Cranky T-Rex's Blog

I finally got around to watching the much lauded Hacksaw Ridge the other day.  It suffers quite a bit from being obvious Oscar Bait, but overall it was a decent movie.  I'm not really interested in doing a review here though; I just found the movie incredibly instructive for another discussion that continues to rage in the social media circles in which I run.  This time it was re-ignited by a couple of people disrupting a version of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" that features a Donald Trump lookalike being brutally murdered instead of the Roman Emperor. As usual, one side asserts that disrupting the play goes against their principles and should be condemned, while the other insists that these are the rules imposed upon us by the Left and they should therefore be made to suffer them just as we do.  Or, to put it more succinctly, Be Better Than Them vs. Payback's a Bitch. I of course fall into the latter group for many re...

Sometimes the hero is the one you least expect... Their goals and their demands vary. Their movement requires almost nothing of its members to join, and so their diversity of both personalities and physical traits is astounding. They're also the last people one might expect to get into a culture war. "They" are the supporters of #GamerGate, and they have been confounding people for almost a half a year now. Even after all that time, it's still a Herculean task to convince people of the significance of #GamerGate, with all "the happenings" as the gamers would call them making it nigh-impossible to wrap it up in a neat little bow for people to understand (though I did take a stab at that .) Those who do take an interest are often stymied by the chaotic nature of a leaderless Internet subculture. David Pakman , for example, spent many of his initial interviews grappling with the notion that a movement with such a low barrier to entry can simultaneously ...