“Attention Peasants: The Show Trials Have Been Cancelled Until Further Notice!” shouts Brian Cates of the Draw and Strike blog, as he takes Thomas Sowell’s classic Vision of the Anointed playbook diagramming coordinated leftwing activism and its aftermath and applies it to GamerGate:
THE FOUR PATTERNS OF SOCIAL POLICY FAILURE
“STAGE 1. THE ‘CRISIS: Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a ‘crisis’ ….Sometimes the situation…has in fact already been getting better for years.
STAGE 2. THE ‘SOLUTION’: Policies to end the ‘crisis’ are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and ‘simplistic,’ if not dishonest.
STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z.
STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as ‘simplistic’ for ignoring the ‘complexities’ involved, as ‘many factors’ went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently, [but wrongly], predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors.”
As they say at BuzzFeed (and yes, I’ve been leaning hard on this horrible headline trope this week), you won’t BELIEVE what happens next! Read on, to see how the GamerGate attack on ordinary every day video game players who were minding their own business before being singled out as the this week’s Emmanuel Goldstein by the Socialist Justice Warriors played out using precisely this formula.
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