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Thoughts on the Zoe Quinn controversy, "Gamergate", the "death of gamer culture", etc.
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Comments
Ultimate priviledge? No. It should be a basic human right.
Elaborate?
^^The reason I dislike colourblindness with regards to race is that culture and the human experience in general is not monolithic. It's better to acknowledge and celebrate our differences rather than pretend we're all the same.
^Take for instance, the naturalistic fallacy. You know how people go on about homosexuality being against nature? Well, it's been frequently observed in animals, among other crazy sexual habits.
It's a paradox. By ignoring ethnicity/gender or any other difference, you are allowing others to discriminate on those same things. If you belong to the most powerful groups, you don't have to worry about being persecuted for being in a less powerful group, and thus you can say that you ignore such a thing. It's too easy to say "Why can't we get along?" when you've got no stake.
We are whatever we are. We are different. And we can live with each other because of that.
>blog is astroturf
If we go up to this level, astroturf means any response that has premeditated discussion attached to it. It says fuck all about the content(all those death-of-gamers articles have no doubt had some discussion happening inbetween the writers beforehand-would this invalidate the ideas in them?).
>celebrate differences
Nah, Appadurai rightfully said the celebratory look-at-this-culture mode so often leads to the state or interest group controlling a much more diverse identity-for example, a diverse country like Mexico being reduced to a generic Mexican culture in the interest of whatever cultural group from said state has the most immigrants in the area.
I agree; differences don't necessarily need to be celebrated (and if anyone's going to be doing that, it's the people who own these qualities), but they do need to be accepted.
Badiou also has a pretty neat critique of multiculturalism (to be precise, the institutional "celebration" of diversity), due to the fact that there's a tendency for the dominant culture to accept only the aspects of minority cultures which are inoffensive to its own, plus reducing them to a stereotypical, patronizing and vaguely orientialist portrayal through various token manifestations. Also, more importantly, it stresses that the coexistence of various identities is something that can't be overcome, in a sense locking them into a perpetual state of conflict while using the almighty, paternalistic state bureaucracy to clamp down on any intercultural conflicts and keep peace, essentially in order to justify its own existence.
I think there's a diference between individual and institutional race/gender blindness.
There's a difference between me not caring if someone is black or white and the state not caring if groups of people are black or white.
The state can never "not care" about that, though. Capitalism is inherently racist, and the state is inherently capitalist. Thus the state is inherently racist.
We know (and have confirmation from David Futrelle) that male users of 4chan have been masquerading as female users on Twitter and such to pretend they are feminists. I've read enough feminist blogs to know that they typically don't write like that user does, and the linked blog post essentially amounts to concern trolling. We know Zoe isn't helpless after she revealed she had been recording the IRC chat all along.
I'm not sure why you chose to highlight that particular post over more notable sources.
Sorry I should have put inverted commas around it, as my point was individuals un-hypocritically not care about race or gender while there will always be something suspicious about those in power claiming not to.
I can certainly agree the state is inherently statist.
Statin' the obvious.
Ah. I still think that "not caring about race" is perhaps a poor choice of terminology. An individual can definitely not be a racist even though belonging to a privileged ethnic group, but since racism is so embedded in society they would have to make a conscious effort in order to. So when you say "I try not to discriminate based on race" you definitely do see race and care about race, because otherwise you couldn't say such a thing. In fact, I think that truly "not caring about race" is a bad thing, as it would literally mean accepting that racial privilege exists and not giving a shit about it.
Race is a construct which, above all, stems from economic relations, then becomes embedded into society through culture and the perpetuation of those economic relations. So I don't think that racism is something that a member of a privileged group can actively become through prejudice. They are racist by default, passively, and have to actively invest themselves in order not to be racist. And even in a hypothetical (though impossible) situation where absolutely everyone would do their best not to be racist while a fundamentally racist system still stands in its place, racism would persist.
Er... What?
Yeah, I don't know how to respond to this.
Anyway, one of the things that's starting to irritate me about GamerGate is the way that people are willing to look the other when some really, really bad folks get on their side, like Milo Yiannopoulos or that Davis M.J. Aurini fellow. (For those not in the know, the former is a Breitbart "journalist" and the latter is a self-identified redpiller who made a video called "racism is a personal problem.")
It's pretty frustrating to me because I do think that at its core GamerGate might have a point about how games journalism handles conflicts of interest, but then they let in utter shitbags like these which completely ruins my ability to take them seriously.
I think the thing here is that we're both coming at this from different perspectives. There's no such thing as 'I couldn't be worse off' but I'm basically on the bottom rung of the social ladder. And white. Institutions may treat me better than BAME people at the economic level I am, but only just. I'm still scum to people in power (And let's face it, anyone who reads a tabloid).
You may argue that not giving a shit about the colour of skin of the people around me is the greatest privilege, but I say I cannot afford that privilege.
I'll try to explain, it's actually quite simple.
1) About capitalism being inherently racist:
The main moving force of society is conflict between the ruling class and the exploited class - if the exploited class (or an exploited minority group, too) becomes too much of a nuisance, the ruling class will improve their condition through reforms in order to pacify them - but it's in the very nature of every system for the exploited class to remain exploited, so mere reforms can't bring to that point. So when the time is ripe the exploited class carries out a revolution, becoming the new ruling class. That's the way society progresses.
Obviously, the ruling class needs various structures to distract the exploited class from that conflict. So that's where, among many other opressive social structures primarily designed to distract or divide the exploited class, racism shows up. If you're a ruthless business person mercilessly cracking down on your workforce and they are furious at you, it's very convenient to blame all of their problems on an "other", or in this case another ethnic group, while convicing the exploited that both he and them are part of the same "race", "nation" or whatever, as opposed to those other guys, and thus should stick together against them. That's why the "they took our jobs" crowd exists, for example - they obviously have a legitimate problem, but instead of blaming it on the capitalists they blame it on the immigrants, who are in an even deeper shit themselves.
Also, capitalism has always been colonial in one form or another, even today. As of now, cheap labor in Third World countries is used to support the First World.
2) About the state being inherently capitalist:
Like I said, the catalyst of all social changes is conflict between two classes. The state is the main instrument of oppression used by the ruling class. The modern state (which is, really, the only "state" in the true sense of the word) is a bit different in that regard compared to pre-modern states, since it builds itself as an abstract, all-encompassing entity and gives the illusion that most or all layers of society are equally included in its foundation and operation. That's not true, as it still remains, above all else, an instrument of class oppression. The modern states perpetuates the illusion that class reconciliation is possible, which is obviously false, and only serves the interests of capitalism. (note: Stalinism and all other forms of bureaucratically-oriented "socialism" are also capitalist ideologies)
You could also make a point that the state is inherently racist straight away, by the virtue of it being exclusive and defined by borders, perpetuating the concept of "nationality" in various forms, or since inter-state economic competition is inevitable, but that might be too long a shot.
Oh, of course, racism is far from the sole form of opression which exists in society. If anything, I might even dare to call it secondary to and stemming from economic opression.
If you ask me, the disproportionate focus on going after indie devs instead of larger gaming companies (which have more power to influence reviewers and reporters) hurts their credibility. I am aware of issues such as the Gamespot Kane & Lynch debacle, Metacritic costing game developers their bonuses, and reviewer bribes, but Zoe Quinn is far removed from all that.
>on the blog being written by a GIRL
It's second-waver writing, I'd wager, which has always been more militant and masculine(see the reference to Dworkin). Compare the blog to this: http://witchwind.wordpress.com/ and insert it into this: http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze
I linked it because it was a good perspective to have with clowns like these in the mix: http://imgur.com/a/oACNH . Whiteknighting gets thrown around way too much, but types like that only rally against sexism as a way to gain moral currency. Also, do these folks seem fake to you? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYqBdCmDR0M
>capitalism is always racist
I'd say state is hierarchy is racism. In a marxist utopia ingroup/outgroup thinking would still manifest. Racism nukes worker's wellbeing and negatively effects maximum utility of human resources, so that has an anti-capitalist aspect to it.
>on bad people on your side
It's the associative fallacy. Does the example in this post of the Schwyzer-expy invalidate the legitimacy of all other dudes who are concerned with the online abuse towards women? Does it make them all two-faced whiteknights? Of course it doesn't. You're going to have filth on your side in anything political.
Translated from Castrostalinism, it means that since racism is a bad thing, it's capitalistic.
I...have no idea where this thread is going now.
Astroturfed by misogynistic anti-hegemonists.
It's been evolving into a thread in favour of castrostalinism for a while, so after much meditation I thought i'd step in.
I was at least hoping you'd get the particular Marxist sect right, I'm very disappointed.
Plus there's enough real saucy insults typically reserved for Trots, my favorite so far has to be when I was called out by some anarcho-buddhist dweeb for being a "bloodthirsty psychopathic red fascist with a hard-on for violence for its own sake", and I openly admit that at least one of those epithets is completely true.
All I know is, artistic vision should not be affected by the nature of politics. But it sure as hell is.
I figured that since all forms of socialism are in practical terms identical, I'd call all of them castrostalinism. The exception are those related to Stalin, Pol Pot and a couple others, these get called socialism instead.
Well...what a derail.
In any case, since I subscribe to Nordic model and anarchist streams of socialism, I'm mildly offended that you think they are the same as Leninism. Mildly because, if we're going to resort to name-calling, castrostalinism sounds like something the Tea Party would come up with.
To me, you can say Vertial Power structures are bad, hierarchies are bad, and all that the state entails is bad. I would agree, but it's a necessary evil, It's states that venture into the unknown and reach father than others. companies don't do it, and communes don't do it. We first need to get to colonizing planets before considering that these structures are obsolete.
Art is created, molded, and formed by politics, being the practice and theory of influencing people.
Art moves you, gives you ideas, changes how you think. Art is a medium of politics.
Now, I get what you mean; art should be exempt from the faction games and counting coup and the competing of agendas. And in an ideal world, I would agree. But that's not how things are. Everything made ever has an agenda, even if the stance is "I don't want any part of this, I feel people should stop caring about it, and care about what I feel is worthy."
The only "pure" hypothetical form of art free from politics would be - I don't know - pure emotion triggered directly in your brain, and even then that stance says that people shouldn't feel anything at all except wallow in the ecstasy of over-stimulation.
tl;dr: Even if you stand for nothing, you're still standing, because all this is the firmament that your feet weighs upon.