[quote=“popobawa4u, post:18, topic:49922”]
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.
[/quote]This. The fallacy that “this worked for me, so it must work for you, and if it doesn’t, then you’re the one with the problem” has probably caused more upset (and much worse) in the world than almost anything else imaginable.
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Pfft. Wake me when they’ve successfully run someone out of their house. 'till then, this is false equivalence.
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oh the day your realize that BOTH sides of that debate are entirely in your. own. head.
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I can’t find it anymore, but going back to Doctor Who, there was a time when Neil Gaiman refused to answer questions on his Tumblr about Doctor Who, because of the death threats people were receiving because of the Doctor being another old white dude.
This story doesn’t say anything about death threats, but Moffatt talks about being threatened. I especially love that the top comment accuses him of saying it merely to drum up publicity about the show, and also shaming him for talking about it because hey, I bet everyone else in entertainment gets threats of violence, rape, and death, too. Yep, that makes it all right.
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Abraham Lincoln! He was just beastly to those poor Southerners - sent a whole army after them. And a massive SJW, too, don’t even get me started.
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What does that have to do with “the SJW side of the GamerGate thing”?
Or are we suddenly lumping everyone who wants to see more non-white-dudes into the same arbitrary camp?
Wasn’t this about ethics in game journalism?
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It’s about projection, and profound lack of self-reflection, is the connection as I read it.
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How shocking, another article smearing GamerGate as a hate mob. Here’s an article from someone who isn’t a rigid ideologue, and who actually knows something about the video game industry:
Well, I don’t know about any GamerGate crap, but it was a response not knowing of any SJWs chasing people out of their homes. I brought up Doctor Who because it was, in my opinion, a glorious case of people using threats of violence to get their way, in the name of social change. I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure it takes a fair amount of shit to silence Neil Gaiman.
But no, I don’t know of any reported, specific examples of GamerGate people being chased from their homes by people threatening violence. Yay, you win! I guess.
Oh, cute! A non sequitur.
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It’s a long way from pointing out douchebag behavour, to calling for censorship of that behavior. Indeed, when you disallow censorship, then calling it out becomes that much more important.
Gamergate and Charlie Hebdo and Bill Cosby have all done some pretty vile things. Invoking first amendment protection does nothing to make it less vile.
I don’t want these people to get shut down by some government action, I want them to wake up to the hurt they are actively promoting. And I’ll engage with their supporters to that end. (No further!)
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Okay, but that wasn’t the accusation, so maybe you could start paying attention?
Perfect, nothing here disturbing my understanding of everyone who uses the term SJW to be a complete and utter knob.
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I find the idea that someone is making $600 a week by making videos attacking women to be pretty awful. But the reason it’s awful isn’t because Patreon exists, it’s because that person’s ideas are worth $600 a week to other people. I find their ideas very objectionable and I wish there wasn’t $600 a week of support for their ideas out there.
But $600 a week is a a pretty modest living. $100 a month, up from $20 a month is very little. $1.50 per thousand views and hundreds of thousands of viewers is only hundreds of dollars.
The reality is that it sounds like there may be tens of thousands of dollars a month up for grabs to people who promote anti-feminist ideas on the internet. I wish that money wasn’t there for these cretins, but there’s more than that for people who play League of Legends on twitch.tv.
Hate groups probably use credit cards to buy things, but I don’t think we need to go after Patreon or Kickstarter anymore than we need to go after VISA for promoting this behaviour. Some of these crowdfunding services may be odious for other reasons, of course.
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Racism has never been limited to real races because there are no real races among humanity.
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There’s been enough discussion here to know that isn’t true. The movement is well-known to have started with harassment, and when people actually look at what has been talked about and done under its banner - for instance MBD here, here, and here - that’s still almost all it is about.
Nor is it unfair to call a grassroots movement a hate group when it apparently doesn’t care to put the slightest distance between itself and that hate. Indeed, you’re not the first account that has shown up just in time to defend gamergate and will never be seen again, and a lot of them have expressed indifference or outright approval of it.
For the most part, very much so.
I would say that whether someone is run from their home or not, death threats are inherently serious, and that includes any made against gamergaters. Anyone responsible for those deserves our full criticism. But from everything I have seen, those seem to be scarce or questionable; nppayne provided a claim otherwise, but it seems to have accepted anything done right by channers or done wrong to them as gospel without any critical judgment, and that seems to be the rule on that.
Meanwhile it’s been very well-established that gamergate is a movement centered around the harassment and threatening of women. So any attempt to equate them to their critics and targets is plainly false equivalence. And so is describing them as part of a dialog, debate, open communication, or anything of the sort; intimidating people into silence is the exact opposite of that.
It’s not an unreasonable way to look at it, but are these supposed to be that sort of neutral platform?
For instance Kickstarter in its terms of use says “don’t do anything threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, libelous, tortious, obscene, profane, or invasive of another person’s privacy”. I think we’ve seen enough to tell that they wouldn’t allow crowdfunding for something like a new pure-race party, so it should also be reasonable to consider what they do allow.
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Great article, Jay. I’ve never been able to sit through a complete video by Mason, MundaneMatt, or Aurini. I’ve encountered people like them my whole life, and unless I have some project where listening to them is necessary, it’s no use making my own skin crawl by subjecting myself to them. What’s more surprising to me is that enough people are willing to send them money to create a minor cottage industry for misogynistic rants.
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Accuracy of the term race notwithstanding, typically disparaging a group that is the way they are without their choosing (color of skin, orientation, disability,etc) is viewed differently than disparaging a group that is what they are through their choosing (christian, muslim, iphone user ;)). The latter commonly being more socially accepted. I would say racism, however precisely defined, is of the former. Thus when someone says something anti-islamic is racist they seem to be moving categories.
But religions are inherited as well as chosen. I’m an atheist but if a new Nazi-like party was rounding up Christians they’d want me in their sweep. My mother was Christian and I go to Christmas parties with my family. It’s safe to say there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t necessarily believe in any god and don’t observe any particular religious practices or laws except to please their families who are “Muslim” for anyone who hates Muslims. I can’t rely on people in hate groups to share my definitions.
At the request of a person who seemed to want to have a conversation I watched one of Mason’s videos. It was 10 minutes long. I would say two and a half minutes was a reasonable criticism of Sarkeesian (one that I think missed the mark, but something that actually raised an issue worth discussing) and the other 7.5 minutes was “SHE’S A LYING LIAR FROM LIARVILLE.” I can understand why you wouldn’t make it all the way through.
I guess I should say that I think the notion of crowdfunding is neutral - it’s kind of analogous to a barn raising. A community might come together to build a place where they can all go and talk about how much they hate the Scots, but I don’t hold the notion of communities coming together for a common purpose responsible for that.
But I agree that if crowdfunding is mediated by a business, and that business has standards like the one you quote, then that business has not just the right but also the responsibility to enforce its own standards. What I’m now torn on is what their responsibility is for the mere fact that they take a cut. I mean, Patreon get’s it’s share of the misogyny money, but that is very directly analogous to VISA, who takes their cut of everything.
The reason I was talking about amounts of money, though, is because I wouldn’t want to throw out barn raising because some jerks got together to build the Scottish-hating club.
Another thought, though. If it weren’t for Patreon, could these guys just get donations directly to their PayPal? Could they get people to mail them money in an envelope? If they got banned from crowdfunding sites would they end up richer for it?
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Ever since the initial attacks on ZQ that sparked this idiocy of Gamergate I have thought that it was all just a clique culling. The original instigators have all increased their online profiles and siphoned tons of cash from their audiences. Their attempts to go after game reviewers and indy devs just emphasized this for me. It really seems that it was a coup orchestrated by z-list gamer personalities. However, it did serve as a catalyst for this being made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsdIHK8O5yo
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My goal was to emphasize that crowdfunding is not a neutral tool, like the telephone, but rather a business partnership. Why would you want to enter a business partnership with people who are hateful and uncivilized?
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