They already have “talking points”.
not to completely parrot @shaddack but a surprisingly large proportion of people both controversies were fairly obscure. i teach 6th grade at an intermediate (4-6) school in texas. my coworkers are a well-educated group of people with varied interests and as far as i could tell from conversations i was the only adult in the building who knew anything about either controversy. only two of my students knew something about gamergate.
when you’re reading a site like boingboing on a daily or almost daily basis and are yourself a gamer and a reader of sci-fi it can seem odd to think that the larger community doesn’t share your knowledge but there it is.
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True but then again, the person was commenting on Boing Boing about it…
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Sure, but a fix specifically to prevent slate voting (which is a bad thing that is quite reasonable to want to prevent on entirely non-ideological grounds) only works as ammo for the puppies’ arguments if they lie about it. So even if the change wasn’t necessary to prevent them from literally destroying the Hugos, there’s no point in failing to do something reasonable because they could present it as unreasonable to people who don’t know any better. Because they’re going to do so anyways as they already lie and make unsubstantiated claims about what’s going on, regardless of what anyone actually does.
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Many of us were (even the Hugos co-host) were tempted to have our badge name read “Noah Ward”.
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And it was their first comment too.
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No, your not the only one. Because they are meant to be condescending and smarmy. Thats the whole point
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Kinja has a dismiss function for replies you receive to your own comments. Whatever problems people legitimately have with Gawker’s business practices otherwise, the dismiss button is a work of absolute genius that needs to be ported to all forums and commenting systems on the Internet. The power to just permanently erase a fundamentalist screed some sweaty jackass is trying to ruin your day with is sublime.
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I was thinking more towards the inevitable public discussion. When you can respond with facts to their ranting, you shift the moveable middle towards your own stance,
There’s a judgment call necessary though. A classic technique for misdirecting or derailing an online discussion is to pose as the “movable middle” and just keep reiterating the talking points.
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Yeah, I’ve definitely witnessed that in action. I’m thinking as much of the people who are reading but not commenting.
Said person joined in April 19th this year, which is way past the GG heyday. This teapot is not rumbling anymore, it is hissing its prime away with fading rain from the lid, hid in the cupboard between thousands of others.
We miss the data about the person’s earlier reading habits, so inferring anything about them is rather dumb. When you assume, you’re making an ass of u and me.
“Racists and homophobes and misogynists”
A racially diverse group who promoted a racially/gender diverse slate are racist/sexist/homophobic how, exactly?
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Hmm, I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand I don’t pay much attention to the awards as a reader, but I know they do get attention and greater viewership for the authors, and they’re respected by publishers.
Surely there could be a way to both broaden the input from fans and voting and also guard against committed rigging? I mean other awards have to deal with the same things.
Also part of the reason the Sad and Rabid Puppies couldn’t bend it to their desire is that they are so clearly twisted. I mean half of what they stand for is a direct affront to the authors they say they admire.
I think that slates/lobbying/political type collective action should probably be discouraged but more ground-up input could be interesting. That seem to be the direction they are going so as to preserve quality not destroy it.
Obviously too many iterations of “no award” is doing no one any favors. The problem here though is that a concerted effort was made to break the awards to game them.
It failed, but it exposed flaws in the system.
Hopefully, this will cause them to develop a more robust and healthy voting method.
I don’t write anything in this genre but I so wish I did so I could take Noah Ward as my pen name.
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GG is small, but it doesn’t mean the effect isn’t big on some of the people involved. Remember it spiraled into physical threats and ongoing harassment of whole families of people.
Sure, if I ask most of my friends, even the ones who coach things like League for, like, a living, kind of shrug it off as a bunch of freaky jerks. But lots of hate groups are a bunch of freaky jerks, it doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous, and it doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Also, it doesn’t mean it’s truly limited to the internet. Once peoples offline lives are involved it’s not an “internet phenomenon” anymore.
Whatever the original point was, if they had one, it was lost. This is largely because they went about it a very wrong way.
Normally, if you thought a reviewer was mistaken you’d do something like write a letter to the editor or write to the contact page for the blog/vlog etc. Enough people writing with cogent arguments that don’t involve things like, say, cutting your throat open and raping your trachea, and usually the reviewer may backtrack and review the specific content.
For instance, if some one reviews a game and it’s clear they missed something and have a biased view of that game due to not fully playing it or even studying it, there are perfectly good ways to call that out.
If people in your group calling this out though begin to do things like dig up home addresses, start threatening to mutilate people’s genitals and assault their children, the sensible thing to do is to speak loudly out against those people and divorce yourself from them.
If you fail to do so you might as well be saying “well I don’t really disagree with them so much as I do this small point about a game I had, so yeah, we’re cool.”
This is how reactionary movements pick up reasonable people who get lost in the shuffle and this is how reasonable people find themselves mired in reactionary groups.
Over and over. So tempest in a teapot. Internet rattle. Meh… this is just human nature and it definitely merits discussion.
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We’re talking about the Puppies.
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In their thoughts, in the their deeds, and in the widely-disseminated words?
On the internet, everyone knows you’re an asshole.
Are you really trying to paint the puppies as a group who promoted a racially/gender-diverse slate?
Go on, re-read the parts of this article on Rapid Puppy Ted Beale, and look us in the eye and say with a straight face “they’re not racist/sexist/homophobic misogynist assholes”.
Dollars-to-donuts, if you do, rain from nowhere will fall on you.
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