We Hunted The MammothToday, the most pretentious, and also probably the most ridiculous GamerGate video I’ve seen so far.
Over black-and-white footage of assorted video game shooters, the YouTuber who calls himself PowerIndustry tries to provide a bit of inspiration to his comrades in the virtual trenches who have chosen, as he puts it, to “stand and fight.”
For those who can’t make it through the whole nine minutes– and there may be more than a few of you – here’s Mr. PI’s basic argument.
Brace yourself, because there’s really no way to prepare you for how terrible this song is.
The lyrics are a bit difficult to figure out using, you know, your ears, so watch this in fullscreen mode so you can read them.
And no, this isn’t a joke. It’s a serious song made by serious #GamerGaters on 8chan. See this thread, or the GamerGareSings Twitter, for more details.
They are hard at work on more of these. A lot more. Here are a couple of works-in-progress. Put them in your ears if you dare.
GamerGaters claim they’re on the side of truth and righteousness, but they sure do love monologuing like cartoon villains.
They claim to be shocked by alleged evidence of journalistic collusion, yet they happily plot strategies and “operations” together both in secret and in broad daylight. They claim to be about ethics, but regularly employ not-so-subtle subterfuge to try to disguise their carefully coordinated propaganda campaigns as spontaneous uprisings.
This week, GamerGaters on 8chan launched a new “operation” to win over the hearts and minds of the masses on Tumblr. And it’s as ethically bankrupt as anything they’ve ever done.
Operation Firefly, as it’s officially known, is an attempt to take the GamerGate “fight” to a “new frontier.” Tumblr. As the originator of the initiative explains it in a somewhat less-than-stirring manifesto:
GamerGate, so depressing and destructive and … inadvertently hilarious?
Like the MRAs I write about so often here, GamerGaters have a certain fondness for the propaganda of the meme, attempting to win hearts and minds with elaborate infographics, repurposed propaganda, and basically any sort of graphic they can pull together in a few minutes with Photoshop or MSPaint.
They are, unfortunately for them, terrible at it. It’s not just that the amateur graphic designers of GamerGate lack a basic understanding of good design. They are also so completely lacking in self-awareness that they are unable to see when their graphics completely undercut the messages they are intended to convey.
So today, let’s take a look at the The Top Five Most Ridiculously Ironic #Gamergate Memes that I’ve found posted recently on 8chan and Twitter.
Do you remember when #GamerGate was young? You know, back before #NotYourShield and Vivian James and bizarrely complicated conspiracy theories involving Gawker, Weird Twitter and some sort of international Jewish conspiracy?
Remember when #GamerGate was still called #BurgersAndFries, and the angry gamebro army was focused on the real enemy of all that is good and true – a young game designer by the name of Zoe Quinn?
If you’ve been feeling nostalgic for those good old days, you’re in luck. A sprawling blog post by a female friend of Quinn’s obsessive, accusatory ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni takes us back to the dog days of August when his even more sprawling thezoepost was unleashed upon the world.
So on Halloween the dude in the pics above went out dressed as a … well, a Men’s Rights Activist, I guess, or maybe a GamerGater, or Redditor? Something along those lines. Whatever he was, he apparently won second prize in some sort of costume contest.
Well, the dude at the Tumblr blog Indefinite Free Pizza is having none of it:
"we're inclusive and accepting!" says #gamergate, before drawing racist caricatures of women they dislike. pic.twitter.com/zbFnWBOmdn
— Sarah Nyberg (@srhbutts) November 1, 2014
The other day, I posted a screenshot of an 8chan comment featuring the drawing above, a crude caricature of Anita Sarkeesian that’s a not-very-subtle variation on a racist and anti-Semitic cartoon that originally ran in a neo-Nazi newspaper.
Here’s the original, in all its crapitude:
A We Hunted the Mammoth reader was inspired by this post yesterday to do a dramatic reading of one of the more melodramatic 8chan posts from my list of 22. I’ve pasted the original screenshot of the post below if you would like to read along.
Enjoy!
RAAAAAAAAAGGHHHHH!!!!!11!!!
So you waited until the last minute to pull together your #GamerGate Halloween costume. And you’re lazy as crap.
Well, you’re in luck! Here are seven totally half-assed, no-effort #GamerGate costumes you can pull together in a few minutes with stuff you have around the house!
Is there some sort of contest out there to see who can sing the praises of GamerGate in the most floridly self-important, over-the-top and un-self-aware manner possible?
If so, we seem to have a new contender: the racist, woman-hating fantasy author and actual adult human being who goes by the name Vox Day, who may have even out-melodramatized 8chan’s pretentious pontificators in a post on his Vox Popoli blog today.
At this point, #GamerGate is about more than games now. It is a Schwerpunkt in the ongoing cultural war for the West. And the gamers of #GamerGate are the only defenders of freedom and Western civilization who are counterattacking and causing enemy casualties. That is why it is more than important, it is vital to see non-gamers joining the cause rather than sneering from the sidelines.
Because if the pinkshirts haven’t come after you and yours yet, they assuredly will so long as you have not submitted to them.
I know that Vox writes terrible fantasy novels for a living. Does he think he lives in one as well?