I popped into this thread a few times over the week reading some people's takes on the Monday podcast and their perception that Austin was being too cautious or soft-pedaling of the current China news cycle and having not heard the podcast yet I was highly skeptical of those takes but was interested to hear what actually was said.
Anyways today I listened to that episode and now today's episode where they actually dive into the issue with a more expansive explanation of their feelings and goddamn if some of y'all really seemed to be chomping at the bit to read Monday's words in the worst of faith and lack a literacy of the under-girding politics Austin has espoused with his platform.
People who are seemingly fans of Austin and Waypoint really seemed to demand him and Waypoint to parrot out a very specific and shallow form of jingoistic pro-democracy response and were embittered by his desire to not rush to that version of response. I'm glad personally he(And Rob) instead chose to come at it form a bigger picture particularly with regard to power, manufactured consent, and how to responsibly advocate for sympathetic causes without having your decency be opportunistically leveraged for duplicitous ends by people with very different goals for their support of HK protestors.
It's also particularly frustrating that people were mad that they didn't get a hot take. Some of the frustration seemed to stem solely from his desire to take some time to develop how he wanted to weigh in on a complex topic given he knows he has a responsibility as a person with a platform and a person who is given credibility on weighty topics. Don't contribute to the watering down of discourse by demanding comprehensive rebuke and takes instantaneously just because we exist in a new media world.
Patrick made two salient points when he spoke up on today's pod:
Firstly, he said that Blizzard's response was wildly disproportionate to the player's statement. It was, and Patrick succinctly summarized the whole thing in few words. Nobody on Monday asked Austin to come to a complete solution for HK and the CCP. This has been about Blizzard since the event because it was Blizzard's actions that were obscene, and despite Austin today knowingly (and appreciatively) going into specific issues both historically related to and explicitly around the current conflict, that doesn't actually factor into roundly condemning the company that kowtowed to what must have just been a perceived pressure rather than an actual one; the firing of all involved was too swift to have actually been forced by the Chinese government.
Secondly, Patrick later said that it becomes really interesting when these sort of issues lead to left-leaning people and Gamergators falling on the same side of an issue (possibly for very different reasons) and ending up with tweets from shitty people collectively retweeted on their timeline. Like you phrased it, duplicitous ends will be reached by opportunists...no matter what the issue at hand actually is. They're weasels. They'll weasel their way in to any hashtag or online movement. That certainly doesn't mean that one shouldn't speak out, and specifically now, pondering over condemning Blizzard's actions because racists may glom on is so unnecessarily navelgaze-y and naive I don't even know where to begin. That's not to say that the broader conversation shouldn't be had with as much thought and effort put into it as possible, and that's not to say that the Waypoint crew didn't condemn them today (insofar as some of it came across as "capitalists gonna capitalize, lend your voice thoughtfully where you can" and
yeah, I know) but also, unless they first spoke about the initial story
just as it broke, saying Blizzard had majorly fucked up on Monday (again, to perceived pressure) shouldn't have been that hard or had needed to be couched in some stupid signs some protesters held up.
And that's not a hot take, that's just a basic analysis fueled by the general background radiation of international news.
Also, as an aside, the phrase "jingoistic pro-democracy response" is kind of horseshit. Come on. It not only assumes commenters were all from the same place and selling the same values (outside of democracy) but portrays commenters as pulling from some Freedom Fries, "they hate us for our
freeedoooom" crap, instead of, you know, the idea that totalitarianism is bad.
