Breitbart on Gamergate (with Garrulous Digression)
An article by one Noah Dulis at Breitbart’s Big Journalism too startling not to share:
Supporters of the GamerGate movement have been working tirelessly to hunt down those who would use their banner to cause personal harm—all while the media continues to claim that GamerGate members are either participating in or indifferent to the harassment of women in the gaming industry.
On Thursday, Salon published a column titled, “#Gamergate is really about terrorism: Why Bill Maher should be vilifying the gaming community, too.” In the article, the author correlates GamerGate to the actions of fundamentalist Islamist terrorists: “putting statements from your garden-variety Islamic extremist side by side with the kinds of threats Sarkeesian and others have received, it’s clear these two groups share some similar attitudes toward women.”
While the thrust of the article is focused more on what the author perceives to be a double standard in the treatment of the Muslim community as a result of the actions of jihadists, it furthers the idea that GamerGate is a hate movement with no place in any discussion of transparency and ethics in the gaming industry and press. In doing so, it shows how the media is so invested in demonizing GamerGate that it is silencing the best ally in combating online harassment: GamerGate supporters themselves.
Meet Margaret Gel.
Margaret is an avid GamerGate supporter and has been working along with others since the movement’s inception to protect both supporters and critics of GamerGate from harassment and abuse online. Margaret credits Twitter user @LetsSailHatan for coming up with the platform that has allowed anyone concerned with online threats, doxxing (the revealing of personally identifying information), and harassment to identify and shut down such trolls on Twitter: the #GamerGate Harassment Patrol.
“You show us who’s harassing, attach the words ‘#GamerGate Harassment Patrol’ to the tweet, and we in #GamerGate all report them at once,” Margaret explained. “We’ve gotten accounts suspended in less than 15 seconds this way: it’s VERY helpful for erasing dox that people post of others.”
“Anyone sending threats is not welcome in #GamerGate,” she continued. “We have random people come in and use the tag to send death threats. We don’t want them, we don’t need them, and we are watching to make sure that their crimes are reported to the proper authorities.”
“If you report harassment and include the exact words ‘#GamerGate Harassment Patrol’ in your tweet, it shows up here, and many of us see it,” Margaret explained. “As long as I’m at my desk, I keep a window showing the tag open. All it takes is one retweet and even more people see it, more people report it, and the account gets suspended.”
Margaret herself has been a victim of harassment, having received “two rape threats and two death threats.” She has also been doxxed, but she noted that when it happened on the image board 8chan, the community responded quickly to protect her: “No one else in the thread wanted anything to do with the person posting the dox: they didn’t approve of the posting of dox; they swore at the person who posted my dox.”
“The staff of /gg/, the ones who moderate it, protected me, removing the dox in record time. They deleted my dox in FIVE MINUTES,” she stressed.
Margaret’s experience is hardly unique as a GamerGate supporter. She provided me with extensive documentation of death threats, doxxing, and harassment committed against GamerGate supporters, all of which can be found in a growing catalog at the Twitter account @TheBattleAngel. The point of doing so isn’t to justify a never-ending back and forth of attacks between supporters and critics of GamerGate but to highlight the discrepancy between the media’s attempts to mischaracterize GamerGate based on the actions of extremists while ignoring critics of GamerGate engaging in the same type of behavior. “I’m more infuriated that there are so many people who keep getting death threats, and yet the media keeps on saying that THEY are the terrorists,” she said.
Read the whole thing http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/10/25/While-the-Media-Slanders-Gamers-as-Terrorists-GamerGate-Is-Hunting-Trolls-and-Abusers
My comment: There is no floor to Hell. Each time you think you have hit bottom, the ground gives way and exposes another abyss below, farther down.
I was in the news business decades ago. It was crooked then, but it was nowhere near this corrupt. The news media, with very few hated and shining-bright exceptions, were solidly Leftwing, smug, arrogant, and utterly dishonest. The male members of the press lacked male members.
The sole newspaper for many a year in the county where I worked, Saint Mary’s County in the southern part of the People’s One-Party Soviet Socialist Republic of Maryland was part of the machine, was called The Enterprise. A cog. The Enterprise merely took orders from the County Commissioners, who were controlled by the Good Ol’ Boys, the old, rich, established, and founding families in the county, and printed whatever the Boys told them to print.
My editor, his mom, his photographer, and little old me, we ran the only alternate voice, and we were subject to the hatred and opposition that Rush Limbaugh and Fox News were later to receive. My boss got death threats from drug dealer and from the wife of the assistant police chief, and the SMART (Saint Mary’s Association of Rightful Thinking) was organized to call up our advertisers and drive them away. County regulations paying newspaper to publish public notices where altered only to deprive us of revenue. I was falsely accused of a crime, falsely accused of not appearing for a court date (I had received no summons, but the DA lied on an affidavit and said I had) and forced to hide from the police. My editor wore a flack jacket, and went to work, smiling, and interviewed the drug dealers who showed up to threaten him.
The cops were crooked and in bed with the drug pushers, and the County Commissioners were receiving payola from developers via a gambling ring where the developers who wanted not to run afoul of Planning and Zoning somehow always happened to bet big and lose large just before the public hearing.
And so on. The kind of bullshit pulled by the Socialist Justice Wankers who took over the SFWA is kiddie stuff compared to the way the big boys play hard ball.
Happy ending: four out of five of the County Commissioners were voted out of office, thanks to one feisty little three man and one grandma pulp newspaper. It can be done. Has the county become corrupt and fallen back into its old ways by now? I don’t know and I don’t care. The price of liberty is vigilance, and if the public won’t pay that price, to the devil with them.
But the crooked press in my day, to the best of my knowledge, did not coordinate their stories and attacks, and they did not send death threats while pinning the blame for death threats on others. In my day, it was just a meeting of minds, a similarity of outlook. It was not an actual conspiracy of slander.
The lying-ass slandermongering scum who ran the press in my day at least had standards. They stayed bribed when bribed, and when they lied, they tried to make it sound believable.
They never would have stooped to this.
Anyway, I hear that some gamers, particularly those who lean toward the live and let live libertarian side of the Nolan Chart are queasy finding the Breitbart, noted Rightwinger blogsite, and John C Wright, Author, noted Catholic Space Opera Dude in a Hat, are cheering for you.
You heard that Breitbart was like Fox News and Glen Beck rolled in a burrito and smothered in hot sauce, and that this spooky Christian godbotherer has some sort of financial dealings with his publisher, Vox Day, who once said something mean to a black woman threatening him, and he called criminals savages, which is a racist word to use in a sentence addressed to an impolite and wrath-addled negress, on account of no one should own a firearm. (Uh, yes, not to reopen old controversies, but that was what the discussion was about. The negress wanted the people disarmed, an rather odd viewpoint for any people once groaning in the bonds of slavery to take. Racial memory is short, I suppose.)
So that means if Vox Day is a racist then Wright, who fails to shun him, is a racist too, and if you fail to shun me, you will catch a case of racism. You can catch it merely by sitting next to me on the bus, if I cough.
This is not an odd opinion to entertain in the modern day, sad to say, since the common assumption is that one can be racist without knowing it. I first learned I was racist when I said that Leftists praise science but when any scientific error involves race or sex is being discussed, they never discuss the actual science, but prefer instead to call the advocate arguing the other side a racist, as has happened in discussions of brain neurochemistry of the sexes, or IQ distribution between races. For that I was called a racist. My accuser did not stop to ask whether I believe in IQ tests (I don’t. Phrenology is more reliable) nor which race I thought would have the highest median IQ if there were such a thing as IQs (there is not; the Jews). So therefore one can catch racism merely by being White skinned. It passes genetically.
Pardon me for the digression, but to be accused of racism by racists, even after all these years, still rankles.I am working on that Christian forgiveness thing. I am. Then I am taking up juggling nine fire-axes while skydiving, which must be an easier sport and less exhausting.
Such is the modern account of racism: minorities are immune, but white men catch it by not being the loudest hypocrite accusing other white men of it. Unless they are Spaniards or Portuguese. Somehow these white Europeans of European descent with white skin who are white are not considered white, but a new and separate race called Hispanic. Which is black. Unless they are needed as a scapegoat for a lynch mob, in which case they are white Hispanics like George Zimmerman. And Elizabeth Warren is a Red Indian.
And these neoheathens called us, the normal people, the Christians, the ones who founded and built this nation, not to mention all the empires and civilizations of Europe, superstitious. They believe in Original Sin just as much as we do, but we think the Sons of Ham and Shem are afflicted as well, and, unlike the neoheathens, we think there is a magic water called baptism that can lave the sins away. They think the only way to remove the stain of sin is to accuse, accuse, and accuse others of being sinners.
The modern Leftwing mavins are the Puritans, the Calvinists, the Cromwellians, who believe you are damned from birth, and you should not drink not even a sip of wine, nor look at an ankle. We are the Catholics, with our lavish cathedrals and operatic grand masses, and drink wine at the Eucharist, and our fasting always comes to an end and leads to a feast-day.
End of digression: there was a point hidden in that turgid wordmass somewhere, like the prize hidden in the box of Crackerjacks.
Gamers, anyone reading this, who told you Vox Day was a racist, eh? Who told you the Republicans represent the rich and powerful and hate the blacks? Who told you the Catholic Church was now run by a Progressive who favors Gay Marriage?
Same people who tirelessly called you a terrorist, eh? Same guys? Still calling you terrorists and misogynist and bigots and saying you are dead, are they?
Gotten your public apology yet?
So, gentlemen and ladies of the gaming world, wherever you are: Do you honestly think they are telling the truth about me and mine, we who oppose them, when you see how they treat you and yours, you who merely annoyed them?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
