Most of us are familiar with what gamergate is about; we’ve seen people discuss the issue, we’ve seen some beautifulstatisticalanalysis of the tweets, and we’ve seen obstinate one-off accounts pop in periodically to defend it. It’s been overwhelming about people like Sarkeesian and Wu, threatening them and trying to make them be silent.
A while ago we had some one-off cheering that Samantha Allen no longer felt safe in speaking, and from the looks of it the bulk of gamergate is for that outcome. Are you? If your position is genuinely that allowing all criticism is the way to have worthwhile opinions stand, you’d be against a movement trying to silence critics, right?
Have you put even that much thought into your own beliefs?
No, I guess not, if this is what you think argument based on reason looks like. I suppose you can make citations about how women were forced into the workplace by anything other than bad economies, and how that’s in any way connected to birthrates or the obviously-lack-of-regulation-caused slump in the economy?
Or are you just planning to insult leftists and use slurs like “it’s gay” until everyone else leaves, or in the case of this board until you get banned for being a jackass, and think that somehow counts as the proof you were right all along?
It’s also grimly amusing to me because the writer is explicitly trying to foster dogmatism, whereas a major concern in almost every discussion among socialists that I participate in is how to overcome this concept of “correctness”.
For anyone interested, /pol/ on 8chan is having a lively little discussion about our debate. They’re torn about whether or not it is accurate of us to call them nazis. I’m sure all the racial slurs in the disagreeing replies are merely ironic or confirmation bias on our part.
It’s so disturbing to find that you have people so skilled in the art of quoting. I had not previously suspected that such stratagems could be applied.
I now live in fear of the inevitable revolution.
I do so hope that you will not lay us low with a retributive quote fest; that would be most disheartening.
However, if anyone is up for a festschrift, I’m all-in!
Posters who [use tripcodes] are affectionately/derisively known as “tripfriends”, or more often a homophobic slur in place of “-friend.”
I read the Storify version of this post, and I tripped over it in my brain at exactly the same point. Why the squeamishness? Why choose such a clumsy and roundabout way to admit that the real word is “tripfag”, and the suffix pervades -chan culture (“moralfag”, “newfag”) as a way to label things that posters do not like?
In the end, I think a_man_in_black wants to hold on to the idea that -chan culture is overall a positive creative force, and its problems come from extreme evolutionary dead-ends like /pol/ or from the conflict inherent in it interacting with the “real world”. Having to face the homophobia (and—if the threads were pulled from there towards “There are no women on the Internet” and “Tits or GTFO”—the misogyny) that is woven into the fabric of that culture in just the second paragraph of the article would have made that delusion just too hard to maintain.
If you’re looking for logical foundations, then you should try math or science instead of politics.
Personally, I have found the argumentation on 4chan to be extremely weak, based on cherrypicking examples and ganging up on people
Nice way to contradict yourself. So membership in a right-wing tribe isn’t dependent upon approval of the group?
What you put forth as “logical” traditions of racism and sexism could just be pandering to old biases which had no factual basis in the first place. Instead of being dependent upon approval, this is just the easy contradiction of reactionary politics, trying to define yourselves against so many bad examples without explaining your own ideology. It is easy to dismiss such rhetoric as style rather than content.
For further further reading that almost literally has nothing to do with GG, I suggest “/Co/operation and /co/mmunity in /co/mics: 4chan’s Hypercrisis,” an essay from 2009 on /co/ (4chan’s Comics and Cartoons board) and its collaboration in the discovery and analysis of a long-form string of references and connections in the storytelling of Grant Morrison and its further ties into higher concepts, dubbed “the Hypercrisis”.
Familiarize yourself with the difference beween ‘sex’ (biology) and ‘gender’ (psycho-cultural). These are not interchangeable terms.
They become issues when society grants certain subsets of people specific advantages or drawbacks based on completely arbitrary divisions that have absolutely no bearing on any given individual’s merit.
Birth rates dropping is a problem if you live in Japan. Most everywhere else it’s fine or outright desirable. There’s too many of us as it is.
“Forced” them to work?! I presume you don’t actually talk to many women.
As for your ridiculous assertion that women in the workforce results in greater unemployment… did you /really/ just argue that more people working causes less people to have jobs?
Modest birth rates, and greater equality in gender-based labour and education are correlated to an improved economy. There’s basically /nobody/ who argues the reverse based on anything resembling actual evidence. Seriously, do at least a tiny bit of research. Here, I’ll give you a random article as a starting point.
It’s a bit more like kicking somebody out of the room. If you do it because they disagree with you, you’re being a jerk. If you do it because they’re yelling and screaming and refusing to adhere to the rules of basic decency you’re keeping order.
They’re not silenced - they’re just being told to yell and scream outside.
I’m willing to assume for the sake of argument that this is the case. There’s a lot of folks with really sketchy ideas as to what communism is, and let’s face it, it doesn’t have a very good track record. It’s mostly lead to societies dominated by small groups of elites who control all of the wealth and live in luxury while a large part of society is crushed beneath them, all the while insisting that everyone actually has an equal amount of power. Unlike capitalism, which has mostly lead to societies dominated by small groups of elites who control all of the wealth and live in luxury while a large part of society is crushed beneath them, all the while insisting that everyone actually has an equal amount of power.
Taking a measure amount of the concepts behind each of the two with a nice balance, and you get most of the best countries in the world to live in.
[quote]Leftists are unable to argue on even ground if they cannot control the narrative by banning people.
Rightists are mostly unable to argue at all, and just yell and scream a lot but rarely make any sense.
See, I can make random blanket assertions regarding perceived political orientation too. Wasn’t that simple?
If a channer doesn’t know how to deal with image macros, something has gone very, very wrong.
As the article points out (in nicer words), the biggest problem is that channers an their near relatives have a disconcerting tendency to come off as complete fucking assholes in pretty much any other context, because what’s considered right and proper in the chans is viewed rather differently elsewhere.
If you track in mud, kick the cat, piss on the carpet and swear at the kids, you’re going to be kicked out of the house. Doesn’t matter if all of that’s considered the height of politeness in your own home, when you’re in somebody else’s home, you play by their rules.
The ones who do are the ones we don’t think of as channers, but as people who happen to spend some time on the chans.
Actually, before it was a term of abuse, it was a mildly ironic in-joke among leftists about what people sound like when they’ve become conscious of (and self-conscious about) various kinds of bias. It was only later that other people, not realizing that leftists could have a sense of irony, assumed that it was an all-out term of approbation and turned it into a ham-handed bit of abuse.
This is exactly backwards. If right wing politics dominate /pol/ it’s because right wing politics are the most appealing to the crowd of anons, and the easiest to defend. Neither of those things mean that the political positions in question are in any way correct, however.
There’s a fundamental logical fallacy at work in the chan culture, and to some extent it is also a problem for Wikipedia. It’s this: Truth is not determined by popular consensus. If it was, we wouldn’t need the scientific method, we’d just hold votes.
It’s because truth is not determined by concensus that they will agree it is, whenever you mention it. Why? Because. It’s just immature bullshit from people who haven’t realized that there are other, less sociopathic, ways to get attention.
