Hey, it's a Palmer Luckey thread

Everyone seems like they want to discuss yesterday's Palmer Luckey news, so here's one last attempt at it. Speaking as someone who was up until 4 AM reading the first thread, though, I'll go ahead and say that if the discussion becomes overly argumentative or shouty, we will most likely just go ahead and lock it again. It's Friday and I think we'd all probably prefer to relax with UPF and a cold beer than have to monitor a flamewar about internet trolling. So, be excellent and civil to one another if you want to participate in this discussion.

What happened to him? Can we get a tl;dr?

@gunslingerpanda: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/palmer-luckey-financially-backed-anti-hillary-clin/1100-6443851/

He (secretly?) used his money to help fund a pro-Trump, anti-Hillary internet meme machine.

This apparently pissed off a lot of people, including our very own Jeff Gerstmann.

I am probably going to get some of this wrong, but essentially, he is a financial supporter of Donald Trump, and has some sort of subreddit promoting his political views. He might possibly have ties to sketchy organizations, or it just might be a case of guilty by association. Now, people are vehemently angry at him. They also found out his girlfriend liked videos that were in support of Gamergate and so on and so forth. If you want the full info dump, you can find it at Kotaku/Gizmodo and few other places.

Not gonna lie, that last thread was...worrisome. Hope this one goes better.

@giantstalker: Jeff said something about this? Completely missed that.

yeah, does anyone have a link to what Jeff supposedly said?

Yeah, link to that?

@andrew2696: @jonny_anonymous: @tanked: Apparently it was in a Mixlr yesterday. I haven't heard it.

Who knew that Palmer Luckey was an asshole. I had my suspicion.

And the Jeff Gerstmann comment is from the mixlr dated 22-09. It's in the archive, starts at about 4:00

@monkeyman04: While that article on Gamespot is concise and to the point, maybe don't wander into that comment section. It get's pretty infowars-like surprising fast.

@andrew2696: @tanked: @jonny_anonymous: This is all secondhand information I gathered last night from the other threads. I dunno if there's a mixlr archive of what was said, or whatever he retweeted, hence it "apparently" pissed off some folks including Jeff... take it with a big grain of salt

ITT: People mad that someone doesn't support the person they support. Yet, if the situation were flipped they would probably be completely fine with it.

@bfinstad86: Yeah, I try and not read the comments on GS.

@subjugation: supporting a political meme site and braging about how rich your are a both dick moves though.

@subjugation: It's well within his right to support any candidate or political idea he wishes, secretly or not. It's also within anyone's right to view his actions or support as undesirable.

That's not really why people are pissed you should probably read the original article posted.

@quarters: @jonny_anonymous: @tanked: @andrew2696: http://jefflr.moe/archive/

The second to last link is the mixlr archive where Jeff mentions it pretty briefly. About 04:30.

He financially supported Nimble America, a group that has promoted White Supremacy.

I wonder if people were as pissed if Palmer had just poured all the money he donated to Nimble America directly to the Trump campaign.

Do you have some reference for that? For Nimble America promoting that stuff mind you, not the reddit pro-Trump pages.

I feel like none of the bombduders have said anything on twitter or anything about any of this... which is weird, since the rest of the internet has been quite vocal... Pope's tweet in particular comes to mind.

Hoping the giantbomb guys have simply been to busy to sound off on this, and aren't in fact trying to avoid this brouhahaha since they've always seemed very chummy with Palmer. That would blow, and if Palmer shows up on another livestream I'm done with GB

Jeff spends a good portion of the mixlr talking about Luckey. Jeff ultimately hopes Palmer eventually grows up and sees minorities as more than just harmful stereotypes, but he knows that being a billionaire at his age makes that unlikely.

Some good stuff about Jeff's youth as well.

@rainvillain:

Alex and Jeff have.

@odinsmana: Thanks for the link and timestamp.

Palmer Luckey is so wealthy he pays people to make memes for him. That's ridiculous.

I would be shocked to see Palmer appear in any GB content for the forseeable future.

Do you know which Mixlr and roughly when? I would be interested in hearing what he has to say.

@don_dimello25: that's good to hear. thanks for letting me know :)

He's the ultimate combination of entitled (young, white, rich). He sounds like mini Peter Thiel. How long until he subsists on the blood of children?

Whoa now, the mod team having to simultaneously moderate this thread and the UPF chat in 20 minutes?

@rongalaxy: Probably awhile. But in the meantime, Peter lets him try on the Doctor Doom mask.

@subjugation: I wish people didn't about this kind of thing.

With people as old as them(presidential candidates) they've all got ties to people tied to racism. This seems more of a political move than anything remotely racist. That's just the cover. It's just another left/right fight. If people were.a little more conservative with their emotions regarding who they vote for things would be simpler.

I don't think palmer luckey is a racist, just another fan of politics. I can't believe paying people to do something you can't is all people need to try and ruin someones life, when they are crying themselves to sleep because some people got fired for not being good enough to keep their company open. It's the american way, free market. If you can't handle that don't vote and ignore politics. Hope that people more reasonable than yourself are able to make the right things happen.

Not to mention even if you back racists it has very little effect on our nation. BLM has a much larger and more negative effect with their riots. You shouldnt be supporting radicals under any banner, especially not racists of any race. There is no good reason for it. You also shouldn't assume Palmer luckey deserves to be attacked like this. He's a mid 20's kid for gods sakes. Even if he IS an asshole he doesnt deserve what appears to be going on. Unfortunately since facebook is in charge and they lean left, like GB seems to, he may suffer some negative consequences that are entirely out of proportion. You lose your very public job because of some link to racism legitimate or not and that's really bad for your future.

@the_devoid:

September 22, he starts to go in depth somewhere around 10 minutes in.

@maginnovision:

Thank you for articulating my exact thoughts on this.

@bisonhero: Praise be to the mod team.

(Seriously they're gonna have their work cut out for them)

I don't really know about the guy, but the notion of a funded meme smear campaign seems pretty ridiculous. Weird times...tho i suppose i can see the roots of the idea. ( marketing, media, satire...at least we are all clear on what those are.)

Don't know it just seems weird that you buy and create perceived outrage now. But maybe it's because people don't trust media as much anymore. Welp, we can't even trust a good old zeitgeist either it seems.

What a silly thing to do.

The two founders of Nimble America are moderators on r/The_Donald. Just go visit that page or find any articles of its activity.

How is Luckey's life being ruined by people criticizing him for directly funding hategroups? He has more money than God.

Nobody's gonna say Ann Coulter, or Luckey's BFF, Milo have ever been hurt by people hating them. He can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.

Remember that he proudly admitted to this in The Daily Beast article, he's quoted for Pete's sake.

It's not so much that Luckey is supporting Trump. The problem is the way he is supporting Trump by funding a campaign of online bullying. A lot of these people are using racist caricatures, hate speech, and harassment to get their message across. It also doesn't help that Luckey and his girlfriend are involved with that whole nasty GamerGate business. The less said about that whole can of worms the better.

I guess Luckey is free to use his money as he pleases but this will just alienate him from gaming media who don't want to get involved with such a polarizing figure. It also hurts the company he co-founded despite the fact that Luckey has very little if anything to do with. If Luckey is that bored with his hundreds of millions of dollars and shoeless beach jumping than he could throw a few million bucks my way.

Shitposting and memes are the worst form of discourse, political or otherwise. My personal opinion is that even dipping a toe in racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, etc., messaging is a bad look regardless of whether or not you really believe it or are just being a troll. Palmer fucked up, if this is true, because it doesn't matter what he really believes. The damage to his image will be done, and it will blow back on Oculus, whether or not that is really deserved. He is absolutely free to spend his money as he sees fit, and to believe what he wants to believe. No one is trying to stop that. Consumers considering purchasing products associated with him have the same rights to their spending choices and belief systems. While Oculus is owned by Facebook, and lost sales don't impact him directly, if it becomes financially burdensome to Facebook due to poor sales, they will excise him from Oculus or Oculus from themselves altogether.

In fact, my gut reaction to reading the news last night was, "well, I'm never buying a Rift now," and I'm still feeling that way. If I can ever comfortably afford a VR setup, I'll buy a Vive. I am not naive enough to think that some, many, or maybe even most heads of mass-market consumer goods and services (the Vive included) don't harbor some views I would find objectionable, but knowing that he directly funded the type of discourse that is routinely posted by the alt-right (for clarity, white supremacists) on social media is too much for me as a consumer to accept. I wouldn't feel this way if he directly contributed to Trump's campaign, because of course someone worth $700m would be more likely to support a Republican candidate than a Democrat, if for no other reason than the parties' historical platform differences on taxation.

He's also 24 years old and can absolutely change, if he so chooses, or if his life experiences result in him realizing that divisive, hateful speech probably isn't a good thing. Maybe he won't. I've said and done some dumb shit in my days, and consequences of that, opening up my views to really listen to others' experiences, and time are really the only things that resulted in me changing. Until then, I will demonstrate my opinion the same way he has: with my dollars.

I'll never understand why people waste their time getting so upset about these things, but I guess maybe it's just not my sort of thing. I'd rather just relax and enjoy a good movie or game rather than argue on the internet. Just seems like a lot more fun.

@maginnovision: Furthermore it seems weird to me to be specifically angry at Palmer for donating to what essentially is spreading memes. If one's against Trump, isn't that way better than giving that money to Trump's official organization, where it can be used to actually increase Trump's chances of being elected in a much, much more tangible way?

I also have a question for the people pissed off at Palmer: what's the reason you think that makes him a douchebag? Is it because he's now outed himself as someone who support Trump? Is it that he essentially funds controversial/vulgar memes? Is it the reputation of the parties/communities supporting the organization Palmer donated to? Or is it something else? I'm genuinly curious.

And Trump's numbers rise ever higher. Strange, that.

I hope I'm not violating the "chill" directive from Rorie, but I take strong exception to this quote. The riots are not being organized by BLM, the actual organization is organizing peaceful protests, but when unarmed people are being killed in the street by cops, that understandably causes emotions to boil over for some people.

The reason that Trump is causing people to react like this is because he's much more overtly racist than any political candidate has dared to be in many years, and he's shown reckless disregard for the constitution, the rule of law, business contracts, America's diplomatic relationships, and seems to not care how incendiary his language is. This isn't a normal election, and the reaction against Palmer reflects this. He's not even supporting Trump via normal republican arguments, he's trying to propagate the ugliest corner of Trump's supporters.

Spend your money however you like, you're free do to whatever you want. If you don't like Luckey's political leanings, show it by buying a Vive and not using Facebook anymore. Problem solved.

The irony of all this is that the proliferation of memes has made facebook basically unusable as a service. Its wall to wall pixelated bumper stickers. For the last five years, there have been only 3 facebook posts. One involving hatred or gloating about sports teams, one dedicated to parenting cliches', and the last to obnoxious political memes. As a non VR user, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but it seems like this sort of thing alienates facebook more even at a time when they are hemorrhaging younger users for other social media services.

I honestly just feel bad for the people working at Oculus. This is a total shitfest for them and they don't deserve that. I also feel bad for anybody who bought a Rift with developers dropping support over this. Just kind of sucks people are shitting on an entire company and their consumers because of one dude.