Yeah, especially in this case where “let’s not jump to conclusions and assume it’s misogyny” has an unspoken second part which is, “it could have just been due to the usual, completely toxic video game fan culture!”
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Her tweets don’t defend her game, they call bullshit on the trolley’s claim that it would get panned if it had been released on a very specific piece of hardware. Regardless of whether you think it’s bad form to do so, that’s what happened. The merit of the response may be debatable, but it’s relevance is not; it’s a direct response to the fallacious substance of his insult. You asked what one had to do with the other. I answered your question.
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Okay, were they serious, or just being a trolley? No, I’m not defending them, and I only looked at their posts not the threads. I spent about two minutes on Twitter to figure that much out and that’s more than my cumulative Twitter history. One should not need to do that much research to understand the context of a headline.
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Yeah, see the problem is that societies aren’t totalitarian. Governments are. Other people calling a spade a spade on Twitter isn’t, nor is it in any way analogous to, actual oppression of the freedom of speech. Societal pressures to not be an asshole, and the consequence of getting called an asshole when one does it anyway, are part of common sense and courtesy, not tyranny.
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That was not the only misogynist thing that user has posted/replied to, though I don’t see much point in dragging all of it out. The person is a misogynist. The person is also a troll attacking a game dev who is a favorite target of misogynist trolls.
2+2=“it’s too soon to judge, let’s try to consider excuses to justify the misogynist troll and complain about how they are really the victim here. Whatever it is, it’s not fair to say 4, let’s change the subject.”
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Sometimes I don’t understand everything that’s in the news, and I have to do research before making brazen statements.
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You mention an equation. Perhaps you and I are in fact the two sides of it. And the only way things will work out is through the dialectic.
We’ve heard the argument you are making before. It is usually made by people who actively cheer misogyny as a way of trying to discredit the entire concept that women may face discrimination or hatred.
You say this primarily because the wider context (in gamer gate and police shootings) means a high standard of proof of discrimination in individual cases is unnecessary. That of course is true: the police are institutionally racist, and gamer gaters are misogynists. We don’t need to re-prove those things every time.
But the very mechanism we revile in the phenomenon of gamer gate or police shootings (“relabeled as a series of unfortunate incidents”) is the same mechanism we advocate for the disadvantaged: an unassailable blanket protection based on who you are not what you do. That is the insidious oppression I am referring to.
So it’s time for a different way of seeing this stuff. I don’t exactly know what a more productive route would look like, but both sides apparently handing out free passes to their own team sure isn’t working. Why, for example, do you think men might hate women gamers? That would seem like a good place to start…
You are more worried about men who criticize women being thought of badly than you are about the fact that women leave the profession of game development because the atmosphere is too toxic.
I’m worried that those in positions of weakness are patronised by a willingness to lower standards of judgement against them. This further compounds their disadvantage (an argument made very well by Disability Action’s “Piss on Pity”). So I repeat: nobody should be getting a free pass on the basis of who they are.
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Stalin wasn’t the Bolsheviks, and Mau wasn’t the Great Leap Forward (or Martin Luther King the human rights movement for that matter). The way totalitarian governments come about is through the collective action of people who think like you to about “common sense.”
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Jeez, you’re just saying that in theory we can’t know this guy is a misogynistic trolley. We can. We do.
Why is it? Please do tell.
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Fucked if I know. That’s why I’m asking.
Fortunately we don’t need to know why to see who.
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The way every democratic government in history (and many other sorts) have come about is by the collective action of people who thought the same way, though I don’t think you can really say Stalin or Mao used public shame to get power so much as violent revolution.
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Everyone must be punished!
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If a solid petard hoisting isn’t pwnage, then what is? (What value is there in attempting a negotiation of the definition of “pwnage”, anyway?)
The defensibility of the PSX comparison is questionable, but that’s not on Wu. Your analogy is just inapplicable here, if not just bizarre.
Indeed, your arguments as a whole are so confused that while you appear to agree at the beginning that Wu has made a point, your attempt to walk it back is so awkward that nothing you’ve said here makes any sense nor has any credibility.
The fanboi assertion is also pretty badly misdirected by anyone who claims misogyny isn’t evident. Who are you kidding?
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I find this worry foolish. Women are not in any danger of being given a free pass for who they are, especially not in the field of video game development.
But that is also completely perpendicular to the situation we are discussing here. Who is giving Wu a free pass and for what? Some asshole tweeted something at her and she responded by trying to make him look like an idiot. There is nothing to forgive her for or give her a pass for. You are trying to draw a line between thinking the asshole was misogynist and becoming a totalitarian society. It’s just nonsense.
Are we saying her game must be good because she is a woman? Who said that? I think more than one of us (me at least) us said we thought the graphics do look bad, someone linked to a review panning it badly, some others seemed to be interested in playing it. There are a variety of opinions.
No one here who thinks this guy is misogynist is doing what you seem to be worried we will do. I’d wager 10:1 we mostly support Sanders over Clinton. There is no link between thinking the guy is misogynist and abandoning our critical faculties whenever a woman does something. There is no slippery slope here.
Well, if you’ve been around long enough to read threads on gamergate you might have seen plenty of times when I tried to empathetically engage people who seemed angry about Sarkeesian videos and other gamergate touchpoints. No hypotheticals involved.
What I found out is that gamergaters do not want to talk about why they are actually angry or what would make them happy. I’m not sure if that’s because they don’t know or because it was the kind of thing they couldn’t actually say out loud without coming across as just horribly sexist, or maybe because finding out that someone was actually listening to them made them feel not so angry anymore. I suspect all three in different cases (different people being different from one another).
If you want to have these conversations you can have them. I don’t recommend it, it’s emotionally exhausting to talk to enraged people, worse than most of my volunteer work at a distress line. But they really aren’t relevant here. It doesn’t matter what this guys deep motivations or person story is. He chose to be anonymous by his twitter handle as far as I can tell, and I’m not looking to psychoanalyze him or find out where he lives.
He said Wu wasn’t a real developer and her game was crap. Many people thought he seemed misogynist. You think that’s leading us down a path to disaster, but your arguments seem really far fetched (if you have to invoke totalitarian states to say why we shouldn’t speak badly of a person in a particular way on a web forum then that seems like a stretch) and aren’t supported by reality (none of us actually give free passes to women; we are not jumping to conclusions that anyone who dislikes this game must be misogynist).
And finally, deeper investigation into the tweeter in question shows lots of similar behaviour and misogynist jokes. What if it’s just that other people are better at detecting misogyny than you are? What if we actually had really good reasons to think that guy was misogynist and you just don’t see misogyny because you don’t know what to look for? You might be a colour blind person telling us there is no way to tell red from green.
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Wait…really? You’d do that, just remove a sponsored CBS link?
That’s…interesting.
You know who scorns societal pressures to not be an asshole, ignores the consequence of getting called an asshole and does it anyway, ignoring common sense and courtesy? Donald Trump.
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Some superlikers unliked your post?
