#StopGamerGate2014: Threat of Terrorist Massacre Against Anita Sarkeesian, or This "GamerGate" Thing Has Gone Too Far

The article: "'Massacre' threat forces Anita Sarkeesian to cancel university talk" (The Verge)

Related post: "Anita Sarkeesian Cancels Talk at Utah State After Receiving Threat of Another “Montreal Massacre.” (We Hunted The Mammoth)

Right-wing videogamers connected with the so-called "Men's Rights Movement" (sic; they really mean "Man's Right") or MRM have been on a campaign to purge female developers and players from videogames. Yes, I mean "purge" in the Stalinist sense. Particular targets include Anita Sarkeesian, who has a series of videos on YouTube called "Tropes vs. Women" about sexist and misogynist tropes in popular media with an emphasis on videogames, and Zoe Quinn, an indie game developer most famous for a largely autobiographical interactive fiction called Depression Quest. They called this "#GamerGate.

But then the death threats began. Now a right-wing extremist, likely a militia type and probably a "Men's Rights Activist" or MRA, is threatening actual terrorism because Sarkeesian was going to hold a talk at Utah State University. She had to cancel because Utah is such an "open carry" gun-rights state that not even universities can prevent people from openly carrying entire arsenals, much less ban guns from campus.

Hence I broke my silence and posted the following tweet:

Re last RT: This is enough. I can't keep quiet about it anymore. #StopGamerGate2014 because "GamerGate" is now officially a terrorist jihad.

This GamerGate thing has become so offensive, and so potentially violent, that enough people are now tweeting against it to trend #StopGamerGate2014.

Here's the political background on this: The American right wing have suffered a crushing defeat in its attempt to stop same-sex marriage from being made fully legal nationwide. Their response, as always, is to double down; but since they can no longer criminalize homosexuality, they've escalated the War on Women to increasingly hysterical extremes. Meanwhile, some of the most malicious trolls on 4chan, many or most of them belonging or connected to the MRM, got mortally offended as only wingnuts do over their favorite games (the military FPSes and gangland "murder simulators") being called out for misogynist tropes on "Tropes vs. Women", and then by the release of Depression Quest, which apparently embodies everything the Right hates in "political correctness". The MRM term for feminists is "SJWs", for "Social Justice Warriors", after their left-wing nemeses on sites like Tumblr and Reddit.

Thus plotted, the harassment campaign began, like a right-wing version of Anonymous, which also began at 4chan. GamerGate has since gotten so vicious that the Gaters (or "Gits") even got themselves banned from 4chan. Naturally, they founded their own "chan", 8chan, specifically as a home for GamerGate and other causes dear to the Internet's extreme right.

Now it has gone all the way to terrorism. As I tweeted, it is now officially a terrorist jihad. And I am now openly against not only GamerGate but the entire MRM. As a matter of fact, I've been working this opposition into my still incomplete novel Chaos Angel Spanner, even before I heard of the MRM. Oh, and that blog post I linked to at the top, from the anti-MRM blog We Hunted The Mammoth? I'm commenting there.

The War Comes Home: Another School Shooting, Another Normal Day in America

A rant concerning this latest incident: Twenty schoolchildren, eight others dead in Connecticut massacre One sign that your country is dying is that massacres of innocents by heavily armed psychopaths become normal. Now, America's fighting several blithely genocidal wars abroad, and trying to start several more, for the profits of the military-industrial complex that rules its empire. Sure, Barack Obama, blithe mass murderer of Muslims by drone and super soldier, cries for twenty innocent children in Connecticut. But none of us cries for the millions of innocent children in the countries America's conquering in order to steal their oil. This is utterly nihilistic — but Social Darwinism is our national faith, so this kind of thing is what our nation stands for! We call it the Wild West, or American values (e.g., God-given gun rights, "stand your ground", etc.). The civilized world, to which America has always refused to belong, calls it barbarism. Back in the 1920s, the general opinion of civilized Americans was that there is no such thing as "American civilization"; that phrase is, by definition, a contradiction in terms. America went directly from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. Sure, there's pockets of civilization scattered around here and there, primarily in the more liberal big cities and college towns. But this massacre of innocent children in a small New England town is a reminder of America's true nature — i.e. no different from those other jihadis — and that barbarism will hunt civilized people down and slaughter them anywhere. Even worse: the killer was a local who went to that school and whose mother — his first victim — was a teacher! I don't ever expect anything to be done to help the mentally ill in America; after all, Social Darwinism is the national faith, and the victims are eugenically inferior because they died and the killer proved himself inferior by killing himself. I don't expect anybody in power to call for restoring the ban on civilian ownership of assault weapons, either; after all, the right to bear combat weaponry was given to Real Americans by GOD!!! and is too much a part of the national faith. This is the empire of capitalistic Christian Egoism, after all. Instead, I expect America to share the fate of its symbiotic enemy, the Soviet Union. The Cold War never ended; only one of its evil empires went away. It won't end until the other empire — ours — falls too. Need more proof that American conservatism and Corporatism have gone completely insane? Just wait till the terrorist insurrections begin — and they will, believe me. The Götterdämmerung of Conservative America is at hand. A disclaimer: I'm not even pretending to be an objective analyst in this post. The blood of twenty innocent children murdered by a psychopath won't let me. I need to vent my outrage before I punch out any of my conservative relatives, who aren't enemies. Now that it's out of my system, I can finally be objective: After several decades of devotion to drug prohibition, some American voters in Western states (including my own) have started to rebel against it. Will massacre after massacre of innocent civilians wake Americans up to the danger of guns in the hands of psychos, or to the dire need for the kind of mental-health system genuinely civilized countries consider an absolute necessity? How many American civilians have to die like their "enemy" Muslim counterparts before Americans start to wake up? My hope is that it won't take many more. But there's a class-war element to this, too. Note that the most conservative states dominated by the richest conservatives are the ones with the laxest gun (and even murder) laws and the highest murder rates. The 19th-century robber baron Jay Gould bragged that he could hire half the working class to kill the other half. He meant right-wing terrorism, championed in his day by the Ku Klux Klan. This kind of thing is exactly what he was talking about. Just wait till the real terrorism begins...

Al-Qaeda Is A Cult

The article: "Can Utilizing Knowledge of Cults Help Us with Terrorist Groups?" by Steven Hassan

Some of you will surely dispute me on this, the same way people disagree when I insist that there is no such thing as a split infinitive. Some will insist Al-Qaeda is strictly a "terror organization". As with the alleged split infinitive in English, this is really a semantic quibble. I look at it structurally. The Manson Family and Aum Supreme Truth committed some of history's most infamous acts of terrorism, but they have always been seen as what they are: doomsday cults. Structurally, in organization and doctrine, Al-Qaeda is clearly a cult.

The author of the linked article, Steven Hassan, is a former Moonie (Sun Myung Moon/Unification Church cultist) turned cult expert. His experience in a cult allows him to know a cult when he sees it. I decided to write this entry when I read his article and realized that he was saying publicly what I already believed but hadn't told anybody yet (except maybe my mother and brother). He begins: "When is it time to start recognizing that Al Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups are cults?"

Why Patriotism Is a Sin

A front page article in today's New York Times relates the tale of a Chinese student at Duke University who came upon clashing pro-Tibet and pro-China demonstrations. She tried to bring peace between the two groups. However, the pro-China group reacted viciously. She was publicly defamed on the Internet as a "traitor". She, and her family back in China, received death threats. What drove those pro-China people to persecute someone who just wanted to bring reconciliation to her school? Patriotism.. This is the true essence of patriotism: "my country right, right or wrong" — which really means "worship my country or die!"

Patriotism is a cult. The cult is called nationalism. Nationalism is defined as the cult of the State. With the death of Christendom, and Dar al-Islam threatened with being dragged out of the Dark Ages, nationalism has become the new Christendom. Inquisition, crusade, totalitarianism, and terrorism necessarily follow. And that's why patriotism is a sin.