Politics On gender politics

The problem here is that nothing is clear.

#gamergate is a massive shitshow.

The one thing that is quite clear, and this reflects what I am actually reading, is that Anita Sarkeesian has been threatened for doing little more than Critical Theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, Jameson, Kroker, Mulvey, Irigaray, et al have been doing for years. She is engaging critically with forms of Pop Culture.

That there are people out there that feel so threatened by critical theory that they would stoop to issuing death/rape threats is disheartening.

To be clear. Very clear. I am not painting ALL gamers with this brush.

I don't know enough about Zoe Quinn to take a stance, but the limited reading I have done, is similarly shitty.

You can disagree with someone, you can even call someone out on something they have done, but what is with the death/rape threats?

 

There's a difference between presenting a compelling set of arguments and attempting to dominate via information overload and emotional appeal. You act as though you are an objective observer, keen with unbiased facts, but clearly you are not. Your bias is evident in your quickness to anger, the swiftness with which you claim the title of oppressed. These are rhetorical tactics for people with weak arguments, and you only hurt your credibility by stooping to their use.

With respect to gamergate, I recognize that I don't know the whole story, but I also recognize that crowd-sourced journalism from people who are clearly super biased won't provide clarity.

So while you can choose to side with people based on how much money they spend on PR via charity donations, I will choose to trust information put out by organizations with fact checkers. Organizations who have some sort of credibility to protect (and I'm not speaking of the fickle, entitled credibility required by gamergaters). The New Yorker fact checks poetry. Think about that. Poetry. So you can cast aspersions about the author of the New Yorker piece, you have little credibility when it comes to disputing the facts presented in the article.

 

How many threats does any major politician or public figure recieve in a single day? Trolls, like all bullies, will actively try to figure out what they can say to inflame their target the most. The real question isn't why Anita gets death and rape threats, she gets them because she's famous, the question is why it matters so much more when she gets them than anyone else. Jack Thompson probably got some significant multiple more death threats than her but to date he's considered a laughingstock while she's treated as a martyr despite being repeatedly proven to be a liar, thief, and plagiarist.

No one in gamergate is saying that threats like that are acceptable, and the fact I need to make that disclaimer is itself part of the problem, that problem being that Anita and now Zoe use the hue and cry of victimhood and misogyny as a universal shield against all criticism even as their side (and in Zoe's case she herself) publicly engages in behavior worse than what they allege happens to them.

Even when Anita can be proven to have been flat out lying about everything from her own history to the content of games (in reality penalizing players for what she claims is encouraged), plagiarized videos, and stolen artwork not one bit of criticism is allowed. People aren't even allowed to disagree with her without being branded as the worst possible misogynist short of being a real life rapist.

Which is a problem because bluntly Anita's not engaging in critical theory, she's engaging in unfactual let alone uncritical pandering and then profiteering off if her protestations of martyrdom. She's Jack Thompson with a different shtick.

You realise that you have literally just described the exact thing that #gamergate and #notyourshield are complaining about, right? Just like if your positions were truly about feminism rather than simply knee-jerk opposing me, if you truly believed this you would be on the opposite side of where you are now.

You talk of bias but when the entire point is that journalism is corrupt, rife with payola, and pushing a false narrative to shield itself from criticism you're saying that you will only trust those very same journalists being protested. You talk of bias but ignore that the author of that article has direct financial ties to the gamergate controversy. You've repeated multiple times now the assertion that the New Yorker has "fact checkers" as if somehow that meant it was infallible, but your respect for fact checking doesn't extend to respecting that I've already empirically disproven the claims made in the article with direct firsthand evidence.

You're using the words, but your actions belie them. You talk of crediblity, facts, and bias, but just like you always have before you so refuse to even consider the possibility of anything I say being legitimate that you automatically and completely reject even reject objective, direct, first-hand proof.

If you really cared about bias you would be inherently skeptical of journalists reporting on people protesting them, let alone journalists with direct financial ties to the controversy.
If you really cared about facts you would be prizing timestamp evidence, archives/screenshots, and links to the original 4chan thread disproving the New Yorker's claims, and proving that they were deliberate attempts to mislead.
If you really cared about credibility you would have immediately spotted the Woozling going on right now where anti-gamergate articles cite each other in circles and rely on claims disproven by the above timestamps and direct firsthand evidence.

Or you could simply spend a few minutes talking to the thousands and thousands of women and minorities in the Realtime Feed and they'll be more than happy to share with you their own personal experiences being called "House Ni**ers", having their race questioned, again and again in deliberate targeted harassment, the blacklisting, doxxing, character assassination and on and on and on.

 

We are just going to have to disagree on this.

 

Jim's take on the Harassment Blame Parade.

The Wacky Harassment Blame Parade | Jimquisition Video Gallery | The Escapist

 

We can certainly disagree about her interpretations, many do, but the plagiarism and lies are empirical matters. It can be proven objectively that she plagiarized other peoples' footage and stole artwork, there are videos of her publicly admitting she has no interest in or history with gaming, and claims such as a game rewarding X misogynist behavior can be considered objectively untrue when the game has hard mechanics which actively penalize the player for taking those actions.

If she wants to argue that allowing game content which is violent against women has cultural ramifications that's completely subjective and up for free discussion. But claiming that a game rewards a behavior when it actually mechanically penalizes it, or when that behavior is flatly portrayed as evil and you're there to stop it, is imho objectively dishonest.

And to reiterate no it does not deserve any form of threat or harassment, if I were on the jury when the FBI catch those people (if they were not astroturfed) I would vote to convict. However at the same time it needs to be recognized that she is absolutely deliberately manipulating the victimhood narrative for her own gain and as a shield against all criticism...

And, in light of her performance at XOXO, as a sword now as well. I think some of the members of #notyourshield said it better than I can:

December 2013? You mean last year when Zoe lied to start a vicious raid on a community of people suffering from depression? The same pattern of behavior displayed when she lied about TFYC and blackmailed them about it? And just the other day got caught astroturfing threats against her from the racist trolls at GNAA?

The immediate collective-guilt lynchmob reaction from people like Jim is exactly the kind of fauxcial justice/hate-in-the-guise-of-justice/SJW attitude that eventually culminated in #gamergate and its sister tag #notyourshield.

 

Her own blog is hardly an acceptable source and given how you've treated my sources it's galling you'd link to it, fair use does not remotely cover the degree of plagiarism she was engaged in, and she represented herself as actually... yknow... doing research including taking over $150,000 to produce these videos.

Someone lying to such a pathological degree about their entire history doesn't remotely make you question their honesty or integrity?
Fine, even if it doesn't there's still the matter that she specifically represents herself as an expert on games and uses her false history to claim authority as well as sympathy and fundraising. It's claiming false credentials, creating a false persona to use as a shield from criticism, and... yknow... pathologically lying through her teeth about her entire history and involvement with gaming.

I don't disagree, the facts disagree. Flat out lying to claim a game rewards brutal misogyny when it in fact has hard mechanics in place punishing the player and preventing the player from mistreating female NPCs as badly as they can male NPCs isn't some minor thing, it's an enormous act of deliberately misleading people about the central point of her entire series. This isn't finding a typo in a footnote, it's finding out they fabricated an entire regression series. It calls into question the validity of the entire work.

We're talking about a person who's lied about her entire history, lied about performing any research, and has resorted to literally making things up from whole cloth. Can you really say that she's engaged in critical theory and not fabricating polemicism?

Good idea, so when will you be considering that perhaps she's wrong? Or even considering that she might be engaging in disingenuous cherry picking at best if not outright dishonest polemicism?

Also when you say things like this it really does come across like you're defining "balanced" as "agrees with me".

 

According to your standards it doesn't, since off the top of my head I can't recall a single source of mine you haven't arbitrarily dismissed as wholly and utterly invalid. Actually if we go by the standards you hold me to there are not valid sources.

Pathological, informal: compulsive; obsessive.
She lies about virtually everything, that's enough to either put her into the category of an obsessive and compulsive liar or a deliberate shyster. Your choice. Also you just proved you didn't read my posts because three posts ago I said in plain english we have videos of her publicly admitting that she doesn't care about gaming and has never been a gamer. The entire persona of her as a gamer with a history of gaming is a fabrication.

They're strippers, in a strip club, where the mission is to go after the guy in charge of a strip club, and you need to avoid them and avoid harming them. They're "decoration" in the same way that any NPC in the game other than your target is "decoration". Female NPCs are already protected from the player above and beyond male NPCs, which can be stripped to their underwear and abused freely unlike female NPCs.

So there's three things at work here:
1. Flat out lying about the game encouraging misogynistic violence (the game has a hard mechanical penalty and protects female NPCs above and beyond male NPCs)
2. Holding a double standard that female NPCs which are already protected above and beyond male NPCs are inappropriate
3. Holding a double standard that violence and abuse of male NPCs either isn't encouraged (absurd, its the point of the game) or simply isn't as important.

That last one is one of the core reasons her entire series is inherently flawed. The wholesale glorified and lionized mass murder and mutilation of male NPCs is perfectly fine. Merely having the capability of harming female NPCs even if it's actively punished by a hard game mechanic is unacceptable.

That's not equality, that's not even privilege, that's pedestalization on a level of religious worship.

Her entire history with gaming and persona as a gamer is a complete and total lie. None of it is true. We have videos of her admitting this. Therefore correct use of "entire".
She has repeatedly been proven to be flat out wrong or lying, and plagiarized videos wholesale. Either she's not doing the research or she's deliberately lying. I was being generous.
"whole cloth" is even in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary. It's perfectly reasonable to put "literally" on it to ensure the reader knows you are saying someone is (literally) telling an absolute and complete lie.
She is in fact into cosplay and there's a great deal of history there where she didn't seem to have any problem with sexualizing even non-sexualized characters, however that's irrelevant except to bolster the argument that she's just a shyster taking advantage of the misogyny moral panic for profit.

Misuse of "sorry".

So evidently when you say I need to do something it's not about you and me, but when I respond that you should take your own advice it's making it about you and me. This goes right up there with how it's only ever "getting the last word" when I'm the one posting.

I believe it does indeed have a basis given that you have consistently refused to recognize even the possibility of anything I ever say being legitimate in the slightest and you often justify this with semantic games such as defining your position as reasonable, right, or balanced and moving the goalposts as necessary to ensure that my position is never even capable of being legitimate due to said semantics games. I'm looking at this in the whole context of her, her habitual dishonesty, and her disingenuous methods. If you want to talk about refusing to see anything beyond a "handful of grievances" look to your own posts. You're following your typical pattern of feminist->never wrong->disagreement is misogyny->special victim status. It's as though you're simply not capable of recognizing the concept that a feminist might be wrong and screaming "victim" because she knows that society will immediately form a lynch mob for a crying woman.

This is where you prove that by "balanced" you really DO mean "agrees with me" and "doesn't disagree with feminists". The only thing that surprises me is how you're being so open with your prejudice, you're not even trying to hide the fact that you just flat out said in plain english feminism can't be wrong. This whole thing boils down to "I don't read things that disagree with feminism because they disagree with feminism".

And if I may engage in a little enjoyable tu quoque... feminist critiques of basically everything they disagree with boil down to cussing someone out and/or using circular logic to make their position undefeatable. And lying. Can't forget the lying.

 

I just want to point out that the last time I played a hitman game, there wasn't really any penalty for killing bystanders. The game gives you options. You can go in and just kill everyone, or you can try to be stealthy and just kill your target. It isn't entirely incorrect to say that you are punished for killing bystanders. It is more correct to say that you are rewarded less for killing bystanders. This is not "active punishment."

I haven't played the particular hitman game in question, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was identical to earlier sequels in this respect.

Pointing out that the threatening enemies are all men isn't evidence of a lack if gender bias in videogames, it is evidence of the opposite.

As a gamer, I would prefer if enemies in games like hitman were of mixed gender. The fact that they aren't undeniably speaks to gender based double standards. The people who made hitman apparently don't consider women to be credible as nameless henchpeople, but they do consider women to be credible as sex worker cannon fodder.

 

I'd prefer there to be mixed gender enemies as well, however the difference is I'm not willing to accept the mental gymnastics it takes to turn "it's ok to murder and mutilate men" into misogyny rather than misandry. There aren't female enemies in most shooters not because women aren't credible but because women aren't as disposable as men. It's the same reason there aren't children in most shooters, it's violence against an unacceptable target.

 

Except that there are plenty of games where women are killable villains and that haven't caused an outcry. Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Dragon Age are all hugely popular franchises whose games have mixed gender villains. These games exist in stark contrast to your assertion that designers aren't comfortable having female henchpeople out of a sense of women being indispensable. When designers make games where women are only helpless potential victims, it is not because they believe that the public won't accept violence against women villains. Unless the designers are woefully ignorant of what has been accomplished in some of the most popular franchises of the last decade (seems implausible).

 

Emma Watson gave a great speech at the UN.
She talks about the suicide rate among men and how important it is for that be gap to be bridged.

 

And the inevitable backlash.

4chan threatens Emma Watson with nude photo leak over UN speech on gender equality | Death and Taxes

 

People really need to stop acting like 4chan is a joint collective capable of accomplishing much of anything other than trolling.

 

I don't disagree. They are trolls, but they are also a dipstick.

 

Bloody hell.

So it turns out that the 4Chan threat against Emma Watson was a prank by a "marketing firm". I hope this company goes down for this.

Emma Watson Nude Photo Threat Was a Prank Aimed at 4Chan