How crowdfunding helps haters profit from harassment

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Gee… if only we could use technology to enable everyone - and have “everyone” be only nice, civilized people who we agree with. Some fortitude is required when these same egalitarian principles enable those who oppose what you stand for. What would a world look like where money and posturing take the place of open communication and debate?

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So, because thunderf00t makes videos attacking Anita Sarkeesian on YouTube he should be blocked by sites like Patreon, etc. for… reasons?

I think thunderf00t is an ass who does more harm than good, but I’m not sure how it follows that therefore he should be blacklisted from raising funds through these sites.

Same thing with the Darren Wilson legal defense fund. Nothing I’d ever donate too, but do you really want to go down the road of claiming that since it allowed a defense fund for an unpopular potential defendant that GoFundMe was “intentionally inflicting human misery”? Really?

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But can’t we just keep the Good Things and stop the Bad Things?? At least we should try to do it for the children.

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As if those on the SJW side of the GamerGate thing don’t also harass people and raise money by behaving like jerkoffs.

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I agree. Letting them have accounts isn’t the same as endorsing them or donating to them. If you don’t like them… don’t support them.

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Yeah; there have been efforts to ban Feminist Frequency and others from raising money through venues like Kickstarter. Honestly…I’m not going to talk about FF (though there was a major FullMcIntosh moment this week, and that’s all I’ll say about that) but about other fundraising efforts: while I’ve seen fundraising efforts that seem scammy and look like they’re riding on the coattails of other successful efforts, and I’ll gladly speak up and try to encourage people to be skeptical before they open their wallets, I wouldn’t support banning anyone from raising money.

I want to make that perfectly clear. Even if I found out that someone had raised a false flag about receiving death threats and was trying to raise money, not to make a girl-power game but was actually just, I don’t know, buying a new roof through the power of victimization, I wouldn’t support banning that effort. Instead, I’d, well, I’d be places like here, reminding people to be skeptical. Because that’s the right way to go about it.

I feel the same way. Look, the thing is, the events that happened in St. Louis…anyone from the region knows that racism is rampant in the region, knows that police can be entitled, abusive pricks, and knows that black people suffer disproportionately at the hands of the justice system. And anyone who paid any attention at all knows that the way the situation was handled stinks to high heaven. But…the more that’s come out, the more it seems like Darren Wilson may (I said MAY) be telling the truth, that he was dealing with someone who was grabbing for his gun, his training kicked in, and he shot the person going for his gun. And despite the bravado he displays on camera, the guy killed someone. That has to keep the guy awake at night (though for balance, at least he has the luxury of being alive…)

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Good job! So, if you can find somebody on the left acting (or writing) like a jerk, it logically follows that people who believe in treating others with respect are exactly the same as the worst trolls on the internet. The only thing missing is the Godwin.

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This. This is why I maintain than in way too many cases each cop-kill has two victims, including the cop, and the culprit is the training methods and the general culture. (And, by extension, prosecuting such cop is good for maintaining the social perception of “justice”, too often denied, but on its own won’t help much and overhaul of the cop culture from “frontline warrior” back to “officer friendly” would be much more useful.)

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I think you may miss a point here, which is that if we condemn people being jerks, we need to commit to condemning people for being jerks, and not just jerks whose political agenda doesn’t align with our own.

One example I can think of is the lack of outrage that Stephen Moffatt received death threats because Peter Capaldi is an old white dude.

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It’s not a left/right or black/white thing. Anti feminists are not the only ones being dicks. They’re not the only ones doxxing people, and they’re not the only ones making money via Patreon.

This BB does not point out that fact. So I did.

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The only thing missing is the Godwin.

By my reading, prematurely invoking Godwin is itself a Godwin violation.

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So… at what point does individuals safety finally trump free speech? This guys seems to be actively encouraging harassment of people. When does that become a crime? When people are physically assaulted? When they are raped, or killed? Clearly the sites have some standards (8chan got banned for the promotion of abuse, apparently, as the article mentions), but how do we tease out what is a threat to human life and what is just noise?

To bring it into the real world and out of the virtual, should we ban the publication of works by people like William Pierce or Osama Bin Laden because their connections with terrorist acts? Do we lock up copies of the Turner Diaries or the collected speeches of OBL and only allow those with proper permits to read these works?

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Even in its original formulation, Godwin’s Law did not apply to actual discussions of Nazis. And if you look at 8chan, you find that many of them are self-described fascists and Nazis.

This article was about their funding model. We have self-described fascists calling for the murder of women, harassing them, and raising funds for unstated purposes.

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Why is it that freedom of speech extends to bad faith or for-profit harassment (like Gamergate, Thunderf00t, etc), but not to those who would criticize this harassment, or to those who don’t want to support this harassment?

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. And doxxing someone in order to intimidate them is not the same as blowing the whistle on the identity of someone who’s created a campaign of harassment.

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No, that’s meta-Godwin, and so is your reply.

Personally I think that TFYC are doing something awesome, they are actually working towards bringing more diverse games into the world.

Everyone else seems to be just profiting off the hate, progg and antigg, so far it seems that the only group that has suffered losses is gawker.

But when addressing this in context of nebulous groups such as GG and 8C membership is so open that I don’t know if they can or should be pinned with having a focused, harmful ideology in the same way as an explicitly sexist or racist group. What if 8C has 100,000 members, and about 1,000 are self-professed nazis? Is that troubling? I would say so. Does that make them a nazi organization? I am not convinced that it does. I would rather place the accountability upon the individual, rather than a vaguely-defined group. No, it might not always be easy or possible to get justice this way, but I think it’s the only fair option. Not unlike how copyright holders need to go after individual infringers rather than ISPs , as they do because it’s convenient, and it’s where the money is.

Also, complaining about funding implies an ideology which I don’t share, which is that money/funding even have any real-world relevance. Most apparently don’t share my criticism of this, so I won’t harp on about it.

I agree that it is “not the same”, but I think that the very real differences are hugely subjective. So any attempt to codify it is doomed to be another effort to legislate common sense. Some people actually do think that those who fight sexism or racism are only trying to get money or personal attention. Because this is an incompatible way they have of framing motivations they don’t understand. To a selfish person, selfless behaviors really are delusional - and vice versa. There is no easy solution to it, But I think awareness helps and it’s beneficial to keep dialog open.

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Citations needed.

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OK, I wasn’t going to go into it, said I wouldn’t go into it, but…

Honestly, if I had control of the Internet, I would give Jonathan McIntosh a time out right now. If I was with Intel, I would consider having a talk with Feminist Frequency right now.

Why? Because he’s spent a good chunk of the last week victim-blaming Charlie Hebdo. No, really.

“#JeNeSuisPasCharlie because I don’t use my free speech to mock and deride the most marginalized and vulnerable in society like Charlie Hebdo”

He’s tried to do some damage control, sorta:

“Two horrible things. 1) Murdering people. 2) Publishing racist cartoons that fan the flames of deep-seated hate against Muslim immigrants.”

Which is basically, “Murder is bad, but they had it coming. Also, ‘Muslim’ is a race now.”

But y’know, it’s a good thing I don’t have such control. As much as I’d like to censor him, he has a right to be a bag of dicks. He has a right to expose himself as a victim-blaming asshole. And I have a right to write to Intel and say, “Hey, this isn’t cool.” I also have a right to hold this view even though the people publicizing it the most are, for the most part, also a bunch of dicks.

But it gets slippery, doesn’t it? What if this attack in Paris really does cause an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment? What if it causes more violence? Would that make it okay to censor Charlie Hebdo, and in that case, aren’t we giving the terrorists exactly what they wanted?

And if his critics manage to incite more anti-Feminist Frequency hatred and it leads to more rape and death threats, would that make it okay to censor criticism of this victim-blaming asshole?

If someone watches ‘The Stoning of Soraya,’ then, in a fit of islamophobic rage, busts the kneecaps of the first guy he sees in front of a mosque, should access to Soraya be limited? And based on what?

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