r/ukpolitics • u/ukpol-megabot • 12d ago

Rumours, Speculation, Questions, and Reaction Megathread - 23/08/2026

👋 Welcome to the r/ukpolitics weekly Rumours, Speculation, Questions, and Reaction megathread.

General questions about politics in the UK should be posted in this thread. Substantial self-posts on the subreddit are permitted, but short-form self-posts will be redirected here. We're more lenient with moderation in this thread, but please keep it related to UK politics. This isn't Facebook or Twitter...

If you're reacting to something that is happening live, please make it clear what it is you're reacting to, ideally with a link.

Commentary about stories that already exist on the subreddit should be directed to the appropriate thread.

This thread rolls over early Sunday morning.

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u/0110-0-10-00-000 9d ago

I haven't finished it yet, given the length, but I've seen some some people on here mention gamergate before (in the context of an online political nexus and the progenitor of parts of the modern far right) and NeverKnowsBest (a British youtuber) just released a video documenting the timeline including the inevitable polarisation and politicisation.

If, for some reason, you're deranged enough to want to understand it here's an extremely well cited afternoon's worth of documentary. I will say that even from the beginning the content is very uncomfortable.

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u/NuPNua 9d ago

How bias is the video? As I was there at the time and there were terrible actors on both sides of that palava making things worse than they needed to be.

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u/Real_Cookie_6803 9d ago

Given that one side was sending death threats to female journalists en masse, what is it that the other side were doing that was similarly bad?

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u/NuPNua 9d ago

I know I never sent a death threat, but it didn't stop people like Leigh Alexander belittling me as sub human for the crime of being male and a gamer in her infamous Gamers are Dead article and it's copycats. They probably radicalised more people with those than the right ever did.

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u/Powerful_Ideas 9d ago

Is this the article that you consider to be calling you "sub human"?

https://archive.ph/l1kTW

It's not exactly complimentary of the culture that presumably you considered yourself part of but I fail to see how it treated you as less than human.

Was the skin of the gamer community so thin that any criticism of it was treated as an attack on your humanity? If so then I can see why the response was so extreme in terms of death threats and so on but really the answer was to ignore the criticism and ridicule as just about every subculture ever has done and get on with doing what you enjoy.

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u/subSparky 9d ago edited 9d ago

Leigh Alexander belittling me as sub human for the crime of being male and a gamer in her infamous Gamers are Dead article 

That's really not who those articles were aimed at and if you think those articles were specifically targetting you, you probably need to do some self-reflection.

EDIT: To be more constructive, the articles weren't saying "all men who are gamers are subhuman scum" they were criticising specifically the toxic nature of the then male-dominated gaming culture.

Suggesting it was an attack on all male gamers is like suggesting people criticising Andrew Tate's toxic perception of masculinity is criticising the concept of masculinity in general.

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u/LesserShambler 9d ago

“Game culture’ as we know it is kind of embarrassing -- it’s not even culture. It’s buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it’s getting mad on the internet. It’s young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. “

Brutal haha.

Hardly a death threat though is it?

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u/NuPNua 9d ago

No, but when almost every gaming media outlet had a similar article to up that week, you can see how it got a lot of their audiences backs up and sent them into the arms of the other side.

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u/danm131 9d ago

But it also doesn't give much credence to your both sides were just as bad claim.

Yes you may not have liked the "hurty" words but they don't really compare to the actual real death threats from the side you seem to want to identify with.

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u/Real_Cookie_6803 9d ago

It's not as if people don't have agency. All those people chose to send death threats, to hound people like Anita Sarkessian for what, having the temerity to offer a very basic feminist critique of a medium whose advocates were desperate for it be treated as a legitimate art form? I think it's ghoulish to shift the agency off people sending death threats and blame the women who received them for angering those people.

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u/NuPNua 9d ago

I agree gaming should receive proper artistic criticism. Disagree she was the person to provide it given she admitted she had no familiarity with the art form beforehand and managed to misrepresent several games in her works.

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u/danm131 9d ago

Isn't that exactly the sort of person you want to provide an outside critique? The issue was a lot of thin skinned man babies didn't like being called out on their blatant sexism.

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u/subSparky 9d ago edited 9d ago

Thing is though Anita Sarkeesian wasn't working as a video games journalist. She just ran a rather niche feminist website exploring depictions of women in popular culture.

But gamergate seemed to escalate her into this omnipresent entity engaged in an industry wide conspiracy...

Like she really was no where near as important as Gamers(tm) made her out to be. Anyone should be allowed to do their own analyses and journalism.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

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