Censorship? There is no censorship!

I feel like there's a whole lot of misunderstanding of arguments going on here, so I'm just going to re-state my position so we don't go down the rabbit hole of escalating quote wars over a simple case of miscommunication.

My problem with TotalBiscuit in general is that he has consistently supported GamerGate, and done so in a way that allows GamerGaters to not confront the harassment and horrible behavior in their movement. So instead of going "I want better ethics in games journalism", he's gone "I want better ethics in games journalism and that's what GamerGate is about and the harassment is just [not so bad|third party trolls|same as other side|just the internet|why are you even talking about your harassment you should shut up]." He's consistently given GamerGate excuses to not confront those issues. Not only that, but he's signal-boosted some of the worst people in GamerGate like KingOfPol and MundaneMatt and Thunderf00t by going on streams with them, linking to them or otherwise giving them publicity. Not only that, but he periodically comes out with statements on how he still supports GamerGate, and has also consistently spread many of the bullshit myths propagated by GamerGate. In other words, all of his actions over the past months have been to support GamerGate, and he's enabled them to continue to avoid being accountable for the shit that comes out of that movement.

I'm sure TotalBiscuit doesn't have bad intentions with all these things, but his actions certainly have bad effects. It makes him, at best, clueless.

My main problem with his specific comment on that YouTube video should be seen in that same context. He's not just speaking in the abstract about how men get harassed too. He's doing it while his audience consists of people who have minimized the problem of harassment faced by women. He's doing that in a comment on a video which minimizes the problem of harassment faced by women. And he's doing that while he has a history of himself minimizing the harassment faced by women, and especially that faced by Anita Sarkeesian. So while the most progressive, charitable reading is that he's promoting an (unproven!) theory that the problem is created by equal-opportunity harassers, the net effect of his comment is to further enable his audience's minimizing the problem of harassment faced by women -- an audience that also engages in that very harassment! Good intentions, terrible effect.

Similarly, his comments on Anita Sarkeesian in that same comment further promote myths and enable harassment. When he tells his specific audience that Sarkeesian (or McIntosh) have been "antagonistic", that they haven't engaged in "rational discourse" (both statements I'd disagree with) and that that causes harassment, what do you think the consequences are? He's further reinforcing the views of the part of his audience that views Sarkeesian and McIntosh as targets to be attacked. That's the effect of his speech, even if it's not what he intended. And he is blind to those consequences, because he's blind to the harassment coming out of GamerGate, and he's blind to the role he's played in legimitizing that.

Good intentions, terrible effect. That pattern is something you consistently in TotalBiscuit's efforts over the past months, and it's amazing that it still hasn't changed. Instead, he keeps doubling down.

Finally, he's also propagating more GamerGate myths in that very post. The idea that Sarkeesian "lied" about Hitman: Absolution is nonsense -- it's the result of Thunderf00t taking her comments completely out of context and then ripping into them, and then everyone in GamerGate just kept repeating the lie until it was accepted truth. Just as the idea that she "wilfully misrepresents developers work as misogynistic" is nonsense: she makes specific arguments as to why she feels the way she does. That's not wilfully misrepresenting, it's just a different perspective from TB's. No one's making "outrageous, uncited, unscientific claims about how videogames cause players to develop misogynistic attitudes", instead people are talking about the role videogames play in reinforcing an established culture of sexism -- and there's a ton of scientific, peer-reviewed research to back that up, stuff that's cited by Sarkeesian and McIntosh.

Again, I'm sure his intentions aren't bad. But he sure is clueless.
 
The thing is, he has not consistently supported GG. He did the thing you wanted and left it. He also has a special message for your assertions about his audience:
3fuoIhd.png


Meanwhile, the totally-not-a-movement-trust-us side sent tons of abuse his way and I don't see you condemning them as well-intentioned clueless idiots who sent a hate-mob on him. I just want some goddamn consistency.



Also, remember that thing I was talking about a while back where the net effects of anti-GG is pushing everyone into the open-arms of the right-wing? Well, the statistics are in on that issue:
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2014/12...olitical-attitudes-part-1-movement-right-wing
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2014/12...des-part-two-old-liberals-vs-new-progressives

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rRMK0Jz-p_7PN7SBvQwcv-QDMChdjumssNzLZVmQLy0/viewanalytics


edit:
Unrelated, but I like this article:
http://www.destructoid.com/2014-go-f-ck-yourself-285481.phtml
edit2:
Fuck it, might as well peddle more since Akratus isn't doing his "spam links"-schtick any longer.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkai...video-game-reviews-what-would-roger-ebert-do/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Y1ArOTEqE
 
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Sander said:
Also note that he never tweeted it at TotalBiscuit -- I don't know what communication there was between them, but it certainly didn't consist of him yelling at TotalBiscuit.
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It was for a charity TB is partnered with. It makes sense that he learned about and supported it.
If the guy tried to ask him nicely, why wasn't it included in the Storify? C'mon, the whole thing was formulated specifically to show how much of an asshole TB is, surely it would make sense to include conversations with him to show that he ignored requests of putting the tweet down?

/edit: Apparently Voidburger retweeted it and TB follows her so he retweeted it then.
 
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PlanHex said:
The thing is, he has not consistently supported GG. He did the thing you wanted and left it. He also has a special message for your assertions about his audience:
3fuoIhd.png
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I never called all of his audience harassers and misogynists. No one did. I'm obviously not talking about all of his Twitter followers. But he does have those people among his audience, and GamerGate sees him as one of the most important public voices out there supporting their cause. He should be aware of that and act accordingly -- but he doesn't, and instead he acts a clueless twit, with all of the negative consequences.

He may not consider himself to be a part of GamerGate, but he consistently supports it -- explicitly. He repeats their bullshit narratives. He minimizes the problem of harassment. Whether or not he is a part of GamerGate, he supports it and in such a way that he contributes to the negative effects of the movement. And note that none of my argument above touched on whether he actually was a GamerGater.


PlanHex said:
Meanwhile, the totally-not-a-movement-trust-us side sent tons of abuse his way and I don't see you condemning them as well-intentioned clueless idiots who sent a hate-mob on him. I just want some goddamn consistency.
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Actually I did condemn that: "exacerbated by genuine abuse aimed at both parties" and "I can also understand TotalBiscuit's initial reaction, given that he had a lot of people harassing him over this stuff. That's pretty bad."

I don't know how the charity reacted to that abuse. As far as I can tell Tolvo, one of the guys running the charity thing, immediately condemned it and asked people to stop -- something TB never did, as far as I can tell. I don't know if the other dude did -- his tweets are protected and I can't check. I also don't think they could reasonably have expected that to happen -- they have a very small reach, and wouldn't have expected this to blow up. But I did see quite a bit of "he deserves the abuse" on GamerGhazi -- and that's pretty bad.

PlanHex said:
Also, remember that thing I was talking about a while back where the net effects of anti-GG is pushing everyone into the open-arms of the right-wing? Well, the statistics are in on that issue:
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2014/12...olitical-attitudes-part-1-movement-right-wing
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2014/12...des-part-two-old-liberals-vs-new-progressives

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rRMK0Jz-p_7PN7SBvQwcv-QDMChdjumssNzLZVmQLy0/viewanalytics
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That's pretty interesting. I'm not sure it says as much as you think it does, though. Mostly it seems to paint a picture of people questioning their political identities, rather than changing their political views. These people still appear to be liberal/left-leaning on basically every topic, except social justice. I think this paragraph best sums that up:
A clearer picture emerges when we look at GamerGate's opinions on issues rather than labels. By 67 percent to 6 percent, GamerGate rejected the belief that there is an "epidemic of sexual assault on US campuses." They also agreed, by 69 percent to 10 percent, that "if there is a feminist movement there should also be a men's rights movement." On the other hand, respondents also indicated a suspicion of identity politics in general, agreeing (68 percent to 15 percent) that "movements designed to advance the interests of particular genders, races, and orientations are inherently divisive."​

These are not uncommon views among people who identify as left-leaning or liberal, they just happen to be the battleground in this instance.

Perhaps the label-shifting does lead to more outright right-wing view-changing, but I don't think we can say that based on that poll. But I think it's more likely to be an acceleration of a process of identity-shift that was already ongoing.

There's also the question of whether "anti-GG" is actually pushing people in that direction, or whether GamerGate is doing that. I'd argue the latter, given how much of GamerGate is basically perpetuating nonsense narratives that have nothing to do with what "anti-GG" says or does. And we'd also need a poll from the "other side" -- how many people has GamerGate pushed away from its identity and its views over the past five months? You're taking a sample of the most-radicalized group and talking about net effects, but that method has a rather obvious selection bias.

Hassknecht said:
It was for a charity TB is partnered with. It makes sense that he learned about and supported it.
If the guy tried to ask him nicely, why wasn't it included in the Storify? C'mon, the whole thing was formulated specifically to show how much of an asshole TB is, surely it would make sense to include conversations with him to show that he ignored requests of putting the tweet down?
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Sure. Maybe they didn't, and that would be bad. I don't have a problem with him retweeting it, and I think his eventual reaction is understandable given the amount of abuse he faced -- although I also think he has a responsibility to act more responsibly, given the reach he has. I also think the charity's initial reaction of "oh shit" is understandable, because they genuinely were not prepared for the likely consequences.
 
Hassknecht said:
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sjkt5p
https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/550698326405165058
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Cool. I missed that. Those are a day late, but I see he did ask them to not harass people on the day itself, too. Yay!

Incidentally, I missed this earlier, but this sums up TotalBiscuit's cluelessness better than I ever could (from here):

"I thoroughly condemn the idea that my followers and viewers are horrible people who would engage in harassment. I accept the obvious, that in such a huge group there will be some assholes and I also accept the reality that I can do nothing about that."

There are certainly things he could do to mitigate the harassment coming from his followers. He could stop minimizing the problem of harassment, and stop victim blaming. He could stop flipping his lid over things like that charity stream, because when he does that, the result is (not surprisingly) harassment. He could stop perpetuating GamerGate's self-serving, harassment-justifying myths (like Sarkeesian being a liar who doesn't engage in rational discourse). He could stop going "I support GamerGate" every few days. But because he's clueless, he pretends that there's nothing he can do and everything that happens is just the way the internet is. Clueless, and harmful.
 
He doesn't have to do shit Sander.



You could do something contructive in the meantime, like fly to Russia and convince Vladimir Putin that his actions in Ukraine are more antagonistic that he thinks they are.


You could create a press conference with Obama detailing the U.S. warcrimes that have occurred in the last decade and ask for a course of action.


You could create a organization to help refugees from warzones across the planet to have access to food, housing, or medical care.


But it's much easier to take the "It's everyone else's fault but my own." stance, and try to deconstruct everything to the point where no-one gives a shit anymore and the only thing you have accomplished is cause everyone to hate you.
 
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But that's an argument we hear a lot, and certainly something that goes in one ear and comes out the other. The idea that something isn't effective enough, and therefore shouldn't be done at all whizzes past the person who has taken that very thing as part of their core beliefs. Sander merely wants TotalBiscuit to pretend like he's improving the community surrounding him. To make the occasional remark or anouncement that bad things are bad, and that bad people are bad. As if the guy who "defends" TotalBiscuit by calling all haters assholes will ever think he's the bad guy. We all just have to stop thinking for ourselves and start accepting social justice on face value, and we should stop doing the things social justice doesn't like even if someone can claim such a thing exists where it doesn't and hundreds of people will rally behind that claim. Rather than embracing the reality of being an internet personality for which the very idea of preaching is laughable, we must embrace self-righteousness as a virtue.

Because better videogames and better people will not come from educated minds, they will come from subjugated minds, of course. Proselytization is the only path forward. Let us all forget intelligent artisticness. Merely mention homosexuality in a positive light and the medium will mature. Obviously the worlds of movies and books and the like have all benefited from sunday school messages over bold artistic pursuits. If you stand in the way of this, you're obviously against criticism, critique, and art. Obvioiusly I just want explosions, technical reviews and numbers.
 
I see Akratus has decided to re-join the fray. You have a response yet to the fact that GamerGaters are still en masse defending 8chan's right to post child porn? No? Well, I'm not particularly interested in replying to your bullshit straw men. Enjoy the bubble you've constructed for yourself, dude.
 
Sander said:
I see Akratus has decided to re-join the fray. You have a response yet to the fact that GamerGaters are still en masse defending 8chan's right to post child porn? No? Well, I'm not particularly interested in replying to your bullshit straw men. Enjoy the bubble you've constructed for yourself, dude.
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If there is anyone living inside a bubble, Sander, then it is you. For a couple of years I thought you were only going through a phase. You know? Growing up, acting like you know everything better than anyone else, hormones, juvenile delusions of grandeur. Like that time when you were deadserious about writing a philosophical book for NaNoWriMo - in English, and never got further than the first paragraph. Or when you proclaimed to be the best poker player in the world and then lost a game to an absolute amateur in the field of poker. I thought the huge gap between what you say and what you actually do would in time become apparent to you as well, because it was so obvious to a lot of us. I thought reality, life and age would humble you. But it didn't, did it? It turned you into one of the most unlikeable characters I know. Always sitting on that high high horse of yours, the social justice warrior, the one who succeeded in deluding himself into thinking his ways are better than the rest, in fact, are the only ways a human being should consider. The energy you put into getting the last word is admirable, but as Dopamine points out, and rightly so, all that energy is for naught. Your words do nothing. Except make you even more unlikeable than you already were. And that's sad. You see, a person like you, a person who constantly needs to remind people about their flaws, shouldn't be sitting behind a computer. Your radical goodness is needed in Turkey, to fight a misogynist like Erdogan. Your godlike insight into right and wrong and good and bad is needed in Syria. There are thousands of muslim girls who need you to protect their labia and clitoris. We don't need a Messiah like you to fix the details in the West, time and common sense will do that for us and we've covered so much ground already. No, a man like you is needed in Afghanistan and Iran and at least one of the Koreas. You need to go to Hong Kong and fight for democracy. You need to help the Kurds fight off ISIS. But instead you take the path of least resistance and you just sit behind your big ass screen and you type about the big injustices, the lack of morals and all the other bad bad bad things in the West, in videogames, on certain sites, the huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge wage gap in Western countries ... Details. While the rest of the world really suffers. And that saddens me. It just seems so eurocentric of you. So egotistical. And so pointless. Telling everyone how to act and what to say and how to think, and no one on these boards gives a damn anymore. We're just so blinded by the aura of perfection that you exude that we're forced to look the other way. 'Cause that's what people do when they're confronted with someone who turns everything into a false dilemma. Your words paint a world where there seem to be only two choices: you're either with us or you're against us. And that's not how the world works. That's how your bubble works, your soap bubble. Sooner or later, though, that bubble is gonna pop. Not because of something any of us told you, since you're too headstrong for any of that. But because that's what soap bubbles do: they pop. And then you fall, bubble boy.
 
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As flattering as your obsession is, I do feel like I have to tell you it will never make me love you. Sorry, bro.
 
Man I totally see how GamerGate isn't a crazy conspiracy theory now that you linked a crazy conspiracy theory article. Outlets need money to survive, so they have people who sell ads and write posts that their audience wants to read. Rather than go EVIL CONSPIRACY THEORY TO PUSH GENDER POLITICS DOWN PEOPLE'S THROATS you may want to consider that this is the stuff people want to read. Because it is.

Why is it so hard for GamerGaters to believe that all of those gender critiques are not evil manipulation, but genuinely held beliefs?

Also, you still have no issue identifying as part of a movement that defends child porn? No? Just going to ignore that and pretend like that didn't happen?
 
You're boring me Sander. Challenging myself in composing retorts to you loses any incentive I had for it when the arguments cease being new. Rather than answer your question I'd answer with my own question: Why do you still think goading me into changing my mindset by false accusations of immoral behavior built on lies will work,especially given that I've already established how pitiful emotional manipulation on the internet is to me?

https://archive.today/C6WNp
"(sigh) Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.
Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.
Because of my fears—my fears of being “outed” as a nerdy heterosexual male, and therefore as a potential creep or sex criminal—I had constant suicidal thoughts. As Bertrand Russell wrote of his own adolescence: “I was put off from suicide only by the desire to learn more mathematics.”
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Not a false accusation at all. GamerGate has consistently defended 8chan's right to post child porn -- you can go back a couple pages where I explained that. That was unethical act #4,786 in the movement's history. Kind of ironic for a movement supposedly about ethics, right? And instead of reflecting on what this says about the movement you are still a part of, you come back here to post inane conspiracy bullshit again, hoping we're going to forget about all that. Nope. That happened. The movement you are a part of continues to defend 8chan's right to post child porn, in addition to all the harassment, lies and bullshit it has engaged in.

Why don't you address that instead of posting your horseshit propaganda here?

PS: That last piece was mediocre and way too long, but I'm getting slightly tired of this bullshit habit of linking archived posts instead of the real thing. Here's the actual link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/ -- I'd suggest reading Lizardbreath's comment for a bit stream-of-consciousness but still fairly solid rebuttal.
 
Why is it so hard for GamerGaters to believe that all of those gender critiques are not evil manipulation, but genuinely held beliefs?
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This might have something to do with the fact that journalists have spent the last few decades building a reputation for deceit and half-truths that support their narrative, bringing their public trust to an all-time low. They have been doing this crap for years and now it's coming back to bite them in the arse. Are you trying to tell me, you're actually surprised that people don't believe for a moment these people are capable of anything genuine?

I mean seriously, Sander, what's next? You're gonna listen to a politician's public statement without calling bullshit?
 
No Man said:
This might have something to do with the fact that journalists have spent the last few decades building a reputation for deceit and half-truths that support their narrative, bringing their public trust to an all-time low. They have been doing this crap for years and now it's coming back to bite them in the arse. Are you trying to tell me, you're actually surprised that people don't believe for a moment these people are capable of anything genuine?
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Yes, I am. Because that blanket dismissal of journalism as a whole is nonsensical -- there's a lot of good journalism out there, and a lot of good opinionated writing. This "journalists are all manipulative liars" bit is...well, not based in truth, frankly. It's also treating the journalistic profession as monolithic, while it's actually highly specialized -- what happens in cultural criticism has fuck-all to do with what happens in political writing. Those areas are almost completely separate, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that cultural critics don't actually believe what they write. None.

But more than that there are lots of people who actually agree with those critics. Like me. Like Tagaziel. Like half the comment sections on those articles, and half the internet. Finding people who genuinely hold these beliefs is really, really easy -- so why is it so hard to believe that the people writing those beliefs also genuinely hold them?
 
there's a lot of good journalism out there
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in gaming? I am curious how many of those journalists actually really studied journalism. But to be fair there are only very few TRUE journalists out there. You know, the kind of journalists that do not only spend time with the US military making pretty pictures while they make some awesome battle-pose. I mean the kind of journalists that would try to interview characters like Arafat, Khomeini or Osama Bin Laden just to also give the other side a chance to be heard, even if what they say is bullshit. I am talking here about people like Anna Politkowskaja, characters which you will hardly find in this so called gaming journalism.

Gaming is a form of press, made for entertainment, and there are for sure some good and funny writers out there, no doubts about that. But true journalism? far from it.
 
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