Lurker > legendary_zell

Yeoh officially GOATED. I'm so happy that EEAAO is now gonna go down in history. It's absurdism, multiverse storytelling, and earnest emotion done right.

We need a few more decades to decide, I think.

So murder of an activist then? Seems like it. They just lie in the service of maintaining their power. Little things like life, democracy, and truth can't get in the way of their enforcing a certain social order.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/2/4/AALY52AAEROU.jpg

Lonestar2000 posted...

Did you have a stroke in the middle of this post?

Conservative id/rage just looks very very similar. The idea that poor people and likely minorities would receive housing near their betters and likely minorities despite being inherently, unchangeably bad and making bad decision gave him stroke like symptoms.

If a Plaintiff's lawyer ever made an argument this frivolous and ridiculous, they'd be tarred and feathered as an example for future generations and whatever law they sued under would be repealed.

For these guys, nothing will happen at all.

Some of you guys are genuinely too dumb and reactionary to exist. It's beyond parody at this point.

That's probably because the movement of people who say that without elaboration is full of rabid woman haters. You both shouldn't be surprised and shouldn't take it to heart. If you're not an incel, they're just wrong.

Unfortunately, amoral dodging of moral responsibility is exactly what the most powerful people in our society want, especially the class of people that is creating these tools and deciding how they are used: tech bros. They love the ability to treat cool and terrible things as the same, to make decisions of huge consequence while professing and possibly believing that those decisions were purely rational and not political or moral.

They already think for some reason that they are the best equipped to solve society's problems. I worry there won't be much humility or reluctance to follow the suggestions their creations spout out and not much second guessing since: 1) If the programs have any political or moral assumptions at all, they'll be the ones that serve their makers and 2) Whether they do or not, people will either implement the AI's suggestions thoughtlessly or they'll consciously choose what benefits them, while hiding behind the supposed objectivity of the AI.

bigblu89 posted...

If there's a single person out there that bases the way the live and perceive people on a Chris Rock stand up routine, we have bigger problems as a society than I could ever imagine.

We have thousands, if not millions of those people. We've got big big problems.

I'll never forgive him for making people think it's okay and not racist to say there's a difference between "black people" and "N-words."

When you do observational comedy that borders on political, people are going to take what you say as the truth or license to be an asshole. We see it every single time.

COVxy posted...

I'm pretty sure she wasn't even on my radar in 2013. So my comment reflects what I saw during the lead up to and during 2015 primaries. At that point, at least, it was obvious that she was democrat only for the purposes of "disruption" and actually aligned with the republican party.

My point was that she was on the Democratic Party's radar and they wanted her to represent the future. They knew or should have known about her background and her views, and yet they still called her a rising star, gave her a speaking position like Obama in 2004, and made her the vice-chair of the party.

If they knew what her views were, they suck hugely. If they didn't that's just more proof that one of our two major political parties is agnostic towards what their leaders actually want, as long as they're useful and will toe the line.

COVxy posted...

I'm not sure I heard or saw too many people pushing Tulsi that didn't seem to be clearly bad actors, or horndogs, or both.

https://www.vogue.com/article/making-a-splash-is-tulsi-gabbard-the-next-democratic-party-star

I think shes wonderful, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer tells me. Shes been in combat in a leadership role, and she knows how to lead. She deals well with men and women, young and old, Republican and Democrat. Shes got an extraordinary political talent.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who picked Gabbard to speak at the Democratic National Convention last year, describes her as an emerging starwhile signaling that as a newcomer she has something to prove. Some fresh recruits stay and some go. Its hard to tell what route shell choose.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/06/what-does-tulsi-gabbard-believe

"By then, she was building a nationwide profile: in 2013, the Democratic National Committee had appointed her vice-chair, a role that marked her as a rising star."

These are just some examples. She was their wet dream because she had all the characteristics they want from their politicians, broad appeal, ambition, and no leftist tendencies or broad political program. You notice they never actually praise her for what she believes.

It's crazy what she was allowed to get away with because she was not a leftist and was brown and a veteran and young and attractive (for a politician). She's always been fash when it comes to LGBT people and is literally a Manchurian candidate for an anti-LGBT, fake Hindu cult.

This info was all readily available and it was ignored because the establishment wanted a marketable figurehead who wouldn't go left on them.

deoxxys posted...

Why do I need to listen to criticism if I can just point to some assholes sending death threats and pretend like they're the same people making criticism?

I'm done going back and forth with people who can't separate harassment from criticism
Untracking this topic

You made like two posts, made unsupported accusations, didn't respond to anything anyone actually said, and now you're acting like you're taking your ball and going home? Not a good use of an afternoon.

The whole point was that the criticisms were self-consciously fake, and even though fake, they barely existed. It was harassment all the way down, there's no separating the harassment from the "criticism" because the movement was never concerned with any "criticisms." It's readily apparent by examining what GGers actually did at the time, how they responded to actual ethical criticism of the gaming industry not related to culture wars (radio silence) and what they do now (complain about the blacks, wamen, gays, and how they were so sorely misunderstood).

deoxxys posted...

They've mastered the art of deflection over the years since gamergate.

It's easily applicable to anything now.

"You didn't like the new Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, etc? It's because you're a sexist, I don't care if you have some valid criticisms. You aren't allowed to have those at the same time that someone on the internet is being harassed."

Nevermind that as long as anonymity on the internet exists there will always be some form of harassment. For those who would try to obfuscate my statement, no...this doesn't mean I'm endorsing it, just stating that it's an inevitability.

Scapegoats

This doesn't excuse movements founded for, started by, and sustained through harassment. It's the leftists who care about the so called "valid points" that you hide behind, not gamergaters. In GG spaces untainted by those evil SJWs, y'all spend all your time hating on minorities and women, not about worker's rights, layoffs, microtransactions, or corporate control of media. There's no deflection here, just accurately identifying what the movement and the people behind it were about.

All evidence shows that its actually gamergaters who consciously deflected from their actual purposes of harassment and culture war by using "ethics in videogame journalism" and the few minorities they could scrounge up as shields.

It's pure projection as 98.7% of right wing politics is. UR keeps bringing up the Civil War and Confederacy and it's actually an apt comparison. What some of you guys are trying to do by retroactively sanitizing GG is much like the Southern Lost Cause myth that says the Civil War was about states rights, northern aggression, and protecting the Southern way of life. When people were very open about what it was about at the time and what it was about was trash.

You're talking to Unfair Represent. About Gamergate. In 2023. You don't have to take any of this seriously. He's going full UR, disengage.

It's a political organization with public, well defined beliefs, and a track record in accordance with those beliefs. People choose to voluntarily associate with it, and the party relies on those votes and the general idea of their support for its power and legitimacy. When you vote for a party, they have a platform/manifesto, they're going to push those things forward if given the chance. You can't then disclaim them by picking and choosing specific items.

Yes, you can in fact be defined by who you associate with, the public professions of belief you sign onto, and who you directly empower. Anything to the contrary for the sake of "civility" is nonsense and a lie. We understand that and act accordingly in all other aspects of life, but for some reason, centrists, right wingers, and blinkered liberals think it's "rude" to do so when it comes to politics. How convenient for the people who directly cause shitty things to happen to other people!

If you vote for the strip X people of rights party, fund them, defend them from criticism or deflect blame from them, you are responsible for what they do. I don't care whether you did it for low taxes or because Biden is old. You could stay your ass at home, vote third party, jump off a cliff, it doesn't matter. You don't get to vote for a fascist party and be considered non-fash.

The overwhelming focus on shooting and fighting when the medium can be used for so much more.

The development of a male oriented, exclusionary culture over the first several decades of gaming.

The dwindling of high budget turn based RPGs (by far the worst)

If you firebomb a police station and get caught, you should understand that there'll be serious consequences.

I swear to God some of you are making a beeline straight for tech dystopia and you won't let a single thing stop you. We'll have Cyberpunk without the constant rain and cool outfits, but with the hypercapitalism and alienation. Cool!

Hoodroar posted...

Thing is the most aggressive party tends to stand out more.

As for the plot, IRC chats revealed that the guy who started it all was just mad that his ex cheated on him, and as revenge leaked personal details about her to help 4channers develop a conspiracy theory about her sleeping her way to the top of indie gaming. The channers cooperated because they already had a grudge against his ex over prior gaming disputes. Together they discussed how to propagandize the "movement" en masse. When questioned about his support of blatant lies, he basically just said, "well it's the type of thing she would do."

So yeah I don't deny that the core premise of GG was fradulent, ill-intentioned, and not about gaming journalism. At best, the original GG supporters were too quick to grow outraged over unverified rumors. The media was right on that end.

Unfortunately though the IRC logs released over a week after the 14 article dump against gamers, so people were too offended by that point to account for the fact that GG was indeed originally a smear campaign. Newer GGers had jumped onboard over behavior they saw with their own eyes (tons of journos from different publications coordinating in their own private chats about how to shape the narratives of the gaming community). It's just a bad case of miscommunication.

There was a subset of gamers attacking people out of sexist paranoia and/or opposition to calls for diversification/cultural progressivism in gaming. But there was another subset that denounced the prior groups, but still felt they didn't represent vocal gamers as a whole and that their presence didn't justify calling out the whole gaming community.

Yet people lumped the latter in with the former simply for standing up for "gamers" in general, despite them not actually spreading any hate themselves. And to some gamers that felt like people genuinely throwing their "livelihoods" under the bus to make a social statement, and/or simply looking for an excuse to start bullying gamers as a group again.

A better method would've been cooperating with the good gamers to alienate the bad gamers. Focusing specifically on the toxic gamers allows others to feel like they're not being attacked.

There's no real way to know. I'd guess a minority, naturally. I don't mean to claim most GGers were good, just that some portion probably was and took an excessive amount of heat.

I disagree strongly with some of this but fair enough. However, this is all very different from saying gamers were leftist until those mean ole journalists turned them into Nazi-wazis.

He's top 4 stealthiest for sure.

Hoodroar posted...

It started as harassment, but not everyone rallied in was aware of the harassment at the time. It was a plot cooked up by a small amount of malicious actors in a private chat; until they were exposed only they specifically knew the premise of the controversy was a lie. (i.e. it was a select group of depraved trolls' faults, and attacking "gamers" as a whole over it was off-base)

It was fairly obvious at the time. I didn't know about the secret plot back then, but I could still tell the overwhelming main thrust of GG was harassment and gatekeeping.

But by the time they were exposed the controversy was bigger than what started it. Whereas some were harassing devs/journalists, others' efforts were being made to simply petition advertisers to pull out from the websites publishing articles against their audiences.

Those petitions had nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with the perception that non-GAMER (minority, female, leftist) journos were attacking gamers...by describing them and their actions accurately. What does that have to do with ethics? That's just culture war by another name.

There was the whole "NotYourShield" thing showing that some of them were minorities and women, and thus probably not explictly opppsed to minorities/women in gaming, but rather onboard for the journalism/censorship concerns.

What percentage of the movement were those people? And where are they before and after the movement? Haven't heard anything about their supposed ethics concerns since 2014 or so. There's no reason to think that just because they were not straight white dudes that they were involved for ethics in videogame journalism.

We've seen from log cabin Republicans, Candace Owens/Jason Whitlock, Blair White/Caitlyn Jenner and tradwives that it's possible to be for a reactionary movement even while being a minority. Many marginalized people like to attack other marginalized people or leftist causes because they are also reactionary in many ways or as a way of being one of the good ones/making a show of attacking the bad ones so you won't be associated with them and attacked yourself.

But even an obsessive degenerate isn't necessarily a bigot. It's important to differentiate because some people are more reachable than others.

That's true. But the ones who were not bigots largely just stayed out of the whole mess or were not the ones posting screeds against the conspiracy of SJW journos to target true gamers. Even most hardcore gamers did not get involved with GG, the ones who did were largely not just degenerates, they were fighting a culture war.

Hoodroar posted...

I was alive on on the internet on forums like this. I know what people were saying and their individual motivations. I know, for a fact, that the amount of people who cared about the GG tantrum before the gaming media basically called their readers losers was significantly lower than the amount of people who responded afterwards.

You underestimated the amount of people who were purely hardcore gamers who didn't like their hobby being attacked, didn't like being attacked for defending it, and were willing to ally with anyone offering help to fight back, regardless of their prior political views.

Generalization is lazy and in this case it was disastrous. There is always nuance.

The only rebuttal you guys ever have is accusing people of lying.

The amount of them who were lying was not 100%.

You're relying on hazy assertions about people's true internal intent. I'm talking about what people actually did. There's a huge gulf between their actual behavior and the pure pure intentions you're ascribing to them. You're ignoring the fact that it started as harassment and only escalated from there. There was never a point at which it was evident that people cared about the things they claimed to care about when challenged.

It's a strawman to argue that we're saying everyone was lying. There were some people who actually cared about "ethics in gaming journalism." The same tiny fraction that existed then and now for such an irrelevant issue.

No, what the majority of people got mad about is the idea that the feminists and SJWs and minorities were invading "their" space and trying to improve it or transform it using what they felt was disproportionate cultural power. They felt that inclusion or games that did not feature silent white male space marines with crewcuts were an attack on them, that 100 percent accurate statements about the exclusionary nature of gaming and gamers at the time were an attack. The alt right was able to feast on this because that's the exact same mindset that produces incels, Nazis, and conscious reactionaries.

Some gaming journalists called capital G "Gamers" losers....they sure went on to disprove that huh?

Hoodroar posted...

No it wasn't. Plenty of gamers legitimately only jumped in because they didn't like the articles claiming hardcore "gamers are over", seperate gaming media outlets colluding behind the scenes, or criticism of these actions being censored. Some were under a genuine false impression that devs were sleeping with reviewers for higher scores, not deliberately spreading fake propaganda themselves. Lumping them in with the 4chan sexists making stuff up to harass female devs and the Twitter/Breitbart anti-SJW grift when they were just trying to defend the integrity of their hobby generated a lot of spite that could've been avoided.

I'm definitely not hashing this out with anyone again. We have access to the full historical record now, you can go back and see what actually animated people, what actually got attention, what people actually did when left to their own devices. Very few ever gave a flying fuck about gaming journalism, such a thing never would have created a "movement" that big. No substantial constituency cared about that before GG, then, or now, it was never more than a fig leaf for a reactionary movement.

It's clear to see that it was 95% about harassment and reactionary politics about "blacks, gays, women, feminists, SJWs, liberals, and leftists keep out of our space." No one cared about so called "corruption" or "ethics in gaming journalism" if it was not related to one of those things and a vector to harass and exclude one of those groups. It was a movement to keep games and gaming thoughtlessly apolitical or right wing by people with reactionary social views.

Hoodroar posted...

I remember when gamers were leftists and then the media response to GG drove them to the right, like Milo Yiannopolous and Steve Bannon wanted.

No, gamers were largely apolitical, but with underlying traits and values that made them an obvious recruitment zone for the far right. Gamergate was an inherently right wing thing that served as a political awakening for people who were already primed for the alt right.

Because it has a long history of being full of right wing trolls of all stripes. So people are very mistrusting of anything that could be perceived as a right wing argument. It's always been trolls apart from a few users over the history of the board.

Because many of the people who try to post there on a lark are very politically uninformed and so they get bombed whenever they try to post stupid things on there.

Because it's a very white liberal board specifically, there's all the flaws that come with that, like people being unacquainted with thought patters outside their spectrum on, to the point where they cannot recognize leftist criticism and can only view it through the lens of rightist whataboutism. Or they cannot distinguish between trolling and genuine conservative thought because of Poe's Law and because they don't encounter conservatives in their day to day.

They also don't like any form of radical politics or identity based politics beyond what's mainstream, so no BLM until 2020, no indigenous politics, no gender liberation, no reparations, no any of that.

CE is even worse on every metric though, except for maybe average level of hostility. But when it's bad, it's worse, more ignorant, and more 2014 Gamergateish.

You're posting a lot of stupid stuff lately, TC. I'd suggest that you post unstupid stuff instead.

https://www.businessinsider.com/florida-anti-trans-bill-court-custody-kids-gender-affirming-care-2023-3

They're saying the quite part out loud now and authorizing the kidnapping of children for getting medical treatment.

They're going further than they did for gay people, they want trans people equated with either child abuse or pedophilia. What do you think is going to happen to such people? How many social protections do we give pedophiles?

And yet some of you are STILL playing semantics. You wonder how people allowed past genocides to happen? YOU are how they were allowed to happen.

Conservatives always seem to be wrong about what their advocates, spokespeople and representatives will do. When liberals and leftists make accurate statements or predictions about what their guys want to do and are doing, they claim the people pointing this out are hysterical. Then when it happens, they are either silent or cape for it and act like it was always justified. We see it with cutting social programs, we saw it with Roe v. Wade, now we're seeing it again.

For those of you who claim you don't actually want this, why support a party that does and why do you never adjust your worldview when you're consistently wrong about what people under your banner actually want to do?

It's almost like you're just trying to avoid the heat that comes from owning your abhorrent beliefs and what the people you empower will do...If that's not the case, then jump of off this ship or you will be considered just as much of a Nazi as this guy. That's all I can tell you at this point.

30 days of September, April, June and November etc.

It's Democratic politics.

I just watched it and I see why there's been essentially no hype or discussion.

After watching Andor, the drop off from that to this is precipitous. The writing, the plot, the dialogue, the visuals, all were trash this episode. The only thing this has going for it at this point is the cuteness of Grogu and Marvel style "are we gonna see X character from Y" or "maybe they're gonna bring back Z who died and was blown up in the vacuum of space."

I have no faith in the actual story at this point.

Everyone needs to stop mincing words. Whatever is in these people's hearts, they're doing fascism. They are trying to turn Florida into a rerun of Nazi era Bavaria.

The anger and pointing out that vulnerable groups are actually bad you know is their whole point. That stuff comes first, second, and third before the funny.

So you end up with repeating the same joke because it attacks the same thing they view as absurd.

Or you end up with them just stating their actual political views on stage, with a mic in hand and a laugh sign behind them, no punch line, no set up.

It's not that it's impossible, but it requires actually addressing social issues in a relevant way. But they don't get that, and they think you can't make race jokes or gender jokes or trans jokes nowadays. No, you absolutely can. They just have to be original and distinguishable from a Tucker Carlson segment. All they have to do is check to see whether the group they're talking about is the butt of the joke, but they never do because that IS the point for them.

Pandemics absolutely break people's brains. Some subset of people immediately starts trying to scapegoat every form of life.