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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27237 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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In my perspective, the major difference between gamergate and dickwolves or racefail or elevatorgate or Eich's ouster is that it was with gamergate that the online journalists stopped even trying to understand the other side. Previously articles would include a sentence or two explaining roughly the other side's position (this is stupid and hysterical usually) but with gamergate it was just mouth breathing chodes impotently raging at Quinn the whole way down. And when the publications started doing that, so did the rank and file - you could sit an agg down and walk them through your perspective and at the end of it they'd bsod, shake their head and call you a mouth breathing chode impotently raging at Quinn*. Everyone acted like Arthur Chu was a lone spark of extra insanity after he talked about mind killing himself, but that's because he was actually giving the game away.

*Note I am not saying they would bsod because they knew I was right about gamergate, I am saying they would bsod because they could feel themselves empathising with me.

What is this about Arthur Chu?

Chu rather famously wrote a couple Facebook posts back in the early gamergate / late rationalist diaspora days where, as while mockingly taking the terms from LW discussion of the time, produced this copypasta. I don't know if it got archived fully in context at any point.

In one of his many many rants against rationalism and in favour of social justice Arthur Chu said:

"“I rigorously manage my own thinking and purge myself of dangerous ‘unthinkable’ thoughts—‘mindkill’ myself—on a regular basis.

This is what you have to do to be a feminist anti-racist progressive, i.e. a social justice stormtrooper, You have to recognize that there is no neutral culture, neutrality is impossible, that culture is a cutthroat war of memes and that you have to commit to picking a side and setting yourself up as a neutral arbiter of memes is impossible and is a form of surrender. You have to constantly “check your privilege” and “unpack the knapsack” and all those other buzzwords.

You need to understand that the only way to be “rational” in this world is to be irrational, that the only way to be “fair” is to pick the right side and fight for it.

The people who genuinely win are the people who do this. The people who refuse to do this are the ones who sit on the sidelines and never even lose because they aren’t really playing.”

For more wisdom from the "Asian American icon" (his words, sorry Asian Americans), check out In favour of niceness, community and civilisation. (I know you're familiar with it grognard, but for anyone else who sees this who is less familiar with the history.)

First time?

I get what you're motioning around, but that's what it felt like for a lot of other people a lot earlier. Any opposition to the Affordable Care Act deriving solely from the President's race was a mainstay from 2009-2012. The only possible motivation for a specific anti-gay policy being thoughtless homophobia is gold-standard SCOTUS law, recognized at three different major cases, and with far broader academic and institutional support. Gun owners as wanting more Trayvon Martin shootings was absolutely a thing.

Journolist was revealed in 2010: it wasn't just that it happened, but even the why and how was common knowledge for a set.

It matters that a bunch of people suddenly got to see it first-hand! But it's why I'm skeptical of it as a starting point.

See that's just US politics to me, but I see your point, maybe it's better described as an escalation. A dramatic escalation. Gamergate marked a change to me not just as an event, but because it coincided with complete US control over the Western cultural hegemon through social media. It went pro and spread from politics to everything, and from the US to everywhere (in the west). I have been politically aware since 2004/5, but trying to get Australians to talk about US politics back then was like pulling teeth. Even during Obama's election people mostly just saw it as a curio - he's going for the record for the fastest assassinated US president they'd laugh and then change the subject. 2012 wasn't much different - Obama was going to win or else Americans are all bigots so what's there to talk about? But after gamergate started, people started paying attention to US politics too. Suddenly every politically aware Australian I knew wanted to talk to me about the midterms! I didn't even want to talk about the midterms. But a lot of Australians and Europeans became very interested in US politics from then on, and I had to start explaining that I was an expat so other Americans wouldn't tell me to shove my opinions up my ass.

So the way I see gamergate is as the engagement where the scolds tried out their new weapon to great success - mind killing themselves in the face of empathising with the enemy. And it hit my shitty little corner of the internet - tech and gaming journalism - just before spreading everywhere. I wrote neutral stories on many of those previous events, and the only one I got push back on was Eich, because Eich himself supported his ousting. I'm sure there was bitching and sniping behind my back about what a chud I was, but it stayed behind my back. Then when gamergate came around, merely asking for a link to gjoni's post had people threatening to blacklist me. The ideology had become so totalising that not even enthusiast press could escape it - and enthusiast press has always been one of the most trivial things in existence.

Agreed, seeing multiple major online publishers run near-identical stories with near-identical headlines at the same time was a gigantic redpill.

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