Granted it was during a bleak period of my life when I was so reactionary. But my god, to think these goobers are still around today, still doing racism and sexism, just moving from target to target to take out the impotent rage on.
Just reminded of it today with the “discourse” of Yasuke being in Ass Creed and G*mers changing any woman not white and waifish with AI.
At one point, I personally identified as an Anti-feminist. It was over a decade ago, of course, but it brings me great shame. I never considered myself conservative, I have genuine fascists in my family and never fully aligned with any of them, but I was a deeply reactionary liberal. I fell down that pipeline and nearly tumbled down the alt-right, but thankfully stopped at “classical liberalism.” Please, feel free to laugh at my former self, he was (and still is, albeit to a lesser extent) a supreme dumbass of the highest order of magnitude, and should be laughed at.
Unlearning the sheer amount of propaganda laid upon me from birth took effort, and a whole lot of grass touching. Talking to women, POC, marginalized people, queer people. Each layer of propaganda built over me peeled off, and with each peel came more and more shame at my former self. However, with each peel came more weight coming off my shoulders, renewed clarity, and new friends and eventual comrades.
What I am trying to say, is that we are the sums of our trajectories. It’s the Dialectic at work! We contain within ourselves the next version. Politzer puts Dialectical Materialism very beautifully in Elementary Principles of Philosophy, and I truly believe it helped me shed my self-hatred for being so reactionary for so long, as it was a necessary step considering my own personal Material Conditions that led to the me of today.
I look forward to looking at how far I have come from where I am now in the future.
Unlearning the sheer amount of propaganda laid upon me from birth took effort, and a whole lot of grass touching. Talking to women, POC, marginalized people, queer people. Each layer of propaganda built over me peeled off, and with each peel came more and more shame at my former self. However, with each peel came more weight coming off my shoulders, renewed clarity, and new friends and eventual comrades.
This was my trajectory too. I went through a lot of rehabs and psych ward visits for my alcoholism that radicalized me and allowed me the chance to meet people very different from myself.
I truly believe it’s the best path to deprogramming people. Exposure works. It’s easy to dehumanize others until you work and study alongside them, until they become just as human as you.
It’s also a major factor for anti-immigrant rhetoric and redlining, to keep that fascism festering.
I look forward to looking at how far I have come from where I am now in the future
I tell myself this all the time. You should always be able to look back ten years and be like “what was I thinking??” It shows growth, and it shows you won’t ever stop working on yourself. Anyone born in the U.S. that has taken our path knows how much unlearning you have to do in life.
It’s funny to me how all the “anti-feminist/anti-SJW classical liberals” from that era have faded away, because even if those guys didn’t realize it, the whole anti-feminism/SJW thing was just a stepping stone towards fascism and now the real thing has overthrown it.
I guess it’s not really funny as much as it is terrifying, but it’s still kinda funny to me how irrelevant people like Thunderf00t and Amazing Atheist are now, because they were assholes.
It’s deeply sad and pathetic to me that other people my age are still posting on 4chan like they’re 12 and just learned some racial slurs. And have now morphed into being “anti-woke” instead of “anti-sjw” when its all the same.
It is, it’s the same shit shit just new lingo. It went from anti-feminism to anti-sjw to anti-woke now to anti-dei, just new buzzwords for the same old hatred of women and minorities.
Gotta say, I mostly view incels with pity. Like, if the demiurge isn’t real, they’ve created it and made it their god. : (
Agreed. I’ve got this saying; “Always compassion, never mercy”. I can recognize that many, probably most of our enemies didn’t start out as bad people, they were made that way by circumstance. But the solution is to change the circumstance, and that’s going to involve breaking a considerable number of eggs. I’ve said in the past that we’re fighting to save the Fascists, too. Not the fascists as they are now, but the children who should have had a chance to not become fascists. In a sense we, like we meaning every person struggling for a better world back to the days we were yelling at each other in trees, failed those children. And we owe it to those children who were beaten in to fascists to fight to make sure others don’t suffer the same fate. idk, I guess it’s kind of abstract and weird, but I feel the goal of socialism, of communism, is to save everyone if we can, and I think part of that is that we can save people from becoming fash, too. Idk, I guess I’m just ranting now.
Naive question - why do you feel shame? I wasn’t too invested in the events back in 2014 when they happened, but after reading the leaked “GameJournoPros” chat thread it seemed like the “Gaters” were right in their criticisms of journalistic ethics in the video games industry.
Genetic fallacies about the motivations of GamerGaters aside, if you personally advocated for ethics in journalism with pure intentions and didn’t doxx or harass anyone, why would you feel shame?
This
You shouldn’t take what they said it was about at face value. Its the same with other right-wing movements like “Save the children” (really just anti-LGBTQ+), or anti-DEI (white supremacist movement).
Well sure. But if the broken clock happened to be right about the time in this case, my question was why anyone would be ashamed of believing it.
The freak out about Anita was so something. She was offering the most milquetoast, inoffensive, basic feminism 101 critiques of some games and the fash and proto-fash lost their entire goddamn mines.
Anita: "Hey did you ever think about how you can murder sex workers in Hitman? Why did they set up the game to allow you to do that? What can we learn by analyzing this question?
Fash: "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Okay, so, I’m old, and I was around when you’d ask your parents to buy Nintendo magazine so you could look for the cheat codes in the back. And here’s the thing about industry journalism. Not just gaming journalism, but all industry journalism; It’s propaganda. There’s never been any “ethics in gaming journalism” because it’s not journalism. It’s a captive propaganda program.
It was the most obivous tell that GG was always reactionary misogyny. People were upset about something that didn’t exist and never had, and they were brutalizing Zoe and Anita and countless others in a ruthless, misogynist, racist, reactionary mob attack.
If you’re accepting free copies of games, free travel, free accomodations, free hardware, gifts, swag bags, perks, bennies, bribes, you have no integrity as a journalist. You’re compromised. journalism is oppositional and antagonistic. Journalists are supposed to tear down the lies of the powerful and reveal the truth.
“games journalism” has always been industry boosting with no credibility. When that fucking asshole wrote a whole misogynist screed attacking his ex, when he set off this massive years long witch hunt, he wasn’t critiquing journalism. He just gave a huge amount of violent reactionaries a paper-thin excuse for engaging in misogynistic mob violence.
if you personally advocated for ethics in journalism with pure intentions
There were exactly zero people doing that in G*merGate.
I was 12 in 2000. There were a lot of words that were “ok” to say back then that I regret having come out of my mouth.
The important thing is to move on and learn why that was bad. Don’t beat yourself up over it.
There were a lot of words that were “ok” to say back then
“There are two words I don’t want to hear anybody say. ‘Sucks’ and ‘Shut up’.”
-my elementary school principal, in a very real and very serious assembly
Suckiest Bunch Of Sucks is the only thing that comes to mind after something like that
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
One of my “friends” taught me a slur in 4th grade and it made the teacher think my parents were racists lol
If you’re reformed and now on Hexbear, fuck you, Jay!
Around the same grade, a friend said to me “you know why everything costs $##.99? It’s called the Jewish dollar, cuz they’re cheap”
I didn’t know the stereotypes but learned there.
Similar to being introduced to the word gay by it being hurled at me as an insult while on the bus, didn’t know what it meant but knew I didn’t want to be that
We had a kid on our elementary school playground that had older brothers who told him about all the “bad stuff”. He would hold court as we could sit around him and learn all the bad words for lgbtq people, the subtle differences between a blowjob and a “hummer”, all the made up sex things like “rusty trombones” and whatnot.
That Kid turned out really weird. Hope he’s doing ok out there.
There were a lot of words that were “ok” to say back then that I regret
The amount that I used the r-slur in high school…
A lot of us did. But look at us now! I’m proud of anyone who realized that was wrong and changed their behavior. Too many people double down on “it’s just words bro” or “it didn’t used to mean that. It just meant dumb”.
The cool thing about being wrong is that it means you’re still growing and alive.
We should do a watch of the original Stepford Wives. It’s a really well done horror thriller that’s still pretty damn relevant. Also a good time capsule of the white middle class feminism of the 70s that was often criticized at the time by more intersectional feminisms.
