I don't mean to beat a dead horse but it occurred to me that that Gail post from a while back is also incredibly disrespectful to the arguments in favor of the behavior from pros. If people are going to argue "but my political sperging and representation will create MASSIVE societal changes for the oppressed" then it's highly inappropriate to do a cutesy "forgetful grandma" act. It makes you look like an idiot for the hyperbole and it makes someone like me look like a jackass for taking your premise more seriously than you do.
It's an observation that applies to a lot of this now that I think about it. If they legitimately believed they're changing society then they should take it more seriously instead of....whatever you call their twitter drama.
And this brings us to the real heart of the issue, and the one fundamental and indisputable factor that unites comicsgate with gamergate, starwarsgate, fucking magicgate, and every other goddamn "gate" out there alongside 99% of the anti-trump screeching and just about all media/academia whining about every form of bigotry imaginable.
These people dont fucking care about the causes they claim to fight for. They just want to make themselves look better.
That is literally all of it.
The fundamental thing that unites marginal middle aged media hacks like gail and borderline-personality psychos like quinn and cynical political charlatans like hillary and literal fucking autistic speds like secretgamergrrl is the fact that all of them see "progressive values" as something that is only useful to benefit themselves personally, both as an armour to shield themselves and their jobs/social cliques/agenda/obsessions from criticism and mockery (along with burying the litany of shady secrets and blatant hypocrisies in their closets), and as a weapon to destroy any who might threaten their status and their image and which justifies any and all aggression and demagoguery and abuse and deceit and continued shadiness and hypocrisy.
Since this is 100% preformative this near universally translates to "
declare [GROUP/PERSON THE KEWL KIDS KLUB HATES] to be the most evil and despicable people in history and spend literal years screeching about how much I hate them and want them to suffer and cry, and this will show people how woke I am and how useful I am to the cause and make them less likely to target me for shit I have said/done in the past", especially among the ranks of those who orbit the various cliques and in-crowds and are desperate to impress them and be seen as useful.
For them these values are solely a means to enrich and empower themselves in these really fucking petty and pathetic contexts at the expense of others, both directly (i.e
. those who get declared heretics and are thus cast out/branded as untermensch due to either expressing dissent, or for simply being in the way somehow) and indirectly (i.e.
those they claim to fight for who get none of the enrichment and empowerment, and wind up becoming seen as culpable for the obnoxious and repulsive and hateful shit done by their self proclaimed defenders) and the moment these values become uncool in the various cliques and circles which these people operate, they will abandon them and the people they claimed to represent without hesitation and will just straight up start backstabbing them if they think it will benefit them.
However until that time, these people see it as directly in their interest to keep ratcheting up the demagoguery and hysteria about how people wanting better comics are literally rapist neo nazi terrorists and how everyone in the industry must immidiately bow down and declare them as such lest they be declared part of the rapenazi conspiracy. The more they pointlessly ratchet things up, the better they think they look, the more social capital they attain, the more they can fraternize with the kewl kids, the more they can get their own stuff shilled, the more shady shit they can get away with on the sly which their SJW friends will look the other way for
And ya know, I hate to keep beatin this dead horse here, but this shit is an exact fucking mirror of how the fundie revival in the 80s/90s worked, and which still echoes on to this day. So many fucking televangelists and satanic panic stirrers and moral guardians were absolute fucking sinners to the core who did shit that their own preachings damned them for, and yet they happily kept on preaching and damning in order to make themselves richer or more powerful or simply more influencial in various ingroups and cliques in media and government.
