Wednesday, January 28, 2015

ATTENTION PEASANTS: 
THE SHOW TRIALS HAVE BEEN CANCELLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE!

In his book, 'Vision of the Anointed: Social Policy As A Basis For Self-Congratulation', Professor Thomas Sowell discusses four stages of failure that necessarily follow when social 'experts'  or 'activists' attempt to bring about changes in a group or culture that result in failure.


THE FOUR PATTERNS OF SOCIAL POLICY FAILURE
“STAGE 1. THE ‘CRISIS: Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a ‘crisis’ ….Sometimes the situation…has in fact already been getting better for years. 
STAGE 2. THE ‘SOLUTION': Policies to end the ‘crisis’ are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and ‘simplistic,’ if not dishonest.
STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z. 
STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as ‘simplistic’ for ignoring the ‘complexities’ involved, as ‘many factors’ went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently, [but wrongly], predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors.”

A collage of the coordinated rollout of the 'Gamers Are Dead' articles in gaming media that appeared on Aug. 28 2014. Click for larger version. 

In response to a consumer revolt among gamers that is popularly referred to as #GamerGate, Social Justice Activists in coordination with enablers in the gaming media made an attempt to drive gamers away & replace them with casual mass market consumers.  Probably the most overt example of this was Leigh Alexander's column that appeared at GamaSutra during the coordinated rollout of the 'Gamers Are Dead' talking point.   It was entitled "'Gamers' Don't Have To Be Your Audience'.  'Gamers' Are Over."
For several months, anti-#GamerGate and the social justice activists seemed to believe they were making headway in implementing this new policy for gaming culture.  Gamers were supposedly being driven off and marginalized while being replaced with a far larger and more acceptable audience.  As time has passed, it's become apparent they were deluding themselves.
We all voted, Bob. You're off the Island!

Now anti-#GamerGate has reached Stage 4: they have to explain why their attempt to abandon gamers & replace them with the broader mass market audience has failed.  They have to explain why gaming journalism sites are adopting the ethical and transparency disclosure rules they've claimed were unnecessary.  

The need for ethical transparency & disclosure by gaming journalists was the subject of my last column, which you can find here

What about the attempt to marginalize gamers? 

Mass market consumers who only buy and play games casually do not engage with gaming media on anything more than the most casual of levels. 

 Even if #SJW's got total control of the gaming media, because mass consumers don't read gaming blogs, don't interact on gaming message boards and don't attend GameCons, they wouldn't really have more of an influence on casual game consumers at all when it came to changing or molding their beliefs and their behaviors.

Succeed in putting out games that preach radical extremist #SJW views on race, gender and class and what will happen is the mass market of consumers out there who don't agree to or accept those views will stop buying your games.

Attempting to deliberately bypass those most passionately involved consumers closest to your industry to reach the mass market beyond them is a very difficult proposition.

Yet this is exactly what the social justice advocates in gaming media attempted to do in response to #GamerGate; dump the closest group of passionate consumers of the industry & trade them in for another audience.

In what universe could this have possibly worked?

The goal of social justice radicals is to create a monolithic collective that all shares the same views. Or at least, one in which it's members only dare to publicly EXPRESS the same views.  All the ships sail in the same direction in complete harmony.  Because the ships that won't have been sunk or driven off. 

In response to GamerGate's call for more ethical openness and transparency, the #SJW response was to attempt to jettison what it viewed as a small, troublesome subset that was unimportant in light of the need to begin going after the far larger mass gaming market.

The stunning blind spot is their belief that people OUTSIDE gamer culture will be more open to accepting the #SJW radical views &  politically correct scolding aiming at changing their behavior.

They aren't.  

News flash to the #SJW's out there in the gaming media: Pay attention to the next two pictures. 

These people.....

aren't any more interested in adopting radical extremist #SJW views on gender, race or class than.....

these people.  

YOU'RE WELCOME. No, no, don't thank me. It's what I do! 

The fatal mistake McIntosh,Sarkeesian, Alexander  and their type of social justice activist have made is that the broader mass market of gaming consumers out there isn't any more receptive to the #SJW extremism & radicalism than the gamer culture is.

This is why the attempt was doomed from the start.   And this is why #anti-#GamerGate is now at the stage of making excuses over their failures.  

19 comments:

  1. Interesting, I think we are a bit away from that yet though, it's getting closer.

    //Active "gamer" + Involved in the GamerGate revolt + Old man + Enthusiast Dev + libertarian with the small l

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  2. And amazingly this 'Replace the core audience you don't like with a new, more 'broad and in line with our thinking'mindset is the same one the establishment GOP has been trying for years as well.

    Their success on the Presidential level has been almost as ineffectual but that isn't stopping them either.

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    1. Likewise, the same policy liberal parties have adopted throughout the west by promoting third world immigration.

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    2. Except that one is working because in a "warm-body" democracy all they need is the bodies to get power. The side effects may be killer but they take a while to show up.

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    3. To be fair, this is kinda of a necessity for all political parties seeking authority.
      Your base will vote for you almost regardless, and so once you have secured a nomination, you need to start appealing to "outsiders"

      All parties do it, over in the UK the Labour party sold it's base out *hard* under Blair and recently the conservatives are making similar mistakes.
      Over here it can actually be VERY costly though.
      Labour lost much of its grass roots support in favour of monied benefactors and middle class liberals, and UKIP is growing into a political force. As our 3 major parties fight for the centre of politics they simply lose the faith of their members.
      Sad really.
      Seems MUCH worse in America, with the lack of alternatives to R or D

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  3. Same goes for the Democrat party. Don't be fooled by the L vs. R debate. Those terms can be redefined at will to serve a purpose. Politicians of all stripes are not to be trusted. Trust actions as words are wind.

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    1. Almost all politicians are narcissists. The trick is electing the narcissists that will actually do *some* good things while you are putting up with them when they are in office.

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    2. Other thing to consider is that as much of a damned mess the Republicans are right now the Democrats seem to be in the middle of the same SJW process whereby they've mired themselves too deeply in identity politics and champagne socialism to be functional on any level. They've also alienated working and middle class men to the nth degree by adopting all that stupid crap.

      When the president's healthcare bill only seems to benefit insurance companies and the welfare class and his wife is walking around in a ten thousand dollar dress it doesn't take a genius to realize what a crock of shit "social justice" is in practice.

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  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. The purpose for gaming control of the Gaming Press and Gaming Media was not to "reach gamers". It is that the Gaming Press is low hanging fruit that is considered valid and trusted sourcing for Wikipedia. The SJW purpose is and always has been to do an end run around Academic Peer Review in order to present their views and theories to the public as established and trusted fact. So with the Gaming Press in their control they can publish articles on Polygon, Kotaku and Gamasutra, cite those articles in Wikipedia and have their ideas presented to the general non academic public as true fact rather than batshit insane theory.

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    1. You start on the right path, but reach the wrong destination. As ChicagoRefugee points out below, social sciences and their publications are lockstep SJW platforms. What the SJW entry into game reviewing was about was financial incentives to drive the narrative at an industry level.

      Entertainment industries are heavily reliant on good press. Bad reviews can tank a movie, book and videogame. If you can install reviewers who grade on a curve based on how a game/movie/book approaches race and gender issues, you can put financial pressure on the content creators to conform with SJW approved race and gender tropes.

      Hollywood did not become leftist and anti-American by accident.

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    2. This is exactly what happened in Science Fiction, where the SJWs have been very successful. It's not just the reviewers, it's other gatekeepers as well. In publishing, a parallel set of key figures are the editors and buyers, almost all of whom have been SJWs or SJW sympatico for some time now. A counterattack is finally underway. Anybody interested can head over to MonsterHunterNation and just read the posts relating to Sad Puppies for some insight.

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    3. I'm just basing their goals on Jonathan McIntosh and Silverstrings own publications. They have actually put out documents on "getting around academic peer review" and using niche media such as the gaming press to do it. It used to be published on Silverstring Media's web site. I'm not sure if they pulled it all down. It reads like the carefully laid plans of a Batman villain. I wish I was making this stuff up but it really is from their own publications.

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  6. You speak as though Academic Peer Review is not a wholly owned subsidiary of SJW, Inc. Academia is where SJWs are propagated, born, nurtured, and largely employed. Why would they need to do an end run around their primary base of support?

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    1. My thoughts exactly. It's not an "end run", it's a colonizing expedition.

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  7. Please correct your first sentence to properly state the title of Mr. Sowell's book. You have the subtitle backwards.

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  8. There's a Stage 3.5 - or more accurately, a standard behavior that informs all the stages - Claim Victim Status. I see a lot of tweets in my TL both pro- and con- on this topic. As the GG's drive the SJW's from the field in a rout, the con-tweets are increasingly of this flavor - "GG is awful people and they ruined this person's life!"

    Said person is probably employed, surrounded by fawning admirers, and living comfortably in the warm hammock of support that the SJW community affords, but Victimhood is Holy, and thus the status must be claimed - it's the SJW equivalent of clearing your thetans or something. Once you're a Victim, you've got it made. You get a free pass on behaving like an utter crapweasel to other people, you can "win" "debates" by saying that you're being further oppressed by all the reasonable replies to your nonsense, you have people falling over themselves to praise your courageous courage... Victimhood is Magic.

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