Looking back through GG history (as well as I can, since it seems Deepfreeze is never going to get fixed...), it's curious how long we tried to affirm a moral high ground when it was clear the lying press were content to paint whatever picture they wanted. Didn't matter how many women, coloreds, or colored women of color tweeted "#NotYourShield", GamerGate was only ever about "angry white male rage". Honey Badgers and Sad Puppies fell on deaf ears and only made the press hate us more for pointing out their hypocrisy. We teamed up with "good fags" and "good feminists" like Milo and CHS and the only thing it ever achieved was excommunicate them from their in-groups before they eventually dumped us further down the line.
It also didn't help that the GG movement was being strangled for years thanks to control of the 8chan board by Acid Man following Niko's capitulation to the Ayy Team. Cole Lamberson's obsession with "muh pr" tanked the entire movement and stalled genuine discoveries such as Seattle4Truth uncovering the money trail between the Literal Whos and big organizations like Microsoft, even if he went totally insane in the end and committed matricide.
What happened over the next decade was virtually an entire generation becoming politically active in a way that hasn't happened since the Vietnam War. Two US elections won, Pizzagate exposed to the world, trannies banned from sports, populism movements sprouting up all over the world, and it was all because we only ever wanted to play video games and be left in peace.
So I ask you - if we had our 2025 mindset back in 2014, would you have skipped the #NotYourShield part of our movement entirely and just got straight to shutting out troons, fags and general SJWs? If not, why?
Yes, the moral high ground is useless and gave us nothing. It’s a trick used to fuck with people against the establishment. Push the idea that this is what’s consider the good way to protest and argue, while your side ignores that and keeps low blowing.
But at least taking the moral high ground got us all of our wonderful rules that keep this forum from being banned from reddit.
Yes, absolutely. You don't move the window without pulling the cord. And you don't gain ground in a war by cozying up to the enemy.
Trump gained the momentum and following he has because he pushed the envelope instead of toeing the line. Because he is crass, lowbrow and doesn't pretend to give a crap about the opinions of weirdos.
For Christ's sakes, some of the whackadoodles back from the reddit days celebrated GG being investigated by the goddamn FBI, just because nothing came of it. It wasn't a gross abuse of power by Obama in their eyes, it was vindication. An appeal to authority, licking the boots of the enemy.
It was pathetic. Thank God the right actually woke up and smelled the coffee.
Absolutely not.
A huge, and I mean massive, chunk of GG's success was pointing out how the media was lying. That's why it was compelling, because we weren't a Hate Group™.
If we'd "embraced the hate," then the media wouldn't have been lying when they called us Nazis and the worst people ever. GG would be a more "pure" but much, much smaller fringe movement that was quickly forgotten, and accomplished nothing.
GG also would have lost a lot of people, who would still be left-leaning, or even get sucked down the absurd leftist "pipelines" and be trannies and shit. GG being more milquetoast, and not being a hate group, likely literally saved lives.
It also, despite it being a meme, may have been a deciding factor in the 2016 election, and going forward. All the "GG created Trump" and "we're in a different timeline" memes have some Truth to them. A hateful GG would have had much less impact, Trump may have lost, and we may have already been in WW3.
I'm not even kidding.
GG woke people up, including more normie-adjacent people. Hate groups largely don't do that.
Eh, I'd call pretty much the entire spectrum of wokeism a "hate group", or at least an ideology completely derived from envy and hate, and it's been pretty successful.
Wokeness didn't begin that way either. It started with "political correctness" (it started even earlier than that, but even the PC movement serves the point) which may have been diametrically opposed to proper morality, but it was mild, milktoast, and easily absorbed by the populace at large.
All movements must begin this way, no major movement ever started from it's extreme point. On both sides they must begin with mild "tolerable" grievance, or else they simply fail to build any velocity.
Communism has made science out of this and "the long march" has been happening everywhere on earth for a century. The opposition to communism is ultimately reactionary, but it doesn't just jump up one day in complete opposition, it builds grievance over time.
Going to disagree here.
Maybe they wrapped up their envy and resentment in "is it so difficult to just be nice?" rhetoric, but the progenitors of this stuff made absolutely no pretenses about their motivations. They always hated normal, successful people.
There were no secret GG organizer masterminds conspiring to kick the women and blacks out of the video game industry. In fact, the reason that the woke assholes made these accusations is because of projection because that was what they wanted to do: kick white/Asian men out of the industry.
If you call turning the goose that lays golden eggs into an entree "successful" then maybe I could agree with you, but they're basically the perfect example of how, even with all of the power in the world, their hateful ideology is literally incapable of producing a functional society.
This is such a huge cope it actually made me chuckle.
The media was lying long before GG. People have been ringing that bell for 80 years. But it wasn't hip back then.
And GG was one of the hurdles that helped make exposing them hip. The very fact leftists still seethe about it to this day should illustrate that.
GG was important as it was, because it happened on the internet. Yes, the media lied for decades before that, and I never said otherwise. GG was important because it was so milquetoast and unimportant. It was about video games. It wouldn't have had the same impact if it had just been a hate group.
I'm not sure how my stance is "cope," exactly. It's a pretty accepted position, that one of GG's biggest and primary wins was exposing the media and opening normie-adjacent eyes to their lies. The legacy media lost a lot of credibility after they went after gamers. They wouldn't have lost that credibility if the people they'd been going after actually had been Nazis.
GG needed to happen just as it did.
My point is that it didn't expose shit that wasn't known for centuries by people who paid attention, GG is number 4,372 on the list of examples of milquetoast political movements that "discovered" human nature again.
It didnt "need" to happen at all, it already did during the Nixon years, and the people who knew it got shouted down and disenfranchised just like they will today, until somebody with guts takes the first shot.
Always been that way.
The road to Fort Sumter runs through Bleeding Kansas.
We had to be reasonable to illustrate that they were the ones who weren't.
Correct.
A bunch of people are missing the point. GG had an impact exactly because we weren't what the lying media said we were. If the media had been telling the truth, we would have lost all power, and been quickly forgotten.
Probably not. I've already understood for a long time that the problem is the majority of the population have fully embraced some misconceptions and delusions that have been fed to them for years, and on a practical political level we need numbers to succeed.
People generally don't like extreme, sudden cultural changes, most resist it instinctively. But most of the people who let themselves be brainwashed into the harmful delusions we've been fighting against have no strong internal beliefs and are very susceptible to a slow ratcheting up of constant exposure to an idea that doesn't trigger their culture shock response. That's why they kept riding the slow slippery slope all the way to insanity in the first place.
So for me it's been years long guerilla warfare against globalist+state propaganda and the softly softly red-pilling approach may have been the best chance we ever had of winning anyway. I don't know if we could have red pilled the gormless masses any faster without triggering their defensiveness and pearl clutching, and the propagandists could have (and probably did) send in both mollifying "moderates" and false flag extremists to fragment the pushback into fighting each other instead. But the propaganda couldn't do anything to innoculate people against uncompromising, slow-marching cultural pressure that quietly insisted on taking just one step more than last time without undermining all their own brainwashing efforts too. I'm just thankful that enough people with an actual internal moral compass never compromised their position even if they had to keep their heads down for years to get to this point.
I mostly agree with this and I have evidence to support that.
Back in the KotakuInAction days, there was a small contingent of posters that was very insistent that SJW activities were actually all intended to oppress white people. They were completely right, of course, but they gained no traction as most people dismissed them as kooks. "Anti-racist is code for anti-white" is what they posted most of the time.
"But that's internal gamergate politics, what if all of gamergate advocated that?" You'd get the same response on a grander scale. Most people didn't even have the cultural vocabulary to comprehend what they were saying, and frankly they didn't do a great job of explaining because the very act of explaining is definitionally a softer, diplomatic approach, and radicals are not inclined to do that.
The part of "slow redpilling" that I don't agree with is telling white lies about your beliefs for the sake of optics. THAT will slow you down. You should never lie about your beliefs. It's largely an adaptation to cope with the influence of women, and we would be living in a much better world if our politicians shoved those concerns aside. Exhibit A, Trump.
Women will destroy civilization if left unchecked, but good luck getting anyone to believe that back when the entire movement was sincerely advocating "ethics in game journalism" (about as naive as advocating for ice cream that doesn't melt).
Arguing by proxy and/or accepting false premises are short term solutions that result in long term defeats.
KIA literally begged for women talking heads to notice them senpai almost daily, and would cream themselves if one (or a PoC) gave them the time of day.
It was the same Identity Politics all the Left played, that NotYourShield was meant to call out, and its why by the time KIA2 was born they were all sucking off their "based tranny" the Narwhal.
The people talking about how everything was just White genocide seemed so crazy, now that’s the dominant opinion.
It isn't your movement. You merely adopted the cringe. I was born in the cringe, moulded by it. I didn't see based until I was already a myn, and by then, it was only memes to me.
The fact you're needing a wayback machine... Are you some kid? Nothing wrong with new youth involvement, just stressing that those who went through it all definitely did their best. EVERYONE hated GG. We got banned from fucking 4chan. Hate groups dedicated to harassing us were sponsored and paid for by all the major tech and social media companies.
And yes, people DID cheer that the FBI found nothing interesting. Because the dead gamers were the king's bootlickers? No, but because we were the jesters. We were a joke. Gamergate did everything wrong, from wiping out the dinosaurs to moving the stairs muffin. It was the boogeyman. And so it appearing so innocent, so milquetoast, so mild, that an FBI that was financially incentivized to find ANYTHING wrong, found NOTHING... was a damning indictment of the paid critics.
The jesters, the meme mages, the Shadilay-singers... They were everywhere, and they were joking about the state of society, the REAL state of society... And even the alphabet agencies said "yeah, that's all legit". We're in a world where truckers get their bank accounts frozen under terrorist financing for honking a horn, where a security guard opening a door for people who walk through and within the velvet ropes of a toured building means those 70 year olds are hardened insurrectionists.
The friendliness gave legitimacy to the concerns. And it painted the haters as malicious agents.
You don't build a house without building a foundation. Without GG's foundation, the more effective efforts wouldn't have that foundation to stand upon.
I chalk GG up to "leftist fatigue" in all its many forms. Preachy race/gender politics don't make good entertainment, especially when we're forced to listen to it to go to school or work a job. Areas in our life where we're all but forced to genuflect to the woke mindset to not derail our job or academic goals. Not to mention how one-sided it is as they excuse their own side for the same shit they lecture you about. So after a day of all that shit, we have our escapes and that's the last place you want the same lectures/whining to show up.
In my personal case, I used to be a TV zombie as a kid. Then it got too preachy and annoying (and full of double standards) to the point I gave up most normie TV. Then movies followed suit (especially genres traditionally geared towards guys). So I retreated to video games. Then they came for the vidya...
And when a blatant corruption was called out, every corporate/establishment tentacle came out and circled wagons to maintain THE MESSAGE (poor oppressed wymyn bullied by male gamers). It was shameless and obvious and woke up A LOT of people on the fence.
Broadly that's the outline of it all. KIA original had such a wide net that actual commies were involved. It truly was just about ethics in games journalism.
But that's the cover, you start asking questions about the man behind the curtain and you end up down the rabbit hole, or you don't, and you become a Dave rubin fan, and think Candace Owen's is smart.
But if you DO ask, that's good, but there's one thing to remember.
Some of us were already down here.
I don't know what more people think GG could have achieved that it didn't. GG successfully turned gaming into a battleground by establishing what is and isn't wanted within the gaming sphere. Every games blog, talking head or forum which went against the GG line is either gone or tainted. But the battle can't actually be won from inside gaming alone, since we know it to be much bigger, which GG also left people in no doubt about. I don't see how you divorce GG and the organic nature of it from the bigger political swings since - our enemies certainly don't, and it might be the only thing they're correct about.
Going more extreme from the start would have one possible benefit, in influencing normies and devs into realising that racism/sexism/etc isn't worth getting worked up about, and that creative freedom should remain king. This is - funnily enough - an optics argument. It's influence by appearances. It has all the problems of the optics arguments on the other side, which is that they don't really matter in the face of government power and blackrock. Nobody is organically deciding to insert genderqueer rubbish in their games any more, only selected ideologues and mercenaries are. That's not to mention that the most hardline arguments in politics today are not necessarily friendly to creative freedom at all or even gaming itself; should gamers have 'risen up' by becoming actually politically active, ditching their childish gaming hobby, and denouncing all 'degenerate content'? So tranny mercs march into gaming even easier? Doesn't look like a win to me.
Their entire arguments from the start are based on nothings, allegations and feelings.
The same people who are culturally sensitive to everyone... wholesale appropriated, then bought and sold gamer culture, and wanted it changed because it didn't suit their constantly evolving notions of what good and bad is, with the only permanent positions of their argument being they are right and you are wrong.
They talk one thing and do exactly what they say not to do, as if they write about the things they're doing hoping to subvert their burnt out blackened little conscience into projecting all the anger and frustration about a life of fulfilment being upended by being told "I just want to be left alone to play my video games, go away."
Then they take your constructive criticism and run with their gimme gimme hands out to media places ran by friends, to rake in speaking fees, while gleefully throwing cancel culture all over you for daring to point out they are walking hypocrites that care only about themselves and never the things they claim to champion.
All they want is the message out there until that's 'just the way it is' so that someone else can pick up the mantle of being oppressed by everything when their lives have never felt oppression.
They are walking dichotomies of carefully constructed lies that contradict each other on a moment to moment basis. But just as long as you're still angry and still frustrated about not having control of everything, you gotta stand and fight those nasty gamers, those garbage people. The people that didn't want this fight thrust on them. The ones that wanted to be left alone. You wanted them to get political, well, they did. And you shrieked even more. You didn't expect them to just conform to your whims because you pissed and moaned did you?
Which reminds me, every time we speak up, another douchebag who wants to burn gaming to the ground gets into a place they have no business being, and another game turns to shit.
If someone had told little me in the mid 80s that in twenty years, it wouldn't be the right's moral panic that ruins games, but the left's moral crusading that they know better than you about what you want that would ruin games, I'd have told you I just want to be left alone to play my video games, go away.
TL;DR: Bottom line is, the moral high ground is useless when the other side has no morals to grandstand on.
GG was never about these people. it wasn't even about women.
It was always about the hypocrisy of the press, as well as the hyper-leftist takeover of the hobby. the "you just hate women" angle was purely fabricated by the press, and it worked for a short time.
however, I contend you would not have gotten the populist uprising we have today if it wasn't for the press overplaying their hands 10 years ago. it alerted many people, including myself, to the fact that the press is bullshit, and this is the most important red pill.
once they learn the press is bullshit, everything else falls into place.
If you assume the same growth, then yes. But it is naive to assume the same growth. Look into Commander George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi party. Read a source from his own lips. There is a solid 1966 playboy interview with him. He believed in agitation and hate as a shock and awe tactic for visibility. It hardly worked for conversion (attention-> power). It was very easy for jews to chorale public thought on it and maintain their gates.
Today, the way it has gone lately is a natural, communal phenomenon. We are growing in more ways than 1 and we now reflect public opinion rather than attempting to interject external rationale into it.
There is a "best of all possible worlds" motif to what I'm trying to express. The world, society, us, it's all a big computer, that is calculating life.
You need to remember that the whole reason GG stuck while so many other movements failed was because it was a lot of Lefties playing within Leftie rules, making it harder to fully dismiss. Its why Reddit had to make so many rules around KIA instead of just banning it outright.
I hate it, and most of those Lefties did cripple our ability to accomplish anything by still being retarded Lefties. But we were never going to make a movement on pure extreme Right ideas that got off the ground.
Surely a bunch of anti-Left kinda, but still very liberal women are going to help our movement succeed! Women always are in it for the principle and absolutely won't break down like women when people do things they don't like! And it surely won't just devolve into them begging for money over and over with no tangible effect.
Supporting them was always retarded, and was built entirely on Karen Straughn's reputation from years prior in the MRA circles. Which was long gone by the time of KIA and she was just another pathetic single mom begging for scraps of attention.
I literally was saying this back in 2014, and was shouted down constantly about optics, being a racist/sexist, and threatened to be banned. Its why I resent the "former Lefties" so much, because it was obvious even back then.
Movement to do what? I doubt many people here let alone back on reddit would even agree on what exactly we're trying to accomplish.
And not a single "no" in sight. Despite the last 8 years of anger simply making the left look more and more unhinged.
A lot of people here right now would consider it too soft and liberal if every post didn't say "the jews did it, also commies, kill them" at least once.
A lot of people here also think you are simp for being married.
Here's the problem.
If you don't team up with people with disparate goals, you don't get enough people to get what you want done.
GG wouldn't have started if the "good fags" or "good feminists" weren't joined up with the rest of us. I don't like it either - but the only way you can push shit is if you convert/convince a bunch of people of your side. We'd unfortunately would be outnumbered, so perhaps we would stay cohesive as a movement, but wouldn't have had much of an impact because there would be way fewer people than us.
A lot of us got into it not realizing who the bigger enemies were. I know for a bunch of you it's the Jews, for all of us it's the far left idpol faggots, but the fact there was a part of the movement that JUST wanted to narrowly focus on "ethics in games journalism" when they failed to realize you will get no ethical journalism if they're ideologically motivated is why it failed. Now the disease that is infecting games journalism has spread everywhere. ALL journalism is as poisoned and politically dismissive as games journalism is.
Winning while losing... https://img.gvid.tv/i/cfeKZLGP.png
Choosing to embrace a side (hate) turns one against the other (love) and vice versa. Choice can only exist in-between side, hence within balance. Others suggest sides to tempt ones choice to imbalance itself.
Counterpoint.
Counterpoint 2.
The only tactic that could be used against people pretending to be victims -- who had all the time in the world to fabricate as many self-addressed death threats as they could -- was to convincingly show we weren't hateful. As they say, cameras show reasonable people being reasonable and unreasonable people being unreasonable.
It's a tactic that can't win, of course. It's purely defensive. But you defend to muster support and hopefully strike back.
Arguably, we haven't really become effective at attacking. I don't think that we're stuck in a defensive profile, I just think a loose organization without leaders simply can't organize a leading attack. It's the nature of it. It's easier to subvert than to kick out subversives once they've passed through the gate, and feminist lunatics have the upper hand in that respect.
Luckily, our enemies are ridiculous. The failure of woke gaming is laid bare for everyone to see. People are in the "stepping backwards with disgust on their face" stage of dealing with tranny bullshit.
The moral high ground works on people who are susceptible to morality based attacks.
The issue is that people didn't understand that Communists are at war with you 100% and are not interested in anything but your rape and murder, publicly.
"Embrace the hate" is stupid and does not work because it literally only does one thing: make you say, "yes, I am the villain that the Left describe me as".
The correct response is basically to be block-headed. "I don't give a shit what you say, am not asking for your friendship, I'm not asking for your tolerance, and I offer you nothing. There are no terms. ESAD. You are nothing of value. Now, I'm going to do something of merit while you can sit here and kill yourself."
This is one of the most Chinese posts I've ever seen, and any of you who are actually real people agreeing with it are WAY too stupid to ever accomplish anything, and frankly you aren't safe online.