That's some spectacular jumps in logic that linked image is making. Though I'd disagree with McIntosh in that Hotline Miami was set up to make you question the violence you're inflicting, so the comparison is dubious. And Hatred probably doesn't constitute hate speech, either.
Meanwhile, FoldableHuman exposes the child porn that is all over 8chan's boards. It is horrifying. I won't link his expose because it makes me sick to read, but you can find it on Google if you really want to. It's really ugly. So be prepared.
KotakuInAction's reaction? Report FoldableHuman for distributing child porn! People have been noting off-and-on that there's child porn on 8chan for months now. Fredrick Brennan has actually defended that as necessary for his site to be profitable (!!!!!). But the guy exposing all this is the one who deserves to be reported? Not, y'know, the site that actually hosts the actual material and has for months? Holy shit. And yes, that post is on the front page, 175 upvotes and 75% approval. This is not some fringe asshole posting in KiA.
Note that that thread was posted by serial harasser RogueStar, a game developer who actually defrauded people on crowdfunding platforms. So you would think that he'd be the kind of person GamerGate would be against, right? Corrupt developer, doxxes people, harasses people. But nope, he's embraced by them because he's pro-gamergate. All about ethics, right?
So that's, what, episode #5,344 in "GamerGate is horrifying"?
Meanwhile, FoldableHuman exposes the child porn that is all over 8chan's boards. It is horrifying. I won't link his expose because it makes me sick to read, but you can find it on Google if you really want to. It's really ugly. So be prepared.
Also note that there are a bunch of people justifying it by saying that he started it by tying child porn to GamerGate. Except he didn't -- the article is strictly about 8chan, not about GamerGate. GamerGate isn't even mentioned.
And then other people justifying it because it's not child porn so 8chan did nothing wrong. But FoldableHuman says it's child porn in some jurisdictions, so he's claiming it is child porn, which means he downloaded child porn, which means he did something illegal and that must be reported. But it's totally not actually child porn, so we don't need to do anything about 8chan, which is hosting the totally-not-child-porn. Just about FoldableHuman, who's trying to help remove child porn from the web. He deserves to be reported to authorities for downloading the very same totally-not-child-porn. Logic!
Thankfully, some people on KiA see the insanity for what it is. But many, many don't.
Meanwhile, FoldableHuman exposes the child porn that is all over 8chan's boards. It is horrifying. I won't link his expose because it makes me sick to read, but you can find it on Google if you really want to. It's really ugly. So be prepared.
I think it's funny though that you somehow think that I think everything I'm against is ok just because I'm against it. You people and your stupid logic. That you would even think I'm anything but 100% against child molestation and the places it's distributed shows a pretty bad lack of decency. In my opinion 8chan could do without boards about jailbait and the like. I like Fredrick though, and his personal ideal for free speech. But then again claiming that 8chan is somehow a bad place because he lets other people post on it what they like is a very stupid argument. No website owner is responsible for things placed there by another individual with no connection to said website owner. Someone posted child pornography on twitter too to harass someone. I guess the owner of Twitter is a pretty bad guy now.
Obviously right now I'm defending child porn though, because making arguments based on facts that aren't there to accuse people of being immoral is fun! And defending yourself against being accusations of being immoral is even worse! It just proves you're a monster! You have to grovel! Grovel in the dirt! Get on your knees and beg for forgiveness! You would defend yourself? You would claim that claims made against you about how immoral you are are in any way false? It's not a question of who's right and who's wrong, it's a question of how much of a scumbag you are! Especially if you're a straight white male! How dare you explain ANYTHING to someone if you're a man! How dare you question ANYTHING a woman does! How could you even associate yourself with an open thing where people can join that own a website you've never been to where people you never knew could post things you don't know anything about! YOU MONSTER! You're not a decent person until you accept everything WE say without question! Being critical? You silly guy! When are you going to solve every problem you don't condone! Social Justice is on the case! Just join us! We've already put huuuuundreds of women into the tech industry! We've got doooooozens of internet trolls arrested! Complaining about stupid shit that happens on the internet is obviously just a side hobby. Anyone who does that all the time, or psch, for a living, isn't really an activist, or very smart, now are they? Socialjustice womyn, awaaaaay!
People get upset when you call into question that they're even decent people at all? How weird! Nah. That's not what they do. They just call you that. It's not even a question any more. No reason to get upset.
Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms remove child porn from their websites immediately, and report such things to the proper authorities. They do not allow discussions of grooming, or sexualized-but-technically-maybe-legal-in-some-jurisdictions pictures of children. They don't allow people to post about how they sexually abused children and how others can avoid getting caught like them. They don't allow discussion of how you can best get child porn, or how they can agitate for the legalization of child porn. But all of that happened on 8chan, right in the open, for months. None of the stuff FoldableHuman pointed out had been removed. There was no moderation. And Brennan has defended this as essential to his site.
8chan is a hub for child porn and child molesters. It is that simple. That makes 8chan pretty goddamn horrible, and there's nothing wrong with saying so.
8chan being horrible doesn't really reflect on you, nor on GamerGate, though. What does reflect on GamerGate is the response to these revelations. Instead of denouncing 8chan, or denouncing child porn, or denouncing these boards, we've seen a lot of attacking FoldableHuman for pointing these things out, of rationalizing child porn as art or freedom speech, of trying to spin it as anti-gamergate posting child porn to take down 8chan. Those people have cast their lots, and they've decided that defending child porn is what they stand for. KotakuInAction doesn't have any post suggesting that maybe 8chan is messed up, that maybe they shouldn't be defending this. Instead, posts suggesting as much get downvoted. And that reaction does reflect on GamerGate. All of that is now a mainstream part of one of the biggest GamerGate hubs -- and you see the exact same reactions on Twitter, you see the same defensiveness in every gamergate place.
So that's what we have now. In addition to all of the other horrible stuff associated with GamerGate, it is now defending child porn. That's pretty awful, but it still doesn't really reflect on you. You can still walk away. You can still say "wow, this is a bridge too far, I'm out", as others have done. Because that's what people do when they realize that the movement they are a part of is suddenly overrun by people who defend child pornography.
I've been in a debate with someone over gamergate for a few months now. And the issue of the cp incident, and it's relation to gamergate has come up.
"8chan being horrible doesn't really reflect on you, nor on GamerGate, though. What does reflect on GamerGate is the response to these revelations. Instead of denouncing 8chan, or denouncing child porn, or denouncing these boards, we've seen a lot of attacking FoldableHuman for pointing these things out, of rationalizing child porn as art or freedom speech, of trying to spin it as anti-gamergate posting child porn to take down 8chan. Those people have cast their lots, and they've decided that defending child porn is what they stand for. KotakuInAction doesn't have any post suggesting that maybe 8chan is messed up, that maybe they shouldn't be defending this. Instead, posts suggesting as much get downvoted. And that reaction does reflect on GamerGate. All of that is now a mainstream part of one of the biggest GamerGate hubs -- and you see the exact same reactions on Twitter, you see the same defensiveness in every gamergate place."
I would like to ask the following questions:
-Is 8chan fostering the distribution of illegal material of underage persons?
-Have any pro-gg personalities come out to denounce it?
-Don't you guys think they should, if not?
-What reactions to this are you seeing in gg and anti-gg in general?
The reaction to the cp story from gamergate seems to be more focused on how badly it reflects on FoldableHuman, and maybe others. This is construed by anti-ggers as coloring gamergaters and gamergate as a whole as defending pedophilia. Shouldn't something be done about this? Not merely to defend gamergate's public image, but to show some moral backbone?
Great! And those responses really do tell you what these people think. Denial that anyone's defending child porn, while you can take a quick look at the RogueStar thread I linked and see several people defending those images and those boards pretending it's not child porn -- hell, people are doing it in the comments to your post. There's someone claiming that 8chan isn't fostering distribution any more than any other sites with throwaway accounts -- which is blatantly false, as none of that stuff would be allowed to stand on any of the other networks they mention (including Facebook, Twitter, 4chan and Reddit). That shit was up on 8chan for months. And then there are the "no FoldableHuman's the one distributing it" rationalizations, which is so far removed from reality I can't even. There's still no one denouncing 8chan there. No one. Not one person.
Instead, you get "Why is it indefensible when it's not illegal? Because they will intentionally misconstrue it as "standing up for pedophiles", and no one wants to be known as a pedo or pedo-enabler. But that's exactly why it's so important to defend it" -- explicitly defending child porn, because free speech. And you get the constant pretense that this was an attack on GamerGate -- it was not. It was about 8chan. What makes this a problem for GamerGate is only that so many of them defend it, and continue to defend it.
It's also telling that your post gets downvoted into oblivion (0 points, 31% positive) and the RogueStar one is getting upvoted.
That framing of FoldableHuman's article as "distributing child porn" is completely divorced from reality. Reporting on child porn by blurring the images and not presenting any pornographic content is in no way "distributing child porn". But the fact that that's the disingenuous attack people go to is pretty telling: they don't care about child porn. They're not attacking 8chan for hosting it. They just want to score transparently bullshit points. There's also no reason to assume he didn't report it to the authorities or 8chan, and there's even less reason to assume that reporting it to 8chan would have done anything. Because we *know* Brennan knew that stuff was there because he's publicly defended it. "Report it to the mods" is a bullshit defense. See also, the Anderson Cooper-/r/jailbait spat. This is the exact same thing.
First things first: Is it ok to talk about these things here? I find this a creepy and uncomfortable subject. Are you as an administrator ok in us continuing to go back on forth on this? I'm willing to discuss the reactions of people to this thing, but it's still connected to something seedy. Are we treading dangerous ground here? Just a bit concerned.
I'm having like an inner conflict on this thing. Obviously I'd leave Gamergate if it defends Child Pornography. But I'm having some trouble with this you said: "there's even less reason to assume that reporting it to 8chan would have done anything." In every instance of this being discussed by Fredrick he's said to report it. What reason does one have to assume the gamergate staff in any way lets ilegal content on their site, and when being notified of this to not do something? Obviously the site very much risks getting taken down or having the authorities crack down on them if they allow this shit to be posted, so what reason has he not to make sure that shit stays off his site?
"That shit was up on 8chan for months."
You seem to have a more in depth source of facts on the matter, would you mind telling me where that is? Genuinely curious.
That framing of FoldableHuman's article as "distributing child porn" is completely divorced from reality. Reporting on child porn by blurring the images and not presenting any pornographic content is in no way "distributing child porn".
If one says that under law, finding and downloading cp is illegal, and this person seems to have done so, that seems quite logical to me to denounce.
I'm also having a hard time grasping what you say in that, if someone blames FoldableHuman for reaching out to find and get these images, they're somehow okay with it being on 8chan?
It's also a bad position to take, according to you, to denounce all forms of pornographic images portraying minors, but then beside that not 8chan as a whole? Could you explain that position?
while you can take a quick look at the RogueStar thread I linked and see several people defending those images and those boards pretending it's not child porn
I'm not seeing it. I skimmed over like, the first 100 posts, and only found people talking about either how sick cp is, why someone would look for it and announce that they did on twitter, discussions on legality etc.
I'm also not exactly seeing the arguments you put forth applying entirely to some of the responses on my reddit thread:
[–]Jessi_Smith [score verborgen] 44 minutes ago I think many pro-gg personalities are denouncing, not just with their words, but by reporting somebody who would rather re-distribute what they saw rather than properly reporting it.
I believe if it was someone pro-gg who did similar they'd also denounce, and report them.
The fact that either side is potentially using this for politicking is the most disturbing part.
We (both sides) should all be working to notify the admin's of the relevant "host" (8chan) and the authorities. We shouldn't be redistributing potentially illegal material, and putting a big red sign on it!
Can confirm. I reported to twitter, medium, and the authorities.
[–]jonsnow7412 4 punten an hour ago
I can't speak much on it because I'd never even go there for 'research'. My take on it though is that if someone posts actual CP it's removed by the mods. If it wasn't I'm pretty positive the authorities would have already taken action against 8chan for it. The bleak reality of it is that those people do exist. If they didn't exist on 8chan they'd exist somewhere else where maybe the mods didn't actively police for that kind of stuff.
I also recognize the only reason 8chan is in their crosshairs though is because of the /gamergate/ board. People peddling in CP should be apprehended and charged. I'm raising 3 girls and a boy and the very thought of that stuff sickens me. We can denounce pedo boards to the end of time, but that's not what they're after. They want us to stop using 8chan as a platform for gamergate discussion. Fuck em. Let them spin it how they want, they would anyway and I'm not caving to the always offended.
H_Guderian 3 punten an hour ago
Isn't CP a universally hated thing like doxxing?
[–]violentevolution 4 punten an hour ago
Since when is calling out, reporting and refering to those who shared as monsters points to supportig it? This can not be real fucking life
Denounce child porn? Do these people want the denouncement of murder too? And of rape? Armed robbery? Any crime you care to list off? Again, the fact that 8chan users report that shit immediately is enough.
Could you also link me to the arguments of "of rationalizing child porn as art or freedom speech" that you saw? That's pretty sick stuff. Wouldn't want to be associated with those people.
I don't do alcohol, but I feel like I need a drink. .
First things first: Is it ok to talk about these things here? I find this a creepy and uncomfortable subject. Are you as an administrator ok in us continuing to go back on forth on this? I'm willing to discuss the reactions of people to this thing, but it's still connected to something seedy. Are we treading dangerous ground here? Just a bit concerned.
As long as we're not posting or defending child porn, I have no issues discussing this, no. You won't be banned for discussing it. It's important to be careful around this subject, obviously, and I don't want to get into the "is this really child porn" debates. But what we're doing now is fine.
Akratus said:
I'm having like an inner conflict on this thing. Obviously I'd leave Gamergate if it defends Child Pornography. But I'm having some trouble with this you said: "there's even less reason to assume that reporting it to 8chan would have done anything." In every instance of this being discussed by Fredrick he's said to report it. What reason does one have to assume the gamergate staff in any way lets ilegal content on their site, and when being notified of this to not do something? Obviously the site very much risks getting taken down or having the authorities crack down on them if they allow this shit to be posted, so what reason has he not to make sure that shit stays off his site?
Brennan has consistently gone with the "technically legal" defense. Which is a very dubious defense because, as FoldableHuman points out, it is not actually legal in many jurisdictions (including Canada and many US states) -- and even under federal US statutes the legality of sexualized images of clothed minors is very, very doubtful. As FoldableHuman also points out, authorities don't have a ton of resources to go after sites and so they'll mostly stick to the hardcore child porn and distribution rings -- a site like 8chan can slip by undetected. That's also why it took Anderson Cooper reporting on Reddit's /r/jailbait on national television before they finally removed it -- and what's on 8chan is a lot worse than what you saw on /r/jailbait.
FoldableHuman does a good job of explaining why what's happening is not legal, but why it's still up anyway.
It is not decisively illegal, but that doesn't make it legal.
Basically it's a problem of resources. The content on 8chan and jailbait isn't a slam-dunk case in the way that hardcore stuff is, so there's just less incentive to spend resources taking it down, unless they can nail a huge producer (which has happened in the past). With the hardcore stuff you basically walk into court and go "here's the stuff, here's where we found it" and then do your little touchdown dance. For softcore you have to build a case demonstrating intent, context, and all that other stuff that proves the material is abusing children and advancing pedophiliac interests. So you're taking down "smaller fish" but it takes twice as much effort to prove.
“If you want /doll/ shut down,” he countered, “you should instead focus on the studios who are producing this content. Some of them are even legally based in the USA. That’s the real story here, not some perverts posting them online after the fact.”
The photos already exist, Brennan argues. So what if he’s building a directory through which they can be shared and discussed? In other words: Someone else is in the wrong already, and he’s merely using the fruits of that labor.
Of course, now that Patreon has threatened to take his funds away and FoldableHuman exposed all the child porn, he's taken /doll/ down. But given that he knew it was all there, given that he defended it, given that he never took it down, reporting it to 8chan wouldn't have done much. And there's also no reason to assume that FoldableHuman didn't do exactly that.
And yes, those images were up for months. The timestamps in that FoldableHuman post say as much. This guy in the RogueStar thread also says it's been there all along.
Akratus said:
If one says that under law, finding and downloading cp is illegal, and this person seems to have done so, that seems quite logical to me to denounce.
I'm also having a hard time grasping what you say in that, if someone blames FoldableHuman for reaching out to find and get these images, they're somehow okay with it being on 8chan?
Reporters get a little more leeway here, because while possession of child porn is illegal, you can't report on it without encountering it. Whether this puts him legally in the clear I don't know, but I imagine he talked to authorities and lawyers to find out. But if it is illegal, why aren't those same people reporting 8chan for actually hosting the material? Why are they angry at FoldableHuman for reporting on it, rather than at 8chan for hosting it? Because that's the direction of the anger in those posts -- many of them even defend 8chan in the same sentence. So the source of the actual content is fine, but the person reporting on it without redistributing it, is out of line? That makes no sense to me.
But setting that aside, what FoldableHuman set out to do was to expose -- for the public -- the fact that 8chan was hosting boards for child porn and child molesters. He did so by presenting heavily blurred images of illegal content to show people what's happening there. Can you honestly say that's distribution of child porn? Can you honestly say that's something he should be punished for? What good is reporting him to the authorities going to actually do?
Akratus said:
It's also a bad position to take, according to you, to denounce all forms of pornographic images portraying minors, but not 8chan as a whole? Could you explain that position?
Sure. I don't think we need to blame anyone in the not-child-porn boards of 8chan for the child porn elsewhere. But I do think that 8chan, as a platform, should be held accountable for hosting child porn.
Let me put it this way: I could probably see people sticking to /gg/ and other 8chan boards that have nothing to do with child porn, because they're places to discuss issues they want to discuss. I personally wouldn't visit a platform that also hosts child porn, but I can at least see some ways in which I'd defend that. But Brennan and 8chan as a platform (that is: not everyone on it as an individual, but the people running the platform) are responsible for hosting child porn. That's pretty horrible. And I genuinely do not see how anyone can defend Brennan or 8chan as a platform.
Akratus said:
I'm not seeing it. I skimmed over like, the first 100 posts, and only found people talking about either how sick cp is, why someone would look for it and announce that they did on twitter, discussions on legality etc.
I'm also not exactly seeing the arguments you put forth applying entirely to some of the responses on my reddit thread:
[–]Jessi_Smith [score verborgen] 44 minutes ago I think many pro-gg personalities are denouncing, not just with their words, but by reporting somebody who would rather re-distribute what they saw rather than properly reporting it.
I believe if it was someone pro-gg who did similar they'd also denounce, and report them.
The fact that either side is potentially using this for politicking is the most disturbing part.
We (both sides) should all be working to notify the admin's of the relevant "host" (8chan) and the authorities. We shouldn't be redistributing potentially illegal material, and putting a big red sign on it!
There are a lot of posts that claim it's not really child porn. They're talking about the posing of children in overtly sexualized ways, who were posed specifically to be viewed sexually, in a context that is about those readers masturbating to those images, discussing how to get more, who these children are exactly, which of these children they find the most attractive etc. And they're pretending that that's not child porn, because it's technically maybe legal in one jurisdiction (and maybe not, and certainly illegal in many).
For instance, this comment does that (22 points). This one goes "I'm not personally opposed to these sorts of images", while acknowledging it's illegal in many places. Here's someone saying it's legal (not actually true in many jurisdictions) and therefore there's no problem because freedom of speech. Here's someone saying it's not porn. And someone else. And another guy. And another one.
And yes, in your thread too. This guy calls it not child porn. This guy rationalizes it as saying it's on imgur and 4chan too (it is not, they take that shit down). This guy says "there is no cp". This guy flat out denies it's there and says that it's "the most indefensible aspect of free speech" but "it's important to defend it" because it's not technically illegal (except, again, it is illegal in many jurisdictions). This guy calls it a "moving goal post of what is considered CP". This dude claims FoldableHuman uploaded the child porn to 8chan. This guy calls it "just questionable material and there's nothing to be done for that".
Akratus said:
Could you also link me to the arguments of "of rationalizing child porn as art or freedom speech" that you saw? That's pretty sick stuff.
Sure. There's this one: https://twitter.com/iglvzx/status/547417659588247552/photo/1
I linked this comment above, which defends posting child porn because it's technically legal and thus freedom of speech -- even though it isn't actually legal in many places, and "loophole!" is a really, really bad defense of child porn. And there are all the other links above that claim it's not child porn. There was a bunch more of this on Twitter, especially in tweets at FoldableHuman and srhbutts, but going through their mentions is impossible right now.
So yes, we have KotakuInAction defending the existence of boards that post heavily sexualized images of children, who are being used as models and posed deliberately, on boards that feature people talking about how they abused children, how you can get access to children, how you can avoid children going to their parents. Boards that feature people talking about how to find child porn, which children they think are more attractive, and their child abuse fantasies. And a lot of people on KotakuInAction are defending or rationalizing that. And, even more tellingly, very few people are denouncing it.
I'd like to correct you on the reaction of gamergaters towards the cp indident. The reaction was not: This is wrong to do, because we don't want you to paint 8chan in a bad light, and I'm not even going to comment on whether CP is bad. Rather it was this: I talk from the assumption that everyone knows cp is horrible, but I think it's grossly inappropriate for someone to post about these illegal materials on twitter before contacting any kind of authority. Though obviously GamerGate is extremely weary of more arguments of guilt by association.
I'd like to correct you on the reaction of gamergaters towards the cp indident. The reaction was not: This is wrong to do, because we don't want you to paint 8chan in a bad light, and I'm not even going to comment on whether CP is bad. Rather it was this: I talk from the assumption that everyone knows cp is horrible, but I think it's grossly inappropriate for someone to post about these illegal materials on twitter before contacting any kind of authority. Though obviously GamerGate is extremely weary of more arguments of guilt by association.
The article was not "guilt by association" for GamerGate, it was simply about 8chan. And only about 8chan. Nothing more. GamerGate wasn't even mentioned. Moreover, the immediate assumption that FoldableHuman never contacted any kind of authority is completely unwarranted, and given the things he reported on the way authorities handle these subjects, actually unlikely.
When people find out that 8chan is filled with some shocking child porn, I would expect them to be...well...shocked. Disgusted. Upset. I would at minimum expect some people to be critical of 8chan. But there was nothing. The people critical of 8chan were immediately downvoted -- really. You can't write this off as people operating under the assumption that child porn is bad, because the people pointing that out were downvoted. The posts attacking the messenger (that being FoldableHuman) were the ones and continue to be the ones that get all the play. As I pointed out, many commenters rationalize the child porn as not really being child porn, make false comparisons to Facebook and other platforms that do take child porn down, and defend the presence of child porn it in the name of free speech.
I repeat: KotakuInAction is not upset with 8chan for hosting child porn.
How about you stop trying to dodge the problem? I don't know about Sander, but I don't plan on clicking on any links from you (ignoring the fact that it's purely GaGa propaganda) until you explain why you're not distancing yourself from a movement which is completely OK with abuse of minors and child pornography.
How about you stop trying to dodge the problem? I don't know about Sander, but I don't plan on clicking on any links from you (ignoring the fact that it's purely GaGa propaganda) until you explain why you're not distancing yourself from a movement which is completely OK with abuse of minors and child pornography.
GG supports cp because an "anon" posted cp on chan²...
So, this week, the new-hot accusation is "child abusers" eh?
Throw mud, throw more mud and then even more mud... Some of it will eventually, hopefully stick, won't it?
Okay. Payola is bad. Video game journalists should probably be a little more open about their personal relationships. Advertisers and game companies pressuring companies for grades is bad. As are embargoes and limiting preview access based on positive reviews.
No one disagrees with those statements. There's nothing to discuss there.
You know what's not unethical? GameJournoPros. Insulting your readers. Opinionated reviews. Feminist critiques of video games. Having sex with a game developer you don't write about. Creating a tool to automatically block people on Twitter.
You know what is unethical? Giving a neo-nazi $10,000/month to make a video to smear a feminist critic. Promoting a gossip journalist with a history of ethical breaches, writing for one of the most unethical outlets out there, for promoting falsehoods with alarming regularity, smearing the subjects he writes about, and never checking what random people on the internet shout at him. Promoting a lawyer who abuses his privileges to spread private information of random people who disagree with him. Promoting a games developer who regularly harasses and doxxes people. Using advertisers to pressure outlets for publishings opinions they don't like. Starting a shitstorm that incites a hate mob over the most trivial bullshit (like someone they dislike dying their dog with pet-safe dye for a hospital charity) every other day. And, of course, defending a website's rights to post child porn because free speech. That's all pretty goddamn unethical. And a movement that engages in all of that, on the regular, can go fuck itself with a rusty slab of reinforced concrete before they can talk about ethical anything.
No. GamerGate has been busy defending 8chan after revelations that it hosts multiple child porn/child molester boards. And no, not "an anon" -- it hosts multiple communities of people sharing child porn. And yes, GamerGate has been defending it -- denying that what's obviously child porn is actually child porn, pretending that because the rules say no child porn's allowed on 8chan there is no child porn, pretending that the person who exposed this awfulness by posting a few heavily censored images of children in an article is actually the one spreading the child porn, pretending that the mods take down any child porn they see immediately despite the fact that that stuff has been up for months and Brennan (the site owner) actually defended it multiple times. And every time someone in KotakuInAction decided to say something negative about 8chan hosting child porn, they got downvoted. And yes, that's exactly what we see in every other GamerGate hub, too. On Twitter. On /gg/. On RPG Codex. Everywhere.
That is why we're saying GamerGate is now defending child porn. And you'd know that this was the actual argument if you'd bothered to actually read this thread instead of jumping in over two sentences of a longer discussion. Congratulations! You fail contextual reading, yet again!
well, it starts off with misogyny and hating women.
you dont hate women do you?
then it moves to sexism and discrimination.
you arent sexist and racist are you?
then it moves to harassment.
you dont support harassment do you?
then it goes to rape!
you dont support rape do you?
then because of how frequently the rape card is played it has become denatured a bit, whats "worse" than rape?
you dont support child pornography do you?
i am starting to think we need to expand upon Moore's Law:
the longer any online discussion goes on, the chance of hitler or the nazi's being mentioned approaches 1.
addendum to Moore's Law:
or child pornography
all because people got sick and tired of how corrupt and un-ethical gaming journalism and media have gotten. all in the name of "diversity".
i dont give a shit if a game was made by a bunch of white guys. is it good and would i enjoy it?
i dont give a shit if a game was made by a bunch of white women. is it a good game and would i enjoy it?
i dont give a shit if a game was made by a team of "diversity". is it a good game and would i enjoy it?
and no, i have seen videos of "gameplay" in depressionquest and gone home. i would not purchase them. they do not appeal to me.
my top 10 games for hours played on steam:
1) counterstrike source
2) Towns
3) defiance
4) sup com 2
5) sanctum
6) orcs must die
7) borderlands 2
8) dungeon defenders
9) rift
10) borderlands pre sequel
defiance and rift are probably a much higher as i play those at times via their out of game launcher. although i dont play rift anymore.
honestly, i think this is hilarious. all these people screaming for "diversity" seem to want someone else to do it. they arent willing to do it themselves, oh no! thats someone elses job! they have to change to suit MY desires!
tell that to these AAA companies making millions of dollars on their titles they have to change their games with huge profit margins. sure some of them may and possibly will make changes. but the real question is will those increased costs result in proportionally increased profits?
will adding multiple protagonists potentially requiring re-writes or more generic or different dialouge or quests to the next assassins creed game result in a proportional increase?
if we spend 100-200k to add female characters to the next call of duty 8, will there be an additional 30-50k units sold in the first week due to that?
GamerGate related? I thought GamerGate had moved on from Zoe Quinn. Guess not! Better troll through her request for a restraining order against Eron Gjoni (granted, incidentally) and try to rationalize and spin everything. That'll prove people we're about ethics in game journalism, and totally not about obsessing over women's private lives.
TheWesDude said:
honestly, i think this is hilarious. all these people screaming for "diversity" seem to want someone else to do it. they arent willing to do it themselves, oh no! thats someone elses job! they have to change to suit MY desires!
No, not to suit desires, or not just desires anyway. To suit societal good. It is objectively better for society if it puts out more diverse cultural products. Because that helps people who are currently underrepresented. Because it's a better representation of humanity and life. So it doesn't distort people's world views as much.
Plus, many of these people do do this themselves. Zoe Quinn makes games. Brianna Wu makes games. Annie Mitsoda Vandermeer makes games. Saladin Ahmed writes books and makes games. Josh Sawyer makes games. Colin McComb makes games. Everyone at BioWare appears to be involved in making games, too. Gee, maybe you're just talking out of your ass without citing sources, like you do every goddamn time? Nah, that can't be it.
TheWesDude said:
Tell that to these AAA companies making millions of dollars on their titles they have to change their games with huge profit margins. sure some of them may and possibly will make changes. but the real question is will those increased costs result in proportionally increased profits?
will adding multiple protagonists potentially requiring re-writes or more generic or different dialouge or quests to the next assassins creed game result in a proportional increase?
if we spend 100-200k to add female characters to the next call of duty 8, will there be an additional 30-50k units sold in the first week due to that?
No one denied that game development as it exists now is profitable. But "hey this is profitable" <> "this is what we should be doing". Yes, we live in a capitalist society where companies are driven by money, but that doesn't mean you have to roll over and say "they make money therefore everything they do is perfect". But you seem to be completely incapable of thinking about the structures of society and thinking outside of those structures, so hey, par for the course for you.
Here's another way to frame this: Would it hurt he bottom line if your peripheral cast consisted of black people instead of white people? Would it hurt the bottom line if you removed white-skinned-goon-number-three and replaced him with black-skinned-goon-number-one? Would your game suddenly not sell if your main character was a woman instead of a man? Would Red Dead Redemption have sold less well if it hadn't contained casually shooting prostitutes? Did Half Life 2 fail to sell because its secondary character was a black woman? Did Left4Dead not sell because it had a diverse cast? Would BioWare games sell more if they didn't add diverse characters? Would Dishonored have sold less if not every single character in the game had been white? The answer: probably not, no, in each of those instances.
But even if they would be less profitable, so? Do you want to live in a world where every game company only tries to make the most profitable (read: lowest-common-denominator) games possible? Of course you wouldn't. You're on a Fallout forum, a game created on a small budget with relatively little oversight, not made to be the most profitable possible game, not made to appeal to the widest possible audience.
Plus, y'know, part of BioWare's appeal is exactly that they try to appeal to those groups. People who want diversity in games appreciate when companies do try, and they're more likely to buy games from companies who do try. Surprise!
Imade this point myself a while ago, the idea that harassment is tailored to the person and that yes, the kind of asshole that would troll and harass you is probably also a misogynist, a homophobe or whatever else (because well, they're an asshole). It's a tragic reality that the threat of rape is an extremely effective thing to use to hurt someone emotionally and is more effective against women than it is against men because its something women on average think about more often than men (though there are exceptions, such as say a victim of child abuse or an ex-convict, who may have either experienced rape himself in a prison environment or was almost certainly exposed to the possibility of it). The recent PEW study indicates that harassment types vary, but not that women are harassed on average more than men. They are harassed in different ways because an abuser identifies the most effective attack vector for the person and exploits it to do maximum emotional damage. As a heterosexual white man, things that an abuser might attack include career success, appearance, sexual history/prowess, social status, my masculinity in general, my sexual orientation or in many cases, one of the most effective, members of my family. A homosexual is more likely to be attacked for merely being gay and an abuser may attempt to exploit the persons insecurities about their sexuality, assuming they have any or perhaps attempt to invoke memories of previous homophobic abuse they may have suffered. Someone might argue that to not endure homophobia is a privilege. I can see your point to some extent, but to an abuser that is not a shield, not at all. It merely means they have to select a different tool for the job. Are these groups harassed MORE on average than your average male online? Well [citation needed] on that one.
Now this is all a conversation that could be had. But instead apparently it's more important to tell people that they are greatly privileged because there are more posters of men on the walls of Gamestop than there of women. Right, ok, that might be a bit of a first world problem there. You want more diverse characters in games? Great, 100% behind you on that one, let's do it, lots of games are boring and more diversity in characters and writing would help alleviate some of that. You want to attain it by condemning perfectly good characters we already have? Slut-shaming Bayonetta? Lying about Hitman: Absolution? Wilfully misrepresenting the work of developers as misogynistic? Making outrageous, uncited, unscientific claims about how videogames cause players to develop misogynistic attitudes in real life? Using silly circular logic like "the more you think you aren't affected, the more likely you are to be affected". Is that going to achieve any good what-so-ever? Justice achieved through lies is not justice.
If you want to cure the problem of assholes online well. Good luck, I don't know how to do that, but you could probably start by not deliberately antagonising people you disagree with and refusing to engage in any form of rational discourse. That might be a start.
Bring me your female leads, your female villains, your reasonably clothed NPCs. Bring me your transgendered, your varied ethnicities and sexual orientations. Bring me your overweight, your mentally ill, your disadvantaged minority groups of all kinds. Just, leave the bullshit on the boat. No, mayonnaise is not a gender.
