There's an argument to be made that GG was responsible for neo-fascism blooming in the west. In the very least it was a big push to getting Trump elected and establishing the alt-right.
I will make that argument. I was there, Gandalf, 3,000 years ago, when the strength of gamers fail. Looking back, we were 150% watching white male gamers being radicalized in to neo-fascism, but I at least didn't recognize the scope or importance of what was happening.
Me too. I watched all the ingredients for an embarrassingly nerdy but still dangerous beer hall putsch mix together and form a fascist brew in real time.
It says something about the state of America that you can't get people to care about politics by talking about health care, mass incarceration, housing prices, etc. But tell them woke is why vidja games are bad and they're ready to go for fascism.
Especially wild when the downfall of gaming is a ham fisted example of the natural conclusion of capitalism.
Turns out when giant corporations just try to charge you a subscription for the same thing every year instead of improving or developing the product because Gamers pre order every piece of shit they wrap in foil paper you get shitty over priced cookie cutter games.
Clearly what would solve that is being more racist.
Bannon's goldfarming business on World of Warcraft, by his own admission, gave him many of his pre- regime political front ideas: specifically, that were a bunch of easily led, credulous assholes just waiting for something to rally behind.
The "nothing ever happens, propaganda has no effect on me" head-in-grounders crowd has claimed that gate had zero influence on the election, but it was a squeaker, and even an upset for many in the ruling class that actually did put their money and expectations behind . A nudge was enough.
And beyond that it's created a persistent, ongoing cultural shift in how media is viewed and evaluated. And it was 10 years ago, a lot of those gamegaters who were teenagers and young adults are edging in to their 30s, in to real big kid jobs where they have some degree of influence.
And it was 10 years ago, a lot of those gamegaters who were teenagers and young adults are edging in to their 30s, in to real big kid jobs where they have some degree of influence.
And some are old enough to already be very, very divorced, and it shows, now shepherding the next generation into following them.
Reactionaries hated The Last Jedi because feeemale and political
I hated The Last Jedi because Rian Johnson can make an entertaining whodunit movie, but "hehe GOTCHA! AGAIN!" is obnoxious and tiresome and out of place in the Star Wars franchise.
They all sucked and the worst part was the back and forth narrative slapfight between Abrams and Johnson that lead from the thesis-antithesis of the first two to the clownish synthesis of the third and worst one of all.
Walking out of the theater my opinion was just a resounding "blah" and in conjunction with Rogue One it killed my interest in seeing any more new Star Wars stuff
Yeah, those were the more interesting bits but then those were just walked back or resolved before the movie was even over
Then you had the insanely convoluted hyperdrive chase premise forming the backbone of the entire movie, the sidequest casino planet and the movie's opening cutting from yo momma jokes to characters sacrificing themselves
There's a subset of the Star Wars fandom that assumes you're stupid if you didn't find all those gotchas and subversions le smart and therefore le good. It's the old liberals versus chuds thing, mostly, tough I'm sure some leftists also believe it to stick it to the chuds (and the treat critics).
That whole chase made no sense, the First Order could've sent a bunch of fighters to attack them, since they'd be much faster than the capital ships they were chasing, or just send in ships from other nearby systems to intercept them (unless their entire fleet was chasing them, which'd be nonsensical in its own way).
At least there was great dialog like ”We are the spark that'll light the fire that'll burn the First Order down”
"Oh Luke is about to confront Kylo GOTCHA he's just sending an illusion and he wasn't just killed OH GOTCHA he died because sending that illusion made him too tired or something. Enjoy your gradually fading and somehow now very important symbolic ghost dice, Kylo!"
That doesn't make them equally Hitler, then. Makes one more accomplished as a Hitler, while one is more obnoxious, sloppy, and directly incompetent as a leader (which is arguably more like Hitler anyway under some metrics).
my point is that America didn't just recently "become fascist" through some gamer social reactionary tantrum. America has always been a fascist state and was doing medical experiments on black people against their will and running slave penal colonies for hundreds of years. Westerners really don't understand that America didn't just "become fascist" it IS fascist at its core and always has been, and stuff like Gamergate are just tiny symptoms not causes
I really don't like it when people try to blame everything on Trumpism and act like it's an anomaly and we were less fascist beforehand. It's even done here, and in the "99% hitler vs 100% hitler" memes. Hitler was 50% as fascist as America. We are worse and more successful at being evil and fascist. Hitler looked to us for inspiration and failed to reach our level.
I didn't say it was a solitary movement in a vaccuum with no precedent; I said it was a nudge further into a new development beyond what was already there.
Fuck Biden but the reason more people died under Biden is because Trump literally encouraged the spread of it with culture war bullshit until thousands of people were dying every day at the start of bidens term.
Fuck him and he didn't do shit to stop it but getting a car up to 100 mph, jumping out of the drivers door and then blaming the person who grabbed the wheel for the crash seems shitty, even if the person that grabbed the wheel dumped it straight into the ditch.
I hate Biden and don't think he's any better than Trump but I think there's a bit of a tendency to overcorrect and act like Trump actually isn't that bad, which even if its lib shit the orange man is in fact bad.
stop using nonsensical metaphors to understand reality. Look at concrete actions and results of those actions.
Biden is perpetrating a genocide right now against Palestinians, and started a war against Russia that has claimed over a million lives. Biden's policies if he were president in 2020 would be roughly identical to Trump's policies, and even less people would follow guidelines because there wouldn't be an anti-Trump culture war to make Liberals want to wear masks to show their moral virtues. Covid would have been swept under the rug even more quietly, with less pushback from the population.
It's not that Trump is "better", that's not the point. The point is countering the radlib tendency among the left to overly freak out about "Trumpism" and "Fascism" as if it's some anomaly and every blame can be placed on Trump's shoulders. He's the scapegoat, and when you repeat this kind of naive idealist analysis that could only be done by like a 20-year old or younger, you are playing into the DNC narrative of Trumpwashing. THAT is the reason more hardline leftists downplay Trump being to blame for everything, because the squishy radlib left are trying to place all the blame on GOP/Trump, which is a narrative being fed to them by the DNC.
That's a pretty one to one metaphor. I literally started the comment with "fuck biden" I'm not trying to carry water from him.
I agree the dems aren't better on any foreign policy issues and are trying to outland the chuds from the right on immigration but complaining that people are "try8ng to counter the tendency to freak out about fascism" is bad and is exactly what libs did for a year when they said everybody has to repect the office of president and people were being dramatic when they called Trump and Republicans fascist.
I live in a really rural area of a supposedly progressive state. There's half a dozen houses within a 30 minute drive of me proudly advertising they're ready to start rounding up anybody who doesn't support Trump. I'm not worried about "overstaying the threat of fasicsm"
Historically that's how fascism gets into power.
There's definitely a tendency to go past "the dems are also fascist" which I agree with into "the dems are actually worse than republicans" which is dangerous.
Democrats never proudly tell me how they'd like to burn down any house with a gay pride flag on it. I worked for a chud designing septic systems. He'd always talk about how we'll build the septic system above the well of any gay people or democrats so their water would be poisoned and they'd die.
stop using nonsensical metaphors to understand reality. Look at concrete actions and results of those actions.
Their metaphor was pretty solid. Trump created the conditions for Covid that Biden inherited and didn't fix. It was a group effort to slaughter all those people, even though most of them died once Biden took over just due to timing.
One thing that struck me about the Jan 6 riot is that, especially compared to the 2017 unite the right rally, everyone was fucking old. My read on that is that Facebook and it’s corresponding propaganda style has been much more fertile ground for activating reactionaries IRL than 4chan and Reddit has. There’s definitely millions and millions of gamer chuds, but they seem over represented online and underrepresented in voting booths, protests and riots
Yea the downside of trying to specifically radicalized antisocial NEETs is that they're pretty useless at anything other than calling people slurs from the safety of their troll cave.
I was thinking about how while it’s nothing new that reactionary groups attempt to co-opt youth subcultures, this one is maybe their most successful attempt of all time in terms of both per capita conversion and raw numbers.
Yeah, it's not a new thing at all, but gate was remarkably and lastingly successful compared to duds like, say, "Metalgate" that tried to ride its coattails but was such a failure that only fucking Green Day could be found to say that SJWs were ruining metal.
I don't need to tell you that Green Day is not metal and never was and fuck them anyway.