I think you are naive to assume he was motivated (even in part) by good intentions. He is just a scammer, and evidently not a very good one.
Sure he was. He held a press conference surrounded by supportive friends and community leaders, who lovingly gave him reassured pats of encouragement, as he came forward against these slurs against him and others in his community. He was being brave!
https://cmgstatesmanaustin.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/rbb-cake-3.jpg?w=640
There isn’t enough info to know what his motivation was. I can see it being purely cyclical and financial, or as you describe it. Bottom line, though, I don’t see any reason to lean towards your explanation unless one is predisposed to want that explanation to be the correct one.
It’s human nature for people to convince themselves that their motives are as selfless and high-minded as they can possibly be. In this case, Bricker’s suggestion is the most obvious approach.
I don’t know if it matters much what his motivation was. And even if he was hoping to bring attention to discrimination, false claims will make actual claims of discrimination less credible.
That’s the myth, but even that’s being challenged. It seems it was mostly used as a lionizing statement before those groups got their hands on it.
I just wish that they hadn’t spent so much time demonizing GamerGate, which will be a trigger for the entire article to be discarded. Or that I could find that interview with the person from the dictionary.
I don’t see how. The question that is actually being dealt with is if it is okay to perform an immoral act for a good cause. And while I can’t begin to answer that question in its entirety, I feel safe in saying that, if it’s an action that any reasonable person would know would actually hurt the cause, then it’s obviously not justified.
Even if it’s possible for the ends to sometimes justify the means, obviously a bad end cannot be justified by a bad means.
It matters not one bit that he thinks he’s on the side of angels, if both his action and the consequences are bad.
And, anyways, from whence this idea of a “higher truth” that allows lying? I’d expect that to come from someone who doesn’t have a belief system with a God who lays out what is and isn’t moral, not a pastor. Seems all the more reason to believe he wasn’t adhering to some sort of moral relativism.
It might not matter in any one particular case. But it’s worth being aware of a general predilection - if one exists - for people who believe they are serving higher causes to justify what they consider relatively minor transgressions in service of that cause. (Frequently this will also contain a self-serving aspect, as here.) Not that you can make too much of any one story, but it’s a data point.
[Note: this is also an issue with religious people.]
That’s obvious. But the whole point is that he didn’t expect to be caught, and if he wasn’t caught then it may have had the impact he desired.
Fuck that noise. Gamergate deserves a lot more demonizing and derision than that article even approached.
The quandary of whether any good deed can ever be said to be truly selfless is a fascinating one, but Brown’s actions are not even in the distant periphery of this quandary.
“Can any deed be truly selfish?” should not be a defense of clearly selfish behavior.
I agree, he very likely did go into this stunt thinking of himself as a hero.
But that in no way justifies what he did.
I think there are also strong grounds to suspect his primary motivations may have been greed or thirst for attention.
The one thing I cannot imagine is that he was motivated by anything approaching an altruistic motive.
My real concern with the whole “higher truth” angle is that it can too easily be used to denigrate a larger group of people.
If he did it for greed, he’s a selfish individual.
If he did it for attention, he’s a selfish individual.
If he did it too inflate his sense of righteousness, he’s a selfish individual.
If you say he did it for the sake of a “higher truth” then you are shifting focus away from his misdeed as an individual and implying association with a larger group of people with a shared belief.
The implication is that this group, and not just the individual, are willing to twist the truth in order to achieve their goals.
You’ve assured us this is not what you’re implying, and I’m willing to accept that. But I still think it is a rather dangerous line of reasoning.
I sure hope you washed that gratuitous speculation carefully after you pulled it out of your ass. We have no actual evidence whatsofuckingever about Brown’s genuine motive(s) for manufacturing and publicizing this fake scandal.
At the risk of revealing a certain cynicism about the human race, I absolutely believe that he is a member of a group that is historically willing to twist the truth in order to achieve their goals. And that group is: the human race.
I was thinking of this just the other day when reading the memoirs of Jack Benny.
When he was a young guy in vaudeville, he had a very tempestuous hot-and-cold relationship with a fellow entertainer. Finally he had enough and broke it off and they didn’t see each other for 10 years. During that time their careers went in opposite directions, and their lives as well - she put on a lot of weight and took to drinking etc.
Then at one point he was working on a skit for his show, where he would have a untalented and unappealing singing group “audition for a role on his show”; the group would consist of three very different looking sisters, one of whom would be “the fat one”. The humor would come from laughing at the silly-looking and untalented group, who would think they were talented while the audience laughed at the notion. And who should apply for the role of “the fat one” but his former flame.
As Benny tells it, his heart sank. He pleaded with her not to ask for the job. Here they were, two people who once cared for each other, and how could he have her trot out to be mocked by him and laughed at by the audience? But she said the past is gone, and right now she’s down on her luck and needs the job and the money.
So he hired her and she was great in the role, and he had to laugh because that was his job as the comedian but inside he felt like crying.
And my thinking was along the lines raised here. This woman’s life was just as miserable without getting that job, and in her present circumstance that job was a positive thing for her. Benny’s reluctance was because if she didn’t degrade herself on his show, then he didn’t have to think about her and her situation and could go back to thinking pleasant things about other matters, and now he was being forced to confront the sad reality.
Not that I would want to be in his situation myself, of course. But the point is that it can be difficult to separate the reality of what’s the right thing to do from what makes us feel better about ourselves.
No, you’re quite correct – I have carefully identified it as “my opinion.”
But my opinion was not derived by rolling dice or spinning a carnival wheel. In my experience dealing with human beings, very few of them see themselves as villains of their own story. So my speculation is indeed … speculative … but it’s grounded in a generally-applicable observation about people.
I don’t buy that he had much motivation for the greater good. He probably told himself that the hoax would bring attention to a good cause, but that was a justification for what he wanted, not a primary motivation itself. He wanted to be a victim/hero, and he told himself that the lying and harm to others necessary to achieve that was cancelled out by the good he could do for gay rights.
I think his main motivation was to make himself a victim of oppression so that he could be embraced, celebrated, and washed in the sympathy of millions. Our society increasingly defines people according to whatever oppressed group they belong to, and within those groups individuals receive great sympathy and attention for the trauma they experience. (I’m not saying that’s illegitimate, just a fact that plays into this guy’s motivation.)
All indications are that this person was someone little noticed by society and not accomplished in his role as a pastor. He wanted to be one of those victims that are supported by the group and the public at large, recognized as brave for standing up and not accepting the subjugation. He wanted to be somebody.
Apparently he was waiting around for someone to make him a victim, and when it didn’t happen he ordered a cake.
Its a good thing to be. This guy was just a bad guy
Yes, well, those guys are the worst.
I’m not so sure. When this story first broke, I was already skeptical about the veracity of his story. Immediate red flags indicating that he was lying:
(1) Who the fuck doesn’t check their custom cake before buying it? I don’t expect anyone to be paranoid about epithets, but at the very least misspellings and cake mix-ups make checking a quick and necessary process.
(2) The icing technique and color didn’t match
Unfortunately, this is only the latest in a long string of fucked-up people with persecution complexes (On more than one occasion the hoaxer cut their own skin!).
It’s an absolute certitude that he saw himself on the side of the angels. NOBODY sees himself as being on the side of the devils.
Well, except the villain in The Karate Kid 3. But he just wasn’t plausible.
He probably saw it as a case of “doing well by doing good.”
Let’s be real, here. There are some people who do bad things, and talk themselves into believing that it’s a good thing. There are way more people who do bad things, and don’t give a shit about it being good or bad. There were over a hundred thousand armed robberies in America last year. You think all those muggers had elaborate justifications for why sticking a gun in someone’d face and taking their wallet was actually a moral act?
Yeah, maybe this guy is some deluded soul with good intentions and really poor follow through. It’s vastly more likely that he thought he’d figured out a way to scam some money from a major corporation, and then it blew up in his face.