revealed! where tumblr sjws actually come from!

[reddragdiva]

in which someone literally posits that the root cause of tumblr social justice warriors turns out to be ... an obscure and short-lived somethingawful forum that neither you nor any sjw you’ve ever met in your life has ever heard of nor would care about. a subforum for ron paul fans, no less (the “laissez faire” forum). somehow, ron paul fans literally caused tumblr sjws.

this is the internet equivalent of explaining your loss of absolute cultural hegemony to yourself by concocting a conspiracy theory called cultural marxism that you trace back to a bunch of obscure and forgettable academics called the frankfurt school. though of course it was those darn jews all along!

(curiously unexplained: the beatles.)

the attraction of this sort of claim is that if an utterly unknown political subforum on the internet can bring about such sweeping cultural change, then he has hope that his own mra gamergatey outpost of the dark enlightenment could one day hit the big time. i don’t buy it myself.

sa is the quintessence of sneer culture, but treating it as the unknowable protean bogeyman final boss of the internet that is the ultimate source of every bad thing and its opposite bad thing may not constitute a good source of workable social theories.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

The place is considerably better than its reputation. At least the bits I'm reading.

[damerell]

Part of what gave me this epiphany was that I had not expected to read this and this from EVE's chief Goon. Besides being apposite, they're also very amusing, and one of the first pieces I saw clearly making the "even if this nonsense were all true, what did you _expect_ from games journalism, FFS?" point.