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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37953 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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I'm aware of how it looks. That being said, Danskin's UC Merced talk is from 2021, so if the woke are still talking about it, I see no reason why they shouldn't continue to be countered and called out on their misstatements. Furthermore, I am aware of several occasions where users on TheMotte have stated that they'd like to know more about GamerGate from a non-mainstream source to get an alternative opinion, and I thought this video would be a good jumping-off point to get into the topic.

Agreed. History is written by those who are considered authoritative, and GG is not ground which should ever be conceded. Ex-posting is bad, but it grew to so much more than Gjoni and Zoe that it would be like saying WWII was “a war about Poland.”

Except it kind of was a war about Poland. We just don't like to acknowledge it as such, because to do so would be to admit just how badly we failed them.

True, but it was also a war about Japan and China, and a war about what it takes to make a government which can span a continent, and a war about the future of weaponry, and a war about oceans and airplanes, and a war about war crimes, and a war about medical experimentation, and more. Poland was just the start of the eruption of fault lines all over the sociopolitical landscape.

Gamergate was the "Poland" moment of "woke". There were rumblings before, but it broke something.

One does not simply “explain” GamerGate. It cannot be understood by anyone who wasn’t on the pre-2014 internet. Telling a person to kill themselves was an acceptable response to them not liking your favorite game back then.

Telling a person to kill themselves was an acceptable response to them not liking your favorite game back then.

Maybe in the circles you rolled in. I'll attest that my corners of the internet never had that norm, and I've been an active internet user since at least 2005.

I think the main difference is that I never really gravitated towards competitive multiplayer video games or the communities around them. My experience of video game-related communities was fun, innocent discussions on the Ushi no Tane forums for Harvest Moon, and not (as they seemed to be from my outsider perspective) the toxic cesspools of teenage boys with no adult supervision teaching each other to be more and more aggressive and bullying over the most pointless things imaginable.

I don't doubt the other part of your post is true - a lot of the sides in Gamer Gate are explained by different media bubbles that had emerged in the pre-2014 internet, but to pretend it was some universal experience is a big mistake.

Telling a person to kill themselves was an acceptable response to them not liking your favorite game back then.

As someone who was on the Internet then (and even longer before that), no it wasn't. It was still flaming and frowned upon.

No one considered it beyond the pale is the point. And as @The_Nybbler pointed out just a moment ago, plenty of places allowed flaming even in quite professional contexts.

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