#Gamergate Event Evacuated by /Baphomet/ Bomb Threat

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Gamergate should be out looking for this guy. But I don't think they will.

Gamergate should be out looking for this guy. (Source: 8ch.net)

Last Saturday, a poorly attended conference about #Gamergate whose name escapes me was cut short when a hacker from /baphomet/ sent a bomb threat to panelist Milo Yiannopoulous. Naturally, the event hall was evacuated and the assorted hacks in attendance continued their discussion regarding ethics in Gamergate at the parking lot. Ultimately, the cops didn’t find anything, and concluded the threat was just hot air.

And, perhaps even more naturally, #Gamergaters blamed “”anti-Gamergate”” and nebulous “”SJWs”” for making the bomb threat minutes after the venue was evacuated. (In fact, the event organizer blamed “”anti-Gamergate”” (including myself) for trying to “shut down” the event before it even began.)

So it seems #Gamergate has picked their bad guy, and is sticking to that story. But their story doesn’t match the facts. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that Baphomet, in particular some guy who calls himself “Eclipso/SWATAnon”, actually sent in the threat, and then framed Gamergate blogger The Ralph Retort. The guy who sent the threat has claimed responsibility for other SWAT attacks. Here’s a recording of a SWAT attack Eclipso made back in January, then posted on Baphomet as proof he made the call. 

The alleged threat. (Source: CH Sommers)

One of the alleged threats. (Source: CH Sommers)

It’s not surprising in the least. Baphomet, a Gamergate-aligned black board, has a history of hurting people within their parent movement just to cause chaos. At an earlier date, this same Eclipso guy claimed Ralph Retort paid him to send a SWAT team to Devi Ever’s house, just to get back at Ralph for castigating Baphomet on his blog.

There’s a part of me that suspects Gamergate actually welcomes these bullshit Baphomet threats as a way to demonize those who speak out against them. But in refusing to call out those actually responsible, Gamergaters are allowing the worst elements in their movement to get away with criminal activity. The more #Gamergate blames Baphomet’s bad behavior on “”SJWs”” or “”third-party trolls””, the more emboldened Baphites are going to be the next time one of them is dissatisfied with the performance of talking heads like Ralph Retort.

I mean, Baph already doxed Sargon. (Yes, that Sargon.) He & his followers blamed SJWs for it, despite the thread on Baphomet saying “I think it’s time we went after Sargon.” Hours after that thread got started, some Twitter account I’ve never heard of was sending Sargon photos of his house. Call me crazy, but these things don’t seem coincidental, and they don’t seem to be coming from GamerGhazi.

Where will Gamergate draw the line? At what point will the movement’s de facto leaders stop and wonder ‘just who the hell am I doing this for?’ I suppose doxing and fake bomb threats to spoil their meetups isn’t sufficient, or at least, the allure of blaming these things on Arthur Chu outweighs the inconvenience of being stalked and harassed by angry fans.

Let me be clear: SWAT Anon/Eclipso is but one of several examples of really obnoxious behavior at the AirPlay event from Gamergate spectators. The live chat stream for the event was polluted with swastikas and hate speech, until the organizer disabled it for the afternoon panel (which was cut short by the evacuation.) As I anticipated, some panelists were doxxed in the live chat. Eclipso was not the only guy working the event, which, some commentators noted, received the threat just as Milo Yiannopoulous was losing his cool onstage. It would be wrong of me to speculate whether the bomb threat was made as a favor to Yiannopolous, or a ‘fuck you’ to the event’s organizer.

My dislike for any individual #Gamergater aside, I wish no ill upon them. I don’t think they deserve to be doxed, or harassed, or to have SWAT teams sent to their house, because nobody deserves that. But Baphomet seems to be sending a message – and a loud and clear one – that if #Gamergate’s most popular personalities don’t perform the way they want them to, they’ll be next in line for the LW treatment.

And that is unethical as all hell.

Sargon of Akkad: Actual Fraudster?

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Hypocrisy, thy name is Carl.

In addition to stealing intellectual property to make hate porn, there’s evidence Sargon of Akkad actually defrauded his backers in 2014, raising funds for a video game which has yet to be made.

Way back in March 2014, when Sargon was still ranting on the Internet for free, he decided to make a video game called “Necromancer.” It’s a zombie apocalypse survival game coded in Unity with like, some necromancy elements straight outta Blizzard. Under his company name, Other Worlds Software, Sargon pitched a Kickstarter to raise funds. The fund drive was a success: 77 people donated £8,016 to make the game.

18 months later, Necromancer hasn’t yet been released. The steam page for it seems to be languishing away In Greenlight Hell. Last week Sargon released two long-ass “development streams”, which are basically radio shows of him pretending to be Brianna Wu.

But excuse making on YouTube isn’t the product Sargon said he would make. Older posts show what appears to be screengrabs of the levels, which may or may not be anything close to ready for play-testing.

What’s also strange is how Sargon routinely criticises Anita Sarkeesian for not releasing her videos on schedule, when Sargon himself is months behind on his own little Unity game. I thought this stuff was supposed to be easy, man. Is the podcast/radio show just too lucrative?

Sargon’s backers probably don’t want to hear it, but I’m not afraid of him sending haters on brigade. He’s a thief, stealing copyrighted videos and his backers money, just to personally enrich himself.

Sargon of Akkad: A Thief, a Liar, and a Bully

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Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. (Source: YouTube/David Pakman Show)

Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. (Source: YouTube/David Pakman Show)

There’s no argument that Sargon of Akkad’s (real name: Carl Benjamin) antifeminist videos are in bad taste. Offending people’s sensibilities is part of the product, part of why the videos appeal to neoreactionary dillweeds. Sargon’s job is to be a bombastic asshole who “debates” recordings of people his fans hate, delivering the grade-school put-downs his witless viewers simply don’t have the mental capacity to compose. His job, essentially, is to spin the news into something his viewers will find palatable and entertaining, for which he gets paid around $870 per video.

Sadly, Sargon violates the rules of the platforms he uses to raise his money and to distribute his videos – and quite possibly the laws of his country as well. Specifically, Sargon’s unlicensed theft of other people’s videos as fodder for him to mock is a violation of the copyright holder, and what he says violates several UK civil statues – namely, harassment and defamation. And given that Sargon’s job is basically to pour gasoline on a raging trash fire, it would seem he is morally (if not legally) responsible for the additional harassment his videos generate.

It isn’t “fair use”, it’s theft

Stealing a video from YouTube so that you can record yourself abusing its maker for profit is not “fair use” by any rational definition of the word. Fair use generally requires a work to be transformative, i.e. not a reproduction of the original work. It doesn’t help that Sargon tends to sample videos in their entirety, and that he does so as a commercial enterprise.

Some might defend what Sargon does as “parody”, which is protected by fair use. But for Sargon’s work to qualify as a parody, it would have to provide a social benefit, and it would have to change the source work in a substantial way to create an entirely new and original work. (For reference, this is an actual parody of Anita Sarkeesian.) Simply insulting the person or thing you’re trying to parody doesn’t cut it – that’s just being a dick. Since Sargon’s “commentary” would be meaningless without the videos he steals, his work is not transformative or original in any substantial way.

Just because Sargon’s videos get past YouTube’s bootleg filter does not mean they’re not copyright infringement. The fact that Sargon would probably never get permission from creators to sample their videos isn’t a suitable justification for stealing them, either. In fact, some of Sargon’s videos have been taken down for copyright infringement, like his hot take on the first Republican primary debate. Let’s be honest – YouTube and Patreon have a greater incentive to heed copyright infringement claims made by Fox News than they do from private individuals, and that’s why Sargon’s videos stay online.

It isn’t “free speech”, it’s harassment and defamation

It always tickles me how Sargon and his followers pivot to a 1st Amendment defense of his work, given that UK citizens aren’t entitled to rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. The laws that govern Sargon and right to his free expression are actually much more restrictive than the ones that govern me & mine, as I write this in New York. Specifically, the UK has very stringent, and very plantiff-friendly laws against harassment and defamation.

In the Nanny State, harassment is defined as any action which amounts to harassment of another person, which the harasser knows or ought to know amounts to harassment of that person. Most notably, the person doing the harassing does not even have to have a motive or intention to harass, so long as the contact is unwanted by the recipient. So, for example, if Sargon made a video examining Ellen Pao’s sexual discrimination lawsuit, he wouldn’t need to mean for it to be harassing for it to potentially qualify as harassment.

UK defamation law is unkind to Sargon as well. In that case, Sargon is liable for anything he says about the people he targets which would be apt to make the average citizen to think worse of them.

Now, the truth is an absolute defense against defamation. But in the UK, the burden of proof rests on the defendant. For example, if Sargon repeatedly accused Matt Binder of being a “liar”, and Binder sued him for it, it would be up to Sargon to prove that Binder did, in fact, lie during his radio broadcasts. As far as I can tell, the only reason Sargon hasn’t already been sued because the people he pillories haven’t initiated litigation against him. But that doesn’t mean what he says is actually legal.

It isn’t “satire”, it’s incitement

It’s important to consider that Sargon’s fans are already pig-biting mad at the people he attacks online. In fact, being widely hated already is an important selection criterion when Sargon makes his videos, because his fans want him to roast someone they already know & love to hate.

To Sargon, the people whose hurt he profits from are an abstraction. To him, these videos are a business, and one his own family depends on. But actually being a subject on Sargon’s show is a positive feedback loop for harassment: people who already receive a lot of internet death threats are more likely to be featured, and if they are featured, the amount of harassment they receive is likely to increase. If Sargon’s video creates a lot of harassment for a person, he’s more likely to feature them in subsequent videos.

To keep his channel online, Sargon goes out of his way to label his work as “satire” or “commentary”, but really he’s just pushing the envelope; harassing his targets enough to get the viewers he needs without getting himself canned from Patreon and YouTube.

There’s nothing “satirical” about Sargon’s videos, because he honestly believes what he says. He honestly believes that feminists and feminism are a mental illness needing to be destroyed. Anita delenda est. 

Sargon may even be legally culpable of incitement, by encouraging others to commit acts of harassment. In the UK, you can be liable for incitement even if your remarks were addressed to the world at large, and one’s encouragement need not have any actual effect on the crime committed. By this rubric, Sargon’s videos would seem like a particularly reckless form of incitement: he broadcasts hate speech to a dedicated fandom of angry sexists.

I have always been a little surprised by the huge viewership Sargon commands, given that you could go to any pub in the Midlands and find blokes like him yelling at the lady on the local TV news for free. But unlike some chap running his mouth, Sargon has a fandom that takes his words to heart, and who have a proven history of harassment.

Sargon of Akkad is pouring gasoline on a fire. So far, the spectacle has made Patreon, YouTube, and Sargon himself a good bit of money. But if someone gets burned, it’ll be Sargon- and the platforms who hosted him- that will be to blame.

Edit: added a paragraph about UK incitement law.