Unfortunately, Ms Mensch is well aware of the potential problems here, so she is running the reverse Deza playbook and throwing up as much smoke and fire as she can to obscure the real issues. Do you think this blog has anything to do with the fact that for the first time since this began, she is directing tweets at me (with ridiculous threats of legal action and more veiled subtle threats of violence from her ridiculous crew of anonymous losers)? Go back and search her timeline and my name - you see what's going on here. When this all started, the respective follows on our two accounts were roughly a 300:1 ratio; now that has dropped to less than 100:1. I'm still the underdog here, but LM has certainly noticed that things are no longer trending in her favor. Hence, the increasingly desperate and unhinged attacks which, by the way, I find both hysterically amusing and also encouraging. Keep at it, LuLu!
Captain Steve has actually faced real danger in his life; the bogwench is a serious annoyance but not remotely intimidating. However, and this is where the story turns a little dark, this is not harmless Twitter fun.
Judging by the group of completely clueless fools who descended on my timeline last night with some incredibly dumb takes, it is clear that that the vast majority of people on Twitter are ignorant of what is going on here. (If you want to be offended that I called you clueless and ignorant, now is the time to go ashore. If you actually care enough to want to learn something, stick around.)
Ok, now that those fools have left, let's get down to it. If you are unfamiliar with Gamergate and the toxic shit that went on during that fiasco, I highly recommend that you fire up AltaVista (heh-heh, Parks and Recreation joke there, just couldn't resist whipping that out) or your own personal favorite search engine and spend a little time reading up on that. I'm not supplying a link here because I want you to look for yourself. This is not just relevant to the current discussion, it's actually some good background for other issues like the Alt-Right, the Pepes, the Men's Rights Movement (MRAs), and all sorts of other absolute nutty crap that currently pollutes our society. This will not be time wasted; you have my guarantee. The MRAs begat Gamergate and that led to the alt-right and the pepes and return of real live Nazis showing their faces in public again. It's quite a little trip.
But what does this have to do with Louise Mensch? she's just on Twitter trying to help us get rid of Trump with her fan fiction about the scoops she makes up in her head. Ok, hold onto your hat, kids, this gets a little bumpy. The bogwench is not your ally. She is here to stir up trouble, distract people from what is really going on, and generally create chaos. She also probably thinks she is going to wrangle herself a book deal or some kind of TV gig off her ability to dupe the gullible with a pack of nonsense. For the longest time, I really felt that what we were dealing with here was a troubled woman who was purely driven by her own demons: a need for attention, a sense of self-importance, fame, whatever. However, recent events have made Steve reexamine that theory. Sure, Louise has her personal demons, but the dramatic turn over the last month from "just some crackpot spewing nonsense" to the ringleader of a vicious band of thugs who are threatening real people with harm has made me reconsider all of that.
And this takes us back to Gamergate. I am going to give away the surprise ending here for those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, but I really do encourage you to go look for yourself. Gamergate was a prototype alt-right movement to make being a fascist look all cool and hip to the youngsters. It's hard to get the kids interested in joining the KKK these days. ISIS isn't the only evil organization who has discovered that the internet is a great way to radicalized young male losers. Gamergate was all about asserting white male privilege within the gaming community and casting any other groups as the enemy (primarily feminists, but also PoC, LGBTQ folks, etc.) It all took place primarily online and especially on Twitter. Prominent voices from the unprivileged communities were targeted in a campaign of bullying, threats, doxxings, etc. It's a shameful episode and one that I know NONE of you would even remotely begin to think was acceptable.
OMG, when is he ever going to get back to Louise Mensch, this is so boring...
You know who really made a name for himself on Twitter and in the wider world during Gamergate? Our old friend Milo Yiannopoulos. Even if you are have no idea what this GG stuff is all about, you surely have heard of this scumbag, whether it was from his recent pedophilia embarrassments or his banning from Twitter last summer for the racially motivated attacks on friend of the blog and all around American hero Leslie Jones. (For goodness sake's, if you don't know what I am talking about here, please fire up your Alta-Vista.) Poor old Milo wore out his welcome on Twitter last summer and the world is a better place for it. Fortunately, he had a friend who wasn't going to shun him in his hour of pain.
That's is Milo and Louise Mensch at a hotel in New York sometime in July 2016 after Milo had finally been permanently banned from Twitter. Louise will blather something about "defending free speech" here, but she and Milo go back a ways. In fact, Milo is a such a generous soul, he has helped tutor Louise in the various nefarious and underhanded Twitter mob management tactics he perfected. And Louise is running the Milo playbook to perfection here today on Twitter as she spreads chaos and confusion in an attempt to divide and neuter the opposition to Trump. Why exactly she is doing that is a question for another post, but Captain Steve now believes that this is no longer entirely about her own insatiable quest for fame and influence; there are other forces at work. Perhaps her employer, Rupert Murdoch? Perhaps other shitheads from the GOP who want to weaken the Democratic party? If you want to have fun some time, take a look at who Louise attacks and who she leaves alone. Take a look at who denounces her and who promotes her. The picture is muddy, but some clear patterns emerge if you look closely at it.
One of the first thing that will jump out to even the most casual of observers is that Louise spends the vast majority of her time attacking women. Captain Steve is one of the few penis-owning folks on Twitter who has faced the full wrath of her attacks. She really has it in for the ladies. One of the most pathetic things about Louise's follower base is that it appears to be approximately 2/3 women. Given that her anti-Trump posturing has brought her a mostly liberal crowd which surely includes many self-described feminists, I am going to risk an accusation of mansplaining here and suggest that many of you of the fairer sex ought to spend a little time familiarizing yourself with Louise's many comments on women and feminism. I think you will find it quite enlightening.
So what - some of those women have attacked Louise for being a fraud - doesn't she have the right to defend herself? Sure she does, and if all she was doing was firing back on Twitter with some Oxford inflected bon mots, I'd say fair play to her. But that is not what is going on here; Louise has assembled an absolutely brutal group of complete assholes who are waging a Gamergate style of intimidation and bullying to silence her critics and to just generally create chaos on Twitter. These people have doxxed, bullied, threatened, and as things go when this stuff gets out of hand, it has moved offline into the "real world" where people's livelyhoods and safety have been put in danger. This is completely out of hand, and it needs to stop.
More to come shortly....
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