Cathy Young · @CathyYoung63
6th Sep 2015 from TwitLonger
More on #GamerGate, allies, and winning
Okay, I really do have deadlines as I said, but I do want to post a quick response to Mytheos Holt, whose writings I love and whom I've found to be a lovely gentleman when we met. :-) I'm not going to respond to every single point, but here are some of the major ones.
1. On the big issue of playing to win, making compromises, and tolerating unsavory allies: Mytheos quotes Winston Churchill's comment about allying himself with the devil if it was necessary to beat Hitler. It's a good line, but we forget that it wasn't just a metaphor. Sir Winston did ally himself with an almost literal devil: "Uncle Joe" Stalin. The result is that while the West did beat Hitler, it condoned and enabled some pretty monstrous evils whose repercussions are with us to this day -- among them the Communist enslavement of Eastern Europe and Soviet possession of nuclear weapons (as well as more concrete crimes such as the forcible repatriation of Soviet POWs who ended up in the gulag and the Soviet army's massive rape spree in Germany). Was the alliance with Stalin still necessary to beat Hitler? Probably. But the price was horrific, and we should keep that in mind when we consider tactical alliances with bad guys.
The war with Hitler was a very, very extreme situation that should be used very sparingly as a parallel. And to the extent that it's a parallel, it should give us pause. What allies are we willing to accept and at what price? If defeating the SocJus authoritarians means creating a cultural climate in which *real* racial/ethnic/religious bigotry, misogyny and homophobia (not the nonsense definitions used by SJWs) are socially acceptable, is that the kind of victory any of us want?
2. Mytheos seems to reduce everything to two warring camps: the SJWs vs. anti-SJW culture warriors who are strategically positioned on the right. But the fact is that, as I mentioned in my piece, there are a lot of liberals, moderates, conservatives and even pro-freedom leftists (e.g. Freddie de Boer) who don't fall into either camp, and who are alienated by Breitbart-type tactics but sympathetic to many cultural libertarian goals. I know someone who strongly supports Black Lives Matter but is also passionately opposed to campus speech and sex codes and to cultural authoritarianism in general.
If the campus crusade to police sex under the guise of combating rape ultimately fails, it's because it's being rejected by numerous liberal professors and by liberal journalists and commentators such as Emily Yoffe, Judith Shulevitz, and Jonathan Chait. This is not to diminish the role of the conservative and libertarian media (Reason, National Review, The Washington Examiner and The Daily Caller have provided crucial coverage of these issues and kept them visible). But if the conservative and right-wing media are the *only* ones championing a cause, it's basically doomed. (Case in point: opposition to same-sex marriage.)
Likewise, a lot of moderates and liberals are speaking up against speech policing. The Atlantic, a mainstream liberal magazine that has been tilting dangerous SocJus in recent years, just ran two spectacular major stories on the campus trend of protecting students from "harmful" and "hurtful" speech (one by Caitlin Flanagan, one by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff).
You want to see a group that has been highly successful in resisting the SocJus cult? Look at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), which has been scrupulously nonpartisan and committed to applying its principles across the board. It will defend your freedom of speech on campus whether you're a conservative white guy in hot water for making an insensitive joke about feminists or a radical black woman in hot water for making an insensitive joke about cop-killers.
3. Speaking of the Atlantic articles: I really don't buy this apocalyptic view that we're all about to be crushed under the SocJus totalitarian boot and have to recruit help from any quarter to avert disaster. I think things are turning around. We're seeing more and more people speak up against SocJus zealotry. I wouldn't say that the cultural libertarians are winning yet, but I think we're making major headway.
4. Finally, on the subject of Margaret Foy. Sorry, but I think Mytheos Holt is making a lot of assumptions, starting with the assumption that she's a hardcore SJW who is therefore humorless and couldn't have been joking. Actually, her Facebook posts make it pretty evident that she's prone to snarky humor; it's pretty clear that she didn't mean it literally when she said people were "rioting" over her tweet, or when she offered people a T-shirt with her picture on it now that she was Twitter-famous. I don't have the time to reread the Jesse Singal piece right now, but I'm pretty sure she did say that she was using humor to make a point about people jumping to the conclusion that black victims of police shootings must have done something wrong. Was it a dumb, reckless and inappropriate thing to say? Yes. Was she actually saying that the cop deserved to die? No, I don't think she was.
Also, once again, she was not an activist, not even on Twitter. Her tweet was a non-story. I have no problem with "hit pieces" on people who have placed themselves in the public eye, as long as these hit pieces are factually accurate. I do have a problem with targeting a college student with an obscure Twitter account and using speculation and guilt by association to justify that targeting.
Does this mean I'm urging #GamerGate to make a collective statement of outrage repudiating Breitbart? Hell no. But if some people within GG want to criticize Breitbart over this, they're within their right to do so. Diversity of opinion is strength.
Does such criticism undercut Milo's reporting on GG and anti-GG? Nope. Most mainstream liberals couldn't possibly despise Breitbart more than they already do, and criticism from within GG won't affect their opinion one way or the other. I actually think GG has a better shot at persuading liberals to take the upcoming report on Butts seriously if you can say: Look, a lot of us are willing to criticize Breitbart when they do bad journalism. But this is good, well-sourced journalism that is relevant, so please take it seriously.
OK, I have the feeling I crossed the line into TL;DR a while back so I'll stop here and get back to actual work. Thanks for listening, everyone.