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[Lime]

It's kind of shocking to see how GamerGate was in many ways, ground zero for this. As someone who strongly opposed the gators at the time, it's depressing too, to see that our efforts failed, and that we weren't able to show the average person what this group really was.

To see so many sympathetic to it... and to see it built on to help hand the white house to white supremacists...

Yeah. I feel more than a little inadequate today.

I'm not going to throw the towel in though.

The problem was compounded by the fact that

1) the unaffected don't care about it, so they are neutral bystanders who watch on as people are getting terrorized. Hence you get bullshit "both sides" and stuff, because they don't want to have any skin in the game

2) companies and media outlets refused to take a clear stand. Tons of publishers and outlets could've done something, but instead they were silent because they either were afraid of having their employees targeted, because they thought they weren't affected by the terror, because they don't want to attract controversy, and because they did not want to lose potential money from bigots.

Also, there have been similar events before gamergate - remember Dickwolves? And #yourslipisshowing where black american women on Twitter were terrorized?

 

[BTA]

The problem was compounded by the fact that

1) the unaffected don't care about it, so they are neutral bystanders who watch on as people are getting terrorized. Hence you get bullshit "both sides" and stuff, because they don't want to have any skin in the game

2) companies and media outlets refused to take a clear stand. Tons of publishers and outlets could've done something, but instead they were silent because they either were afraid of having their employees targeted, because they thought they weren't affected by the terror, because they don't want to attract controversy, and because they did not want to lose potential money from bigots.

Also, there have been similar events before gamergate - remember Dickwolves? And #yourslipisshowing where black american women on Twitter were terrorized?

Even within gaming alone we'd obviously had prior incidents. The thing that comes to mind was the harassment of the women criticizing Giant Bomb for hiring two more white dudes. I definitely recognized specific Twitter accounts involved in that (and some earlier things that year) when GG started a few months later.

None of this is new, and if not with Zoe it would have been someone else eventually. Those two points you made, though... if this was shut down then, I do think it would have set a precedent for not accepting this bullshit. But the more I think about it, I guess my thought is also that if it was shut down, we'd inherently be in a world that was less willing to put up with this to begin with? So despite what I posted yesterday, I don't think I can really just say "if only they did _" because it would require everyone to care more about how others were being hurt to begin with.

 

[L Thammy]

It's all because these Nazi/Nazi sympathizer stooges can't even think for themselves so they just parrot the exact same buzzwords and memes pumped into them from their Breitbart/Russian masters. They are straight up sheep. I also think deep down that they know this and its one of the main reasons they are so super defensive and flip their shit over the most innocuous things. They know they're pathetic wastes of flesh but they are terrified of confronting that fact and trying to improve.

I think it's more because they lack empathy and therefore are unable to care about the effect of their actions and the people they hurt - you know, the things the recipient of the apology would care about - and because their actual goal is just to avoid consequence, so there's inevitably some denial of responsibility in there.

Basically, they've never cared about being good people before, so now that they have to they usually don't even know how to imitate it.

 

[Toxi]

Zoe finally got the apology the second time he sent it (actually the first time, pretty obvious he was lying about the initial one).

And here it is:

 

[Zap Rowsdower]

I think it's more because they lack empathy and therefore are unable to care about the effect of their actions and the people they hurt - you know, the things the recipient of the apology would care about - and because their actual goal is just to avoid consequence, so there's inevitably some denial of responsibility in there.

Basically, they've never cared about being good people before, so now that they have to they usually don't even know how to imitate it.

It's a mix of both really, sociopaths that realize that they aren't the genius supermen that they thought they were.

 

[plagiarize]

The problem was compounded by the fact that

1) the unaffected don't care about it, so they are neutral bystanders who watch on as people are getting terrorized. Hence you get bullshit "both sides" and stuff, because they don't want to have any skin in the game

2) companies and media outlets refused to take a clear stand. Tons of publishers and outlets could've done something, but instead they were silent because they either were afraid of having their employees targeted, because they thought they weren't affected by the terror, because they don't want to attract controversy, and because they did not want to lose potential money from bigots.

Also, there have been similar events before gamergate - remember Dickwolves? And #yourslipisshowing where black american women on Twitter were terrorized?

Yes, I do.

Perhaps I should look at it more from the perspective of the gators having a lot of outside help and resources, where those of us trying to bring as much awareness to the real story as possible had little to no help.

Those other things don't feel like as much like a dry run of the tactics the alt right came to embrace as gamergate did. I'm probably biased though, since it's the one I was most directly involved with.

 

[SENPAIatLARGE]

The problem was compounded by the fact that

1) the unaffected don't care about it, so they are neutral bystanders who watch on as people are getting terrorized. Hence you get bullshit "both sides" and stuff, because they don't want to have any skin in the game

2) companies and media outlets refused to take a clear stand. Tons of publishers and outlets could've done something, but instead they were silent because they either were afraid of having their employees targeted, because they thought they weren't affected by the terror, because they don't want to attract controversy, and because they did not want to lose potential money from bigots.

Also, there have been similar events before gamergate - remember Dickwolves? And #yourslipisshowing where black american women on Twitter were terrorized?

Too many places want to have their cake and eat it too.

 

[Shaneus]

What's pissing me off is seeing this fucking ad each time I visit off-topic.

https://m.imgur.com/gallery/nvCkK

What the fuck, he's coming to Australia?!?

 

[Oberon]

This might be a weird thing to bring up, I remember when the Prison School anime was getting dubbed around the same time the Gamergate thing was everywhere. Basically in the english dub a girl character calls a guy a "GamerGate creep" and I thought at the time "Man, this will get really dated when this whole thing is over!" How wrong I was.

 

[Alo0oy]

I saw in a documentary that Steve Bannon's company used to be very active in World of Warcraft, they sold virtual currency, but they probably used that for recruiting too.

 

[TheOGB]

Unfortunately for everyone, nerds are easy marks.

 

[timetokill]

This might be a weird thing to bring up, I remember when the Prison School anime was getting dubbed around the same time the Gamergate thing was everywhere. Basically in the english dub a girl character calls a guy a "GamerGate creep" and I thought at the time "Man, this will get really dated when this whole thing is over!" How wrong I was.

How did that go over in the community? It seems like the anime community is like ground zero for gamergaters and nazis these days

 

[Tawpgun]

Wolfenstein will be so cathartic.

This.

I honestly had no intentions of getting Wolfenstein but after charlottesville I just wanna shoot a bunch of Nazi's.

Might pick up Far Cry also

 

[Oersted]

I saw in a documentary that Steve Bannon's company used to be very active in World of Warcraft, they sold virtual currency, but they probably used that for recruiting too.

What Bannon found was a world “populated by millions of intense young men” who may have been socially maladroit, but were “smart, focused, relatively wealthy, and highly motivated about issues that mattered to them.” While these were the same players who destroyed IGE’s business model, Bannon saw something he could use. “These guys,” said Bannon, “these rootless, white males, had monster power. It was the pre-Reddit.”

Bannon would go on to aggressively court this audience when brought on to help Andrew Breitbart build out his ultra-right-wing news-and-entertainment site. It was Bannon who hired Milo Yiannopoulos, recognizing him as someone who could whip up disaffected gamers. (Indeed, Yiannopoulos — who previously had no interest in gaming — rode Gamergate and its attendant rage to fame and page views.)

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html

 

[ElBoxyBrown]

It's kind of shocking to see how GamerGate was in many ways, ground zero for this. As someone who strongly opposed the gators at the time, it's depressing too, to see that our efforts failed, and that we weren't able to show the average person what this group really was.

To see so many sympathetic to it... and to see it built on to help hand the white house to white supremacists...

Yeah. I feel more than a little inadequate today.

I'm not going to throw the towel in though.

Most people's responses were different variations of, "I only care about video games, man" or "It's just Twitter drama. Ignore it." Go back to the Zoey Quinn thread EviLore made. It's fucking unreal.

 

[FlyinJ]

Oh yeah, wasn't it awesome that 2 months before he became a champion of gamers everywhere and a defender against bad ethics in journalism he wrote an article saying that video games are for losers and the people playing them were the lowest rung of society and should be shunned?

And every little man and boy in their basements ignored it while squealing with glee for their new "ally" against people trying to take their video games away.