Also now that I have tried to read more than a paragraph of that bad fake. That shit reads more like HP Lovecraft than an academic paper. Literally substituting basic English words for "means something similar but would only ever be used in a specific scenario" words.
This is what fucking 14 year olds think academia is like.
“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting” was the aphorism of France’s influential post-war thinker, Michel Foucault, who is one of Sarkeesian’s philosophical influences, and it is one that Sarkeesian could well apply to her own body of work. But employing Foucauldian tools to chisel into the nature of power and oppression in pop culture requires at the outset a characterization of power (that itself rests on assumptions), or else any sustained analysis would have no political bite. But to offer what is power leads to the pernicious effect of considering where is power. In taking Foucault’s claim in The History of Sexuality that “power is everywhere” including all that such a colorable pretense entails, the entire thing seems to become relatively homogeneous — and so power is ostensibly nowhere. Just like the perception that darkness is the privation of light, an antipode of relation to power is resistance, whose existence is dependent on a certain social actor; and since society can’t exist without power because it is omnipresent, then under Foucault’s oeuvre, human agency and emancipation is rather nonsensical.
This both reads like "I have no idea what the fuck I am talking about" and like Douglas Adams.
“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
While decrying capitalism foisted upon the culture industry with the Dadaist spirit which Sarkeesian affects, she has fully funded her current web series, “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” through a version of bottom-up capitalism (i.e., crowdfunding), and amassed six-figures over her original requested amount. It quickly becomes clear that Sarkeesian is able to reconcile her personal views of capitalism, that of a growing pillar of oppression, with her craving to become a pop culture critic. That she conveniently massages her belief system in favor of private ventures says more about her than anything else.
Now I probably should watch Sarkeesian's videos myself to find this out, but I was under the expectation that her videos on Feminism don't actually go on Socialist rants? So this would be someone going on completely unrelated rants about their own specific interpretation of the views of the presenter rather than the literal body of work presented. Someone want to fill me in on that? If they are feminist videos full of Marxist ranting then suffice to say I don't need to be donating to Able Gamers any time soon.
Also
what in the actual fuck does where she got money from have to do with anything and is this seriously suggesting that she is doing terrible things because she is using the money exactly what the kickstarter said it would be for instead of taking the money and running? Or returning to private industry?
The quotes they cherry pick to use as examples of her being "Marxist" are
ike the atavistic leftovers of Marxian dialectics, Sarkeesian points to capitalism as the root and wellspring of patriarchy and class struggle:
We should have better representations, but in our fight for media justice we have to push back against the social systems that maintain dominant [sic] cultural norms such as patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.
She later writes:
…shouldn’t the villain not be one single bad person but rather acknowledging that the root of our problems lie in institutional systems? It’s not about the singular evil corporation but the entire way corporations exist within capitalism.
Neither of which is saying anything about Capitalism being the root of all evil. It is saying Capitalism is an intrinsic social norm these days and to use a real world issue as an example, that something like say wide approval of credit far beyond people's ability to pay back might have be an institutional problem and not just the actions of one bank.
When Sarkeesian’s rhetoric twists into a personal moral prerogative, her morally loaded and provocative language brings an undercurrent of flippant, almost otiose acquiescence to an unchallenged moral authority which lays itself open to parody. Curiously enough, in all her charges of oppression (mentioned no less than twenty times), Sarkeesian never offers the basis of her criterion for the intuitive notion of “oppression,” a term which is heavily value-loaded, both morally and politically. In the Philosophische Bemerkungen, Ludgwig Wittgenstein considered when “two men mean the same by the word ‘white’,” and asserted that the meaning was determined by “how you are searching” for the answer. There is no evidence to qualify and explain Sarkeesian’s methods, or lack thereof, in answering her self-question: “what does a female hero (and even a male hero) look like outside of patriarchy?” This central question is left unanswered.
This entire paragraph is a pile of fucking stupid.
When Sarkeesian’s rhetoric twists into a personal moral prerogative, her morally loaded and provocative language brings an undercurrent of flippant, almost otiose acquiescence to an unchallenged moral authority which lays itself open to parody.
This sentence says absolutely nothing. It is literally "Because she believes something we can laugh in her face". Academic!
Curiously enough, in all her charges of oppression (mentioned no less than twenty times), Sarkeesian never offers the basis of her criterion for the intuitive notion of “oppression,” a term which is heavily value-loaded, both morally and politically.
Again, I should watch the videos, but I kind of thought she actively is trying to show people how this oppression works. I am sorry this concept couldn't be boiled down into a single line sound bite for the writer, but as someone who has read Foucault they may realise that Power structures are actually quite complex and difficult to describe within modern sociological frameworks, but even if you actively reject them out of hand like we do here, Power and the way it interacts was still quite hard to describe even in more classical structuralist frameworks.
In the Philosophische Bemerkungen, Ludgwig Wittgenstein considered when “two men mean the same by the word ‘white’,” and asserted that the meaning was determined by “how you are searching” for the answer.
If only there was some highly educated philosopher with works on definition of terminology and meaning that had already been introduced into this conversation earlier that was pertinently relevant that could be referenced instead of bringing up a singular unrelated theorist from the early 1900s instead of one more relevant to modern theories. I suppose no such theorist exists however so we must make do with what we have.There is no evidence to qualify and explain Sarkeesian’s methods, or lack thereof, in answering her self-question: “what does a female hero (and even a male hero) look like outside of patriarchy?” This central question is left unanswered.
You mean like *gasp* that maybe the Power exerted by the Patriarchy that she is discussing
might be ever present and exerting influence into all our media by subtle and complex mechanisms and that while there is a strong patriarchal society with no space that is not influenced by it, we may be entirely unable to answer this question? It sure is a shame that an inability to produce and answer completely invalidates the existence of a question to begin with. I was really looking forward to finding out what a male hero looked like outside of a patriarchy. I bet he is hot and has a huge dick.
And on that note I am out. Fuck this nonsense and fuck me for being stupid enough to even read any of it.
Edit - Nope I am a fucking moron, the last paragraph set me off more and I couldn't leave well enough alone.
Despite sciolistic posturing about ills traced to patriarchy in Western civilizations, Sarkeesian enjoys far laxer academic scrutiny and far more media acclaim, the sycophantic, often panegyrical, and nearly always smarmy push of coverage from the credulous herd of journalists on their pet idol of the hour forming the core of her widespread propaganda.
Take THAT Youtube videos! You should be peer reviewed just like all the other Academic journals! What would a woman know about "oppression" from the "Patriarchy" with her "Masters degree" in "Social and Political Thought". Clearly she is presenting a BARELY researched poorly thought out diatribe on a topic she has no education in. This clearly shows in the fact that she gets media coverage from people in the industry that she is talking about very directly. Unless of course they meant something different than Sciolistic than the dictionary definition. OH MAYBE THE DUDE FROM HARVARD IS SAYING SHE KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT VIDEO GAMES. That must be it. I mean it isn't mentioned anywhere else in the article, but that must be it. That or Harvard be fronting on York and shit gonna get real soon.
One is strongly reminded of the indefatigable Dutch feminist and political author, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, striving to recall the founding concerns of feminist theology. She writes in her memoir, Nomad:
There was a long article in The New York Times that went on and on about who [in a couple] would load and unload the dishwasher. If you have a career and you’re so intelligent, you can work that out. You don’t have to have a manifesto. There is feminism that has evolved to a kind of luxury.
This only says or means anything if you are out of hand completely dismissive of there being anything to discuss here about Feminism or that there is already a mass of equality in video games and the video games industry. No one is that fucking stupid right?
The more Sarkeesian critiques pop culture for a wide audience, the closer it circles in to the day that the world may know that all that glitters is not gold.
Indeed. The more people that see criticism of pop culture the more hopes we have that video games are not fucking flawless and perfect the way they are.
I think we had better flood the area with cool water for 20 minutes or until help arrives because that dis to Anita is an
