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Notes -
For anyone debating wasting 22 minutes watching this, it is a left-coded video essay about the author, having been subsumed into the successor ideology, becoming uncomfortable with his previous enjoyment of Deus Ex now that the subject matter is more right-coded. He goes on to call Gamergate and other grievances “conspiracy theories”.
It's so depressing to me when I see this happen: "I used to enjoy X but now that I espouse ideology A I see how misguided my enjoyment was and can no longer experience it". Their brain has literally been attacked by a parasite that is eating away their personality, how sad. Like a psychological version of Alzheimer. I hope it never happens to me.
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If the exercise wasn't so depressing, I think I'd start collecting these sorts of videos for a documentary or something. There's a thousand things I find wrong with the successor ideology, and I think I could suffer through most of them, even the ones resulting in the loss of human life and lowering of living standards across the board, but brainwashing someone into putting away their favorite toy (publically!) hits me right in the heart.
The march of progress may continue unabated, but I think this sort of stuff is getting memory holed, and I'd like to force people to remember it.
Why the assumption that this person cannot make his own decisions and can only be "brainwashed"?
Why the assumption that brainwashing is contradictory with making your own decision?
I believe he's brainwashed for the same reason I believe Pavlik Morozov was. Not that "I don't like my favorite game, it's for rightoids now" is the same as selling out your own parents, and on the other hand it very well may be that Pavlik was a little rat psychopath who never loved his parents and communists just gave him an opportunity to shine, but assuming we're dealing with psychologically normal people, I believe that not only is it natural to protect the things you love, it's perverse to self-flagellate over having loved something. I've seen turned-away-from-the-life-of-sin-born-again-Christians who have more ability to enjoy media they find problematic. It doesn't help that his sudden realization that Deus Ex is problematic comes smack on top of the peak of the Brown Scare hysteria, this has peer pressure written all over it.
Is it not within your conception of the psychologically normal person that they can change their mind? Even about something they loved? Yes, sure, according to some worldviews no one ever changes their own mind, but just assuming you believe in freedom of will.
It's just that it looks like, according to you, there is no purpose for this forum as a platform for seeking truth, because everyone who's normal is just going to defend what they love instead of what's true.
Not in this particular way, especially about the things they loved.
That's not what I'm saying, and the question of truth doesn't even apply here. The idea that past enjoyment of a game is problematic is a moral claim, not a factual one.
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Yeah, I didn't agree with all of it. He's right that the term "conspiracy theory" has vastly different connotations now than 20 years ago, but I did bristle when he described gamergate as such.
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