Spez1alEd
3d ago
This is true but I don't think it's the whole story. This is anecdotal, but if you were online and involved in gaming discourse in the late 00s and early 10s you would probably remember that gamers and journos already had a kind of culture war going on at the time, but it wasn't yet political. It was over things like day-one/on-disc DLCs, microtransactions, always-online requirements, streamlining in search of a "broader audience," shoddy reboots, and who could forget the Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco? Gamers and neckbeards complained endlessly about these things on online fora, but curiously the gaming journalists always seemed to take the side of the industry, calling gamers entitled manchildren for caring about this stuff. It wasn't until a little later that the Great Awokening happened and hit gaming journalists early, so they started complaining about immoral content in gaming and calling for it to be censored or changed the way conservatives had a few years earlier, and that was just another rift that opened between the two sides. I think among some gamers, they actually felt a sense of betrayal that journalists would do this after dunking on Jack Thompson with them years earlier.
Anyway, I think Gamergate was really just the largest battle in this already-existing war between gamers and journos and the point it became political, and for a lot of participants on the gamer side it was as much about stuff like this as it was about Zoe Quinn or feminism. Even on the journo side, actually--that's what all the "gamers are dead" articles were about, journos had seen gamers quarrelling with them and the industry for years at that point, acting entitled in their view, and this Zoe Quinn thing was just the latest flareup.
I think that's part of where the ethics talk came from as well--because journalists had a track record of defending anti-consumer practices in the gaming industry, a lot of people may've suspected it wasn't just about one dodgy review, but that journalists were probably shills being paid off by the industry to dismiss legitimate criticism of their business practices. To my knowledge no evidence for that was ever uncovered, but it was a suspicion I'd wager a lot of people had.
Spez1alEd
3d ago
I didn't go through what you're describing, but I began browsing 4chan in 2013 at the age of 17, largely /v/, /vr/, /vg/, /tg/, /his/, /an/, /r9k/ and /lgbt/, which is what set me on the path of the chud. Initially I found a lot of the content quite shocking, but partly convincing, at least the notion of what here would be called HBD, and the equivalent for gender, and incorporated it into my worldview which at the time was mainly apolitical but leaning pre-woke liberal, if that makes sense. I'm less sure of it now... clearly innate racial and sexual differences exist to some extent, but I'm unsure how complete an explanation they are for inequality. It isn't something I ever rigorously investigated anyway, I just suspected it was probably true because the sociological explanations all sounded like total cope.
I recall following Gamergate on /v/ at the time, not directly participating, but I'm not sure I fully understood the stuff about Zoe Quinn even then. All I knew was I already didn't like the weird turn left-wing politics had taken into supporting minority idpol and wanting everything they considered problematic censored or changed, so movements which opposed that, I generally liked. I never really watched Skeptic YouTube but I certainly still agreed strongly with that whole ethos of being socially liberal, rabidly pro-free speech and anti-censorship, and anti-progressive idpol/DEI/special treatment/whatever you wanna call it.
At the time that seemed like the dominant strain of liberalism so I had no reason to call myself anything but liberal. As late as 2019 I can recall being out drinking at a gay bar and feeling completely comfortable there, it wasn't like enemy territory or something, I didn't feel like an infiltrator who had to hide his beliefs. Today I doubt I'd feel the same way, after the riots in 2020 made it clear that the fringe woke ideology everyone used to dunk on had just become what liberalism is now. Which is an issue for me, because I don't want to think of myself as conservative. I'm not some Red Tribe guy (doesn't really apply to my country anyway), not religious, I don't care about promiscuity or sexual degeneracy or abortion. To the extent I was ever anti-trans it was always on account of opposing compelled speech, not some moral pearl-clutching about guys acting like fags.
All the same I've been in effect a chud since like 2015--that's the earliest I can remember thinking importing massive amounts of third-worlders into Western nations was probably a bad idea, anyway. And I was a free speech maximalist and thought trenders were giving trans people a bad name and all the rest of it. I've been trying to hang on to that while reconciling it with liberalism, but it seems an impossible task. I've tried to moderate my views on things like trans or immigration, but I feel like it's just binary now, pro or anti, anything that isn't transwomen are women/open borders will just be seen as total opposition.
And emotionally seeing some smug Redditor advocate for hate speech laws or deplatforming or celebrating when it happens will always set me off. I can't really feel comfortable with modern liberalism if that's what it is now, to the point contrarian spaces like this are the only places I feel normal in. And even though intellectually I still think racism is bad and all that, I feel like I've lost the capability to be offended by it or any other form of bigotry.
This is just what polarisation feels like, I guess.
Spez1alEd
4mo ago
I don't think it's directly downstream of progressive ideology, and is instead actually a consequence of the honour culture that many lower class black people seem to have grown up with in the hood. Honour cultures form in places where a strong central authority either doesn't exist, is unwiling or unable to enforce order, or is so resented by those subject to it that they're reluctant to call upon it and will punish any of their peers who do. This situation has occurred in many times and places historically, but today it often shows up in prisons, and everyone has experienced a kiddie version of it on the playground. It also seems to be common in black American ghettos.
Since people in these environments can't call upon a central authority to defend them, they have to defend themselves, and one method they use is to dissuade aggressors by signalling that they'll strongly retaliate against any attack. This is why they escalate to confrontations, threats or violence in response to minor, even unintentional slights. If they didn't they might look soft and be intentionally targeted for abuse or exploitation.
This is a potentially adaptive behaviour for people in such environments when dealing with their peers, but is at times maladaptive when dealing with authority figures. However, they can't simply choose not to behave this way towards authority figures like cops, because if they did then they would look like a bitch and a collaborator and be subject to ostracisation by their community, which would again endanger them. Besides, it's not as if this is necessarily a rational strategy they knowingly apply, it's often just a subconscious attitude they've learned and cannot simply unlearn at will.
TL;DR they fight the police because they fight everyone who challenges them to preserve their honour and reputation, even when it might have negative immediate consequences for their physical health or legal standing, and because they really don't want to look like a collaborator any more than a prisoner, a concentration camp detainee, or a middle schooler does.
Spez1alEd
5mo ago
It may be cancel culture but honestly, I don't really care. Ultimately if it had been some left-wing pundit that had been assassinated like Contrapoints or Destiny or Hasan, and right-wingers were getting fired for celebrating, I don't believe for a second hardly any lefties would be sticking up for them and really, nor would I. I didn't make a stink when that guy got fired for outing himself as a literal fascist on Jubilee, I'm not going to make a stink when people get fired for supporting political assassinations of pundits they dislike. I'm perfectly fine with a norm of "don't celebrate assassinations of mainstream political pundits" existing, or not existing, it just needs to be applied symmetrically to left and right.
I absolutely would be against people facing legal consequences for it, but to my knowledge that hasn't happened thus far. I suppose I don't agree with the calls to deport non-US citizens who have celebrated the assassination, and I don't think people should be fired for making jokes or just saying they don't care, either. Nor should they be if someone dies in an accident or of natural causes, and they say he/she had it coming. But supporting outright murder of a pundit because you didn't like their mainstream, milquetoast political opinions goes much further than that in my view, and it's really not that unreasonable for somebody to get you fired over it. That's what it comes down to for me, the real transgression isn't "I don't have sympathy for him" or even "I'm happy he's dead" but "I think it's good he was murdered for saying things I disagree with."
Spez1alEd
5mo ago
What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war. What are the issues really when you boil it down? Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be? These aren't issues that should be tearing nations apart. These should be normal political issues people can discuss civily and disagree on without thinking of themselves as soldiers in an apocalyptic all-consuming war for the soul of the West. If people could politely disagree on gay marriage they could certainly do it for any kind of trans issue, or so you'd think.
Maybe I'm naive, I don't know. I suppose the right-wing partisans would speak of this being an issue of whether their people have a right to continued existence, their children a right not to be brainwashed and subjected to horrifying medical procedures akin to lobotomies, while left-wingers would claim they're seeing the rise of out-and-out white supremacy and antisemitism. There are certainly actors out there amplifying the most extreme positions and escalating things as much as they can, but most people I'd have to imagine don't agree with them. Most people, I'm told, don't like woke and are a little conservative on trans issues and immigration, but I'd have to assume they're not raring to vote in theocrats or fascists either. Yet we never seem to hear from them, it's just endless escalation by zealous partisans on either side ready to literally murder each other, or at least cheer when it happens.
It didn't feel like this to me a decade ago, back then these people felt marginal and broadly mocked. It just doesn't feel like these issues have to be discussed this way, but maybe it's too late now. Even if both sides moderated, conservatives dropped the conspiracy theories and accusing every trans person of being a groomer, liberals reaffirmed a commitment to free expression and pulled back a little on trans and immigration, even just conceded not every dissenting opinion is beyond the pale, too much of the base is radicalised now on both ends. I'm sure many people here would say it would be useless even if it could be accomplished, certainly. You have to wonder though, if just a few things had gone differently, Trump not being elected, liberals moderating even a little, Pizzagate not being a thing, Sherrod DeGrippo not deleting Encyclopedia Dramatica, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation.
Spez1alEd
6mo ago
Not necessarily The Motte specifically, but I'm talking about the phenomenon in general, wherever it might appear. I do think that the tendency of hard-right posters on places like /pol/ to casually and unironically refer to groups with names like mudslimes, shitskins, and so on contributes to the gradual dehumanisation of those groups in the users' minds, such that it becomes easier to justify indiscriminate violence against them. Obviously that also has to be combined with factors like anger at terror attacks or crime committed by members of the group, dismissal of concerns over it in the MSM and so on to produce that result.
Spez1alEd
6mo ago
It seems obvious to me that even assuming WhiningCoil's claim is "true," in the sense that young black men commit more crime, and this is inherent to their biology, and we have countless studies to prove it, it is still perfectly valid to strongly object to describing them as an invasive species. To do so is a blatantly dehumanising use of language that I believe could easily prime those who engage in it to see such a group as less than human, and therefore to be dealt with in the manner you would deal with non-human pests. This isn't complicated, it would be clear to everyone if he were describing Jews in a manner that compared them to vermin. So it is with blacks or any other ethnic group.
To be clear, I'm not accusing him of personally wanting to genocide or start a race war against blacks or anything, nor is this about being squeamish and finding the language offensive. But I think when you normalise referring to groups in such blatantly dehumanising and contemptuous terms, there is a clear risk of it contributing to a culture that views violence against them as legitimate.
There is nothing about acknowledging HBD or even arguing for explicitly racist policy that requires you to engage in this sort of thing, and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter and to turn the public against you because whatever points you may or may not have, they can clearly see that your position is rooted in seething hatred and malice.
There were pro-consumer journalists at the time, of course, but I do think there was a perception among a lot of the people kicking up a stink about this stuff that their concerns were often not taken seriously by mainstream journalists. Admittedly though I was a teenager back then and not following it super closely, so it's hard to recall the sequence of events perfectly. I just remember that at the time Gamergate definitely didn't feel like an isolated event, but rather part of an ongoing series of consumer revolts or, less charitably, nerdrage episodes that were pretty common in the gaming space back then.
Regarding Mass Effect 3's ending in particular I definitely remember journalists being quite adamant that calls to change it were illegitimate and that it would be an affront to the game's artistic integrity to alter the ending to appease angry fans.
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