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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   2515 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?

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.

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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