Anita Sarkeesian (@femfreq) and Zoe Quinn (@TheQuinnspiracy) testify at the U.N.
In his new book SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, Vox Day summarizes the habits of progressive “social justice warriors”:
1. SJWs always lie.
2. SJWs always double down.
3. SJWs always project.
Vox Day’s Third Law of SJWs, the role of psychological projection in social justice discourse, is interesting to observe in practice, as accusations made against #GamerGate must always reflect some wrong of which progressives are themselves guilty. If you don’t understand #GamerGate, Breitbart.com’s Allum Bokhari has described it as “an online uprising of gamers against poor journalistic standards, political correctness, and moral crusaders in the world of video games.”
This epic battle, which began by exposing unethical conflicts of interest among certain journalists and game developers, quickly metastasized into a much wider critique of how progressive activists were attempting to politicize this multibillion-dollar industry. There is “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners” who have been “lying, bullying and manipulating their way around the internet for profit and attention,” as Milo Yiannopoulos said. #GamerGate is about calling bulls–t on this agenda and exposing the shady people pushing it.
Over and over, amid the confusing welter of arguments surrounding #GamerGate, SJWs made accusations of bad faith (mala fides) the central weapon in their rhetorical arsenal. If you did not like Zoe Quinn, if you would rather play Call of Duty than Depression Quest, if you thought Nathan Grayson was an unethical fraud, Sarah Nyberg was a dishonest totalitarian pervert and Anita Sarkeesian was a pretentious academic opportunist — well, if you held any of these opinions common to #GamerGate, then you were obviously a racist, transphobic, misogynist proponent of “rape culture.”
You thought Lara Croft Tomb Raider was just a fun pastime? Stop objectifying her with your male gaze, you heteronormative bigot!
This finger-pointing accusatory style — the SJW as Grand Inquisitor — is easy to mock, but SJWs take themselves quite seriously and therefore assume that their critics must be bad people. The anti-#GamerGate discourse thus takes a predictable rhetorical form, a circular argument loaded with the prejudice of confirmation bias, which if expressed as a formal syllogism would look like this:
Premise A: #GamerGate is bad;
Premise B: [Whatever];
ergo
Conclusion: #GamerGate is bad.
Facts and logic are ultimately irrelevant to the SJW, who never wishes to debate critics, but instead seeks to silence them. In other words, if you do not share the ideological enthusiasms of these “social justice” crusaders — if you are not willing to parrot their politicized jargon and applaud their opinions — then you must be excluded from the ranks of those who are qualified to speak at their conferences, publish on their Web sites and be employed in the videogame industry. If your response to this attempt to monopolize control of gaming culture is to organize your own conferences and Web sites to influence the videogame industry, your efforts will result in you being blacklisted as part of a “hate group.” You will be accused of participating in or condoning illegal “harassment” and it will be assumed (rather than proven) that you are guilty of various intolerable Thought Crimes, e.g., homophobia.
It’s about who controls the narrative, as Andrew Breitbart would say. Protecting the Official Progressive Narrative from external criticism requires that only True Believers be allowed to speak from the institutional platforms through which progressives endeavor to exercise hegemonic control over the culture. At some point in the past few years, videogames were identified as a medium of cultural communication that was not exhibiting lockstep conformity to progressive ideology, and from this realization emerged an effort to subject the gaming industry to a relentless political attack. The object was to ensure that the videogame industry was controlled by progressives in the same way that journalism, Hollywood and academia are controlled by progressives, as part of a complete system of cultural totalitarianism that prohibits dissent by marginalizing (or even criminalizing) opposition.
Why do you think Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn were invited to testify to the United Nations last month? We may suspect they want to have Disagreeing With Feminists classified as a human rights violation. But remember, SJWs always project and, despite having a near-monopoly on the kind of media influence that can make someone like Zoe Quinn — a mentally ill ex-stripper with a notorious habit of lying about everything — appear to be a credible authority, feminists expect us to believe that they are victims of oppression. The actual balance of power is the exact opposite of what SJWs claim. They are the ones engaged in harassment, but they call their harassment “activism,” and when the targets of SJW harassment (e.g., male videogame programmers) attempt to defend themselves, the defense is called “harassment.” The liberal media have gone out of their way to depict the #GamerGate controversy in this prejudicial one-sided manner, which begins by assuming that (a) feminists are always right about everything, and also (b) anyone who criticizes feminism is a misogynist, so that (c) the question of what constitutes misogyny is always decided by feminists, and therefore (d) feminists authorize themselves with the power to instantly discredit anyone who dares talk back to them by labeling the critic as a misogynist.
Strange as it may seem, some males have bought into this mentality, and hasten to parrot whatever the feminists say, a form of behavior called virtue signalling, “indicating that you are kind, decent and virtuous.” The online spectacle of clever young men jumping up and down and shouting “misogyny” at other men has become sadly tedious.
There is something pathetic about the male SJW’s eagerness to prove that he is not one of those awful heteropatriarchal oppressors. And so, at a social-justice Tumblr blog, we encounter “Ral”:
A 22-year-old geek studying computer science, with a passing interest in philosophy and social justice. Political leanings are strongly to the left, with some anarchist sympathies. Lifelong gamer and vehemently opposed to GamerGate. Has had lifelong experience with Aspergers syndrome. Straight, white, cishet and male, yet always seeking to listen to the experiences of other demographics.
It is nowadays fashionable for awkward young men with poor social skills to claim a diagnosis of Asperger’s, in the same way it is fashionable for awkward young women with poor social skills to claim a diagnosis of depression or anxiety disorder. Having a psychiatric diagnosis to explain your problems is the difference between being a victim and being merely a loser. By a similar trick of rhetorical prestidigitation during the 1980s, liberals transformed winos, hobos and panhandlers into “the homeless,” so that any drug-addled lowlife moocher bumming spare change on the street corner was considered a Victim of Society, a symbol of America’s moral failure. Given the way this issue was promoted as an indictment of the Reagan administration’s economic policies, and considering the known political leanings of those who promoted it, anyone could see that the liberal solution to The Homeless Crisis was:
- More federal spending;
and
- Vote Democrat!
This is really the answer to every problem, according to American liberals. As long as Democrats get elected and federal spending increases, we are on the Road to Liberal Utopia. Now that we have ObamaCare to guarantee treatment for the mentally ill, and a generous policy of disability payments to these suffering victims, it is possible that every awkward young person could collect a government check for doing what they would be doing anyway, i.e., living in Mom’s basement and playing Xbox all day. Federal disability payments have skyrocketed in recent years, and America is said to be experiencing an “epidemic” of mental illness, proving that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. Taxpayer-subsidized craziness has become a growth industry, throwing federal money at every kook and weirdo who can get his personal problems diagnosed as a “disorder” or a “syndrome.”
Now that nutjobs and neurotics are Victims of Society, publicly proclaiming your psychiatric diagnosis is just about the only way for a heterosexual white male to exempt himself from the category of Privileged Oppressor. Thus we return to the 22-year-old geek “Ral” and his Tumblr exercise in “virtual signalling”:
It’s important to remember that the real reason why antifeminists and anti-SJW bloggers are so quick to paint every act of media criticism that doesn’t fall in line with their own view of how the world works as “censorship” or “subjective nonsense” is that villainizing cultural criticism protects their own worldview. . . .
I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that nearly everyone I’ve ever seen react so harshly to feminist criticism also holds extremely regressive ideas . . .
Denying the wage gap exists despite the fact that every peer-reviewed study that has ever been done on it confirms that there is still a gap even if you account for everything that they can measure . . .
Related to the above, denying the slightest possibility that unconscious gender bias is an issue despite consistent evidence supporting its existence, and that said biases stem from backlash against deviation from expected social roles.
Denying the existence of rape culture . . .
You can read the rest of his indictment of the “extremely regressive ideas” that he attributes to others, and the point here is not to argue about any of these specific accusations, but rather to ask: What is the basis of moral authority by which this person deems himself fit to condemn the “worldview” of anyone who does not share his own left-wing anarchist political biases? What has “Ral” accomplished — what record of achievement does he have, what duties has he responsibly exercised — that he can expect anyone to defer to his judgment of these matters? How easy it is for a college student to sit as his laptop and type in a sequence of phrases — “wage gap . . . gender bias . . . rape culture” — as if these rhetorical flourishes prove him to be a virtuous person.
Talk is cheap, boy.
Responsible adults cannot surrender moral authority to 22-year-old anarchists, nor can we permit a dishonest ex-stripper like Zoe Quinn to make herself an official arbiter of online civility, simply by calling herself a “feminist” and portraying herself as a victim of misogyny.
My suspicion is that all male SJWs actually hate women, and that their advocacy of feminism is a psychological defense mechanism against subconscious guilt over their rage toward their domineering mothers. The male SJW is always Mama’s Precious Boy, a creepy introverted weirdo, a Norman Bates type whose professed enthusiasm for “social justice” is an attempt to get women to provide him a substitute for the unconditional maternal affection he craves. One can find many case studies in abnormal psychology of such warped males, emotionally crippled by deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Their sex lives are always profoundly abnormal, typified by furtive voyeurism, habitual masturbation, and frustrated rage at their predictable impotence in whatever intimate interactions they may actually have with women (which are usually few or non-existent, due to the social awkwardness of the male introvert’s personality). “Ral” is probably a dangerous sexual deviant with a massive cache of violent BDSM porn that appeals to his own bizarre fantasies. Police investigating the disappearance of hookers could probably find them tied up and gagged in an SJW’s basement rape dungeon, if they haven’t already been tortured to death, their bodies dismembered and buried in his backyard.
That’s only a hunch, of course. I’m just a blogger, not the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico, but really: Go look at the cartoon superhero character “Ral” uses as his avatar, the grandiose conception of himself as a powerful figure. This is a common online behavior of introverted narcissistic misfits, displaying a heroic self-image to emotionally compensates for their lack of real-life success.
These SJWs are all sick freaks, I’m telling you. A guy whose ambition in life is to earn the approval of Zoe Quinn? Yeah. He’s profiling as the “unsub” in an episode of Criminal Minds.
“Look at the bee on the Lobelia cardinalis,” he intoned with his best innocent condescension. Fumbled with his iPhone. “It’s trying to do something with the network, but we don’t have any bars!” his tone regressed to about age four.