aven

aven, 3 months ago

@Moon @olmitch
>are they monitoring in minecraft?
Unironically yes. Microsoft went full 1984 with MC.

aven, 3 months ago

@ic3l9 @Moon @icedquinn @teratology
>just that people joining the outrage because they hate women was a key part of the dynamic

This. This exact reaction was the key part of the dynamic, that caused gamergate to explode. It wasn't the initial corruption. It was that when it was pointed out, this enormous coordinated simultaneous response from numerous outlets with the exact same message, slightly reworded, dropped all on the same day. It was later discovered that they did coordinate with secret email lists. And if you point it out, your post gets deleted.

This gaslight of "criticism of our corruption is invalid because you hate women and minorities", which grew to "gamers hate women and minorities and gamers don't need to be your audience." "gamers are over".

How dare they say the emperor has no clothes.
Now keep pre-ordering your AAA slop, and don't complain no matter how bad it is. The videogame industry is stronger than ever. If you don't agree then you're a white supremacist misogynist.

aven, 3 months ago

@icedquinn @Moon @ic3l9 @teratology I've never heard of most of that stuff, and I don't think there needs to be a government connection. I'd be somewhat surprised if there was one, other than something like it being a test to see how far people can be pushed.

>to just running denial and counter-accusation game
The culture and philosophy that they're coming from is similar though, and I've thought that the same dynamic that occurred in gamergate has repeated many times since then, without any explicit relation, in the Woke and ESG shit.

The very soviet "everything is perfect and we are perfect and never make any mistakes ever and you are the evil enemy and must be destroyed for even suggesting the notion that anything is wrong." It's like narcissistic abuser dynamic writ large. Any valid criticism, no matter how minor, is treated as "hate", especially shoehorned into an idpol "you just hate women and minorities" way.

And they take as many as will fall for it with them as they go over the cliff, like it's a giant ponzi scheme. FTX is a literal ponzi example of this, complete with "effective altruism".

The videogame industry is currently going over that cliff, and I'll be genuinely interested to see if Activision/Blizzard get bought by Tencent, because I do have a tinfoil hat theory that China is pushing woke in industry so that it can crash and be bought up cheaply by Tencent, who will then go anti-woke but pro-CCP-censorship with them, because Woke is the gift you give to an organization that you want to die.

aven, 3 months ago

@Moon @ic3l9 @icedquinn @teratology exactly. "gamers" as a group, in terms of group reputation, is no different than "anons".

aven, 3 months ago

@Moon @ic3l9 @icedquinn @teratology and those people speak for themselves, not for "gamers". I'm trying to say that real people with real jobs at real companies making real money with their actions, lying about groups of people, is not comparable to anons going on the internet and telling lies.

The journos desperately need those two things (professionals lying and anons lying) to be equally valued, to create a "well both sides did bad things so it cancels out". If those things aren't equivalent, then they're assholes.

aven, 3 months ago

@ic3l9 @Moon @icedquinn @teratology
lol just make sure no one does bad things on the internet while calling themselves a "gamer". It's not a novel concept. Nobody even tried.

If only those goobergrapes policed the entire internet and made sure every "gamer" behaved in a dignified manor. Why didn't they???

Why didn't "gamers" just trademark the term and sue anyone who abused it?

>is a billion times worse than
Yeah, I know they think "It's okay when we do it".

> in a hit piece meant to boost morale.
Really? Do you think the purpose of hit pieces is the "boost morale"? Tell me more.

You know you're being a disingenuous piece of shit.

aven, 5 months ago

@incognitum @icedquinn @olmitch socialist activists seem to pretend that abolishing capitalism means that corporations and industry would cease to exist, in a "food comes from a grocery store" mindset. In reality, it means that companies are nationalized and seized by the state (which communists call "the workers" or "the people") and become state-owned corporations.

State-owned corporations operate on a different set of incentives: money and growth of their corporation don't come from profit (revenue minus costs) or happy customers, it comes from The Party (bureaucrats with politically-correct opinions). Therefore state-owned corporations tend to be very inefficient, very polluting, miserable to work for, an miserable to buy from.

The post office is a good example, with the expression "going postal" coming from how happy their workers are with their jobs. In terms of customer satisfaction, I'd point to the VA (Veteran's Administration) as the state-owned corporation for single-payer public-option healthcare. Public school teacher low salaries, public school teacher child abuse (and inability to be fired for it).

Socialists seem to think that all industry and corporations should work that way, and point to the most regulated and government-controlled industries as examples of how capitalism is failing, demanding even more merger of state and corporate power as the solution. Socialism was never about ending corporations, it was always about making them too big to fail and then incorporating them into the government.

Full-blown communism is when you have to go to work and your shitty abusive job, and refusing to do so is unpatriotic and criminal. There is no unemployment or homelessness in communism because they're rounded up and put in sweatshops. If they refuse to work, they're imprisoned and enslaved and sent to more remote areas. Look up "Wrecking" in the USSR.

aven, 5 months ago

@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch I'm sure there was some of that because the CIA is evil and should be destroyed. But also communists lie and blame the CIA for literally everything. The USSR did the vast majority of it to itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(Soviet_Union)

aven, 5 months ago

@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch my point is that in socialism you cannot refuse to work, and you cannot strike for better working conditions. In socialism the worker has far less power and freedom, and the state will consider refusal to work as sabotage or disability like Sluggish Schizophrenia, which the USSR used to put political dissidents into asylums.

The more socialist activists "win", the less power they have and more more miserable they become. Socialist activist "helping" is Munchhausen Syndrome By Proxy against workers, making workers weaker under the government than they were under private industry. See unions for which it is illegal to strike.

aven, 5 months ago

@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch that's just small communes and private business. That does work, but it's not socialism. It's actually capitalism. The people involved own the means of production on a private basis. Even if shared, it's still private for the group, and is therefore a corporation.

Socialism is necessarily government and large-scale centralization of power. Also

"The purpose of socialism is communism" - Lenin

aven, 5 months ago

@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch
>capitalism tends to have everything owned by a financial caste
That's kind of a strawman, because one could say that The Party is the "financial caste" in socialism. People with big money exist regardless of the system, and I'd argue that socialism is even better for big money people because then they control everything, not just capital. The definitions I'm working with are "capitalism is private ownership of capital and free markets" and "socialism is public (government) ownership of capital and regulated markets"

>worker co-ops are actually owned by the citizenry
So are publicly-traded megacorporations. The difference is size and whether the owners also work there or not. Private companies and small business are not "functional socialism", they're actually more capitalist than megacorporations. Small business owners or worker co-op workers are the most capitalist, because they own the capital at their organization.

A socialist hackerspace or worker co-op would look like lobbying the city or the federal government for a taxpayer-funded grant to create a makerspace or co-op, where the money for it has little to do with how well it is run or what it makes or if the workers are happy.

aven, 5 months ago

@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch which is why socialist activists most hate small business owners, never turn their organizations into co-ops, and gleefully shut down small businesses during lockdowns in favor of "essential businesses" like Walmart and Amazon. It's why they hate indie game devs and prefer AAA, "because AAA can pay workers a steady salary, whereas indie is cruel to the worker who might work for the equivalent of less than minimum wage if their game does poorly".

They always seem to have some reason to prefer the big player over the small player. Then things get worse as the big player gets complacent due to lack of competitive market.
Then they demand government step in, and big player becomes "too big to fail".
Then things get worse, as there is no alternative, no free market.
The more they "win", the worse things are for them (and everyone else).

aven, 5 months ago

@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch
>i suspect the government has no socialists
No one at the government wants the government to own the means of production?

aven, 5 months ago

@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch don't fall for the Pavlovian word-association thing of "Socialism = things working well, Capitalism = things sucking, Socialist = Good honest person, Capitalist = Sociopath", because that shit is what actual sociopaths use "to con everyone in to obeying them".