@a1ba @alyx The postings will continue until morale improves.

@lanodan @a1ba
Do you have the money and political influence of the LGBT lobby to get a miraculous number of people to sign at the last second? Answer: no, no you don't.
Honestly, I wouldn't even be surprised if they pressured EU into just fudging the numbers behind the scenes.

@alyx @a1ba Gamers being broke compared to trans folks?
Imagine if instead of say buying a switch2 it would be paying for newspaper articles. (And like all gamers ought to know that you can pay journos)

@lanodan @a1ba
Doesn't matter if gamers buy Switch2 or not. That's not gonna do it. The LGBT lobby doesn't have money because they don't buy games. They have money because they grift, and get your government's money. USAID ring any bells? They grift public money, and then use the money for their activism. Probably to bribe politicians too. They do the same thing all big NGOs do, launder money.

So when you manage to get gamers to start functioning like a semi-criminal organization, then you can hope to accomplish magical tasks, like getting 500k people to sign a digital petition in a month.

@lanodan @a1ba
Sure, things are fucked up. But I can be honest with myself enough to know we're not gonna get the industry to fix things. We don't have the resources to, we don't have the influence to.

Gamers tried to gain some control with Gamergate, we failed. Gamergate2 barely had any impact. If GG2 had been actually successful, we would have seen numerous AAA publishers closing down and tens of thousands of people becoming literally homeless over night. Clearly that didn't happen.
And now StopKillingGames is gonna be another case in the repertoire of gamers' failures.

What do you want me to say? You want me to pretend we'll get 500k signatures in a month? It. Is. Not. Gonna. Happen. I'm not gonna lie to you like that, or to myself.
I'm not even blaming gamers. I'm being fucking honest. I signed the bloody thing as soon as Ross put up the link. You think I wouldn't have preferred for it to work out? You think I enjoy giving out my personal information to an EU database just for shits and giggles? I was hoping that something will come out of it. I was hoping I didn't give out my info to the next neo-fascist multi-state government for nothing. Clearly things didn't go my way.

P.S. Did you block me? Cause things are acting weird on my side.

@alyx @lanodan @a1ba
The real customer is major retailers and e-tailers.
Amazon's monopsony ring any bells?

@alyx @a1ba Meanwhile the real problem is more that most gamers hate journos so much they would never ever deal with them.
And influencers (aka most big streamers) are basically on a leash from corporations because if they would ever say anything against them they'll just be cut off from sponsorships (if not the whole platforms they use).

But of course it's easier to blame some fucking randomass group of people than look at how fucked up it is.

@alyx @lanodan @a1ba > the money and political influence of the LGBT lobby
my sibling in Christ what are you on about

@pmmeurcatpics @alyx @a1ba Maybe dude hallucinates LGBT people having yatchs just like Gaben or something.

@pmmeurcatpics @lanodan @a1ba
Are you really trying to argue that the LGBT community, or however you want to call it, doesn't have political influence? Were we hallucinating years upon years of multinational corporations putting rainbow flags on Twitter? Or the useless rainbow road crossings? Or the yearly Pride parades, that have become useless at this point? This is all politics my friend.

There are multiple social activist areas that come with their own political power. You have the environmentalists, you have the PETA types, you have the LGBT crowd, any many more.

And all of these areas of activism have a bunch of NGOs, that get funding from governments. From the American government, from the EU. Sometimes it's from the central government (federally in the case of US), sometimes it goes down at the local level.
And they use the money they get for their activism. Sometimes they use the money for advertisement to get a million people to sign an EU petition, and other times they use the money to support a politician that is more favorable for their cause. In which case, it works closer to money laundering, cause they're helping a politician that is more likely to help them get funding.

This is what the real world of NGOs and activism is like. And there's more money flowing in these spaces than people realize. Money that they ultimately get for free. That they don't work for. So maybe your average lesbian isn't riding a yacht, but the NGOs could definitely buy some if they wanted to.

The hilarious part of all of this, is that I'm not even arguing against the LGBT lobby or activism. I'm just honest enough to acknowledge that this is how things work, and that this is how you manage to get things done. I'm not anti-LGBT people.
But I can understand that their community has something gamers don't, and that we won't get things done, because we don't have these resources that other activist groups do.

@uis @a1ba
That's how things work. Realistically you're gonna get logarithmic growth. Most of your support early on, and then it will continue with a trickle.
If the petition got 350k signatures in say a month, and it took another 10 months to get 150k more, you can expect to reach the full 1 million in about... never.
The people who supported this already signed. 500k is what you got.
This is not even a matter of reach. The petition reached millions. It got covered by Asmon, got covered by Philip DeFranco, it reached into mainstream spaces. And people didn't care.

@alyx @a1ba it consistently was on second-third place by signature flow among concurrent ECIs, so, as Ross noted, people don't seem to care in general, not only about video games.

@uis @a1ba
I think people here lost a lot of their trust in EU. Me personally, I now view it as a neo-fascist government project. Others just see it as a governmental structure that oppresses their particular nation and it's interests. And others just see it as incompetent.
So yeah, people don't actually trust EU will do what the people want.

@alyx @a1ba How so? As outsider it seems to me best of currently existing. Aside from less healthcare.

@uis @a1ba
At best EU is a bureaucratic nightmare that manages to do nothing, because that's how bureaucracies are.
At worst, EU is actively trying to sabotage the national identities and culture of its constituent members. Nationalism and patriotism are taboo concepts for EU leadership.

BUT... what is interesting to notice, is that EU is and has been pushing, for as long as I know, an European nationalism. I think there are factions within EU leadership that want to completely dissolve the nation states that comprise EU, and create something new, around the newish invented European nationality. And I think ultimately it will lead to a new form of fascism formed around it.

One of the tools I think they're trying to use to achieve this is unrestricted immigration. Get enough foreigners from Middle East, Asia, or Africa to go into a country, over many years, and you'll manage to disrupt its culture. Say you import tens of millions of people into French. At some point talking about French culture and nationality becomes meaningless, because there's no more shared history between everyone living in France. So instead, you get everyone to give up talking about themselves as French people, and have them adopt European as their identity. It's not encumbered with any kind of historical meaning, it's not tied to any cultural norms. You can go "you're not a real British person because you don't drink tea", but you can't use that sort of reasoning to deny someone being an European citizen.

An interesting case example, a few years ago there was a competition for "best town from EU to live in". An Hungarian town was supposed to win it. But then the jury literally went "but... it's too white. Why is everyone Caucasian? Where are the ethnic minorities that dilute your culture and nationality". And they were denied the win, over something that wasn't even an official requirement of the competition. A competition that was about nations celebrating their culture and heritage instantly became "actually, you're following your culture too much".

Of course immigration is not the only tool. They've been pushing propaganda around "European citizenship" since forever. You can have both politicians and media talk about EU citizenship as if it's something that actually matters. That it's something to take pride in. There's a massive push to make it seem like it's the EU citizenship that grants people their rights within EU. They even tried to replace manufacturers putting "Made in France/Denmark/etc." on their products, with "Made in EU".

And EU is becoming more and more like a nation, instead of what it was supposed to be: an alliance. EU already has a central government, with a president, Parliament, the EU Commission. It has a constitution, it has laws. It has it's own justice system with courts of law. The only thing EU lacks thus far is a central military, although there are constant talks about forming one.

And before you accuse me of being an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, I want to make it clear, I am firmly convinced this has nothing to do with Jews. If anything, all of it probably has German origins. Though at this point in the process of reforming Europe in this aberration, the ideological motivation for all of this likely exceeds the borders of Germany, and it's no longer just them that push for this new fascist conformity.

In all honesty, this is pretty much the Nazis winning and Europe finally forming the 3rd Reich that Hitler wanted. And there's more than enough antisemitism to go around, thanks to a deluge of Islamic immigrants that didn't integrate, so we have that part of Hitler's dream covered too.

@9eurosyltbesucher @a1ba
Don't worry, I already took the L yesterday.

@alyx @a1ba worth noting we pretty much know a lot of those are fake, so while it says 1,2M it might still be less than 1M verifiable signatures (which is what actually matters)

1,2 is considered safe-ish normally, but it's not unreasonable to expect this campaign in particular to need closer to 1,5

@ivesen @a1ba
I know, but considering that two weeks ago it was below 500k (including the fake or faulty signatures) and it had been like that for almost an entire year (which is why I was completely skeptical this thing would ever reach even million), this is on a great track now. If it keeps a decent momentum, I think it can reach 1,4-1,5 million.

@alyx I think it will until 31st

@a1ba I think it's doable now. There's a bit of drama that is keeping this thing in the news. Asmongold still talks about it. I see random YouTubers I don't even know in my feed talking about SKG and Pirate Software's takes.
If this drama gathered 700k in the last 2 weeks, another 200k-300k in the last 3 weeks seems reasonable.

I don't think anyone could've predicted the support this suddenly picked up in the past week; if the pushback was only one off formal messages like the VGE post I don't think it'd be as well known as it is now. Thankyou Pirate Software for the hundreds of tweets trying to vindictively kill it. 🫡