The intellectual bankruptcy of game’s haters

Fellow travelers in this area of the blogosphere might be familiar with a guy named Justin, who runs the blog The Truth Shall Set You Free and occasionally comments at Elusive Wapiti’s, Anakin Niceguy’s, Φ’s, and The Spearhead. Justin is opposed to game, denouncing it as “evil and stupid” and claiming it fosters a “destructive” worldview. Thursday described him as a “hyper-moralist” on the spectrum of game detractors:

Hyper-Moralists – Don’t like the fact that the main discoverers and theorists of game are almost all libertines and/or nihlists. They also don’t like that game contains techniques for getting women to have premarital/extramarital sex, and that it seems too consciously manipulative.

In any case, I’m not interested in debating Justin or dissecting his arguments, as trying to have a debate with individuals like him is like trying to convince an Orthodox Jew to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. You might as well ram your head into the wall. However, I recently caught Justin in a little lie that has all but destroyed his credibility on this topic, so I’m calling him out on his flagrant dishonesty.

Justin wrote this over at Biblical Manhood:

E.W. [Elusive Wapiti] just did a post responding to a question from a Gamer about if he were unfortunate enough to have a daughter. That is the fruit if Game, to poison your outlook on women to the point where you would regret your own daughter’s birth.

There is just a teeny tiny problem with the statement above: it is completely wrong. Not subjectively wrong, but objectively “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west” wrong. The post that he’s talking about is “Mailbag: Gusto Hat Eine Frage,” published at The Spearhead last week. Elusive Wapiti was responding to reader Gusto who wrote this:

If I’m unfortunate enough to father a girl, what should I do to make sure she grows up with the right attitude?

Those are the only words from Gusto that Wapiti had in his post. Take a look at this sentence, folks. Is there any way to divine that Gusto practiced game from that one line, or that he even knows what game is? If your answer is “yes,” get me the name of your dealer so I can know what brain-damaging drugs you’ve been abusing in your free time. There is no evidence, none, that game had anything at all to do with Gusto’s question. Gusto himself left two comments on the post, one in which he defends himself against Justin’s assertion that he shouldn’t have kids and mentions he is a high-functioning autistic, and another in which he thanks Wapiti for answering his question. In neither comment is game mentioned or even hinted at, and since Gusto says he is autistic and implied he has difficulty understanding people in his first comment, I am confident in saying that he most likely does not practice game.

Additionally, while game is a frequent topic of conversation at the virtual Algonquin Round Table that is The Spearhead, Elusive Wapiti did not discuss, make reference to, or mention it in his post once. Not once. Not only that, game did not come up as a topic in the comments at all. Discounting the unrelated sidebar, searching for “game” in the post using Google Chrome’s word-finder feature turns up a grand total of three usages, listed below.

One comment from Jabherwochie:

The two Demaines continue to work closely together and have many joint works of both mathematics and art,[13] including three pieces of mathematical origami in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York;[14] their joint mathematical works focus primarily on the mathematics of folding and unfolding objects out of flat materials such as paper and on the computational complexity of games and puzzles.

One from Thursday:

As me and my teacher friends say, the kids just want to fuck and play videogames.

And one from Eumaios, quoting the above Thursday comment verbatim.

Unless you’re like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind and able to divine secret messages from completely innocuous passages of text, there is no way to claim that ANY of the above statements have ANYTHING to do with game, consergame, seduction, or whatever you want to call the science of winning a woman’s sexual and romantic interest.

So what can we ascertain about our friend Justin from his tiny little fib here? There are two possible conclusions:

1. Justin is a liar who has no qualms with twisting the words of others in order to libel his opponents.
2. Justin is a moron who can’t read.

If you case his blog for a bit, you’ll find that Justin clearly isn’t stupid – in fact, he’s well informed and correct on a number of topics. Therefore, we’ll have to go with option number one.

Now, pardon me if I get this wrong, but isn’t there a Biblical commandment that forbids lying? “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor?” A God-fearing man such as Justin ought to know this. I wouldn’t make a huge deal out of this, but Justin is one of those hypocrites who wraps his arguments against game in a film of moral superiority. He even had the balls to call me a “moral degenerate.” And here he is, violating the very codes he is supposed to live his life by. I have no quarrel with the religious, but people who break the moral laws they use to attack me and my compadres just piss me off.

I never claimed to be a saint or even that good of a man, but I strive to be as honest as I can be. I despise liars and hypocrites, and if I had ever believed in God, my conception of hell would be something akin to Dante’s, with the aforementioned groups occupying prime real estate just above Satan’s chambers. If people oppose game, that’s their business, but I’ll not tolerate them lying to my face in a transparent, intelligence-insulting fashion. In his statement above, Justin has revealed himself to be a man lacking in both integrity and intellectual gravitas. Keep this post in mind the next time you catch him spewing his empty moral platitudes and sterotypical shaming language insults around the blogosphere.

You tangled with the wrong blogger, holmes. Now feel the pain.