If you don’t want to see evidence, you won’t see it. Most people who read those chat logs came away satisfied by the evidence. Especially after seeing the rape threats right there on Twitter for the world to see.
Not you, though. You’re not satisfied by the evidence. Maybe they faked the moon landing.
In the mid 20th century, racists rallied under a “states’ rights” movement. Federalism is a legitimate political concern. But soon enough, everybody knew that when you said “I support states’ rights” you meant “I support Jim Crow laws.” Even legitimate federalists who didn’t support Jim Crow found that they couldn’t make their argument any more; federalism itself was tarnished.
Today, it’s 1948. I don’t care how important federalism is to you. You can’t caucus with the States’ Rights Democratic Party as a moral person today.
Whatever you want politically, you can’t do it morally when you do it with the Gamergaters.
As I see it, the hashtag serves a valuable function: the only people left with the Gamergaters lack the empathy to see how what their doing hurts other people; they see a false equivalence between their own anger over minor slights and the serious damage self-proclaimed Gamergaters are doing to other people.
If you expect your opponents to concede that you’re completely right and they’re completely wrong, you’ll never be satisfied. And if the only way for them to meet your standard of evidence is to do that, then you’ll find no evidence that meets the standard.
All right. How do you feel about the teenage trans girl who, because of her involvement with GG, was threatened over the phone by someone planning to out her to her friends and family and pressure her college admissions office to reject her application? Have you heard GG opponents distancing themselves from that harassment in a more convincing way?
I believe those “you are wrong” assertions are incorrect. If the boycotts are because of perceived ethical violations, as stated, and not because they write articles supporting women, then what backlash is there to fear?
I think you’re also overlooking another possible outcome, which is that the websites just correct the conflicts of interest, and continue producing the same sort of content they have been, but without the perceived ethical violations.
Finally, this chain of logic seems to prove too much. Do you really mean to argue that if a website produces content you deem valuable, their misdeeds should be overlooked for fear of reducing the amount of that content? What line would they have to cross in order for you to decide that a boycott is justified?
This claim about evidence only addresses the “It’s not quite based in fact” bullet point. Even if we stipulate that the chat logs really mean what opponents claim they mean, that still leaves “The founder is not the movement” and “The movement has moved on and is no longer controlled by the founder”.
Hmm. So by aligning yourself with GG opponents, are you supporting the threats I mentioned above in my response to matt w, and every other threat that’s been made against people participating in GG?
(If your response is “No, because those threats didn’t use a common hashtag”, you owe me a dollar. )
Wouldnt it be super easy to abandon the name and come up with another ? Its not that incredible brand, anyway. If they were called the Hitler Jugend would you still think they were using it for promotional benefits?
Laroquod is screencapping and posting large sections of this discussion to Twitter under the #GamerGate hashtag. It is starting to attract more and more GamerGate attention to this board. It is incredibly frightening to me. A massive target is being painted on this board and this year’s competition.
I highly recommend ceasing this discussion. I’m asking all participants to stop talking about the theoretical merits or problems of the GamerGate hashtag here. If you are critiquing GamerGate, know that your comments are being posted to Twitter with an incitement to further involvement. I believe this is a genuine danger to the safety of people in this community. It’s not your fault. But please stop this conversation. Now.
The sole purpose of this “movement” is for attention. It’s a group of fourteen year olds and men who still believe they are fourteen craving reaction from a demographic they don’t feel they can otherwise be successful socially with, and they feel has wronged them somehow. If they can’t gain positive reaction, negative is just fine with them. You don’t see regular people with lives and RL companions wasting hours of time in IRC chat.
They are fueled by any type of attention, positive or negative, and the only legitimate way to deal with the situation is to acknowledge them with bland indifference and move on. If their tactics disrupt a person’s life or a forum group, they’ve won. It’s terrorism on a very minor scale, and the worst that can be done is to give legitimate voice to a bullying minority that would rather gain attention via disruption than earn it legitimately. The less effect they have, the quicker they’ll get bored and move on to something more interesting. You will never wipe them out, because the demographic of disaffected fourteen year old children is ever-replenishing, and that is the age that youth starts wanting to change the world via hormone-fueled ‘revolution’ but hasn’t learned yet how to legitimately influence their world in a positive way.
Ethics in game journalism is a topic that can be discussed without doxxing or threatening phone calls. 99.9% of the trash talk in those chats is just talk. It’s disaffected and wannabe youth who want to brag to each other how gangsta they are by making someone’s life miserable. The rare person who is brave enough to actually follow through with any physical damage or harm to someone is the stupidest of all, since there is a ridiculously well-documented precedent of harassment and it would take probably eight seconds to connect the dots.
Don’t let your life be ruined* by a group who are following the precedent of high school bullying and find their strength to do so only in like-minded but anonymous numbers. It all gets better when you graduate and go to college where people have better things to do than spend time worrying about what someone else is doing. Seriously.
*I’m not saying hide, and I’m not saying to ignore legitimate threats to your person or privacy. Some completely anonymous person threatening hyperbolic harm in a public or private internet forum or chat with a site owner and potentially hours of transcriptions and witnesses is more than likely not going to be a legitimate threat.
And to think all this came about because someone said IF was dead and suggested 1-voting non-parser games. Makes you wonder how much damage someone could do if they actually set out to cause it.
Like I said in the other thread: people take things way too seriously. As a result of this one comment we’ve had people leaving the forum, the admin stepping down and a potential war brewing with GG. Wouldn’t it have been better to simply have not overreacted?
MTW, I don’t care which side you’re on - vague threats against other users are not acceptable.
Everyone, for the safety of other users, please refrain from discussion of GamerGate for now. This includes linking to related material. There is abundant evidence that organised harassment of women specifically and “SJWs” in general has been a major part of the GamerGate movement and I do not want anyone here to be targeted, either on this board or off it. And no, fearing that your posts here may be moderated is not on the same level as fearing that you may be doxed or threatened with rape or murder, so please take a deep breath and consider other users before your next post.
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