James’s and Milo’s Year In Liberal Stupid, Part One

JAMES: “Rape Culture”

If you want to know what “Rape Culture” really looks like, just pay a visit to Islamic-State-held territory in Iraq and Syria.

Here you will find no shortage of heartbreaking examples of the real “war on women”, as evinced by this tragic quotation from a young Yazidi woman captured by ISIS and sold into sex slavery:

“If you know where we are please bomb us… There is no life after this. I’m going to kill myself anyway – others have killed themselves this morning. I’ve been raped 30 times and it’s not even lunchtime. I can’t go to the toilet. Please bomb us.”

Now compare and contrast with the confected, faux grievances of the West’s oppressed female Social Justice Warriors, as they battle against such appalling injustices as: their insufficient representation on bank notes; people saying horrid things about them on Twitter; being asked to cover up while breast-feeding at five-star London hotels; being subject to unwelcome scrutiny over their unsubstantiated claims about having been “raped” at university; not having been given as many Nobel-prizes as men have; being treated like sluts in video games; etc.

It is no coincidence that most of the angry young women making these complaints are childless. In the (possibly quite unlikely) event that one day they find a male they are prepared to mate with and they are blessed with a son, what they will belatedly realise is this: that they have helped create a world viciously and unfairly inimical to the interests of the person they most love – their boy – whom their tiresome campaigning will have stigmatised as a greedy, testosteronal, rapist-in-waiting.

MILO: “GamerGate”

To many readers, video games will seem an odd battleground for the culture wars to play out in. But in fact the people formerly derided as basement-dwelling nerds have been revealed as heroes and inspirations this year. Gamers are the only fandom ever to mount a sustained revolt against social justice warriors riding in to “save” their hobby from “misogyny” and other invented offences.

The culture crusaders did not see it coming. Previously, in the worlds of science fiction, fantasy and comic books, they had been able to shame innocent fans into prostrating themselves and begging for forgiveness before the altar of third-wave feminism and all its contrived, manufactured complaints. But gamers fought back, ridiculing the absurd critiques from feminists like Anita Sarkeesian.

They were rewarded with a vicious smearing by left-wing journalists and feminist developers who discovered, and in some cases almost certainly manufactured, rape and death threats to paint gamers as misogynistic villains intent on driving women out of the games industry.

Nothing could be further from the truth: video gaming is one of the most inclusive, diverse communities on the internet. But it’s also populated by methodical, determined people who like to win–people the feminists weren’t counting on fighting back.

The war has been so acrimonious and so thrilling that I’m writing a book about it which explains not only why feminists were dumb to pick gaming as a battleground but also why each of us should be grateful for the spirited and relentless but infectiously good-natured defence gamers have mounted against this poisonous incursion into their culture.

GamerGate, indirectly, had a huge effect on feminism in the popular imagination this year, because it showed third-wave feminism up for what it is: a hateful, bullying, authoritarian creed of funless cultural Marxism.

If only the rest of us had a gamer’s gumption…

JAMES: “Torture”

1. So which of the year’s two big torture stories did the mainstream media consider most worthy of our attention?

Was it

1. a) the revelation that a bunch of terrorists, including the one who had masterminded 9/11, had been made to suffer various unpleasant, but non-fatal indignities including waterboarding in order to try to gain intelligence that might prevent future atrocities?
2. b) the revelation that the British military is now so heavily circumscribed by human rights law that the kind of cruel and unusual techniques its interrogators are expressly forbidden from using include: blowing on the suspect’s neck; shouting loudly in his ear; touching him on the nose with a piece of paper; dangling cigarettes in front of them in order to persuade them to speak? (Apparently the rule now is that you should give them as many cigarettes as they like instantly. This is a better deal than British soldiers in military prison get: they’re limited to five cigarettes a day).

I think you can guess the answer.

Do you not find this perverse? I don’t mean “do you or do you not approve of waterboarding?” or “are you against torture”, much though some of you would like this to be the subject of this particular post so that, yet again, you can parade your virtuosity by declaring how very much against them you are and how we in the West need to hold ourselves to higher standards yadda yadda.

What I mean, rather, is can you not see something effete, decadent and self-defeating in our enthusiasm first for washing our dirty linen in public (as the Democrat Senate report was so eager to do) and second for showing apparently more concern for the human rights of those who would destroy us than we do for our own soldiers and for the civilians they are trying to protect?

Tune in tomorrow for Part Two…