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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   22169 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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In honor of GTA 6 coming out this year. I'd like to talk about the fake progressiveness of the games industry, particularly, of Rockstar. They apparently have removed content that makes fun of the transgender community in GTA 5. But fascinatingly enough, they dont seem to extend this progressive attitude towards their workers or staff. According to a former employee:

He also described one case involving a colleague who was fired while on paternity leave. “One of our friends in particular had plans that didn’t involve being unceremoniously fired while on paternity leave, just 9 days after the birth of her second child. This is the human cost of this decision, the human cost that wouldn’t have been considered when it was brazenly and recklessly made, because it wasn’t a quantifiable number on a spreadsheet.”

They have had these complaints in the past and were have thought to have gone through a restructuring, apparently according to this new report & some others, that is not the case. I know that at the end of the day they are a corporation that only cares about the financial bottom line, but one thing that bothers me a lot about this kind of progressive outrage is why its so.... selective? Why give more heat towards someone making fun of the LGBTQ+ community in comparison to say, someone being underpaid at the company or not getting the right amount of maternity leave? Things that are arguably much more important? Along with the (quite regressive id argue) decision to make the game completely digital. Is this just a problem with the public caring more about culture war issues than economic ones? Or perhaps they are just more responsive to the culture war outrage because it costs them nothing to adjust?

One of our friends in particular had plans that didn’t involve being unceremoniously fired while on paternity leave, just 9 days after the birth of her second child.

Huh? Is this a trans-identified female who was on "pa"ternity leave?

I would assume simply a typo (or confusing “paternity” for “parental”), or intentionally using “paternity” as a generic/unisex term (like when people don’t use the word “actress”).

Why give more heat towards someone making fun of the LGBTQ+ community in comparison to say, someone being underpaid at the company or not getting the right amount of maternity leave?

The law forbids one, but not the other.

That's it. I imagine, in France, it would be a significantly bigger problem to deny people their benefits, fire them arbitrarily, etc.

one thing that bothers me a lot about this kind of progressive outrage is why its so.... selective? Why give more heat towards someone making fun of the LGBTQ+ community in comparison to say, someone being underpaid at the company or not getting the right amount of maternity leave?

Progressivism makes a lot more sense when you model it as basically a game.

Certain groups are considered by progressives to be "lower status" or "oppressed" in their perception of world outside progressive spaces (this doesn't necessarily need to bear much correlation to actual reality, as progressives consider first world women to be terribly oppressed, despite them being one of the most coddled and pampered groups throughout all of human history). Because progressivism is characterised by kneejerk contrarianism to the reality most of us live in (I have a lot of thoughts about how people turn to progressivism simply to distinguish themselves from the crowd), those lower status groups become high status in progressive spaces. The more highly regarded a group is in progressive hierarchies, the higher the point multiplier you get for advocating for them.

At all times it is important to maximise the point value of your performances. Routinely in progressive spaces, those who accrue insufficient performance points are rounded upon by the rest of the group and either quietly exiled or, if transgressions can be found in their past, excoriated and loudly denounced as a source of more points. It's sort of like an elimination race; you just don't want to be near the bottom of the scoreboard or it could cost you all your social circles and maybe your career. If you have skeletons in your closet it's important to be close to the top so nobody has any reason to go looking for them (but not at the very top because that's also a reason to go looking, taking down a high ranking progressive with a successful accusation of secret racism or something also scores very highly.)

Progressivism makes a lot more sense when you model it as basically a game.

I basically agree, which is part of the reason why -- in my opinion -- it's impossible to come up with a set of core principles of progressivism. Because it's not an ideology but rather a process by which people compete for social status.

In my view it's roughly analogous to fashion in clothing. The basic rules are (1) to be safe, copy what most other people are doing; (2) if you want to get ahead, you need to go a little further than what other people are doing; and (3) sometimes it's worth the risk to try to be a trend setter. If you don't follow the rules, you can expect to be ostracized.

Imo one of the core problems with wokeness is that it generally elevates symbolic above substantive behaviour. Under wokeness, a person who has never lifted a finger for a single black person in all their life is still fundamentally better than a mildly racist old coach who has not only trained, but also helped countless young guys to stay on the straight path in their personal life. Even (arguably, particularly) if those young guys were black.

Unfortunately, I'm cynical enough to think that this is a feature, not a bug, of wokeness.

For those seeking to discredit nominally progressive institutions, these examples are a satisfying just-so story. As you say, these ideas support the premise that progressives are hypocritical, undiscerning, and intellectually dishonest. I can understand the temptation, but I am drawn to another explanation. Companies are not single-minded entities, but loose collections of hundreds of individuals. It strikes me as almost tautological to say that the HR and branding departments are likely to be strongholds of progressive thinking, well-attuned to the image that the company wants to present. On the other hand, it seems equally intuitive to think that middle-management is not so concerned with appearances, instead prioritizing the bottom line. Ultimately, then, the conflict we observe not does not arise from a rusty cog in progressive ideology but instead a lack of internal coordination/agreement.

There is no way for me to prove this, of course, but the continual tension between games company employees and management (via union drives, public awareness campaigns about crunch, etc.) seems sufficient to point to the values gap between the two groups.

On the other hand, it seems equally intuitive to think that middle-management is not so concerned with appearances, instead prioritizing the bottom line.

This doesn't seem intuitive at all. From what I've observed, middle managers aren't especially known for prioritizing the bottom line - even upper managers and CEOs aren't known for that, though they're generally moreso. They're known for prioritizing their own career progression, which is sometimes helped by the bottom line, but, for middle managers, often are overwhelmed by other, often zero-sum/negative-sum concerns like office politics, which often intersects with actual politics.

Yeah. CEOs and Upper Management KPIs tend to be broad enough that it's hard to completely game them without doing something for the bottom line at the same time, even if you can argue all day about sustainability and short-term KPI optimization that's damaging to longterm business success.

Perhaps middle-management isn't the perfectly apt term, but I still think the dichotomy (that some employees are concerned with appearances, and others are concerned with the bottom line) holds regardless of how you categorize the respective camps.

They're simply socially liberal while economically conservative. Obviously plastering trannys all over a game is just common decency, but paid leave and worker protections is communism. This is a totally consistent position from woke corporate and even many mainsteam dems.

Anyways being a father is right coded and has zero clout on the victim hierarchy.

I think to some level it makes tactical sense for progressives to be selective here. Media has reach and shapes culture. It shapes what people think is OK, normal, etc. If you have a fixed outrage budget to force people to be more progressive, do you burn it on improving the working conditions of thousands or changing the media consumption of millions?

Is that really a dichotomy? Why not just include progressive economics into the media?

fired while on paternity leave, just 9 days after the birth of her second child

Based

Good catch, I missed this

This isn't unique to the games industry. You see the same in Hollywood, academia, even a lot of progressive NGOs. If I had a penny for every performatively woke company that turned out to be exploiting its workers, I'd have rather a lot of pennies.

But at the same time I don't think those industries are particularly worse than other sectors. If you want to get mad at aggressive layoffs, union busting etc you need to be mad at pretty much everyone. Maybe that makes it harder to organize against?

But at the same time I don't think those industries are particularly worse than other sectors

My intuition is that people and entities that make a show of moral superiority behave morally worse, generally speaking, than others, in situations where they perceive they are not being scrutinized. I have basically no evidence to support this claim, it's just my intuition about human nature -- that bad people have more incentive to don a halo and also that people who have paid lip service to some Just Cause are more likely to feel they have permission to step out of line. Oh, and also my many observations of hypocrisy among celebrities, politicians, activists, and so on.

“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yeah. Industries with massive pull factors (Getting to work in gaming/film/whatever) and fairly weak bottom lines/hugely variable returns on investment are always going to have volatile and shitty working conditions. Either your sheer passion for making media has to cover a lot of ground or you're kinda shooting yourself in the foot economically by choosing to go work in an area that's never gonna be able to pay out commensurate to your skills' worth on the boring market.

“One of our friends in particular had plans that didn’t involve being unceremoniously fired while on paternity leave, just 9 days after the birth of her second child.

What is happening with the gendered nouns here?

I've known Chinese people to do this since they lack gendered pronouns. "He", "she" and "it" are one word. In the 20th century they created written gendered versions of these; inspired by gendered Western languages. But spoken is "tā" for everything.

Countless times I've been listening to someone live translate their Chinese language thoughts to English and veer between "he" and "she" even though there is only one subject in the story.

But maybe this is instead radical gender fluidity or the rare post-partum sex change. Or someone wrote down a single incorrect word

Yeah no idea if it's a typo or it's a MtF who is on paternity leave for a recent childbirth? Or I guess maybe a non-birthing member of a lesbian couple.

Either a weird half-transgender situation, or they screwed up between "paternity" and "parental". I'm guessing the latter.

EDIT: or it's two different people. Bob was fired after Alice gave birth to her second child.

No big deal, just a female employee on paternity leave because s(he) transitioned into a male sometime in the 9 days after giving birth. The baby might be a bit confused though.

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