Tag Archives: Cracked

Male Physical Intimacy

In their continuing efforts to destroy itself, Cracked has an article up on being in the closet while in other countries. It’s a low effort post consisting of 5 “facts” that are mostly blindingly obvious (Some geographic spaces have people more accepting of homosexuality than people from other geographic spaces! Surprising!) and a complete absence of humour. But there was one thing in it I wanted to comment on (aside from it being just another note on Cracked’s continued decline).

In Botswana, it’s customary for men to hold hands while chatting and walking. (No, the irony of such a homophobic country being filled with men skipping down the street holding hands was not lost on me.)

This is not irony. It is in fact the definitional opposite of irony, it is exactly what you’d expect.

These men are friends, engaging in male bonding. Touch is and always has been and important part of bonding and there is absolutely nothing implicitly homoerotic about men engaging in physical male bonding. In past, intimate physical contact between men was normal, and in other parts of the world that have not been homoeroticized it still is.

Take a look at this picture (one of a hundred similar ones from Art of Manliness):

Are these guys gay? Probably not. Yet it probably looks gay to you. In a healthy culture, intimate physical contact between men is normal and healthy. There would be nothing untoward or sexual about this, it’s just some friends hanging out. In our homoeroticized culture, this  kind of intimate contact between males is gay. We can see this difference from the Cracked article:

I didn’t even have to hide my boyfriend, whom I met at the gay underground party. He came to visit me for a weekend in my tiny village, and no one seemed to notice or suspect anything unusual about two dudes quietly holing up in a house together and sweating a lot. They must be great friends who love to work out!

As was pointed out in the Way of Men, men want to be recognized as masculine, as men within their gang who have attained the masculine virtues. Gays are effeminate, not masculine, and exist outside the gang. Normal men don’t want to be seen as effeminate or gay as this represents a failure to attain manhood and puts one outside of the gang.

In a “homophobic” society were homosexuality is proscribed, men can be physically and emotionally intimate with each other without being gay, because this intimacy is simply a normal, close friendship. So King David can say of his best friend:

“Jonathan lies slain on your high places.
I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;
very pleasant have you been to me;
your love to me was extraordinary,
surpassing the love of women.

And it’s not gay, because it isn’t gay. A man can have and signal intimacy with other men without it signalling gayness, because homosexuality doesn’t exist outside the occasional condemnation in a religious sermon. Male intimacy is normalized.

But, in a society where homosexuality is normalized as an accepted alternative lifestyle, and homosexuals publicly display their sexual proclivities through displays of intimacy, you can no longer safely display intimacy. If you do, there is a significant chance that other men around you will think you are signalling gayness, you will lose your masculinity. Through this, homoeroticism colonizes male intimacy. When homosexuality becomes normalized, male intimacy becomes denormalized.

In a gay society, you can not be homosocially intimate without being gay.

There are some modern attempts to bring non-sexual male intimacy back into normalcy. Both bromance and no homo try to explicitly counter-signal hetorosexuality and masculinity while engaging in male intimacy. But even then, our society is so gay that bromance is seen as “an increasing openness of society in the twenty-first century to reconsider gender, sexuality, and exclusivity constraints” rather than an attempt by young men to close the gaping spiritual and emotional wound that the lack of intimate male friendship has left in their hearts. These attempts have mostly failed.

In a non-gay society, you could slap your friend on the ass after the game, and walk to the showers with your arms around him. In our gay society, this sounds gay to you (and to me) because male intimacy has been colonized by homosexuality. This is one vague, virtually invisible, unquantifiable harm the homosexual movement has done to the majority.

5 Reasons Gun Owners Should Join the NRA

Luke McKinney at Cracked has an(other) idiotic article lacking that substitutes snark and insult for anything resembling logic or reason over at Cracked on why we should hate the NRA (Spoiler alert: Because they think you should be free to own a gun). So, I’m going to reply to his distortions:

#5. They’re Paid By Gun Manufacturers

In 2013, Business Insider reported that less than half of the NRA’s revenue came from membership dues and fees …

Which means almost half of its funds come from member dues and fees (it has 5 million members according to wiki). Compared to other lobbying groups, that’s pretty high. For example, the AMA (the second largest lobbying group next the the Chamber of Commerce) supposedly represents physicians. It gets only 16% of its fees from dues.

In this section, Luke throws out a bunch of random unrelated trivia, but never gives any reason why they matter. Why is it bad that the NRA is half-funded by the industry? Luke never explains, he just says it is. In fact, I’m happy that the gun companies support their customers and their freedoms.

Also, notice how Luke links an article saying the NRA engages in illegal activities, when the article’s big findings (after the updates are taken into account) were that a website page was accidentally improperly routed, that taxes were properly paid but incompletely documented, and that a single box was left unchecked on tax papers (not effecting taxes paid).

So, Luke McKinney believes that if your webmaster screws up a link and you screw up your tax forms, nobody should ever associate with you again. I’ve done both, you all must never read my blog again.

#4. They’re Allowed To Casually Talk About Shooting People

Ted Nugent made a joke about shooting senators, therefore the NRA is evil. (That is literally his argument).

Cracked made multiple jokes about beating retarded children, therefore Cracked is evil. If Luke McKinney has any decency at all he will quit writing for Cracked. Or does Luke support beating developmentally disabled children?

#3. NRA Board Members Are All Kinds Of Scary

According to McKinney, because one NRA member argues for school paddlings you should leave the NRA. Maybe you don’t agree with school paddlings, but it is a normal practice and is hardly that frightening to support. 26% of the US supports school corporal punishment: so Luke literally thinks a quarter of the US is so evil you should not interact with them.

Fellow board member Don Young, a congressman from Alaska, described the BP Gulf oil spill as a “natural phenomena,”

What he actually said, right where Luke links is:

Young said: “This is not an environmental disaster, and I will say that again and again because it is a national phenomena. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. During World War II there was over 10 million barrels of oil spilt from ships, and no natural catastrophe. … We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sealife, but overall it will recover.”

If you are not retarded (sorry Luke) you can easily read, even in that conveniently clipped quote, that it is referring to oil spilling into the sea is a natural phenomena, not that the BP spill itself was.

Then Luke just flat out lies:

and thinks wolves would be a great solution to the homelessness problem.

Actually, if you read the article Luke linked, you can see that he wasn’t talking about solving the homeless problem at all. He was talking about how wolves are dangerous and how urbanites who never had to deal with the danger of wolves are making laws to prevent rural folk from protecting themselves. Of course, Luke, being an ignorant urbanite, has no idea about the danger of wolves in rural areas where their aren’t a lot of police and where animal control is far away. It almost seems like he supports wolves killing people.

So, if you are one of the quarter of the US who support paddling in schools and believe that rural people don’t deserve to get eaten by wolves, you are so scary that everyone should disassociate from you.

#2. They’re Pretty Racist

The NRA’s 2015 annual meeting featured a presentation on how whole swathes of American cities had been turned into Muslim “no-go zones,”

It seems Luke McKinney thinks Muslims are a race. I think that makes him a racist, not to mention just plain ignorant of biology, sociology, and religion.

“Demographically symbolic” is a masterpiece. Nine syllables that would be less obvious if he’d just screamed, “Racism sexism racism!” It’s a code word, but not a disguised code word;

He links to this:

Eight failed years of one demographically symbolic president is enough. Eight years of the Obama-Clinton regime has sent our nation into a tailspin of moral decay, deceit and destruction.

I guess Luke McKinney thinks the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein is racist for thinking of the emotional symbolism of Obama’s victory, or Habib Aruna for thinking of the sybolism of an African American winning resoundingly twice, or NBC news, or CTV news, etc. The symbolism of the first African American winning the presidency was a huge topic in 2008. I guess Luke’s ignorant of recent political history as well.

He went on to blame the president for all problems, to describe how guns solve all problems, and to explain, “For that right, NRA will always fight and, believe me, the fight is coming.” Of course, there’s no possible problem with the leader of an armed group blaming a single named individual for all the problems in the world in public and insisting “the fight is coming.” Not even in a country where a Cracked writer can be placed on the No-Fly list for writing a satirical article. Right now the only difference between NRA talks and Al-Qaeda videos is production value.

Do I honestly need to explain how retarded this is?

Maybe I do. Luke believes that using a fighting metaphor to describe a political battle (oh no, a war metaphor, I must be Hitler) is exactly equivalent to to literally talking about blowing thousands of other people, and yourselves, up. (But only when the evil NRA does it).

I am sure Luke has never used a war metaphor before.

#1. They Blame Victims (And Everything Else)

The NRA makes the very accurate point that if you vote against people’s ability to defend themselves they won’t have the ability to defend themselves. This makes them evil (somehow, he doesn’t exactly explain how).

After Sandy Hook, Wayne LaPierre blamed music videos, movies, video games — they’re on course to blame every object in existence for shootings except for objects that actually shoot. Blaming everything except the gun is their only job, and the angrier it makes people, the better it works.

Luke McKinney believes guns are magical objects that have their own agency and willfully kill people. People who don’t share this belief are implied to be evil (for some unexplained reason).

****

Finally, though, through all the distortions Luke finally gets to his real point:

Their sole function is to prevent rational debate…They’ve buried the country under so much bullshit that even intelligent Americans start talking about individual rights and waiting periods, as if there was any sane sequence of words that ends with a peacetime civilian holding an AR-15

He wants to limit any discussion of guns to “rational debate” and by “rational debate” he means people who agree with him that guns he doesn’t like should be banned being able to talk and everybody else should shut up. He wants to control the discussion and he wants to limit your ability for self-defence. And he is willing to distort the truth and slander others to do so.

The whole point of his rambling, illogical, unconnected anti-NRA rant was that he hates the fact that civilians can own a semi-automatic weapon. He wants to take them away from you.

Join the NRA so he can’t.

Join the NRA: where business and citizens work together to protect freedom, where celebrities make jokes, where people don’t believe rural dwellers deserve to be eaten by wolves, where people make and understand common metaphors and use basic communication skills, and where people don’t believe inanimate object have agency.

If you value sanity, join the NRA!

Cracked’s Gay “Marriage” Article

I read this article on “5 Reasons ‘Traditional Marriage’ Would Shock Your Ancestors” by one Kathy Benjamin on Cracked, considered responding and decided against it, because ‘what’s the point?’ Then somebody asked me on Ask.FM to respond, so here it goes.

The article’s main flaw (other than it being obvious left-wing evangelization with a complete dearth of humour on a supposed humour site) was that it cherry-picked every small edge case in Western history to draw a pattern for the gullible while ignoring larger realities.

Now onto something more thorough.

#5. People Didn’t Marry Young

First, yes they did, even if we accept the author’s own misrepresented data. In the US the average age of first marriage is 27 for women and 29 for men. This is actually younger than Western Europe where age of first marriage is almost invariably over 30 for both men and women. The highest age Kathy cites are: 23-24 years old and grooms 26-27 (in England, where the average age is now 32.1 & 30), a difference of 2-4 years. Her other link points to a 1890 high of 22 for women and 26 for men, a difference of 3-5 years. 2-5 years is a rather significant difference.

Other than this Kathy simply distorts what the links say:

In general, the marriage age in Western Europe has stayed constant. English records from the 1600s show that brides were usually 23-24 years old and grooms 26-27.

Click the link:

Age of First Marriage

The mode (ie. ‘usually’) for women is given as 22, the median as 22.75. The mean was 23.5. So, 22 was the usual age and half of women married at 22 or earlier; there were just some outliers who married later pulling the average above. Bu even if we use the mean, women in Britain in the 1600s still married 4 years earlier than the US today (and 6.5 years earlier than the UK today).

For men the relative situation is much the same Mode: 24, Median: 25.5, Mean: 26.5.

We can see Kathy doesn’t really understand statistics.

When colonists in early America started getting married slightly younger, it was considered odd enough that Benjamin Franklin commented on it.

Here she gives the impression that Franklin was like ‘wow man, those Yankees are like so far out there.’ If you follow the link, you see that Benjamin Franklin simply looked at the subject and found that yes, Americans had earlier marriages and that settled European cities were not naturally replacing themselves due to low wages preventing family formation. If anything, he’s commenting on the self-destruction caused by the (conditions causing) later marriages of the settled European cities. (Side note for NRx: Franklin noticed that cities are demographic shredders back in 1814).

But the marriage age in America soon settled back into the normal pattern, and by 1890, most couples were getting married in their mid-to-late-20s again.

Again read the link. Marriage age rose from 20 to 22. After which it shrunk again.

If you read the earlier .pdf (Table 2, p. 28), female marriage age peaked in 1880-1900 at 23 (after a civil war which pretty much destroyed an entire generation of young men) after which it declined steadily reaching a low of 20 in 1960. It wasn’t until 1980 that the marriage age again reached what it was in the post-bellum period. So, by “the normal pattern” she means an anomalously high few decades around the turn of the century following a civil war which destroyed the supply of single young men.

Also, notice that this high was the age of 23, which is still almost a half-decade lower than the average age is now.

Also, notice that the earliest time here is the 1600’s. So, she’s ignoring millennia of Western Civilization prior to this; not to mention she ignores anything outside of England. You can read about the uniqueness of Germanic marriage patterns here.

As can be seen, Kathy is simply incorrect across the board.

#4. Marriages Were Short

Ancient Greece and Rome both allowed divorce, and the most famous divorcee of all time is certainly Henry VIII, whose first one occurred in 1534.

Yes, the Pagans did divorce, but in Rome, it was not at-will, it was at-fault and solely the right of the husband, at least for the first few centuries (ie. before Rome declined). Once Rome began declining, calls to end easy divorce were implemented. In Greece, while divorce was allowed, monogamy was still the rule.

Are these really the models Kathy wants to hold up as an example?

King Henry was one person. Anecdotes /=data, especially when said anecdote is a historically significant king because of his divorces.

John Milton, the poet most famous for Paradise Lost, also wrote four books on how awesome divorce was in the 1640s… Inevitably, religious figures freaked out and tried to ban them.

First, she undermines her own point here; she says that Milton was the exception at the time not the rule. But beyond that, read the link:

To Milton, canon law was just another weapon used by the “Great Whore” against men, and since the English church continued to enforce such laws governing marriage and divorce, she was the whore’s accomplice. Milton wants to restore manly dignity to the practice of marriage, first by restoring the power of divorce exclusively to husbands, and second by insisting that marriage is principally a kind of friendship much like the manly friendships described by Socrates in the Symposium and Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics–a kind of enlightened heteroerotic pederasty. Milton’s zeal against canon law is the same as his zeal against bishops–the goal is to restore manliness to English Christianity. This is why he has no patience with the widespread European Protestant notion that divorce should be allowed to wives as a protection from abusive husbands. Milton wants to liberalize divorce, but for men, not for women.

Milton was closer to an extreme MRA than anything. I wonder why Kathy would hold him up as a model?

In America, the 1870 census revealed such a high number of divorces that the government ordered a report on the subject.

She’s being very disingenuous here. Read the link, flip to p. 138. This crisis of divorce was caused by a increase (157% increase over 20 years) in divorce that was still a low rate of divorce. New Hampshire had the highest average divorce rate, at 1 divorce per 10 marriages, meanwhile Maryland had 1 divorce per 62 marriages.

The divorce crisis was caused by divorce rates ranging from < 1% to 10%. A far cry from today’s 40-50%.

By the 1920s, divorce was so common that society was convinced marriage would soon be a thing of the past.

By “so common“, she means a peak rate of 16% (1/6) during 1929, which you might remember as the year of Black Friday and the start of the Great Depression. So even when the economy was being annihilated, the high divorce rate was still only 16%, as compared to 40-50% today.

And yet here we are almost 100 years later, and people are still fighting for the chance to get hitched.

Actually, marriage rates have been in free-fall since the 1970’s or so. Marriage is dying.

#3. Single-Parent And Blended Families Were Always Normal

Here she makes the argument that because people in the past experienced the tragedy of the deaths of spouses we should be fine with destroyed families. I don’t think I need to comment too much on that.

Her concluding argument is this:

And in the 1950s, those halcyon days of supposedly perfect families? Between divorce, death, and sex outside of marriage, 22 percent of kids were still being raised by a single parent. If being raised by one gender ruins children, our ancestors were screwed.

Yes, because the boomers are the models of health. That’s why the 60’s were such a peaceful time, and that’s why they have such healthy families, never use drugs, never commit suicide, and are never depressed.

#2. Procreation Wasn’t Everything

People much smarter than me have pointed out how ridiculous this is. What about couples where one partner is infertile? Or couples where the woman has gone through menopause? Are those marriages also totally invalid?

Her argument is literally that because we don’t police edge cases we should therefore overthrow our our entire understanding of and tradition of marriage.

In the Middle Ages, some couples took this to the extreme. Catholic men and women could enter “Josephite marriages” where they lived together as husband and wife, but never got it on.

Some people make deep, extraordinary spiritual commitments to dedicate their lives to God while denying themselves sex therefore sex and marriage have nothing to do with procreation.

Her next argument is literally a lot of people have murdered their children, therefore marriage has nothing to do with procreation.

Then it is that people use contraception therefore marriage has nothing to do with procreation.

These arguments aren’t even worth refuting. They aren’t even really arguments, just random, barely unconnected statements designed to elicit emotional impressions in the gullible.

#1. Gay Marriage Has Always Existed

Gay marriage was not uncommon in Ancient Rome; even the Emperor Nero publicly married at least two men.

Neither were raping slave boys and pederasty. Also, is Nero really the role model you want to look up to here?

But even among the people fine with raping young boys, gay marriage a joke and not officially recognized:

Same-sex weddings are reported by sources that mock them; the feelings of the participants are not recorded. Both Martial and Juvenal refer to marriage between men as something that occurs not infrequently, although they disapprove of it. Roman law did not recognize marriage between men, but one of the grounds for disapproval expressed in Juvenal’s satire is that celebrating the rites would lead to expectations for such marriages to be registered officially.

She goes on:

During the Ming Dynasty in China, it was not uncommon for older men to marry young men and bring them into their families as official sons-in-law.

Not Western civilization.

Both the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic church allowed “brother-making” in which two totally straight single guys had an official ceremony telling everyone what good friends they were and how they were going to live together and pray together but totally not do any guy-on-guy stuff.

Mark Yuray was right. Kathy has been so indoctrinated in homosexuality that she can’t even conceive that men may have close friendships, even formalized ones. Here’s more on why this is nonsense.

Single women living together has always been more acceptable than men cohabiting (because women don’t have sex drives, right?), but that doesn’t mean that all female “roommates” tried to hide their bean-flicking activities from their neighbors. Many of them were open about their relationships, and both the women involved and their friends considered the couples married, whether they had gone through a ceremony or not. In the late 1800s, these relationships were called Boston Marriages. In at least one case, Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant were considered a “common household” under the law for tax purposes. In Spain in 1901, Elisa Sanchez Loriga pretended to be a man in order to marry Marcela Gracia Ibeas. Despite needing to use deception, after they were found out, the marriage was still allowed to stand.

Her argument is really: ‘because women could live with friends, everybody loved lesbianism’. She then finds 2 cases were may have been accepted. Two. Do I really even need to comment on the extreme cherry-picking being done here?

If you want to admit you don’t like the idea of same-sex marriage because it makes you think of sex that makes you feel icky, feel free to say it. I’m sure everyone would feel better knowing how much you fixate on their bedroom antic?

I am highlighting this merely to show how ignorant this woman is. Oh yes, not wanting to destroy 2 millennia of tradition and engage in a massive court-forced social engineering experiment is because ‘yuck!’. Not wanting the persecutions of Christians and Christian churches who refuse to recognize this farce (and even homosexuals know it is a farce given that half of their “marriages” are open) is because ‘icky’. Not wanting to condone the behaviour that leads to deadly plagues is all about “eww’. And that’s not even touching religious reasons as I know those won’t mean anything to leftist nihilists.

I know modern leftists don’t have deep reasons for their beliefs and mostly just base it on whatever emotions the most recent Gawker article stirred in their shallow hearts, but they should at least have the common decency not to project their emotion-driven shallowness on everybody else.

Do the right thing. Make America as progressive in civil rights as South Africa.

Yes, let us emulate this self-destructing land of rape and murder.

****

To put to death this topic, gay marriage would be, at best, shocking to anybody in Western Civilization from the fall of Rome up until a couple decades ago.

For an example, let’s just take the cause de jeur: gay “marriage”, which is now, in 2015, supported by “moderate” “conservatives” and is currently illegal to oppose in any real way in some states. In 2008, just 7 years ago, “moderate” liberal Obama opposed it. In 1996, less than 20 years ago, “moderate” liberal Clinton signed a law banning gay “marriage”. In the 1980’s, only gay radicals were pressing for “marriage”, in the 1970’s not even most gay activists were for gay “marriage”. Before that, it was hardly ever even mentioned. In 1962, just 50 years ago, sodomy was itself illegal in every state. In 1953, less than seven decades ago, just mentioning gay marriage or writing about homosexuality was considered obscene. Just over two centuries ago sodomy merited a death penalty (although these laws were rarely enforced and went beyond just homosexuality). In the 1500’s, the debate was between whether the church or the king would execute homosexuals. Talking of homosexual “marriage” at this time would have been seen as insanity.

Leftists can make up whatever bullshit emotionally-driven arguments they want when they force their social engineering experiments on normal people, but the least they could do is stop lying about our ancestors. There has been no place for homosexual “marriage” in Western Civilization since the church shut down the Roman’s anal rape of slave boys.

Ruining Games

I didn’t really have anything to write about today, but it’s post day, so I’ll say just a bit more on gamersgate, inspired once again by Cracked and Mark Hill. Two articles were up today.

One was yet another anti-gamergate piece, (sadly, Cracked has now reached my Unvisit list) this one so stupid. For someone who is as supposedly pro-reason as Luke McKinney this is based very strongly in unreason. Despite this I’m going to engage it from points 7 to 1: genetic fallacy, irrelevant ad hominem, fallacy of composition/anecdotal, irrelevant to anything (his argument in #4 boils down to ‘people shouldn’t be allowed to discuss’), ambiguity fallacy, straw man, and, finally, genetic fallacy again. I should also note that the asinine immaturity of Luke McKinney in this piece is rather ironically humourous given that point #1 in last week’s article on gamersgate was “We’re Incapable of Mature Conversations About Gender”.

****

At this point, I’m going to make a small aside on the term Social Justice Warrior (SJW), as Luke McKinney is not the only one I’ve seen commenting on how SJW sounds awesome.

SJW is a term of pointed mockery. The mockery comes exactly from the fact that SJW’s are the farthest things possible from warriors. Fatties who revel in their obesity, feminists that go into conniptions when its pointed out that sluttery and tattoos go hand in hand, women that become physically ill from words, people who try to ban trashtalk from games because it hurts their feewings, and psychologically ill perverts who can not tell fantasy from reality are as unlike warriors as is humanely possible.

Using the term social justice warrior simply points out, in an ironic fashion, the pathetic weakness of the SJW’s (on an individual level; as a screaming, anonymous lynch mob they do have some social power).

****

Cracked and the rest of the SJW’s seem so very confused by gamers’ motivations against SJW’s that they can posit no explanation but ‘those evil mysoginists hate women’. Which bring us to the second article, where Mark Hill goes on about why video game narratives need to change. At first glance, this article seems relatively benign, what’s wrong with making suggestions to improve video games, but if we look at it closely, his arguments essentially boil down to:

6: Stories should have fewer sociopaths. He specifically points people who do things that make games fun as sociopaths, but, in context of other anti-gamersgate Cracked articles, it is clear that anyone deviating from SJW orthodoxy is a sociopath.

5: Villains should be made more morally grey, so the difference between heroes and villains are less stark (ie. break down traditional morality and replace with prog morality).

4: Games should decide your character’s emotions and reactions for you, the game should think for you, rather than you reacting to the game yourself.

3: The reason we’re shooting at people can not be ‘fun’, there must be a justifiable reason that is very easy to understand without reading.

2: Suggestions having to do with pacing and structure, which are not relevant, one way or the other, to my point.

1: Games should dictate morality, particularly SJW morality, rather than let gamers figure out moral quandaries for themselves.

Why, oh why, would gamers be against this? Why would gamers be against people trying to remove the fun parts of games and turn games into morality lectures?

Mark Hill is a perfect demonstration of why gamers are against the SJW’s entering gaming, and it has nothing to do with misogyny. They want to turn games away from the objective of fun and towards the objective of forcing their SJW moral system on people who just want to relax for a few hours.

Mark Hill, #Gamergate, and Punching Down

I’m going to add to the crapheap by wading into the #gamergate controversy. I’m mostly going to focus on a particular article at Cracked* by one Mark Hill, because I think it brings up a lot of the hypocrisies of the issue.

First thing, ‘Quinngate’? I don’t know what Mark Hill is smoking, but he’s the first one I’ve read who’s even used the term Quinngate; everybody has been using gamergate. He then uses this nearly non-existent term throughout the article, each time referencing how icky the term is. He is obviously purposely using this rarely-used term to smear gamers.

Now, his first point: “#4. We’re Incapable of Mature Conversations About Gender”.

He cherry-picks some immature comments, because of course in the millions of words spilled on this he’s going to find a few jerks.

Of course, he ignores that these discussions always start with his side, with the SJW’s lobbing accusations misogyny and racism at those basement-dwelling virgins (remember, Zoe Quinn controversy started when she started attacking Wizardchan). Why do the SJW’s expect a ‘mature’ conversation when every time the ‘conversation’ starts with ‘you are all a bunch of misogynist, racist, homophobes’? (who are virgins with small dicks). But, of course, he doesn’t point out the immaturity of the SJW’s, punching down is too much fun.

His second point: “#3. Male Gamers Think They Know What the Real Problem Is”.

Here he, of course, argues that white male gamers never have any problems and their opinions don’t matter.

The problem is that guys who have never faced discrimination because of their hobby or profession really do believe that this obscure ethical non-breach is the bigger issue.

I don’t know where Mark grew up as a gamer, but it must have been a nice place. So, how about I try to teach some empathy for all the SJW’s?

Many a young nerd (those evil, evil gamers) spent (spend) most of their lives bullied and socially rejected, partially because of their hobbies. They turn to places where they can escape: gaming, science fiction, comics, etc. Of course, these hobbies were ‘nerdy’ so they were only bullied and rejected more.

Now, when these hobbies are finally gaining some small social cachet, a whole new breed of bullies, your Sarkeesians, your Quinns, etc. are entering these nerds formerly safe spaces and are bullying them again. They barge in unwanted and start hurling insults and accusations. They use their much greater social power to demand the hobbies change and for those old icky nerds to be ostracized from their own hobbies.

Then somehow these social justice bullies are surprised that the nerds don’t take too kindly to this bullying. Somehow the bullied are the bullies for fighting back?

A minority of loud, male, and probably young gamers want to dictate what the rest of the gaming community talks about, because in their minds they know what’s important and best for everyone.

That’s because this is our community, our hobby, it always has been. Males make up 80% of the core gaming community with an average age in the mid-20s. Women are a small minority trying to break into our hobby and, in the case of SJW’s, destroy it. The ‘rest of the gaming community’ is a small minority out to silence the majority and force their minority viewpoints on the rest of us who only want to enjoy gaming.

So they recognize that gamers have a problem with gender — they just can’t understand how they’re contributing to it or why anyone wants to talk about it instead of their problems.

I’d turn this around on Mark: why doesn’t he, and all the other SJW’s, realize that the majority doesn’t want to talk about their problems and just want to have some fun gaming. Why does the minority get to dominate the conversation with their moral crusades? Why aren’t the majority allowed to talk about the things that effect the majority without a bunch of whiners whining?

Luckily, there’s this thing called “empathy” that can overcome that.

Funny Mark talks of empathy while supporting the people who attack depressed, near-suicidal, male virgins and take joy in destroying careers and bullying others. How about it Mark, where’s the Empathy from the SJW’s? From you for that matter?

Point 3: “#2. Gamers Don’t Really Care About the Industry (Until Women Are Involved)”

Here Mark is both lying and mistaking cause and effect. (I’ll note I don’t pay attention to the gaming press and haven’t since my PC Gamer subscription ran out a decade ago). He’s lying in that corruption in gaming journalism has been a long standing topic, not just something that appeared because of Zoe Quinn. This article from 2013 points out that these kind of scandals have been going on since 2007 (at least).

It’s not outrage over the gaming scandal that’s unique here, what’s unique is the press’ reaction. We’ll ignore the press cover-up for now, and instead focus on how the press only takes these scandals seriously when “harassment” occurs.

It’s not that gamers only complain when it’s women, it’s that the press only cares to listen when they can use accusations of corruption to start beating the accusers with accusations of misogyny.

Also, I’d like to turn this around on Mark. How come harassment only matters when it happens to women? I remember Matt Forney and the RoK gang undergoing all kinds of harassment: death threats, doxxing, castration threats, etc., and absolutely nobody outside the manosphere even noticed or cared. Yet every time someone makes a single negative comment on a woman in a forum somewhere, it becomes a major issue.

Or a bunch of sexually frustrated…

Here we see the hypocrisy of Mark and leftists in general. He spends his whole piece prattling about empathy and maturity. then he starts insulting his opponents for being sexually frustrated. Perhaps Mark could show some of his much-vaunted empathy and maturity?

Point 4: “#1. We Will Never Learn From Past Mistakes”

It’s not a fringe issue, though, at least according to this study that claims 63 percent of female gamers have been sexually harassed at some point.

Threats, etc. are a fringe issue. Those people making death threats and the like are a tiny minority.

Everybody gets ‘harassed’ online, that’s how online gaming goes. I usually only play single-player games, but for a while I was playing Starcraft online. I was regularly ‘harassed’ with a variety of epithets. If Mark was more of a man, he’d realize it’s because that’s how men act. Men are a competitive lot, when engaging in competition we trash-talk. If women want to join our spaces and play men’s games with men, they should grow thicker skins and take trash-talk for what it is. They should stop being thin-skinned whiners and start trash-talking back.

For ideological purposes though, Mark and his SJW ilk love to lump trash-talk, rational criticism, and death threats all under the label of ‘harassment’, so they can better smear critics and further their ideological agenda.

Remember the old saws, don’t play the game if you can’t take the pain and stay out of the kitchen if you can’t take the heat.

****

What Mark Hill and the other SJW’s miss in their victimization narrative is that they are the bullies, they are the harassers. Gamers and other assorted nerds escaped the trauma of public schooling, bullying, and social ostracism by retreating to nerdy hobbies and now just want to be left alone to enjoy their hobbies in peace.

But instead of leaving them in peace, the SJW’s are invading their hobbies and attacking them. It the SJW’s who have invaded gaming, not gamers who have invaded SJW space.

They should also realize it’s not the gamers who are punching down, it’s the SJW’s. The SJW’s have most of the gaming press writing insulting articles about ‘gamers’, they have Reddit and gaming sites banning #gamergaters posts and comments, and they even have the mainstream press jumping on gamers. Meanwhile, the #gamergate have no platform beyond their personal blogs and the occasional forum and are threatened with firings and never being able to work in gaming again if they dare express their opinions. Even Cracked itself has written two anti-gamer pieces on #gamersate and not a single piece from the other side (not to mention all the SJW in games stuff they’ve written previously).

The SJW’s should realize they are the ones with the power who are punching down. They’re the ones doing the harassing. They are the bullies.

The gamers are a mostly powerless group using what little they have to keep their hobby safe for them.

So, Mark and other SJW’s, please have some basic empathy for the nerds. Leave them in peace, stop punching down, and let them enjoy their hobbies without constant harassment.

****

Here’s my final point, gamers do not have a ‘woman problem’, women, or rather a particular type of woman, are the problem. We do not need women in gaming. If they want to game, fine.  My sisters regularly gamed with me (and on their own), and they still do, that’s great. Having women game is fine, what’s not fine is (a particular type of) women trying to change (ie. destroy) the hobby for their own ideological ends.

While we can take or leave women in gaming, we do not want SJW’s in gaming. I’ve been board-gaming (and winning at Monopoly) since I was 3 and video-gaming since I was 5, and we do not need lying Janey-come-latelies and fake geek girls intruding into our hobbies and whining about how Mario games are sexist. We do not need them whining about sexism because one game featured killing hookers, when almost every game features the mass-slaughter of men. We do not need them whining about racism when one game has people shooting Africans, when every second game is about shooting Germans.

This is our hobby and the SJW’s should leave well-enough alone. We want to game to have fun, to enjoy ourselves. We neither need nor want their idiotic moral crusades.

If women/SJW’s want to make their own SJW games, fine they can enjoy their Depression Quests, but they need to stay out of our games. Why do the SJW’s refuse to live and let live?

****

* If you want to know why I focus disproportionately on Cracked on this blog, it’s because it used to be my favourite site. I’ve been reading it daily since 2007, the majority of my adult life. I hate that its been declining over the last couple of years with increasingly mediocre columnists and humourless SJW nonsense, almost to the point where I’ve considered removing it from regular reading. I want it to go back to the good ol’ days of hilarious no-holds barred humour.

J.F. Sargent Sucks at His Job

Moving away from the marriage talk that has dominated the last few weeks, JF Sargent wrote an article for Cracked, supposedly on the men’s rights movement, which was, of course, non-flattering. The article was ludicrously stupid and was also unfunny. JF Sargent is obviously incompetent at his job and failed to do even the most basic research.

This left-wing nonsense is part of a pattern at Cracked, which has been sliding downhill for the last couple years, it’s sad because at one point they were my favourite site on the internet. Cracked has made the same mistake as many other forms of entertainment and decided the message is more important than fun. The great humour of the past is being replaced with boring SJ-stuff and snark.

Anyway, I’ll point out a few of his mistakes:

First the title: JF, it’s not uncomfortable to say something that’s the mainstream opinion. There’s no edge to attacking something most people either don’t know about or hate already and then parroting the mainstream opinion about said issue. Pretending there is, is just kinda sad.

I spoke to Frank Meeink, a former white supremacist, and Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology, about the men’s rights movement, and I found out that it has less in common with any civil rights or equality movement than it does with goddamn neo-Nazis.

I assumed the movement was like neo-nazis, so I asked a neo-nazi about this movement, and we concluded it was like neo-nazis. Am I ever a genius.

JF, there is a thing called confirmation bias, you should read about it.

If you want to learn about a movement, why not ask someone in the movement rather than someone in a completely different movement or a feminist academic known for his hatred of the movement? I’m sure Paul Elam would be happy to talk to you. Or, given that, despite the title, your article is all about the Red Pill rather than men’s rights, I’m sure Rollo would be as well.

But it’s a trick, because that’s not what these places are really about. Check out the very first sentence on a list of the Red Pill’s “fundamental beliefs”:
…
Yes, this shit is internally contradictory and sexist as fuck, but more importantly, it has nothing to do with men.

JF obviously didn’t do even the basic research an average 3rd-grader would put into his C+ book report.

The MRM and the Red Pill are different. The MRM is about men, or more accurately, how men are mistreated by modern society, particularly the government, and possible solutions to this.

The Red Pill is (primarily) about intersexual relations; it is about helping men understand women, so of course the basics are going to be about women. A man can’t understand intersexual relationships without understanding women.

He then goes on with cherry-picking quotes, I’m not going to address all of them, because hey, some members of any given group in an anonymous forum say stupid things (shocking). Quoting people only matters if they are some recognized leader in said group (which random /r/TRP commenters are not).

But I will point out a couple times where JF writes like an idiot.

Overall, I’ve found that their complaint about women is … that they exist. It’s the old dichotomy: If they’re too selective with whom they sleep with, they’re “hypergamous” (they only sleep with people of a higher social standing), and if they sleep around, they’re “sluts” and lack any worth as humans.
…
Notice how that description is internally contradictory enough to cover every woman ever: saying someone is a “hypergamous slut” is like saying they are “elderly infants” or “freezing hot” or “a tasty light beer” or holy shit you can’t be “slutty” and “too selective” at the same time that makes no fucking sense.

You can be both too selective about how you engage in something, yet engage in that something too much.

For example, I could be a glutton who overeats but be so picky my food intake is limited to pizza. I could masturbate 12 hours a days, but limit yourself myself to German BDSM porn.

JF, the only reason it doesn’t make sense is because you lack basic reasoning ability.

I said I was going to address more, but while writing this I simply got bored. I simply don’t care enough. It’s not worth continuing and it won’t make a difference, so, I won’t continue. He’s being willfully ignorant and I’m sure anybody who takes his drivel seriously won’t care either.

I just considered not posting this, but it’s been written and I don’t have much time this week to make another post, so here it is. Bleh.