by Vox Day
I’ve often wondered why Gammas are so intent on trying to shut down discussion and silence others. And then it occurred to me that they do this, not because they are foolish, but because they are cowards. If you silence a Gamma and he cannot escape, he will superficially submit. Sure, he’s seething and angry, and he’ll hold a grudge about it forever, but the one thing he isn’t ever going to do is fight you. Physical confrontation is simply not an option for him. And that is why the Gamma is always astonished on the rare occasion that he actually gets punched in the mouth. Because he would never fight, he can’t imagine that anyone else will do so. I know many, many men who have been in fights over the years, and yet, in retrospect, I cannot say that any of them were Gammas.
Of course, this is also why the Gamma shrieks like a little Swedish girl being raped by refugees when anyone even suggests the possibility of force being utilized. The very thought of it is terrifying to him.
But can Gamma be cured? And if so, will that also cure him of his attachment to social justice ideals? I think it is at least possible. The trick, we are told by one former Gamma, the make-or-break point is to learn how to say the two things that are terrifying to every Gamma.
The first is “I don’t know.”
The second-most terrifying statement for a Gamma is to admit that he doesn’t know something. A Gamma frequently speaks of having knowledge in areas he most certainly does not. To the Gamma, being ignorant is tantamount to being discredited as a person, so he will do whatever is in his power to bluff, obfuscate, and redirect people so others don’t see his ignorance. If a man wishes to escape the mindset of a Gamma, he must learn the statement, “I don’t know” and use it whenever it is appropriate.
He doesn’t need to say this all the time, merely when it is necessary because he honestly doesn’t know about the topic at hand. While at first glance this may seem easy enough, it is more difficult in practice. It’s challenging for the Gamma because typically he has already hung himself on his own ignorance by saying way more than he should have, so by the time he is challenged on a point, the admission may well cause his entire argument to collapse. Think about this dilemma for a moment. In this scenario, where was the first error? It was talking nonsense in the first place.
The second is “I am wrong.”
The most terrifying statement for a Gamma is admitting that he is wrong about something. To stop being a Gamma, a man must start to take responsibility for his own words and actions. Once again, this is exceedingly difficult for those who are not accustomed to doing so. And yet, there is tremendous power in the words “I am wrong” Those three little words are not words of weakness but of power, for two reasons. First, because they are true, and second, because this truth allows one room for correction and improvement. In other words, if a man never admits he is wrong, he can never correct his mistakes or the erroneous thinking that led to them.
At the end of the day, a relentless dedication to the truth is the only cure for both Gamma and social justice. It is not a path that everyone can walk; many will prefer to stroll upon the wide and easy way to Hell. But the important thing is that the harder path is there, and even the most deceitful, self-deluded individual is capable of deciding to follow it.
Chapter 8: GamerGate Leads the Way
What began as a backlash to a debate about how video games portray women led to an internet culture that ultimately helped sweep Donald Trump into office. Really.
—“GamerGate to Trump: How video game culture blew everything up”, CNET, 8 July 2017
The ride never ends.
That’s a phrase you’ll occasionally see on social media, often accompanied by an image of a world-weary skeleton soldier. It’s something that the meme warriors of GamerGate say to one another, sometimes wryly, sometimes knowingly, and sometimes bitterly, in response to yet another SJW incursion into video games, sports, comics, or some other branch of the entertainment industry. GamerGate has often been pronounced dead, it is mostly inactive these days as far as active campaigns go, and yet it lurks around the consciousness of SJWs everywhere like Marley’s ghost haunting Scrooge.
GamerGate killed Gawker. GamerGate created the Alt-Right. GamerGate elected Donald Trump.
There are elements of truth and falsehood to all three statements. GamerGate didn’t kill Gawker, but Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan would not have pressed their suit against Gawker had it not first been targeted and weakened by GamerGate. GamerGate didn’t create the Alternative Right, which had been around in one form or another since William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, and Barry Goldwater chased the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement in 1962, but it showed the Alt-Right how to defeat the media at its own game. GamerGate didn’t elect Donald Trump—in fact, most American GamerGaters were probably more inclined to vote for Bernie Sanders than Donald Trump—but it provided the social media arm of the Trump campaign with a blueprint on how to effectively destroy the public image of an opponent without spending a single dime on a television or newspaper ad.
SJWs were, and are, terrified of GamerGate. The mere fact that two GamerGaters, myself and Daddy Warpig, were involved in the Rabid Puppies campaign was enough to cause the science fiction SJWs to panic and retreat to their safe spaces. Their terror is not entirely not without cause. After decades of pushing around conservatives, Republicans, the National Football League, and even the U.S. Army, SJWs finally encountered an enemy that was even more ruthless, even more implacable, and even more indefatigable than they are. As Milo Yiannopoulos once observed, it’s really not wise to take on a collection of individuals whose idea of entertainment is to spend hundreds of hours at a highly repetitive task, especially when their core philosophy is founded on the principle that if you are running into enemies and taking fire, you must be going the right way.
“Of all the enemies Gawker had made over the years—in New York media, in Silicon Valley, in Hollywood—none were more effective than the Gamergaters…. What I’d missed about Gamergate was that they were gamers—they had spent years developing a tolerance for highly repetitive tasks. Like, say, contacting major advertisers. On Reddit, a campaign was launched to contact every advertiser Gamergaters could find on Gawker’s site—and not just the marketing departments of advertisers like Adobe and BMW, but specific executives. If you can bug a chief marketing officer, it doesn’t matter that your complaints are disingenuous: He just wants to stop being annoyed… Gamergate proved the power of well-organized reactionaries to threaten Gawker’s well-being. And when Gawker really went too far—far enough that even our regular defenders in the media wouldn’t step up to speak for us—Gamergate was there, in the background, turning every crisis up a notch or two and making continued existence impossible.”
—“Did I Kill Gawker?”, Max Read, New York Magazine
While GamerGate is largely dormant these days despite the occasional lapse into old, bad habits by the game journalists, its legacy lives on at /pol/, which has taken the GamerGate policies of digging deep into the opposition, crowdsourcing investigations, and archiving absolutely everything, and turned them up to eleventy hundred. Their method is known as “weaponized autism”, their motto is “/pol/ is always right”, and they make we GamerGaters look like Jeb Bush action figures in comparison. Their successful hunt of Shia LaBeouf’s anti-Trump He Will Not Divide Us flag is hard to believe, as they used everything from cross-references of airplane flight paths, jet contrails, and constellations to identify its general location, which they finally nailed down by driving around honking their car’s horn until the live-stream camera picked up the sound. The flag was taken down and a MAGA hat was raised in its stead. It took /pol/ only 37 hours to find the flag and steal it.
But /pol/ does far more than that. It has identified criminal Antifa members and provided information to the police that has led to their arrest, such as the case of the “bike lock attacker” who hit several people over the head with a bike lock at a Trump rally in Berkeley on 15 April 2017. With nothin
g more to go on than some photographs and a few seconds of video of a masked man attacking people, /pol/ used his sunglasses and his backpack straps to identify Eric Clanton, an itinerant teacher for the Contra Costa Community College District. On May 26th, Clanton was charged with four counts of felony assault with enhancements alleging that he caused great bodily injury. He also was charged with a misdemeanor; wearing a mask during commission of a crime.
Nor is he the only SJW to have been publicly identified by /pol/. Yvette Felarca, one of the leaders of the December 2014 Black Lives Matter protests in Berkeley and a founder of the group By Any Means Necessary, has been a target of /pol/ for years, which celebrated when she was arrested for battery and resisting arrest on 26 September 2017.
What GamerGate showed, and what /pol/ is actively demonstrating, is that cyberwar is real. It is not just a cool-sounding fragment of William Gibson’s glittering imagination, nor is it something limited to government agencies like the U.S. National Security Agency or the Russian Special Communications and Information Service. It is something that sufficiently motivated parties can do together, and something that they can do successfully.
Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
—“What Gamergate should have taught us about the ‘alt-right’”, The Guardian, 1 December 2016
The truth is that GamerGate is no more dead than when the game journalists collectively pronounced its demise on 28 August 2014. As one GamerGate meme rightly has it, “Gamergate was an opening skirmish, welcome to the war, soldier.” The SJWs were dealt a blow, but they haven’t disappeared. Their societal cancer has metastasized and is spreading. But we are the surgeons.
THE RABID PUPPIES RETURN
A lot has happened in the world of science fiction since the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies blew up the nominations for the 2015 Hugo Awards. Most people focused on the fact that a record five categories had not been awarded thanks to the determination of the science fiction SJWs not give out any awards to the Puppy-selected Finalists who had swept those categories. I was more interested in a few things that I’d observed from the detailed reports on the nominations that were released after the awards, which in combination with the final vote made two things perfectly clear to me. First, there was no way the system was ever going to permit us to actually win any Hugo awards. Due to the rather convoluted voting rules, where everyone’s votes are ranked so that once a Finalist is eliminated, the votes of those who preferred it are distributed to the other Finalists according to their preference, we were going to have to provide an absolute majority of the registered electorate before we could win anything. Second, although most observers believed the Rabid Puppies were coasting on the Sad Puppies tails, the truth was the other way around. Not only did we have no need for the Sad Puppies to put our selections on the Finalist list in all the categories besides Best Novel, but wherever there was a conflict between the two Puppy groups, the Rabid Puppy candidate won and it wasn’t even close.
The third thing I concluded was that WorldCon was going to change its rules, because that was the only way they were going to be able to prevent us from dominating the short list in the future. And that meant that there was only one way we were going to be able to do lasting damage to the award system that science fiction’s SJWs had been using to deceptively boost the literary reputations of their favorites for over a decade, and that was to create a new award while somehow convincing the SJWs to render the Hugo Award increasingly irrelevant by comparison.
But how do you convince your enemy to destroy himself? As Donald Trump has repeatedly shown, you do it by convincing your enemy that the actions that will harm them will actually harm you instead, and provoking them into a reactionary cycle where each provocation from you causes them to hit themselves under the impression that they are striking at you.
This all sounds rather Machiavellian and complicated, but in practice, it’s usually pretty simple due to the fact that SJWs neither know themselves nor their enemies, and react in a mindless, but concerted manner like a school of fish. Add to this their tendency to project their own emotions on you, and if you pay attention, you can usually figure out what action will inspire them to react in the desired way. I also had the advantage of seeing how the SJWs had reacted in the recent past, and there was no reason to believe they weren’t going to double down on their previous reactions.
The degree to which the 2015 nominations had upset the science fiction SJWs can be seen in the rapid increase in the number of ballots that were cast from the nomination stage to the final stage. In 2014, 1595 nominating ballots were cast compared to 3,587 final ballots, a 125 percent increase. In 2015, after the Rabid Puppies stormed the nominations, 1,827 nominating ballots were cast versus 5,950 final ballots, a 226 percent increase. This increase of more than 2,400 voters was the result of an aggressive campaign by SJWs to ensure that no Puppy candidate would soil the sacred Hugo Award by taking home one of the trophies.
There was much public celebrating in the science fiction media after the Puppies were shut out at the trophy stage, so much so that some of it even leaked out into the mainstream media.
“‘Sad Puppies’ campaign fails to undermine sci-fi diversity at the Hugo Awards”
—Los Angeles Times, 24 August 2015
The drubbing received by the reactionary lobby’s preferred nominees shows that sci-fi’s future has to be a diverse one.
“Diversity wins as the Sad Puppies lose at the Hugo awards”, The Guardian, 24 August 2015
Song of Ice and Fire author writes that he is glad to see reactionary lobby ‘routed’, but regrets the number of ‘No Award’ decisions this entailed
—“George RR Martin ‘relieved’ after Sad Puppies’ Hugo awards defeat” The Guardian, 26 August 2015
“Hugo Awards: Rabid Puppies defeat reflects growing diversity in science fiction”
—Chicago Tribune, 28 August 2015
Science fiction’s SJWs were certain that they had turned back the unseemly challenge posed to them once and for all, mostly because anyone who purchased a membership that gave them voting rights for the award at one Worldcon also received the right to vote in next year’s nomination stage. But just to hedge their bets, they also voted in several changes to the rules that would make it harder for a group of outsiders to dominate the nominations by coordinating their votes. I had expected that they would react in this way, although I underestimated the extent to which we had shaken them, since I did not expect the measures to actually pass. But they not only passed one set of rules changes, they actually passed several, rendering an already complicated set of rules into something so twisted and confusing that there was little chance that the average science fiction reader would ever understand them. However, due to the two-convention process for rules changes, the new rules did not go immediately into effect, but had to be ratified at the 2016 convention.
So, the SJWs were confident going into 2016 that their numbers were sufficient to dissuade any further attempts to interfere with their annual exercise in self-congratulation. What they did not realize was that their churlish and insulting behavior directed at excellent authors such as John C. Wright and Larry Correia had angered the majority of the Sad Puppies and transformed them into Rabid Puppies more than willing to follow my lead.
And while I knew that we didn’t have enough nominating votes to play for the Best Novel category, which is always the most popular, we had more than enough to target every other category. Furthermore, the SJWs didn’t realize that, far from me manipulating Larry Correia, the original Sad Puppy, and Brad Torgersen, the 2015 Sad Puppy leader, those two men had actually acted as a moderating influence on me. As bad as the SJWs believed the joint Puppies’ campaign to be, they had no idea what a pure Rabid Puppies campaign would look like. Their expectations were confounded by
the fact that while Larry and Brad originally wanted to be members in good standing of the science fiction community, and to a certain extent, had craved its respect early in their careers, I have never been a part of that community nor wanted to be. I am a gamer and a game designer who merely happens to write science fiction and fantasy, among other things. But that is no more important to my self-identity than the fact that I have also recorded electronic music, played soccer, and worked in technical support. So, I never sought nor valued the respect of the professional science fiction community or the fandom that orbits it, which I consider to be little more than a sickly collection of mentally-ill sexual deviants.
In short, the Sad Puppies wanted to loosen the grasp of the SF-SJWs on the science fiction awards, and see a broader range of authors and works honored. The Rabid Puppies wanted to devalue and destroy the science fiction awards, impale the SJWs responsible for converging them, burn down the science fiction publishing houses, and build a pyramid of SJW skulls.
Metaphorically, of course.
Because we were not actually angling for awards, that permitted us to pursue three goals in continuing to devalue the Hugo Awards. The first goal was to rally the SJWs to resist us. That was most effectively achieved by putting forward works and authors that they found intrinsically offensive. Since the publishing house we had started two years before was publishing more books every month, and more importantly, a military science fiction anthology, we had a good supply of works that we knew would generate strong opposition simply due to the fact that they were published by Castalia House. I knew that because SJWs always seek to send a message, the more we could provoke them, the more extreme their response would be. So, we put the predecessor to this book, SJWs Always Lie, on the ballot as Best Related Work, along with a pair of works about the decades-long pedophilia problem in science fiction, and put me forward as Best Editor in both the Short Form and Long Form categories.