Some worthwhile cultural analysis on Gamergaters

It’s all about ethics in internet forum commenting.

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Turnabout is always fair play, is it not? And when did I ever complain about ethics? Way to make it about me and not my analysis. I’m sure I’m bullying you too though when I tell you i think you’re off topic, right? It’s 100% me! HA

So my interpretation of what these cultural analyses of #germergoat amount to is: Christ, what assholes.

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“Social construct” doesn’t mean “arbitrary” (or, for that matter, “fictional”), though.

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And this is how one trolley* throws off an entire conversation…

*I mean voidfraction, not you Humbabella

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I’m totally off topic. I was just making the same crappy GG jokes I always do. See the #notall one further up.

I wasn’t disagreeing with you in the slightest. Carry on!

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Mod note: Stay on topic.

Well, you’re certainly “Just Asking Questions” aggressively enough to come off as a concern trolley.

Anyhoo, both posts were pretty interesting.

Testing someone’s mitochondria will not reveal their “Jewishness”.

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you really are. as you were. :smile:

the notion being mitochondial dna is passed along through the mothers line only, and it is a hair splitting argument with some questionable overtones.

i agree with you.

Because even if race is not a scientific term, and only a social one, it still has meaning as an agreed upon set of inherited traits in broader society.

You are not born into the gamer-gate. It is a group one chooses to associate with and thus are also associated with it’s actions.

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A few hundred years from now gamergate might be an ethnicity, but let’s all hope not.

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Biology has pretty much abandoned race because dna shows there is more variance within ethnic groups than between them.

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Not thinking a lot of procreation will be going on there.

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and that’s Bingo!

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The commentary from A_Man_in_Black is probably the most useful and informative explanation of gamergate that I have read. It certainly explains why their behaviour comes across as disingenuous and, more importantly, why they don’t see it that way.

They literally had to invent a computer waifu to take their side. I think we’ll be OK.

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This isn’t about the content of these articles; just the presentation: I feel like blog posts that consist completely (or almost completely) of extract of Twitter read like powerpoint presentations or someone’s lecture notes. I get the feeling of having skipped a sociology class.

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That bit on chan culture is fascinating, but I think is a bit incomplete. He’s totally right about how the structure facilitates groupthink consensus, but that doesn’t fully explain why the channer consensus is so insanely right wing and anti feminist. For example, 8chan had a straw poll, and their hypothetical legislature is 30% percent literal nazis. That’s almost twice the combined take (17%) of all the choices that could be considered left wing.

That channers are almost certainly mostly straight white men explains why the consensus, facilitated by the structure, ended up where it did. This is not to say if you put a bunch of us straight white dudes in a room together that we’ll all emerge as nazis, but that a monoculture can only breed a limited number of outcomes. The libertarianish mindset that delights in transgressing social taboos combined with unexamined privilege also helps steer the consensus to even narrower options. It is unsurprising that those who used racism/sexism/etc to troll for the lulz eventually swallowed that shit.

If one thinks transgressing taboos for free speech is an inherent good, being repeatedly banned because nobody wants to debate the merits of the Holocaust, becomes seeming evidence that these views might be right. That certain views that are widely held in contempt is not because they are objectively terrible ideas, but that these views have actual merit. Free speech absolutism tends to regard any sort of censorship (legislative, social, corporate, etc) as stemming from a hatred of free speech, not because some views are suppressed because they are literally dangerous to an open society. And the fact that these views prioritize straight white men, and are repeatedly banned for offensiveness makes them more attractive to the channer demographic. That they are being censored for who they are.

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Speaking of chan culture / anons: fucking disgusting insincere manipulation.

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