You can give it to Arthur Chu that he certainly gave deceit “the old college try,” but his latest article in The Daily Beast ends up coming across as nothing short of cringe-worthy. The pile of unsubstantiated claims and rhetorical switches entombed in that verbal landfill is staggering. As a matter of fact, he immediately bemoans his tragedy in the title, “What I Got For Speaking Up.” The first thing Chu gets wrong is that “speaking up” has a connotative value of implying that one is swimming against a current, that they are saying words which come with difficulty due to their righteous unpopularity. Saying you were “speaking up” from the top of a mass-media dogpile is not actually speaking up, it is chiming in.

Chu’s major deceit in his piece was his attempt to rhetorically switch himself into the position of an oppressed, abused bystander whose only crime was trying to defend women in gaming. That in itself should come across as a tortured interpretation of feminism, bearing the subtext that women require him to brand his self-admitted attention whoring (his contributor profile on the site bears the quote that he is “shamelessly extending his presence in the national spotlight by all available means”) into white-knighting for their protection.

Chu also writes later in the article how he felt compelled to lend his disproportionately loud voice (quote Chu: “I’m a louder and more eloquent voice [I think]”) to the anti-GamerGate cause, without batting an eye as to how preposterous that makes his “poor me” narrative seem. Coupled with his characterization of Randi Harper’s invention of the ggautoblocker as an innocuous tool with no negative bearing on having substantive debate, Chu’s deceit reaches hyperbolic levels. Deceit to the power of n, deceit’s transitive property, or maybe deceit times mass equals the speed of lies, squared. He becomes a Frankensteinian abomination of social justice when one manages to simultaneously consider that while having an admittedly more powerful voice in the media and claiming that he requires the use of ggautoblocker to enjoy the use of Twitter, Chu then also complains how all of his Jeopardy!-bolstered whining hasn’t convinced GamerGate that it was wrong and to just shut up now.

But perhaps the most offensive thing of all in his disturbingly tone-deaf spiel is how Chu white-washes GamerGate. While he begrudgingly admitted to the involvement of women and minorities in the consumer revolt, he basically charges them with being Uncle Toms. Again, the social justice white-knight warrior reflects the opinion that minorities and women need to follow their scripts or lose their status. It is a crime to even incidentally agree with an actual white male, and one that is punishable with being branded a Republican.

What is completely ridiculous about the ideological team that Chu has decided to join is exactly this attempt to erase the identities of people who disagree with them. GamerGate has never been a Left vs. Right issue, unless either of those wings can prove that they own ethics and honesty. They are making it into a punishment, to exclude people from their beliefs for “getting one wrong.” Neither side of main stream politics has earned a seat in this discussion so far, and actually, one of the metrics by which one can emotively determine the positivity of GamerGate is to look around them and drink in the sense that they’ve formed a bond with people who put aside other ideological differences; people who have joined together in determining that gaining honest representation was paramount. Chu’s deceit will never, ever dent that.

Opinion by Brian Whittemore

Sources:

The Daily Beast

randi.io

Photo by Hans Splinter – flickr License

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