It must be nice on your weird non-Earth planet

or: another GamerGate post.

First off, a hat tip to my liberal friends who keep (inadvertently) pointing me to these things. Today we're discussing another article (ostensibly) about GamerGate, this one on The Daily Beast, called Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage.

First of all, this article has almost nothing to do with GamerGate. It does, incidentally, cite another article that has almost nothing to do with GamerGate that I dissected previously. It is, to the extent that it's about anything other than liberal chest-puffing (more on that in a mo), about denigrating reactionaries.

Let's first take a step back here and talk about what's going on.

Closest thing I can find to a source.

Now, at the outset, I should point out that if there's one prong of GamerGate I identify with more than the other, it's the "exposing corruption" prong rather than the "defending their culture" prong. As I said somewhat crudely in the last post, there's room in the market for "guns and boobs" and "flowers and dresses" or whatever it is that the radical ideologues (SJWs) want in their games. More to the point, "my culture" is pretty marginalized already (how many classic rock stations are there, for instance? And yeah, I'm coming back to this).

Of course, by "defending their culture" you don't mean "every game should be guns and bewbs" but rather "we're not evil, socially-awkward jerks," I take back that distinction.

Gamers are a bunch of evil, socially-awkward jerks who like to scorn everyone who's not "them." Yeah. Hokay. Before GamerGate, the last time (that I'm aware of) that news in the gamer community made it to the front page of Reddit was when the Starcraft team Evil Geniuses fired one of their players, Greg "Idra" Fields, because of some comments he made in an online forum. Idra was one of the best "foreigners" (non-Korean players) in the scene. How many people have gotten a hilarious Iron Maiden pastiche performed by John "TotalBiscuit" Bain, after all? (Note the first: Idra is called "Grack" in the video because of an infamous mispronunciation of his first name. Note the second: TotalBiscuit is a games critic who has his own video on GamerGate which you can watch here. He's also battling cancer, so keep him in your prayers.)  But he got fired.  Not because of death threats or bomb threats or even (gasp!) misogyny, but because he called a few fans "a bunch of fucks." Where and when we can hold people accountable for their actions, we do so!

Okay. Let's dive into this piece. We open with a bunch of liberal chest-thumping.

I grew up in the evangelical Christian subculture, among the people on whom Ned Flanders and the Veals on Arrested Development were patterned. So the infamous bonfires where conservative Christian teenagers would gather up their “sinful” media, throw it in a pile, and burn it while singing hymns were a part of my childhood lore. 

And, of course, I condemn the right-wing cultural paranoia that leads to people supporting such nonsense (even if all the kids re-buying their sinful albums two years later when they went to college probably boosted net profits). I condemn them for burning heavy metal albums in the 1970s, for burning Harry Potter books in the 2000s, and for supporting Jack Thompson’s moral crusade to get all game designers thrown in jail for “causing school shootings” before he got disbarred in 2008. 

I’m against all of that crap. But it doesn’t particularly worry me. The Maude Flanderses were never going to win. The idea that religious conservatives could take down Black Sabbath or take down J.K. Rowling or that Jack Thompson could take down EA and Take Two Interactive was always ridiculous.

Well, I'm glad you said that. Since "they were never going to win," you just wasted three paragraphs' worth of my time. I'm also glad you said at the outset that you "condemn the right-wing cultural paranoia," because at least you're being more honest than certain other people on your side of the debate (again, see my last post).

Now I'm going to grab two different paragraphs from different parts of the article. I want you to tell me whether you think the author was capable of putting both in the same article with a) a sound mind and b) a straight face.  Ready?

I’ve said my piece about angry video game fans’ endless abuse of people in games journalism and the games industry elsewhere
(snip)
And there’s the aggrieved underdog stance, calling disco artists and producers “elitists,” spinning a narrative that rock was authentic music made by blue-collar kids in garages while disco was being “pushed on” America by corporate labels. (Are you kidding me? Led Zeppelin the hardscrabble underdogs vs. the Bee Gees? That’s as ridiculous as saying Call of Duty fans are oppressed compared to people who like indie text games about what it’s like to have depression.)

Sorry... who's the "aggrieved underdog" here?  Newsflash, pal, everybody wants to be the underdog, because it makes for a better narrative.

He yammers a long while about stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with GamerGate, namely, music. Here. Go here. On the right-hand bar, under "active streams," click on any link. If they're playing classic rock, I'll give you one begrudging point. (Hey, DeMusliM's streaming! Gonna watch that for a while and get back to you later.) Anyway, he does this to try to tie GamerGate in under one big reactionary umbrella of hate. It's truly a bore to slog through.

Or there’s the recent unpleasantness with Lena Dunham’s Girls where it was a popular Internet sport to find new ways to mock the show, mock Dunham for making the show, and mock every critic who ever supported the show, right down to accusing critics of “colluding” to make the show a success when it didn’t really deserve to be. (That one sound familiar, gamers?)

You're talking about the show that got renewed for its Nth season despite atrocious ratings? No, I don't see any foul play there whatsoever!

I love how the Left is determined to make Lena "voting is like sex" Dunham into a celebrity. Personally I wish she'd keep her clothes on and her mouth shut - and before you go "ah, just another macho misogynist telling women to stay in the kitchen" I said "personally." It's a free country. She can do what she wants. Idiots can listen to her if they want. The alternative - letting a select few decide what we hear and what we don't - well, gee, that sounds like having a corrupt media. Hrm.

So much of the fear the media tries to stoke in me is fear of the oppressed underdog lashing out. Fear of criminals from the “inner city,” fear of terrorists from the “third world,” fear of cults and gangs and fanatical splinter groups. Even on the political left, there’s a tendency to pick on the Other, the “crazy fundies,” the white supremacists in their compounds, the scary tattooed skinheads.
But I’m not afraid of underdogs.
Underdogs, make no mistake, can be vicious and cruel and evil, all the more so because they have a grievance to justify their viciousness. But to be an underdog is to lack power. It means, by definition, that you’re weak, where the overdog is strong.

O...kay.  Who, exactly, is labeling, say, ISIS as an "underdog" (other than you, evidently)? Because they don't "lack power."

Anyway, this continues for a while. Then...

What gives me hope is that despite what I’ve been saying, the #GamerGate zealots, the Disco Demolition zealots, the Lena Dunham stalkers—they aren’t that different from the “moral guardians” they hate after all.

"Despite" what you've been saying? Did you read a word you wrote? This is the first time you mention the phrase  "moral guardian" in this "piece."

See how it’s never been less cool to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, not because “classic rock” is a bad genre but because our generation is so much more aware of how much great music the rock fundamentalists who built that hall left out.

Actually, it's never been less cool because the institution is corrupt. The very first rap "artist" admitted to that institution got in because the people in charge decided to game the system to achieve an end they preferred.

Hey, remind me what GamerGate is really about again. (Hint: it's not Zoe Quinn's sex life.)

He's in the home stretch now, thinking he's made a profound point.

Diversity has won in music. Diversity always wins. Diversity isn’t going to leave music, or TV, or film no matter how many backlashes and reversals there are. 

The “fake geek girls” aren’t going to leave your subculture; the “PC police” aren’t going to stop criticizing it. “Angry black women” aren’t getting off your TV and neither are angry Asian men. The “PC diversity brigade” of science-fiction writers is going to keep winning Hugo and Nebula awards, and someday my wife’s going to be one of them.

Diversity always wins. P.S., every winner of a 2014 Nebula was a woman.

Psst. To the extent that GamerGate is about the changing gamer culture (and again, it wasn't originally; it was about corrupt journalism), "diversity" isn't the issue. "Exclusion" is. Believe it or not, people like to protect what they have (it comes as a shock to the author of this piece, apparently). I said at the top that I really care more about the journalism part that the culture part because simple free-market principles suggest that there will always be a Call of Duty or a Skyrim or a Mass Effect. The market for videogames is a lot bigger than the market for movies or TV shows, because there are only so many channels and so many theaters, but the internet is essentially infinite. There's plenty of room for Stuff You Don't Like.

I have to admit that this dissection wasn't as "good" as the previous one. Part of that was because the author wasn't even on-point for most of his article. I really just wanted to get that bit about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame out there, and pick him apart elsewhere where I could.

GamerGate isn't going away, no matter how much you claim you've won the culture war. Because, no matter how much you try to claim otherwise or ignore it, it has a prong that has nothing to do with culture.