Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

[Cygnia]

 

#GamerGate is an attack on ethical journalism

 

[Cygnia]

http://www.shakesville.com/2014/10/the-misogyny-tax.html

[Cygnia]

 

The Threats Against Anita Sarkeesian Expose The Darkest Aspects Of Online Misogyny

 

[death tribble]

Another Woman In Gaming Flees Home Following Death Threats

This has made the national news over here.

[Sociotard]

Honestly, I'd like a little reciprocity. Just publicize the perps name, address, and phone. Just that. Just let them sit there and feel a little more naked.

[Cancer]

Stay strong, people.

 

Internet hate has fallen on others, too, though not (in the cases cited immediately below) due to misogyny; these links report on death threats, etc., made to climate scientists.

 

one

several more

more recent, mostly comments

in Australia

in the UK

longer perspective, from AIP; death threats noted in 1996

 

Most of these are from incidents that happened in 2010-2012, which is when I first heard about the phenomenon. More sickening is that in the US certainly, and apparently in Australia, there are elected officials who have used their office to encourage this electronic lynch-mob behavior.

 

When you know there are such hate campaigns that are carried out at the behest of recognized, organized and well-funded political power blocs, that means that those engaging in such campaigns are not going to be declared criminals and hunted down any time soon.

[BoneDaddy]

Eliza to the rescue! http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2014/10/ultimate-weapon-against-gamergate-time-wasters-1960s-chat-bot-wastes-their-time

 

Seriously, the girl is 50 now, and she has a lot of fight in her.

[Cygnia]

 

Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage

 

[Zeropoint]

Disco's not dead! Disco is life!

[Cancer]

Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage

 

I am not sure I have seen so much clueless smug self-congratulatory condescension directed at an older generation, and a willful gross disregard of relevant material circumstances, since some of the flamboyant excesses of the late 1960s.

 

It was a drunken riot in a ball park in Chicago. Bill Veeck, owner of the White Sox, could have declared you were going to burn, oh, Barbie dolls, or Dallas Cowboy t-shirts, or copies of Billy Budd Foretopman, or California state flags, or maps of Helgoland, and it would not have mattered. Cheap admission given to people who brought the designated artifact ... chosen for marketing purposes to attract what Bill Veeck thought would be a maximum number of butts in the seats ... explicitly to destroy said artifacts. And things kinda got out of hand, what a surprise. Kinda the same thing happened as in the public book-burnings in the 1930s, with the exception that the latter were actually intended to spur violence against a chosen target.

 

A few years earlier also in the 1970s though in Cleveland rather than Chicago, there had been another predictably stupid promotion idea -- Ten Cent Beer Night -- and which became, sure enough, another drunken riot in a ball park. And there, too, the riot was composed mostly of young white men. Why is that? Could it possibly because traditionally young white men just happen to like the idea of gratuitous random minor violence, when they can get away with it? And cheap beer is a pretty clear invitation to get loaded and get rowdy in public, yes?

 

In neither riot were there deaths, and no evidence of homicidal intent, just stupid rowdies going too far.

 

Reading a premeditated tapping of a groundswell racial backlash into Disco Demo Night is taking Bill Veeck to be a master social-political manipulator of mainstream American culture ... and if you you sincerely believe that, or expect others to because you say so, then don't go to New York; you'll end up buying a nice bridge there.

 

If you want to argue that Veeck's choice of disco records came at least partially from racist attitudes, I'd be willing to buy that, though Veeck was not the kind of ax-grinding deep thinker to have framed his strictly-for-profit promotional event to launch a white supremacist movement. If you want to argue that it was young white men dominating the rioters because of the whole sex-race privilege package, I'll buy that too. But the argument framed by the author just drips of a self-congratulatory sneer by someone clueless enough to read deep meaning into a dime novel.

[Cygnia]

NSFW

 

 

 

[Cygnia]

 

Gamergate Is Running Out of Heroes

 

[Cygnia]

 

Anita Sarkeesian on GamerGate: 'We Have a Problem and We're Going to Fix This'

 

[Cancer]

That is an unfortunate choice of words in the title, given the meaning of the word "fix" to be "emasculate" in the context of what one does to domestic animals. It would be difficult to convince me that wasn't premeditated and intentional.

[Cygnia]

Of course, one could argue that you're intentionally trying to apply that meaning to it.

[Ranxerox]

Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage

 

 

 

 

But let’s be honest: It’s usually guys doing it. Our various “culture wars” tend to boil down to one specific culture war, the one about men wanting to feel like Real Men and lashing out at the women who won’t let them. Whenever men feel like masculinity is under attack, men get dangerous. Because that’s exactly what masculinity teaches you to do, what masculinity is about. Defending yourself with disproportionate force against any loss of power? That’s what masculinity is.

 

After reading that paragraph I couldn't take anything this blogger said as having value.  How is this different from saying that hating is men is what feminism is, or saying that Islam is terrorism?

[Cancer]

Of course, one could argue that you're intentionally trying to apply that meaning to it.

I'll concede that, given the shallowness of expression in the medium. It was my reaction, and it was instantaneous, and I tend to believe intent operates more slowly than that. "Did you really mean to say that?" with accompanying jawdrop is probably the briefest expression of that initial reaction.

[Lucius]

 

I just get "Page cannot be displayed." So there's definitely a problem but I've no idea how to fix it.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary has a Y chromosome and a Y-not? chromosome.

[Cygnia]

 

The Bad Apples Of #GamerGate

 

[Cygnia]

It has always been a spin.

 

From the very first, the movement that became #GamerGate was never about "ethics".

[Cygnia]

When the #GamerGate mob targeted Anil Dash for no reason

 

1. Anil Dash is a prolific blogger and entrepreneur who has been around since the very beginnings of the internet. Currently, besides managing the businesses he helped co-found, he is also a contributor to Wired and to Medium's own publication The Message. Anil is well-known for championing social justice causes and left-leaning viewpoints on current events.

    
2. One thing Anil is not, has never been, and as far as I know, has never claimed to be, is a journalist.

    
3. Let alone a games journalist.

[Cygnia]

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/20/vultures-circle-gamergate.html

[Markdoc]

It has always been a spin.

 

From the very first, the movement that became #GamerGate was never about "ethics".

 

 

I have to admit that I've been paying only peripheral attention to this whole saga, but the argument that sending people hate mail (often of a pretty vile sort) was motivated by concern over ethics is so laughably stupid and self-serving that I cannot believe that anyone even considered taking it seriously.

 

cheers, Mark

[Cygnia]

Gamergate Goons Can Scream All They Want, But They Can’t Stop Progress

 

 

Games aren’t very fun these days.

 

As anyone paying even tangential attention to videogames likely knows, the medium is in the throes of a misogynist backlash so virulent it often could be described as terrorism. In the past nine weeks, three female games professionals—Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Zoe Quinn—have been driven from their homes by death threats. Sarkeesian, a critic who received a bomb threat when she accepted an award at the Game Developer’s Conference earlier this year, recently became the target of a terror threat promising “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if she gave a scheduled lecture at Utah State University.

 

Harassment is a sadly commonplace reality for women on the internet in almost any field—yet the ongoing death threats, rape threats, and harassment campaigns directed at women in games has eclipsed other media. But why has the emergence of new female voices in gaming provoked such a disproportionately violent reaction?

[Cygnia]

 

The Gamification of Terror: Manufacturing GamerGate’s Sphere of Delusion