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You Cannot Boycott a Nobody

By definition, one can only boycott a vendor one patronizes, perhaps even patronizes on a regular basis. So, one cannot boycott someone of whom one has never heard, or someone one already avoids as a matter of course.

That said, I know nothing of Gamergate, aside from dim echos and third-hand accounts from partisans involved in the matter. I do not know what it concerns and I could not care less. However, I can tell, even from a distance, what the tone and the tactics of the self-appointed Social Justice Crusaders, or, as I call them, Morlocks, are attempting: accuse, accuse, accuse, ad hominem and personal destruction.

Had I not been on the receiving end of similar tactics myself, I might be willing to extend the Morlocks the benefit of the doubt. As it is, after the boy who cries wolf has cried it for over a hundred years and never once, no, not once reported a real example and real instance of a real injustice, but instead always and forever without a single exception used the cry merely to savage and silence decent and normal people going about their normal business, I would, myself, far rather see the boy who cries wolf eaten by the wolf than run the risk of listening to what I damn well know is one more false alarm turned in by professional false alarmists who hate me and everything I love, my clan and nation, way of life, philosophy, worldview, church.

So I was bemused by this list, found at Vox Day’s website, complied by a Morlock boasting of the relevance and victorious might of the forces of Morlockery.

Look it over. Notice anything odd about the list?

I compiled a list of the news and opinion outlets that have published articles critical of #gamergate just in the last few days. They’re welcome to boycott these all, it’ll just hasten their increasing irrelevance.

Here is what I notice: two items from the BBC; one from Buzzfeed, the honesty-challenged persons who called me the sixth biggest bigot of all novelists; CBS; CNN; two items from the Guardian, which employs the honesty-challenged loser whose name I forget who has never written a SF novel, but pontificates endlessly about novel writing, insulting me and Larry Correia and writers infinitely his superior, because we do not bow the knee to his Politically Correct dipshittery; two items from the Huffington Post; one from the New York Times; one from the New Yorker; Newsweek; Reuters; Rolling Stone; Slate; Time Magazine; four items from the Washington Post; one from Boing Boing.

And the rest from news organs I have either never read or never heard of, including  a suspicious number from Canadian or overseas sources. (The Irish Times? Really? My mouth is dry with semi-ecstatic excitement waiting for their next world-shaking opinion of paramount significance.)

Here is what I notice: the list is padded. I do not have the patience to click through all the links, but I would unsurprised to discover they all lead back to one or two press releases by an interested party, taken as Gospel by a compliant and lazy journalist, not fact-checked, and the rest are repeats of the same few stories. It looks like a snowball-job, the kind of thing newspapermen (like me) see all the time: the artificial inflation of a minor story through endless repetition. It is an old trick in my field.

Here is what I notice:  Of those I recognize, these are all Leftwing rags whose integrity and journalistic ethics died during the Clinton Administration, and the corpse was burned during their bouts of Bush Derangement Syndrome in the administration after that; and the burnt ashes scattered to the far corners of the universe, no scintilla thereof ever to be found again, no, not by the most persistent forensic paleontologist, during the rapture and the coming of the Messiah, Obama the Lightworker, whom they all adore in grovelling transports of ecstasy indistinguishable from bouts of epilepsy.

This list is about as convincing to a skeptic as hearing a true believer in Marxism quote from Pravda to prove his point.

Here is what I notice: without knowing anything whatsoever about the issues, or who started what, or what the facts on the ground might be, I notice that there is one accusation of McCarthyism, which tells you right away that the accuser here is a liar with no substance to his claim; one of relentless death threats forcing someone out of her home, which tells you right away that liar does not know enough to tell a convincing lie; countless accusations of harassment, threats of massacre, misogyny, threats of gun-violence, which tells you right away we are dealing with freaking paranoid lunatics who are trying to outdo each other with hysterical shrieks of make-believe fear. Of course they are talking about the normal rudeness accompanying any typical internet debate among the young. What they call violence, misogyny, and so on is what sane people call a robust debate between equals, protected by the First Amendment.

Here is what else I notice: If I had not heard this before roughly a zillion times, I might be curious enough to look into the matter, and hear what each side has to say. But since one side has decided on the screaming lunatic method of making its point, my normal curiosity is abated.

This is a rerun.

My reaction to the shrieking hypochondriac-of-injustice who yet again claims he is the innocent victim of relentless evil, and rolls at my feet in a puddle of his own spew, screaming in tones of utterly hypocritical self-righteousness that I must side with him, because his foes are so hateful that they must never be allowed to give their side of the story — my considered and healthy instinct is to wish for an excuse to trample his face below the bubbling mud until he shuts the hell up.

I am haunted by the thought that there may be a real person with a real problem suffering a real evil, a person whose cry I cannot hear because of this noise, such as, for example, Copts in Egypt having their churches burned down, or Christian girl-children being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery by the Islamic jihadis.

These are the Jihadists whom the Left are so swift and so vehement to defend from criticism, that they start up new comic book superheroines, for example, to show their broadminded love for everything Islamic.

I do not have the patience to compile a list as long as the forgoing, but for those of us who are comic fans, just the titles are telling

and note the company they keep:

When one comedian  made a pointed joke mocking the preposterous political correctness of Marvel Comics for toadying up to the Muslims while we are at war with them, the Left played pile-on, not just on him, but on anyone who applauded the joke. It was freakish, as if one were to see Jews during World War Two drawing or praising a comic book starring the superhero Captain Jewhunter, Champion of Racial Purity, and other Jews lambasting anyone who mocked the comic, calling them an anti-German bigot.

And, why, look, we are seeing the same names there, concerning that tempest in a teapot, as here. Making the same accusations.

These accusations, these humbug reports of death-threats and riots and gun-violence and misogyny.

All bull.

This is all for their internal consumption. They neither believe this nor expect to be believed: it is like the fretting and fuming of those who dwell in a floating island above Cloudcuckooland, as reported by that honest historian, Lemuel Gulliver, and which I am pleased to repeat yet again:

These People are under continual Disquietudes, never enjoying a Minute’s Peace of Mind; and their Disturbances proceed from Causes which very little affect the rest of Mortals. Their Apprehensions arise from several Changes they dread in the Celestial Bodies. For Instance; that the Earth by the continual Approaches of the Sun towards it, must in Course of Time be absorbed or swallowed up. That the Face of the Sun will by Degrees be encrusted with its own Effluvia, and give no more Light to the World. That, the Earth very narrowly escaped a Brush from the Tail of the last Comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to Ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for One and Thirty Years hence, will probably destroy us. For, if in its Perihelion it should approach within a certain Degree of the Sun, (as by their Calculations they have Reason to dread) it will conceive a Degree of Heat ten Thousand Times more intense than that of red hot glowing Iron; and in its Absence from the Sun, carry a blazing Tail Ten Hundred Thousand and Fourteen Miles long; through which if the Earth should pass at the Distance of one Hundred Thousand Miles from the Nucleus or main Body of the Comet, it must in its Passage be set on Fire, and reduced to Ashes. That the Sun daily spending its Rays without any Nutriment to supply them, will at last be wholly consumed and annihilated; which must be attended with the Destruction of this Earth, and of all the Planets that receive their Light from it.

A Laputian gentleman taking a walk.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> Illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1909.

They are so perpetually alarmed with the Apprehensions of these and the like impending Dangers, that they can neither sleep quietly in their Beds, nor have any Relish for the common Pleasures or Amusements of Life. When they meet an Acquaintance in the Morning, the first Question is about the Sun’s Health; how he looked at his Setting and Rising, and what Hopes they have to avoid the Stroke of the approaching Comet. This conversation they are apt to run into with the same Temper that boys discover, in delighting to hear terrible Stories of Sprites and Hobgoblins, which they greedily listen to, and dare not go to Bed for fear.

 

About

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.

October 21, 2014 @ 6:00 am
Musings, Only Posting a Link