Your comment smacks of that plaintive white-male-gamer cry, “But that girl that one time called me names–I’m being harassed, too!”
We all know there’s that one girl, that one super-programmer, super-commenter, super-eeeeeeevil young feminist woman who is doing so many awful things to the poor young male gamers out there…and yet she’s outweighed exponentially by the volumes of GG peckerwoods doxxing and threatening.
And if I might venture a guess? That super-eeeeeevil young feminist? She doesn’t exist.
What I said was these aren’t equal. That comparing them is false equivalence.
Because the conversation is actually about how GamerGate is a movement that exists due to misogyny and continues to harbor violent misogynists within it, and comparing what those reprehensible human beings do to what some other person somewhere might’ve done at some point I guess is missing the point.
Until you admit that GamerGate was founded on lies and has been perpetuated with monstrous cruelty, there’s not much use in your desperate, flailing finger-pointing.
Patreon is a recurring payment platform targeted at content creators. It is not a curator or businesses partnership and has zero say in what creators do. Your post is counterfactual.
They allow plenty of folks who violate their new TOS to have accounts (thunderf00t doesn’t, and it appears to have been created for the specific purpose of kicking Fredrick Brennan off the site, since it does things like say that people who engage in doxxing should not be allowed on the site, while keeping people who have engaged in doxxing and even written articles about why they feel doxxing is OK).
Another important thing to note (since srhbutts seems to be blind to it entirely) is that /baphomet/ is not GamerGate. In fact, /baphomet/ is not fond of GamerGate, but aren’t their primary targets so GG only gets targeted when they get in the way. The reason they seem to share enemies is because /baphomet/ is currently on the war path after the people they perceive (rightly or wrongly) to be related to or responsible for the attacks on 8chan, and they are casting a wide net. People decided to shit up their home to get at GG, so anon will escalate like anon does until they stop having fun doing it. I hope they get stopped, but don’t expect it to actually happen.
Honestly, I want everyone who’s engaged in doxxing and actual harassment to be punished to whatever degree is possible for it. Fuck them all, on every side. I said actual harassment because disagreeing with someone is not harassment, arguing with someone is not harassment, pointing out their own words publicly is not harassment, even being somewhat snarky or sardonic in presenting your argument against someone isn’t harassment, but things like threats, doxxing, mailing syringes, mass pizza orders, black faxes, calling someone’s employer to have them fired from an unrelated job, those are all examples of harassment.
Those who oppose GamerGate don’t want that to happen though, because too many of them would either be caught up in that net, or profit from being victims.
Dude, Mr Schad (I can haz a Schad?) signed up to make that post. And after this thread he’ll probably never be seen again. You shouldn’t feed the trolls, and you definitely shouldn’t darn the sockpuppets.
Why? Why is someone telling JennOfHardWire that they know where she lives and are going to kill her, that they want to rip her next daughter out of her and rape and kill it, why are these suddenly not worth mentioning? Because she’s on the “wrong” side, so her victimhood doesn’t count?
You have literally said that a woman receiving rape and death threats isn’t equivalent to a woman receiving rape and death threat because you don’t agree with one of the harassment victims on some issue. You didn’t actually look at either link I provided, did you?
I did leave out another one – Sam Biddle recently wrote and published an article that was basically an excuse to throw a bunch of virgin shaming at WizardChan over a non-event. I guess he really did mean it when he said he wanted to “Bring Back Bullying.” You are probably OK with that though, since the target is a group of men who aren’t of value to women, and thus not being people they are acceptable targets.
GamerGate is about misogyny huh? Let me guess, because GamerGate only targets women? Women like Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, srhbutts, Randi Harper, Ben Kuchera, Nathan Greyson, Arthur Chu, Ian Miles Cheong, Jonathan McIntosh, and so on?
What lies was it founded on? Can you disprove those lies? Does this even matter given that assigning properties to a thing based on the origin of that thing without consideration of the claims being made is a logical fallacy known as the fallacy of origins or genetic fallacy, a form of fallacy of irrelevance.
Whoops. Thought you wrote “hairdresser”. Yeah, why would Patreon allow a known hairdresser? :-0
Question for you, do you support the US government’s pressure on credit card processors to ban WikiLeaks donations? Or US government banning credit card transactions on goods that are legal but transactions the government considers, at its own discretion, “high risk”? What about PayPal’s ban on erotic fiction? Do you really want financial services companies to be censors? How do you know that censorship won’t turn on you?
Saying someone’s victimhood counts or not is an odd way to put it, as if it’s about scoring points. But absolutely, the treatment described for JennOfHardWire is unacceptable. Whatever she has written, no matter how vile, doesn’t and can’t justify it. Any such harassment and threats against her need to end, full stop, and ideally those responsible would in some way be held accountable.
I hope you understand the same applies to harassment, threats, and attempts to intimidate people into silence made by gamergate. The problem here is that the movement is centered around them. Yes, I know people like Jenn have claimed otherwise, but they’re wrong or lying; when people actually look at what is done and talked about under the name gamergate, it’s almost all attacks on critics and women, as for instance in the links I gave.
And we have enough accounts that show up here to defend it and are never seen again to tell there’s basically no interest in repudiating that. Complaints about the odd harassment of gamergate supporters are just used as an attempted tu quoque; as here, the same people are often happy to see it used to silence women.
I think you’re actually the first one who’s been so much as willing to admit that harassment is not acceptable in general. If that’s really your values, good, but then you need to stop ignoring how much of it gamergate has been built around, stop faulting people who criticize the movement for it, and above all stop pretending the victims are somehow asking for it. You should be cleaning your own house, because right now it deserves to be called a hate group.
There’s a common fallacy that goes something like, “The KKK hates African-Americans, but African-Americans hate the KKK. Really both sides are equally bad.” (Let me know if you need me to explain why that’s a fallacy.)
WIth that in mind, what does it mean when a member of the KKK is harassed?
A decent human being will naturally condemn the harassment, simply because decent human beings always condemn harassment.
But the rules are a bit different for KKK members themselves. If a KKK member says, “Oh, no, some black-robed vandals burned an inverted cross in my front yard! What did I ever did to deserve that?” then decent human beings will laugh at him. Even though harassment is wrong, KKK members don’t have the moral standing to complain about it.
In other words, JennOfHardware has the right to not be harassed, but she isn’t entitled to any sympathy if she does get harassed. She needs to drop out of her hate group first.
You write like you actually have some sense, enough sense to notice how absurd this statement is. How many people do you think oppose gamergate? All of them are in favour of online harassment in the abstract?
Within gamergate, which I think it rightly called a hate group, probably a sizeable portion to a majority are sure against online harassment, generally speaking. People against gamergate - which includes the majority of gamers, gaming media, game designers and game companies and every single non-gamer who has heard of it - is way too diverse a group to peg them all as three standard deviations out for moral standards.
In the article you link by JennOfHardwire she notes that 40% of internet users report having been harassed online at least once. That means that a sizeable portion of the harassment of both gamergaters and those who don’t like gamergate is probably just “noise” rather than “signal” - that is to say that people would be harassing one another whether gamergate existed or not. And that is particularly true for people who are in gamergate, because they are surrounding themselves with the harassers.
When KingOfPol had a huge meltdown (for lack of a better term) he said that the most vicious harassment he had received was from within gamergate. Does that makes sense to people within gamergate? I’ve never seen Breanna Wu send death threats to Anita Sarkessian, but maybe some gamergaters see that as proof that they are conspiring together?
At this point, what is gamergate? Thread after thread I ask everyone who defends gamergate what they’d like to see come out of it and no one has ever given me an answer. Gamergate’s one victory - Intel and Gamasutra - has now been recognized by Intel as a $300M gaffe that no other company is likely to emulate. There will be no more advertisers pulling their ads.
The articles about it are sputtering out, getting fewer and further between. All that’s left is the general sense that we really do need reform in video games because video game player culture is sick. The biggest legacy of gamergate will be the tens of millions of people who know basically nothing about video games now know that apparently people who play them threaten women online.
In the context of my post, it has to do with censorship by payment processors.
Do you think that payment processors should be in the censorship businesses?
I’m against harassment, and I think ThunderD00d, or however one spells his name, has revealed himself as an odious trolley, but I don’t want financial services companies to be in the businesses of adjudicating free speech.
If ThunderD00d has committed a crime, prosecute him. If he is a driving trollies douchebag staying inside the law then by all means point out what a douche he is all over the internet (though that’s also kind of his MO). The payment processing companies should not be in the position of deciding who should speak and who should not - and, yes, the ability to be compensated for speech is part of free speech. And, no, patreon is not the government, so it may be constitutionally allowed to deny payments, but the concept of free speech, and advocating for it, is not limited to the minimum required by the constitution.
There’s a positive side to it, I think. We survived the Zerg rush, and the advantage is now ours.
Gamergate has been largely a reaction to efforts that were beginning to succeed. Lots of people used to write off gaming as a sexist, cliche-ridden wasteland of stupidity. Now we’ve had major media stories on intelligent critics and innovative indie developers, and it looks like it’s not such a wasteland. Many people know now, what they didn’t know before, that there are capable and creative women in game development and criticism, and that people will support them.
But doesn’t Patreon similarly deserve the ability to decide who they want to be seen associating with? Shouldn’t they be able to say “That speech is odious and we won’t support it financially, even if that means less money for us?”
As a non-video game playing nerd, yes, that is pretty much my take away. I know it’s not all gamers, but pre-gamergate I had no idea of the extent of how much sick and vicious mysogyny there was in video game culture.
On the other hand, it is all pretty much a thunderstorm in a teacup. From my physical-world friends and coworkers, about one is familiar with the GG thing. Others aren’t, despite some of them playing games.
The media that comprise the bulk of your data intake may be full of a thing, causing a false perception of how important/widespread/wide-known it is. That may not be actually the case.
Indeed, you can make that argument, they have that legal right. But in the larger context that I outlined in my earlier post, payment transaction companies are a financial choke point that government and pressure groups can use to strangle people, companies and ideas that are legal, but that they don’t like. That’s what you want to do. I, for one, am warry of such censorship. Today you want it to be ThunderD00d, but tomorrow it could be you being censored by Visa, or BoingBoing by Bank of America, or name any person, group, idea or thing that isn’t illegal but at least one person, org or gov doesn’t like. I’ll pass, thank you.
