At the start of GamerGate in September 2014, a chap called Max Read who was an editor at Gawker wrote an editorial piece declaring war on gamers. He hoped to make the term a dirty word. When Intel pulled their ads as a result of his editorial insanity he called them a few names;
“… So let’s say it now: Intel is run by craven idiots. It employs pusillanimous morons. It lacks integrity. It folded to misogynists and bigots who objected to a woman who had done nothing more than write a piece claiming a place in the world of video games. And even when confronted with its own thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, it could not properly right its wrongs …”
Oh dear.
It’s taken a while for his hubris to catch up with him, but dear Max has been fired, sorry! sorry!, I mean ‘resigned.’ And the more mainstream sites are starting to catch on that maybe, just maybe, these GamerGate people might be on to something:
“… When a friend, Beth Haper, first alerted me to the cultural significance of #GamerGate, I was skeptical. Really? A bunch of gamers were going to expose the bias and corruption of the media? This seemed improbable, but the fact that #GamerGate was arrayed against feminists drew my interest because, of course, I was working on a book (Sex Trouble, $11.69 in paperback, $1.99 on Kindle) about radical feminism’s War on Human Nature. Let us stipulate that #GamerGate is not “political” in the usual Left/Right Democrat/Republican way that Americans typically think about politics. Nevertheless, as fate would have it, the exposure of the Zoe Quinn/Nathan Grayson connection made gamers aware how unscrupulous women could exploit feminist politics and how unprincipled journalists were willing to assist this tawdry little racket. (See “The #GamerGate vs. Gawker War.”)…”
That quote is from a piece over at the other mccain, and a damn fine piece it is too. Have a read of it and rejoice that things are slowly turning around. Although if you’re not rejoicing, then I suppose you need to start being a little worried. Or afraid.
In my post in June on the boycott of Tor Books, a reader posed me this question:
“… I’m concerned that your boycott of TOR is just setting you up for further disappointment. It solves one problem, but what happens tomorrow, when an employee of some other publisher targets you for a blast of hyperbole? Instead of dealing with an ever-growing blacklist, why not come up with a whitelist of publishers who can guarantee that they’ll never expose you to anything that will offend you?…”
There are a few misconceptions here, and whether they are deliberate or not it is in my interest to clarify a few points. Firstly, there is what I call a classic misdirection when he states, “… why not come up with a whitelist of publishers who can guarantee that they’ll never expose you to anything that will offend you? …”
Also known as a strawman argument, this is an obtuse attempt to falsify the position that I originally intended. It is also amusing, in that the misdirection is actually a classic position of the new young American left. Trigger warnings anyone? But to clarify, the boycott of Tor is not to protect our sensitive feelings from happening across anything that might cause us offense, (we’ll leave that up to the SJWs). No, the boycott is because we don’t want to give money any more to people who publicly state that they hate us. This has been a tactic of the left for many years, and it has worked for them. The reason that conservatives haven’t employed it thus far is because it makes us feel icky. But desperate times call for desperate measures and it is time to take a stand.
Which leads me on to the remainder of his question, what do we hope to achieve. Sure, he says, you may win this little battle but someone else will just come along tomorrow and upset you. What, you mean someone like Ellen Pao?
Drooling idiots like Damion Schubert have been declaring GamerGate dead for quite some time now. They still don’t realise what GamerGate actually is. It is the true line that has been drawn in the sand when a whole bunch of us realised that we didn’t have to put up with the SJWs shit anymore. Everything else flows from that moment in time last September. And this isn’t just a fight back. It is a gathering of a tribe of like-minded people who are happy to stand up and fight for what we believe in.
The Noisy Rogue 