So, GamerGate.
First, if you'll pardon me...
That's me patting myself on the back for discussing the topic of corruption in gaming journalism
- specifically at Kotaku and Destructoid - a good three fuckin' years ago, long before
GamerGate had hashed their first tag.
Without resorting to personal harassment or bedroom drama that is none of our fuckin'
business!
That said, while I don't consider myself 'of the movement', if you cats are sincere on
this subject, I do believe it's half-past time you articulated your specific position,
and did so with alacrity, because to most folks on the outside leering in, your movement
is lookin' Goldust circa 1995 ambiguous.
And I believe it comes back to the masthead of the movement: Your title.
There's a reason I entitled my series 'The Downfall of Gaming Journalism'... and not
'The Anita Sarkeesian Happy Funtime Ideological Obfuscation Hour'.
GamerGate is too nebulous a term.
You need a razor-sharp point, articulated with lazer precision...
preferably by a devil-may-care, roguishly handsome, svelte ne'er do well with a buzzsaw
wit, inimitable personal style, and a bitchin' 2-for-1 deal at the cosmetics counter at JC
Penny.
Nah, I'm just fuckin' with you.
I won't be one fifth that deluded or self-important...
at least not until The Escapist's check clears.
The need to be concise and fanatically adhere to specifics isn't due to any incoherence
in your own message...
it's due to the shitbag tactics of the opposition.
Simply put: They have taken a discussion about a handful of very specific instances of irrefutably
proven journalistic misconduct... perpetrated by men...
...and somehow made it about Feminism.
It's the oldest debate tactic in the book.
If you can't win the debate you're having...
jeté on over to a debate you are winning.
Or at least one you can rely on mainstream media to break out the big guns for in your
compulsory fuckin' defense.
If your evidence is steadily eroding, if your grasp of the facts has all the self-assured
steadiness of Michael J. Fox during a volcanic eruption... change the debate by employing
facts you do have command of.
If you've broken every campaign promise you ever made, further pursued illegal wars you
yourself decried, and alienated half the electorate in the process...?
"Well HEY!
Look how white, rich and Mormon that guy is!"
That's why we're somehow debating the merits of modern feminism in a discussion about how
a blithering, profligate asshat from Kotaku didn't volunteer to his boss... the fact that
he was banging the subject of several of their fucking articles.
...and to the coterie of contrarian Colbert-coddling cuntflaps supporting Sarkeesian out of spite:
The aforementioned journalistic impropriety is not that some shitbag hipster at Kotaku
was railing a bitch while he was writing about her.
So you can head it on back to the timeline discrepancy all you fuckin' like.
'Well, you see, RazörFist... that article by Nathan Grayson was written months after
their relationship was over...'
Yeah, that's swell, Nightwang.
And unlike anything else I read on Kotaku, let's go ahead and assume it's actually true.
WHO GIVES A FRONT-FLIPPIN' FUCK?!
Are you actually suggesting that if a correspondent for ABC News was being rammed by a member
of Clinton's cabinet during the Lewinski scandal, they wouldn't be compelled to report that
fact to their fuckin' boss?!
I don't give a seventeenth of a shit if they're actively covering the cabinet at the time
or not, it's their obligation to voluntarily recuse themselves...
before they're presented with a conflict of interest!
As Kotaku Editor in Chief - and my personal favorite member of the Lollipop Guild - Stephen
Totillo has proven through his own fucking tweets...
Nathan Grayson did NOT volunteer an electron of that information...
until he was confronted with it.
As in 'against his will'.
As in 'by a fucking whistleblower!!'
There's your journalistic corruption!
Not blowjobs for benefits!
Nathan Grayson committed the first deadly sin of gaming journalism (and at least one
of the biblical ones) and every day he remains employed at Kotaku removes a glacier-sized
portion of credibility... from a website that didn't have a thimble-full to begin with!
And has harassment - and even worse - taken place in the name of this movement?
Absolutely!
Harassment and grotesque, unconscionable invasions of privacy have taken place in defense of
figures targeted by the movement, as well... proving only that there ain't a party in existence
that assholes don't turn up to!
It doesn't mean you call off the party.
The 2000 Democratic National Convention was penned in by rioting and protests, but you
don't halt the fuckin' nomination process just because Rage Against The Machine needs
to promote their new albu-- I mean social change!
I mean, fuck, I seem to remember in 2004, during the Anti-Bush protests, seeing a shitload
of busted out windows and spraypainted death threats in Downtown Phoenix courtesy of fringe
elements of the protest movement.
I don't remember seeing these folks calling for the end of that movement!
Accusations of harassment aren't invalid.
Not at all.
But your problem isn't with the movement.
It's with the act of harassment itself!
The law hasn't caught up to the internet yet.
I vehemently agree that it's ridiculous that if I go 50 in a 40 mph zone, I could wind
up paying upwards of $200 in traffic fines, but if I post someone's address, school schedule,
and child porn of them online, unless the FBI takes a time-out from prosecuting drug
kingpins and corporate racketeers and takes an interest...
ain't shit going to happen!
You want to be an activist?
Push for a well-funded, well-staffed cybercrime division in every police station in America,
with the full ability to coordinate with like divisions across the globe.
Sure, hacktivists can cower behind proxy upon proxy, but I tell you what: You devote an
entire division of law enforcement to finding these creeps - in the same way that forensic
science has caught up to the modern serial killer - the cops are probably going to pick
up a few tricks.
You subpoena a few of these land whales, impose the internet equivalent of traffic tickets,
and see if Doxxing and SWATing isn't cut in fucking half over the next 5 years.
The point is: We see this same behavior in every societal subset from Radical Feminism
to My Little Pony, why would a divisive issue like fuckin' GamerGate be any goddamn different?
GamerGate: Not the most coherent cabal.
But I will say the fuck out of this: I'll take an incoherent truth... over perfectly
lucid lies.
I'm RazörFist: God - fuckin' - SPEED!