It definitely depends on where you are. I spend 12 years working for an aerospace/defence multinational engineering firm and they had the best culture by far. Before that I was working in traffic signals for a government organisation. Still pretty good with some women working in engineering. I think the larger, more professional organisations with solid HR processes will have the best environment. I work for a small company now and the culture isn’t so good, but not because of the attitudes of the developers.
Right, because ignoring groups of violent bigots has always worked so well in the past.
Oh wait, no it hasn’t. Fuck that shit.
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What a load of bull. Ignore it?
You’ve first posted here before on this issue, haven’t you?
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The biggest problem is the effort to track down resources based on semi-anonymous internet threats.
Controlling the narrative would only matter if gamergate was actually taken seriously. This isn’t some important battle to be won. It’s just people hurling insults and poorly worded 140 character arguments on the internet.
Ms. Wu has been actively engaging (if it can be called that, she likes to throw around just as much rhetoric as anyone on either side of the hashtag) with gamergate since it started. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that having spent all this time yelling at a hashtag that some wack job with take offense. There’s only so many times you can generalize a group of people millions of people that put a line of text at the end of their tweet before someone will do something stupid.
Boogie2988 got his share of death threats (people actually coming to his house) and work related threats after his involvement with gamergate. He did the smart thing and withdrew from the issue. I don’t see him having to go to the police or leave his home now.
If this was a worthwhile fight that could actually accomplish something, you’d have a point. But nothing good will come out of confronting gamergate. But there isn’t anything. The longer it’s perpetuated, the more people will get hurt.
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So, tell me what has been accomplished by confronting gamergate? Other than more death threats and more polarizing rhetoric?
So, shut up if you know what’s good for you?
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There is a distinct difference between gamergate and the group of violent bigots that gather around it. Gamergate is the platform that people are using to attack others. By confronting it, you lend it legitimacy and perpetuate its ability to draw more filth who will hurt more people.
And via that perpetuation of the platform and its surrounding problems, you also continue to allow it to taint any attempts to effect worthwhile change as you allow it to polarize discussion of any issue that can have even a remote relation drawn to it.
Does anyone remember back when David Vonderhaar was recieving death threats over changes to black ops II? Or Jennifer helper? Whether it was women or men, everyone thought there was something wrong with it. People didn’t try to turn it into a platform for different issues, attack other people over it, or see some kind of conspiracy surrounding its reporting, they saw it for the evil that it was.
Ha ha! I love that.
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No. I am so tired of people telling someone that is being victimized that they just need to sweep it under the rug. People are threatening to kill and rape these women, and hurt their families. It is not okay. It is incredibly graphic. You do not ignore people who do this. Anyone that shines a light on the abusive threats they receive is not adding to it. It does not perpetuate the abuse. The only thing perpetuating this abuse are the whack jobs that are making those threats.
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The group of violent bigots doesn’t “gather around” GamerGhazi. They are its’ core. They started it. For them, GG is an acutal shield. They started this whole shitstorm, way back when the Zoepost first appeared. They riled up a bunch of naive, entitled gamers with paranoid and completely misguided conspiracy theories about “journalistic ethics”.
And now they’re using the hashtag as an actual shield to do what they love doing the most: Harassing women.
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Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass, 1857.
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Sadly, as true now as it was in the antebellum south.
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Nice quote. I’ll have to remember that for the next “don’t feed the trolls” idiocy I see.
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Be sure to read the whole speech. Douglass was brilliant.
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I’m not talking about the death threats. I’m talking about gamergate. The fact that you are unable to seperate the two is part of the problem here. You’re unable to separate the people using the platform from the platform itself. If someone drove up to a woman in a prius, open up the window and started hurling death threats at her, would suddenly demand that all Prius’s be destroyed since they are clearly sexist tools of the devil?
Additionally, if the guy didn’t have the Prius, he’d have to work a lot harder to get to that woman to threaten her, wouldn’t he?
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See the “/s”? that’s the sarcasm tag.
@chgoliz is making a comment of the tendency of some to derail or obfuscate, as in “not all men” or “won’t someone think of the children”, or talk of Priuses.
edited to add Prius.
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They try but there are problems. These sorts of threats fall into a confusing mish mash of harassment , stalking, menacing, and newer “online bullying” type laws. In any given jurisdiction it could fall under any or none of these statutes, and then there’s annoying shit like it having to be “credible” for charges to be filed. On top of this there are jurisdictional issues. Chances are the guy making the threat resides outside the jurisdiction of the department doing the investigation. It’s also a sad fact that most departments don’t have the resources, or skill set to do these sorts of investigation s properly. It’s reletively trivial to find these guys if you know what you’re doing, but that skill set it’s exclusive to a handful of very small units in larger regional departments and regional fbi task forces. These guys are largely swamped with child porn, human trafficking, hacking, fraud, and financial cases. As well as providing tech forensics for every other pertinent case in their respective organizations. So sadly given the difficulty with making anything stick, and the stakes of the existing case load , online harassment cases tend to stick with the smaller departments who are ilequiped to deal with them.
in other words the cops often do try. But if they can find the harassers there’s no guarentee they can do anything about it. And when they could potentially do something about there’s no guarentee they can find the guy. So you hear police are involved and then it never comes to anything.
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“Controlling the narrative would only matter if gamergate was actually taken seriously.”
The people driven from their homes by bigots take it seriously. The rest of your argument boils down to, “She asked for it for standing up for herself and confronting people who were hurling invective at her for being a woman in an industry they’re part of.”
Pardon my language, but FUCK THAT.
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This was the intent of #Gamergate from the beginning, as has been documented and discussed thoroughly in this forum.
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