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According to the results of a search right now, there has been no discussion here of the Pragmata controversy so far.
Wikipedia talk page
(There is no Wikipedia article on it, at least not yet.)
Summary on Know Your Meme
Shoeonhead's video
Forbes review
Slant Magazine review
I’d put forth the following arguments:
It seems the Blue Tribe generally views Gamergate as a propaganda defeat because they see it as a long-term contributor to the MAGA/alt-right phenomenon but at the same time I don’t think they concluded that they themselves are even partially to blame. Therefore they are looking for opportunities to fight back, and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers. As far as I can say, this was generally not yet the case back in 2014.
I’m also noticing something that eluded me so far, namely that the probable reason why both the original Gamergate (the Zoe Quinn controversy) and the current controversy proved to be effective ragebait to the Blue Tribe is that they are fueling two of their grievances at once.
One: they generally believe that toxic loser men are aiming to police women's sex lives out of resentment and hatred. I don’t think they have anything specific in mind. (I once asked here what this stuff is even supposed to be. I only received one answer: ‘compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.’) It’s just a general vibe that makes them feel the ick. It’s why they think Quinn was unjustly attacked.
Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.
Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.
I'm beginning to think the specific argument isn't the thing and this is the ultimate point. You have a bunch of neurotic ideologues (and, to be fair, people who outright earn a living from adulterating everything with politics) and their victory is forcing you to be as neurotic as they are about it. I'm sure they'd say it was consciousness raising or something but that's what it seems like to me.
In theory you could have just played a game about a child and thought nothing else about it. Instead, you've been forced to do woke philosophy to figure out what the hell drives this stuff.
Unreasonable demands actually work better here. There's always something. The more ridiculous it is the more sensitive you become about everything because everything can be "problematized" and the little woke-model living rent-free in your brain knows that more anodyne things yield more points when problematized.
This struck me during the Snape debacle: people, antiwoke people, were pre-outraged on essentially woke grounds (are we gonna watch some white jocks beat up a black kid??). What better victory than to loom so large in your opponent's mind that they can't escape your ideology and are in a permanent defensive crouch?
There's no winning this once it starts.
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