While over on Reddit the regulars are highly offended that anyone would point out the striking similarities between their ideas and the crackpot “men’s oppression is worse than slavery” rants of War Machine, the mixed martial arts fighter and accused woman-beater is getting support from one prominent Indian MRA, Rajesh Kumar, known on Twitter as @MensMrm:

Every many will realize it- sooner than later- MMA Fighter : Men’s Oppression Is ‘Worse Than Slavery’
addictinginfo.org/2014/08/20/mma…—
Mens Rights Movement (@MensMrm) August 23, 2014

Kumar’s Twitter account, with roughly 1600 followers including numerous well-known names in the MRM, looks to be the official account for the Men’s Rights Movement group on Facebook, a public group that boasts some 14,000 members, among them AVFM’s Paul Elam and British MRA/child prostitution apologist Tom Martin.

The link in his tweet is to a story that details the charges against War Machine, as well as his hyperbolic MRA-eqsue views, so there’s no question that Kumar knows just who he’s endorsing here.

I don’t usually post raw videos from the insufferable assholes I write about on this site because, well, they’re insufferable assholes, and listening to them smugly opine about shit they’re completely ignorant about is generally about as entertaining as, you know, GirlWritesWhat videos. (I know, that’s a bit circular, but I really couldn’t come up with anything more insufferable than that.)

Anyhoo, I’ve broken my rule and posted this video because the two guys who made this video — the would-be filmmaking duo of jordanowen42 and Davis Aurini — are so over-the-top in their insufferable assholism that it’s actually kind of perversely charming.

You see, these two woman-hating YouTube blabbers — the first a belligerent doofus whose apartment is nearly as unkempt as mine, the other a sort of PUA version of Anton LaVey — are pitching what they claim will be an important new documentary exposing the evil “Social Justice Warrior” agenda of evil women and traitor men like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and, well, I can’t remember the names of any of the men. It’s called The Sarkeesian Effect. And they want your money to fund it.

Their promised “feature-length documentary” will be a powerful work of investigative journalism that will give a voice to the voiceless — to the “silent majority” of, well, angry white dudes who spend whatever time they don’t spend playing video games posting obnoxious and abusive comments about Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn to YouTube and Reddit and eleven zillion other websites that cater to them.

In other words, this is the loudest “silent majority” I’ve ever run across.

But these are guys who love to pretend that their bold thoughts are being silenced, and PUA Anton LaVey Davis Aurini happily panders to their persecution complex:

Don’t let these people silence us. Your contribution will be a defiant strike against the degeneration and corruption that is going on in this world.

The word “degeneration” helps remind us that Aurini considers himself a part of the neo-Nazi-lite “Dark Enlightenment.”

Anyway, they argue that you should send them lots of money, because PUA Anton LaVey’s suits can’t be cheap you’ll be striking a blow for every dude who’s ever called Anita Sarkeesian a “whore” in a YouTube comment. Well, they don’t literally put it that way, but, you know, come on. That’s what they mean.

And hey, who wouldn’t trust this dude with their hard-earned cash?

Send me your money! Heh heh heh heh heh.

I found this video hilarious from start to finish. Stick with it at least until, a little after 6 minutes in, PUA Anton LaVey Aurini lights up his second cigarette, showing what a devil-may-care attitude he has by mumbling his lines with a cigarette in his mouth as he fiddles with his lighter.

Yep, that’s the kind of quality investigative  journalism you can expect from these two.

The price of ladies is plummeting!

Some thoughts on the economics of sex from the fellas over at MGTOWHQ.com.

It’s not looking good for the ladies, at least according to the guys who’ve decided they’re totally over women, honest, but who somehow can’t stop talking about how totally over women they are, honest.

A fellow called TheShaman offers some thoughts on the complete worthlessness of women after they hit the proverbial “wall” somewhere shy of age 40 and are suddenly transformed from swans back into ugly ducklings. He starts off with an idea cribbed directly from good old Warren Farrell before moving on to more advanced Cock Carousel Theory (CCT):

A woman, traditionally, would have used her youth and beauty as a down-payment to a man, to secure his loyalty so that he would stay with her for what could be as long as 50 years of Post-Wall woman.

Nowadays women squander their SMV wealth on bad boys, giving away all their value to Alpha Fucks, and then expect that Beta’s to provide the bucks to settle their massive debts. Especially women in the West- all of the sweetness once expected from women is gone- no ability to cook, no desire to please, no willingness to make a man’s life better. These cock carousel riders only feel like settling down and getting married when they have maybe 1-3 years of decent youth left to her.

A woman truly only has, maybe, 20 good years to her. Afterward, she becomes an aging monster, increasingly bitter over the fact that her best years are behind her.

Women- NEVER BUY.

Not all of the assembled MGTOWers are willing to agree with TheShaman’s radical proposition – that is, that women ever have any value.

As Hank Moody sees it, women are worthless long before they hit the wall:

The economic of Sex for women is at 0%. Its over for cunts, the cat is out of the bag. No sane man will pay for some used slut.

Wallkeeper, meanwhile, reminds the fellas that they’re the real prize. Hooray for fellas!

men must realize that we’re the prize, women are just a sexual fantasy, an accessory, a luxury.
a man can live without sex and without women, a woman cannot live without men.

In return for these valuable insights, I would like to offer all Men Going Their Own Way some concrete suggestions on where exactly they might go. How about one of these lovely islands, all conveniently devoid of women and other humans?

Damn those uppity women.

It’s rare that they come out and say it this explicitly, but here’s Heartiste, arguing that unless society treats women badly they won’t give him a boner. In a brief post about “Dread Game” — his term for manipulatively gaslighting women to prey on their insecurities — he offers up this bit of shitbag philosophy:

Dread game on a societal scale keeps women in line, always working hard to please men lest they be cast to the icy wastelands with the rest of the anti-feminine rejects. The opposite of Dread Game — Coddle Game — relaxes selective pressures on women to stay feminine and thin and agreeable. And so what you see now in the decadent, coddling West is what we get: Ballbusting fat feminist cunts and careerist androgynes.

So brave, Heartiste, so brave.

Safe space! No girls allowed!

Though Men’s Rights activists devote an enormous amount of their time denouncing feminism – or at least the imaginary version of feminism that exists only in their own heads – they’re happy to appropriate feminist concepts when it suits them. One that many MRAs seem especially eager to claim for themselves is the idea of the “safe space.”

Of course, their version of the “safe space” bears only a slight resemblance to the feminist original. Feminists seek to create spaces for discussion in which say, rape survivors can discuss their experiences without being triggered by insensitive arguers and trolls and mansplainers in general.

When MRAs talk about “safe spaces,” by contrast, their goal is often to exclude women not just from discussion spaces but from full participation in society, essentially declaring giant arenas of work and play, from STEM fields to video games, to be places where feminists, and women in general, should fear to tread.

And so it’s hardly surprising that more than a few MRAs are arguing that the Zoe Quinn “scandal” proves that women and gaming don’t mix – or, at least, that they shouldn’t.

Consider the little manifesto recently “pinned” as the top post on the Men’s Rights subreddit, in which a fellow calling himself mradiscus lamented what he called “a pattern of female feminists migrating to formerly male spaces, demanding to be accommodated and eventually causing conflict and alienation.”

The “male spaces” he has in mind – the “hacking scene,” atheism, and the video game industry – won’t come as a shock to anyone familiar with the current state of nerdboy rage, but might trouble anyone who thinks that women are, you know, equal to men and have the same rights to choose their own careers and have their own interests and beliefs.

Not only that, but there is just a teensy bit of irony in that the way that MRAs and others are trying to drive off the feminist, er, invaders is by harassing them. That is, MRAs are appropriating the concept of “safe spaces” — designed to protect those in them from harassment and abuse — and using it as an excuse for … harassment and abuse.

But let’s step back a bit, because we still don’t have an answer as to why any of these “spaces” should be defined as male in the first place. How is atheism – the lack of a belief in god or gods – only a dude thing? When did guys get the right to call dibs on the gaming business?

Well, as mradiscus sees it, these “spaces” have traditionally been essentially nerdboy preserves, and should be protected from the pernicious influence of “female feminists” who, presumably, have no real interest in hacking or gaming or skepticism and whose real goal is just to make life hard for already beleaguered nerd dudes:

A scene predominantly populated by rather introverted young males becomes popular and attracts, among others, young women with a feminist mindset. Some of these women then go on and demand to be accommodated. Their demands are mostly met, and so we see the emergence of “gender awareness teams” at hacking conferences, no-means-no campaigns at anime conventions and a whole lot of conference panel slots devoted to “feminist this” and “gender that”.

Mradiscus then offers what I can only call a “revisionist” history of the harassment of feminist women from Rebecca Watson to Zoe Quinn:

What we also see is a whole lot of scandals. What seems to spark them most of the time is a overreaction to a minor offense, blown way out of proportion by a semi-popular feminist and her fan base who then proceed to launch an attack on the whole “misogynistic” scene. The young men feel cornered and unfairly attacked and retaliate with inappropriate and infelicitous measures which only leads to the feminists seeing their prejudices confirmed. Rape threat allegations are launched, there’s doxxing and name-calling all-around and new-found fame for a brave and courageous young feminist who may or may not proceed to make a career out of her struggle.

I should point out that none of the women who have allegedly “made … career[s] out of [their] struggles” actually asked to be harassed and demonized. If the harassers are angry that their harassment allowed Anita Sarkeesian to raise a lot more money than she asked for, they really have only themselves to blame.

Mradiscus ends with an ominous prediction-slash-threat that young men aren’t going to remain “patient” for much longer – and that things could get much worse for feminists venturing into these “male spaces.”

I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if the patience of these young nerdy men turns out to be a shallow well that’s drawing to a close. I sense quite a bit of alienation in the hacking and gaming sub-cultures when it comes to feminist topics. What do you think?

I think that you have a very strange notion of “patience.”

Naturally, MRAs being MRAs, mradiscus’ little manifesto – dripping with unexamined misogynistic assumptions and a quiet, curiously passive-aggressive rage – won praise and more than one hundred upvotes from the subreddit regulars.

The most extraordinary response to mradiscus’ rant was also the top-ranked comment, a long screed from a fellow calling himself a0i that argued, with complete seriousness (and occasional very confused references to the theories of Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci), that

The logic of how feminists target predominantly male spaces is very similar to the pattern of locust swarms.

Yep. Feminists are LOCUSTS.

Wherever there are men, there are targets for false accusations, male scapegoats, and fake victims. False accusations can’t happen without men, and neither can feminism. When there are too many women somewhere, you can’t claim that the environment is dominated by men, and feminists have nothing left to justify their presence. Feminists can’t thrive because they lack a scapegoat. They seek out a place where men are, and fabricate outrage at finding too many men in once place, at one time.

They have to find fresh environments with concentrations of male majorities, for “structures of misogyny” to pretend-struggle against. Thus, nerd culture being targeted, video games being targeted, Anita Sarkeesian making up being attacked, etc.

Yep, apparently all those hundreds of thousands of comments you might have seen attacking Sarkeesian all over the internet are nothing but a mirage.  That Flash game in which you could cover her face in bruises? You must have dreamed it.

It’s telling that a major feminist concern is for “women’s exclusive space”, while another feminist concern is for “women’s inclusion in male-dominated spaces”. They fight to get in, just to kick the men out. …

Feminists demand unlimited access for women, as proof of men’s commitment to equality, but demand limited access for men, to prove men’s concern for safety.

Wat? I’m pretty sure no feminists are talking about excluding men from video gaming.

This works, despite the irony that – if you believed in their equality, you wouldn’t make special accommodations for their safety.

Uh, no, because if one group faces systematic oppression because of prejudice, the only way to ensure an egalitarian society is by making “special accommodations for their safety.” That’s why we have hate crime laws.

In the case of gaming, and atheism and tech in general, the only “special accommodations” feminists have asked for have been, you know, protection from sexual harassment and assault. Protections that also apply to men.

If there is one principle to understand about the tactics used to engineer women’s privilege over men in society, it is this:

• “what you intend to do to an opponent, you must accuse them of doing to you” …

Frame your victim as your victimizer, put them in a position to want to prove themselves innocent. Frame your attacks as self-defense, frame your transgressions as righteous. Frame the enemy as using propaganda, make this part of your propaganda. Frame the enemy as a threat, before you launch your attack. Pretend to be a victim, while attacking the accused.

Apparently MRAs are utterly oblivious to irony.

Searching for your car: Not much like rape.

In the world of fantasy writer and all-around hateful shithead Vox Day, women who are raped when they’re too drunk to consent should just suck it up, because reporting their rapes would be akin to someone calling police when they can’t remember where they’ve parked their car.

In a blog post today, Vox approvingly quotes a retiring British judge under fire for telling a newspaper that “the rape conviction statistics will not improve until women stop getting so drunk.” (This is the same judge who recently gave a teacher convicted of possessing a massive library of child porn a suspended sentence, saying that she couldn’t “criticise you for being a teacher who’s attracted to children.”)

Vox offers his take:

Perhaps women would be slower to put themselves in positions where they can be raped with impunity if they understood that they will not be taken at their word simply because they cry rape. It’s ridiculous. Can you imagine any other purported crime being investigated, much less prosecuted, on similarly vague grounds?

He follows this with an imaginary conversation between a young woman and the police in which she reports that her car is stolen because she can’t remember where she parked it.

It’s not really quite as hilarious as Vox imagines it to be.

PRO TIP: One way you can tell that forgetting where you parked your car is not actually much like rape is that no one actually calls police when they forget where they parked their car, while people do indeed report rapes, despite knowing that they will be grilled and second-guessed and called a “slut” and possibly mocked on the internet by assholes like Vox Day.

In the comments, one fellow suggests that feminists should have their right to vote taken away from them:

Feminists love to conflate the difference between saying that a drunk woman’s testimony is insufficient to establish a conviction of rape in a he/she said situation and the mythical attitude “she’s drunk so she’s asking for it even if she’s passed out on the floor.” They don’t understand that this is primary evidence for the fact that feminists should never be allowed to vote, because they’re (deliberately) too stupid to grasp the fundamental principles of civil society, or that alcohol affects men’s inhibitions as well as women’s.

Vox and his readers do indeed live in a fantasy land.

UPDATE: It’s a Vox Day twofer today! On his other blog today, Vox quotes a Daily Mail story claiming that the horrifying sexual abuse of 1400 children in Rotherham, England went unchecked in part because (as a report on the disaster notes) some social workers felt “nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist.”

Ignoring the fact that this is the self-serving claim of people who knowingly allowed this abuse to persist, and ignoring all of the other factors that contributed to this horrendous failure, Vox concludes that

the material costs of anti-racism are CONSIDERABLY worse than the material costs of racism …

Anti-racists not only actively celebrate predatory relationships, they regularly demonstrate that they have no problem whatsoever with child abuse, whether it occurs within the same race or is interracial. Moreover, what they falsely decry as “racism” is quite often nothing more than the exercise of the Constitutional right of free association. …

If you think that you possess the higher moral ground because you are anti-racist, think again. You are observably enabling widespread crime, particularly rape and child abuse, and are quite literally doing material harm to your own nation.

Astounding. Appalling. And just plain ridiculous.

I don’t even … what?

I don’t usually bother to read the comments on Chateau Heartiste; making it through Heartiste’s own florid yet turgid prose is exhausting enough. But after skimming a recent post of his on the increasing historical fatness of British women, I happened to glance down at the comments, only to see a discussion of the comparative anatomy of female humans and deer that was so odd and creepy I felt obligated to bring it to you all.

Brace yourself, because the following might just ruin your breakfast:

Ewwwwww.

I’m pretty sure that guy’s hunting license should be taken away from him. And if there were sex licenses for human beings, well, all three of these guys should lose those as well.

Anita Sarkeesian, still standing

On Monday, Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest installment of her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series on YouTube, a half-hour examination of the ways in which video game makers use sexualized violence against women as a cheap way to spice up their narratives and appeal to straight male gamers.

Her tone was measured, her analysis clear and logical and supported by dozens of clips from a wide assortment of games.

Late Tuesday night, this happened:

Some very scary threats have just been made against me and my family. Contacting authorities now.—
Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) August 27, 2014

I’m safe. Authorities have been notified. Staying with friends tonight. I’m not giving up. But this harassment of women in tech must stop!—
Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) August 27, 2014

That’s right: Sarkeesian was forced to leave her home due to violent threats against her and her family … because she made a YouTube video analyzing violence against women in video games.

She then posted some of the threats she had gotten from a Twitter account set up specifically to harass and threaten her and her family. [TRIGGER WARNING for graphic rape and death threats.]

I usually don’t share the really scary stuff. But it’s important for folks to know how bad it gets [TRIGGER WARNING] http://t.co/u6b3i0fysI—
Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) August 27, 2014

For a larger version of the screenshot, see here.

Sarkeesian has also been tweeting some of the other threats she gets on a daily basis from anonymous gamers who are incensed that a woman has anything critical to say about their precious video games.

It’s especially amusing that this misogyny laced email is unironically signed “See you soon m'lady. *tips fedora*” http://t.co/rLk3CvoxXV—
Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) July 15, 2014

https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/504437681527353344/photo/1

I get so many emails like this I could publish a coffee table book full of them. http://t.co/qMoYOtV9tT—
Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) July 15, 2014

Unfortunately, this is an all too typical twitter response to my observations about video games. #E32014 http://t.co/aWmwtQZLnm—
Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) June 09, 2014

You’ll notice that several of these threatening comments mention videos by Thunderf00t, a “skeptic” videoblogger best known, at least in the corner of the internet I write about, for a series of videos in which he viciously attacks some of the women who’ve drawn the most internet hate from angry misogynists – from skeptics like Rebecca Watson and Melody Hensley to video game maker Zoe Quinn and video game critic Sarkeesian.

Thunderf00t’s attacks have won him kudos from assorted Men’s Rights activists, from the regulars on the Men’s Rights subreddit to A Voice for Men “operations manager” Dean Esmay, who has praised his videos and urged other MRAs to subscribe to them.

In other words, the harassment of feminist women on the internet is directly linked to antifeminist propagandists like Thunderf00t – and his MRA fans and enablers.

The constant, vicious, personal attacks on Sarkeesian you see not only in video game circles but from Men’s Rights Activists – on Reddit, on A Voice for Men, on YouTube, and so on – have helped to create a hostile environment in which critiques of sexism in games result in real-world death and rape threats against women. This has an undeniably chilling effect on the free speech of women. That in fact is the intent of the harassers.

Margaret Atwood once famously observed that

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

I think we need an internet corollary to Atwood’s observation:

Men posting on the internet are afraid that women will block them. Women are afraid that men will treat them like Anita Sarkeesian.

Thing is, Sarkeesian keeps moving forward, diligently researching and putting forth the videos she promised she would. All the huffing and puffing of her critics and attackers hasn’t shut her up. Each new video she puts out is a testament to her courage and her perseverance. Each new video is a blow against those who would shut women up. Each new video helps to inspire others who’ve gotten similar threats to continue speaking up and speaking out.

Supporting Sarkeesian helps to support every woman who wants to be able to speak out online without fear of violent threats. There’s no better proof of this than how angry the biggest misogynistic bullies get whenever feminists and other people of good conscience rally around her. The bullies are still angry about the money she raised via kickstarter, money that has enabled her to bring a new professionalism to her videos.

Hell, AVFM Bully-in-chief Paul Elam is still so angry about this that he’s already accusing her of “damseling for dollars,” collecting “gash-cash” because of these latest Twitter threats. Indeed, in a post that’s a lot more revealing than he intends it to be, he complains bitterly that she’s getting bigger donations than he is:

I am jealous. I have had half the major media in a couple of countries disingenuously and maliciously demonize me. Even after forcing some retractions I bet I got more threats than Sarkeesian.

My reward? Jack shit.

Maybe it was because I didn’t swoon hard enough or treat the threats like they were tickets to Disneyworld.

Oh, don’t be modest, Paul. You take in tens of thousands every year by pretending to be some sort of human rights generalissimo. You raked in $35,000 this summer by trumpeting “threats” that you were saying privately were phony.

While Elam “damsels” and fumes, Sarkeesian simply goes about doing the job she set out to do. Each video she puts out is yet another “fuck you” to her haters, and they know it.

U mad bros?

Here’s the video that caused all the stir. It’s well worth watching. CONTENT WARNING: Graphic violence against women.

The REAL thousand-cock stare

One of the odder folk beliefs of the pickup artist subculture is that women become worn down and used up and even a bit addled if they have sex with too many men. Men, by contrast, are said to be able to handle an equal number of female lovers with grace and aplomb.

In a recent post, our old friend Heartiste offers what he sees as decisive photographic evidence illustrating the different effects of promiscuity on men and women. One bit of this evidence: a picture of a young woman used to advertise some sort of singles event. Reflections from the photographer’s lights obscure her pupils, an offputting effect that gives her a slightly deranged look.

Heartiste, apparently not curious enough to wonder why the woman seems to have no pupils, sees this as clear photographic evidence of the tell-tale “thousand cock stare” that he believes women develop after exposure to more than the lifetime recommended allotment of penises.

To underscore his claim that promiscuous men are “more emotionally stable and contented” than their female counterparts, Heartiste offers this photographic evidence:

I think we can all see the problem here. Aside from the fact that a single photograph of someone smiling offers no real clue to that person’s relative stability or degree of happiness with their life – there are plenty of people who can put a good face on all sorts of troubles – this is not actually a picture of a promiscuous man.

It’s a picture of actor John Hamm playing the character of Don Draper, a promiscuous ad exec on Mad Men, in full costume and makeup and doing his best to act the part of a contented man.

As regular viewers of the show are well aware, Don Draper is not always so contented. Indeed, the character is a near-constant drinker with a troubled past who ruins two marriages through his compulsive womanizing.

Here are pictures of Don Draper in some less-happy moments.

Can we conclude therefore that excess promiscuity will turn smiling, confident men into puking emotional wrecks? Well, no, because, again, Draper is a CHARACTER, not a person. He’s NOT REAL.

But don’t try telling Heartiste that, because he seems to prefer to live in an imaginary world.

A man can sample the slits and furrows of outrageous fortune and survive the whirlwind of passion to mark a day in the future when he contentedly and without pathological second-guessing slips into a stabler, longer term commitment.

Women who have sampled a poo poo platter of penes accumulate emotional scars that never heal; promiscuous women have a mental storage closet filled with five minute montages of alpha male love, and these exciting, prurient memories rob the female id of something important. Call it purity or innocence or self-worth or ability to appreciate romantic idealism, the slut with ass chafing from riding the cock carousel is never the same as she was before she let herself get pummeled by dick.

Uh, just so you know, Heartiste, the Chinese menu item you evidently have in mind is actually called a Pu Pu Platter. A Poo Poo Platter is something, well, a bit different.

Then again, I suspect that most of those women who’ve “sampled” Heartiste’s alleged charms would have, in hindsight, rather spent the evening cleaning shit out of a toilet tank.

Marlene Dietrich is not impressed

Over in the Men’s Right’s subreddit, one new Social Injustice Warrior is weary, worn down by fighting the Bad Fight against the “Sarkeesian feminists” on Twitter. And what better way to convey one’s weariness than with a melodramatic monologue?

So he posted this:

In the AgainstMensRights subreddit, one of the regulars felt that Maring_’s  existential lament was good enough to deserve a dramatic reading. Two AMRistas responded to the challenge. Here’s one of their readings, complete with swelling music at the end:

Stirring indeed!

I went back over Maring_’s Reddit history to see what kind of heroic work he has been doing to fight the Sarkeesian feminists of the world. I would report on some of that, but I found his insights into sexuality to be far more interesting.

For example, he shared these thoughts about his sexual prowess with the regulars in r/celebs:

And these thoughts about his multicultural sexual preferences:

As well as these observations about the redoubtable Marlene Dietrich:

Meanwhile, in a thread in r/movies on the death of Richard Attenborough, he left these kind words:

Rest up, weary Redditor! It can be difficult to bring so much ruckus to the world.

A scene from my inbox

So how much do some angry gamebros hate Anita Sarkeesian? Enough to send me death threats … for writing about the death threats sent to Anita Sarkeesian.

Shortly after my post on the threats against Sarkeesian went up on Thursday, I got these messages sent to me as anonymous “asks” on Tumblr. These were all in succession, in this order; I’m pasting each one individually instead of the whole bunch at once so you can read them in the order in which I got them. [TRIGGER WARNING: Violent threats; I'm putting them past the jump.]

.

.

.

.

There is a certain irony in that last comment, whether or not it came from the guy (and I’m pretty damn sure it was a guy) who sent all the threats that immediately preceded it. It’s pretty clear to me that Sarkeesian has no need to fake anything; obviously her haters aren’t exactly shy about sending death threats to people they don’t like.

And if this is what my inbox looks like for merely writing about Sarkeesian, I can only imagine what her inbox looks like. I suspect she gets threats like these all the time; the reason she called the police about several of the threats she got this week is that the threateners posted her personal information as well.

In the interest of full disclosure: Here and here are screenshots of these messages as they appeared in my Tumblr inbox; I’ve blurred out the personal information of the people sending me cat pics.

Needless to say, I’ve turned off anonymous asks on my Tumblr blogs.

The saga of that still-just-hypothetical “documentary” about Anita Sarkeesian and other evil Social Justice Warriors just got a little stranger.

The dogmatic duo behind the project — lady hating YouTube blabbers jordanowen42 and Davis Aurini — are still having a bit of trouble raising the necessary funds (so much so that Aurini wrote an angry, rambling blog post aimed at those who think he and his pal are too inept and biased to make a decent film).

But a new video  — put together by Kav P and a friend, and posted above  — reveals that the dogmatic duo has found some surprising new allies.

Enjoy!

4Chan rallies the troops

Over on 4chan, angry gamebros are organizing a vast wave of Twitter, er, ” activism” to SAVE VIDYA GAMES from the evil fake gamer girls and their Social Justice Warrior allies.

According to one anon, who’s been posting this message into numerous threads, the best way to fight “journalistic corruption” in the gaming world is to … set up fraudulent sockpuppet accounts on Twitter to make it look like there’s a groundswell of opposition to the evil game ladies.

If that’s a bit hard to read, here’s the text, with some bolding for emphasis added by me. The bits at the end are my favorite.

We campaigned against journalistic corruption; we were told that gamers are dead. Both lawfag and marketingfag told you to flood the pax hashtags as it would get the attention of their advertisers. You now have the opportunity to save vidya and get the average person on your side.

Why are you not doing shit /v/? GET OUT THERE AND FLOOD THE HASHTAGS. Here is a quick guide:
>1) Make a gmail throwaway if you don’t want it linked to your main email.
>2) Make a testing tweet and choose an appealing description of your account.
>3) Make a few tweets proclaiming your newness.
>4) Make a few tweets about #GamerGate.
>5) Increase your visibility by following people — search the #GamerGate tag and follow people you like. Remember, you’re legit new, so at least some should follow you back.
>6) FOLLOW THE PEOPLE WHO ARE FOLLOWING THESE PEOPLE. Chances are some of these are your fellow anons, so with luck we can increase our follow counts.
>7) Continue tweeting about the cause with the pax hashtags (#PAX #PAXPrime) with the #GamerGate tag.
>8) Seach the hashtag, favorite and retweet supporting tweets. That’s the star icon. Get your anons to the top.
>9) If you get stuck with zero followers. Reply to someone, chime in that you agree with them. But don’t argue on this step. Let them do that if they want to do that.
>If you are confronted, remain calm, don’t lose your spaghetti, and be the better person. Explain that this is not about girls being victimized, it is about the vilification of gamers and jounalistic integrity in the media.
>For extra class, present yourselves as normal people who sjws by their own standards should sympathize with, like an indian cab driver who can’t read traffic signs. (this requires extensive shitposting experience.)

So what’s got these dudes so enraged today? Aside from, you know, their normal misogynstic manbaby rage, there’s been a FLOOD of articles on gamer sites and mainstream media outlets alike arguing that “gamers” — as they’ve traditionally defined themselves — are about to take a plunge into the dustbin of history, and that if the game industry is to survive it needs to free itself from the clutches of the angry young dudes currently yelling at the top of their lungs against Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian.

Here are some of the articles that have really pissed them off:

‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over, by Leigh Alexander at Gamasutra

The End of Gamers, by Dan Golding, on his own blog

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: Why Are Gamers So Angry? by Arthur Chu at The Daily Beast

The death of the “gamers” and the women who “killed” them by Casey Johnson at Ars Technica

A Guide to Ending “Gamers” by Devin Wilson at Gamasutra

This guy’s embarassing relationship drama is killing the ‘gamer’ identity by Mike Pearl at Vice

If you only read one of these, make it that first one by Leigh Alexander, which is awesomely blunt.

Scumbag Reddit strikes again.

If you’re a straight guy looking for “fapping” material, the internet is your friend. It’s awash in freely available pictures of naked women of every size, shape, color, age, or hairstyle you prefer. And if you want more than pictures, the internet is happy to oblige, offering up videos featuring women of every description engaging in every sex act you can imagine, and then some.

You might think this would be enough.

But for some straight dudes, it evidently isn’t. They don’t just want to look at the mind-bogglingly enormous selection of women out there who have agreed to pose naked, or even perform explicit sex acts, on camera.

No, they also want to look at women who haven’t agreed to have their nude photos put on the internet. Hence the popularity of “ex-girlfriend” or “revenge porn” sites, filled with pictures that are (or at least purport to be) of ex-girlfriends who never wanted the pictures they shared with their then-boyfriends posted for the world to see.

Hence the popularity of “leaked” celebrity nudes.

The latest celebrity nudes scandal revolves around a gigantic collection of personal pictures stolen from the supposedly secure online accounts of an assortment of female celebs (and a couple of guys).

The most famous of the celebs in this current batch are Jennifer Lawrence – Jlaw – and Kate Upton; there are many others, including alleged pics of comedian Aubrey Plaza and gymnast McKayla Maroney, which internet “detectives” are scurrying to prove are real. Maroney is only 18; if the alleged pics of her are real, and weren’t taken very recently, they’re arguably child porn.

The pics were first released by an anon on internet cesspool 4chan, and they have found a welcome home on the slightly more respectable internet cesspool Reddit, where they have been posted and reposted, sometimes retouched and color-corrected, and celebrated with enthusiasm by hundreds of thousands of Redditors.

Indeed, the leaks have inspired a new subreddit, TheFappening, which has managed to gain 100,000 subscribers in a day. Evidently Reddit’s admins have no problem with a subreddit distributing stolen celebrity pics, including some that may well be child porn.

Naturally, Reddit being Reddit, some of new members of TheFappening are trying to distract from their odiousness by suggesting that those downloading Jlaw’s stolen pics also … donate to a charity fighting prostate cancer. Either that or start up their own prostate cancer fund – to make sure they get credit for their donations.

Sorry, guys, that doesn’t make what you’ve done ok. And if you’re truly concerned about prostate cancer, why on earth did you wait until you needed some good PR to launch a fundraising effort?

Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, one concerned fellow attempts to stand up for the hidden victims in the scandal: men. No, really.

Even some of the commenters feel obliged to point out that, er, the hacker almost certainly is a dude —  not just because the leak originated at 4chan, or because the overwhelming majority of the pics are of women, but also because, you know, women can’t STEM.

The strangest reaction to the scandal from an MRA that I’ve run across so far comes from the new Twitter account of A Voice for Men’s PR gal Janet Bloomfied (the one she created, in violation of Twitter’s rules, to get around her recent ban). After mocking celebs for taking private selfies or posing for their partners, Bloomfield posted a topless, headless picture of, presumably, herself, commenting “Is this me? Maybe. I text nothing I don’t want shared. #DontBeDumb.”

Apparently Bloomfield doesn’t quite understand the difference between posting nude photos of yourself and posting pictures of other people that have been obtained and posted without their consent. This isn’t particularly surprising, as MRAs in general seem to have trouble understanding the finer points (and the blindingly obvious points) of consent.

The enthusiasm with which so many male Redditors – and skeezy dudes in general – have greeted this latest leak of celebrity pics makes one wonder if it is not the celebrity of the women in question that is the draw but the lack of consent. After all, there are plenty of other celebrity nudes out there that the celebrities in question consented to have taken and published.

For a lot of those downloading and/or posting the pics of JLaw and Kate Upton and the rest, I suspect the real thrill comes not from seeing the nude bodies of these particular celebs – which, after all, are pretty similar to the nude bodies of porn actresses that can be found everywhere online – but from the violation of privacy that these pictures represent.

There is a real sadism here, driven in part, I suspect, by resentment that many female celebrities don’t agree to appear nude in their movies or to pose nude or topless for magazines. Sharing these stolen nudes is a way to punish JLaw and other female celebs who have so far refused to share every inch of their bodies with their male, er, fans.

It’s a toxic stew of entitlement, resentment, and misogyny. And no amount of donations to prostate cancer research will make up for it.

Hat of choice for the discerning Men’s Rights Activist

Men’s Rights Activists have become known, not without reason, as belligerent assholes whose main forms of “activism” consist of harassment and threats.

One bold Men’s Rights Redditor known as El Rellok thinks he’s come up with a way to counteract this perception and deliver a powerful men’s-rightsty message at the same time.

He wants MRAs to send feminists … pictures of bloody feathers. No, really.

Now, to most people, getting a bloody feather in your email inbox would seem to be the digital equivalent of having a bloody horse’s head left in your bed. But in El Rellok’s world it is a rational and reasonable way to express “outrage” at feminist evil, and anyone who might possibly think otherwise is by definition unreasonable.

Let’s let him explain, because I certainly can’t explain how sending pictures of bloody feathers to someone you hate could be construed as anything but threatening:

The idea that men are violent, rather then the primary victims of violence, is being used to discredit men’s issues.

Well, actually, what’s being used to discredit the so-called Men’s Rights Movement is the simple fact that its members don’t seem to know how to engage in any kind of “activism” besides harassing individual women.

It is glaringly obvious that we need a method of clearly expressing unbounded outrage that cannot be construed as a threat by any reasonable person.

I don’t know that expressing “unbounded outrage” is really the most important goal for any activist movement, but the part about saying things that aren’t threatening sounds good to me.

Gentlemen (and ladies) i propose The Red Feather Campaign.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, why a feather?

None here should be unfamiliar with the “white feather girls”.[1] , one of the most craven and deplorable pro war campaigns in human history.

In case you aren’t completely up-to-date with all Men;s Rights hobbyhorses, he’s referring to the Order of the White Feather. Founded in Britain at the start of World War I, this was a group of women that hoped to shame men into enlisting by presenting them with white feathers, a symbol of cowardice.

Though the White Feather campaign happened literally a hundred years ago, at a time when the general public in Britain and elsewhere was rabidly pro-war, and thought it hardly won universal support from the suffragettes of the day, MRAs like El Rellok have turned it into a symbol of the intrinsic evil that lurks in the hearts of feminists today.

The white feather campaign was about mens obligation to sacrifice to women, a socially imposed gender role. Feminists, while declaring their total reprobation for all gendered roles, continue to demand that men sacrifice for women by ceding anything described as privilege, regardless of whether the “Privilege” is earned, a “Privilege” at all, or whether a society without the thing described as a “Privilege” can be understood as just ….

Sorry, I nodded off in the middle of that. He finally gets to the point:

SO, I propose we return to them their feathers covered in the blood of the men mercilessly and ruinously sacrificed to their agenda.

Well, he doesn’t mean this literally – he means PICTURES of feathers that look like they’re covered in blood – but we’ll get to that in a minute.

We make this present with the following message.

“This blood is not your blood. To think it is, is a refraction only of your narcissism. This is the blood of men, sacrificed to females, by females, for generation upon generation. When you speak of sacrifice, before our eyes flash visions of bayonets, within our nostrils the waft of trenches, our ears recall the scream of artillery coming to shred our bodies. That is what sacrifice means to men; agony, suffering, death. This feather is a reminder of your inhumanity towards men, your lack of compassion and understanding, and your hypocrisy in declaring gender roles obsolete while commanding men to fulfill the most destructive of all gender roles, the gender who gets sacrificed.”

I dunno about you, but this is creepy as fuck. And more than a little threatening.

Why this tactic? First, the consistent theme seen presented by SJW/feminists is that men are “Violent oppressors who refuse to compromise.” This meme makes clear that it is not us being oppressive, and that the compromise being asked is not just.

Yeah, sending women pictures of bloody feathers accompanied by an over-the-top mini-manifesto charging them with narcissism and cruelty and blaming them for all the death and misery of war (and who knows what else) is definitely going to convince the world that you’re not violent creeps.

By turning the oppression meme around upon the feminists, it creates equal footing in the debate space.

Yes, that’s right, he thinks the way to win the debate is to quite literally argue “nuh-uh, you are!”

Second, it supplants the current “MRA send death threats” meme. MRA’s do not send death threats, MRA’s send pictures of blood covered feathers.

I’m sorry, what?

MRA’s do not send death threats, MRA’s send pictures of blood covered feathers.

That’s what I thought you said. You people really don’t understand how PR works, do you?

If your message does not include said feather, that was not an MRA, as anyone who understands the MRA position would understand the symbolism and necessity of the red feather campaign.

Yes, that’s right, a woman getting El Rellok’s unhinged message along with a picture of a feather drenched in blood is going to say, ah, yes, this isn’t a threat. This is a Men’s Rights meme, and a perfectly rational conversation-starter on the important topic of why women deserve blame for all the wars in the world because a small number of women in Britain in World War I handed out feathers to men who weren’t enlisted.

Third, it allows us to fracture the feminist movement and more clearly identify those feminists who actually want equality and are just being blind, from those feminists who are actually misanderist (i use that term hesitantly, but as i have not had time to create a new term to describe my view of this branch of feminism, so it is necessary). If we can separate the equality feminists from the misandarists, then we can actually start working with reasonable people to begin wide scale social reform on gender issues.

Trust me, any woman who sees your message as anything but the unhinged rantings of a possibly dangerous crackpot is not any kind of feminist.

Depending upon the response I get here, the above shall be sent to AVFM with a proposal for a “Feather Drive” asking submissions of drawings of bloody feathers we can then use.

This, El Rellok’s concluding sentence, is also the first sentence of his that makes any kind of sense. This sounds right up A Voice for Men’s alley.

In a followup comment, directed at MRAs who weren’t completely convinced that sending pics of bloody feathers is the best way forward for the troubled Men’s Rights Movement, he added:

OK, There are multiple people Doxxing and sending threats to feminists (and others). We need a way to signify that this IS NOT US. We need a way to signify this IS NOT US while still sending a reply of some form. Sending death threats is not useful, and no, sending a picture of a feather with a message clearly stating it is about mens sacrafice is a threat only to people who would percieve any responce at all to be a threat. So unless you are saying we just need to grovel before our new feminist over lords, tell me what the hell else we do. DO you understand the concept that feminism is not simply going to go away if you ignore them? We need a symbol representing male disposability, to counter arguements that we are privilege defending mysoginists. And it needs to be a historically poinant one, or its not going to stick.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Also, have you ever heard of spellcheck?

Well, the denizens of Reddit’s TOTALLY ALPHA Red Pill subreddit have weighed in on the stolen celebrity nude pics that have so many Redditors — and other skeezballs — so excited. And they have some, well, intriguing explanations for why feminists are troubled by the widespread dissemination of stolen nude pictures that were never supposed to be seen by the general public.

In a thread with the lovely title Why are the feminazis so buttdevastated about the leaked nude pics?, a RedPill dude with the lovely handle trpmdsrfggts explains that said feminazis are angry because the pics — some of which show the celebrity women looking like, you know, actual women — are driving down the “price of pussy.”

I’ll let him explain, because his logic is obviously more sophisticated than anything I learned in my pussy economics classes in college:

Wow. That seems completely ass-backwards to me, but what do I know? I’m just a beta or gamma or epsilon or pi or whatever Greek letter it is that dudes like me are.

Others in the thread expand upon this, er, argument. I’m just going to paste some of their comments in, because, honestly, trying to parse their “logic” in order to think of funny things to say about them hurts my brain. (Clicking on any of these pics will get you to the original quote in context.)

Oh, there’s more, so much more, but that’s about all I have time for now, as I need to get back to poppin bottles and, you know, doing whatever else I can to keep up the price of pussy, because, as a male feminist, that’s obviously job number one for me.

How women get ahead in the workplace, according to men who hate women and don’t know shit about anything

A bitter gamebro wandered into the Men’s Rights subreddit last night to deposit an angry little manifesto on the evils of women and Social Justice Warriors. He didn’t get a terribly friendly reception from the regulars — last I checked he’d been voted down to zero — but his manifesto is such a classic example of self-pitying gamebro misogyny that I sort of felt obliged to bring it to you all here.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then let’s begin.

I am shocked — shocked! — to hear this about the laundry, as the females I live with are quite fastidious about their personal cleanliness, spending a good portion of their waking moments licking their fur coats clean. But they are cats, after all.

The human females I know are mostly slobs, actually, though I can’t claim to be any better myself.

How exactly did the state of one’s laundry come to be a factor in deciding a human being’s worth, anyway?

Also, I’m thinking that “cause I’m a penis, and that’s all I am” would look really good on a t-shirt. Anyone else agree?

Sometimes the only way to win is not to play.

Congratulations, assholes! You did it! Your threats and harassment have driven game journalist/designer Jenn Frank and game designer/media critic Mattie Brice to leave the gaming world.

Frank, an award-winning writer and sometime game designer, came to the attention of the misogynist mob after writing a brief opinion piece for The Guardian decrying the widespread and vicious harassment of women in gaming. In addition to writing about the harassment she’s gotten — including someone trying to hack into her email account — she (as you might expect) also highlighted the misogynistic rage directed at feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and indie game designer Zoe Quinn.

The new rule seems to be that any woman who writes about online harassment will herself be harassed, and in this case it didn’t take long.

The gamebro army, completely ignorant about how journalism works, decided that she had a “conflict of interest” — because, and I’m totally serious here, she had previously exchanged some tweets with Quinn and donated some money to her on Patreon. One critic, who put together a much-passed-around graphic outlining the charges against her, angrily denounced Frank for “vigorously defending [Quinn] while pretending to be impartial.”

There are a couple of giant problems with these accusations. First off, Frank never pretended to be impartial. She was not reporting on anything for the Guardian. She was writing an OPINION PIECE about a topic that obviously affected her. Editors don’t assign OPINION PIECES to writers who are, or who pretend to be, impartial. They assign these pieces to people WITH OPINIONS. You’re not going to get much of an OPINION PIECE from someone with no opinions.

Second of all, according to Frank (and I believe her), she had asked The Guardian to attach a brief statement to the end of her piece noting her — admittedly tenuous — connections with Quinn and Sarkeesian. The Guardian editors chose not to run it because they thought these connections were too trivial to merit a mention. They forgot that she was a woman writing about gaming, and that misogynistic assholes will seize on anything, literally anything, as an excuse for harassment.

After she started getting harassed for her alleged “conflict of interest,” Frank wrote a blog post dealing with the issue  clearly and straightforwardly, and convinced the Guardian editors to append a version of her original disclosure statement to the piece:

Update: Jenn Frank has purchased and is a supporter of Zoë Quinn’s work, although this is the first article she has written on the developer. Frank has also briefly met Anita Sarkeesian.

As absurd as it is for a woman writer to have to publicly confess that she “has also briefly met Anita Sarkeesian,” as if this is some sort of crime, Frank thus answered her critics directly. And that should have been it. But of course the harassment — sorry, the perfectly legitimate criticism — continued, and on Wednesday night Frank announced that she’d had enough:

I've been going over it in my head for the last several months, but no, good, I think I'm finished.—
Just Jenn! (Frank) (@jennatar) September 04, 2014

in other words, please, please, please, please leave me alone. You have my nine years. Have them. Leave me alone, please, oh god, please.—
Just Jenn! (Frank) (@jennatar) September 04, 2014

The only “conflict of interest” here was the “conflict of interest” that Frank wrote about originally in her Guardian piece. After describing her horror on discovering that someone had been trying to hack her email, she wrote:

My unabashed love for video games, my colleagues and my work have a conflict of interest with my own terror.

And, at least for now, the terror has won.

Meanwhile, game designer and media critic Mattie Brice was also extracting herself from an industry and a culture that has been grinding her down. I’ll let her tweets tell the story. (See her timeline for more.)

real talk is that people like me have been getting harassed and disregarded for a long time and patience's gone for things not being better—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 03, 2014

it feels like everyone is taking their merry ol' time to wise up and take action in a way that actually helps. don't have time for that—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 03, 2014

i need to get better and since that healing isn't coming from the outside i have to get it from the inside. shouldn't be how it is—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 03, 2014

see ya video games pic.twitter.com/0nnU6oAl7N—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 04, 2014

Congrats to all the people excising themselves from something horrible and looking to take care of yourself—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 04, 2014

If industry cared you would be properly supported. It wasn't ready for or deserving of you. Go shine elsewhere—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 04, 2014

It'll be nice not aspiring to be a part of an industry that makes me cry and hurt so often—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 04, 2014

I'm glad you all love video games a lot, these guys are tough company.—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 04, 2014

i decided i'm not spending time and energy on things that don't reciprocate. the games industry never budged to make room for me—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 05, 2014

it asked for volunteer work, it asked me to take harassment, it asked me to live in poor conditions. i won't anymore—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 05, 2014

until you figure out how to change that this industry will be a revolving door where people don't even get into the building—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 05, 2014

i won't spend any energy making you feel like your consumer products are art and deserving of critical attention—
Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 05, 2014

Elsewhere on Twitter, the bullies crowed over their victory:

@subtleblend @jennatar @xMattieBrice The dominos are falling. We're winning. It's brilliant.—
Dante (@AlrightAnon) September 04, 2014

Another day, another couple of women ground down and spat out by the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Gaming Division.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the gamebros haven’t forgotten about Zoe Quinn either.

lemme just check my email and- oh. #GamerGate http://t.co/YJ8cwzlM79—
Zoë ʻTom-Kunʼ Quinn (@TheQuinnspiracy) September 03, 2014

Here’s the screenshot; click for a larger and more readable version — if you’re not triggered by violent threats, that is.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

Seriously, if you know, tell me, because I am fresh out of explanations for this level of blind hatred.

NOTE: This thread is a NO SHITHEAD thread. If you say anything that in any way even slightly excuses or justifies the harassment of these women, you can fuck right off to any of the eight zillion places on the internet where you can badmouth these women to your heart’s content. I and the other mods will be banning and deleting as necessary.

Mystery has taught you well, young douchebag

The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.)

Thanks! (And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.)

By now you’ve probably seen the latest set of creepy PMs that’s making the rounds of the internet — you know, that series of sour-grapey insults some random finance asshole sent to a woman on Tinder who had gently rejected his crude sexual come-on. If you haven’t, I’ve pasted them in below.

Well, it turns out that this would-be Romeo is not only an asshole, but a wholly unoriginal asshole at that. Thinking that more than a few of his angry negs sounded vaguely familiar I did a bit of Googling and discovered that a couple of his more, er, polished insults came straight out of the pickup artist playbook. Quite literally.

That bit where he tells the woman he messaged that she’s “not hot enough to be acting like this?” An old PUA neg he literally may have discovered by cruising the message boards at VenusianArts.com, the website of everyone’s favorite PUA peacock Mystery, where one commenter described it as his favorite line to use with “highly egotistical women” he met in the club:

4Channers discover that Zoe has been spying on the #IRC channels where they’ve been planning and coordinating their “raid.”

The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!

Ah, sweet schadenfreude! The gamebros at 4chan have been insisting publicly that the whole #GamerGate campaign — you know, the vicious attacks on game developer Zoe Quinn and other women in gaming — has been a spontaneous grassroots uprising against corruption in the world of game journalism, not a targeted campaign by misogynistic 4channers and their allies to ruin the lives of Quinn and everyone even vaguely connected with or even just aligned with her.

Well, it’s just become a lot harder to make that argument with a straight face. Last night, Quinn announced that she’s been lurking in the IRC where 4chaners have been diligently and often quite deviously planning this “spontaneous” uprising. And she’s started posting screenshots that seem to offer pretty incontrovertible evidence of  just how duplicitously 4channers planned every element of #GamerGate.

You can find Quinn’s tweets of these screenshots laid out neatly on this Storify page; it’s essential reading for anyone who’s been following all this.

But I thought I’d highlight some of my favorite bits.

Here, 4channers talk about trying to hack her email:

definitely no raids ever happen because of 4chan and I definitely hacked myself mmhmmm http://t.co/3309AiQk3u—
Zoë ʻTom-Kunʼ Quinn (@TheQuinnspiracy) September 06, 2014

Here they spout bizarre conspiracy theory — while conspiring to hack another website.

this has pure insanity AND some illegal shit in it http://t.co/rRo5KVFBhZ—
Zoë ʻTom-Kunʼ Quinn (@TheQuinnspiracy) September 06, 2014

In this screenshot — you can find the whole thing here – 4channers talk candidly about how they hope to ruin her career:

More of the same:

because this is about integrity. not revenge. not harassment. not hurting people. http://t.co/rSSm4ZJG4T—
Zoë ʻTom-Kunʼ Quinn (@TheQuinnspiracy) September 06, 2014

Here some 4channers talk about #NotYourShield, a supposedly spontaneous bit of hashtag activism in which people of color — and white dudes pretending to be people of color — attack “social justice warriors” for supposedly using them as “shields” for their attack on gaming. Notice the dudes at the end talking about showing up on Twitter “as a Latino” and “in blackface” to support the campaign.

Given how damning a lot of these screenshots are, it’s hardly surprising that they freaked out when Quinn started posting her screenshots:

@TheQuinnspiracy abort abort, she's HERE http://t.co/Ep7xRSZyxO—
Adriel Wallick (@MsMinotaur) September 06, 2014

Too late, dudes. Too late.