Blarghagh

The Force Gets Tested For Dark Sides

This thread hasn't needed serious moderating in months. I'm proud of you guys.

Koreans! I knew someone who moved there to teach English. Everyone hates him there and he's been depressed ever since.

I didn't really mean anything by it, I was just making a joke, but if you want to get into it: It's always my opinion that two wrongs don't make a right and it feels rude to me for someone to go "your problems don't matter because other people have bigger problems so you should appreciate what you have*" and I felt that was what was happening in this case since HoonDing didn't give enough information to make a value judgement. Even if you read into it, the only thing I can read from his post is a feeling of disappointment in his country which is an emotional response to how a country compares to hopes and expectations which would make this another case of you jumping in and shaming someone for what their emotional response is. Here's an example of why I think that argument is rude and dishonest at its very core, and this is one from my personal experience. One of my friends in primary school was a kid who got beaten by his dad on a regular basis, and the way he internalized that problem as being "okay" is because his dad would berate him to say that child soldiers in war torn, third world countries had it better and that he should appreciate the better life his dad had made for him and he bought into that. Does that seem better to you? Because this is pretty analogous to the argument you're making. Everybody knows third world countries have it bad. It requires no pointing out. But it doesn't cancel out other problems and it isn't some kind of "blindness" of privelege. Pretending a smaller problem isn't something that needs to be solved or something you can feel disappointed or disillusioned by because bigger problems exist is fundamentally wrong, because all problems are problems and a person can only look through a filter of their own experiences and goals. Another hypothetical that I'm just making up: What if HoonDing said he hates his country because, oh, I don't know, his dad is dying and he just found out that the treatment that could have saved him isn't covered by his insurance and costs a fortune because his country has privatized health care. You just told him he's just blind to the problems of others because he's priveleged. That seem like a good thing? So yes, I think it's a pretty unreasonable comment in this case. You don't have any information to go on and just marginalised someone else's problems and opinion. You just jumped in there with it, unprovoked. And let's not even get into the offensive implications that the term blindness carries in the first place.

That redhead is pretty cute but I'm concerned about the "what's in a name" factor considering the word nasty is right there.

Did you really just tell someone to check their privelege in the current atmosphere? That's going to go over well. I salute your bravery.

Yeah, you're right. I misread. Sorry. KingOfPol released that Facebook post that was obviously a fraud.

No, that was Oliver Campbell. Question. Who's the e-mail goal of the day? I went through the tag but I didn't see it. Ironically, leadership has made the tag degenerate into madness.

I liked it better when "leader of GamerGate" was an injoke.

I may be biased because all the things I enjoyed in the book? We've had them.

New trailer for the last Hobbit movie. As someone who enjoyed the first two... this one looks so boring.

Has it been sleeping?

It's the sound of I'm Rubber You're Glue. It bounces, then sticks. BOING THWIPP. It's Alums criticism bouncing off of Keyrock and sticking right back to him. Yeah, I'm 12.

The sound of that post... it's BOING THWIPP.

"A woman is horribly murdered and there might be a link to someone who could possibly be a member of an amorphous mass of thousands of anonymous members of a message board that is obviously on my side because it absolutely hates and censors the seperate amorphous mass of thousands of members, anonymous or otherwise, that I consistently accuse of sending death threats to me when none of the facts support that accusation since the only recorded instance of this came from a brazilian games journalist, games journalists being another group that is obviously on my side... poor me!"

Harry Potter memoribilia has convinced me I have a dirty mind.

She was a columnist indeed, and as far as I can tell she criticized Giant Bomb when they hired two men saying that they should have hired women, and was subsequently ridiculed en masse by Giant Bomb readers and couldn't take it, so she left. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Not making a literally who statement here, but I'm actually asking literally, who? Who is Samantha Allen? I have absolutely no idea who she is or why she keeps being brought up in regards to #GamerGate. Brianna Wu said #GamerGate chased her off, but as far as I can tell she left way back in June.

I would.

See? Told you. It's no point to distance yourself from harassment because they will just push you back into association with it. I've also been accused of buying into conspiracy theories. Here's all I have to say about that:

Did you vote for Ron Swanson?

TotalBiscuit responded to the Arthur Chu interview and was subsequently accused of being unethical: Anyway, I'll probably respond to Tale if he responds to me but overall I'm going to try and put less time into this. I've spent too much time for too little return and at this point I don't think the conversation can be had until this thing dies down and it's been a giant distraction from things I should be doing. If I start monologueing in this thread again, please call me on it.

Yeah, I think rebranding as a unity is a bad idea. There's already too much of it. GamerGate should have been the name for the scandal that's being discussed, not the name for the people doing it. I suppose I'm guilty of that as well, I got swept up in the "we can change the industry" thing again, like I did with when Kickstarter really blew up. (Also I think your response was in the wrong spot.)

I get that it's not organized, which in my opinion makes the claims that it's a hate group much more unpalatable. And I disagree that the impetus was built on deception. Like Nonek points out, it hasn't been debunked at all. Nathan Grayson may have not reviewed the game in question (and I never claimed he did), but he did publicize it without disclosing his relationship, informing his editor, or recusing himself. This has created at the least the appearance of impropriety. It's debatable whether or not he went too far, but the appearance of impropriety is enough to be considered a breach of trust and since then many more breaches of trust have happened (for example, the fact that game news websites didn't publicize TFYC or the IndieCade scandal involving Polytron). I'm not seeing deception - at the very worst, it's misinterpretation. Regarding kicking those guys out, I wrote a lengthy post about that before. What control does GG have over anonymous internet trolls and threats that other people don't have? There are numerous and ongoing attempts to do so from a large majority, from figureheads to ground level grunts who just "retweet" something and really, there is nothing GG can do. It's been three months and the clearest call from GamerGate is "we denounce harassment". I can't tell you how much time I've spent reporting twitter accounts this week alone. It. Does. Not. Work. These guys get one account locked, they make four more by proxy. We once discussed this regarding trolls that banning them just gives you more problems, and that's been extremely true. Your point of it not being organized very much applies here. And even then every attempt GG makes to get rid of the trolls is undermined by the opponents continually signal boosting them. We are powerless and they are giving them power. Of course, the people responsible are the trolls. But that doesn't mean I can't blame their enablers for the things they do to give the trolls power. Why don't they ever signal boost someone denouncing harassment? Because it doesn't get clicks. I don't believe for a second that it comes down to "large swathes" of the movement because I've been following this from day one and that's simply not what I've seen. Edit Addendum: What about the people getting harassed by those against GamerGate? People losing their jobs, getting syringes or knives in the mail, getting swatted or the fire department sent to their house, people having to deal with false plagiarism claims and losing royalties to their books, it literally destroying their livelihoods and ten year old boys being doxxed? Who is reporting those? Who is kicking those out? Why am I or any other GamerGater responsible for trolls on my side when nobody gives a hoot about those guys? Why am I compelled, almost forced, to pointlessly waste my time dealing with trolls when they don't actually have anything to do with what I want to talk about and have my efforts wasted because some "progressive" personality will paint another target for trolls to hit by giving them attention, when they don't have to denounce anyone? When most of those, in fact, approve of that harassment, such as the case of people like Chu or Movie Bob or Leigh Alexander or Devin Faraci. Because my "side" has a label, a word put on it, suddenly it's different? Fringe lunatics are fringe lunatics. I don't have to distance myself from muslim terrorists because they are air breathers like I am. As for focusing on indies, I get your point but you're overstating it. It's not a focus on those developers, it is the fact that the breach of trust happened in regards to these independant developers. I think it's a false equation to bullying. Nobody wants to shut independent developers down, but we CAN make journalists accountable for how they cover them. We can't make journalists accountable for how they cover AAA developers, because the journalists are not the ones controlling that balance, and there's not much anyone thought we could do about it and also, journalists have talked about these things themselves! Like I pointed out, when Jeff Gerstwinn got fired journalists smelled blood in the water and where is Gamespot now? They used to be the biggest games website on the web! There hasn't been a situation where a consumer revolt could step in and also needed to. I mean, GG is now focusing on places like Gawker. What the hell is Gawker compared to something like EA or ActiVision? I believe after this, GG will definitely try to take them on. But baby steps, man. I don't actually focus on those specific indie developers at all - the only time when I bring them up is because I understand how they became involved and whenever someone brings up the argument that "why not get pissed when this happened?" to provide context which is what I've done here. It's how journalists step out of line when dealing with indies that is the problem. In fact, a majority of GamerGate doesn't engage them. These people are referred to not by name most of the time, the accepted response inside the hashtag to posts bringing them up as "literally, who?" because GG doesn't want to bring them back into a conversation they have no place in. It looks like GG focuses on indies because those jerks (likely a significant part of which is GNAA like trolls rather than actually invested in it) are the ones getting publicized. It's simply not true. It's like the claim that Brianna Wu is getting harassed the most on Twitter yet 95% of the tweets to her using the #GamerGate hashtag are neutral or supportive? It's nonsense.