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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Nyberg appears to be some small-time individual who got 15 minutes of fame and has moved on to doing whatever she does now. Her twitter feed is mostly about plugging her own stream/Patreon, quote-tweeting some lesbian novel bot, and talking about trans politics from a clearly pro-trans perspective (and I mean in the normie online progressive way).

I definitely agree that at the moment she's not someone with a huge amount of cultural reach (she did have more during Gamergate), I posted this more because it's probably the most stark illustration of just how unprincipled a good amount of the progressives engaging in that specific culture war were.

But it's worth considering that when you search up Nyberg on Google, you get her twitter, a LinkedIn profile, and then a Medium piece which clearly comes down on the side that Sarah is an actual pedophile. DuckDuckGo straight up links to the "Why you shouldn't stand with Sarah Nyberg" piece at number 1.

Interesting, it doesn't show up like that for me on Google. The very first result is Intelligencer, which links to this article speaking with a good amount of mirth about Sarah Nyberg's Twitter bot that exists to troll the "alt-right" online. The second result is to her Twitter. Further down, articles about the whole debacle do show up, and I will concede that the information about Nyberg being a pedophile is on the internet and can be found - but only as long as you know about Sarah Nyberg in the first place, and almost always from non-mainstream sources.

My comment at the end of the post was more to do with the fact that any memory of her 15 minutes of fame (and how she was defended by the progressive camp) doesn't really exist much on the internet. When you search up "Gamergate" you often get long lists of what the mainstream perceives that Gamergate did wrong, and meanwhile things that the anti side did that's objectionable - even something as objectionable as this - has been mostly scrubbed from the general discourse around the topic. I've seen people in real life that know absolutely nothing about it, and essentially just parrot stock anti-GG talking points from videos and articles they've found around, and often they are surprised when I tell them these things. Hell, my dad at one point read something about the topic and I had to disabuse him of certain notions about how it all actually played out.

It's not impossible to find sources that are congenial to Gamergate, but they're a definite minority, and represent the parts of the internet that are frequented almost exclusively by the terminally online.

Further down, articles about the whole debacle do show up, and I will concede that the information about Nyberg being a pedophile is on the internet and can be found - but only as long as you know about Sarah Nyberg in the first place, and almost always from non-mainstream sources.

I mean, yeah? Is that surprising? Why would a mainstream org even care? Progressive hypocrisy isn't that hard to find and it's over some nobody? Even if I ran the most anti-woke paper in existence, I probably wouldn't dive into the specifics of one pedophile and her progressive defenders from the Gamergate era.

But that's just me.

It's not impossible to find sources that are congenial to Gamergate, but they're a definite minority, and represent the parts of the internet that are frequented almost exclusively by the terminally online.

That's fair, but I don't think this is the best example of how Gamergate was poorly treated. The nicheness of the story itself overshadows the "progressive hypocrisy/culture-warring" aspects, imo.

I mean, yeah? Is that surprising? Why would a mainstream org even care? Progressive hypocrisy isn't that hard to find and it's over some nobody? Even if I ran the most anti-woke paper in existence, I probably wouldn't dive into the specifics of one pedophile and her progressive defenders from the Gamergate era.

The mainstream tends to love excavating initially niche things and making them into huge stories, as long as it conforms to their preexisting ideological bent. They kind of control what is niche and what's not, and typically the things that get dragged into the spotlight are culture wars they feel they have a good likelihood of winning. The media dictates the cultural reach of a story as much as it responds to it.

In addition, I would like to record as many instances of progressive misconduct I can find. It's not just the magnitude of these instances that matter - the frequency at which it occurs also matters when you're trying to convince normies of your point, and finding more than a few fairly egregious instances and being able to document them exhaustively - niche or not - does help you. And some of the people who supported Nyberg - such as Leigh Alexander and especially Dan Olson of Folding Ideas - are not niche.

That's fair, but I don't think this is the best example of how Gamergate was poorly treated. The nicheness of the story itself overshadows the "progressive hypocrisy/culture-warring" aspects, imo.

I mean, I agree, but I've already covered the main thrust of my point as to how Gamergate was poorly treated in my previous top-level thread about it and don't really care to write about what I've already addressed a second time. This just builds on that. The issue is that at this point I've covered most of the major, mainstream topics in the culture war that I have strong opinions about. I am very much a specialist with a very limited scope who espouses the approach in this blogpost: "So if you want to stop being an NPC, simply say “I don’t know” to all the matters that don’t concern you. And that will give you the time to not be an NPC on all the matters that do".

I've addressed the topics I care about (mainly identity-progressivism) ad nauseam in many forums IRL and online for years, and so most of the new information that I'm coming across is necessarily going to concern less mainstream topics and situations. Of course, I definitely don't expect everyone to care about the minutiae of the culture wars I look into. But this is a weird forum with weird people that may or may not find it interesting. If there's a place on the internet at all it belongs to, I think it's this one.