Gamergate's Political Dimension

Mytheos Holt has written an article about GamerGate for The Federalist, entitled GamerGate’s Anniversary and the Rise of the VideoCons. Holt describes the inception of GamerGate as a consumer revolt against unethical gaming journalism.

Holt goes on to say that GamerGate mounted "the first serious resistance to the pervasive social justice ideology that has crept into seemingly every area of culture and politics." This is how I found GamerGate, or should I say, it found me. GamerGate pushes back against the notion that unequal outcomes always bespeak discrimination.

This is a distillation of how and why I went from being a liberal to being a conservative: The modern liberal is now a progressive that will always value equality over liberty.

This is why I identify with the GamerGate side, even though the politics of most of them are not my politics. What we have in common is that we are liberty absolutists, whether it comes to speech or behavior or deeply held beliefs. Holt makes an important point when he says that "GamerGate remains leery of the Right."

Why? Because many in GamerGate believe that "the Right is just as illiberal as their new enemies on the Left." The perceived hallmarks of the Right, Holt says, are its "continued fear of porn, its willingness to cave on bills that restrict internet freedom in the name of cybersecurity/anti-piracy, and its phobia of certain areas of scientific inquiry."

These are profoundly important points, and correct to a large extent. But is there currently any serious effort from the Right to curtail or even stigmatize pornography? I believe most people have made their peace with pornography on the basis of individual liberty. Most of the efforts to censor porn come from radical feminists.

As far as "anti-piracy," the limits of copyright law is something everybody should be eager to discuss. I think it's ridiculous that someone can get drunk, write a catchy song in one night, and receive royalties seventy years after passing away. The plain fact is that a copyright is a property right, and without property rights there is no liberty. Also, the bulk collection of internet and phone records is a threat to individual liberties. It would be better to use metrics that identify serious threats to safety, but that practice is decried as "profiling."

Holt's comment about "phobia of certain areas of scientific inquiry" is not expanded upon, but one can imagine what he meant. Climate change? With all the falsifications, cherry-picking of data, and appeals to popularity and emotion deployed by the alarmists, the hysteria of climate change is going into history's wastebasket along with Piltdown man.

Did Holt mean evolution? It's still called the "Theory of Evolution," isn't it? I don't know anyone who doesn't acknowledge the role natural selection plays in the development of species. It is the illiberal left who refuses to believe that natural selection may play a role in the disparity of intelligence among races.

The notion that conservatives are anti-science goes back to the Bush 43 ban on new fetal stem cell lines. Maybe Holt was referring to stem cell research? It turns out that the more promising lines of research are happening in the field of adult stem cells.

What I perceive as the conservative movement's greatest weakness, is that the Right is portrayed as unfeeling and uncaring about those less fortunate. In Arthur Brooks' new book The Conservative Heart, he mentions that the Right needs to start talking about people, not things. For example, progressives claim that the Right always wants people to practice self-reliance, and "go-it-alone." Not true. The Right understands that people need incentives, and intergeneration dependency is a serious problem, too.

What I would like to see is the government run more like Amazon. In the New York Times profile of Amazon yesterday, the article notes how "The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff." I don't think there are too many Amazon employees watching porn at work.

I'm very interested in a government in which "team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year."