We’re still missing a bunch of pingbacks from people we’re used to seeing in the standings. To make sure you get credit, please e-mail your links to me before noon (Pacific time) on Saturday, July 25, since WordPress is being arbitrary in its hate lately.
Guerrilla warfare tends to bring out the worst in people, but when the gamers found themselves in the cross-hairs of the Social Justice Warriors, did anyone expect them to just roll over for the likes of Anita Sarkeesian? Oh, hell, no. “War to the knife and knife to the hilt” — the targets of cultural aggression vowed to destroy the aggressors.
So, why did #GamerGate go to war against Gawker? It’s a long and complicated story, but a major focus of #GamerGate rage has been the Gawker-owned game journalism site Kotaku:
If anyone from Gawker or Kotaku had bothered to interview someone like Sargon of Akkad, Christina Hoff Sommers, Mundane Matt, Ashton Liu, Adam Baldwin, LeoPirate, Allison Prime, Jennifer Medina, Daddy Warpig or any of the moderators from Kotaku in Action, it would have been made abundantly clear that it wasn’t that Kotaku avoided talking about journalism ethics, it’s that Kotaku avoided doing anything about their failure at upholding even the most basic of ethics principles in the world of video game journalism.
This involves a controversy at the heart of #GamerGate, the affair between “Depression Quest” developer Zoe Quinn and Nathan Grayson, who wrote for (Gawker-owned) Rock Paper Shotgun before joining Kotaku. You can read more about this scandal at “A People’s History of GamerGate,” but the essence of it is this: Quinn was accused of gaining favorable coverage of her work — which is allegedly useless and awful — by providing Grayson and others access to her nasty poontang. And when these allegations of quid pro quo were published by one of Quinn’s embittered ex-lovers, Quinn’s defenders accused her critics of misogyny.
Let us stipulate that two things can be simultaneously true:
The field of game development attracts a lot of Alpha Nerd males who may have bad attitudes about women;
and
Zoe Quinn is an opportunistic hustler who realized she could use sex as bait to garner lucrative advantages, including “free” publicity from unprincipled journalists who would accept graft in the form of occasional access to her nasty poontang.
Both of these things could be true, but because of the leftward bias in media, Misogynist Alpha Nerds is an important story, whereas in contrast, Zoe Quinn’s (Alleged) Opportunistic Poontang Hustle is something that no bien-pensant can acknowledge.
While I know nearly nothing about the videogame industry, I’ve spent the past two decades covering politics and therefore know a lot about corruption and opportunistic hustlers. And I also know that there are journalists whose stock in trade is not their skill as writers, but rather their slavish loyalty to the Democrat Party and the Politics of Social Justice. Many writers of limited ability have learned that they can attract unmerited praise — indeed, as in the notorious case of Stalin’s journalistic henchman Walter Duranty, they can win Pulitzer Prizes — if they are willing to tell lies that benefit the Left.
Relatedly, none of this vindicates any of the psychotic, hateful, performatively sanctimonious self-marketing of Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yianawhatever, “gamergaters,” and the bevy of cold, craven, retrograde pre-fab apartment-dwelling souls who are waging an inane jihad against Gawker Media, feminism, and cultural justice. They are wrong. They are twisted. They are abusive. And I could give three hot farts about their crocodile tears for David Geithner and his family. What pisses me off the most about this lapse in editorial judgment is that it’s (again) enabled this barely coherent rabble of internet bullies to signal boost their dumb assertions about Gawker en masse, and to get them taken seriously for a dumb nanosecond. Gawker is not that bad, and those critics are not that smart.
This gratuitous smear of Dr. Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos and #GamerGate — “psychotic, hateful . . . retrograde pre-fab apartment-dwelling souls . . . barely coherent rabble of internet bullies” — tells us more about Adam Weinstein than it tells us about his enemies, and it may also tell us a lot about the underlying problem at Gawker. Whether or not publisher Nick Denton is a leftist ideologue, he has apparently employed leftist ideologues who in turn have made Gawker into a hive of leftist ideology. Like so many other modern media enterprises, Gawker is like one of those Stalin-era “progressive” organizations that, having failed to exclude Communist Party members, were taken over by Communist Party members. By the time Ronald Reagan realized that Communists were trying to take over Hollywood unions, Reagan himself had already unwittingly joined two Communist “front” organizations.
As anyone who has studied the Cold War knows, the Communists relentlessly smeared their enemies. Character assassination was elevated into an art and science by Soviet propagandists, and Reagan himself was among the many enemies of Communism who learned what vicious methods the Left employs against those who tell the truth about the Left. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not cure the Left of its habitual dishonesty, and hired liars like Adam Weinstein continue to practice the deceptive arts that were pioneered by the Bolsheviks and their stooges many decades ago. You may think it is unfair to compare 21st-century leftists to Comintern agents and their “progressive” dupes of the 1930s and ’40s, but to whom is it unfair? At least Walter Duranty could imagine that the socialist utopia was a viable possibility, whereas the Left in the post-Cold War era can have no excuse for their dishonest promotion of “social justice” delusions. They are not leading us toward a Progressive Proletarian Future, because they know that no such secular Heaven on Earth can ever exist. Rather than Building a Better Tomorrow, the Left is now inspired by nothing but abject nihilism, destroying society because they hate society and, also, because they enjoy destruction.
Reminder: wacky liberal terrorists like Gawker are in the minority. They only have power if you give it to them. pic.twitter.com/SzTloBhUOx
I would call Adam Weinstein a terrible human being, but that would not be accurate. He is an inhuman being, an amoral monster who delights in perverse cruelty against honest people. Firing him was one of the few good things Gawker has ever done, but I suspect that the editors who fired Adam Weinstein are actually worse than he is. He is like Trotsky, an evil man who was assassinated by an agent of the evil he helped create.
God’s purposes could be mysterious, he thought, gazing at the photo of his hand in his mother’s as she passed from the trauma of bringing him into the world.
When old enough to understand, he sardonically thought it a reverse abortion.
He’d fallen in love rapidly with his darkly beautiful wife, Zorha. Their passion was intense, but mirrored by her rejection of him. In a weeping phone call, she’d confessed soul-deep guilt over an old, dark deed.
He realized the symmetry with his birth situation. He offered her forgiveness, if she could forgive him.
Elsewhere, mother’s fingers curled.
Last night, a writer at Gawker outed and gay-shamed someone at the behest of an unnamed (for his safety!) source. It was a story steeped in sex, fame, cash, and blackmail, which made it a perfect target for today’s salacious clickbait culture.
Today, Gawker’s managing partners voted 5-1 (with the lone dissenter being the editor who approved the story) to take the story down—but the damage has already been done.
Sorry, Nick Denton—you don’t get to take this one back. . . .
Long story short, Gawker allegedly received a series of text messages and photos showing a planned liaison between Condé Nast CFO David Geithner (his name sounds familiar because he’s Tim Geithner’s brother) and a gay porn star and escort. Gawker claims that the escort, whose story is told under the pseudonym “Ryan,” sent them the photos and text messages after Geithner (who is married to a woman) was unable to meet him as planned during a Chicago business trip. Major money was involved: $2500 plus airfare for “Ryan’s” plane ticket from Texas to Chicago. Geithner forwarded a chunk of the cash to “Ryan” in advance, and sent his photo and lodging plans to “Ryan” via text . . .
You can read the whole thing by Amy Miller at Legal Insurrection, and let me be the first to say how shocking it is to learn that a male Conde Nast executive is married to a woman. A white heterosexual man working in the magazine industry? Is that even legal in 2015?
It’s not surprising that David Geithner turns out to be a closet homo, allegedly. What’s surprising is that he’d be paying $2,500 for a night with a rentboy. Couldn’t he find a gay “executive editor” to satisfy his occasional cravings for manmeat?
I’ve been thinking about this ever since Trump rode the White Horse of conservative hatred for open borders and scamnesty to the top of the polls, and in the process, spread terror and loathing throughout the GOP establishment.
I mentioned a couple of days ago that the strategy of the Gentry GOP uses to co-opt the votes of the Republican conservative base (even though they despise almost everything that base so desperately wants) is to make sure that, in the end, that base has only three choices – vote for an establishment crap sandwich GOP candidate the base can barely stomach, vote for a Democrat, or don’t vote at all. And they combat that last option by trumpeting at every opportunity that refusing to vote is a vote for the Democrat, knowing that voting for a Democrat is anathema to most members of the base.
Read the whole thing. Bill posits that the GOP is going to fold like the Whigs it supplanted in antebellum America.
I don’t think that this captures the evil of the GOP in its fullness. My take is:
there is a single, Progressive party in the United States that has carved up the electorate along various fault lines, then assigned the chunks to the Demmican and Republocrat parties;
the conservative urge for reform is threatening the starboard, Republocrat shock absorber, due to Tea Party fanatics;
the Donald and his ridiculous hairstyle will have some glorious meltdown around the time the JEBbage is anointed the clear GOP leader by the Codpiece Media;
the Trump card of going Independent will be played with flair and panache;
Her Majesty cackles maniacally all the way to the coronation;
Bush, Clinton and Trump (privately, so as not to give up the game) #PartyLikeIts1992 and laugh all the way to the bank, since they are all hedged to win financially, irrespective of the symbolic electoral results.
I’m all for Scott Walker, but my faith in the GOP is relatively cratered. I have the gnarly suspicion, for example, the IRS emails are taking so long to drag out because the Vichy GOP would stand revealed as having certain strange familiarities with the details of what Lois Lerner was up to.
Or not. I have not idea what the ground truth is. Just sayin’.
A gunman unleashed a barrage of gunfire at two military facilities Thursday in Chattanooga, killing four Marines, officials told CBS News. The suspect also was killed.
NBC News reports that Abdulazeez is a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Kuwait. . . . The Associated Press says he lived in Hixson, Tennessee, which is a few miles from Chattanooga. . . .
He was arrested on April 21, 2015 for driving under the influence in Hamilton County, Tennessee, according to the Chattanoogan.com. . . .
The case is being investigated as possible “domestic terrorism” and the FBI is leading the probe.
UPDATE: Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit reports that ISIS-affiliated Twitter accounts are celebrating the Chattanooga attack and promising more, including one threat aimed at Berlin.
The FBI’s Knoxville Field Office, along with the Chattanooga Police Department and other law enforcement partners, are working jointly to investigate today’s shootings at a military recruitment center and a reserve center in Chattanooga, Tennessee in which four individuals were killed and three injured. The shooter, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24, is also deceased. While it would be premature to speculate on the motives of the shooter at this time, we will conduct a thorough investigation of this tragedy and provide updates as they are available.
