Well, maybe not Jim Sterling, since he doesn’t have the connections, but he certainly does a bang-up job of exposing the structural decay in so many entertainment industries. Video games, comic books, pro wrestling, movies all reek of rot and corruption right now.
The problem, as always, is money and capitalism. There’s always a selfish grifter happily exploiting any successful industry, clawing more and more wealth and power to themselves at the expense of others, preferring to maximize wealth inequity at the expense of distributing the art and science to others.
Just watched Jim’s new video. He’s great and I’m so happy he’s getting help. He’s good people. It’s nice to find a games journalist who acknowledges the abuses within the system. I love games, but even groups like CD Project Red, or CCP are guilty of exploitation. I love that Jim goes after the big fish like Ubisoft and EA, but the entire culture is toxic right now.
Jim is one to call it out when he see’s it and I appreciate it. Who would have thought that an entire generation of Counter Strike players calling each other “gay” and “pussy” as pajoritives would have caused people to dehumanize homosexuals and vagina people. (pardon my sarcasm).
I’d also suggest reading the work of Jason Schreier if you want to see exactly how bad capitalism fucks over workers in the industry, he’s been covering it with incredibly well-written stuff for years (and I suggest his book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels every opportunity I get).
It will hurt to read his stuff at times, because it really exposes that the rot goes to the core in the game industry…
Why is it that when you put a bunch on men (usually white men) in charge of something, they always have to start abusing people? I ask this as a cis-het man. I’m afraid that even if we get rid of capitalism, we’ll still have that problem.
Or I could just be depressed today and extra pessimistic.
I am glad that Jim is getting some help. I have been watching/reading/listening to him for half a decade and he has been just crushed lately.
I liked how he owed up to his behavior in the past (really, it was bad). Not only did he say he wants to do better, he’s been doing so. On top of that, he said he knows no one “owes” him forgiveness. If they’re still mad about the statements he’s made in the past, he said he understands. That’s the kind of thing we need more of in the world.
Liberalism assumes capitalism.
Time to update the banner?
F.O. @7:
Care to indicate where in https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/liberal there’s a reference to capitalism? Or in https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/liberalism for that matter?
@Skeptical Jackal #8
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_dictionarium
I don’t think he can do academia next … or ever. He hasn’t the experience in the field. The emotion, the knowing from having been there would be missing.
But you could, Dr, M.
You know where the bodies are buried.
jason the cripple @ #3
“First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women”
That’s not an entirely facetious quote either. Whispers around the various skeptic scandals definitely gave me a vibe that those guys – lifelong nerds who probably knew they weren’t the popular, sexy gregarious ones in high school, college etc and you’d think would have dealt with that in their minds by the time they hit 50 – loved feeling like they had groupies and behaved accordingly (in their minds).
Many of these other instances seem roughly the same genre. As soon as some guys are in a position of some power over some women they’re going to take advantage of that. I dare say many think this is why you get into that kind of position in the first place.
Jim Sterling, one of the few people who can make Atheists say “Thank God!”
I first saw him on The Escapist (the site underwent a change in management last year and is MUCH better) along with Yahtzee “Zero Punctuation”. ZP has some problems with the sexist language but it’s improving.
@Skeptical Jackal, #8:
Liberalism, particularly the liberal concept of property rights, is the ideological basis for capitalism.
Music is even worse, and MMA is so bad that fighters are leaving the sport for pro-wrestling. When labor conditions are better in pro-wrestling you know your industry sucks flatus out of stillborn wildebeests
Yeah @13 Ishikiri… Going from, “I have a right to keep my stuff, or sell/trade it for ‘fair’ compensation.”, is totally the basis of, “I should also be allowed to cheat people out of fair compensation for their work, and wring every dime I can out of the people I am selling to, then hoard all the money, instead of reinvesting it in society.” Or, as one asshole described the last bit, and no one called them on it at all, “Never invest your own money. Find some other poor saps to invest theirs, then keep most of the resulting profits for yourself.”
Funny how none of that crap seems very… liberal, to me. Its supposed to be, “All boats rise with the tide,”, not, “I will buy even the tide, if I can get by with it!!!”
You’re just not thinking fourth-dimensionally (dumb Back to the Future reference).
Look, you’re using “liberal” as if it’s equivalent to “leftist,” like it means something good, decent, reasonable, coherent…. That’s where the confusion comes from. John Locke’s influence on the topic is an okay place to start, rather than how you or I may use the words now.
Historically, that is what “Liberalism” has been about. Notice how this right is regarded as “inalienable,” if you already have property. (Thus, “you shouldn’t steal my stuff. Nobody else has a right to it, and I do.”)
But at the same time, people are definitely alienated from everything this is meant to entail, if they’re too poor to have any property to begin with. (Thus, “you’re poor? Then fuck you. If you want to live, get off my lawn before I start shooting.”)
Anyway, to some limited extent, this did represent a kind of political progress, for a specific group of people who owned land and such, several centuries ago. But it’s not the kind of leftist idea that you have in the back of your mind now.
It isn’t just cishet white guys. Any group that gets power can abuse that power. Do you think that there haven’t been women and/or people of color that did horrific shit to people they were in power over? You see it less frequently because it’s harder for that particular group to get more power in a society stacked against them.