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Jan. 30, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
13:09
Social Justice Hypocrites： #ZeroBiscuit and Exclusionist Behaviour
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Now, there's nothing quite like a good bit of hypocrisy.
For example, if we take the hashtag Zerobiscuit, started by everyone's favourite racist Arthur Chu.
But interestingly, this is Arthur Chu's echo in the social justice echo chamber.
Chu was in fact pipped at the post the day before by David Gallant.
For the sake of the industry, no more Total Biscuit.
This was a blog post featured on Gama Sutra by an expert blogger.
Wow, I'm very impressed.
So our expert blogger goes on to say, you probably already know of John Bane, also known as the Cynical Brits, also known as Total Biscuit.
Self-proclaimed number one PC gaming critic of YouTube, has nearly 2 million subscribers on that service and nearly 400,000 followers on Twitter.
Well, yes, that is why we may well have heard of him.
And I think those numbers actually make him the number one PC gaming critic of YouTube.
I don't think it's necessarily self-proclaimed, I think it is actually more self-evident.
But I'm not actually here to point out your stupidity.
What I'm here to talk about are the disgusting totalitarian tactics that David Gallant recommends.
Despite Total Biscuit being a cancer survivor, and that he has undoubtedly done many positive things that I'm sure will be listed in the comments below this post, David for some reason needs to make an appeal to you, the Gama Sutra audience, and when he says that he means developers and the collective games industry.
We need to stop enabling this man.
David doesn't actually tell us what people do to enable Total Biscuit, and given Total Biscuit subscribership on YouTube, it's rather difficult to believe that anyone from Gama Sutra could enable anything.
But he goes on to say, for a long time now, Bane has been exhibiting harmful opinions and being very dismissive when called to account for them.
He wields his audience as a weapon against criticism.
He very plainly supports Gamergate and aligns himself with the worst harassers in the movement.
He is not a man we should be celebrating, promoting, endorsing or helping.
To do so is to lend support to his regressive opinions.
Which says everything we need to know.
David Gallant is a social justice warrior.
Total Biscuit is a reasonable, rational, ethical man who wants journalists to be held to account for their actions, as if they were the consumer advocates they are supposed to be.
So David lists Total Biscuit's various crimes as retweeting a charity stream.
Okay?
Why was this a bad thing, David?
Oh, the charity stream asked him not to retweet them because of ideological bigotry.
Well, that is a damn good reason to retweet that charity stream.
If people can give money to a charity and rub it in the face of social justice warriors, where do I sign up?
I've got 10 bucks with your name on it.
He disagrees with Intel's new diversity initiative.
He appeared on a live stream with several prominent Gamergate organizers, including harassers like Slade Villena.
Rogestar, you're a harasser now, buddy.
He's been buddy-buddy with Milo Yiannopoulos, the same journalist who harassed Brianna Wu over her dying dog, and who asserts trans folks are merely mentally ill.
He was also the guy who broke the Game Journo pros list, you know, the one, the secret mailing list where all the games journalists were talking to each other and pressuring each other for ideological conformity.
But let's not worry about that.
Participated in Gamergate's thunderclap.
Shaqs!
Links regularly to posts on Kotaku in Action, one of Gamergate's organising points, and a place routinely filled with slurs, trans misogyny, racism, etc.
Won't someone think of the social justice warriors routinely mocks concepts like punching down, chosen pronouns, trans identities, etc.
Well, I haven't heard him mocking trans identities and chosen pronouns are fucking stupid.
And punching down, isn't that what the gaming media is doing to the gamers?
This is why Gamergate exists, you fucking idiot.
But this is just minor hypocrisy.
Let us carry on.
He created a short Twine game with the explicit purpose of mocking Twine games and their developers.
Possibly because they're not really games, and possibly because they're easier shit to do.
Who knows?
He expressed support for notorious YouTube anti-feminist Thunderf00t Oh myny- terrible. terrible thing.
It's an awful, awful thing.
Rational thinking and skeptical inquiry.
We don't agree with that here, do we?
We're busy listening and believing.
And finally, he recently incited hate against Brianna Wu.
Well, if I've got to be honest, you don't need to incite hate against Brianna Wu.
Brianna Wu is a pretty distasteful person.
A lot of people hate her without Total Biscuit doing anything.
He says, this is the kind of behavior you support when you support John Bane.
This is the kind of behavior this industry awarded as trending gamer in 2014.
This behaviour is being signalled as acceptable by the industry to the nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers and nearly 400,000 Twitter followers accumulated by John Bane.
This has to stop.
Now, if you're not familiar with these things, you may be thinking, why are they bad?
Well, they're not bad.
They're political.
They're political to the ideology that is social justice, which can best be summed up as a very racist, sexist ideology of totalitarian radical feminism.
And I am not even exaggerating when I say that.
So David Gallant's call to action against Total Biscuit is do not send this man your games.
Do not allow him to produce video footage using your content.
Do not endorse him on your storefronts.
Do not invite him to your events.
Do not nominate him for your awards.
Do not appear on his podcasts.
Do not have him guest on your shows.
Do not follow him on Twitter.
Do not subscribe to him on YouTube.
Do not endorse his actions any longer.
Now David Gallant is clearly unaware that this is naked and flagrant bigotry.
Total Biscuit's objectivist stance on the gaming industry is at complete and absolute odds to David's own.
He wishes for subjectivity, bias and cronyism.
Total Biscuits has argued for objectivity, impartiality and meritocracy.
It's no wonder then that these people are so at odds with Total Biscuit.
This tweet is the sum total of Garma Sutra's ethics policy as written by Garma Sutra's editor-in-chief Le Alexander.
Her ethics policy is this.
Get money.
Fight quote-unquote bullshit and make sure those I love stand the longest.
It's self-evident that this is nothing more than a rallying cry for greed, lies and cronyism.
So it is no surprise that David Gallant says this.
I realize that what I am asking you to do is to directly impact the livelihood of a games critic.
If there was another way to get through to Bane, I would have suggested it.
But he has proven immune to any kind of constructive feedback, all of which he characterizes as an attack regardless of tone or approach.
Well, I'm sure a social justice warrior would never do that, and certainly not to one of their own.
But this attack on Total Biscuit is nothing to do with the games industry.
This attack on Total Biscuit is an ideological attack.
This is because Total Biscuit has vast numbers of supporters because he is not like David Gallant.
Is it any wonder then that David Gallant would do everything he can in his meager power, the extent of which appears to be writing an article for Gama Sutra, decrying Total Biscuit and asking for him to be ostracized from the game industry.
This is of course stupid as all hell.
It's a form of sociopathic retardation by which because Total Biscuit is so successful, getting almost 40,000 subscribers a month and not only not complying with his ideological position of listening and believing, but completely flying in the face of it and being phenomenally successful while doing so.
It threatens to undermine everything the social justice warriors have been fighting for.
And so David Gallant, like many other social justice warriors, will stoop to any depth in his attempts to try and defeat what he deems as a threat to his ideology.
As I said, this sociopathic retardation is a very interesting thing.
Total Biscuit has enough subscribers to start his own sub-industry if he chose to.
There is no way that people are going to be listening to David Gallant over Total Biscuit.
His reach, his range, it can make or break games single-handedly.
This is in fact probably one of the reasons why Total Biscuit is so concerned about ethical standards in gaming journalism.
He knows the power he has, David Gallant knows the power he has, and this is where we are.
And now we come to the hypocrisy.
An article called We Can Do Better by David Gallant on the 26th of May 2013.
An article in which he says, I'd like to think of myself as a person with zero tolerance for bigotry, possibly because he has no idea what bigotry is.
If he's anything like your average social justice warrior, he thinks that bigotry is something only other people can do.
We still say nothing to exclusionist behaviour because we don't want to stir up trouble.
We still smile at the respected community member who spreads lies about your friend because you don't want to appear uncivil at such a large game jam.
I have no problem stirring up trouble, David Gallant.
You are an exclusionist.
You are advocating here and now for exclusionist behaviour.
And you are doing it in the most ridiculous, absurd way.
It is laughable.
Your hypocrisy, your ideological blindness, you are a joke.
This is such a joke that even Bob Chipman can see that it is a bad idea.
You have shot yourself in the foot, you fool.
So who is David Gallant?
David is a no-account indie developer who has produced small, insignificant games that apparently no one has heard about.
Having only 700 odd followers on Twitter, one might wonder, why is this man allowed to write for a major gaming website?
Well, David worked very hard to become one of the cool kids by kissing ass and sucking up and ingratiating himself with Toronto's cool indie dev scene.
Don't believe me, let's hear it in his own words.
Quote, I became a game developer because of how I saw the Toronto game development scene from the outside.
There was one key moment where Craig Adams responded to a passive request with a very active engagement that cemented my desire to join the community.
At that point, I didn't want to make games because I liked to make games.
I certainly enjoyed playing games, but I had no idea what making games would be like.
Rather, I started making games so I could be one of them.
I had found a group of people who I considered inspiring and I wanted to be included with them.
They responded with a large amount of acceptance, invitations to join game jams, suggestions on where to start, an unorthodox internship springboarded my growth.
The community immediately lived up to my idealistic expectations.
Well, that's probably one of the most pathetic things I've ever read.
But what bothers me most is the admission.
I got into making games not because I liked making games, but because I wanted to be part of a clique.
And now he is part of a clique writing for a major industry website to promote an ideological agenda.
Because he is a hypocritical bigot.
From his own words.
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