It’s so amusing when my two favorite train wrecks – GamerGate and the Republican Primary – manage to find a way to collide. This week, Donald Trump earned a key endorsement. Not, Sarah Palin –although that one is comedy gold. This one:
That’s right, Mark Kern – a former game developer turned GamerGate zealot with a history of noxious idiotic activity came out in support Donald Trump. Because, you guessed it – Political Correctness!
So, about to lose some followers, but I’m going to back Trump. Nobody else is fighting PC culture or saying what needs to be said.
— Mark Kern (@Grummz) January 18, 2016
Yes, that old windmill is back – PC culture is going to destroy us all! Except, of course, that it’s not. Speech has never been more diverse and free than it is right now. It certainly is not bad enough to support someone who is a racist, a sexist, a total asshole, a congenital liar, and completely incapable of delivering a doable or humane campaign policy. Complaints like that are just the SJWs blowing Trump’s record out of proportion!
You’ve used that club so many times its become hollow and brittle and fake. Yet still you cry ‘racist’ until no-one cares. @TheShiriko
— Mark Kern (@Grummz) January 20, 2016
This epiphany may or may not have come after a Republican strategist dissed the ‘alt-right’ followers of Trump who masturbate to anime. I feel like I should note that I am not making this up or using hyperbole here – that’s an exact quote.
The full @TheRickWilson trolling the alt-right on their porn habits: pic.twitter.com/uQD9QJ9wZg
— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) January 20, 2016
Given that Mark Kern is an aficionado of the waifu navel (with an appetite that GamerGaters generously fill to his retweeting approval), this may have been the decision point. To their credit, The GamerGate hive mind didn’t bite on this directly as near as I can tell, but another GG celebrity did – namely Milo, who took time out of his new hobby of comparing Twitter to a fascist anti-conservative thought police for taking away his blue tick in order to complain about how the Republican establishment weren’t interested in the Alt-Right movement.
.@Nero eh. That you think what defines the AltRight crowd is their “working class” status is just plain weird, and I suspect you know it.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) January 20, 2016
@Nero you may be right. But again, of the people who boast that label in my feed, it’s scummy Nordic horseshit and antisemitism.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) January 20, 2016
Note: twitter thread then devolves into a whole bunch of Milo fans that proceed to prove Jonah and Rick correct. Jonah Goldberg writes for the National Review, generally considered one of the more respectable bastions of conservative thought on the web and, while I tend to disagree with 80% of the things they write, they generally tend to at least have a veneer of respectability with what they write. Milo, on the other hand, simply writes for Breitbart, which has been accused by former employees of being a bought and paid mouthpiece of the Trump campaign. Ethics!
Then Milo went off to get another time out from Twitter for breaking their terms of service by posting private information about one of GamerGate’s most vocal critics. The future of conservatism, ladies and gentlemen, is apparently being a jerk and then whining when people point it out.
“The future of conservatism, ladies and gentlemen, is apparently being a jerk and then whining when people point it out.”
This has been the Interwebs, in a nutshell, for a while now. And in no way is it limited to one demographic. So much self-righteous shit-posting. It’s almost like the Web went PVP when we weren’t looking.
One of the key tenets of the “dissenting” (as opposed to the “harassing”) GamerGate is that GamerGate and by extension, videogame culture advocacy is not a hivemind. There should be minimal social pressure to police thought inside the movement.
I, being a (sort of) Nationalistic Mexican, obviously disagree with Kern’s political leaning on the upcoming USA election. But I also recognize something that the authoritarian left is trying to disappear: The right of people to have complex, nuanced personalities and leanings, mix of ideas we like and of those we reject. I reject the decision of Kern to back Trump, while recognizing his efforts to create a community of gamers and game developers who dissent from the “official” narratives.
“There should be minimal social pressure to police thought inside the movement.”
Which is one of the reasons GG looks so shitty to anyone not inside it. There’s no quality control. This guy is spewing transphobic shit? Better keep him around. This guy’s homophobic, that guy’s racist, this guy (well, all of them) are virulently sexist? Can’t exclude them, that’d be ~censorship~.
“The right of people to have complex, nuanced personalities and leanings, mix of ideas we like and of those we reject.”
And we have the right to say “No thanks, you’re an asshole, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” And other people have the right to look at people who hang out with assholes and judge them (correctly) to be assholes too.
“recognizing his efforts to create a community of gamers and game developers who dissent from the “official” narratives.”
This was also a stupid idea, btw. Kern hasn’t done ANYTHING good for GG.
I don’t want to be contrarian but I think there is a form of quality control. Let try to claim that there is systematic discrimination built-in society( overt, covert or simply due to social inertia) and witness the quality control kick in, violently. There is a filter to bring quality down.
http://xkcd.com/1357/
I like the moreover text. “I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express. ”
It describe a reason why the whole movement is ridiculous. Since they aren’t prevented from expressing themselves, except if you conflate harassment with expression (and harassment is not even effectively regulate anyways), the argument they muster is simply that what they say isn’t illegal. The problematic part is that GG, as a hole, nether understand or care about speech.
The cover of GG can be described as frivolous pseudo-legalism, like The sovereign citizen movement. Of course, the heart of gg is another matter entirely.
BTW, can GG do anything good except cease to exist?
Life is not like that.
History is not like that.
As an example I will give you: José Vasconcelos, the most ardent supporter of free education in my country, with streets, libraries, schools named after him, director of the National Autonomous University of Mexico once, thrusting forward arts and science…
And also in his time, a Hitler sympathizer, dazzled by his ideas, publisher of a pro-Nazi magazine.
Should I have burned my free books? Rejected my basic education just because it was originally pushed forward by someone who was pro-Hitler?
Life is complex and nuanced.
Mark Kern has created a nascent community of gamers and gamedev dissenting from the cultural cliques and mainstream narratives. I don’t agree with all he says. Also, his public liking of anime navel is an open act of transgression against a hivemind culture who wants to police what you can like and what you can lust for.
As I say, I reject his endorsement of Donald Trump. But I recognize him as a valuable contribution to videogame culture advocacy. As a nuanced individual.
I think you are building a straw man. Something that would be a valid parallel to José Vasconcelos is if there was a movement asking to boycott or even ban WOW because KH did something vile in 2015-2016. I am not aware of such movement.
Kern can lust whoever he wants to lust after. And I’m actually for the addition of more adult themes into games – particularly in ways that aren’t blatantly porn or anime porn. I’ve written a couple articles about Cock Hero, for example, something I find fascinating. His insistence on plastering his news feed (and anyone interested in GG, by extension) with loli, though, does make it much harder to take him or his stances seriously. Most people tend to keep their fap habits to themselves.
I’ve seen many a Gator *claim* that they disagree with Milo Yiannopoulos’s right-wing politics, but the only time they will ever mention that they disagree is when they’re pressed on their association with him.
Unless you have criticized Mark Kern’s support of Donald Trump *independently* of someone else pointing out your association with Kern, then you’re not actually disagreeing with Kern at all; you’re just being apathetic.
“I’ve seen many a Gator *claim* that they disagree with Milo Yiannopoulos’s right-wing politics, but the only time they will ever mention that they disagree is when they’re pressed on their association with him.”
Seconded.
The ‘authoritarian left’ is a misnomer. First off, what GG and the right are complaining is a ‘critical left’. Authoritarian tendencies actually tend to belong to the right, and currently are the core of Donald Trump’s support. Also, the key reason why the left has not had the success that the right has had over the years is that it is hugely more fragmented in terms of goals and objectives. Union leaders don’t care about the same things as Black Lives Matter, who don’t care about the same things as Hispanic leaders, who don’t care about the same things as the Gay Rights Movement, who don’t care about the same things as feminists. Describing any of those submovements as particularly dominant is really overselling their ability to even get people to listen to those points of view, much less be ‘authoritarian’ about it.
The right, on the other hand, has 10 candidates running for president, of which 8 of them are virtually identical policy-wise. Rand Paul is an exception, and other than his anti-war stance, he’s worked hard to bury his libertarian leanings to get a GOP nomination. The other exception is Donald Trump, whose policies aren’t so much ‘conservative’ or ‘right-leaning’ as they are ‘batshit insane, while tipping its toe into blatant racism, sexism’.
I’d have no opinions on who Kern wants to win the presidency if the stated reason wasn’t to fight a ‘political correctness’ boogeyman that doesn’t actually currently exist.
Funny how the National Review publishes an entire issue against Trump, then finds itself disinvited by the Republican National Committee from a debate in Houston.
The thing with the National Review is how establishmentarian it had become. The more it goes on about how Trump deviates from establishment conservatism, the more the people who felt betrayed by that same establishment conservatism are likely to vote for the guy the establishment conservatives have published an entire issue complaining about.
You seem to hold the National Review in much higher esteem than I do, and Goldberg’s book “Liberal Fascism” is a magnificent case of cutting the corners of a square to the extent you could call it a circle, but in this exchange with Milo, he happens to be right. However, and perhaps I’m giving Milo too much credit, but he seems to follow a very British class-based approach to an extent of which an American pundit would be incapable.
Meanwhile, American punditry is so dedicated to (1) denying Trump has a chance to win the nomination, let alone the presidency (2) comparing his rise to fascism, that it has missed the forest for the trees. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but the historical precedent of someone like Trump is the French election of 1848, where Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (the nephew of the other) won with three-quarters of the popular vote (male universal suffrage) because he was the political outsider with a famous name. (If that means anything, less than four years later, he mounted a coup to install himself as Napoleon III.)
Oh, I find Goldberg fairly odious as well. He was previously right up there with Coulter in terms of writing unsupported hyperbole effectively comparing liberals to cancerous traitors. However, compared to Milo and Trump, he comes off quite moderate. It’s the Oberton window in action.