Recently, Arthur Chu wrote a whiny article in The Daily Beast filled with lies, whining, more lies, more whining, and did I forget to mention some lying happened?

https://archive.is/xT8Nw

I shall take his histronic, dishonest screed and take it apart here:

Original in italics, my comments in regular font:

The Making of a ‘Terrorist’: How I Was Framed for the Paris Attacks by GamerGate Trolls

We haven’t even gotten past the title and Arthur lies. Not only is there no proof a GGer did this (quite the opposite in fact), GamerGaters CALLED OUT THE PHOTOSHOP.

But regardless Arthur, don’t let a little thing like the truth stop you.

Veerender Jubbal is a pleasant Sikh from Toronto who doesn’t curse. So why did a doctored photo of him as a suicide bomber end up plastered all over the news?

Meet Veerender Jubbal.

I confess that, as with many other people I’ve only met through social media, I don’t know much about his personal life — how old he is exactly, whether he’s in a relationship, what he does for a living. He’s “Twitter famous” in the most arbitrary sense of the term; a random Torontonian Sikh with family in India and 12.4K Twitter followers who mostly posts about his interests and rarely about himself.

His English is sometimes awkward, being his second language, and his “takes” are sometimes naïve — as he has had to all-too-frequently say in the past year, he’s “just a kid.” But I’ve always been impressed with the sincerity and the earnestness with which he writes; he’s a relentlessly cheerful, positive person who refrains from personal attacks and negativity with a scrupulosity that’s rare in the vicious snark tank of modern-day Twitter. Part of his “brand” is refusing to use profanity, and responding to insults and trolling with a stone-faced “Gosh.” He’s even been given the honorary title of “Social Justice Healer” by his fans, and for a while his avatar was a picture a friend drew of him as a Blue Lantern — while the better-known superhero team the Green Lantern Corps is known for willpower and grit, their Blue Lantern counterparts are known for optimism and hope.

Alright, so far, so good.

On November 13, 2015, one of the worst terrorist attacks in history occurred in Paris, a coordinated series of bombings and shootings that left at least 129 dead and 300 injured. The radical Islamist terrorist organization known as “ISIS” or “Daesh,” based in Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility.

Thanks for not finding a way to blame GGers like you usually do, Chu. Was getting really tired of you contorting reality to somehow make us responsible for the Ashley Madison hack, the Patreon leaks, and the rise of Hitler.

On November 14, 2015, a photo of Veerender Jubbal — a Sikh (not a Muslim) from Toronto, thousands ofmiles away from Paris or from the Middle East — was misidentified as a photo of one of the Paris terrorists by pro-Daesh groups online.

A newspaper in Spain, La Razón, ran Veerender’s photo on its front page as “One of the terrorists.” An Italian TV channel, TG24, similarly put up his photo as a stand-in for “the terrorists.” He’s reported that he’s now seeing his photo everywhere with stories across Europe, Asia, and the U.S. talking about the “controversy” over his doctored photo.

The media didn’t do their jobs and ran with it without proper fact checking. Gee Arthur, GAMERGATERS WARNED ABOUT THIS SORT OF SHIT JOURNALISM.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say Veerender’s life has been ruined by this experience. These things pass, and it’s hopefully getting easier to cope with them as people — especially prospective employers — begin to realize how unpredictable and irrational online shitstorms can be.

But this is going to haunt Veerender’s Google results for the rest of his life, probably. It will be an ongoing risk factor should he ever need to pass a background check. In the wake of the fear and rage after the Paris attacks — and the general climate of Islamophobia that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon — it very much puts his life at risk.

Alright Chu, I’ll grant you I personally found it tacky and given the current climate, you have an arguable case of endangerment here.

What the hell did Veerender do to deserve this? Why, out of everyone in the world, did he end up being the victim of such a sadistic, senseless “prank?”

Well, see, it’s because he criticized video games.

WRONG. More like he did what you do: say unsubstantiated crap about us gamers in the most inflammatory way possible, hide behind the harassment narrative you, him, and your fellow gang of grifters and lunatics have constructed, then you rely on the very news media we’ve called out since day one for dishonesty to keep those memes going.

The only reason Veerender is “newsworthy” is because along with his interest in anime and his hobby of swapping selfies with his online friend — one of which got Photoshopped into the aforementioned “terrorist” pic — he also loves video games. He talks about things he likes and doesn’t like in video games. One of the things he doesn’t like is that, as a Sikh who has a hard time finding positive portrayals of brown South Asian dudes in general and Sikhs in particular, he feels that his favorite games are less welcoming to him than white guys.

Fine Arthur, then he needs to get an SJW friendly studio to make one.

In May 2014 he made the mistake of saying so publicly, writing a single tweet about Far Cry 3’s disturbing box art showing a light-skinned man forcing a brown-skinned man to his knees. He said so in the mildest possible way one can air a serious concern: “Hope you are all well. Just wanted to say — the box art is racist.” No profanity, no rage. The bare minimum of a “callout.”

Ok, fine, he didn’t like it. As I understand, the light skinned guy was the villain, the whole point WAS to make you hate him, so, given context, that makes sense and was not intended to convey an IRL slur against people of color.

Then again, I’m probably expecting too much of either of you to exercise critical thinking.

In response, he received a flood of threats, attacks, and racial slurs. As he said at the time, “I wrote two tweets. I had responses for ten whole days.” The reactionary gaming culture sworn to destroy people they labeled as “identity politicians” and “SJWs” out to ruin their games had marked him as a target, even though it hadn’t yet gotten a name or a clubhouse.

Weird, Chu. Aside from the obvious trolls and assholes of the internet, we didn’t like him shitting on us and we certainly don’t like people trying to force their butthurt identity politics on our favorite media especially when it’s based on out of context buttmad, but I certainly didn’t consider him a “target”

That was only the beginning. A few months later, in August, the reactionaries got a name (“GamerGate”) and a clubhouse (the r/KotakuInAction subreddit, 8chan, and their insurgent presence as an unending horde of Twitter eggs and anime avatars) and a strongly established ideological commitment to halting political and cultural change in the gaming industry as some kind of holy crusade.

And you don’t think anti-GamerGaters doesn’t act the same way (before you say there is no anti-GG, just GGers and the rest of the world, shut up, that’s a crock and we both know it) about their beloved harassment narrative and diversity politics, then I question your intelligence and integrity. You’ve even admitted your own zealousness to your own causes before on social media and multiple articles, including that of opposing GG, so if fanatics exists, there are obviously some on both sides.

Gamergaters, raised in a dysfunctional world of rankings on leaderboards and “grinding,” tended to celebrate the fact that they were able to keep the #GamerGate hashtag trending through tireless, endless repetitive tweeting of links, retweeting of each other, and creation of new accounts. As gamers with a distorted sense of reality based on thinking of everything in quantifiable numerical terms, they seemed to think this spamming of Twitter — terrifying their targets but mostly confusing and bewildering bystanders — constituted “winning.”

I don’t even haunt the chans, Chu. In fact, not everyone who is a gamer haunts the chans. Also, where are you getting this “distorted sense of reality” crap from, that same hilariously idiotic report the UN was using linking gaming to Satanism? I’m a gamer and know full well its just phosphor dots on a screen that have no bearing on reality, an opinion I will bet money is the majority of opinion for most of humanity.

So when a “counter-hashtag” successfully trended for a while in October — #StopGamerGate2014 — their reaction was immediate, intense, and disproportionate as hell. And as is typical for their “movement,” it became a personalized attack against the poor guy who had the misfortune to “start” the hashtag by being the first one to tweet into it: Veerender Jubbal.

And having every media outlet call us woman hating pricks and trying to get us branded domestic terrorists isn’t just as bad as our supposed crimes? Pot and kettle Chu. Pot and kettle.

Being Veerender Jubbal online has not been a pleasant experience since then. Those two strikes were enough to damn him in the eyes of GamerGate zealots as an “enemy of gaming” and to make everything he said and he did fair game for massive waves of harassment and trolling.

Chu, you’re horribly naive here. Even completely nice people on the internet get trolled and harassed because some people just like to be dicks for the hell of it. Your chances of getting trolled / harassed reach 99.99% if you have an opinion on ANYTHING someone else disagrees with. I know, happens to me all the time, but instead of sobbing into my keyboard, I get over it, and as Tyler The Creator aptly put (and I paraphrase):

“How is that cyber bullying? Close the screen.”

Basically, you, Jubbal, and everyone else who sees mean things said about them on the internet has the power to let it affect you or react to it. By surrendering that power, you, he, and everyone else who lets insipid fools saying mean things get to you are playing into their hands.

It got to the point that, in February, he quit Twitter for several months despite having a strong social network of friends and well-wishers there, because that network had been so poisoned by the trolls.

Trolling has been on the internet since it first became usable by the public, Chu. Even if Twitter were to become a hugbox, this would’ve happened elsewhere. He chose to leave despite that support network, that was his call.

Veerender isn’t the only person who’s been slimed by GamerGate. He’s not even the first person who’s been slimed by GamerGate by them Photoshopping him to look like a suicide bomber (they did it to me).

Cry me a river. You’re the guy who was tweeting “IT ENDS TONIGHT!” and a bomb threat followed not long after. Granted, I still maintain accusing you of the crime without proof is wrong, but you kinda set yourself up for that by being an inflammatory zealot handing your enemies ammo to mock you with.

The fact you are mad over it means you played into their hands, so good job Chu, you have only yourself to blame for your current butthurt.

Nor is this instance, when GamerGate trolling broke out into the “real world” media, in any sense the beginning of their harassment of Veerender. They’ve been mocking him by Photoshopping him into photos of 9/11 for months. They Photoshopped screenshots of his tweets to libel him with false quotes, justifying harassing him as an “anti-white racist”.

And here we have the infamous trotting out of crap you either wrote or shilled to prove your point canard and well as trying to throw mud on any truthful claims by claims they were shopped.

Chu, we both know that if you look at the original tweets (or archival site versions where they conveniently vanished), Jubbal is damned by his own words just like Randi Harper’s own words damned her. As for the photoshops, nice try blaming us as a group based on fluffed up invective and cherrypicked datum.

Their by-now predictable response to this latest incident is to complain that there’s no proof the particular racist vile troll who made this particular Photoshopped image of Veerender is “truly GamerGate” (as though their deliberately amorphous, leaderless “hashtag movement” has any official membership rolls).

Because the party behind this WASN’T. I know you want to blame us every time life gets the slightest bit unpleasant, but get over yourself, Chu, we’re tired of being the boogeyman for you and your fellow harassment narrative victim complexers.

They draw an equivalence between putting an innocent Sikh man at risk for racist violence and Veerender’s supposed offense of accusing “innocent gamers” of racism. Their favorite new news organization, Breitbart Tech, publishes a high school bully-style sarcastic condemnation of the Photoshopped image while insulting Veerender and snickering about his situation.

You should be damned grateful Breitbart condemned it, they could have just kept their mouths shout and just laughed at his pain, but they stepped up to condemn it. As for the snickering, quit whining Arthur. If Encyclopedia Dramatica can call me a moralfag and I get over it, you can get over being called “Bombchu”. Besides, if you and your friends can mock GamerGaters, turnabout is fair play.

I can only respond the way I’ve been responding for a long time to these hilarious shenanigans: This is not a game.

Maybe not. But your whining is hilarious, so sob some more, your tears are delicious.

We live in a world that has yet to adapt to instant mass communication on the scale of modern social media in many ways. It’s not just possible but easy to manipulate publications hungry for clicks into ruining someone’s life or career over nothing — Breitbart, in particular, has made an art of doing so. Even a small-scale social media shitstorm can easily lead to one particularly zealous person crossing the line to get a SWAT team sent to your house — or to your family’s.

Okay, Breitbart ain’t perfect Chu, but one swallow doesn’t make a spring. You write for Salon, a rag that white knights pedophiles, but that doesn’t make every other article crap by default, so false equivalency there. As for the swatting crap, I’ve yet to hear law enforcement confirm it was actual, identifiable GGers behind these acts. Oh sure, the media reports we’re Hitler, but then again Buzzfeed tried that but tried to backpedal when proof surfaced we actually were innocent of the Jubbal photoshop, so your article links are shoddy evidence.

The trolls who are intent on denying that games and media and Internet “bantz” should be treated as real or have real-life consequences keep pushing the envelope. The people who trumpet that no consequences and no moral considerations should be allowed to compromise their absolute freedom of speech keep going further to make their point.

Arthur, you white knight Brianna Wu, who libeled me on Twitter and got TotalBiscuit harassed for months. You glorify Randi Harper, who damns herself as guilty of all the claims she’s a harasser by archives of her own words. You blow glitter up Zoe Quinn’s backside, when she was forced to withdraw a gag order from Eron Gjoni that was withdrawn because it was unconstitutional.

You side with some real winners there, Chu, so stop claiming the moral high horse.

As for freedom of speech, as an absolute believer in that, I’ll just say this: your idea of what is acceptable speech is what I consider fascism, and I’ll die before I live in the state of acceptable speech you idolize.

We are at the point where a bloody, horrifying tragedy is fair game to be exploited in order to fuck with a random, innocent person the Internet hate machine has decided needs to be taken down. Where Veerender’s possible death is something to laugh and joke about, as is the diversion of attention and resources from real perpetrators.

I agree. We GamerGaters are tired of the thugs you white knight getting away with hurting real people.

The for-profit “legitimate” mainstream media sources that put his face in the newspaper and on TV bear the biggest lapse of responsibility, yes, and I hope his family successfully sues them for defamation. But the blisteringly-rapid instant-gratification no-time-for-fact-checking news cycle of “legitimate” media is a response to the pressure they constantly experience from social media. Veerender’s doctored image wouldn’t have gone viral in the first place if not for a great mass of unaccountable civilians deliberately spreading it for shits and giggles with the hope of screwing with his life.

CRY ME A RIVER. Seriously Chu, you think you can prevent evil by wishing it away? Even if you aren’t religious, that’s just going against all knowledge of human nature there.

The anonymous person who created that image and the many, many anonymous people who shared it bear responsibility for the damage done to Veerender’s life and to his safety. In a just world, people would be afraid to pull off pranks of this caliber because they’d face not only moral responsibility but legal liability.

The ‘just world” fallacy. Sorry buddy, but the world is what it is.

Unfortunately, under the current legal regime, we don’t live in that world. I’m hoping to be proven wrong, but judging from the many other times things like this have happened, the anons responsible are probably high-fiving each other about how successfully they’ve upended a random person’s life and created a massive media tumult over their shitty Photoshop job. They won’t be found, they won’t be prosecuted, and they’ll be emboldened to continue stepping up their sick, sociopathic game until they eventually get bored or they finally go too far and step into an actual FBI sting.

*Facepalm* Again, I refuse to live in the fascist state you prefer where all mean people are punished if they offend you, and I’m glad your wish for such a hellish world has yet to be realized.

The intensity of the game of ruining lives keeps ramping up. We keep getting platitudes using terms like “bullying” or “trolling” that implicitly diminish this game to a mere annoyance, something to toughen up and ignore. We keep getting promises from the people making massive profits off of all this online activity and “engagement” that they’ll do better without any evidence of change.

Allow me to play “My Heart Bleeds for Thee” on the world’s smallest violin for you.

Veerender is safe, for now. Most of the people I know who’ve been trying to weather this storm are safe, for now — jobs have been lost, homes have been fled, countless productive hours lost to fear and anger and social media damage control. But gamers “trolling” feminists on Twitter haven’t yet literally gotten someone killed — at least not someone famous enough for me to have heard of them.

Your claim to fame is “gaming” (how ironic) Jeopardy. Second, mean tweets don’t kill, Chu, they never will. Finally, if mean tweeters did so much damage, how come all those “harassed” have the media firmly in their corner, most of them are quite well off, and they have hordes of rabid dogs like yourself willing to assault us via acid pens if they are so helpless.

I suspect it’s only a matter of time.

*dies laughing*