling that Silicon Valley journalists had rationalized to each other for years was far worse than the mediocre "Depression Quest" would indicate. Before they decided to turn against the behaviors of Harvey Weinstein, they were engaged in it, as you would expect from Male Feminists. And in response to being called out, they went to war against their own audience in a desperate attempt to polarize enough of their audience to hold onto the collapse profit margins that they had already had.
Since then, we have seen what failing media sites did in GamerGate, has been replicated a hundred fold by the corporate media, in every industry, in every field, in almost every western country. The most tragic thing about GamerGate is what was once considered unethical, taboo, reprehensible, and sometimes even criminal; has now been normalized among the managerial class. How else can you explain living through the moral panics, race riots, tyrannical edicts, and fear mongering you have lived through these past 9 years?
Our enemies see GamerGate everywhere, because they have made it everywhere. They took a losing tactic, and replicated it wherever they could, for no discernable reason. We have done nothing but demand a simple ethical standard which the media claimed to uphold in the first place. We were not engaged in an Alinsky-style tactic of radicalism, or a Gramscian war of position. We just believed them. We believed that journalists believed in their own standards, and that was our worst mistake. And for that mistake, we were directly attacked for not acquiescing to corruption, criminality, and condemnable behavior. We compounded that mistake by making an appeal to standards we never knew were never enforced. We were accused by the media, of things the media already did normally, and were angry that someone had told them to stop. Even the term GamerGate is not a reference to gamers, but a reference to a media blitz that gaming journalists had unleashed against their own audience, on this very day, 9 long years ago.
We once believed that journalists spoke truth to power, or at least should. We learned the hard way that only we can speak truth to power, and when you do, power takes it very personally.
None the less, we remember today as the begging of what has become a long war against people who are incapable of integrity, are remorseless to their victims, and sadistic to their perceived enemies. A war we didn't know was already being waged against us, and a war we never wanted. We just wanted to play video games.
But since we are in it, like "save my disaster campaign", or a dark souls boss, or that one time-trail you just can't quite master; we're in it to win it. I think it might be worth it to remember a biblical passage when fighting demons. I like Psalm 37:
Anyways, what games are you playing today? Any invites you'd like to send out?
If ''Beware : Borderline Personality Disorder'' had an illustration, it would be a Chelsea Van Valkenburg holding hands with Amber Heard.
Valkenburg also later pushed Alec Holowka to suicide by falsely accusing him of comically-atrocious sex crimes... Such as shoving his hand in her vagina to puppet her around the appartment.
An appartment he was allegedly forcing her to stay in. The usual journos Listened and Believed, Alec was kicked out of his own company, killed himself, his Feminist sister threw his corpse under the bus.
The problem was, Quinn, being terminally online and still a socialite of ''the scene'', was very-much active on Twitter during all the time of the alleged extreme abuse, leaving evidence that contradicted her new fiction piece all over the place.
Alot of Listeners and Believers then quietly dropped her because they didn't want to be the next Alec.
Pretty much.
Okay, but, that is really funny.
The sister really bothers me. I can only hope she and her brother didn’t get along. In fact hated each other, and there was no reason he should have expected her support. Otherwise she betrayed him for internet likes, and certainly prompted his suicide. There’d be no place in hell bad enough for her.
That's a fucking extreme generalization.
You could make the same argument toward men if you cherry pick too.
Mr. "Sure my daughter was murdered but at least we have tacos and food trucks" comes to mind.
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I actually think this was intended to be a joke, but it clearly didn't come across this way. In fact, it may be an old boomer anachronism.
Why exactly? Admins?
Well, it's ridiculous that Wikipedia is claiming this (if it is), but it's not ridiculous to point out that Wikipedia is doing that. So I wonder what the problem there was.
Because Reddit only supports 2 announcements at a time.
I just wanted to move stair muffins.
This is the part that blows my mind. Gamergate won. All of our agreed-on targets are now flaming dumpster fires, with many of them, like Gawker, VICE, and Buzzfeed News, having declared literal bankruptcy. Games journalism is widely acknowledged as totally dead, with YouTubers taking over as credible reviewers -- and mainstream journalism isn't far behind.
Yet they just keep doing it. For over nine years now, they've been running the same losing play. Why? In my view, I think part of it is that they bought their own bullshit. That is, they were so convinced that everybody rejected Gamergate because all they saw were articles rejecting Gamergate. Wikipedia even calls it a harassment campaign, so checkmate
atheists.The other part is that I don't think they have anything else. They have to keep ramming some tactic, any tactic, down everyone's throats or they will just lose. But they don't have any thought leaders left. Thinking gets you purged. So they're stuck with the same old safe orthodoxy, and have no other option but to double down over and over again -- no matter how much they lose.
Yes, our targets are flaming dumpster fires, but not necessarily from us.
And to be clear, our goal wasn't to destroy gaming journalism. It was to fix it. They chose death, rather than reform. All of them.
That's what worries me about the Leftist hysteria behind GamerGate expanding everywhere.
I would quibble with this slightly. They didn't think they were choosing death. They chose to blow us off and call us powerless incels who everyone should ignore because they were the future. They had no idea that it would lead to the end of their entire industry. Kind of like Bud Light or Target (while their industries aren't totally destroyed, they had the same attitude towards their customers as Gawker did). Now, not only is it mainstream to believe that all journalists are untrustworthy liars, it's mainstream to believe that a cabal of wealthy elites is forcing this stuff -- and we were all rewarded with a normal, non-gay June this year. Blackrock and Vanguard have both announced they are stepping away from ESG (they're almost certainly going to rebrand it, but that's another story). No, we didn't set out to destroy gaming journalism, but when your opponent refuses to surrender, the only option is to finish the fight. We did.
Hillary defeated, Gawker defeated, mask mandates and mandatory vax defeated (with the help of a massive Canadian trucker protest), Bud Light defeated, the teacher banning Gadsden flags defeated.
As I've said before, exposing another health bar does not mean you're losing.
I get all that. What I'm saying is that they could have chosen reform, but reform would have led to them making a voluntary loss of power. Instead they chose to grip tighter onto power as their industry burned around them, and continues to.
What country do you live in? I was rewarded with gay-juneteenth.
Then they will be deposed from the ashes, with nothing left to rule. Even Blackrock and Vanguard, as I said, are choosing to (at least pretend to) back off at this point.
The US had a nice, normal June with the corporations cowed into compliance.
Oh god. This shit never ends.
I just want to play video games.
I remember abstaining from "the vote" on Half because as a 2017 newfag I didn't think I'd been there long enough to have an official opinion. I don't know whether to feel happy or sad I've been posing here that long.
Still when it was all going down I remember lurking here and being surprised that all my IRL friends (who themselves were gamers) were bashing a bunch of gamers and defending a bunch of stupid journalists. One of many similarly confusing moments I was having at the time.
My IRL reaction to the event was: "Why is there a media blitz against the audience? What the fuck is happening?"
Yeah the "gamers are dead" thing said by games "journalists" (who I still thought were themselves hardcore gamers like they were back when I still read gaming mags) was also very confusing. "What do you mean 'gamers are dead'? Aren't you guys gamers yourselves?"
There were a bunch that clearly were. I think Jeff Gherstman is a prime example of somebody that spent his whole life inside the gaming industry, and saw all the best and worst parts of it while developing an ironic and just barely edgy sense of humor that softened the blow of how shit the industry was, while clearly still being quite good with basically all games without ever actually being a pro at anything.
GamerGate corrupted a bunch of people who came after his generation of industry pros. Patrick Klepic was deep in the SJ nonsense, the Quinnspiracy, and attempts at Blacklisting. Meanwhile, Gherstman (despite having been fired for not corrupting his standards over his "average" scoring of Kane & Lynch 2), tried to stay entirely out of the fray. Klepic was newer in the industry, and Gherstman had been around for so long I think I remember seeing a video of him demonstrating the Dreamcast on "Regis & Kathy Lee"
But the people who came after Klepic? Jesus Christ, these people seemed to have never even been involved in play-testing, or even just playing games occasionally. At best, people like Anita tried to grift (I remember her picture with a pile of games that included fucking Bulletstorm) It's important to remember sometimes that the infamous Cuphead tutorial video came years after GamerGate.
I don't know how many believe it but imo without gamergate we wouldn't have had Trump and without Trump we wouldn't have the one sliver of hope there is now for saving western civilization.
James lindsay may be lib but he is right in that Trump made the the gay commies panic and spring their trap before we were fully contained. That disruption is what helped raise the public consciousness of at least a suspicion of what was really going on. Because the enemies tightened their grip too fast a few systems slipped through their fingers, like Elon recognizing the threat and making the heroic decision to buy Twitter. That release of the public discourse is another handhold that we can use to pull ourselves back up the cliff.
Things will continue to get worse before they gets better. It took generations to get to where we are now and it will take generations to get out of it.
We all need to accept that it is our duty to plant trees in whose shade we will never rest.
I generally agree.
Both GG and Trump were wakeup calls, shocks to the system. With how the indoctrination works, the soft libs - the ones who just think they're "liberal" by default - often just need a jolt to make them realize the weird discrepancies and juxtapositions.
I know that's how it went for me. I grew up in a very liberal/progressive environment, Republicans were evil (I mean, sort of true for many of them at the time, and even still now, but it's still a harmful view to cut off a side completely and side with another without even making a conscious choice), progressivism was the way to go...I mean, hey, progress is good, and the like...all by default.
When even minor questioning got you in trouble, despite not being outside your own beliefs, it makes you realize you didn't know your own side at all. Wait, so we're not allowed to question anything, even if it makes no sense? Wait, you'll try to completely destroy me for saying some journalists might be bad? Despite bitching about journalists yourself?
Something relatively innocuous like GG or even Trump, can wake up the defaulters, because it makes them question both what they actually know about the "other side," and what their own side is like.
Sadly, I wonder how many soft libs are left. That's the downside, waking those people up helped solidify both the left and the right; the left kicked out those that weren't True Believers, and hardened their base massively. Proportionally, the left is now much more hardline than they were.
Still, it's a good thing overall. As you were getting at, we would have lost utterly on the slow boil, now we have a chance. As frustrating as all the forced division is, we do need to draw battle lines if we're going to fight back the cultural rot. As you say, we now have at least a sliver of hope. Maybe even more.
The problem is not regarding Republican politicians as evil, which of course they are. The problem is regarding rank-and-file Republicans (or Democrats, who are just brainwashed) as evil, or imagining that because you support Corrupt Politician A rather than Corrupt Politician B, he is somehow good or the messiah. The left has this problem of imagining that goodness consists of agreeing with whatever they are told to believe by the media.
You only realize that you are in an invisible cage when you step out enough to bump up against it.
Very true. I was mainly talking about politicians, but you're right in that Republican voters are/were viewed as evil, which is a much bigger problem, and that's what I should have focused on. Because, yeah, fuck most Republican politicians. The bigger issue was that, at the time, without questioning, I bought the narrative that The Other were indisputably the Bad Guys.
I remember there was a right wing family in my school/friend group, and the other parents badmouthed and excluded those parents. I never bullied them or anything, and I realized it was wrong, but I was too young to either do anything about it, or fully realize how disgusting it was. And, yes, there was basically only one conservative family in my immediate circle, and they were somewhat outcasts. They seemed to do well regardless, though, which isn't really that surprising. I think the more conservative ideals are - in moderation, of course - much better for raising children.
If Trump did anything, it was to alert some part of the population as to what's going on, who stopped being the proverbial frogs being boiled. And not due to anything he did, but because of the insane reaction to him. Even when I despised him, I could easily see that the news sources I trusted (yeah, yeah) were writing non-stop hitpieces on him.
I don't think GG led to Trump. I think we have protagonist syndrome if we think that. Rather, I think both have a common cause: increased lunacy led to both GG and Trump.
We simply can't keep getting away with it.
Also...we just wanted to play vidya. We'd still like to play vidya, but now we're pissed off too.
The bible was written many years after Jesus.
Who will write the Gamergate bible?
Based on the amount of time, I would say Mr Data. Star Trek the Next Generation is about 300 years in our future. We've already surpassed some of the tech from the show already.
Do you think people 300 years ago had any idea what today looked like?
The best we can do is archive and preserve knowledge.
Oh, I missed The Day Of Dead Gamers? Well, a belated "Shadilay", I suppose.
Can you believe we found a worldwide child trafficking ring that is used to keep those in power from rebelling against their satanic cabal masters from a single game review?
At my current age I view the people who are the age I was then as children.
9 years is a long time.
Now Willie Wonka, Major Tom, Ali and Leia have moved on.
Signal the final curtain call
In this atomic pageantry.
Bravismo
Hip hip hooray
For this glorious display
Minds and bodies blown away
What a radiant crescendo
Hip hip hooray
Hip hip hooray
Into mushroom cloud confetti.
I just wanted to play videogames.
On balance getting clued into things that are actually important was a net good. 🙂
I would like to formally remind you all that GamerGate was NOT the first Domino. Tumblr was the fuse and GamerGate was the explosive.
All the tranny and SJW shit was neatly contained in Tumblr and universally laughed at in that era.
To the left, the invisible hand of the free market is a vast rightwing conspiracy (only when it doesn't go their way, that is).
My woke movie that spent half its advertising budget on "memes" that insult the original target audience of the franchise failed? Must be right wing bigots and trolls that caused it!