How the gamergate crypto-fascists got under my radar.

Stuff from Facebook #25.
-and-
Revisits #49.

Eh, it's a long rambly one, but I want it on record, and at easy access for the future.

This is from a board, and this "Dinner", person is a Gamergater we know who went full racist, but can't even see that he's racist.
He finally got sick of being called racist, and ran away.
Fuck him.
Up the ass with a cinnamon grater.
Good riddance.

It also counts as another update to "cryptos", and "conspiracies".
Hence the revisits moniker.


Nov 2, 2019

Dinner says in the "fuck being woke", thread he'd know if he was being seduced by Nazis.
I called bullshit, and then I decided this needed its own splinter thread.

So, here's how it happened to me.

We all judge trustworthy people on past performance.
The longer the good past performance, the more reliable we consider the source.
The danger comes in, with enough trust, we get lazy, and stop checking the source's sources.

I gave that blind lazy trust to people like Amazing Atheist, Armored Skeptic, Thunderfoot, and Sargon Of Akkad.

They said all the right shit when it came to liberalism and atheism.

They hated all the right things and people when it came to liberalism and atheism.

SO, when the Gamergate shit started creeping in, why wouldn't I think that was part of the bad-guy team like the fundamentalist Christians, and the Republicans?
Right?

The trustworthy sources were still saying all the right shit against those forces of evil too.
There was no sudden swing.
They didn't all slap swastika armbands on.
They didn't grow fangs.
Their eyes didn't turn orange with cat irises.
Their voices didn't turn into tiger growls.
They were still themselves.
Just this new little bit of bullshit got added on.

We think if this shit happens it's like a movie.
It's never like a movie.
It's never gonna be.

And it took up more and more of their shows reeeeaallly gradually.
It creeped up over a few years.
From 2012 to 2016.
You'd have to be a time traveler downloading all their shows, and timing the content out with editing software to see the change happening.

First there was Elevatorgate, then Gamergate, then the Gamergate-ers went from hating radical feminists to ALL feminists, then it became okay to say misogynist shit about just the radical feminists, because they were causing harm, then it grew like a fungus, then the pickup artists and incels were rejected because "oh, at least we're not like THEM", but then the pickup artists and incels were just let right in through the side door.

It was a million tiny little steps.
A slow evolution.

And when it has its tentacles around you, you think you're sane, and everyone else is going crazy.
Dinner keeps saying this shit, and I remember being the guy saying it.

So, how did I snap out of it?

For one, I walked the walk when it comes to being logical.
Most people who think they're logical really don't understand what that means.
They think puffing their chest, and throwing a lot of dictionary words into their speech is logic.
No, it's an actual process with rules.
Its an anti-virus for your head.
But you have to manually work it.
It doesn't run by itself.
You have to do it.
I actually keep a chart of logical fallacies at hand.
I keep the Carl Sagan baloney detection kit at hand.

But, the part of me that gets the virus warning was broken, so I wasn't using it.
I was getting the virus warning from people virus warning me about Gamergate.

So, how did I snap out of it?

Ghostbusters: Answer The Call.

When the anti-feminist CHUDs went after that, I knew something was fishy.

Cuz, I know everything about Ghostbusters.
I did my homework on Paul Feig.
I did my homework on the new cast.
The shit the CHUDs were saying about the movie and him wasn't adding up.
I knew it wasn't part of a feminist conspiracy.
I knew it had nothing to do with Anita Sarkeesian.

By being a Ghostbusters fan, I had checked the sources of my sources by accident.

And that made me finally boot up my root logic program.
And then a lot of the anti-feminist shit started to fall apart.

And then the blind trust of my sources went away, and I started un-following fuckers.

But the next to last straw, was Sargon being so anti-Hillary he was pro-Trump, and he was pro-Brexit, when my British Facebook friends knew in excruciating scientific detail that Brexit would be a nightmare.

But the final-final straw was Charlottesville.
When actual Nazis actually killed someone, and the CHUDs like Sargon were laughing at it, and victim blaming, the jig was up.

And this shit got smarter people than me.

It was a combination of luck, and being an OCD logic fundamentalist that got me out.
But, being a logic fundamentalist was OCD, and OCD is genetics, so it was all luck.

People that don't have my combination of experiences, and head-wiring, they're kind of fucked.

As we can see with Dinner getting sucked deeper and deeper into it.
He ain't coming back.

There ain't no logic-checking software in that guy.
He's going down in flames.


And the lesson I learned to keep from repeating the mistake?
ALWAYS trace the sources.
No matter how much you trust the speaker, look up where they got the information.
That's the easiest anti-virus to bullshit.


Not much more to add there.
Boils down to, don't ever let your vanity tell you you're too smart to fall for their shit, cuz that's exactly when they get ya.
Stay on your toes.



Previously with SFF-

Asshole during Justice League. (SFF #24)


Previously with revisits-

Roy Cohn! (R #48)