IT HAS been demonstrated. Over and over and over again. #GamerGate was NEVER about ethics in journalism. NEVER. It’s always been used primarily to attack and silence women. Always.
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You won’t get other people that are associated to the hashtag to disassociate. Your best bet is either to wait until it fizzles out, or reach for some sort of mutual understanding; my bet is that their motivation is more about in-group membership (a strong motivation for social animals) than about the nature of the group itself.
You won’t win.
Neither won’t they.
Go for a draw.
And don’t get so heavily emotionally invested in it. Won’t help anything but shorten your life by the added unneeded self-generated stress.
Your best bet is either to wait until it fizzles out, or reach for some sort of mutual understanding
Are you kidding me here?! We need to come to a mutual understanding with people who are sending rape, death and bomb threats to women? You’re joking, right? And “fizzle out” is just yet more dismissing and downplaying and silencing women (and men) who are speaking out against DEATH AND RAPE THREATS.
Go for a draw
Wow. You want us to negotiate with literal terrorists. You want us to “go for a draw” – basically, give up and stop speaking out against the hate. Because that’s what you mean when you say they won’t stop but “we” (anti-gamergaters) need to set the draw. What?!
NO.
Your entire comment is dismissive and an attempt to silence victims. Ugh. Where the fuck are all you assholes coming from, anyway?
NEWS FLASH: This problem is far larger than gamergate. Hey, guess what, this sort of harassment was happening before gamergate and is happening elsewhere. This isn’t just about gamergate, not really; as a Skeptic and Atheist, this same fucking shit happens to women in all/most online communities. It’s not just gamers and gaming. If you want us to shut up about gamergate, that means you want us to shut up altogether about the harassment tossed at women on a daily basis. Is that what you really want to stand for?
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I’m with marilove here. This comment sounds like you haven’t taken any notice what this is about: a movement that has been harassing and threatening women, trying to silence them online and even driving them from their homes. The choice to wait it out or try to reach an understanding isn’t a privilege everyone enjoys, and I’d rather we stand up for the people who can’t.
“I appreciate the noble intention of attempting to build a bridge, but maybe consider why some of us have been forced to live behind a moat.” - Quinn, for those who didn’t read it the first time I linked it.
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These are the outliers, not even really belonging to the group (even if claiming so). If you understand this, you’ll get that you are getting riled up at a wrong target.
Even if they were that, you HAVE to negotiate. There is no other way to end up such kind of a conflict. Years of incidents were never ended by other way than negotiation (or, in case of Tamil Tigers, by bungling up strategy and going conventional against a stronger adversary).
Sorry.
No. I mean that whoever you are standing against - a small handful of threat-flingers hidden in a larger gamer group, or a small group of al-Qaida hidden between ordinary Muslims, and many other examples, you will not make anything better by focusing on the larger, misunderstood group. Many many examples all through both history and present.
And people are STILL not getting it. And some even make careers (or clicks) from perpetuating the conflicts.
I want off this stupid rock…
So other than sending threats and that kind of bullshit, what, specifically, has been done under the banner of gamergate?
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You’re being fucking ridiculous and you really need to learn how to start listening to the people this actually affects instead of ‘splain’ to us how we should react and discuss this issue. I have already talked about this same shit with other assholes over the last two or three days. Go back and read my other comments addressing this other stuff. DO YOUR HOMEWORK before presuming to understand this subject. And stop lecturing us on this subject!
As someone who has actually been threatened and once lost her job due to online harassment, I am so fucking tired of people telling me how to react and fight this shit, especially people who have no direct connection to the threats being thrown at women.
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Well, you see @CaptainPedge, it’s about ethics in journalism. I mean, when @sypin was also asked this question directly, he totally didn’t talk about Quinn and her sex life in response while saying nothing at all about ethics in gaming journalism!
Oh…wait.
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I’ll set em up, you knock em down
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Group cohesion under external pressure, I’d guess from what was visible to me from the fog-of-war covered battlefield. The rest are rather ineffective attempts to find a meaning for the group, whose core meaning is merely its existence.
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This is gibberish. Word salad. It says nothing and adds nothing.
Okay. Again and simpler.
People naturally want to belong to a group, to identify with it. It is a pretty strong feeling, common for nationalism, soccer clubs, and many other fields. The group identification and cohesion is more important than the group’s other properties.
The desire to belong to a group is magnified for people who don’t have any, who are lonely. It hurts to be lonely. Therefore they find a group they can identify with, and stick with it and gradually invest more of their emotional bonds to it. You don’t need any special meaning for the group to have such function.
Meanwhile some tangential associates do something wrong.
Then somebody comes and tells them that their whole group is a wrong one. Natural reaction is not to disassociate from the group - instead it is circling the wagons and starting a defense. The alternative is to go to the lonely state before. The ones who can disassociate easily usually have other groups with strong enough bonds to compensate the loss of that one. But many don’t. And they will argue and fight back to defend the by-then already pretty significant emotional link with the group.
You won’t change that by attacking them. You will only make the group more threatened, and more cohesive, providing them with an external enemy as a powerful uniting factor. Maybe the group gets a bit smaller, but in the prevalence of loneliness in that demographics I wouldn’t bet on much further shrinkage.
That’s the adversary you are dealing with.
So that’s the situation as I see it, said in more words. Hope it is clearer now.
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I’ve read the personal stories of a number of reformed former members of hate groups that talked about this. About being in a mental state where membership in a group - any group - mattered far more than what the group stood for or did.
You might also recall that Fred Phelps used people’s vocal condemnations of the Westboro Church as a major part of the conditioning process for his younger children. He’d send them out to places where they would draw fire, to make sure that they’d be unwilling to consider other views. Phelps had his enemies working for him.
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But how does any of that work in this case? I know you’ve been here on these threads, so you should know how ridiculous it is to imagine it as something that started innocently like a soccer club.
Because it’s been explained and demonstrated again and again: gamergate formed around attacks on Quinn and other women. That it’s not a question of tangential associates doing something, but that the whole group is organized around it, discusses little else, sets all its goals and determines its victories by it.
That’s the adversary we’re dealing with. They provided their own external enemies, who are now stuck in opposition to them simply by continuing to exist as voices. What you’re seeing isn’t people starting fights against them, but circling wagons around their would-be victims in hopes of limiting the fire they take.
You say our best bet is to wait until it fizzles out. But I say that wait can’t be passive, we also need to limit how much they hurt people in the mean time…and when you combine the two, I think the response here has been the appropriate one.
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That would work for a pre-existing group, but who is that supposed to be? Certainly not all gamers. Who are those people who identified with an asshole ex and his supporters and decided that that was their struggle?
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Of course I’m obviously now thinking of:
Of course this is what all hate groups are like. The KKK didn’t start as a social club and later evolve into an anti-black organization after black people raised a fuss about the KKK’s garden parties. Hate groups are built on hate.
So if they are a hate group, then what do we do about hate groups? The KKK wasn’t reduced to it’s current size from it’s peak in 1920 because it was ignored, and I don’t think it was because it was negotiated with. It’s just that society started to be uncomfortable with in-your-face violent racism. The group became unacceptable. If you join now you probably hide it from your parents and your co-workers.
We’ve still got a big racism problem and the trajectory hasn’t exactly been uniformly positive, but hate groups usually can’t be quite so vocal (or at least so violent) these days.
I think that talking about it and condemning it is exactly what has to be done. Sure, yelling at the people who come here to post may not do much to change those people’s opinions, but we are making it clear that it is unacceptable here, and we should do that everywhere.
But there are still hate groups, and the KKK is still around with about one one-thousandth of its peak membership. Hate groups are never going to go away. As I said above, maybe what needs to be done on a broader level is try to address disaffected youth because that’s what the real root of the problem is.
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There’s was a “Toys for Tots” game-drive; but I think it only ended up with a few copies of Custer’s Revenge.
Okay. You two are starting to get creepy. This is freaking me out.
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Soccer hooligans aren’t exactly a peaceful bunch. Other groups can assemble in a war (e.g. soldiers) and end up as peaceful clubs. The trajectories from/to violent/peaceful aren’t set in stone.
How much of it is because of external pressures? How can they be led to abandoning these things and doing something else instead? Can their support for that other developer group be leveraged?
That’s what makes the situation so complicated. An initial minor skirmish where nobody can say anymore who shot first, or what can be considered an over-the-threshold event for a reaction. An otherwise minor affair nuke-shroomed up (and then the threats appeared) in few days, don’t ask me why, possibly as a result of enough people primed for “something” and then getting this to focus on.
The wagons-circling is happening on both sides and each side has its reasons. And the group-belonging is likely to be a strong motive for both sides.
My guess for the correct response is addressing individual attackers, not the group as a whole. Do not bomb out the whole village just because it hides a few individuals; that will only cause collateral damage and make you more adversaries to counter in next round. Something should be done but be VERY careful about the reaction to not make it yet worse.
…which won’t happen because of too many hotheads. Like in the doomed War on Terror. So many parallels.
My guess is that the group formed out of latent need of the members to belong to a group, the cause (and the demography of the initial group) being close to some, then others snowballed onto it due to some sort of identification that was good enough to provide the in-group feeling, and now we are where we are.
In terrorist groups, there is a common phenomenon of individuals migrating between groups. The groups can even have entirely different goals; the in-group acceptance seems to be a more important factor than the group’s own goals. Don’t ask me for the link, I read that whitepaper years ago and forgot details. 
Yes, but less emotionally. Leave the overly affective reactions to the other side, it will weaken them as well as it would weaken you.
I have a rule to not post when excited, in either way. And it helps a lot to keep cool head and not escalate conflicts Just Because of Feelings. Feelings lie and are fed not primarily by reality but by in-group ties and other subjective factors, and personal traumas of all kinds may (and do) lead to irrationally strong responses. With that setup, the progression into the all-too-familiar internet shouting matches and snowballing outrages is only natural.
(Also, another concept I employ is to favor the less controversial explanation when something offers more choices of interpretation. Getting outraged is tempting, group-strengthening when shared (likely a factor why I find it hard to belong to a group as I refuse to get emotional unless the situation REALLY deserves it, and it rarely does), and, more often than not, wrong, due to the omnipresent risk of mere misunderstanding. If the other side wants to push things, they will repeat the attempt and make it clear.)
Again, generally true but care has to be taken to hear some of the opposition voices. There may be parts of the whole thing where even “the enemy” can be right. The loudness of the yell is not any good indicator of truth of the argument. Listening to the adversary both builds bridges and provides better arguments.
They won’t. And they are sort of needed in a diminutive size and reduced to pretty much harmless as an indicator of the social climate. Membership growth can be an early indicator of something somewhere going wrong. Push them too much underground and you lose these easily observable indicators.
THIS!!! Straight on the money.
Wanting blood instead of striving for peace is a typical maladaptive reaction. Feels good. Does not help.
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Except of course that everybody is familiar with the first shots, and they were all gamergate attacking women. Which it has done to the point of issuing death threats, which as everyone should be able to tell goes over every threshold. It’s been explained with evidence here again and again.
Except of course that it’s not a village full of civilians, it’s a hate camp. The entirety of gamergate, the only cause advanced by the people who’ve adopted the banner, has been trying to silence women and critics of silencing women. It’s been explained here with evidence again and again.
Except we’ve been hearing the opposition voices; there’s been a non-stop stream of new accounts that showed up just in time to defend gamergate and will never be seen again™. And even when invited, none have offered anything beyond disingenuous defense, downplays of attacks on women, and occasionally more attacks on women. It’s been demonstrated here again and again.
What exactly do you think it benefits to spin this all into a narrative that completely ignores all these things? To completely omit any mention of the central concern, the women who were targeted in all this, the real victims at whom real shots have been at least promised, in favor of a story where you somehow can’t tell who started the fight?
To actually twist things so far as to portray the people who are non-violently critical as “bombing” and “wanting blood”, while insisting we should regard a group that is actually silencing people with death threats as like a village or soccer club?
Because if you think it lends some credibility to your claims, I can assure you it doesn’t. If you really want to try and persuade me that anyone here is reacting in too emotional a way, then recognize this for what it is and try to persuade me based on that. Not from more false equivalency.
Though I’ll be honest: I’m still not going to be much more inclined to listen to tone driving trollies any more than I am to its near-cousin victim blaming. Sure, I’m as impressed as anyone @anon50609448 has the patience to try to reason with these one-offs, but if @marilove doesn’t feel obligated to act subdued and polite each time yet another hate group defender decides to vomit the same nonsense here, she’s entirely in the right too.
It damn well should make people angry. And that some instead worry more about that reaction than the misogyny and violence itself, making everything about the one and ignoring the other, does not make me feel we have similar priorities to say the least.
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