- Joined
- Oct 1, 2013
Usually, a normal person would go along with it, even if his views are completely different (if only to please the heads). And if he wanted to quit, then he'd do it professionally or something along those lines and move on with his life no problem.Thank you for your kind words.
Idly, name any item in that post I made, and I can get you a citation for it.
Fact is, this is one of the reasons GG's been a sticking point for me.
It's all well and good to make fun - that's pretty much what we do here, and there's no shame in that. There's plenty to make fun of in Gamergate, ranging from the fact that it's literally a group consisting of a bunch of nerds from across the tubernets that finally had enough of the media's shit, to the fact that this very group of nerds managed to do millions of dollars worth of damage to Gawker (to the point where several familiar with Gawker blame it more than Hulk Hogan for its demise), accomplished pretty much everything it set out to do (get the FTC involved enforcing disclosure guidelines, taking down pretty much everyone involved in Gamers are Dead, discrediting DiGRA as a whole), donated enormous amounts of money to charity, and most importantly to a Kiwi, gave us the glory that is the Rat King subforums and some of the most broken, dysfunctional lolcows we've ever had the privilege of covering. Hell, most GG supporters readily acknowledge how fucking Autistic the whole shebang is and will laugh about it right alongside you, because for fuck's sake: Look at it.
Over the last few years I've done a lot of chronicling about the subject, both in relation to lolcows and on its own, since I've been looking for my own answers about the matter, to the point where I'm something of the Kiwi Farms' resident expert on the subject. I've proposed a lot of theorycraft on the matter and I've taken a lot of time to try to figure out how the pieces fit together.
The simple fact of the matter is that virtually nothing ever said about Gamergate by the mainstream press, or by GG opponents has been even remotely accurate. Not even close. I'm not sure how much of the reporting blindly about GG being all about harassment is due to narrative pushing (we've seen it a few billion times with other cases of narrative pushing; again, Ghostbusters coming readily to mind) and how much of it is due to simply not giving a fuck about the actual facts, but the truth is right there for anyone who cares to go looking for it, which of course brings me to the last point I wanna make in this long-winded posting.
If you take a closer look at almost any high-profile Gamergate opponent, you will, without exception, find a case of them being either directly or indirectly tied to Quinn's clique in some fashion or another. This is literally why the fucking Rat King subforum exists, and the result of this is fucking self-evident.
Moving on to the subject of the thread, however: Has Bobby ever told you the real reason he got fired from the Escapist? He covers it a bit in his AMA on Reddit:
There's more to the story though, if you're interested.
Chipman tends to use some weasel words here, so I'll break it down for the uninitiated. One of GG's biggest and most aggressive pushes was to attract the attention of the Federal Trade Commision to cover things like the blatant conflicts-of-interest exposed by the Game Journos Pro list and native advertisements. GG was hilariously successful at this - in fact, if Gawker wasn't killed by Gamergate weakening the company enough for Hulk Hogan to finish it off, odds are very good it would have faced a full-fledged FTC investigation over its shit.
Fact of the matter is, however, that The Escapist was currently being looked at - not actively investigated yet, but looked at - because several of its staff had been caught on the list or directly involved with other scandals. Jim Sterling, for example, was indirectly implicated in the Alistair Pinsof scandal, though it's questionable whether or not he had anything to do with it. The Escapist had nothing to hide, and was working with the FTC to establish disclosure guidelines, which Chipman himself was against.
Chipman also, however, absolutely lost his shit over the fact that Gamergate discussion was being allowed on the site, and he started going out of his way to leak information on what was going on at the site to his buddies in Quinn's clique, basically proving that long-held suspicions that he was just as involved with conflicts-of-interest as many suspected was a legitimate worry.
Bear in mind that at the time, the active attempts to shut down discussion of Gamergate was happening all across the net, and the fact that The Escapist was allowing discussion was a major sticking point for Jim Sterling (who quit the site when they wouldn't shut down GG discussion, which we'll discuss more in a moment), and Chipman as well - both of them also, surely by coincidence, happen to be personal acquaintances, IRL, of Quinn herself.
Suffice to say, these two chucklefucks arguing that GG discussion MUST BE STOPPED NOW BECAUSE HARASSMENT isn't looking particularly good when the inevitable occurs and the FTC starts casting its angry searchlight The Escapist's way, looking for malfeasance. The site tells both Sterling and Chipman to ratchet back the ongoing bullshit a few notches, since The Escapist was one of the first sites to enforce disclosure guidelines as a show of good faith and really wasn't keen on pissing off the FTC or its userbase - of which Gamergate was a giant chunk of. In fact, The Escapist's staff are among the ones who were in the GJP list, but told the likes of Ben Kuchera to fuck himself regarding censoring GG discussion on the forums. Jim Sterling saw this as kowtowing to internet terrorists and wound up quitting the site. Chipman, in turn, doubled down on his Anti-GG idiocy, in the face of all common sense. Chipman begins leaking ongoing details of the Escapist to his buddies in the clique, whilst actively running damage control for them.
At around this point, GG's Internet Autism Machine (read: the boycott arm of the movement) sees this, smells blood in the water, and it starts contacting the site's advertisers and the FTC about Chipman's massive conflicts of interest and support of Anti-GG talking points. If you're familiar with the amount of damage GG can do with just one fucking Boycott campaign, look to Gawker, which it cost it millions over the course of a few months - so the Escapist had good reason to worry.
The inevitable happens at this point, and Chipman is recognized as a liability by the site owners. His show is one of the least-popular the site has, he's drawing the attention of one of the biggest boycotting arms the Internet's seen in ages, and he's directly putting the site's attempts to make nice with the FTC in jeopardy by actively fighting the disclosure guidelines. At this point the Escapist fires his ass, and Chipman tries to make himself out to be some sort of self-styled martyr. Nobody is sad to see him go and his depature is literally cheered by the userbase.
So yeah, he sperged about GG until it got him shitcanned.
But of course, since this is MovieBob. This is a "Fuck yer' logic, I do what I want!" scenario that backfired horribly. And it amazes me that his bullshit's not got him banned from twitter yet.
