Try harder. If you don’t want to see this comment thread which is directly targeted at Gamergate, don’t read it.
That link reads to me like he is telling them off for being trolls, not egging them on. Does it really read like encouragement to you?
Having not had the energy to read Eron’s post (I only read the TL;DR after reading the first post, because it’s long and rambly and not really very clear on details), could you enlighten us to the abuse that Zoe dealt to her boyfriend? Cheating on somebody (which I’m still unclear about, did she actually cheat on him? Or was all of the sleeping-with-other-people stuff when they were on a break?) is not abuse. Trying to cover your ass so that you don’t get caught cheating is not abuse. Misrepresenting your character is not abuse. It’s being a shitty person, sure. But I don’t see anything in the TL;DR post that evidences any kind of emotional abuse (the only thing even remotely close is when she apparently made him ostracize his one friend that showed an interest in them when they were broken up). But maybe there’s more in his full post. If so, I’d love to hear about it.
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Oh, it gets better if you actually read Eron’s own posts where he admits that 1) he and Zoe were not dating at the time the alleged incident took place and 2) the alleged incident never actually took place.
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This raises a lot of difficult questions about abuse and about how to react when people say they were abused. I currently know someone who is at the end of an emotionally abusive relationship - his wife has falsely accused him of abusing their children (to the police and the Children’s Aid Society). She has claimed he tried to kill her. I know that some people believe her (fortunately, that does not include the authorities) and very few people believe him. I imagine if I asked him how much sympathy he’d get if he went and posted his story on a message board using the real names of many of the people involved, he would tell me that he wouldn’t think he’d get much. That’s a bit of a mess.
Should everyone who claims abuse be immediately 100% believed? Should everyone accused of abuse be immediately named in public? I’m not sure if you think this is a “when a man does X but when a woman does X” thing, but I don’t. Once you stop talking about statistics and start talking about people by name, there is no more “X” (no more generalizable lessons) there are instead the particulars of the situation.
Here is why I called him an asshole:
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Sometimes when people try to say bad things about other people it makes them seem bad.
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Most of what he wrote seems like examples of him taking the way someone else behaved and constructing a logical framework around it to explain it the way that it suits him to have it explained. Even if I actually believed him about what she did I would not accept his conclusions about what that says about her. You can’t just reason out what someone else must have been thinking or feeling.
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He escalated a bad break-up into the public sphere. If the purpose of the post was to give insight into other emotionally abused men (as he seems to suggest in the final follow-up), it would have been just as effective without using anyone’s name (and people who knew him and her probably would have known who he was talking about).
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When it became clear that what he wrote had lead to credible physical threats, he added a caveat saying, “Hey, don’t make threats” without removing the content or saying he was wrong to post it. Apparently the importance of “warning the world” about his ex-girlfriend was greater than the importance of not inciting violence.
If someone I knew behaved in this way, I would say that they were behaving like an asshole. When someone I don’t know behaves in this way I say they are an asshole. Maybe I should be more charitable, but really, he should take what he now knows to be an incitement to violence down, and until he does I’m not going to sweat the difference.
I’d like to see that. (Not because I don’t believe you, but I did read basically his entire rant and I could use a chaser)
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You just opened a new account, you have only posted in this thread, you appeared after a sock puppet was banned. You are being deliberately confrontational and smarmy, you are not actually providing your viewpoint as much as you are just picking for a fight with fragmented opinions, you are availing yourself of your own facts.
You are avoiding the real discussion by debating your conclusions instead of your reasons for believing as you do.
You sir, are a trolley.
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All these sock puppets and trolls are getting old
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Wait, is that a yawn or someone stuffing their mouth with sock puppet trolls (which are invisible outside of the internet).
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Whichever you want it to be.
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Context matters. He’s asking them to back off on attacking Quinn, in the context of a discussion of a harassment campaign against feminists in general.
Yeah I just saw the text in the linked image, I had no other context. The problem I have with this ‘thing’ is that from the outside both ‘sides*’ appear to be bullshitting as much as each other.
*Leaving out the actual crazies sending death threats etc, as their own inexplicable side.
You need to be careful with that kind of assertion.
When the Penny Arcade guys called Jack Thompson to the mat, there were a lot of inflamed people doing a lot of inflamed shit. Pretty much to the same caliber as here (And let’s be clear, we’re talking THREATS of violence, not actual violence, Still not good, but, also still distinct). Nobody called on them to stop saying mean things about Thompson (nor should they have) “For his safety”. True statements calling out folk for their bullshit should have a platform, even if it might mean other people might take it on themselves to get out of hand. This is not even close to the “Fighting Words” doctrine, where it’s likely to initiate immediate violence, this is especially clear, and notably why I drew a highlight on, the fact there hasn’t been any actual violence, so, imminent violence standard is CLEARLY not met.
What you’re talking about is much closer to a kind of reverse heckler’s veto. If you say this, people might get too angry at the person you’re saying it about so, you can’t/shouldn’t say it, or retract it regardless of your personal belief or support due to that anger. And that’s a crap argument. That’s the same argument they tried to use about releasing footage of a police shooting, because it would “light a powder keg”. Just because people might get upset to learn something, and that some of those people might act irrationally/violently, isn’t cause to either self censor, or to support demands that they do so, either before or later.
Not to mention, “Remove the content”? On the Internet? I’m sure somebody would love to have that magic wand, but, one major 'net issue is, it dosn’t yet (and may never) exist.
I don’t think this is a fair comparison. Jack Thompson was a public figure making public statements about what he thought should happen. We can’t blame Penny Arcade for the fact that people hated Thompson and did nasty things to him. I thought Jack Thompson was a moron and I didn’t read Penny Arcade.
This is someone going after his ex in public.
First of all, police are public servants and their actions are worthy objects of public scrutiny. Secondly, refusing to release information about your own misdeeds because you don’t like the potential anger directed towards you is a pretty different thing than not publicly naming someone else because you don’t want to create anger against them.
I think it’s worth remembering I was talking about criteria for being an asshole. People who insist on their rights without thinking about how their chosen expression of their rights affects other people still have their rights, but that’s pretty much being an asshole. If you don’t care how what you are saying affects other people - if that’s not a factor that gets weighed into your calculus - then I would say that’s a pretty assholish way to be. If you factor that in and decide to say something about them anyway, then you have to admit the possibility that you fudged the analysis and that you are being an asshole. It’s a risk you run when you say nasty things about other people.
When you are trying to decide whether to slag off your ex-girlfriend by naming her and people she’s slept with on the internet and you decide the importance of doing that far exceeds the importance of not having her receive death threats, I think that puts you in clear asshole territory.
Let’s say the barista at my coffee shop made me a bad coffee so I made myself a t-shirt that says “[person’s name] is a bitch” and started wearing it around. Later I find out that some people have started harassing her after seeing the shirt. Someone says, “Shouldn’t you stop wearing that shirt?” and I respond, “But the people harassing her already have photos of me in the shirt - taking it off now wouldn’t do any good!” Yup, that’s an asshole.
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Can Eron Gjoni be neutral in all this? No he can’t, he started this.
Can he disavow himself of the violence and hate? Not while he insists on playing victim, he would have to recant and admit he was wrong to air his dirty laundry and to lie about what he said. It would take a real man to do that, and from the beginning, he has not been nothin’ but a scorned child.
In the police shooting video incident, what is being hidden is the truth, and in hiding the video the state is failing to be accountable for what happened against their mandate.
In this case, the failed relationship between Zoe and Eron, only Eron’s interests are being served by a public account of their now dead relationship, truth is not owed to anybody outside that small social group… It is more like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
Can we agree that it was improper to air their dirty laundry publicly and to suggest that this was important because “gaming journalism”?
I think this boils down to two people, and how much pain Eron is willing to inflict on Zoe.
Can Eron be held responsible for the actions of other people? Thats a silly question, academic at best, the real question is how much is he willing to hurt Zoey that having seen the response to what he did, that seeing how it has affected her, he can’t even distance himself from that.
No, he’s getting exactly what he wanted, to hurt her.
Can you remove things from the Internet? Again, an academic question. Rather, Would Eron even make the gesture? No, he wouldn’t.
There is no objective truth to be found here, at most there are facts, what those facts mean to Eron’s and Zoe’s relationship? It means its dead and it ain’t coming back.
What do those facts mean to the rest of us? What we now know to be true? Nothing.
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Before replying, Let me be clear, I’ve no actual dog in this fight, in fact, I’m not even a spectator, I’m a person at the barbershop the next day hearing other folk talking about this crazy dog fight they saw. I didn’t read or participate in virtually any of the actual discussions under… Discussion…
That said, I call a spade a spade, and, Meta discussion about what should be proper debate and what’s off limits, regardless of the substance of the actual debate in question, strikes right at my interest. So, With that done, a couple responses:
I have no bloody idea what the truth is behind what’s posted, the only reason truth is a factor at all would be the potential Libel/Slander type things, and, that’s between her and him. Will get back to that in a moment.
Gah, I hate this quote, Please read the supreme court decision it actually originates from, and it’s surrounding circumstances, before flinging it about like so much poo. The standard that tries to invoke, however, is more or less the imminent violence standard, and is even further off point than the “Fighting Words” standard I hit in my previous post.
Ahh, now we get to some interesting points. Yay @anon50609448! So, I don’t know of the developer who was at the center of all this, My days of gaming cred run threadbare after around the Starcraft and Quake3/UT’99 eras. That said, a game developer isn’t necessarily a hermit. Especially if one had a social agenda, and, that doesn’t sound like it’s too far from the mark, at least potentially. If someone posted the dirty social laundry of, say, John Carmack, that’d be much more for the pages of the gossip rags than the front page of any reputable publication, but, I don’t think anyone would say that you could claim he was not a public figure. Is it truly necessary for public discourse? Not particularly, no. But that doesn’t really get to the propriety of someone feeling able to speak about it. As to what’s worthy of public scrutiny, it seems the public simply decided whats worthy of scrutiny, and, there’s not a tinkers damn any of us can do about that.
So, trying to parse this out, are you saying that concealing your own misconduct is somehow more admirable than exposing that of others, and in addition to that, it’s proportionally good to how mad others will be about that conduct? I’m… Not sure how to take that. Perhaps that’s not at all what you mean. Certainly one can understand the motivation to conceal one’s own misdeeds, but, that would seem like action that should be roundly condemned.
As to sharing the misdeeds of others, certainly anger from others is expected, even desired to some degree. That dosn’t translate to being held responsible for the actions taken by the others, unless you’ve included some specific call to action.
I don’t think it’s too much in debate that it’s likely the move of an asshole. That in and of itself dosn’t make it wrong, or deserving of condemnation. A person can be an asshole, and say something completely insensitive, but, be absolutely correct, and, while in violation of some decorum, it dosn’t mean they should be shouted down per se. And I think it’s silly to even attempt to assert that someone speaking ill of their Ex anticipates or desires anything but a negative effect for that person. That much is pretty obvious. However, we’re allowed to go about multiple ways of addressing it when we perceived we’re wronged. When one is the subject of a breakup, feeling wronged isn’t exactly a rare phenomenon, and, right or wrong about our perceptions of it, simply going to others about how we feel wronged is pretty damn mild conduct. And not something I think can be condemned by itself. As to how others react, they can and should be held responsible for their own conduct.
I’m not sure about the “Importance” of doing it, but, people need to feel the ability to address when they feel they’ve been wronged, and, this is generally a rather benign way of doing so, this instance notwithstanding. Stating that folk should morally not have that right, for fear that others might get angry, creates a pressurecooker situation, and your cure causes more problem than it cures.
True, (It doesn’t mean they get to take the high road either) but it doesn’t apply to this case though, Eron is not absolutely correct, the fact is he said some pretty insensitive things, the types of things couples say when they’re mad that they later regret. He’s gone and corrected himself a couple of times now.
To be clear: All this was sparked by what Eron said, it runs out, not everything he said is true.
Yes, in theory you are correct, someone can be a jerk and be right, and not deserve opprobrium, but you’ll have to say why this is that case before you offer that as opinion.
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What I’m going for is that statements can’t be judged on if they’re insensitive, or, if the person is being an asshole about it, and, getting back to the initial point, definitely not based on how OTHER people pick that up and roll with it.
Now, if what he said was false, and, again, I’ve no real opinion or even desire to develop an opinion, that’s bad on it’s face, by itself. It’d be bad if nobody but his close friends even read it, or if it was on the cover of every blog and news site world wide. Spreading out and out falsehood==bad. But, people seem to think he’s in the wrong for being an asshole, or, because his comments roused some ugly undercurrent of the internet. And that’s my objection and only concern.
This dude could die in a car accident tomorrow, and I’d doubtless never know it or really feel much about it if I did. But, if his actions are used as a rally for “This type of speech, by it’s nature, regardless of truth, is to be condemned” that I take issue with. And that seemed to be the path @anon50609448 was taking.
Well, we’ll just have to disagree, but I’ll be as friendly as I can about it. 
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