Just a quick note, the following is not game related and may not even be all that humorous. We'll see as I write it.
Okay so whether you live in America or not, you probably saw some sort of news coverage last week about a white nationalist/supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia that turned very ugly. Hard to believe a bunch of people who identify with Nazis attract negativity huh? As bad as it is though, it's starting to unite everyone else. Lots of people who might have been on the sidelines no longer are, and that's a good thing. And one thing we're starting to see is individuals who were marching with the white nationalists or whatever you want to call them are being identified and singled out. They're being reported to employers and losing their jobs. Basically they're paying the price for their hate speech. Good. However, I'm starting to worry that the righteous might be getting a little too righteous with their vengeance.
One of the people who was recently singled out and identified as taking part of all of this was a cosplayer who went by the name Alisa Kiss, and she's someone I happen to know. She was never an A-list cosplay celeb (who are all D-list celebs in the first place), but Alisa was one of the first girls out there with a name that you could say and other people in the scene would at least recognize her name and even today a lot of people in the Southeast know her name. This is partially due to a couple reasons:
1. Her costumes which were good.
2. The pool of costumers was a lot smaller in the 2000's than it is now.
3. She had a softcore/tease porn site that apparently made her quite a few bucks for a while.
I won't pretend to have ever been friends with Alisa or I even have something nice to say about her. Frankly, she was always kind of a cunt. I first met her 15 years ago when I went to my first big comic convention, DragonCon, and we were all a part of the burgeoning cosplay scene. Sidenote, that's also when I met a pre-boob job Yaya Han for the first time. Anyway, Alisa was not particularly friendly to many people and earned a pretty deserved reputation of giving the cold sholder to anyone who wasn't a photographer and being pretty full of herself. But we were in the same social circles so our paths crossed from time to time and over the years our paths crossed multiple times. She even dated a friend of mine for a few months. And in all that time I learned more than anything else she was dumb as a brick. Brown toilet paper kind of dumb. So now that I hear she is attending a white pride neo-nazi rally? Well it makes a certain amount of sense.
So that brings us back to earlier in the week when it was discovered by someone or something that she attended the event in Charlottesville. I don't know all the details of how that was discovered, but it was. She tried to deny it at first and insisted she was just in the area. That was proven to be a lie. Then the real damage hit. An article about her was posted at Bleeding Cool News and it details everything that went on and even provided video of her alongside her husband who does appear to be a full-fledged cardboard shield carrying neo-nazi. - https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/08/18/supergirl-cosplayer-went-charlottesville-guess-whose-side/
Anyway the fallout for her has been pretty swift. She's deleted her social media accounts or locked them down. Her web host is no longer hosting her porn site. And on social media... yikes. Since we travel in similar social circles we have several mutual friends on Facebook, and man let me tell you I'm seeing the virtual lynch mob up close and personal and it is scary. There are insults, mud slinging and death threats. If I'm to believe everything I hear she's been a racist since high school, and her mom is an even worse and a full fledged neo-nazi.
Surprisingly though I almost feel bad for her. Almost. Like I said before Alisa, while cold, was stupid as fuck. I can honestly see her husband brainwashing her to some extent. But that really doesn't matter. She was there, she was chanting, and she earned the fallout. Take away her cosplay fame. Take away her porn site. But the lynch mob mentality that's heating up... I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. There's too much being thrown around, and who knows if its all true. Seeing what's happening to her makes me wonder what would happen if the wrong person got fingered in a case like this. Hell, it did a few years ago during the Trayvon Martin shooting and Spike Lee tweeted the address of the shooter George Zimmerman. But it turned out, it was the wrong George Zimmerman, and the result was an innocent elderly couple got harassed and threatened (there's your additional reason to dislike Spike Lee if you needed one).
So it's all got me wondering about justice and how far people should take things. Hell, I just want this summer to be over. Things always seem to get bad when it gets hot. I think that alone is reason enough to care about global warming.
I don't think they were saying jews. It sounds like "YOU will not replace us" to me.
I've never really understood hate groups of any kind. It's one thing to protect your own, but to just outright be against everybody else who isn't exactly like you doesn't make much sense to me. People always like to feel as if they're a part of SOME kind of group though, one way or another. I truly think the media and the news outlets make everything out to be worse than it is though. They always do....constant spin and trying to push their own agenda. Even the images they show you over and over again...it's designed to give you a certain impression of any given subject. Not always the most truthful one.
As for the freedom of speech...it's not just hate per se. Corporations are really taking advantage of social media and you could take any subject at all, and anything even remotely "on the edge" that you say is being used against people now. That is fucking ridiculous, and it's something that has only popped up in the past decade. I know for a fact the company I work for would be scoping out this website if they knew I posted here. I don't even give anyone at work my gaming username's on the consoles, because I'm all set getting in trouble for calling out of work and having some jackass tell people I was playing videogames or some shit.
Yep, I never link this site to social media for that very reason, though I do think it's fairly innocent here, still not worth it.
The only two reasonable positions are always completely true or completely bullshit (making the former easy to distinguish from the latter), so perhaps the stupidest if I'm muddying the two with each other.
But I'm trying to be completely sincere in anything I say now. Which is why I say very little on the internet anymore.
I think freedom of speech should be paramount, as long as it doesn't lead to violence or stigmatizes a group of people. Purely as an example, it's ok to say that Robio is an idiot and a danger to society who should be locked up, but to say that all VGPressers are idiots, a danger to society, and that they should all be locked up is taking things too far in my opinion. Also, crying out to go over to Robio's place and bash him up good is where free speech ends.
As I've said before, this whole polarisation of western society can be traced back to the advent of the internet as a means of mass communication. It gives everyone a more or less annonymous forum to place their small crate, climb it and start spewing nonsense. Even worse, contrary to the roman fora of old, this virtual forum has the tendency of sorting all these crate-abusing loonatics together, giving them their own quiet corner in which to bask in the approval of likeminded idiots untill they have all convinced eachother that their common viewpoint is acceptable and the only correct one.
What we're seeing now is that nationalistic and protectionistic political ideologies, which are currently on the rise because people yearn for simpler days when the world seemed smaller and safer while at the same time ignoring all the extra wealth globalisation has brought them, are giving credit to what once were rather harmless minorities, strengthening the beliefs of said minorities even further to the point where it seems, to them, acceptable to go out onto the street declaring their twisted views to the world, or worse feeling justified to start physically harrassing certain demographics, like we saw happening in Brittain after the Brexit.
I think that we're at a crossroad in history which started with the industrial revolution. We've come at a point where life standards in the west are so high that they are incapable of sustaining themselves. We all love all the little bits and bobs we can afford, but also ignore the fact that the only reason we can afford them is because they're being made far away in appalling circumstances. This then leads to the loss of jobs. At the same time, the wealth in certain poorer parts of the world is increasing as well, which in the end will leave us all with money to burn, but no one willing to cheaply manufacture the goods we crave. At that point we will either be forced to pay a fair price for our goods, which in return we will want to be more durable than the disposable nature of most consumer level goods we buy today. But in the end this will lead to a perceived loss of wealth as we will be able to buy less for our money. The other option is that robotics will take over nearly all production processes, leaving humanity with nothing but spare time and free goods, be they actually free or subsidized through a form of base income for everyone.
Lol poor foolz, great post before even I got it was very proffersor like.
I believe all forms of hate speech needs to disbanded. If you want to do it privately, post some stupid viewpoint on social media, put a confederate flag outside your home, that's fine. An organized march of people who's message is hate other races needs to be shut down immediately. Same if BLM starts ranting about attacking cops, you cross a line into personal threats goodbye. Yes it gets muddy cause taking down the police infrastructure can be viewed as a threat, the message needs to be clear to that you are attacking the system not a person.
Now ifthe argument about the hate groups is they marched on a social platform of "take back what's ours" ok that's no necessarily a direct threat, well you know what too fucking bad. Those groups have a long enough history of violence where they shouldn't be allowed a public space ever.
Man this whole saga just took another step into WTFville. Alisa just got herself a well known defender in the costuming community named Jamin Fite. He makes Slave Leia metal bikinis and they're considered the top of the line. He also organizes these big meet-ups of girls dressed as Slave Leia at the bigger conventions like Star Wars Celebration that get a lot of press, and because of this he goes by the very charming name of "The Slavemaster." He does however exclude any woman who is over a size 6 from participating in these shoots. Oh and he's also a very public holocaust denier.
Yeah, he actually is a very public holocaust denier. People who've known the guy for a while have always known he was a scumbag for various reasons, but about a year ago he got a little too public on social media about how much he hates the Jews, and a lot of his holocaust opinions came out of the woodwork. When that whole controversary hit he eventually ended with a special apology that went something like, "I'm sorry.... that you're too stupid to understand what I'm saying" and then deactivated his social media accounts. That kind of sunk of professionally, but only briefly, as he did quietly reactivate things, and went about his work to people who don't pay attention to this kind of stuff.
Anyway he chimed in to defend Alisa, and reminded everyone what an awful human being he is. And he really is. The details are of course at Bleeding Cool News once again - https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/08/20/holocaust-star-wars-cosplay-designer/
I'd like to say, "what the hell happened to this hobby of mine?" but the truth is, whenever anything gets popular dumbasses find their way into it. And hell, a lot of these dumbasses were here all along. They just had the sense to keep it quiet and didn't have a dillhole of a president to empower them.
There's a GAF thread on this.
And...... its been locked.
Wow. WTF indeed.
Now if they could only get the furry community behind them then everything would be perfect.