There have been so many good posts about GamerGate and NotYourShield that have covered just about every aspect of the scandal from the social ranking (geeks and nerds who survive to adulthood rarely give two craps what the in-crowd thinks or says about them) to pointing out how the rabid so-called “social justice warriors” have ruined so much of the entertainment industry already and more. But there are two aspects that I feel have been overlooked: the first — journalism is not some noble, ethical profession filled with intelligent and educated people who want to report the truth to the world. The second is that gaming is the last form of art to stand up and shine a mirror in everyone’s face instead of just the current cultural boogie-man’s.
The first point could, frankly, take ages to cover. Suffice it to say: L. Rhodes is wrong because gaming journalists are no different than other journalists who have covered up scandals (such as Walter Duranty covering up and excusing Stalin’s massacres), sold their souls to keep access (such as Eason Jason and CNN covering up Saddam Hussein’s horrors or journalists not reporting on Hamas using hospitals to launch attacks), proven themselves to be completely, willfully, callously, and unfixably ignorant about reality (crack open any article on science and tell me it’s written by someone who has an honest-to-God clue of how to read statistics), and acted unethically, calling in favors of all kinds (such as David Gregory getting his good buddy the DC prosecutor not to haul him off to prison for breaking the same law that has caused veterans and honest travelers to spend time in the lock-up for not knowing DC’s rather insane laws on guns, magazines, clips, and bullets). If someone is a journalist, that’s not something to be proud of. It means that they weren’t skillful, honorable, or intelligent enough to get a better job — such as being the pianist in a whore house. To be a journalist is to be without honor, ethics, and intelligence.
As a matter of fact, the only thing lower than a journalist that isn’t a politician would be a social justice warrior.
Social justice warriors are modern day Thomas Bowdlers. They are the kind of people who will deface the Sistine Chapel because it offends them. They would rip apart the Pieta because it’s offensive. They have a lot in common with the Taliban and that ilk in that they will destroy something priceless and precious, something that can never be rebuilt, repaired, or replaced, with the same mindless self-righteous zealotry that saw the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. These are the same kind of people who have destroyed (in order) academia, the arts, the news media, the broadcast industry, the publishing and literary industry, the school system, the movie and television studios, and the music industry.[1] Not satisfied with that, they’re going after the last hold-outs to their Puritanical tyranny — indie writers, comic books, and video games.
Social justice warriors cannot stand the thought that someone out there, somewhere, might not be in sync with their groupthink. Some of us out here might honestly believe in marriage equality, a truly colorblind society, legal equality of the sexes (even when it might not work in women’s favor), and still have absolutely no problem with a world where Playboy, World of Warcraft, the Mona Lisa, Shakespeare, Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Robert Heinlein, and A Canticle for Leibowitz exist. Some of us even enjoy almost all of those things while still contentedly working alongside a gay FTM black man, having a lesbian sister, a Southern Baptist mother and a Roman Catholic father, and going to an Eastern Orthodox church every Sunday.
I’m not delusional enough to think that my books are high art. They aren’t. They are pretty good reads with interesting characters and a fun plot. They’re not going to be assigned as homework in two hundred years. But, they do sell fairly well considering that I am my own marketing department. I’ve heard plenty of good comments and constructive criticism. I doubt that many of our current games will be remembered in a century and I can guarantee that almost none of our movies or television shows will be remembered because there’s little that is actually memorable about them aside from a handful of shows that ignore social justice warriors and focus on telling a good yarn (Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones).
The long and short of it is that we can’t let these Bowlderites destroy the last vestige of art, storytelling, and original thinking in our culture. We probably won’t let that happen at any rate because we’re geeks and nerds. We’re the people who built the Internet so that it treats censorship as damage and routes around it. We’re the people who invented TOR. We’re the guys and gals who made Amazon popular. We’re the ones who have dragged civilization and culture kicking and screaming into the Digital Age. And, by and large, we’re not sexist. We’re not bigoted. We couldn’t care less what people do in their bedrooms (so long as it’s consensual), whether or not they go to church, or anything like that. Gamers, geeks, and nerds are probably the most open, inclusive, welcoming, and tolerant groups in existence. We’re not going to let the Ministry of Truth wannabes tell us what kind of books we can or cannot read anymore than we let the Roman Catholic church tell us the same. We’re not going to let these groupthink weenies tell us what kind of games we can or cannot play anymore than we let Congress tell us that. We’re not going to let a bunch of pretentious fakes tell us anything — especially when any one of us (on average) knows a hell of a lot more about history, law, tech, art, literature, grammar, and debating than any of those dopes.
So, let’s quit letting them push us around. They’ve cowed the popular crowds and the in-groups by threatening to call them names and spread nasty rumors about them if they don’t cave in to peer pressure and wear the right jeans and shirts, use the right words, make fun of the right people, and go to the right parties. Fuck that, mates. We’re the ones who got made fun of, who don’t get to go to those parties and we’re all past the point of caring about that kind of petty crap. We’re going to keep on keeping on and if the SJWs don’t like it…well, we’ll treat them the way we treat Jack Thompson whenever he starts running his mouth. And, if they don’t get the picture after learning that we know that they’re a big joke…we’re the ones who built the Internet, guys. We can always reprogram the damned thing to keep them locked away from us the same way we keep our toddlers from playing with our gadgets.
Who knows? Maybe locking them off in a kiddie corral where they can’t hurt themselves or anyone else would be for the best. Maybe once we show that these morons have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about, the rest of the culture will start to wonder just why they were so willing to throw themselves and their priceless pieces of art off a bridge just because a bunch of SJWs told them to.
— G.K.
[1]Exactly how they’ve managed to destroy all of these things will be the subject of future entries. This one is already clocking in at almost 1.5k words and if I get into this, we could be here until Christmas.
“As a matter of fact, the only thing lower than a journalist that isn’t a politician would be a SJW.”
http://t.co/hv4KiAgX6a
RT @myfist0: “As a matter of fact, the only thing lower than a journalist that isn’t a politician would be a SJW.”
http://t.co/hv4KiAgX6a
The point on journalism not being the shining beacon of truth people want it to be is kind of where the whole gamergate thing boggles my mind. I see these people losing their minds about Kotaku’s writers possibly having their own personal agendas aside from objectively reporting on the industry, and it feels like the sort of thing you’d expect from a middle school cafeteria. Railing against conflicts of interest in an industry that as recent as 5 years ago was little more than a Stars-For-Sale review machine seems like the height of inanity.
As for the social justice warrior aspect of the whole thing, I’m neutral to the whole thing. If the female or LGBT or whichever niches try to carve out their own place in the culture, more power to them. The hypersensitivity gets annoying. Defending the fact that I may have once laughed at a Penny Arcade strip that was intentionally offensive is a nuisance, but it’s not like I don’t understand why those groups feel singled out and targeted at times. The bigger problem in that field, of course, is the outsiders who see the events as a chance to jump into the arena and make a name for themselves. You end up with a CancelColbert fiasco and the actual problems get lost in the sweeping judgments of misguided activists who have no real insight into the world they’re trying to change.
Of course, I’d prefer it if the culture itself was one single unit without all the sub-cultural infighting, but when I see the brutal responses to the social movements from your stereotypical gamer bro type, it’s hard to not immediately side with the minorities. Whether it’s tyranny of the majority, or a vocal minority of dipshits who never learned how to act right, all they do is perpetuate the stereotypes of gamers as socially disconnected, misogynist xenophobes. Either way, I don’t think it’s going too far to expect basic human decency from both sides on this, and call the assholes from either side to task.
Or, to be more concise, the only thing worse than an Internet White Knight, is the shithead who justifies their existence.