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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.
If anything, the Pragmata "controversy" is an example of seeing the fake and gay culture war strings getting yanked in real time, or whatever metaphor you want, something something outrage farming, something something grifting. People say intentionally-outrageous things to get clicks, regardless of if it furthers their own stated ideological goals or even their reputation, because clicks are the sole aim.
This controversy has two elements to it: the pedo thing and the pro-family thing.
The pedo thing is just a cost of making anything with children in it, sorta like how anything anthro unfortunately attracts furries. Yes, they made the little girl very pretty. The bare legs/feet makes for a distinctive silhouette, but that also draws attention to her physicality. (Apparently pedos are really into feet, legs, and specifically the backs of knees, but that's precisely because those are parts of children's bodies that are typically exposed to view). Getting up in arms about accusing it of being a pedo game is someone actively trying to create generic moral panic outrage when there isn't any. If I run into someone in real life who goes off on an unprompted rant about how gamers are pedos and Pragmata is Incel Pedo Gamergate Misogyny Racism, I'll update my opinion and be disappointed.
The other element is a Hassan Piker line about how gamers (a lot of his audience and periphery audience, the guy is on Twitch) are pathetic losers something something. It's just outrage bait from an outrage baiter, what's annoying is that this naked-outrage-baiter hyperconsumerist grifting socialist gay-baiting himbo nepo-e-celeb gets fawned over and glazed by the NYT.
Socialists/Marxists shitting on the concept of the nuclear family isnt a good look for them, it annoys normies and sane people. Reminding normies that abolishing the family is technically on the Marxist platform is bad tactics when socialism is supposed to just mean "the government does nice things."
I think that the Marxist platform is very diverse because there are many kinds of Marxists. I think that most of them do not want to abolish the family.
As for Marx himself, as far as I know he did not want to abolish the family, he just wanted to get rid of the "bourgeois" style of family.
I'm no expert on Marxism though, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Perhaps most Marxists don't want to abolish the family.
But, most people who want to abolish the family are Marxists.
This is generally because they can't get a family for themselves for some reason, and they want [the qualities that make others able to do that] to be taken away from you and given to them. (Or they're academics.)
The way that's accomplished is to maximize the threat each person in the relationship poses to each other. This can range from most of the basic Western stuff that's "only" financially ruinous- no-fault divorce, alimony, child support- to the more extreme stuff like encouraging children to inform on their parents, separating them entirely Residential Schools-style, or mandating them be grown in a lab and punishing all sex as rape (the Demolition Man/1984 approach). Nobody's gone back to this in the modern age yet, but if they did, it'd look more like [1].
In this way, "the capacity to maintain a family" is redistributed by the State, with those that have it paying more of the bill in the form of needless oppression (as spouses and parents lack the moral hazards the State [as an extension of the people demanding redistribution] has in this matter), while at the same time allowing those with less to escape the consequences of lacking it by having the State exert pressure on the other member(s) in legible, pre-defined ways.
[1] The Harrison Bergeron-style handicapping method for functional families, where you're not allowed to talk to each other beyond an AI intermediate that perfectly mimics your [family member] screaming personalized insults at you for X amount of time before you can listen to whatever else they want to talk to you about. Conversations between couples are ranked based on how much you disagree naturally, so it could be several days before you're allowed to speak a single word to each other, in order to level the playing field for couples that can't do that.
(Actually, AI offers so many other possibilities for the virtue-Marxist; this is just one of them. Imagine a system imposed on you whose sole purpose is to cause you unbearable pain until you've abused your spouse or kid comparable to the State average. It's a handicapper general's, or equity commissioner's, wet dream.)
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Yeah abolish the family is essentially capitalist propaganda the Soviet Union and Maoist China never tried or planned anything like that.
I genuinely can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not.
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Could you provide the definition of "abolish the family" which neither the Soviet Union nor Maoist China tried or planned?
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