Bye then, for now

Life comes at you fast if you are willing to say trash for cash, as Milo Yiannopoulos has found out this week. It’s nothing personal. I mean, he did email my boss saying me and my team consisted of “an arsehole co-founder who snipes and subtweets every time my name is mentioned in the papers and attention-seeking staff who gatecrash my parties, drink my booze and then insult me on the internet” but that’s by-the-by.

Here are three pieces on this week’s crash and burn that are well worth reading:

“The rise and fall of Milo Yiannopoulos – how a shallow actor played the bad guy for money” – Dorian Lynskey

“So what is his ‘important perspective’? What does he stand for? It’s telling that he was banned from Twitter for ringleading a campaign of harassment against actor Leslie Jones for the crime of daring to appear in the female-led reboot of Ghostbusters – hardly a vital cause. He is a gay man who hates the gay rights movement. A libertarian who calls an authoritarian president ‘Daddy’. A vigorous opponent of Black Lives Matter who says he can’t be racist because ‘I just like f***ing blacks’. A self-styled second-wave feminist who sells hoodies reading ‘Feminism is cancer’…How was this smirking void ever taken seriously?”

Read in full

“Everyone Who Enabled Milo Yiannopoulos Should’ve Seen This Coming” – Katherine Cross

This is especially good on explaining the tactics that #GamerGate employed, and why “the fact that pedophilia advocacy caused his downfall is a kind of poetic justice.”

“‘Mirroring’ is the name I gave to a troll tactic that draws on rather old agitprop techniques: Accuse your opponent of that which you are guilty. GamerGaters became quite adept at it, turning all the adjectives used to describe them back on both their critics and their victims. In their first month, they had not a care in the world for the issue of online harassment. But once the media widely reported that they were a harassment campaign, GamerGaters suddenly began posing as victims of online abuse and accusing their very victims of perpetrating it against them. To an outside observer, it looked like two equally squalid factions going ‘no you!’ at each other, and the smokescreen had its intended effect: making powerful people throw up their hands and dismiss the campaign being directed at women, people of color, and queer folks in game journalism and development as ‘just another flame war on the internet.'”

Read in full

“To the people I know who know Milo” – Bobbie Johnson

“To hear people say that he is now beyond the pale, or suddenly indefensible, or that maybe this time he has gone too far, is to suggest that his behavior is somehow new or exposes some hidden reality. There is no secret Milo behind the façade — his desperate need for succor and his underlying viciousness have been there the whole time. If you’ve chosen to ignore it, then that’s on you. He has always been a deeply misogynistic troll whose main objective is to seek attention through whichever means he can. He has always been a supplicant to those he wants approval from, and behaved contemptuously towards those who reject him or demand things of him. He knows how to flatter, and how to bully. I do not know what his core beliefs really are, if he has any, but as anybody who has been on the other end of his attempts to silence them will tell you, his supposed commitment to free speech is merely a convenient carrier for his other desires, entirely disposable.”

Read in full

This is about the third time I’ve seen Hanrahan/Wagner/Yiannopoulos career written off. I’m sure he’ll be back in a few months, in full-on Dapper Laughs turtleneck contrition mode, explaining how he has seen the light. Maybe he’ll convert to Islam. Anything for the attention.

In the meantime here’s four other things always worth remembering about Yiannopoulos:

• Twitter doesn’t think he can tell the difference between a seal and a dog.
• He may not have published his GamerGate, Sociopaths of Silicon Valley, or Dangerous books, but he did publish his collection of poetry featuring plagiarised lyrics from Tori Amos, deconstructed beautifully by Chris Kluwe.
• “‘I support fat-shaming’ says Barney-wearing-a-teen’s-poplin top, Wonka-accident amazing-gobstopper-a** motherf***er”
• He once hijacked a moonwalking vigil for Michael Jackson to generate publicity for himself.