Insular groups can make up their own external enemies, they don’t need real ones to radicalize people. Like you say, this is the tactic of cults, but most cults don’t have real enemies because no one has heard of them.
But as I’ve said before, lectures on how to convince people to do things from someone who is clearly not convincing the person they are lecturing with of anything are a little hollow. If you know how people behave and what motivates them and how to get things done, then demonstrate it by showing that you have a trick up your sleeve other than aloofness and actually convince someone.
If you want to talk reality, here is reality: We aren’t going to save everyone. How much empathy and compassion are we going to put into getting a couple of people on twitter to stop tweeting #gamergate (while getting threats from the rest the entire time) when if there’s any hope for them they’ll probably grow up and stop doing it in a year or two anyway? The strategy you are suggesting - actually reaching out to people, being moderate, offering people an ear is work. I know because I’m the person who actually does it on these boards.
But somehow @marilove has never yelled at me for apologizing for or supporting #gamergate. That’s because actually reaching out to people (while refusing to accept distorted reality and hate from them) is neither of those things. Telling people who aren’t doing that that they are taking the wrong approach from a high perch is.
Sometimes when you have cancer you treat it and try to save as much of the tissue as possible, sometimes you cut it the hell out. Is #gamergate an organ worth saving? I hardly blame anyone who doesn’t think so.
It is sad. I think that’s how a lot of people feel. And a lot of people who aren’t gamers are looking on in amazement, think, “Why would people do this over videogames?”
Imagine there was a news story about how some stamp collectors were bullying women out of stamp collecting. That would sure make everyone stay the hell away from stamp collecting.
Here’s the problem, what is anyone saying to @marilove other than: “You are doing it wrong,” “You are emotional,” “Not all gamergaters.”
The analogy to the KKK is completely apt. There are people who are in the KKK just for the social connection who don’t have a deep hatred for any of the groups the KKK was formed to attack, and yes, some of those people, given other opportunities, would leave the KKK and stop racist behaviours. If someone can put together an outreach program to reach those people then good for them (there are such movements in Germany for neo-Nazis). But does everyone else have to band together and say that, for the good of the few KKK members who aren’t as bad as the other KKK members we’ve got to lay off the KKK?
Gamergate is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s radar as a hate group. At what point do the members themselves have a responsibility to look at outside sources and go, “Whoa!”?
Doesn’t this smell a little bit like white men sitting around talking about how everyone should be more sympathetic to misguided white men?
