Liana Kerzner at Comic Con 2008, dressed as Dawn. Picture via Wikimedia Commons.
The Witchfinder welcomes the thoughtful and insightful contribution of Liana Kerzner to the debate over gender identity and video games as well as her rejection of the monopolitical approach taken by Anita Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency. Your Inquisitor recommends Kerzner’s Patreon.
Free Speech or Controlled Speech? Art approved by the Party or Art approved by the Public? These are the questions that underlie the often heated #GamerGate controversy, questions that are central to our society.
Only a few weeks ago, 3.7 million people marched in France for Free Speech (1.5 – 2 million in Paris alone, according to Wikipedia). I chose an article about that to link via ‘Free Speech’. For ‘Controlled Speech’ I chose a link to the Khmer Rouge with their infamous piles of skulls. The Khmer Rouge were a leftist / Communist dictatorship in Cambodia that killed up to 3 million people. In the aftermath of the regime, another 650,000 starved to death.
When considering politics, it is worth remembering that the most vicious ISIL jihadist, be he one who has severed human heads as a mower severs wheat, has nothing on the blood soaked history of the 20th century left. Similarly, the regimes that Wikipedia says claimed the lives of 85,000,000 – 100,000,000 people were defined in large part by their monopolitical, monoideological, totalitarian, free speech controlling systems.
Like Islamic terrorists, the modern left have never abandoned their push to control speech. The Communist governments fell as their ludicrous economic systems failed so they switched to social enforcement via Political Correctness. The term ‘Political Correctness’ originated as a description socialists used to criticise hard line communists but in more modern times it means an attempt by the cultural and political left to enforce control by way of social and economic ostracism.
The same polarisation is seen in the so-called #GamerGate controversy. Feminist Frequency creator Anita Sarkeesian alleges games are bastions of negative portrayal of women – literally ‘tropes against women’ and her supporters have sought to obtain influence over this aspect of culture by making allegations of misogyny. The tropes are so broadly defined that in reality they could cover anything.
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