Thanks. I agree we won’t really know what stance Patreon is allowed to take until they face a legal test against their claims that they aren’t a party to the transactions they facilitate. While I like the direction the OP is headed, I do feel like that part of the argument leaps past a good number of business law issues.
Should we have a morality test? God, I wish we had more of them and could apply them to people like Uber and Facebook. Absent Patreon turning themselves into a B-corp (or something similar) I think the only effective and recognized morality test we have is our own vote, and what we do with our own dollar. I knew I had been sensitized to these issues when I heard a friend apologize for using a GoFundMe for an otherwise worthy cause (bail money for wrongly arrested Ferguson protesters).
While I generally agree with your point, I think with Patreon there is a slight difference in that (as I understand it, I only checked it out briefly a couple months ago, as I’ve nothing to sell and nobody I want to support monthly), it’s not just payment, people on it set up a specific ‘profile page’ for themselves which is essentially advertising under patreon’s “brand name”, and Patreon offers them special tools where they can, say, release some content only to people to support them (which I guess means it’s also hosting that specific content?), so there’s more justification to hold them to the standards of a co-publisher, like a magazine advertiser can choose not to run ads it disagrees with.
Now if Patreon had a system where they can say, “You know what, you have a right to collect money through us, you can send any potential supporters you recruit on your own to donate through this code, and we’ll give you the money and the e-mail addresses of those who support you (those who don’t want to remain anonymous) but we find you odious so we will not host a page for you and you can make your own arrangements to reward your supporters,” that would be okay by me.
But frankly, I think pure payment processors should be required to be neutral except where a transaction is actually against the law. That PayPal can cut off support just because someone’s business is slightly unsavory is rather unconscionable to me, as you say, there’s a huge choke point risk: any alternative payment processor requires not only the business to change, but for every potential customer to join a different and untested and potentially untrustworthy site and let them handle their financial information, it’s not really a realistic option any more than shopping around for health care is.
I meant it in the sense that pro-GG people who get harassed tend to simply have their harassment disregarded as though it never happened. In some cases, you’ll even see the anti-GG folks be happy to see it happen in the sense you describe (you know, like that time that someone put up a blog with dox and instructions on how to file an anonymous police tip warning them that the target was a dangerous and violent individual under the influence of steroids? Mike Cernovich, specifically? Yes, he’s an asshole [which doesn’t make doing it any less wrong], but any time you bring this up, you’ll see anti-GG folks try to justify it).
You see anti-GG folks justify harassment and doxxing as well (note that I’m not claiming this is one sided, I’m claiming both sides have plenty of assholes to go around). Rebecca Watson wrote an article that, when you stripped it away to it’s core essentially said that doxxing was OK so long as you doxxed people that she felt were the right sort of targets. Sam “Bring Back Bullying” Biddle wrote an article that was almost entirely virgin shaming of WizardChan, using an utter non-event (a typo during a DNS change causing WizardChan’s domain to redirect to another site for a little while) as an excuse for it. Hell, let me use some examples of people who have been dubbed the innocent victims in this: Zoe Quinn retweeted dox and a photo of someone’s home. Anita Sarkeesian posted the same kinds of images that got Fredrick Brennan temporarily suspended from Twitter and received a positive response. Brianna Wu created a Twitter sockpuppet for the purpose of mocking gamers.
My first post on this thread I included two links. One was to JennOfHardWire listing some of the harassment she received, the second is a post where the same person details harassment targeting other pro-GG individuals, with quotes and the like.
I’ve been lucky so far at least, the worst that’s happened to me is being called a pedophile on the internet and having two people block me on Twitter (one of which was Sam “Bring Back Bullying” Biddle because I called him out for the virgin shaming article I mentioned earlier).
It’s astoundingly hard to find someone who’s actually innocent in this mess.
Of course it does. It’s a minority of both groups doing it, as well as the usual internet trollies, GNAA, BWC, and Goons. /baphomet/s recent involvement is only going to make things worse, and they’re mostly going to target anti-GG people not because they’re pro-GG (they’re not, they generally hate GG for drawing attention to 8chan by going there) but because they attacked 8chan. From their perspective, outsiders attacked their “home” because of the new neighbors, and they are meeting attacks with escalation, because escalation is what old school anon does.
Is it centered around them, or is coverage of it centered around them? That’s the important question. Jenn and I would both say it’s the latter. Honestly, for every woman you could name attacked by GG, I could name one who is pro-GG and was attacked by the anti-GG crowd (people [especially media] seem to care less about male victims, if you’re wondering why I specified women).
Let me put this another way: Do you feel that Intel throwing money at “diversity” was a loss for GamerGate? Most of GamerGate doesn’t. My personal opinion is that looking at who they’re partnering with either they aren’t spending their money well or they’re more concerned about scoring a certain kind of political points rather than actually getting anything done.
As an atheist I feel kind of bad referencing scripture, but Romans 3:10, 3:13, 3:14 describe every side of this whole mess.
You haven’t been listening too hard then. Or else you’ve seen someone follow it up with “but soandso is asshole, so I don’t feel as bad as I might” or the like and decided that doesn’t count. I’ve seen people respond to my pointing out idledilletante’s blog post organizing a police reporting campaign in an attempt to get Mike Cernovich swatted by arguing that it doesn’t count because Mike is an asshole. While that is certainly a word that a lot of folks might use to describe him (which is why I picked him here), that doesn’t change what was being done against him.
[quote=“chenille, post:74, topic:49922”]
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.[/quote]
I could say the same of it’s opponents, but it’s a lot easier to look clean despite using the same tactics when the media will conveniently ignore your actions because your opponents are against the media.
I find this strange. Gamergaters sent emails to Intel, Intel responded, this was considered a success for gamergate, was it not? If that’s the case, then how is Intel feeling they need to spend $300M to apologize for doing that not a failure? When people think that agreeing with you requires $300M of reputation repair, that means you are at least $300M worth of toxic. Basically, no one else is going to be willing to ally with you. How is that not a loss for a movement?
What does it mean to be against the media? What is gamergate trying to accomplish? What would you like to happen?
Employees at 7-11 shouldn’t be allowed to sell anything to assholes. Even if they were a jerk elsewhere, they could still buy a can of soup or beans and throw it at someone.
Very explicitly the former. People like to assert otherwise, but above I linked to where someone has actually looked at what the movement talks about, and it is almost all around harassing and silencing women and critics. Every other attempt I’ve seen to actually look at the movement has been similar.
And we’ve had a long string of gamergate supporters pop in here, and patient people like Humbabella have tried to figure out what they want. Ethics in video game journalism, of course, but when you try to get them to articulate what that vision entails, there isn’t to be much there. They spend a lot of time explaining why women like Sarkeesian, Quinn, and Wu are evil and need to shut up, but nothing else seems to have been thought out.
So both from its representatives here and from every look at the evidence I’ve seen, the problem isn’t the media, it’s gamergate itself. If you’re actually concerned with harassment and threats, you can’t keep excusing a movement that is very clearly built on them. People need to not attack gamergaters in unacceptable ways, but gamergate itself was still founded and acting mostly as a hate group.
[quote=“Schadrach, post:68, topic:49922”]
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.[/QUOTE]
No, I said they aren’t equivalent because on the one hand, we have people run out of their home due to these threats, and on the other, we do not, and thus they are not equivalent because the same things haven’t happened. Herp a derp. Unless you are trying to deliberately muddy the issue, that should be clear enough for even a mouth-breathing internet tough guy to follow.
Misogyny is never just against women. You’d know that if you paid attention. It’s pretty baldly obvious.
We’re all familiar with Eron Gjoni’s jilted bile.
The claims being made have been shown to be largely about being monstrous to people for having vaginas on the internet, thanks to some handy-dandy twitter analysis linked upthread.
But you didn’t read the thread now, did you, you poor, poor creature.
I think what you heard in what I said was not what I meant.
Isn’t it interesting that someone named “Sceptic” is actually what we like to a call a Hyper-skeptic? JAQing off is always the specialty of anyone with “skeptic” or “sceptic” or “MasterofThought” or “BigBigBrainThinkyPerson” as a 'nym. And so much moving of the goal posts! Their arms must get really tired.
Man, your arms must be getting really tired from all that heavy goal post moving. And that hyper skepticism must be exhausting. Maybe you should take a break!
Is it me, or is the label of “Anti-GG” a disingenuous way to frame the argument? I don’t often see those being labeled as antiGG self-applying the label (except sometimes ironically). Near as I can tell, the only thing that people labelled as antiGG have in common is they point out harassment and call for it to stop.
The most frequent use of the term antiGG seems to be by gameragators as a way to aggregate and otherise the people they want to bully into compliance or silence.
I also think there’s a growing semantic linkage between “antiGG” and “SJW,” which serves as a dogwhistle for the openly misogynistic MRAs/PUAs/anti-feminists who have glommed onto GG.
I think it’s a very confusing term. Clearly there are a lot of people who wish gamergate would go away, but it’s a little weird to unite them under one banner. It feels like the point of the term is to give people within gamergate a clear enemy.
The reason people are anti-gamergate is because they are anti-harassment and anti-misogyny and they believe (reasonably) that’s what gamergate is about. They are against gamergate because the actual scandal (that gives the -gate suffix) was a hoax by an angry man trying to get people online to harass his ex-girlfriend. Who isn’t against that?
It would be fair to call me anti-KKK, I suppose, but at the same time it doesn’t sound quite right. Sure, the KKK is so synonymous with hate that I don’t know how to separate the two, but what I have a problem with is the hate and the actions of the group. To borrow a religious phrase, I hate the sin and not the sinner.
I’m totally sure that @Schadrach is right when he says that people who are against that harassment have done some harassing of their own - we all know people are moved to vigilanteism and that some people out there are just itching to be cruel, violent or intimidating regardless of what their professed underlying cause is. Pascifism has it’s violent proponents. That makes them lousy hypocrites for sure.
There’s another thread going on about gun violence right now, and whenever I think of the NRA’s party line I think, “So you need guns to protect yourself in case… someone comes to take your guns?” I guess this is how I feel about gamergate right now. It seems to exist only for the sake of existing, only to defend itself against attacks. Evidence that it is being attacked doesn’t really make sense of this.
How odd, given that I’ve explained that rather clearly in my earlier response to you: Speech. Speech that you seemingly agree should be controlled by use of financial chokeholds without due process.
And again, if someone’s done something illegal - used speech in an illegal, constitutionally unprotected manner - then prosecute them using the legal process.
Do you really not see how creating a hecker’s veto enforced by restricting legal activity via payment transaction services, without due process, could bite you, and the rest of society, in the butt? Really?
As to “hyper-skepticicm”, define it and cite specific examples - back your claim up - don’t just throw around ad hominems to poison the well.
Internet merchant accounts were horrible last time I had to use one. You must set them up with this tier of trashy sales-driven reseller front companies instead of the actual banks, the software is this hinky shit that involves uploading text files sent to FTP-like clearing servers, you’re the soak for chargebacks and the general liability of fraudulent transactions, and you have all the opportunity in the world to keep and lose actual real customer data that could ruin their lives.
Paypal treats merchants terribly, but it thrives anyway, because it will never be as unpleasant as the likes of http://charge.com
I mean, just go and look at it. It’s for two types of person: a) people who buy fax machine toner from cold-calling salesmen, and b) people who literally have no choice.
This is a ridiculously shallow version of free speech. Under this view, the Hollywood Blacklist was not a threat to freedom of speech. Freedom of speech encompasses a lot more than just a specific amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Pretty much. The funny thing is for those “it’s about ethics in gaming journalism!” folks… great, most of us are for ethics in gaming journalism too, or at least, not against it! It’s all the OTHER crap that goes along with the gamergate name that we have a problem with, so you’re welcome to join our side and STILL be in favor of ethics in gaming journalism.
(Unless of course you define “ethics in gaming journalism” as “no feminists allowed”, which, unfortunately, most GGers seem to… if that’s your attitude, then F%#! off, you’re already in the right group.).
It’s worth pointing out that beyond the non-existent “postive coverage for sex” Zoe Quinn allegedly received; the gators’ greatest point of contention about “ethics in video game journalism” are the “Gamers are dead”-articles, which were published as a reaction to their harassment and general human shittiniess.
That’s right: In their mind, the greatest breach of “journalistic ethics” the VG press has committed was writing something they didn’t agree with.
If your goal is to stop the internet hate machine–what do you do? You starve it. There are infinitely better things to write about. There’s a limited amount of emotional energy an individual can invest in any sort of movement–political or otherwise. If that energy is not refreshed via confrontation, escalation, or affirmation, the self-satisfaction that feeds the sense of ego dies off.
