Words mean nothing anymore.
Reminder that Chelsea’s critics were a Jewish American and a Palestinian Muslim.
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Australian centrists also suck:
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In terms of the video games themselves, yes, that’s stupid.
But I do think that a great many of the communities based around these video games are toxic and could have led to this kind of result.
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I’ve seen similar white supremacist rhetoric from people who don’t game - jocks and farm kids. While there is a lot of toxicity in gaming spaces, and yes, even entire Nazi clans, the average casual gamer is more likely to run into your usual brand of toxic masculinity and homophobic behaviour.
This isn’t just a games issue. It’s a male culture problem.
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Oh, absolutely.
There just seemed to be an undertone there of “The fact that he was playing video games is a completely irrelevant data point, why are you bringing it up?”
My point was just that if that became his primary medium of social interaction, it’s likely that that’s where he was indoctrinated, and that there’s enough people there who share the beliefs he was spouting who could have done it.
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I hear that he also breathed a lot of oxygen, and we all know that all neo Nazis have that in common with each other.
I get what you mean but at the end of the day, he is a white supremacist who is buying into white supremacy because it speaks to him as a philosophy.
Yes, the alt-right uses toxic fandom in videogames to recruit but they also use Facebook, Reddit, the Chans, and fucking Instagram for all I know. I feel like we should be focussing on you know, the white supremacy rather than his hobbies…
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Sure, every community needs to drive white supremacy from its ranks, and every community can do better. But, if we can trace one attack back to where the radicalization is happening, why shouldn’t we pressure that community in particular to clean itself up?
After the Pittsburgh shooting, a huge backlash descended upon GoDaddy to suspend Gab’s services.
After Heather Heyer was murdered and the Daily Stormer mocked her, they were driven off the internet a dozen times because any service hosting them was bombarded with bad publicity.
After the Toronto van attack, Reddit was pressured into banning the incels subreddit.
Facebook was convinced to ban Alex Jones after he explicitly threatened the life of Robert Mueller and posted the videos there.
…And so on.
Let me be clear: I have no idea if the games in question are the actual source of radicalization here. The shooter might have been radicalized through YouTube or 8chan or any one of a dozen sites. My entire point is that, while “shooting people on his computer made this asshole shoot a bunch of people in real life” is patently absurd, the fact is that he spent a lot of time in these communities, so they’re good places to look for influences that could have radicalized him. If that turns out to be the case, this should be a wake-up call to those communities and the games’ developers to deal with their problems, the same way that the other communities I mentioned have received wake-up calls due to evil actions undertaken by their users.
But right now, it’s only a single point of correlation, not worth more than “Hmm. That should be looked into;” I just wanted to register disagreement with the idea that the communities he frequented shouldn’t be looked into as possible sources of radicalization.
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I absolutely agree that it’s worth looking into the way that the alt-right uses communities of men (because it’s basically always men) who feel like they have been left behind by society in order to further their agenda of hate.
In particular, I think it’s well worth looking at why the Left has been so slow to counter the successful outreach of the Right in these communities across the globe.
I mean, the Right has weaponised the feelings of disenfranchisement that were the mainstay of twentieth century labour movements and fed it directly back into fascism. Meanwhile, the Left has focused on tone policing and middle-class infighting that does nothing to broaden its appeal to the wider public.
So yeh, it’s absolutely worth looking at how the Right has coopted angry young men into fighting against their self-interest, just as it’s worth looking at why the Left has overwhelmingly failed to persuade people that socialism represents a meaningful way out of this nonsense.
That said, when the Daily Mail (of all fucking people) says “chubby kid got bullied, played violent videogames and that’s why he became a murderer”, that’s a deliberate attempt to a)downplay their own fascist complicity in this tragedy and b)shift the blame from their own hate speech onto the modern equivalent of video nasties or D&D.
It was a tired, bullshit argument in the 80s and it’s downright disingenuous now, especially coming from a fully white supremacist newspaper who have spent decades normalising the kind of racism that is directly responsible for hate crimes.
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My focus was less on the gamer aspect and more on this:
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