Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - A Conversation with Mykeru

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March 8, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

03:22:39

A Conversation with Mykeru

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	Hello, everyone.
	I'm here with Mike Ru, who is a veteran of the atheist community.
	And he's going to be telling us about his experiences with feminism and social justice in that community and the damage that it did.
	Hi, Mike Ru, how's it going?
	It's all right.
	I am a veteran of the social justice warrior invasion of the atheist and skeptical community, but I'm not bedridden with PTSD.
	I can't believe it.
	I thought everyone in that movement was.
	Anyone who's anyone.
	Exactly, the famous ones.
	So would you like to tell everyone just about yourself and how you came into the atheist scene and what happened?
	Oh, well, I mean, taking it back, I was nominally raised a Roman Catholic, just so that my grandmother on my father's side didn't have a stroke.
	But my mother is British, and so she was C of E, which is, I guess, as close as agnostic as you can come.
	So I was never really a believer in any of this.
	You know, in the Catholic Church, when you're a certain age of being able to reason, you're supposed to become a full-on member of the Catholic Church.
	But of course, if you're able to reason, then you just reject that.
	So I made communion, but it was never confirmed.
	And I've been an atheist since as long as I could remember and had an interest in skeptical topics.
	You know, using it, things like Eric von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods or Ronald Cush's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, just as a way to use these as examples of how people's thinking can go wrong.
	So I was amazed.
	I sort of was out of the atheists and sceptical community, at least online, for a while.
	And then I came back in during, really, Elevator Gate, where...
	Ah, yes, Rebecca Watson is that.
	Right.
	She was a long time participant on the JREF boards, which themselves made a transition into social justice, la-la-land, and general pandering and white-knighting somewhere in this process.
	And, you know, I was not there when apparently a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, thought it would be cool to dye their hair purple and become an atheist.
	I came in a little bit after that and then wondered what happened to the community.
	And I was absolutely amazed at the extent to which they were able to weed their way into the skeptical community, showing very little skepticism, because very often fear outweighs skepticism.
	Okay, I think that's a good point for us to start with, actually.
	Fear.
	Would you like to elaborate on what you meant when you said that?
	Well, these people, and this goes for social justice warriors and feminists, are very good at shaving tactics and shutting down conversations.
	And they tend to vilify people.
	And if they can call you a misogynist or say that you're transphobic or whatever phobic for criticizing them, usually it takes the form of you criticize someone for something that they said on logical grounds, and then they try to turn it around to you criticize me simply because I'm a woman or I'm something or other.
	No one wants to be painted with that brush.
	No one wants to be made to look intolerant.
	And in fact, if you look at some of the things that they've done, like the blockbot, which is something that comes out of Atheism Plus, and you look at the reasons why people were added to the blockbot, I got labeled misogynistic, transphobic, this, that, and the other thing.
	And, well, I was transphob because I made a reference to the porn genre, chicks with dicks, which is something that they used to transfer.
	And that got me labeled a transphobia.
	I also got labeled anti-Semitic simply because I did a few tweets questioning why it is that the first wave of attacks that they made against men for various sexual indiscretions were Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer, that is two notably Jewish skeptics.
	And for bringing that up, paradoxically, they labeled me an anti-Semite.
	You see how that works?
	I do.
	And this is the worst thing at all.
	I got labeled for doubting Melody Hensley's PTSD.
	Who wants to be hard with that brush?
	But really, it somehow goes on your record that now you're at...
	You know, misogynist has completely lost its sting.
	Transphobe, I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
	But really, an anti-Semite?
	See, that hurts.
	Yeah, I think...
	That's the one that actually still bothers me.
	Well, they're just blatantly calling you a racist there.
	And if you're going to be a racist towards Jewish people, what's stopping you from being a racist towards anyone else?
	Right.
	So it's no wonder that I would agree.
	That's quite shocking, really.
	See, their major weapon isn't logic or critical reasoning or attacking a person's argument.
	They attack the person.
	It is inherently ad hominem.
	And the weapon that they use is disapproval.
	I disapprove of what you said.
	Now, for some people, that will actually, you know, everyone likes to be liked.
	And in fact, the online radical feminists, that is their main weapon.
	If you criticize them, they'll say things like, oh, you're a little man.
	A real man wouldn't say that.
	Shaming language, yes.
	Shaming language is inherently, my power is disapproval.
	Yes.
	I don't generally like to sort of gender these sort of things, but it is inherently female and it's always inherently used towards men.
	One of the things that I think most men just can't stand is to be shamed by women.
	I know, I know that's such a generalization, but I really do think it's true.
	Some of these anti-woman or the deck is stacked against women.
	It's such nonsense.
	I mean, males are almost hardwired to appease women.
	I mean, not all of them, but the structures are set up that your success as a man, even on the most basic level, your reproductive success is based upon appealing to women.
	Many men take careers because this is the kind of thing that women like.
	Absolutely.
	I think that, honestly, I think that almost everything about sort of traditional masculinity is just designed to attract women, really.
	It's designed to promote and protect.
	And just, I mean, it's what women go for generally.
	From what I've seen, from my experiences in the world of interpersonal relationships, this is what I can't understand about the sort of the feminist male who is just the antithesis of everything that women seem to find attractive in men.
	And they seem to use it as a weapon against other men as if I don't know, as if somehow they can level the playing field so they can remove all the positive attributes that women find attractive in other men so that they by comparison become, I don't know, maybe it gives them a way of competing.
	Right.
	I mean, that's in very broad terms we're speaking on.
	I guess individual women that would find the reclosive poet, cheeto-eating, gamer, you know, attractive.
	I don't think they're gamers that we're talking about.
	I think we're talking about hipsters.
	No, actually, actually, you know, the funny thing is that I've noticed that women making incursions into the gaming community invariably treat the men like Peter Pants, that they've, because they're involved in gaming, that they've never grown up.
	I mean, that's the stereotype that they pull.
	But yeah, in broad terms, I don't necessarily buy into when I read people talking about alpha males and beta males and women just want.
	I mean, there's a lot of variation, but in the broadest terms, yeah, there's certain types that generally appeal to women.
	I mean, even things that are outside of your control.
	I mean, I've seen women on dating profiles who actually, it seems to become a meme moment almost in itself, saying, I don't date any guy whose height begins with a five.
	Yes.
	Whereas only 14% of males are above six feet tall.
	So they're appealing to a very, very small segment of the male population there.
	They are.
	And the thing is, I really doubt that they're particularly stringent on their own rules when it comes to someone that they actually do like the look of.
	But that last thing, we are talking in very broad terms, but I just, the whole thing is very peculiar to me.
	whole, just, I mean, what do you make of identity politics?
	That's tough.
	I mean, I find it a strange thing that people can behave in any manner, any variety of ways.
	And some of the people behave in ways that are just sort of socially awkward or abrasive.
	And then the out is, you don't like me because I'm ex. Brianna Wu is really good at pulling this number.
	One of the things I've noticed about that sort of thing is it speaks to your motivations as if they know what your motivations are better than what you know your motivations are.
	And so you can't ever disprove it.
	You can never really disprove it.
	But they want you to try to disprove it because it's another way to end a conversation.
	Now you're on the defensive and saying, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm not whatever you just accused me of.
	In fact, let me go out of my way to appease you, to prove to you that I'm not whatever you just accused me of.
	And that way you're on the hook.
	And then the goalposts can keep being shifted.
	Yes.
	It's an endless cycle of appeasement.
	Yes.
	And then at the end of it, they won't respect you because you're just a jellyfish.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Haven't stood your own ground.
	You haven't stood by your own principles.
	They say, well, you're doing this because you're a racist or you're a sexist.
	Instead of just saying, no, that's not it, and I'm carrying on with how I'm doing, you've instead completely folded to their accusation.
	And like you say, you're dancing to their tune.
	They're going to keep changing the goalposts.
	And ultimately, you can never really prove that you're not any of these things that they're suggesting that you are.
	And so eventually you end up in the sort of situation where the only option is to completely fold and completely become entirely spineless and give in to whatever it is they're demanding of you.
	And after a while, they cannot continue to pull that.
	The example that I think of is the Comedy Central show South Park.
	Early on in South Park's early seasons, they got a lot of complaints saying, oh, you can't do that.
	You can't say that.
	That's horrible.
	That's outrageous.
	And Comedy Central wouldn't back down.
	And they would say, well, it's a cartoon show.
	Get over it.
	And now we're at the point where they can do things and no one complains anymore because they know it's not going to work.
	Absolutely.
	I think that the amount of dew jokes at South Park is incredible.
	And I can't believe that they can get away with it.
	And I think you're exactly right.
	The fact that they've never actually bowed to any of the pressure on them.
	And therefore, now they just don't have any pressure.
	I think ultimately with the social justice warriors, that's the only way to go.
	I mean, just today I saw an article on Kotaku of all places.
	I honestly don't go there, guys.
	Where Blizzard had come out and made a, I think she's some transsexual or just extremely muscular female character for one of their games with shocking pink hair with a big heavy weapon.
	And the person who was writing for Kotaku was a woman called Patricia Hernandez, who's extremely feminist and progressive.
	And she was thrilled by it, absolutely thrilled by it.
	And you would think, oh, God, look at them.
	They're thrilled.
	You know, it'd say it's a non-traditional, non-stereotypical female representation, very empowered, very, very powerful in the game.
	And the comments section was bitter, just the most bitter thing I've ever seen.
	Well, we're still not happy.
	We're furious about this or that or the other.
	And it's just like, what was the point in even trying to appease them?
	Well, first of all, I don't consider what I kind of think of as fashionista feminist, hipster feminists, ones where they seem to be wearing a uniform of hipster glasses and consignment shop clothes, hair, the color of neon signs.
	I don't consider them particularly progressive.
	What I see them as is selectively choosing traditional roles, especially when it comes to men.
	But when push comes to shove, they will fall back on saying, well, I'm just a girl.
	Oh, yes.
	Oh, yes.
	But it's not that there was anything necessarily wrong with the character or anything like that.
	In fact, the character looks quite good and stuff like that.
	But it was just the attitude.
	It wasn't complained about.
	Exactly.
	It was the attitude that really got me.
	It was like, you know, Blizzard had literally turned around and said, look, you've said this, we listened, and we've decided we completely agree with you.
	Here's our best effort.
	What do you think?
	Not even any charity.
	If someone was trying to desperately, I don't want to say pander, because I don't think that's necessarily what Blizzard were doing.
	I think they were just trying to get it right because there are so many rules, and these rules are almost entirely arbitrary and can be changed at any time for any reason.
	And Blizzard were just kind of walking through this minefield thinking, okay, well, we just want to make people happy, and we just want to make a product that they're going to like.
	And just the venom in the comments, they were just, there was no way Blizzard was ever going to come out of this without stepping on a mine.
	So, like South Park, why even bother trying?
	And again, there's nothing wrong with the character or anything like that.
	It was just it really bothered me.
	It really got to me.
	It's complete lack of charity from the social justice warriors.
	Again, presuming the intentions of people Blizzard, it's not mean, it's they're incompetent.
	It's just notice the selectivity.
	Isn't it the canard of these people that criticize games that they'll say, oh, look at this, look at this female character.
	She's an unrealistic body type.
	But they don't look at the male gaming characters.
	I mean, the whole thing is inherently hyperbolic.
	It's supposed to be.
	For that, they say that the male characters are power fantasies.
	So men like to pretend that they are those characters, whereas women apparently don't like to pretend that they are the attractive female characters who are the counterparts to the males.
	It instead makes them feel insecure and frumpy and whatnot.
	So, I mean, I'm willing to believe that men and women approach these things in different ways.
	But frankly, I come from the perspective of, well, you know, it's art and free expression.
	If you don't like it, that's your problem.
	You know, don't buy it.
	Or make your own game.
	Because you realize what's happening again and again is that you have games that are developed by other people, or it may even be developed by women game developers, but yet these people who don't do anything, don't know anything, don't have much in the way of skills, can't get off the couch, think that they can come in and say, yeah,
	change this to the way that we like it.
	Rather, you know, it's the old thing, if you don't like a movie or a book, you don't ban it, you write your own.
	Yeah, I know, I totally agree.
	I think that fundamentally they've got a lack of skills because they've spent their formative years doing gender studies degrees rather than learning practical skills that might have earned them a career.
	And it's not absolutely a lot of people.
	They apparently think that they should be in a managerial position where they're just guiding the workers, you worker being anyone who actually does anything.
	And they're in a managerial position where they will tell you what to do.
	Yeah, well, that's the thing, isn't it?
	They've got a remarkable sense of entitlement.
	Everything about them stems from this entitlement.
	I mean, for a starter, I'm entitled for you to listen to my opinion and give it the due weight that I give it, which, I mean, if you listen to what their opinions are, there's no particular reason anyone should listen to them.
	And then the entitlement of I should be the community manager or gatekeeper.
	For example, I'm going to use a lot of gaming references, but that's because what I'm used to.
	But there was a Kickstarter for a project called Mighty Number Nine.
	And the community manager, for some reason, they hired a social justice warrior who then proceeded to become a tyrant on their own forums at points banning even the backers of the Kickstarter from the forums.
	And just the again, it just speaks to the entitlement.
	How do you think that you should be the person doing that?
	And in what world do you think banning the people who have backed the Kickstarter from the forums discussing the game for the project is even remotely acceptable?
	And it was based on political opinion.
	It wasn't based on something that they'd done wrong, obviously.
	It was just based on the difference of opinion.
	Right.
	When you peel away the thin veneer of altruism or justice or whatever they pretend to do, what they're interested in is the raw exercise of power.
	Yes.
	Unearned.
	The exercise of unearned power.
	Well, it's very interesting because it is absolutely about power.
	And a lot of the times they will not they aren't shy about saying it.
	I mean, I there was a, again, another gaming reference.
	But there's a YouTube channel called Extra Credits.
	And they were asked about Game Agate.
	And now, there shouldn't really have been any particular.
	You're familiar with Game Gate, aren't you?
	Oh, yes.
	Just checking.
	Yeah, so, and I'm sure anyone listening is as well.
	But there should have been no particular reason on the face of it that they would have had any issue with Gamergate.
	I mean, they seem to like to present themselves as ethical people, and they seemed to, you know, I don't think there's any particular ethical violations on their part that people in the community would be concerned about.
	So I don't see any particular reason why they would take the stance they did.
	But instead, I guess it's being part of a certain community that's made them in this way.
	But the main writer is this guy called James Portneau.
	And his repeated opinion in this video about Gamergate was just it's a group of people losing their power.
	It's just them losing their power.
	And I'm thinking, look, man, I'm just spending my money on video games.
	I want to be informed about the video games you are promoting to me.
	I want you to tell me if this is your best buddy's video game that you're promoting, such as Patricia Hernandez promoting an anthropy on Kotaku.
	I want to know if I'm being informed about, you know, if it's cronyism or if it's not.
	And apparently, that's me worrying about me losing my power.
	And so there's a dramatic disconnect in what they think is going on as to what I think is going on.
	But it's interesting.
	Well, it's revealing of their mindset in the same way, you know, the old saying is: the more he talked about his honor, the faster we counted our spoons, you know, because he's probably not.
	I've heard that, actually.
	He's probably heisting the silverware.
	No, but the people who are most security conscious would be thieves, because thieves would assume that since they're out to take everyone's stuff, someone's out to take their stuff.
	So when these people keep talking about things entirely in terms of power relations, it shows you what their focus is.
	What's interesting to them that they're projecting on other people and their interest in the exercise of power.
	That is another, again, I'm so glad we've managed to get this conversation sorted.
	That's another thing I wanted to talk to you about, actually, is projection.
	One of the things that I just, every time I hear a social justice warrior speak, I just ask myself, is what they have said true about themselves?
	And almost every time it is, until they say someone has done a great deal of work, and then I realize, well, that's not true about them.
	But almost every time when they say something, it's I mean, the racism issue.
	And I'm not, I'm talking broader than feminism.
	I guess what they would call it is intersectional feminism, which is effectively, I don't want to say Marxist, but it kind of is.
	I think I've recently been given an education in what the social justice warriors are are not cultural Marxists, but they think they are Marxists.
	But it's quite complicated, and I think I barely understand it.
	But the principle is class conflict.
	And they think that white men are the dominant class, because if you look at the numbers in a white society, a predominantly white society, well, it's predominantly white men who are doing everything.
	And so they look at that as if that makes predominantly white men like the aristocrats of society or something.
	And therefore, everyone else, i.e., women and minorities, are the serfs who have to till the fields to the white men who are presumably in their manners eating roast pig.
	And so that's basically how they seem to view everything.
	So they've got this little formula that they'll always trot out and say, oh, racism isn't, you know, what you're talking about is prejudice.
	Racism is prejudice plus power.
	And I just have to, you know, no, it's not.
	Racism is not prejudice plus power.
	Racism is just the opinion that certain people or races, I suppose, are inferior or superior based on the natural biological race.
	It's nothing but the same thing.
	Well, they have that formulation plus power because they assume that for some reason that all white males have power, which I mean is demonstrably untrue.
	One part of that is, and this is particularly true of feminists, is that they tend to always be looking up.
	Males that are below a certain level of status or power are practically invisible to them.
	In fact, it was interesting that during a lot of the sexual, in the atheist and skeptical community, there was a lot of moral panic over sexual assaults at conferences, even though none actually happened that anyone can demonstrate.
	But at the same time, one of my favorite little tales is at a conference, this woman was so concerned about this guy.
	You know, those little collapsible sticks you could put a camera on so you could do selfies of yourself with other people.
	She saw this guy who apparently was a little developmentally disabled anyway.
	With this camera and a stick, he was going around taking pictures of himself with his favorite members of the skeptical community.
	But in her tiny little mind, she thought the only reason he could have a camera and a stick like that is to take upskirt photos of women.
	And now, didn't complain at the time, maybe a week later, complained to the organizers.
	It seemed to be one of those things.
	She complained after the fact so she could claim she complained and they didn't do anything.
	But the upshot of it, this guy who they finally started tossing his name around, he was so distraught over this characterization of him that he didn't go to any more conferences.
	It's completely understandable.
	I mean, if that were you, you'd be like, well, Jesus, why are they all assuming this about me?
	what have I done wrong?
	It's the presumption of your motives, and that your motives are...
	And the projection.
	Yeah, and the projection.
	But that's the thing, again, it was about power.
	So yeah, but yeah, so it just, I just, I just cannot, cannot, yeah, the inherent assumption The upshot of it is that when they were running around, and then they started trying to formulate rules for conference behaviors, where basically anything that you did, especially if you were male, was going to get you in a lot of trouble.
	Now they've set it up so that you are walking in the door, you have to walk on eggshells.
	And the thing that I don't like about these conferences is that they always existed in a kind of sexualized atmosphere where there was lots of alcohol present.
	There's a rather famous photo of a video of a party Rebecca Watson was holding where they had a male stripper in a kind of a Tarzan outfit going around and women doing test tube shots, the test tube held in a suggested manner, so it looked like they were doing fellatio on him.
	And it was odd.
	And these were exactly the same people that were saying, you know, guys have to control themselves.
	It was setting things up again.
	Hi, we're here.
	We have a double standard.
	We're in control now.
	We'll tell you what to do.
	It's like establishing martial law, isn't it?
	Yeah, it is.
	Honestly, I think it is about setting up a privileged class.
	And again, just everything, you know, and they're like, racism is privilege plus power.
	And it's like, you know, so I can say whatever I like to you, a white man, because my God, white men are the dominant class with all the power.
	And so, you know, like with this poor mentally challenged chap who has a lot of people.
	Yeah, who had the power there?
	Exactly.
	He's the one forced out.
	And it's like, well, it's a good thing that, you know, in your mind, or, you know, a good thing that your definition of racism is prejudice plus power, because otherwise you would be an awful human being for what you're doing.
	You know, you would be an absolutely horrible person for doing what you're doing.
	But because in your mind, you can convince yourself somehow that it's actually, oh, well, I don't have power in whatever specious rationalization that you want to use to make it so that you can believe that, then you can do horrible, horrible things to really nice people who don't deserve it.
	And who have been fighting back?
	That's one thing that I like to come around to, which is that, you know, a lot of people think that social justice warriors are just misguided or they mean well.
	No, they don't.
	They are horrible, horrible people.
	Yes, yes.
	And it's a weapon.
	That's the thing.
	It's a weapon for them.
	They are suspicious, denigrating people who slander people in the raw exercise of power, who think nothing of going into a community and instead of engaging in discussion.
	Well, what you were talking about before, someone comes in as a social justice warrior and starts shutting people down in a way that would make a Stalinist proud.
	Oh, I've spoken to a few people from Eastern Europe who lived under the communist regime, and they are in awe of the social justice warriors.
	And the thing is, all of this comes from universities.
	That's the thing.
	It's all coming from universities.
	And it's been fermenting for about 20 years.
	And they have been honing and refining their techniques.
	So it is no wonder that when they go out into the real world, they are razor sharp.
	And they're coming across people who have absolutely no idea what's going on.
	They're coming across people who think that you should innately presume the good in people, the presumption of innocence, all that sort of thing, traditional moral values.
	And they have been practicing their critical theory post-modernist bullshit.
	And they can take them down brutally, absolutely brutally, with very little resistance because these people simply don't know what is being talked about.
	And that's why you've got all this terminology like cisgendered, heteronormative, all that sort of stuff.
	completely outside of most people's depth.
	And so this is how they can bamboozle and bully their way into a community with people, like you said, with fear.
	Just people, oh, God, I don't want them labeling me so everyone now thinks I'm a racist.
	You know, it's absolutely sorry.
	I've been going through that.
	Well, I was about to say, you know, when I used the, when I said they were like Stalinists, you know, I don't mean to overly politicize it in a left-right way, because this would be equally applicable to fascists.
	The distinction is what's important is not that they're necessarily left or right, it's that they're authoritarian.
	And there's authoritarian right and authoritarian left.
	And the social justice warriors are not progressive because they are ultimately authoritarians.
	I think that everyone in Gamergate has learned this the hard way.
	Most of the people in Gamergate are sort of central to left-leaning.
	There's a minority of people in GameGate who are right-leaning.
	And I've never met anyone who's on the extreme right or the extreme left in GameGate.
	But the political left-right spectrum, I think everyone is well aware it's irrelevant, really, because it is entirely libertarian versus authoritarian.
	And the social justice warriors, like you say, are on the authoritarian spectrum.
	Yeah, I don't see gaming being inherently going along political lines.
	And I think that was very helpful because there is really no left-right divide.
	Or you could say to an extent that gaming is apolitical, which it is.
	I don't see much interest in politics among people that are into gaming.
	It was very effective in being able to shut down a lot of the incursion of social justice warriors in a way that the atheists and skeptical community was unable to do.
	Yes.
	And I think that one of the main differences is that gamers spend a lot of money on what they do.
	And the thing about gaming is it's very, it's very tangible.
	It's something that you do.
	It's not necessarily something you believe.
	And it's not necessarily an attitude.
	It's an activity.
	So it's very easy for people to feel very close to and defensive of what they do.
	Because what you do is what you are.
	If you go around telling lies, then you're a liar.
	If you go around playing games, then you're someone who plays games.
	So I think that that in itself has made it basically one of the reasons why there's been such a pushback.
	It's because gamers are very intrinsically linked to what they're doing.
	Whereas I think with an atheist community, it's less about what you're doing, isn't it?
	Per se.
	Yeah.
	I don't mean to be too broad, but yeah, the failure in the skeptical community is, of course, that the people in the skeptical community allowed Fear and slander to keep them from being skeptics.
	I mean, they basically gave these people who were acting in a completely irrational manner a free pass.
	And as far as the atheist community goes, atheism doesn't mean a lot of anything, which is atheism just being lack of belief in deities.
	There's no politics, there's no ideology that goes along with it, which is why something like atheism plus something or other was such a ridiculous concept.
	Why do you attach yourself?
	What is the benefit to say we want to do social justice, we want to be for women, we want to be against homophobia and other things?
	What is the added benefit of saying, and we're atheists?
	Where does it even come from?
	This is where it comes into the principle of, oh, they think they are good managers, and it's entirely self-interest.
	You know, everyone who is interested in social justice has something to gain from social justice.
	I mean, for example, if I saw a court case that was just flagrantly unjust, it was just self-evident from the evidence, say, the video footage or something of the case.
	And there was, you know, the guy was, or whoever it was, was wrongly convicted, and that was it.
	No one was really bothered.
	I would be making videos.
	I would be on Twitter complaining about this, saying, look, this was a miscarriage of justice.
	It's cut and dried.
	I would have very little to gain from that other than, I suppose, the knowledge that I live in a justice system that can dispense justice and will in future perhaps do it to me.
	So, you know, but that's kind of a nebulous, sort of, you know, very vague.
	There's no direct benefit to myself, but I would still do it because it would be the principle that I would care about.
	But these people don't care about principles.
	I don't even think they know what principles are.
	I think everything about it is self-interest and benefit to themselves directly.
	This is kind of giving away something that I'm working on now.
	But for the past month or so, I had a bad case of sinusitis.
	And so I had a lot of time to lay on the couch and watch procedural shows on TV, like, you know, forensic files.
	And I noticed that the state of Texas in false convictions appears again and again and again.
	And there was one case, Lovelace and Miller, these couple, they had children from previous relationships, but they were living together in a five-acre ranch.
	And they had a four-year-old daughter who they found under a tree, scratched and with this huge gouge in her leg that severed her femoral artery.
	And they took her to the hospital.
	The girl said the dogs did it.
	Well, they took her to the hospital and she died on the operating table, unfortunately.
	And the parents were convicted of her murder.
	Because it was the state of Texas, they had some theory about a cult bloodletting ceremony.
	And they presented to the jury that it couldn't have been done by dogs because the wound on the leg, the edges were too clean to have been an animal bite.
	Five years after their conviction, someone going back through the case found photos of the wounds before the surgeons got to it, and it was a dog bite.
	The clean edges of the wound was a result of surgeons trying to save her life by cleaning the edges of the wound.
	So the prosecutors and the police must have known this.
	And you can't say it was prosecutorial error.
	You can't say it was a mistake.
	Their calculus is simple, which is I want to maintain the authority of being a police officer, and I want to be a prosecutor, wear a nice suit and tie, have a nice house, have the respect and status.
	And if a couple of lowlives have to go to jail for it, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
	Well, just to add a question, though, the social justice warriors strike me, especially at the top, the people that are calling the shots, the PZ Myers and Anita Sarkeesians, they don't mind if they slander and ruin people because this is hay in their way.
	I've got to say, I've got to say, just Anit Sarkeesian, as far as I can tell, hasn't done that.
	She is very, very clever.
	She's a lot more clever than I think people give her credit for.
	And I don't think she is a social justice warrior.
	I think she's a con artist.
	Oh, no doubt.
	But, you know, for me, con artists and social justice warrior are interchangeable anyway.
	Well, this is the thing.
	I think I've been studying them in their natural habitats.
	And I think there is a difference.
	But kind of.
	The thing, Anita Sarkeesian, I don't think she is a rabid social justice warrior.
	I really don't.
	I think that there is definitely a stripe of person.
	Oh, no.
	There's absolutely no doubt that she doesn't believe she's a snake oil saleswoman.
	You know, that video that made the rounds of her, she was part of some seminar and she was like 23 years old.
	And she's saying, I really learned a lot about marketing and everything from someone's seminar and the way that I can sell my website.
	She was basically learning AMWA.
	She was part of this multi-level marketing seminar.
	And it's obvious that somewhere along the way, she was thinking, how could I sell myself?
	Oh, I'll become a feminist.
	She has a very good spiel.
	She has good production values.
	But she's just selling something.
	Well, that is exactly Anita Sarkeesian.
	that's the thing.
	It was, um, what was the name of the name?
	Alex Mandozian, he was literally, when I first learned about him, I went and looked him up.
	Alex Mandozian.
	And he's literally there giving a speech saying, look, if you have a message, I can teach you how to make so much more money with teleseminars.
	And it's like, oh, there we go.
	There we go.
	And that is very much Anise Tarkeesian spiel.
	And I know this because she doesn't actually go out of her way overtly to slander people.
	She does sometimes in tangential and cunning ways, subtle ways.
	For example, recently she tweeted a picture with four famous, well, internet famous YouTubers.
	So we've got 250,000 subscribers or more each.
	Thunderfurts, Mr. Repsion, Alfred Megason, and some other gentlemen I'm not very familiar with.
	And she said, whenever a person with 250,000 subscribers or more makes a video regarding me, then the harassment I receive increases exponentially.
	I mean, it's very, very cunning.
	I mean, she's not saying anything about them.
	She's just saying whenever a big name talks about her, she receives harassment.
	And if you care about a woman receiving harassment, then you won't make videos and criticize.
	It's a way of trying to silence her enemies and trying to basically solicit donations through sympathy for her feminist frequency.
	And in this, she is completely and utterly unoriginal because Rebecca Watson in the so-called in the skeptical community did this first.
	And she's another con artist because she's skeptchic, she has skeptic international.
	She's never done anything in skepticism.
	Her entire shtick is, I'm the girl in skepticism and people are mean to me.
	Yes.
	And that's, you're exactly right.
	She's not original because that is her.
	I'm the girl in gaming and people are doing this.
	But that's the thing.
	The difference, though, is that Anise Sarkeesian doesn't come out all guns blazing, label, label, label, label, attack, attack, attack on any individuals because she understands that to people who are not drinking the Kool-Aid, this comes across as very uncouth, very aggressive, and it reflects badly on her.
	And she wants to be mainstream media credible because these people are not mainstream media credible because you can't go on TV and do what social justice warriors do and expect the majority of people to think, oh, there's a decent chap or a decent fellow or a decent woman or whatever.
	Because anyone looking at it who hasn't been part of the interactions leading up to it is just going to look at it out of context and go, God, what an awful Haradin.
	So, you know, there is a certain level of self-awareness that she possesses that I think most social justice warriors don't possess.
	And these are the ones who are the Kool-Aid drinking power-hungry slanderers, basically.
	And that's so like our friend PZ Myers.
	Now, you know what?
	I actually don't really know much about PZ Myers.
	I've been told a lot.
	I've heard the name.
	But could you just, you know, tell me about it.
	And for the audience as well, obviously.
	PZ Myers is an inconsequential little nothing.
	Oh, maybe I should be more specific.
	He's a professor of biology, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota at Morris.
	Morris is a small town with a population of about 5,000 people.
	So it's basically like being in the relegated to the outpost.
	He had a, in the atheist community, there was what was known as the four horsemen, the ones that were taking the lead in the atheist community.
	They were Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late, great Christopher Hitchens.
	Myers thought he was on the short list to join that company, but that was mostly his delusion.
	So he runs a website, a blog on Free Thought Blogs, which is just the most Orwellian title foringula.
	And he has just gone spiraling into crazy land.
	I mean, the way that he went from being a semi-respected, he was never a prominent evolutionary biologist.
	He's just an associate professor who pretends he's bigger than he is.
	But the way he spiraled down into this sort of echo chamber of his little blog where he strikes people with the ban hammer for the smallest indiscretion.
	I mean, he's one, he's just a couple of beats away from ending up like Howard Hughes pissing into Mason Jars and watching Ice Station Zebro on a continuous loop.
	I mean, he's just that far away from just going utterly insane.
	The thing about Myers is he, like a lot of the social justice warriors, seems to be more interested in lashing out than anything else.
	And he generally lashes out against his bettors, which means virtually everyone.
	And he's attacked.
	If you want to have an unsourced accusation made against someone who's prominent in the atheist or skeptical community, you just anonymously send it to PZ Myers and he'll do the dirty work for you.
	Famously, he posted on his blog, the title was the awkward, What do you do when someone hands you a hand grenade and pulls the pin?
	And it was someone's unsourced, anonymous, which later turned out to be completely bullshit, accusation of rape against Michael Shermer.
	He didn't do any vetting.
	There was no due diligence.
	He seems to be motivated entirely by bad intentions and jealousy.
	So if you're saying that Anita Sarkeesian, she's clever because she doesn't directly target people in a way that it could come back on her, then Peasy Myers is extremely unclever.
	See, now that is the difference.
	That's why I don't think Anita Sarkeesian is actually a social justice warrior, and I think she's a con artist.
	She's made a lot of money by doing this as well.
	So, you know, there's no doubt that teleseminars really can make you quite a good deal of money.
	Well, famously, she got $5,000 as a kind of a campaign so that she can go through video games.
	But I also assume that she's making quite a bit of money off of speaking gigs now.
	Well, you know, interestingly, she's not making all that much.
	We actually know how much because she, as a non-profit organization, so she doesn't have to pay tax.
	She does have to release her company finances and all that sort of jazz.
	And recently she had to do that.
	And it was very interesting because she apparently received a death threat in October, October the 14th.
	A very oddly worded death threat.
	It was almost humble bragging.
	Yes, we're targeting Anita Sarkeesian because she is the face of modern feminism.
	She's just fabulous.
	She's a great human being and she's cute and perky.
	It was oddly worded.
	It doesn't have any sally light.
	It made you wonder.
	I mean, when you read it, the first thing that you thought was either this was something that was ginned up by Anita Sarkeesian or someone from that women's center that was also mentioned specifically.
	And that's exactly it.
	It was, you know, I mean, it was almost instantly claimed by the police that there was no threat.
	This was not a legitimate threat.
	This was just words.
	And yet she cancelled her talk anyway.
	And in the fourth quarter, if you look at the quarter, she made very, very little money in the rest of the year and made almost, I think it was over half of the money that the feminist frequency, I think they call it a foundation, made in that year was made in the fourth quarter after that death threat was apparently sent to her.
	So her pulling out of a speech made her something like a quarter of a million dollars, something like that.
	It was in donations.
	That's good money for not working.
	That's a hell of a good wage for not working.
	And no tax as well.
	So, you know, it's.
	You know, there's there's something that we can do then, because you know, a really if if you're a really bad musician, you can have people pay you not to play.
	The Marx brothers did this routine.
	Maybe we should start paying Anita Sarkeesian not to make videos.
	You know, I you know, I think.
	She should go for it too.
	The only you know, that would actually be terrible for us because the only real weapon we have against Anita Sarkeesian is the fact that nothing she says is true in those videos.
	Everything is either it's either simply flat wrong, it's cherry-picked, or it's just simply completely taken out of context.
	There's you know, no very I can't remember who it was, but I was watching an interview with someone and they were saying something like, Yes, Anita Sarkeesian has to spend hours and hours and hours going through these video games to find the examples of sexism.
	And I was like, Well, then they're not inherently sexist, are they?
	Did a video very early on.
	In fact, I used a clip of his video in one of mine where he demonstrated that she was just lifting other people's gaming videos without what point do people just wake up and realize that she's just pulling a con?
	Well, I think a lot of people do know that.
	But the problem is the people who know that aren't the people in the media.
	And the people in the media, and it all comes back to the fear and power, because the people in the media, there seems to be a culture of fear, that they don't want to rock the boats, because it's just a lot easier to believe the victim narrative.
	You know, it causes no hassle for them.
	If they, oh, look at this poor Anisaki.
	Yeah, there are so many terrible misogynists out there.
	My goodness, if we just give her five minutes of airtime, then she'll be happy, the feminists will be happy, and the feminists have all been doing their communication studies courses.
	So they all write blogs and they, you know, they've got WordPress blogs and all that.
	They're professional bloggers in a lot of cases.
	And so they write clickbait.
	They know how to get their articles read.
	Again, they've been trained in university to get to write clickbait.
	Just as a quick aside, do you know what they're teaching people in communications courses?
	Not journalism, but how to be presentable.
	No, not even.
	They're teaching them two things, at least that I'm aware of.
	One is Edward Bernays' propaganda techniques.
	And the second one is I've seen literally where the required reading for the course was Edward Bernays and Saul Lalinsky, who wrote Rules for Radicals.
	And it's just like, Jesus Christ, it's no wonder they're coming out of university writing clickbait and being so efficient at what they do.
	They are being very well trained.
	Bernays being the father of modern advertising that based a lot of his stuff off Freud.
	And I think he was even partnered with Anna Freud at some point.
	I think so.
	And there's a video of him that I'm actually going to be doing a video on this very soon.
	Well, I say very soon.
	I'm lazy.
	It probably won't be very soon.
	But there's a video of him saying literally in these words, after World War II, propaganda became a dirty word.
	And so we needed to repackage it.
	And so we invented the term public relations instead.
	And there we go.
	It's just a different name for an old technique.
	And so yeah, that's what they're being taught in universities.
	Instead of being, you know, cathedral, instead of being institutions of higher education, they're just being cathedrals of propaganda and brain formatting factories almost.
	Yeah, and you know, that kind of corruption of language has We're so used to it now, we almost assume that people are going to do it.
	An explosion in a nuclear power plant isn't an explosion in a nuclear power plant.
	It's rapid oxidation.
	I mean, Orwell would be flipping.
	But the point of this is Bernays, is that what he was practicing was very, very cynical stuff.
	Yes, yes.
	It's all about manipulation, all of it.
	I was at this weekend camping gig, and there's people from survival and preparedness groups, and some of them happen to be a little more right-wing than I'm comfortable with.
	But they were telling me about the way that the legislatures in this country had approached restricting people's right to possess certain firearms and weapons.
	And oddly enough, when the military would order a certain rifle, it would be called a personal defense weapon.
	However, if a civilian tried to buy it, the legislature classified that as an assault rifle.
	It's just the bastardization of language to fit an appropriate usage.
	And shameless.
	Yes, yes.
	That's the problem, isn't it?
	It's shameless.
	And no one's calling them on it.
	And this happens, yeah, like you say, in government and now in universities, in a lot of walks of life, this really, really bothers me.
	Just the repurposing of terms to just political correctness in general, really, isn't it?
	It just alarms me.
	Right.
	And the problem is that it's a never-ending process because especially things that have a kind of a pejorative taint to it, it always has to shift.
	More on an idiot began as clinical terms, imbecile as well.
	And then you couldn't use that, and then you started calling people retarded, and then retarded became too much of a pejorative.
	And now we went from people being crippled to handicapped to handy-capable to differently abled.
	It always eventually reached the point where words have no meaning whatsoever.
	Well, I noticed that with the gay community and the language they use, they've come full circle.
	Now they call themselves queer.
	And I remember when I was young, and I'm not that old, I'm only 35, but when I was a kid, you were told, don't call them queer, because queer means wrong, you know, bad, different.
	It's a bad word.
	You call things that aren't right queer.
	So you wouldn't want to be called queer because it makes you sound like you're wrong.
	So the fact that they've come all the way around now, oh, no, I'm not gay, now I'm this, now I'm this.
	No, now I'm queer.
	It's like, really?
	Okay, fine.
	You know?
	But for me, I don't.
	You have to be careful because between American English and British English, there's sometimes a disconnect in the severity of the terms.
	Typical of this is the word cunt, which in America is the most horrible.
	I mean, it's the C word.
	You're more likely to use any other swear word in its full form than that.
	Whereas in Britain, it's almost a form of greeting.
	Yeah, well, it can be.
	It can be.
	Yeah, it's a lot less impactful.
	It has less of a sting.
	And it's less gendered, it seems.
	Oh, yeah, gotcha.
	Yeah, oh, God, yeah.
	It's not.
	I mean, yeah, it's definitely not necessarily something you consider to be gendered in this country anyway.
	I mean, Jesus.
	But that didn't stop and it strikes me to the extent that a lot how much of social justice warriors and this sort of fashioniste of feminists seems to be an American phenomenon.
	Whereas the fashioniste feminists can tell you how you're not supposed to use the word cunt, even though it has a completely different connotation or denotation or connotation for you.
	Yeah, it is something that has come from the United States and Canada, and it's made its way over here.
	Oh, yeah, Vancouver is like ground zero for a lot of this.
	Well, again, it's just all coming from universities.
	It's gender studies is where it's all come from.
	And communications degrees, they're all they may as well be just they may as well just call themselves gender studies propaganda degrees.
	They're very excited.
	I mean, I consider myself liberal and centre-left, but these are just so radically left, I just can't see any kind of relation between me and them.
	You know, I live and let live, let people do what they want as long as they're not hurting each other, you know.
	That's having a libertarian tendency.
	And they are nothing.
	I mean, I consider myself to be progressive and left-wing.
	And when I go out with these survivalist meetups, I proudly argue with right-wingers.
	One guy was a neo-Confederate.
	I mean, he was making the claim that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.
	And I just love that.
	Well, you know, there might be an argument for that.
	No, actually, if you look at the secession documents from North Carolina, it specifically mentions slavery.
	I can't remember his name.
	He was Jefferson Davis's vice president.
	He gave what was called the cornerstone speech, and basically he said that the cornerstone of the Confederacy and the system we created was white supremacy.
	So the claim that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and it was all about states' rights is just nonsense.
	You know, that's the thing, which is why I try not to put too many political labels on this, because the tendencies of the social justice warriors seem to be the mirror image of what we have in this country to be the Tea Party.
	You know, these radical oppressed right-wingers who think that Obama is going to take their guns.
	In fact, when Obama was first elected, gun sales went through the roof, and for years, it was hard to get ammunition because people were buying it up before the hoarders got to it.
	And it's all perception because the only thing that Obama has ever done as far as gun restrictions is not renew the assault weapon ban that George W. Bush had put into place.
	So, I mean, there seems to be, you know, two polls of the same sort of insanity.
	I guess that insanity, really, if you get down to it, is grievance politics.
	Just a quick question there.
	One thing I think that we've got to make sure that we don't do is I think that I mean, I'm sure I've seen Obama saying how he's not a fan of guns and he wants increased gun restrictions and regulations and whatnot in the United States.
	I'm not an American citizens, obviously, so I may be wrong when I say this.
	But how much of his inaction against them has been due to their preemptive paranoia, maybe, and expression of distaste for the idea.
	I mean, we can't obviously know this, obviously.
	No, actually, they're engaging on that kind of Tea Party right wing.
	They're engaging in the same kind of projection that you get from the social justice.
	Social justice warriors approve you're assume you're a privileged white person, so you're inherently racist and blah, blah, blah, blah.
	They're dealing with you as a type rather than a person.
	And with the right-wing Tea Party movement, they assumed because Obama primarily was black, among other things, that he was going to do certain things.
	And based on the fact that it was a script.
	They were following through with a script that they had written beforehand, and nothing that Obama actually did was going to change that script.
	Because the way that you, among people who fight amongst themselves, and the Tea Party movement is the same thing as the social justice warriors, if you look at the Atheism Plus Forum, they started kicking everyone out until there was nothing left but moderators fighting with each other.
	I mean, they all resort to cannibalism eventually.
	And so the way that you keep that from happening, you enforce unity by creating enemies.
	Well, now that's an interesting...
	So I'm trying to find something on Reddit because it's very, very, very pertinent to this.
	Recently, you know who Brianna Wu is, don't you?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Recently, yes, yes.
	Recently, she made the mistake of having a lunch or something with someone, a developer who's pro-Gamergate, or at least pro-Gamergate enough to be concerned about journalistic ethics in the gaming industry because he's part of the gaming industry.
	And this has led to her, I can't remember whether she said truce or not, something like that, an ally or truce.
	And my God, the social justice warriors went ballistic.
	Personally, I think it would be a great idea.
	I would be more than happy to have some sort of truce with Brianna Wu because she's not a journalist.
	She can't commit any violations of journalistic ethics.
	Even if she fucks every journalist in the world, she is not the one committing any ethical violations.
	And also, too, the entertainment value of Brianna Wu on Steam trying to solicit negative comments about herself to log out of her account.
	I mean, that's priceless.
	Idiots.
	Just idiots.
	But that's the thing.
	It shows that she's a provocator.
	She knows she is.
	She does it for political reasons to get coverage.
	But this is the thing.
	Brianna Wu, I would be more than happy to get a truce with Brianna Wu because, again, she cannot be the subject of what I would like to see Gamergate attacking, addressing.
	It just can't.
	She's just not got the power to do it until she stops being a developer and becomes a journalist.
	And I don't think that's going to happen.
	Although maybe it will do one day.
	But until then, we don't need to worry about it.
	But that's the thing.
	She's having lunch with another developer.
	And so I'm just sat thinking, okay, these people are effectively nothing to do with Gamergate, in those technical terms, at least.
	And yet the social justice warriors castigated her.
	Absolutely, how dare you?
	You were a traitor.
	And all of a sudden they're coming out saying, well, this is just white feminist splaining and all this sort of thing.
	And then they would come in and say, well, thank God we don't have to be nice about her anymore because her game looks like shit.
	It does look like shit, but now is not the time to do it.
	And if you're going to do it like that, then it just makes you just comes back to look how awful these people are.
	Yeah.
	I mean, there is no truce with these people.
	Everything is what you get is temporary stays of execution.
	And all it takes is one slip, or they figure that they don't like you, or you're getting too high of a profile, and then you have to be taken down.
	It's like I said, they tend to immediately resort to cannibalism.
	And unfortunately, I think it would probably involve some sort of pretentious Asian fusion cooking.
	Well, that was the thing.
	It was savage, what they were doing to Brianna Wood.
	And she didn't deserve it for having lunch with Brad Wardell.
	I think it was having lunch.
	She absolutely didn't deserve it.
	I've run out of sympathy a long time ago.
	Oh, yeah.
	Because she was more than capable of slandering other people and making outrageous comments or trying to tar an entire community by saying that she received these threats and then even soliciting themselves.
	So not to put so fine a point on it, fuck her.
	Yeah, well, no, no, on a personal level, absolutely.
	She's used this for as much as she can get out of it.
	And she's done it with gusto.
	We've got proof of her deliberately trying to provoke outrage against herself so she can play the victim.
	We've got cast iron proof of that.
	So I agree.
	One of the things, and if you've seen some of my way back when I did this video called Creepy Clowns about the threat narrative free thought bullies and the threat narrative clownhorn.
	And this is why I'm so lacking in sympathy because there was a time in which these people actually targeted me.
	They doxed me.
	One particular clown found an old my old address when I was married, and which the last inhabitant of that abode was my ex-wife and posted the address and a photograph of it online.
	And I got Melody Hensley, actually, she got on Twitter and was coyily saying, I'm going to complain to your employer about you.
	Although no one gives a living shit what videos I make.
	So I'm not in the mood to have a truce with these people because they will destroy people and they will do it gleefully.
	And I've often said there is no compromise.
	There is no reasoning these people.
	They have to be destroyed.
	Not destroyed the way that they destroy people, but mocked out of existence.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Just given no credence.
	That's the important thing.
	Honestly, everything you're saying about what happened to you is it's happened to me.
	So I've been doxxed.
	I've been, you know, I've had nasty messages.
	And this gets back to submitting to them or trying to reconcile with them, which is a lot of people that got doxed or were threatened kind of backed away.
	I used it as an opportunity to rub it in their face.
	And actually, they haven't done.
	In fact, I think they're trying to pretend that I'm not there anymore.
	Because and I thought that was an important lesson to pass on to people, that they will do these terrible things.
	They will slander you.
	They will interfere with your employment.
	They will do whatever is necessary to hurt you on a personal level.
	And the only response to that is to use it against them.
	Well, this brings us to an interesting point.
	They're horrible, horrible people.
	They absolutely, the ends justify the means.
	They absolutely justify the means.
	To them, the ends justify the means.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	I mean, I was going to say to them, of course.
	To me, I don't think the ends ever justify the means.
	I think, you know, I can't really think of I can't think of any, I can't think of any example where it's morally justifiable.
	I mean, it might be justifiable from necessity, but, you know, to say that it's a moral action, I think, is very unlikely.
	I'll be able to find anything like that.
	But that's the thing.
	What's your opinion on this?
	Why, you know, the ends justify the means.
	What do you make of it?
	And I mean, is it just an inevitable part of being a social justice warrior?
	I think it's part of being a social justice warrior.
	I think it's having a very narrow mindset.
	Again, along with the authoritarian mindset is this sort of black and white thinking.
	You know, someone was telling me at this group that I was at, he's a Baltimore detective.
	And he was saying that when they give the test, they use the same test as they do to become a police officer or an FBI agent.
	But they'll evaluate it.
	If your responses tend to be black and white, that's good for being a police officer.
	It's not good for being an FBI agent, and vice versa.
	You know, there's a black and white mindset that they want for police officers.
	And the social justice warriors are the same way.
	They have that kind of punitive, black-and-white way of thinking.
	To them, the ends justify the means because they've dehumanized you.
	They've dehumanized critics.
	They're not people.
	They don't have any rights.
	They're just types that they're fighting against.
	And part of this is the facelessness, not just of the Internet, but when you start dealing in talking about things like privilege or male privilege, why not just eviscerate people's rights to due process when they're accused of sexual assault?
	On the theory that if you evaluate an actual claim of sexual assault and find that there are some false accusations, that somehow admitting that there's false accusations is bad for women in general, which is another thing, which is they're playing a zero-sum game.
	There's no little benefit here or a little bit.
	It's all or nothing.
	What's good for them is bad for you, and what's good for you is bad for them.
	Even if it's not, even if it's something that really, if you looked at it, if you took a step back and just looked at it from as many angles as you can find, it had no particular bearing on them.
	They will still treat it as if it does.
	I mean, I've been recently doing a video series on why the video game press declared gamers to be dead or over or whatever language they want.
	Try and get rid of the term the label gamer because that's the thing about Gamergate is gamers, people who considered themselves to be video game enthusiasts.
	And it seemed very strange that for ideological reasons, the video game press would try and end their own audience.
	But this was the thing.
	One of the things that in the there's research done by a Marxist feminist academic called Adrienne Shaw, who she was very concerned not to have a plurality of markets.
	Now, I can't see why a plurality of markets would be a bad thing.
	If anything, it would seem to be the optimal method of doing things.
	Because for me, as a libertarian, I would be looking at this thinking, well, live and let live.
	We'll have what we want over here.
	It won't interfere with what you have over here.
	And effectively, never the twain shall meet.
	We won't even know each other exists, preferably, because that way everyone wins.
	But for them, that is a loss for them somehow.
	And I can only assume it's power politics that's doing it.
	Because, like you say, it's a zero-sum game.
	If we get what we want, and even if it means they are getting what they want, us getting what we want as well means they're not getting what they want.
	And so in this research, it's all very, very heavily activist.
	Well, it's a purity test, isn't it?
	I guess kind of it was.
	But by comparing to this, once again, going back to a zero-sum game, and appealing to this group here, you're not being pure in your faith to this click.
	How you allow heresy to exist.
	Right.
	Heresy exists over there.
	So even if we're being good Christians over here, they're being heretics.
	So it's our duty to do something about that.
	And they need that.
	And, you know, they'll accuse people of being mealy-mouthed or not being pure in their faith because they're so insecure that they need that constant reinforcement.
	I mean, part of the whole mindset of social justice warriors is, you know, things have turned against me or things aren't going well because you're misogynistic or you're racist or you're transphobic or you're something or other, rather than admitting that things aren't going their way perhaps because they're weak, ineffectual, untalented, lazy, stupid people.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	People who have also just made bad choices with their lives.
	You know, isn't an aspect of this of saying that things have gone against me because of, you know, you racist, transphobic, misogynist people.
	Isn't there a taint of the post-Weimar Republic stabbed in the back theory that Hitler promulgated?
	That it wasn't us, us good Germans that lost World War II or the economy collapse.
	We were stabbed in the back by Jews.
	Yeah.
	It's anyone.
	Scapegoating.
	Absolutely.
	Literally anyone can be blamed for their own personal failings.
	And this, I just, there are so many things, like just layers to the characteristics of these social justice warriors.
	I mean, if you just add up, you've got people who are obsessed with power politics.
	You've got people who are how they show a religious zeal for what they're doing.
	They show very little self-awareness.
	So they think it's appropriate to attack in the most powerful ways that they have.
	And then they never start low and build up.
	They go straight for the throat.
	And they they they have absolutely no concept of moral principles, absolutely none.
	What is it's morality, isn't it?
	Sorry?
	It's sociopathy.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I think this sort of thing, like other things, I mean the authoritarian mindset appeals to people who tend to be sociopaths anyway.
	I mean there is no there there is no compromise, there is no conscience, there's no ability to treat the other people as a human being.
	There's the politics of personal destruction, all of those things.
	And you really do need to be lacking in a conscience to engage in that sort of thing.
	Or you're just spending far too much time on the internet.
	Well, no, it's interesting because they can't do that on their own.
	Being a sociopath and even being a group of sociopaths who all agree that we're all a certain stripe of person.
	But they also need another stripe of person to enable them.
	And these are now commonly known as white knights.
	What do you make of white knights?
	You know, in a way, you can kind of one, they're tapping into what we talked about before, which is the tendency of men to want to carry favor with women and protect and things like that.
	I think after a point, though, it's a lack of moral conviction.
	You know, like I said, in the skeptical community, when these people invaded, the one thing that skeptics did not engage in was skepticism.
	That's just weakness.
	Yeah, I mean, that's one of the.
	Are you talking specifically about the kind of the white knighting that has a double standard where if, if someone who happens to be say female, comes in and is rude and abrasive and insulting, and then the minute you give him back what they were giving out, someone steps and goes, oh no, you can't say something like that yeah that, and then, and then, instead of having the discussion with the woman that you were criticizing, who was you know it again I,
	I'm not.
	These days I don't even broach accusations of misogyny.
	If I'm criticizing someone, I'm criticizing them as an individual.
	You know, that's the thing.
	They and it.
	I'll get to another point in a minute.
	But um, but yeah the the, the.
	All of a sudden the, the white knight jumps in.
	It is I.
	I receive my validation from defending a woman right, so it's, it's noise.
	I mean, I don't, I don't it.
	White knights don't really bother me the way that they seem to bother other people, because I don't even pay attention to them.
	I mean they, they literally have nothing worth listening to that.
	That they're, they're.
	They're not.
	They're not adding anything to the conversation.
	In fact, what they're acting as is a screen they're, they're distracting you away from the, you know, leading you away from the, the original target.
	Yeah that, that that's exactly exactly their function and they, they're walking red herrings.
	They are, they absolutely are walking red herrings, and I've seen it in their Twitter profiles, where they, they literally say things like you know I, I paraphrasing, I guess, and they don't literally say this, but in, in a, in a roundabout way they, they say something like, I'm willing to take the bullet for a woman on the internet by arguing with trolls because I, I don't know I I, they assume exactly, you know they, they can fulfill.
	Exactly.
	And obviously, no woman's ever going to swim for some fedora-wearing hipster with thick-rimmed glasses.
	But that's the thing.
	They need validation from these women, don't they?
	But they need validation.
	And also, you know, it's kind of a, even though I don't like the term, it's sort of like a backdoor way to acting like an alpha male.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	God, there are so many things I want to go over with you.
	Yes, it's a way of getting one up on the guys that they would otherwise have no way of getting one up on.
	Yeah, it's and one thing that yeah, I don't, one thing I could see being irritating about white knights is that they immediately kind of dial things over to these traditional sex roles.
	Damsels in distress, even if she was the aggressor and she was throwing barbs or that, now she becomes a damsel in distress.
	He's the protector.
	You're snidely whiplash.
	One of the things that the point I was going to get to, I think really fits very nicely here, is the externalization of individual actions to group actions.
	For example, if you say to, say, I don't know, a woman who's, say Patricia Hernandez, she promoted her Kotaku who promoted her friend and roommate, Anna Anthropy.
	I think she did reviews, but she promoted her games on Kotaku without telling anyone that they were roommates.
	It's a violation of journalistic ethics 101.
	And so if I then said to Patricia Hernandez, how dare you?
	You should be fired for your malfeasance working for Kotaku, white knights would jump in and say, you hate women.
	It's like, why would you say that?
	Well, you're attacking a woman.
	It's like, well, that doesn't mean I hate women, does it?
	That means I hate one woman.
	That's not all women.
	But you know, there's a strange thing that goes on with these kind of women where they, and I don't know where this sort of ego comes from, where they think they are not only able to speak for all women and think that a reaction to them is a reaction to all women, but also think that they know men's lives better than men do.
	Well, this is the thing.
	It's the externalization of it onto the entire demographic that they consider themselves a part of.
	I like it, like it.
	I can't understand how they think it's appropriate to do it.
	I would never say that I represent all white men or all games players or anything like that.
	It's a ludicrous, ludicrous thing to do.
	And yet they do it shamelessly.
	They will shamelessly say, you're a misogynist.
	You hate women because you have criticized me, a woman.
	And it's absurd.
	I would be embarrassed to do it.
	Well, it wouldn't work.
	I mean, if someone criticized me and I said, well, you just have something against Scottish Italians.
	Exactly.
	I mean, what kind of sense does that make?
	And, you know, especially on the internet, and this has actually happened to me, where I got white-knighted, and I didn't know that the person I was arguing with, I had no idea what their gender was.
	Somehow I was supposed to know this so that I could tailor my response appropriately.
	You know, something that you brought up, which is something that we see in the atheist and skeptical community, which is getting back to conventions, there's the same incestuous click of people that kept getting hired for speaking gigs.
	I mean, you kept seeing Rebecca Watson?
	Rebecca Watson, PZ Myers, Ophelia Benson, who could Put anyone to sleep.
	You had people like Greg Leyden, who is a professor, I think, of anthropology.
	And he is the guy who put my address and the photograph of the condo I had on the internet.
	These same group of people appeared again and again and again, even if they no longer had anything worth saying.
	And I think that was the response in the gaming community with Zoe Quinn, not because of her sexual, her amateur, amorous exploits and sexual adventures, but because they realized how incestuous this was.
	It was the same narrow clique of people stroking each other, propping each other up, cutting each other's slack, giving each other's breaks, giving each other unearned privilege.
	And yeah, I see that absolutely.
	And it irritates me when I see Rolling Stone had a glossary of terms related to MRAs, you know, men's rights activists, which is, you know, if you say anything critical, they can just sort of shout you down by saying, you're an MRA.
	I get it all the time.
	Constantly.
	They had a definition of Gamergate as being a bunch of misogynistic trolls.
	And so I was thinking, well, how did this person from Rolling Stone come across this definition?
	And I can only think that all of these people were in the same mailing list.
	Well, there's probably a lot of truth to that.
	There was the Journalist that was started by Erza Klein, wasn't there?
	Mm-hmm.
	And that was...
	I can tell you it was a secret mailing list that left-wing progressive journalists were all on.
	And they would all message each other.
	And in gaming, we had something very similar.
	It was called Game Journal Pros, where left-wing progressive journalists were all on the same mailing list to enforce ideological orthodoxy on each other.
	Is that how they were able to do gamers?
	Are we over on the same day?
	Well, it's hard to tell because we don't necessarily have a remarkable coincidence.
	Well, no, no, I think what it is, right, is that they're lazy and they're stupid and they're a bunch of fucking sheep.
	Because you get a couple of people in the community who are more aggressive than others.
	You've got a woman called Le Alexander who is very, very happy to torch people's careers before they've even really started because they've had some sort of cross with her.
	And she's very much a leader in the community.
	And if she says something, then other people, it's like a cascade effect.
	They'll see it.
	And then they'll, like, you know, half an hour later, have their own little blog post written that's similar, but not exactly the same, but towing the party line.
	And so there's this sort of cascade effect where they all know that they're going to write exactly what she writes because they're not thinkers.
	They're parrots.
	They're echo.
	It's just, you know, they're a speaker in the echo chamber.
	And that's exactly what they do.
	And so I'm not sure that they, I mean, I can't be sure that it's either that they deliberately organized it through the Game Journal Pros list, which is entirely possible, completely possible.
	But it's also just as possible, in my opinion, that this was down to ideological orthodoxy.
	They intuitively knew what the hierarchy was and how things flow from the top.
	Yeah, because they all cited these two articles.
	One was hers, and this other one was a Tumblr post of all fucking things from a guy called Dan Golding, who is an academic who works for this organization, is part of an organization called Digra.
	So, yeah, it absolutely flowed from the top.
	There is a certain point that, in their minds, has a degree of legitimacy, and it literally just cascades down through the echo chamber where they all echo it out.
	And yeah, and so it doesn't necessarily have to have been collusion.
	It could also just be a terrifying ideological orthodoxy that is, I just find scary beyond all reason.
	Or just laziness, like you said.
	I mean, I think.
	Oh, definitely laziness.
	As these people are not thinkers, they're more than happy.
	You know, we were talking previously about clickbait.
	When they see this kind of meme, they know it's clickbait.
	I mean, if they can just get in on the bandwagon, someone will link to them and they're going to get more hits and they'll get popularity.
	Actually, saying something that's controversial or questionable, though, they'll have to defend it and they won't be able to spend time.
	You know, on free thought blogs, I mean, it's amazing the number of people that can blog post 10 times a day.
	But they're all short.
	I mean, Ophelia Benson is notorious for having blog posts that consist of just lifting someone else's opinion and then interspersing it with a very thin mortar of her comments and then posting it.
	It's just I don't see that as being ideological.
	I see that as just being lazy.
	Well, it definitely, well, I mean, absolutely.
	And a lot of the Gamers Are Over articles are very similar.
	The Kotaku one.
	I'm just going to get it up a second.
	Because it is just the laziest fucking thing I've ever seen.
	And honestly, it's an embarrassment.
	There are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight paragraphs in it, right?
	And these are just, when I say paragraphs, they're sentences.
	They're just broken up to be easily read.
	And it's just some guy saying, oh, well, I mean, it's almost apologetic that he has to post this.
	And literally, at the end of it, so he posts the Dan Golding one, The End of Gamers, the Leigh Alexander one, Gamers Don't Have to Be Your Audience, Gamers Are Over.
	A quote from Leigh Alexander's one, and then he says, note, they're not talking about everyone who plays games or self-identifies as a gamer as being the worst.
	It's like, why are you apologizing for these articles if you don't agree with them?
	Don't write this article.
	Don't write this.
	Why are you writing this article?
	If you don't agree with them, you either write a rebuttal saying, no, this is wrong, or you just say, you just ignore it.
	You say, no, it's not even worth covering.
	It's nonsense.
	Why would they back off and say, well, I'm not talking about everyone?
	I'm making a generalization over here, but I'm not.
	It's almost like this sort of bigoted meme or attitude where a bigot will say something about a particular group of people, point out his friend who happens to be black and saying, well, I wasn't talking about you.
	You're one of the good ones.
	Well, this is exactly what they do.
	Because Luke Plunkett is the guy who wrote this.
	And you can see from his picture, he's a balding guy.
	He's a social justice warrior.
	Does he have a good team?
	He's got kind of like a beard.
	But he's low on the list.
	He's low on the hierarchy.
	And so he is being there is definitely an ideological hierarchy, and he is being told by his ideological betters, Le Alexander and Dan Golden, who have done more work than him in this realm.
	It's definitely a form of conditioning.
	He sees them writing these articles, and he knows he has to cover them.
	They are making statements of faith.
	This is canonical.
	What Le Alexander and Dan Golden have said.
	Gamers are over.
	And so him now, as a gaming journalist, he not only has to write exactly what they're writing, toe the party line, but he also has to somehow justify this to the gamers who are his audience.
	So he's trapped in a rather uncomfortable position and therefore has to say, well, not everyone who plays games.
	Just the bad people who play games.
	They're awful and they're gone.
	It's like, well, could you point one out?
	Well, no, because then I'd be pointing directly at you because you're the person that Le Alexander's talking about.
	But that would be an uncomfortable thing for me to talk about.
	So I'd rather just write the bare minimum and then, and literally, straight off that, he's just like, right, once you're done here, I'll see you next week.
	That's the end of the article.
	There was no point writing this.
	There was nothing in the article.
	Tried not to offend his audience, but he technically fulfilled the directive of the Central Committee.
	Yes, yes, that's exactly it.
	He absolutely, he did his job ideologically, but he knew that it was going to get him in trouble.
	He absolutely knew it.
	Yeah.
	That's the way to live.
	It's weird.
	But the thing is, he's, that's the thing, working for Kotaku, Kotaku is brazenly.
	I don't like saying progressive in such a pejorative manner because until I met progressives, I thought I was progressive.
	You know, I'm all for gay marriage and all the, you know, whatever.
	You know, I'm all for people living their lives as they want as long as they're not harming others.
	And I imagine that probably involves a great deal of progressive ideals, but these people call themselves progressives, and I don't want to be in any kind of category that these people are in.
	Yeah, but they can call themselves progressive, but that doesn't mean that every country that calls themselves the People's Republic of is actually a republic.
	That's true, but you don't go calling your own country the People's Republic, then, do you?
	Well, China, the Congo.
	Oh, that's a Democratic Republic of the Congress.
	Exactly.
	But that's the thing.
	I wouldn't want, you know, I wouldn't want the Democratic Republic of Britain, because that's what people are going to think.
	Because the connotation has been kind of tainted, hasn't it?
	But that's the thing.
	He's benefited so much from his status as a social justice warrior by writing for Kotaku.
	It's not like Luke Plunkett's writing or quote-unquote journalism is merits.
	It's not noteworthy.
	You wouldn't notice it.
	You wouldn't be able to pick it out from a crowd.
	So he's got there by arse-kissing, I reckon.
	I mean, I don't know this.
	I can't prove it.
	But I can't imagine there's anything particularly special about Luke Plunkett.
	So I think he's a yes man.
	Yeah.
	But that's not anything that's particular to say gaming.
	I mean, the amount of people that have lower echelon businesses in the media who just toe the line.
	I mean, they're legion.
	But it just happens to be that he's doing it.
	This might speak to a greater corruption within the media, but my reaction to people doing something like that is kind of visceral, which is just that it's what a horrible, soulless, pathetic way to live.
	I mean, if you're taking direction for people like that.
	And I mean, basically, it's being a whore, isn't it?
	You're whirring yourself out.
	Well, I don't even know if it's necessarily being a whore.
	I think at least whores are independent actors.
	You know, they perform business transactions, and then they are not controlled by the people they've sold their services to.
	Right.
	But these people.
	But a lot of them have pimps, and these people are pimping themselves.
	That's true.
	These people are slaves, though.
	There's no getting around it.
	Because people like Luke Plunkett, they're going to owe their position to who they know and what they line that they toe.
	It's not anything to do with how great they are at what they do.
	It's not that they're merit.
	And so it is a horrible existence.
	It must be.
	It's just this kind of the emasculation aspect as well.
	And I don't want to talk about like alpha beta sort of thing, but there is a distinct joy in feminists when they emasculate men.
	Even if they don't necessarily say it, you can tell on their faces.
	And these men seem to have been, and again, I'm not saying you have to be a giant alpha male, but just having a backbone.
	It would be interesting to see that the culture that they come from, because the distinct thing in the atheist and skeptical community is, of course, that unless you're an actual doer writing books, like James Randi has tons of books.
	Michael Shermer has tons of books out.
	You could actually make money that way.
	But as far as the rank and file, there's no money to be made.
	No one's getting rich on going to conventions.
	It's more about in-group identity than anything else.
	Wow, that's absolutely true as well.
	We've got a perfect example of that of a man called David Gallant, or Gallant, I don't know how it's pronounced.
	But he literally, I think it was Toronto, he saw people in the indie dev community and thought, wow, they're cool.
	They have a cool community.
	I want to join the community.
	And so he began producing really crappy indie games that obviously don't make any money or anything like that.
	But he did.
	Is it better than Depression Quest?
	Probably not, no.
	I didn't actually play it, but it looks awful.
	So you're saying there could be something worse than Depression Quest?
	I am actually saying that.
	I'm actually saying that David Gallant's video games are probably worse.
	He did one about being a call center operative.
	And so I think it's called I Take This Call Every Day or something like that.
	And he actually MS Paint art about taking calls in a call center.
	How thrilling is that?
	But he made it because he wanted to be able to call himself an indie dev and join the indie dev community.
	And he said those words, those exact words, on a, I think it was Gama Sutra blog literally not so long ago, where he was just like, all I did is I saw how great the community seemed and I wanted to join it.
	It's like, so you're not making games because you want to make art.
	You're not making games because you enjoy creating things.
	You're not making games for any reason that I would consider laudable.
	You're making games because you want to be one of the fucking cool kids.
	That's the only reason.
	And just that's that's the sort of that's the sort of person we're dealing with.
	And he writes on Gama Sutra.
	You know, he publishes blogs.
	He's an expert blogger on Gama Sutra.
	It's baffling.
	Right, because he's playing the part.
	I mean, just as the way that PZ Myers plays the part of being an atheist and Rebecca Watson plays the part of being a skeptic, well, not knowing what the fuck they're talking about, you get people that are coming into the gaming community.
	And, you know, coming in from the outside of this, though, to pump up my own gamer cred, I should note that way back when I had to reconfigure my Auto ExecBat and config sys files to get Wolfenstein 3D to run on my computer.
	So did I.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, I've got some experience in gaming.
	I can't wrap my head around the complexities of actually being.
	I mean, I assume that game development is not something that one person does on their own.
	One person just couldn't do it.
	You need a team to actually develop a semi-decent game, unless you're fabulously talented.
	I mean, you're not.
	To be fair, there are a lot of tools these days that have done most of the hard work for you.
	So, I mean, back in the day, you'd probably have to write your own game engine if you couldn't afford to license a decent one.
	So, the Romeros are gone now.
	Pretty much, actually.
	No, no, that's not true.
	You've still got the AAA industry who make massive technological marvels in gaming.
	But you've got a very large and thriving indicator that is possible because the tools are now there for people in small, very small teams to produce surprisingly high-fidelity expert work.
	But David Gulland is not one of those.
	No, I mean, it's embarrassing.
	You see some of the people that posture as a game developer, and that's why I was talking about Zoe Quinn with Depression Quest.
	I mean, coming from someone outside of the gaming community, more or less, I mean, not being up on what's current, it was even to me embarrassing for Zoe Quinn to posture as a game developer because she did Depression Quest.
	And for people who are actually familiar with gaming and what good game development is, that must have been infuriating.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm developing a video game, and it's been a lot of work.
	And it's I mean, if Zoe Quinn were a man, she would never have happened.
	She wouldn't be getting four grand a month on Patreon.
	She wouldn't have been lauded in the video game press by one of the guys she fucked as writing a Twine Darling game, and she wouldn't be given any kind of credence whatsoever.
	Whatsoever.
	They would not care.
	But if you're a woman who can play the victim, now they care.
	I bet you could name a handful of reputable women game developers off the top of your head.
	And what a disservice it must be to them.
	I can only imagine.
	I mean, one of the main beginning of Game Game, one of the people who struck me most was Jennifer Dore, who was producing a game, I think it was called Seed something.
	It wasn't my sort of game, so I didn't really pay attention to the game.
	But that's not in any way to discredit her talent or capability doing it.
	And she was, that was one of her questions.
	She was just like, well, I can't get any coverage for my game.
	And I've worked very hard, and it actually has graphics and gameplay.
	And it actually qualifies under the technical terms or definitions of what a game is, unlike Depression Quest.
	And no one would touch her because she wasn't a social justice warrior.
	She wasn't part of the clique.
	She wasn't telling the line.
	She wasn't useful.
	That was the thing.
	She wasn't playing the victim.
	So she didn't enable these social justice warrior men to white knight for her and feel validated by serving a woman.
	She didn't do that.
	And so they didn't want to know.
	Well, I find it fascinating that the women that are actually fulfilling what's supposedly the feminist ideal are the ones that are getting no attention.
	I mean, they're coming into a community, they're playing by the rules, and they're succeeding on their own initiative.
	And the ones that get the attention are the incompetent, talentless ones that happen to be able to do the damsel in distress.
	It's the modern-day chivalry, isn't it?
	Have you not noticed how much third wavers hate second waivers?
	Oh, yeah.
	You know, and when they call me anti-feminist or anything, that's just nonsense.
	You know, absolutely no one, no one is against what was stood for in first wave or even second wave feminism.
	It was the third wave that came in where there was a big injection of identity politics and scapegoating and all of these things that, you know, oddly, you were talking about white knights.
	I mean, I intuitively am not able to get in with third-wave feminism because I can't denigrate men as a group the way they have.
	And talking about white knights, I mean, there seems to be a lot more group affinity among women that you insult one, you insult all, or pretend that way.
	Guys will sell each other out in a heartbeat.
	Well, there's no group affinity.
	I think primarily men, I think men generally see themselves as individuals, don't they?
	And so when someone says men, you instantly, if it doesn't directly apply to you, then you just, you don't think, you're not in the, you're not in the group that they're talking about.
	Even if they say men, even if they say all men, you think, well, I don't do that, so I'm not going to get offended.
	But I do think that, and it's not all women that do this, but there is a certain type of woman who does hear, I mean, maybe to a degree, it is all women, but there's a certain kind of woman who hears a woman being criticized and then becomes offended on their behalf because they are also a woman.
	And I don't know why.
	Well, actually, it's a means of manipulation.
	The way that I like to think of a lot of these third-wave feminists and social justice warriors is that they treat all interactions like they do their own personal fucked up relationships.
	You know, they're basically nagging a community.
	Or, you know, really, a lot of the impetus behind this constantly saying, I'm under threat, I'm under attack, or I'm offended by what you're saying, is saying to a community, I don't think you really love me.
	Prove that you love me.
	Yeah.
	I think that that's a really, really, really accurate description of it as well.
	No, absolutely.
	I totally agree with that.
	I don't even have anything to add.
	I think that's a nail on the head.
	I mean, there's a very definite kind of personal take that they make on it.
	And I do think there's something to be said for these people engaging in dysfunctional relationships.
	You know, you see the lack of social skill, of just, you know, he's one of my favorite people.
	PZ Myers, the way that he conducts himself on his blog, ultimately, it's just lashing out.
	It's a miserable, unhappy, insecure person lashing out against people.
	And I see a lot of that.
	A lot of the social justice warrior, it doesn't make sense because there is no rational basis for it.
	It's just people lashing out because they think that the world has wronged them or they haven't been given their, you know, it's like someone who's raised as a single child and they're told, oh, you're so wonderful, you're so talented, you have so much potential.
	Yeah, everyone's parent says that if they're halfway decent parents, and then they get out in the real world and you get your ass kicked because you're not nearly as good as people said you were.
	And these are people that have not quite gotten to that adult stage yet.
	They've held on to adolescence and thinking, and you know, a lot of them are still adolescents.
	I mean, it's a very young phenomenon.
	And I try to think about what kind of life experiences do these people have.
	And, you know, obviously they came from a certain family.
	They went through a high school where, you know, there's no longer winners or losers.
	Everyone gets a participant ribbon because everyone's a winner.
	You know, you don't want to have contact sports or, you know, make people out to be less than the special snowflake they are.
	Then they go into the university and now they're given an ideological underpinning for why they're special, why they're better than everyone else, why people are out to get them, why the world is not recognizing them for the wonderful, beautiful, talented people that they are.
	And what comes after that is lashing out.
	Absolutely.
	You know, that was actually something I was going to bring up earlier.
	There seemed to be a confluence of social circumstances that appear to all contribute to the situation that we find ourselves in.
	I'm going to list a few that I just want your opinion on these really.
	So, first off, the rise of the single-parent household.
	Fatherlessness, effectively.
	This is why they call me an MRA.
	I'm not.
	I don't want to take any kind of gendered label like that.
	But I think I'm a humanist.
	And so, you know, I think that history shows us that two-parent households produce healthy children.
	And I'm not making judgments on the nature of the parents, but I think fatherlessness, especially in boys, produces not every time, but there seems to be a trend that it produces men who are less happy with their position in life.
	This is just from my own personal experience, really, dealing with people who have come from single-parent households.
	But the people, there is a definite trend of single-parent households with the mother raising the children.
	And then you've got, like you say, the sort of special snowflake syndrome in school where no one can do any wrong.
	And you've also got Christina Hoff Summers, I think, did she write The War on Boys?
	Or I can't remember if she wrote, it was an article she wrote.
	She was saying how boys are being treated like defective girls.
	Well, you know, and you get getting back to my buddy Greg Layden, he actually gave a talk at one of these conferences where he made the claim that a male is a female fetus poisoned by testosterone.
	In other words, that males are simply failed females.
	And I think there's something to that.
	If you're raised in a fatherless or a household where you're not allowed to experience the pot, you know, even if you say you want to experience maleness, the thing that comes to mind, because we've been conditioned into this, is misbehaving, aggressiveness, things like that.
	But there's positive aspects to maleness.
	And so if you're not experiencing that, you end up being treated as and thinking of yourself as a failed female.
	In fact, in the American school system, they do exactly that.
	Boys that aren't acting like girls are doped with Ridalin.
	Rather than boys will be boys, which itself is raised as a pejorative, they're doped up because they're acting like males.
	Yep, that's exactly it, there is, and this, again, it comes from basically the, I don't want to say the feminization because it makes it sound like by definition I'm advocating for the masculinization of something, if I say the feminization.
	But that's not what I'm saying.
	I don't think it's feminization that female attributes are imposed upon them.
	I think it's more of a vacuum that's created.
	Yeah, it's more the desire for...
	Basically, there have been...
	I mean, you get very few male teachers these days because everyone's afraid of being called a paedophile.
	And so this has led to schools being increasingly feminized, you know, with lots and lots of women.
	And women have got a natural tendency to want to make things safe.
	And boys acting rambunctiously to women isn't particularly safe, especially if they are single mothers or have been raised by single mothers and don't really have much experience of masculinity.
	And especially if feminists are in control of a lot of media, which they are.
	There is a lot of feminist media pumping out bullshit about masculinity, toxic masculinity.
	Men are rapists, all this sort of stuff.
	And so even in those circumstances, I think.
	Even worse is, and it's getting back to the egotism that it's displayed, is that a lot of women presume that they know male experience better than men do.
	Yes, absolutely.
	And male intent as well.
	And this is the thing.
	I have read academic feminist papers where they literally say in the introduction, feminists have argued that men use rape as a form of societal control.
	It's like, well, Jesus Christ, that just makes us all deliberate and intentional rapists.
	It's a miracle that rapes illegal.
	You know, speaking about religious faith, I mean, the whole idea of rape culture is an article of religious faith because there's no, I mean, just two guys discussing it amongst themselves.
	Do we condone rape?
	Do we think rape, do we high-fi rape?
	No, we think rapists are the lowest.
	It's despicable.
	Like you say, the lowest.
	It's cowardly.
	That's masculinity.
	Do you think of a rapist as being a real man, an alpha male, someone to emulate?
	No, of course.
	In fact, you're a failure.
	Exactly.
	You're a monster.
	You're a monster.
	failed to protect women, you failed to be able to, I mean, I understand that rape is supposedly about power and not sex, but it is a sexual act.
	You've, you know...
	The old saying was that war is politics by other means, or war is a failure of politics.
	Rape at some level is a failure of you behaving like a human being.
	Yeah, and being a failure of you being able, you're behaving like a man.
	That's the point.
	Because when you behave like a man, women find you attractive.
	This is what I was getting back to the very beginning when we were talking.
	I know it's talking in broad terms, but men act like men because women find that attractive.
	And so if you can't get a woman by acting like a man, raping someone is not acting like a man, you know.
	And so this is the thing.
	I think there are a lot of circumstances that come together.
	I think there are still more circumstances.
	This whole thing where you've got a lot of men who have been raised by single mothers therefore probably innately want female approval.
	You've got women who have effectively taken over the education system.
	Boys are being drugged simply for acting like boys.
	You've got the terrible feminist propaganda of one in five women will be raped.
	And there's a rapist behind every car.
	Your son might be a rapist.
	all this sort of shit, and it's just...
	And then you've got the white knights who are like, fuck me!
	A lot of this is targeted at children.
	And this has happened in the American school system.
	When you get a six-year-old kissing a girl and then he's brought up as a sexual abuser, what a horrible thing.
	You know, way back when I lost my cookies at some Catholic cultists that were handing out flyers for children saying that, you know, you are a wicked sinner, and unless you do this and that, you're going to end up in hell.
	And I ripped it up and I said, this is just child abuse, telling a child that they are a sinner, that they're innately sinful.
	But isn't that what we're doing to boys?
	Absolutely.
	It's the new original sin.
	Privilege.
	It's the, you were born white male, therefore, boom, you've got original sin.
	need to be repentant towards women and this is the thing right now you've got being male is something that you have to transcend exactly Exactly.
	Exactly.
	They can't stand the idea of being masculine because, my God, that is what they have been trained to hate.
	That is why Jonathan McIntosh is going on about how awful masculinity is.
	And you've got these boys.
	You've got a generation of these boys, millennials.
	They're 20-something.
	They've just finished.
	They're just coming out of university now, sort of thing.
	And their whole lives, they've been told masculinity is awful.
	They don't have fathers in the homes, or at least a large portion of them don't.
	And they've been taught time after time, men are evil, men are evil, men are evil.
	And now they're thinking, well, shit, I don't want to be evil.
	I'm a nice guy.
	I love my mum.
	I love the women around me.
	I love the women in my family.
	Why would I want to hurt women?
	And so if they're being told that any criticism of women is misogyny, it's hating women.
	You need to stand up for women.
	That's what a good man does.
	He stands up for women.
	My God, why wouldn't they be white knights?
	Why wouldn't they be looking for justification from these women, validation from these women?
	And then you've got people who aren't crazy, who think women are equals rather than these terrible fragile creatures.
	Treating women as equals is the best way to be labelled a misogynist.
	Yeah, it absolutely is.
	That's the problem, because for them, in their minds, women are so downtrodden.
	They're oppressed.
	There's a patriarchy, in their opinion.
	And so you go, no, patriarchy doesn't exist.
	Why would we have women politicians if there was a patriarchy?
	They don't care.
	That's irrelevant.
	The point is you're criticizing a woman and it's their job.
	And there is a certain kind of woman who is obviously going to see this and think, well, I can gain personal power from this.
	I'm going to take advantage.
	And they do.
	And I think that is how we have arrived at the position of the social justice warriors as we are now.
	And they've all done their communication studies degrees.
	They've been to university.
	They've been taught.
	They've been indoctrinated into their ideologies and they've been taught their tools and now they are the commanding voices in the media because of fear, like you said.
	And there we are.
	That's what I think has happened.
	Yeah.
	It's quite terrifying, really, isn't it?
	Well, I mean, where do we go?
	I mean, how do you take this back?
	I have no freaking clue.
	I mean, it's almost like living under an occupation where you wake up and go, my goodness, we're being controlled by morons or con artists or just these kind of spineless cult.
	Well, it is a cult.
	And as far as the media goes, I only attribute the most cynical motives.
	I don't think they believe any of this.
	I think it's pandering.
	I mean, it's the reason why commercials on TV now portray the guy as bumbling.
	I think Twitter has played a large part in this because if you get 30,000 feminists from across the world, I mean, this is the perfect thing.
	There was a Twitter petition going around on Twitter amongst the feminists to get Grand Theft Auto V pulled from a shop called Target in Australia.
	You know that it wasn't 30 or 40,000 feminists in Australia who signed this petition, but because you've got Twitter, the internet, and the world, it doesn't matter.
	Suddenly, it's a very, very loud-sounding voice.
	Whereas, you know, if you could analyze it in detail, you'd see that most of these feminists probably didn't live in Australia.
	And none of these feminists were going to buy Grand Theft Auto.
	And yet, still, Target ended up pulling it from their shelves because of just loud voices, nagging, basically, on Twitter.
	And it's intimidation.
	And this is how businesses and corporations willing to pander to them.
	I mean, look what happened on Twitter itself.
	There was a rash of people getting banned from Twitter, and I was one of them.
	And our account suspended, not banned, but suspended.
	And we couldn't figure out what the hell it is we did.
	And then it turns out that Twitter had partnered with this group, Women Action in the Media.
	And when you read the, it's like a two-person operation.
	They have absolutely no means of vetting all of the charges that were brought about against people.
	But if you look on their website, they have this fast-track form that you could fill out.
	This so-and-so is a harasser.
	And then you read the people in charge of this.
	One woman, I think her name is Friedman.
	She says, well, you know, we're going to be expanding this beyond the scope of Twitter's actual standards for harassment because we think it would be beneficial to men.
	Yeah, it was a net, wasn't it?
	They were going to cast the net and see what Twitter picks up.
	And it's like, wow.
	So I mean, this is just what they have this kind of power over.
	I mean, is Twitter going to now partner with the JDL or the Nation of Islam or some other group so that they can vet people that they think might potentially be harassers who say something untoward?
	Who else gets a seat at this table?
	Well, that's a question.
	I don't think anyone who isn't a woman, because ultimately this is all done under the justification of protecting women as if women are children.
	And this kind of infantilization of women is something that a certain kind of woman is going to take advantage of.
	They're going to play up to it, know that they can use it to their advantage, and then they're going to cash in off it, like Randy Harper.
	They're going to go out like Brennawoo, play the victim, deliberately provoke people, cash in on it, and then use it to enhance their own status.
	And out of context, they'll say, I'm a woman who was attacked by horrible mean gamers, and then people go, oh, no, what can we do to protect a woman?
	Because every man wants to instinctively protect women.
	So, yeah, I think it's the most magnificent, just not even con.
	It's just incredible how it's come about.
	And I don't think it's necessarily by accident, but I don't think it's necessarily by design either.
	I think it's going to, I don't know what we can do to get out of it.
	I really don't.
	No, the only thing I can think of is just to continue to push back and make the case that, yeah, we disagree with these people, but we disagree with people on a factual basis or the basis of methodology or maybe even values that are being expressed, not because we're anti-women or we're against a certain amount kind of people.
	I mean, in fact, the philosopher Larry Louden said that there is no factual disagreements.
	I mean, if you think about it, no one disagrees on fact.
	I mean, the evolution versus creationism debate can easily be settled by fact.
	So when people don't want to deal in facts, they'll step it up to methodology, saying, well, you know, this is the, your methodology is flawed.
	But ultimately, what it comes down to is values.
	I mean, the impetus for creationists isn't necessarily that they want the biblical story of creation.
	It's because they think evolution is evil, that evolution, and usually, generally they do this by confusing Darwinism with social Darwinism, that they think that evolution leads to certain moral and societal ills.
	In fact, they even have diagrams of evolution at the base, branching off into a tree, drug use, promiscuity, all of this stuff.
	And with the social justice warriors, sometimes you end up having these factual arguments, which are just bullshit because it's not going to be decided by fact.
	You can appeal to methodology.
	I mean, take the case of Casey Johnson, the guy who did the blog Durham in Wonderland, who dismantled the Duke La Crosse case.
	He's a political historian.
	I think he's got some background in journalism.
	He recently gave a talk in Ohio University.
	And he was just dealing with the cases, two cases where false accusations were made.
	The Virginia Tech case that Rolling Stone did an article about, and the Duke La Crosse case.
	And he got a bunch of people from this group called Fuck Rape Culture sitting in the front row with T-shirts that said, fuck rape culture, because it's classy that way.
	And they listened to his speech.
	They listened to the facts that he gave, the background he gave, his reasoned argument, because all he was arguing for was not that women lie about rape or that rape isn't a problem.
	He was just arguing for there should be due process.
	There should be a methodology for determining the truth or falsehood, and it shouldn't be conducted by tribunerals.
	But they weren't listening to that because they didn't care about facts.
	They didn't care about method.
	What they cared about was values.
	And they were able to sit there after listening to him saying things like, you know, one in five women will be raped in the universities, which he pointed out was a higher incidence of rape than the Congo during the Civil War, where rape was used as a means of warfare and assaulting civilian populations.
	It's ludicrous.
	So I think the thing is that, yeah, it's kind of fun to have factual disagreements.
	Yeah, we can talk about methodology that, you know, this study that shows, you know, one in five women will be raped in university is flawed.
	And, you know, the Super Bowl domestic violence hoax and rule of thumb, all of that stuff has no sense.
	But ultimately, it comes down to values.
	What values are we expressing?
	And again, this is the thing that really disheartened me about the skeptical community.
	When these people came in, skeptics were not practicing skepticism.
	They not only can abandon method, they had abandoned the value of skepticism.
	And maybe we should be having more values-oriented discussions.
	What do you value?
	Do you value due process?
	Do you value fairness?
	Do you value the methodology of science, which would itself be of value?
	What do you value in gaming?
	What is the value of gaming?
	Well, this is a very, very interesting thing for us to come across because almost everything that they do is a breach of a few very important principles to me.
	The first is practice what you preach.
	Don't be afraid.
	Hypocrisy is rampant, yeah.
	Exactly.
	The second is presumption of innocence.
	That's a bit strange.
	But to say that someone is a misogynist is to presume that they are full of hate, to presume that they irrationally hate half the human race.
	That's a horrible thing.
	That's a horrible guilt to presume about someone.
	Most people would presume that people don't hate you presume the minimum scope of whatever evidence you have.
	So if I were to say be having an argument with Brianna Wu or something, I would expect someone to say, wow, he really hates Brianna Wu, not he really hates transgender people or he really hates women because that is just the most extreme side.
	You've got two extremes.
	You've got, I either hate the individual Brianna Wu or I hate all transsexuals.
	So which one is it going to be?
	I would be presuming the innocence of that person's motivation, the innocence of their heart, I suppose, to say, well, maybe they just hate that one Person rather than they hate everyone.
	And you'd have to prove it.
	Somebody's making a claim that you're criticizing Brianna Wu because you hate transsexuals generally.
	Well, prove it.
	Did you write something?
	Do they have any evidence for this?
	I mean, go through the paper trail and back this up.
	Exactly.
	But nine out of ten times, you're in a heated discussion.
	They make things emotional.
	They're very good at manipulating emotions.
	And again, this is there are just so many things.
	I mean, well, the angriest I ever got, I think, in any video that I did was the anally inserted grenade, which was a take on P. Z. Meyer's post about, you know, what if someone hands you a grenade, where it came out that the person, the identity of the person who had accused Michael Shermer of rape came out.
	And then the details of the story of the supposed rape came out.
	And I'll probably get in trouble by summarizing it.
	But basically, she was all over Shermer.
	She was one of the organizers of this conference.
	She decided to celebrate her successful conference by getting shit face drunk.
	And apparently something happened.
	And what it comes down to is, again, treating women as children.
	The only claim that could be made was, yes, there was something sexual that happened between her and Michael Shermer.
	Both of them were drinking, but she could not give consent because she was drunk.
	And that was the basis for the rape.
	And slandering Shermer.
	And when you pick it apart in a kind of follow-the-paper trail, prove it way, it was just infuriating.
	I mean, I think that's what's necessary to do.
	Don't just roll over on it.
	When someone says to you, you know, you're a transphobe because you're against transgender because you criticize Brianna Ru, stick on them.
	Say, yeah.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, no one actually does say that to me, but that was just an example, you know.
	But I agree.
	If someone listening is listening to try and get angles of attack back at them, Micah is absolutely right.
	If someone is saying you hate women, ask them to fucking prove it.
	And when they say, well, you criticize an Esakesin, then you can literally just turn around and say, yeah, but that's an individual.
	Right.
	She doesn't represent.
	The important thing, though, is to, I mean, you have to take a little note from them and do a little self-promoting.
	I don't mean self-promoting in a narcissistic way, but maybe it's better to say, you know, disseminating your opinion.
	When the people in free thought blogs and the Atheism Plus attacked me, I was, you know, there's not a lot of readers of those blogs.
	And someone did the calculation that much more people watched my videos than read the initial thing that I was responding to.
	And so they realized somewhere along the way that it just wasn't cost-effective for them to do this because I could have a forum making videos where I could take their stuff, distribute it to a wider audience, and it was a monologue.
	I mean, once they made an accusation or said something stupid, there was no response they could give.
	I was off doing a monologue in a video that they couldn't respond to.
	And well after the point, whatever initial stupid little forum post they made or comment on a blog, that got buried somewhere, and people were still watching the videos.
	Absolutely.
	And at least it means that We've got something, you know, something with a bit more permanence than they have.
	In gaming, I mean, they have these gaming blogs and magazines.
	What could someone who, say, hypothetically is accused of being misogynistic or transphobic do to push back?
	Have you got more time?
	Because I really need to get a drink because my throat's getting a bit sore.
	But if you don't mind taking a few questions from the chat or something while I'm going grab one, then how do I see that?
	Oh, I'll send you a link that you can put into your browser.
	You'll need to mute the sound or pause it.
	But you'll see the chat coming up along the side.
	Oh, yeah.
	They've been talking a lot of shit, probably.
	So, chat, be nice and ask Maikaru some questions.
	He's a guy that I'm sure you can tell has plenty of experience with social justice warriors.
	Oh, you're right about having to mute the sound.
	Yeah.
	But I'll be back as soon as I can be back because I'm really, really enjoying this conversation.
	Okay.
	All right, let me see.
	Do we have any questions that I can actually answer?
	How big is your dick?
	Well, yeah, thanks.
	Yeah.
	Why am I such a fag?
	Chat is a trap.
	Thank you, Admiral Akbar.
	Don't look at it.
	It's a trap.
	Don't look at the chat.
	Wait, I actually saw what might have been a pertinent question.
	What are your aims in criticizing free thought blogs?
	They are just massive disseminators of horseshit.
	What is the origin of the term shitlords?
	Oh, you know, I actually once knew that.
	I think it was just a feminist way of denigrating men's rights people, snack bar.
	Yeah, I do have a video in the work.
	I pretty much got the voiceover written.
	Now I just have to go back and slap it together.
	But I had to take a few days off to go winter camping because I'm a glutton for punishment.
	I met Sargon on the internet.
	The worst social justice warrior story I've heard recently.
	I don't know.
	I haven't been paying much attention to them recently.
	I think the funniest one was with Brianna Wu trying to gin up some comments about herself and forgetting to log out of her Steam account.
	That was just my favorite thing ever.
	Sorry, I'm back now.
	Okay.
	No, sorry.
	Oh, someone was asking me about MGTOW, men going their own way.
	Oh, yeah.
	You know, on one hand, I think it's kind of, you know, it's people who think that, you know, if you can't win, don't play the game.
	But I think generally, I mean, as long as you do it in such a way.
	I think it's a good thing for guys to concentrate on doing things that are good for them, fulfill them, not worrying about doing things just to please women.
	And, you know, actually, I think in a strange way, MGTOWs, by being MGTOWs and working on themselves and doing things that interest themselves, would probably be more attractive to women than they would stop being MGTOWs.
	Absolutely.
	And one of the things I think, I think MGTOWs are actually a very, very essential thing to give men an option because it's very, very difficult to go against the grain in any society if you're the only person doing it.
	Someone asked me what games I play.
	Well, right now I'm stuck in the tunnel in Metro 2033.
	What's Metro 2033?
	Is that the name of it?
	I probably forgot the name.
	It takes place in a post-apocalyptic Russia, and you're pretty much down in the underground.
	Right.
	And it's yeah, Metro 2033 redux.
	Someone suggested that, so I started playing that, and then there's just a point where I ran out of shotgun shells and just kept running out of them, and I keep getting eaten.
	It sounds pretty cool, actually.
	Is any single player?
	Cut down.
	I've been playing a game called Seven Days to Die recently, which is kind of like a video game version of The Walking Dead.
	Someone wants to know which tunnel.
	The first tunnel.
	That's what tunnel.
	Oh, look at that.
	Yeah, stuck in the tunnel.
	Okay, I'm going between two stations the first time you do it.
	I'm just stuck.
	Bite me.
	They'll make me feel worse about it than I already do.
	Would YouTube please finish the Sarkeesian effect?
	Oh, good God.
	Have you heard of the Sarkeesian effect?
	Yeah, I don't know what to make of those guys.
	Are they just sort of douchebag self-promoters?
	Well, I mean, I don't know either, really.
	I've only talked to Jordan very, maybe I've said like 10 sentences to him on Twitter via message.
	And I had a conversation like this one with Davis Arene, which honestly I enjoyed.
	It was a fun conversation.
	But I don't know them.
	I wouldn't be able to say I know them.
	And I didn't.
	I would have thought when Jordan first put his video out saying, oh, we've parted ways or whatever, I thought that it would be something that Arena had done because I don't know why, really.
	I don't know, but it's just, I just, I didn't expect Jordan to be reacting quite so emotionally, but that's because I didn't know him, you know.
	I don't know.
	From what Arrini's put on his blog, it kind of seems that Jordan, I don't know, just seems personal rather than, in fact it kind of brings me back to a point I wanted to make earlier about the mis-, just the flagrant lies about statistics.
	Like the one in five, you were saying it would be a higher rape rate than the Congo.
	And that's obviously true.
	And it's obviously not one in five.
	In fact, I had a study that I linked in a video a while ago that showed that it was actually 0.03 in five women were raped in colleges, which is lower than the general population.
	So the hysteria of rapes on campuses are just absurd.
	It's ridiculous for it to be, you know, I mean, like being hysterical about tiger attacks.
	But this is the thing.
	They lie.
	They have lied about these statistics.
	Well, someone's asking, what's the most dangerous thing about SJW?
	And I think it's, you know, the truth doesn't matter.
	I mean, there's a script that they've written in advance.
	I mean, it's like the thing, you know, it's the polar end of, you know, the Tea Party movement.
	They get a script because they think it's going to appeal to the rank and file, and they're going to follow it, come what may.
	There is literally no way to talk anyone out of this one in five statistic.
	It is a convenient lie, it is a useful lie, and they will repeat it as many times as necessary.
	And that's the inherent danger.
	It is sophistry.
	It is really the SJWs come down to the truth, is whatever you can make people believe.
	Absolutely.
	Well, this, again, there are a bunch of points here.
	The narrative is the most dangerous weapon I think the social justice warriors have, but it's also one of the biggest weaknesses.
	One of the things with Gamergate that they've been trying to push, and they've managed to do it.
	This has got to the point where everyone's pissed off about it.
	I don't know whether you heard about the special victims unit law and order episode about gamers.
	Did you see that?
	I saw that.
	I saw that clip.
	And their take on it was: the thing with the Gamergate was that there were actual gamers raping women in restrooms.
	Yeah, and trying to get gamers out of the game.
	And then they can kind of confuse gaming with anonymous, and there were guys with masks on saying, Game on, New York Police Department.
	What do you think?
	Do you think they're not Islamic terrorists?
	They don't think they're getting some kind of virgins in heaven when they die.
	It's absurd.
	But that was the thing.
	They've constructed this ridiculous narrative where as a weapon, this is a weapon against gamers, is a way of never having to compromise or even listen to gamers.
	They've decided, right, if we can cherry-pick events that we can turn around and say, these confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt, that gamers are misogynistic shitlords who are terrorists, who are worse than ISIS, who are trying to force women out of the video game industry.
	And my God, we're the only people who can save them, us brave white knights.
	Then they construct this narrative and they cling to it.
	They make sure it's easy to repeat.
	It's always very easy to get from point A to B to C to D.
	And I think the motive is very similar to what motivated people to form Atheism Plus.
	That is, you know, if you want to do social justice, if you want to work for any number of causes, then there's already organizations in existence where you could work on that cause.
	But people like, you know, Myers and Watson and everything, they didn't want to do that because they would have to start at the bottom, you know, work their way up.
	It was something ready-made where people could come into a community and say, we're in charge now.
	And it's not for nothing that it seems skepticism was identified as a very male-oriented community.
	You know, the leading lights were.
	And I think it was the same thing with gaming, which is it was identified as a male-oriented community.
	And so therefore, it was ripe for the pod people to come in.
	Well, this is the thing.
	I mean, they never tried to take over knitting or something that is not male-oriented or identified as male-oriented.
	No, they would have no power there.
	Their main weapon is: you want to feel good about yourself, and you don't want to think that you hate women.
	Therefore, do as we say.
	And obviously, that's not going to work with a bunch of old ladies in their sewing circle.
	In one of the groups that I belong to, we would go camping in an area down in southern Virginia where there were habituated black bears.
	They're not big like grizzlies, but the difference with that grizzly bears will attack you because it's a territorial thing.
	They'll slap you around, and maybe they might turn over into predation.
	Black bears, when they attack you, it's because they're hungry.
	So we would carry firearms.
	I'd have a shotgun.
	And some women came into the group and said to us, you know, they really liked the group.
	They liked doing primitive skills and stuff like that.
	But they didn't like all the firearms.
	And so I said to this woman, I said, well, you know, there's these bears here.
	So I'll make a deal with you.
	If a bear attacks anyone else, I'll shoot it.
	If it attacks you, I won't.
	I thought that was a reasonable compromise.
	It's amazing how what it demonstrates is people coming into a community and having some sort of arrogance of thinking that they're able to call, rather than working their way up through the community and learning what's what.
	I mean, these people came into the community and before they learned any skills that they had any kind of talent or knowledge, assumed that now they were calling the shots.
	Yeah, it's absolutely entitlement.
	I mean, you've got Lori Penny, who's this really annoying woman who wrote an article called On Nerd Entitlement.
	And she basically went through the article ripping on nerds about being entitled to the spaces that they paid for.
	Well, that's very brave.
	I mean, it's she obviously thought it was, I mean, and she's not even talking about gamers or a male-owned community.
	She's targeting nerds, something that she's already, you know, categorized as a soft target.
	And as if they, you know, they've paid the money.
	They put the time going to whatever conventions or whatever spaces they wanted to create.
	They put the money in to make sure that these industries that support these spaces and are using these spaces exist and have thrived and profited.
	And now she's like, oh, they're entitled.
	Yeah, they're fucking entitled.
	They're absolutely entitled.
	They've put the time and effort in.
	What have you done?
	Nothing.
	You've come in, you've seen someone build something out of nothing and been like, maybe I could take advantage of that.
	Maybe I could co-opt that.
	That's your entitlement that you are obviously projecting onto them, whereas they have a legitimate entitlement to it.
	Fuck off.
	It just infuriates me.
	I just audacity of it.
	And sometimes this sort of attitude, it's so, you know, talking about men being misogynistic or something, but this entitlement is so reflective.
	Now, I work in a building that's the second largest federal building besides the Pentagon.
	It's huge.
	But, you know, there's rhyme or reason to getting around.
	And so I'm going into one office, and these two women walk past me, and they're looking around.
	And I said, can I help you?
	And they said, oh, yeah, we're looking for the elevator.
	I said, well, it's simple.
	Down the hall there and just go to the right.
	It's in that little alcove.
	Rather, in lieu of saying thank you or anything, they take two steps past me and one of them says, I told you this building was designed by a male.
	What?
	It doesn't even make any sense.
	It was just a kind of reflexive male bash between girls.
	And I said to, I say, what pai?
	I said to him, I said, I'm sorry I helped you if you were going to say something misandrist.
	Every building you've ever been in is designed by men.
	Well, yeah, that's what I was thinking.
	I mean, yeah, this building was designed by men.
	It was built by men.
	And when something goes wrong, probably a guy will fix it.
	Exactly.
	So you look down on that.
	You know, you look down your nose at that, love, you know.
	I mean, if it wasn't for us, where would you be living?
	But hey, I can't say us because I never built anything.
	But it's the principle, though.
	It really pissed me off.
	It's the entitlement.
	It's just palpable.
	Absolutely palpable.
	Would you, you know, if you bought something at a Jewish-owned store, a bodega in New York, and take two steps out and say, you know, he jewed me out of, you know, he jewed me down or, you know, whatever they say.
	Would you actually say something like that?
	You would have to be a massive asshole.
	I mean, you have to be the most bigoted, stupid, socially awkward fuck on the planet.
	Yet these two women thought nothing of well within earshot saying, oh, yeah, I told you this building was designed by a man.
	I don't even think that sort of thing registers.
	That's the thing.
	No, it's not considered to be bigoted.
	I mean, it's you know, then again, you know, because I work in tech and everything, and I wear a dress shirt, but I luckily haven't had to wear a tie in eons.
	You know, they probably just thought of me as lower level, that they were talking over my head.
	You know, I noticed that very often that women will, as I said before, they'll look up.
	They see the men in position of authority, and the men that are not at that level are either invisible or considered to be a threat.
	What's the whose law is it?
	I can't remember.
	It's some colloquial law of the internet, probably the manosphere, that says if there's no benefits to the interaction between a man and a woman, the woman doesn't let it happen.
	Oh, yeah, I know.
	I can't remember the name of it.
	But there's some sort of truth.
	It's some French-sounding name, Burge Lowe's Law.
	Yeah, something like that.
	Someone in the comments will have it.
	Yeah, come on, guys.
	Stop asking me the size of my dick and get to doing some research.
	Yeah, stop talking about the Jews.
	Get on there.
	The pussyhounds.
	No, they're not doing it.
	Patriarchy and aliens.
	Now, there's a bit of a delay on the chat.
	Oh, do you believe that six trillion Jews died?
	What the fuck?
	Well, anyway, okay.
	Well, we'll just roll with it.
	Yeah, but I understand.
	You know what I'm talking about.
	And I think there is truth to that.
	It might be some truth.
	Yeah.
	Then again, you know, it yeah, I don't want to say it's the product of bitterness.
	I just don't like stuff like that that would become that that would become sort of the mirror image of what social justice warriors do, and you use that excuse.
	Cross-generalizations that kind of cement themselves into methods of thought reflects.
	Oh, someone had it.
	No, not Brad.
	Refaltz.
	False law.
	In between comments about Jews and horse dick, someone actually knew what it was.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, that's that's.
	I don't even think it's necessarily malicious.
	But to a certain type of woman who, I guess, and again, I'm wondering if this is the sort of social and sort of cultural conditioning of the reverse of the white knight,
	the person who has been raised by the woman who has been raised by a single mother in a system that is very concerned with men not being men and women being treated like princesses and not being ever challenged and whatnot.
	Why wouldn't she be entitled?
	Why wouldn't she look upwards?
	And you get this in women responding to comments on blogs or YouTubers.
	There's going to be a certain percentage of people who are trolling or shit talking.
	And you just take that instruction.
	I mean, like the comments here on this conversation, I mean, there's nothing that's actually going to offend me, no matter how much someone writes Jews with horse dicks.
	I mean, there's going to be a fair amount of shit talking, and a lot of it is, you know, one-upmanship.
	You know, it's Jewish horse dick.
	But, you know, but they use that as a means of controlling the entire conversation.
	But they know, you know, how do you do that?
	I mean, unless you give over complete control to them, how do you prevent the untoward remark on the internet?
	Well, you can't.
	I mean, well, I mean, unless you've got wham, of course, in which you censor all kinds of speech and you completely abandon the principles that the West is built on, which I'm personally not prepared to do.
	I mean, honestly, it's kind of why I've run a YouTube channel.
	It's just so I've got some sort of voice in the public dialogue, because, God damn it, I'm very tired of all of this going on so smoothly for the people I disagree with.
	You know, YouTube is a great venue because one thing that we noticed is that the social justice warriors are very bad about doing things that actually take some modicum of learning and talent that has a learning curve, like doing YouTube videos or game development.
	So if you can find a venue that because of their incompetence, they're sort of left out of the conversation.
	I mean, I'm thinking of it, I'm trying to think of anyone who does.
	There's so many YouTubers that I could point to in the atheist and skeptical community that are just doing hysterically funny and or just delving, driving stuff.
	But I can't think of any social justice warrior who can do anything really besides bitch on comments.
	So that's probably the best medium for going after these people.
	If you can do it in an entertaining, funny, thoughtful sort of way.
	I think very interestingly, YouTube has very much become the forum of public debate these days, of intellectual debate.
	Especially with viral videos.
	I know that most videos that go viral are crap, like, you know, tat videos.
	But you do get some videos that you know, I think they can influence a large number of people.
	And I think that one thing that I find very amusing is that feminists hate the comment sections on YouTube.
	They hate them.
	They think they are the worst drivel in the world.
	I love my comment sections and my videos.
	I read all my comments, and there are people who disagree with me.
	There are people who agree with me.
	There are people like, man, you don't know this, you don't know that, and therefore you need to learn these things.
	And I'm like, great, thank you.
	Because that is something I can now add to my arsenal.
	I am less wrong than I was a minute ago.
	Now, I've learned something.
	I think comment section is excellent.
	Well, you can tell the social justice warrior videos because they're, say, comments are disabled.
	Disabled.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They're afraid to have their worldview challenged.
	But that's the thing.
	They have lost the YouTube battle.
	Every time they just, oh, the MRAs are coming or something.
	No, you're just wrong.
	People can show you that you're wrong.
	And if you disable your comments, they're going to make a video about it and make you look like a tit in perpetuity.
	So, you know, you go ahead.
	I mean, famously, Mr. Rapisian, when he did some videos, and the first reaction that Anita Sarkeesian had was to start blocking people from commenting on her videos.
	And I think she eventually went over to just disabling all comments.
	Which was a double-edged sword for her because, on one hand, she didn't want to hear it, anyone being critical of her.
	On the other hand, she wanted to quote mine all the negative comments that she could, especially when people stepped over the edge a bit.
	Absolutely.
	Being the professional victim, she needs to find the few comments to cherry-pick where someone's obviously blowing off steam at her because she's pissed them off by telling them how awful they are.
	Without even knowing them.
	Amazingly, that'll piss people off.
	And yeah, and that's just part of a professional victim shtick.
	I know that YouTubers like Thunderfoot and there's one guy, Integral Math, who the way that, especially like Integral Math, he can take idiotic remarks, just a car, one of these idiotic remarks and just dismantle it with a scalpel.
	It's beautiful to watch.
	And they have no result.
	I'm trying to, I'm trying, maybe, maybe I haven't been watching.
	I don't think there's a case where someone social justice warrior made some idiotic remark or idiotic blog post and got a YouTube response taking it apart.
	I don't think anyone has ever responded with their own video.
	I don't think they can do it.
	Now, there is a certain breed of male feminists who have taken to YouTube.
	I've been recently.
	And honestly, I've just got to point.
	And this brings me back to a point I wanted to make earlier, actually, is the lies about statistics.
	They will lie.
	They will fucking lie brazenly.
	And I am just sick to the back teeth of it because for two reasons, right?
	I was watching a video by a guy called Andrew Clavin.
	Now, he's a right-wing gentleman.
	And I don't like using the phrase right-wing pejoratively.
	It really annoys me because the progressives have got to the point where anything from the right-wing is wrong.
	It's ad hominem.
	It's just instantly wrong and can't be considered.
	And I don't like that.
	But I also, I'm not right-wing.
	And so I don't like giving them undue ammunition.
	And I was watching a video of his because he's quite a funny man.
	And he was saying, you know, liberals say this because liberals lie.
	And that is a statement of truth.
	They fucking do.
	They lie constantly.
	Absolutely infuriates me.
	I just wish they would just stop lying because you're giving them ammunition.
	And even then, there's this cadre of sort of, I don't know.
	I just call them the Mangina Crew because I don't really have a better name for them.
	But they've got maybe, I don't know, 500 subscribers between them.
	And they're just the just the most reactionary male feminists you've ever seen.
	They can't stand to have anything challenged.
	And you also have to take into account that a lot of them are not particularly intelligent.
	I think that's, you know, I'm not sure that's fair because some of them are.
	I think the problem is that they've been conditioned.
	So they must see things in a certain way, regardless of what the actual facts of the matter are telling them.
	And like with the narrative, they'll cherry-pick certain things that they think forms a current narrative and conveniently ignore other things that don't.
	And it's just, it's, I just wish they would just calm their tits, basically.
	But they say they're in line.
	I mean, there's this one guy called King John Targaryen, which I did a response to because I wanted to show him that, look, he's got like 200 subscribers, but I don't care about the number of subscribers.
	I care about what he's saying.
	And I've seen him in comments being like, oh, I mean, I'm a big fan of history.
	I'm well read in history.
	I'm not a professor of history or anything like that.
	And I've never claimed to be.
	And he's like, you're a charlatan.
	It's like, how can I be a charlatan if I'm not claiming to be anything?
	You know, I'm just someone who has read stuff.
	And, you know, I'm not saying I'm a professor.
	And he's like, well, you're a charlatan.
	It's like, well, I can't be a charlatan.
	Okay, well, you claimed that the Egyptians were Caucasian.
	It's like, where did I claim that?
	And then he's like, oh, well, I guess not.
	You know, I challenged him.
	He couldn't prove it.
	And yet he still claims it afterwards.
	And I'm just like, for fuck's sake, would you just listen to yourselves lying?
	Lying, lying, lying.
	And I just, it's got to the point now where I'm just like, I'm not even going to deal with them.
	I like to address my critics.
	If someone's like, man, you're wrong on this.
	I want to address it because I don't want to be wrong on a certain thing.
	But good God, these people are just fucking liars.
	Sorry, I'm not an awful one.
	Well, you know, when I say they're unintelligent, I liken it to someone who is like a Bible-thumping Christian.
	Again, getting back to this is an article of faith.
	I mean, someone who believes ludicrous crap from the Bible as literal truth.
	I mean, it's not like they're not functional human beings.
	They're able to buy houses and drive cars and not crap their pants on a regular basis.
	There's this one area where they've just abdicated responsibility to be a critical thinker because it's convenient for them or it makes them feel better or it gives them status.
	And I think it's the same case with these white knights and other people.
	They could be perfectly functional and hold jobs and hit the toilet on a regular basis.
	But this is one area where they've decided that they're just going to throw critical thinking out the window.
	You know, one of the hardest things that you can do is it's typical.
	You ever notice that the best critiques of religion are religious people when they critique other religions?
	Oh, yeah.
	A lot of Christians are brilliant when it comes to critiquing Islam or Catholicism, unless you're Jack Trick and Jack Chick and you're making those crappy cartoon books.
	But they can't turn that inquiry around on themselves.
	They've carved out an exemption for themselves.
	Now, this is where I'm wondering how much of the circumstances that I was talking about earlier come in, where they're raised by single parents in a school system that despises them and their gender.
	And that sort of thing.
	I wonder, I mean, because that's the thing.
	I've watched the videos, and a lot of them aren't stupid, as in, you know, not like actually stupid people who can't grasp concepts.
	It's more a willful ignorance to refuse to grasp a concept.
	And this is due to their bias, their very, very strong bias in favor of, in these cases, feminism, the ones I'm talking about.
	And so any kind of really strong ideological bias, I'm heavily suspicious of, because I really don't like ideologies.
	I find them just terrible things are done in the name of ideology.
	Someone has to be sacrificed on the altar.
	And I don't like that.
	There was a book by his name was Edmund Cohen.
	It's called The Mind of the Bible Believer.
	And what he said is applicable to ideologies too, other articles of faith, which is that when you have a conversation with a Bible believer, you find that words have a very different meaning.
	You could be arguing about truth, and you have an idea of truth as being empirically verifiable objective fact.
	They think truth is their dogma.
	So you're talking at cross-purposes.
	And when you're dealing with someone who's ideological, you'll find that they're almost using language in a different way than you are, which allows you to talk at cross-purposes.
	I mean, the very idea that these people label themselves as for social justice, what does that even mean?
	Well, it's one of those you couldn't possibly sound like you're against.
	Right, it's like the Patriot Act.
	I mean, exactly.
	You're not patriotic, are you?
	Yeah, if Congress wanted to pass the most evil draconian law, they would be calling it the Kittens and Puppies Act.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, and it's entirely deliberate.
	And it's part of their propaganda game because ultimately the people doing this are propagandists and they know it.
	In fact, you know what?
	I'm not going to say they know it.
	I think a lot of them don't know it.
	I don't know if they're aware of the origins of the dogma that they spout and the ideology that they follow.
	I'm really not.
	But I think a lot of them see the advantage in adopting it and so go with it anyway.
	I think a lot of these people that are true believers in this, the only thing I can think of is they have very narrow, sheltered lives that they've, you know, when they talk about things like male privilege, you know, because you're a white male, you're privileged, or just male in general, you're privileged.
	They obviously have a very Selective view of how people lived their lives.
	I mean, my background is pure working class.
	I mean, my great-great-grandfather pushed a fruit cart in Brooklyn.
	His son loaded bags of cement for 40 years and swept up.
	My dad joined the Air Force at 17 to get out of Brooklyn.
	Hey, my dad did the same thing.
	Not Brooklyn, but the same thing.
	And then he worked his way up from a sea mechanic until he retired as an instructor at Consolidated Edison, the electrical utility.
	I mean, there's not a lot of privilege in that.
	Well, I'm very much the same.
	My family background is insanely working class.
	My mum's side of the family, Welsh miners from the Rhonda Valleys, and my dad's side of the family are farmers.
	Bunch of pansies.
	What do they know?
	Exactly.
	Mining.
	What are you doing?
	Exactly.
	My nan tells me, told me stories about when they were kids, you couldn't tell whose father was who because they'd be coming back from the mines, they'd be coming down the mountains covered in coal dust, and they were all just black as night.
	And you couldn't, oh, I'm racist now.
	You couldn't tell who was who until they came to the actual house.
	How is black as night racist?
	Oh, I don't know.
	Everything's bloody racist.
	You know what I mean?
	But yeah, no, so yeah.
	And my dad joined the Air Force at 16, the RAF at 16, because he lived on a council estate in Yeovil, and that was literally the only option he really had for a stable career that would have got him out of a council estate.
	And so I got to have a nice middle-class lifestyle based on my sergeant in the RAF father.
	So that probably explains my accent, too.
	Well, that too.
	Well, and my grandfather, my mother's side was captured in St. Valerie and Co. in 1940.
	And he spent six years in a German, he was a 51st Highland Cameron, you know, Queen's Own regiment, spent six years in a German POW camp.
	Well, that sounds privileged to me.
	Yeah.
	But, you know, it's a different generation because during that period, the greatest generation, when my mother grew up during the London Blitz, I mean, she remembers having a Mickey Mouse gas mask.
	My grandmother, when my grandfather was in a POW camp, she was working in an armaments factory.
	You know, there was women were more than capable of doing the job that men did.
	And it was necessary.
	They had to.
	So I contrast that with these social justice warrior types, where for the life of me, I'm trying to look at whether or not these people had a real job in their lives.
	Imagine Melody Hensley having to work in a factory.
	No, she was a miniature.
	You know, they would collapse.
	They couldn't do it.
	Absolutely.
	Really, I mean, first of all, social justice warriors, they seem to be chronically underemployed, which gives them a lot of time for opining on blogs and things like that.
	Doesn't seem to be much out.
	I mean, talking about gamers being isolated Cheeto eaters, you know, as their stereotype, but they must have no damn life that I know of.
	Well, that that's very interesting as well, is because they generally seem to come from money.
	Plenty of them.
	Plenty of them come from money.
	You've got, for example, Brianna Wu, who bragged that, you know, when she first set up her game studio, her parents gave her millionaire entrepreneur parents gave her $200,000 to start up her business with.
	I'm thinking, Jesus Christ.
	And she pissed it away.
	And then you've got, what was Arthur Chu, won hundreds of thousands of dollars on Jeopardy.
	And then you've got Jonathan McIntosh, the writer of Feminist Frequency, whose dad has a vacation home on the San Juan Islands.
	And they come from money.
	They all come from the money.
	Because working class people cannot take, you know, can't go in and take one of these identity politics degrees.
	Exactly.
	And it costs money to do a pointless degree.
	A degree that's not going to get you any money out of the end of it.
	And that's the thing.
	And so it comes back to everything they say is projection.
	You're privileged.
	No.
	You are privileged.
	I didn't come from money.
	And, you know, really, there has to be, people should be more proactive in pointing this out to them, that they are the children of, and someone posted something.
	Some woman posted something about men on a construction site.
	The forklift operator was looking at my ass as I walked away.
	It was some random comment.
	And I commented back saying, you know, I worked in a lumber yard in high school and college, and I know how to drive a forklift.
	And I'll tell you something.
	The one thing that the forklift operator is not looking at is your ass.
	That's true.
	There's penalties for failure in working a forklift.
	I mean, it's something that's...
	Yeah, he's doing his job.
	Right.
	But it's the attitude, you know, here's one thing that never really comes up because they like to talk about gender and they like to talk about sexuality and the orientation and things like that.
	What never comes up is class.
	And as you were saying, this is a very class-oriented phenomena, and they spend an awful lot of time denigrating working-class people, particularly working-class men.
	If class came up, then they'd lose that debate instantly.
	They never ever want to talk about class because, you know, I was not aware that Brianna Wu comes from money, and her parents gave her $200,000 that she squandered.
	Yeah.
	She absolutely pissed it away, apparently.
	And yeah, and the only reason we know this is because she bragged about it.
	She tweeted about how the same with McIntosh.
	She tweeted about these things.
	So they're a matter of public record now.
	And it's just, it's incredible.
	Exactly.
	That's a great point that class never comes up because, God forbid, because they know they'll lose that.
	They know they're instantly going to lose that debate.
	I've pointed out several times in my video.
	I mean, I'm proudly from blue-collar background.
	And a lot of my perspective comes from that, the good and the bad.
	And seeing my father described himself as a one-man money-making machine because we were able to have growing up on Long Island.
	We had a boat, we went skiing, we had a nice house, we did all these things.
	But my father basically worked two jobs for 30 years.
	He had his own electrical contracting business, and he worked for Khan Edison.
	I mean, his way of expressing love was making money.
	And when he was there, we would do things like go out on the boat and things like that.
	But he was very task-oriented to that.
	So our privilege came at his expense.
	But that's quite common for people who have come from poor families.
	They understand that being able to buy things for people is an expression of affection.
	Because when they were a kid, my dad tells me stories about how him and his five brothers lived in a bloody caravan.
	And I'm just thinking, Christ.
	So, you know, when I was growing up, I was living in a nice, comfortable house.
	I didn't have anything to worry about.
	We had to go to the mill half an hour before we went to bed.
	Exactly.
	The four Yorkshireman sketch.
	Yeah, honestly, he was piss poor, pissed poor when he was a kid.
	And that's why he joined the RAF, you know, and it was like, yeah.
	And so, yeah, I'm personally not working class, but my family background absolutely is.
	So I was, you know, I was not encouraged to not be working class.
	I mean, it was expected that I had a dirty, menial, difficult job like working in a lumberyard.
	I mean, it was something that does give you character, you know, out in the middle of winter, breaking apart two by fours with a crowbar because they're frozen together.
	And that's part of your job.
	So, yeah, it does offend me a lot to have these, like you were saying, a lot of them being children of privilege.
	And because they're children of privilege, they're sort of like, you know, kind of like the British aristocracy, you know, frivolous.
	Yep.
	And thinking that they get to tell other people how to live.
	And thinking that they're better people because of it.
	Yeah.
	Just, you know, just fucking.
	Talking about unearned privilege.
	Yeah, exactly.
	The giant irony of it.
	You would think it would just kind of collapse in on itself at some point, wouldn't you?
	Well, that's it.
	We just have to beat the banner of class warfare more often.
	I think we should, actually.
	I don't like bringing it up, though.
	That's the thing.
	It's not seemly, is it?
	You don't want to think of yourself like that generally, I guess.
	You don't want to think of yourself as the sort of person who's in warfare.
	There's a way out of that because one of the ways that they explain away their hypocrisy and they can say horrible things to people, but people can't respond to them, is because they consider themselves to be oppressed.
	They're punching up.
	Punching up is always good.
	Punching down is bad.
	But in the case of class, I would be punching up at them.
	And all they can do is punch down.
	If they're children of privilege, if they were able to get $200,000 from their parents or whatever, you know, other little six stories is then they're just punching down at people.
	Once again, they're violating their own quasi-ethics.
	Yeah, I think that is actually a great...
	Because one of the things that I think that they...
	They can't rationalize that away.
	They can't rationalize.
	Because with all things on, it says power, privilege, or whatever bullshit they want to go up with.
	They can't rationalise away money.
	They brag about their money.
	They brag about it.
	And they absolutely take any other tack other than money to attack other people with.
	And I completely agree.
	I think class...
	The only way, really, to really, really bite them is to maybe go into class warfare.
	I don't like the idea, but they brought this on themselves.
	Well, you know, look at the the what what what do you think the socioeconomic status of the ad average gamer is?
	I mean you're not you're not talking about making a lot of m money and it really it in a lot of w it strikes me sometimes that uh gaming uh in in this in this day and age and culture where males are sometimes prevented from going out and actually adventuring You know,
	Gaming is a is a substitute for that and it's a way for people who might have otherwise, you know, tedious lives with middle-class jobs to to have something that's a little pulse pounding and interesting.
	You know that it's a surrogate for that.
	Yeah, I get.
	Yeah, I mean like, like you said, I doubt any of them have had a proper job, so I don't think any of them have really suffered any kind of any kind of hardship.
	I mean, this is Melanie Hesley, PTSD from Twitter.
	Just, Melody Hensley is the luckiest person on earth because she was able to get.
	You know the story of the Center FOR Inquiry, which was?
	It was founded by a guy named Kurtz and then, somewhere in the process it was, there was a coup where the control was wrested away from him and Hensley was one of the people that was, you know, backing the person.
	So she got a cushy little job, didn't she?
	Of course she did.
	What?
	What other job could you possibly have where you, she's not showing up for work?
	She said she was bedridden for three months.
	Who the hell gets a three-month sabbatical?
	I mean, isn't laying around in bed claiming that you got PTSD from Twitter.
	Isn't that the ultimate indulgence?
	Jesus Christ, just when you say it, it's just like you know what.
	That's absurd.
	It's just laughable.
	I just laying around in bed claiming PTSD from Twitter is one of the funniest things I think I've ever heard in my life.
	Most people have to buck it up, get their ass out of bed and go to work.
	That's the thing, isn't it?
	It's the entitlement I'm so fucking entitled to you giving a shit about how I feel.
	I'm going to make up the most ridiculous thing in the world and you're still I'm.
	I'm still going to expect you to take it seriously, right?
	I mean, there's, no, there's no insight in that.
	I mean she, she obviously has no idea of how she appears.
	Yeah no self-awareness, that's another social justice trait.
	But you know narcissism comes into it because you know I've seen some unfortunately, videos that like say, Rebecca Watson has done and a lot of them are just her, just off the top of her head she did one video that was three minutes long.
	It was her changing a signal switch in her car and she was getting paid money for that.
	She actually, you know, figured this would be of interest to my subscribers.
	I Can hardly believe that people would think of that as interesting in any way.
	I mean, do you know what?
	She did recently.
	In fact, I've been planning to do a video on this.
	Recently, she did a video about an anti-vaxxer woman who was sent threats by people in the anti-vaxxer community to play the victim social justice style in the same classic Anita Sarkeesian style.
	In how she says, you know, oh, she was threatened at a talk she was going to give in Australia or something, and she pulled out of it.
	And instead of just, you know, instead of taking a word for it, it was a woman doing it.
	So instead of taking a word for it, like a good feminist, listening and believing, she instead, you know, went for the kill and was like, no, no, no, this was rubbish.
	Apparently, it turns out that it was some, or it might have been some other anti-vaxxer doing it with a false flag or something.
	Blah, blah, blah.
	And yet, I've got a video clip of this one.
	I've got a video clip of her saying literally almost exactly the same thing about Anita Sarkeesian, except she doesn't exactly know where it's come from.
	The threats, theoretically, quote-unquote, threats have come from.
	And so she's completely, oh, well, definitely, definitely misogynist gamers.
	Anita is such a brave woman.
	And it's just like, good God, it's exactly the same circumstance.
	It's just which, you know, Rebecca Watson likes games and she doesn't like anti-vaxxers.
	So guess, you know, guess which one she's on the side of.
	Yeah, well, you know, you think eventually people would catch on to this little page out of the playbook.
	But they never do.
	People just line up and saying, oh, poor you.
	It works.
	It absolutely works.
	You know, I think there is a certain sort of mass that this can get to.
	because I'm just going to look something up quickly.
	I mean, if you look at Rebecca Watson's channel, she has had a very...
	She's only 18,000 subscribers, which I don't like to talk numbers, really, because to me, they're generally quite...
	I don't like talking about the numbers.
	Yeah, whenever I know my subscribers to anything, it's accidentally.
	Yeah, I try to not look.
	And then people are like, oh, well done.
	You've hit this number.
	I'm like, oh, thanks.
	Thanks very much.
	But if you look at her subscriber, she's on 18,000.
	She's been on 18,000 for months.
	She grows very, very slowly.
	And I think it's because she's not really drawing people in.
	She's just got this echo chamber.
	She's got the people who she got in with the clique, and they're supporting her, so she will tell them what they want to hear.
	And it's just this little feedback.
	Speaking of pissing it away, I mean, Rebecca Watson is a study in missed opportunities.
	She came out of the JREF forum where she never really participated in the sections that actually dealt with skeptical topics.
	She dealt on the socializing sections of it, where she could play girl on the internet.
	And she actually achieved some prominence.
	She got identified as the skeptical chick.
	She had a gig on the skeptic's guide to the universe, but they recently got rid of her.
	And her entire career has been looking for that Reichstag fire that she can point to to get attention.
	And now she's just sort of dwindling away into nothing because she doesn't do anything.
	I can't think of a single video she does or a piece of she.
	In fact, she had a gig where she was getting paid for um, I forget what Maggie, it might have been Scientific American where she had like a guest column and all she had to do was do a weekly column or a bi-weekly column, and it wasn't that long and she missed her first couple of deadlines for doing it.
	I mean, she just couldn't rouse herself one.
	One column every two weeks, was it?
	Well that you just said it?
	Was it bi-weekly column?
	Well sorry two, was it twice a week?
	Was that sorry?
	No no, it was once, or once every two weeks.
	She missed her first one.
	Yeah yeah, I mean just the.
	These people have been given every opportunity of prominence and they can't do anything with it.
	I mean, Anita Sarkeesian, what has she done with it?
	Well, that's because she's fishing around for the next buck, but you know, there's just nothing comes of it.
	Yeah yeah absolutely, that's.
	That's um, that's the issue, isn't it, I mean?
	But the thing is, I think, because they're not actually creating anything, they're a form of parasitism.
	Yeah, I agree, I think they they, they are, they are parasitical on people's good will.
	That's, I think, ultimately it.
	They completely take advantage of the fact that most people want to do good things and so oh, we're social justice.
	Oh okay, tell me about just helping women, helping miners.
	Oh, my god, I want to do that.
	How are you going to do that?
	Well, I'm going to do that by completely taking advantage of you and completely, completely being an awful person, but I'm not going to tell you I'm being an awful person.
	I'm going to tell you lies, lies after lies after lies, because I have a narrative and it's just like you couldn't make it up.
	Well, they just, they distract from the subject at hand.
	Really, I mean, in the skeptical community there's, you know there's, you know, atheism it.
	It may or may not be fun, but there's probably some benefit in pointing out that.
	You know, so much effort has been put into getting on God's good side and building cathedrals and things like that.
	It would be interesting what would have happened historically if it was actually, you know, something done with an actual purpose.
	I mean, if you think about it, great cathedrals were built on the backs of their surrounding communities.
	It was a generational strain, because it often took generations to build these things.
	So there's that.
	But in the skeptical community one.
	It's fun, I mean, if you, if you're interested in Bigfoot on either side of the debate, at least you can get out there in the fresh air and look at some bearshit and argue over whether or not it's it's bigfoot.
	But these people have managed to just take away from the subject.
	I mean the people in the skeptical community that do this like supposedly Red Rebecca Watson.
	They don't actually do skepticism, they distract from the top.
	In fact, they deride actual inquiry into skeptical Things like cryptozoology as Bigfoot skepticism.
	And my question would be: well, what else are you doing?
	You know, I think that your point about how they managed to take the skepticism out of the skeptical community is it's incredible, actually, isn't it?
	I can't, how else could that have been done?
	You know, what other methods could they have?
	What other groups could possibly have gone into a community dedicated to skepticism and sucked the skepticism out?
	I mean, the subject of skepticism is fascinating enough.
	I mean, one of the things that always attracted me was the minutia of it.
	And if you study something like the Patterson Gimlin film, it's the famous film of Bigfoot striding across.
	I have.
	I have seen that, yes.
	And it was originally very jerky, but someone imaged stabilizing it.
	There is a lifetime of research you can do on that with photogametry, of figuring out how it was shot, who shot it, what their motivation was, whether it was a fat guy in a suit.
	It was a fat guy in a suit.
	Or with the Bermuda Triangle, you learn that really the basic, the modern myth of the Bermuda Triangle was the result of three guys incestuously feeding off each other.
	Vincent Gaddis, Charles Berlitz of Belitz language fame, and the writers of Argosy magazine.
	And every time they copied off each other, it got better in the retelling.
	But you can actually go back to original source documents, meteorology, and learn that when they say this ship disappeared in clear skies and it was a beautiful day, it was actually a storm and the ship was carrying like, you know, 20,000 tons of coal, you know, something like that.
	Yeah, suddenly an explanation comes to light.
	Well, one of the most fascinating things which arose out of von Daniken sort of stuff was there was once a claim that the Aztec masonry was so precisely fit together that you couldn't slip a piece of paper between it.
	Oh, that claims were made about the Egyptian pyramids.
	Yeah.
	Pretty much any pyramid you could do.
	But the explanation that they came up with was fascinating.
	What they did was they roughly fit the stones and they had two people on either side working them back and forth until they ground the stones into each other.
	And it would never occur to us because that was a shitload of work.
	You know, the point is, there's so many fascinating aspects of this that these people coming in and saying, well, skepticism is all very nice, but I think it's more interesting that we talk about misogyny.
	Well, that's it's you know, the one place I used to hang out on a lot of history message boards and stuff like that, and you did get this sort of ancient astronaut phenomenon where you would get someone who comes in and says, oh my god, the Egyptian pyramids were built by aliens.
	Look how perfect they are.
	And then you'd have to point out to them, look, right?
	Like, if you look at the 500 years preceding that, there are a bunch of other Egyptian pyramids leading up to it that are shit.
	There's like the leaning pyramid.
	Yeah, I think one collapsed.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And they're bulging in weird places because they were learning the craft, you know?
	And then when they'd learned the craft, they decided to build a fucking giant one.
	Obviously, the Pharaoh had a lot of resources, but it wasn't magical.
	And they had professional teams, and there was no Exodus.
	There were no Hebrews in Egypt, as far as anyone can tell.
	No, there were crews that competed against me.
	Exactly.
	They were professionals, you know.
	No wonder they built such magnificent pyramids.
	Do you think such great monuments would be built by slaves?
	You get what you pay for.
	Yeah.
	The world as it is is fascinating enough.
	I mean, that was always my criticism of when people would reach for supernatural explanations.
	I said, you know, you have to eliminate the natural explanations first.
	And the natural explanations are in and of themselves enough.
	They're fascinating.
	Yeah.
	One thing, like you said, people underestimate how much work people in the past were prepared to put in.
	Because they look at that themselves and think, oh, that's a lot of work.
	I wouldn't want to do that.
	Yeah.
	I mean, there's a learning experience in actually carrying out skepticism.
	I mean, to learn how people can lie to themselves and lie to other people or just get things wrong.
	And, you know, the idea of social justice warriors piggybacking on this is just ludicrous.
	Yep, it absolutely is.
	Right, okay, it's kind of half twelve here, so I think I'm probably going to have to call it a night, which is a shame because I've really, really enjoyed the discussion.
	And I really appreciate you coming on.
	I think a lot of people have been waiting for me to have you on, given the 1,400 people watching.
	So honestly, thank you so much.
	And at some point in the future, if you don't mind, I'll...
	Sorry?
	1,404.
	Oh, 16.
	Oh, okay.
	Maybe if we keep going, we'll get...
	Oh, no, we don't work on that, how many hits we get.
	No, we don't.
	No, I think it should be.
	I'll come back to our arguments.
	You had the one time, didn't you?
	Thunderfoot and Justicar on?
	No, that was Internet Aristocrats.
	Oh, that's right.
	But I would definitely like to have those on.
	I think we should get a roundtable going.
	I would love to do that.
	I absolutely would.
	Yeah, that would be interesting if we could get something.
	Do it more or less regular in response to some of this.
	To practice what we were talking about, which is getting the word out via YouTube.
	Honestly, I think that's a really good idea.
	Just to just keep growing the people on the rational side of this argument, the people who care about facts and reason.
	We have to network.
	And I think one of the great things that is happening here with you and me and Internet Aristocrat is sort of networking together the atheist and skeptical community with the gaming community.
	Since we had the influx of social justice warriors first, we can kind of give you a heads up.
	That's one of the reasons that Internet Aristocrat got Jessica and Thunderfart on his channel, and that's why I've got you on now.
	Just seriously.
	There is a lot of...
	They've been here and done this before, and they will go to other places and try it in other locations.
	So as much, you know, just I think networking is the best way to describe it because we really just need to talk to people who are going to experience social justice warriors.
	Great, it's decided, let's do more of that and really piss them off.
	Absolutely.
	Fuck these guys.
	Seriously, they're fucking awful people.
	Awful people.
	And they deserve everything they bloody get.
	That's the right note to end on.
	They're fucking horrible, awful people.
	There's no excuse for them.
	They're bad people.
	They do bad things and they should feel bad about themselves.
	They fucking should.
	Thanks very much, man.
	And thanks everyone for listening.
	Thanks for having me.
	Good night, everyone.

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