Apology on the internet? Am I seeing things?
I guess it is possible to change minds, Maybe all is not lost. It’s still mostly crap, though.
But accusing women of being too emotional in arguments (especially ones that concern women’s issues) is a pretty common sexist trope.
I’m saying it because Gamergate and anything that involves the terms “political correctness”, “Social Justice Warriors”, and “Cultural Marxism”, are inherently toxic since it undermine the complete oppression from the top white cis-males that dominated our world.
Not to say Every white cis-males should be killed, but any attempt to discredit any female role model such as Anita Sarkeesian, regardless of background, will only justified the trust in their absolute rulership of mankind; and therefore discourage everyone else to challenge said rulership. It’s why the term “Patriarchy” is favored over “Kritarchy” in order to hammer the fact that the world is still male dominated; and the whole point of having women, minorities, and other socially oppressed people is to encourage everyone to take a change and change it once and for all. In fact, the entire diversity in terms of fame and fortune were skewed towards a point that it was mostly males that make the perfect leader and not everyone else.
They have to realize that the reason why they’re wary of progressives is because they’re either jealous or socially inept to the point that they’re afraid to admit they have a problem, which is why so many people cling on to gamergate; because they afraid that if they let go, everything they ever done is wasted on a scam that used a female indie developer’s sex life for their personal gain. Not to mention that it was Politicians and Corporations that desperately need disclosure; Focus on them, not the independent content makers that nobody ever heard off.
Still, the GamerGate was inevitable anyways since those toxic vocabularies ingrain themselves into the minds of every self-doubters; feeding to their paranoid that some short of nanny will rule the world (and sometimes their fears been justifed). But be glad that it’s going to die off soon, since some of “their so called demands” has been met, and some of which rage quits when they realized that they created a monster. All in all, it’s a mix bag of terror, hate, tolerance, and love, all rolled up in some deluded echo chamber infested with trollies that seeks to incite as much drama as possible.
So the next time you read the words “political correctness”, “Social Justice Warriors”, and “Cultural Marxism”; intervine and remind them who their enemies truly are.
I appreciate your apology and that you have admitted to your laziness. However, I don’t have the luxury of being lazy about this subject.
I wonder if people here remember the story I told of the stalker I had which eventually lead to my forced resignation due to his online stalking and harassment (it was a whole “revenge porn” thing in 2007 before that was even a thing, because I’m fucking lucky or something).
So keep in mind: Not all of us have the luxury of being lazy about the subject of online harassment, as it can literally ruin our lives.
Why didn’t you say so in the first place?
For the moment there, I thought you’re one of “them”.
I think it’s not just “written to sound reasonable in small doses” it is actually moment-to-moment reasonable. Just like it’s reasonable for the prosecutor to not think he can convict the white cop of killing the black man. Just like it’s reasonable for the white couple to be upset their kid is unexpectedly black - not because they are racist but because their society is.
I think this is a very painful message for some people, but reasonableness itself is another tool that benefits people with power. It will always be more reasonable to stay calm, keep your head down, and not put yourself in the way of the juggernaut. We need unreasonableness for things to change. I’ve seen people on these boards try to present a version of history where MLK was reasonable. Of course he was reasonable if we look at him from today’s standards - his ideas were the winning ideas (even if there is still a long way to go). But however unreasonable you think someone who disagrees with you is, there was a huge portion of the population back in his day who thought MLK was way more unreasonable than that.
@cowicide stopped by to link us to this the other day: http://bgr.com/2015/01/19/lizard-squad-customer-database-hacked/
One of the things going on in the arms race is that most of the harassers are not actually technical geniuses. They use tools that other people have built, or hire someone to do it for them. You are either buying a tool that will one day be defeated (possible identifying you) or you are paying extremely unethical people to do something illegal, which is pretty dangerous too. The lizard squad stored their customers’ password in plain text - they didn’t give a shit about the security of the people using their services, and only a fool would expect them to.
Yeah, there are some actual genius hackers harassing people out there somewhere, but they are probably as rare as serial killers.
Do you actually care about those people? I do. I’d really like to talk to some of them and understand what gamergate is doing for them. I’d like to do the same with members of the KKK, were that practical (and if it didn’t involved worries about physical safety). I’ve tried - to some extent - to talk to people within gamergate and I haven’t had much success.
This why I find your “you’re doing it wrong” to be really frustrating. You have watched history unfold, but have you ever engaged in this kind of activity? Have you reached out to people who think totally differently than you do?
And if you really do understand how this works and you care about the outcome of this situation, and you really think that @marilove is inflaming the debate with her emotions, why don’t you apply the same reasoning to her? Think that through. Antagonism breeds resistance, so we shouldn’t do it to gamergate, that means we also shouldn’t do it to the antagonistic opponents of gamergate or the cycle will just continue. Continuing the argue back and forth is doing the opposite of what you say is the right thing to do.
The troubles ended with 30 years passed. Ghandi’s struggle for an independent India was 32 years. The struggle to end apartheid was even longer. Have you noticed these things tend to go on for a geneation? Was it a change of tactics or was it a new generation of people who just didn’t want to do that anymore. Was it that the hardliners who started it mellowed out or was it that they just didn’t have the recruitment pool in the new generation and didn’t have the power to keep being hardline?
What do you think the goal is here? The fastest way for us to get rid of gamergate is for everyone else to agree to never talk about gamergate again and also to never talk about sexist in videogames again. Remove the stimulus that makes them angry. The goal, though, is to actually beat the sexism, not to beat the people in gamergate.
A friend of mine teaches grade 8. When Steven Harper was elected they were terrified that he was going to bring in laws to ban gay marriage. My friend told them that they didn’t have to worry. He asked them how many of them supported gay marriage. All of them did. Quite simply, the people who support gay marriage were getting old enough to vote, and the people who didn’t support it were dying. It sure would have been rotten if Harper had passed a law banning gay marriage, but it would have been a temporary setback in the march to rights (and it probably wouldn’t have been more than a year before the courts struck it down).
We defeat sexism (not just gamergate) by explaining sharply what is wrong with the sexism so that newcomers (i.e., younger people) can see it. They aren’t stupid, so it’s not going to be hard for them to see that the sexism is wrong. In 30 years there will be a lot less of it.
This is akin to “sharpening contradictions” described in the Juan Cole piece that was linked about Charlie Hebdo. As Cole notes, sharpening contradictions is a strategy of psychopaths, but we’re not talking about carrying out terrorist acts here, we’re saying why what people are doing is wrong. That’s what you do when something is wrong, you say it is wrong, you say why it is wrong, and then, mostly, you wait for assholes to die.
I think we’re all condemned to be bigots on the wrong side of history when we are old, but I’m trying to do my best to avoid it. Choosing not to have greater sympathy for mostly white, mostly male people who self-identify with a hate group than I do for women who don’t like hate groups is one way I’m doing that.
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