Yeah, he did
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I wish BoingBoing would stop posting about Gamergate. It only turns into a shit storm.
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Hereās a topical post over at PZās blog on more chan-related bullshit - this time targeted harassment of sucidal teens on tumblr. FFS.
Itās the culture thatās sick (comment 44 at time of writing)
jesus christ this is the stupidest thing I have read this year, and itās just the second day of january. I actually had to stop and laugh after your second paragraph. Holy crap!
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you win. Go home.
Here, FTFY.
Indeed, it is interesting to see how many people (me among them) will often like back a cogent reply that disagrees with them completely.
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Actually, count one for the side that finds references far less jarring than the actual word.
For me, thereās simply something less discomfiting about recreating the offensive word in my brain than seeing it on the printed page.
Just letting you know itās not entirely one-sided.
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Actually, GG doesnāt get particularly great page views. And I can assure you that sociological analysis of channers is a subtractor from that.
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Iād argue that it does not operate by consensus (which generally means everyone agrees), but by majority votes
Mostly, but as a means of getting the majority of votes in a only vaguely interested public, it can be effective, along with TV ads, etc. If you have perhaps 20 seconds to get a bored party to vote your direction about a critically important issue, then shouting is generally the only tactic that works.
However, shouting is a terrible way of arriving at policy decisions among the interested and informed, but they are not the ones making the decisions about policy. The disinterested public is.
Welcome to democracy - the worst of all possible governments, except for all the others.
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I actually donāt particularly think that you deserve to be comfortable in the presence of a slur. I hope you do feel uncomfortable, I think itās valuable to induce discomfort in journalism. I just donāt think it would get interpreted as malicious, which isnāt the same thing as pretending it doesnāt jar anyone.
In the past, Iāve said that we should take this Gamergate business seriously, because the Gamergaters resemble fascists.
The more I see of 4chan and 8chan, the more obvious it is that they donāt merely resemble fascists. They are, deliberately, trying to be fascists. One of the posts in the PZ Myers thread points out that one of the channers claims affiliation with Jobbik, a fascist organization in Hungary, and two others claim affiliation with the Golden Dawn, a fascist organization in Greece. If true, that means these people have material links with actual fascist movements that, literally, intend to commit mass murder.
This isnāt just a spat about tastes in computer games. These people are dangerous.
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But donāt many thousands of people use those boards? What makes the three you mentioned more statistically relevant than the others? Some of them probably are fascists, but it seems obvious that any large population would probably have a percentage of far-right people in it.
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I donāt think this is what is going on on anonymous internet boards. The people posting havenāt subverted their ego. Iād wager itās the opposite. By having everyone be anonymous, and assuming bad faith on the part of everyone else, it allows for complete solipsism.
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Have you looked at those boards?
My first comment in this thread on 8chan, after looking at it briefly, was that there were significantly more racist, sexist, and extreme right views posted than Iād seen elsewhere. Iāve looked more at it, and my first impression massively underestimated the dominance of the extreme right. Nearly all of the comments express murderous hatred of oppressed groups or direct support for fascism.
So when youāve got a group of people who talk continuously about their desire to rape and murder, the presence of a few people who are actually members of fascist organizations is cause for real concern.
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The gamergaters (and probably channers as well) bristle when you describe what they are involved in as a right wing movement. But theyāve adopted the language of the fringe right (SJWs and āCultural Marxismā, extreme racist and homophobic terminology), and most of the supporters who use their open identities are on the right (Milo Yiannopoulos, Adam Baldwin, Christina Hoff Sommers, Nick Flor).
It reminds me of what Hunter Thompson wrote, in the 1960s, about nazi symbolism among outlaw bikers. If they werenāt right wingers, and were using the symbols for shock value alone, why not choose hammers and sickles instead of swastikas, since that would be much more shocking to America of that time?
The chan boards, and gamergate, seem to be hotbeds of fringe right culture.
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The funny (and yet sad) thing about solipsism is that this implies what these boards hate most is - themselves.
But isnāt this more just emotional overreacting than anything else? It seems more likely that these people for the most part donāt actually know anything about what they complain.
I notice this trend amongst the far right in general, and I struggle to understand it. Even the well-established, wealthy far right of the US and Europe seem to take pains to obfuscate their ideology. Which seems ironic, considering how ānaturalā and ānormalā they espouse such views to be.
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This isnāt a simple matter of ignorant comments. These people already have experience with organizing efforts to harass and terrify people. Theyāre already acting.
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It would be interesting to see what this discussion would look like if the troll were ignored rather than replied to. T enforce this, the website programming could be designed to respond to a ātrollā upvote by blocking all replies to the troll.
The result would be that the troll posts would languish rather than invite reasoned responses, which of course is the trollās malicious intent in the first place.
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this one was particularly hilarious though. First I was livid, then I kept readingā¦ and well, he did the job himself. Ethics!
