Nowadays there is one thing that feminists are excelling at: Creating outrage out of absolutely nothing.
How? Well, we have a concrete very recent example (which is not the only one, and will most certainly not be the only one): The new Watch Dogs video game has a black protagonist. A semi-famous internet critic (Jim Sterling) searched high and low for some forum comment about it that could be even remotely interpreted as negative, and wrote a sensationalistic article about how the gaming community is full of racists. And, of course, the rest of the gaming media copied him like mindless drones.
Mind you, that forum post that Sterling quoted in his article wasn't even racist. (It was just someone pondering on whether the character design was chosen for political reasons, and wishing that the possible identity politics behind it wouldn't affect the plot of the game too much.) But that doesn't matter, of course. It can be interpreted as negative, therefore it was obviously racist, and therefore the gaming community is rife with blatant racism. And every gaming media outlet out there is swallowing this whole.
And thus a controversy was created from thin air, out of absolutely nothing.
Do you know what the appropriate word for this is? Propaganda. Pure, unadultered propaganda.
And do you know what's scary? The propaganda is working.
How? Well, we have a concrete very recent example (which is not the only one, and will most certainly not be the only one): The new Watch Dogs video game has a black protagonist. A semi-famous internet critic (Jim Sterling) searched high and low for some forum comment about it that could be even remotely interpreted as negative, and wrote a sensationalistic article about how the gaming community is full of racists. And, of course, the rest of the gaming media copied him like mindless drones.
Mind you, that forum post that Sterling quoted in his article wasn't even racist. (It was just someone pondering on whether the character design was chosen for political reasons, and wishing that the possible identity politics behind it wouldn't affect the plot of the game too much.) But that doesn't matter, of course. It can be interpreted as negative, therefore it was obviously racist, and therefore the gaming community is rife with blatant racism. And every gaming media outlet out there is swallowing this whole.
And thus a controversy was created from thin air, out of absolutely nothing.
Do you know what the appropriate word for this is? Propaganda. Pure, unadultered propaganda.
And do you know what's scary? The propaganda is working.
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