David Futrelle shares with us four absurd rationalizations about the threats against Anita Sarkeesian.
One boils down to: “Hey men are fucked up because of feminism so women should THANK US for giving fucked up men a safe space where they won’t be killing women all the time. Gaming is one of those safe spaces – or was, until women started trying to shove their whorey way in. So watch out because if they don’t stop it’s going to get bloody!”
As many commenters pointed out, men actually seem to have an abundance of safe spaces.
Another said that another Marc Lépine would be…a terrible thing for men.
But the best one said it was those god damn English majors.
Because only English majors know deeply arcane and hidden things like not saying “by informing you who she will be speaking” and how to spell “separate” and that you DON’T use the possessive apostrophe in its. To everyone else that kind of thing is as occult as physics or risotto.
There are also a lot of funny comments on Futrelle’s post. Like this one:
At some point, someone “proved” that Brianna Wu sent herself the threats she received, because both of them used periods at the end of sentences.
Ha!
Better just lock up all English majors to to be on the safe side. Right guys?
And while we’re at it, we can just round up everyone wearing glasses. The Pol Pot method.
The guy went to college? How? He’s stupid.
As has been unfortunately demonstrated time and time again, being smart doesn’t make you immune to doing stupid things. In fact, being smart can actually make it worse, as:
A) You have so much self-image tied up in being ‘smart’ (see also ‘rational’) that you define whatever you do as that and ignore any comments to the contrary, and
B) You’re smart enough to figure out ways to justify whatever you did, no matter how poorly those justifications hold up under objective analysis.
See also The Nobel Disease.
This is one of those things that all humans are prone to, but some at least try to realize and work around.
We would all be safer if “these guys who are actually dangerous” (to quote “DaNiceguy”) were in prison. I wouldn’t exactly call it a refuge for the people there, but it does tend to be segregated by sex.
There’s a new Youtube video on the Utah threats by Phil Mason (the creep who goes about calling himself “Thunderf00t”). Mason predictably, dismisses the threats. Full on conspiracy stuff. Alex Jones territory.
I only lasted 5 minutes though. By that time Mason was declaring that those who publicize their death threats are “stupid”. I recall that Mason spent most of 2010 telling everyone about his own threats from a Muslim Youtube vblogger. The entire schtick is self deluded.
The comments beneath are nuts, as you can imagine. One couldn’t get further from Reason, Rationality and Logic. How did it end like this?
I also love the assumption that all English majors are automatically feminist. Hey, if it’s true, I guess we’re doing our job in the English departments.
Translation: “It couldn’t have been written by someone on MY side, because everyone on MY side is poorly educated, an idiot, or both. Waaaait…”
Don’t worry Arthur. It’s not over.
I just can’t believe we are still discussing this. Folk are still pretending to get upset about a biased game review that was never written but a terrorist threat isn’t any concern for them at all.
But chances are we will still be discussing #gamergate in a years time. After all we are still hearing new Benghazi conspiracy theories two years after the GOP was forced to gin up an Obama conspiracy theory to muddy the waters and cover up Mitt Romney’s crass opportunism of holding a press conference to attack the President while the militants were still attacking the compound.
Know how to turn an MRA type into a feminist? Change the topic to Islam.
“…as occult as physics or risotto.” Beautiful.
I don’t understand this concept that in order for a space to be “safe” for men, women have to feel unsafe in it. It seems rational that spaces which are more inclusive are actually safer for everyone. What these gamers really want is a “boy’s club” where they can spout vitriolic misogyny and never get called out for it. It’s depressing to me since it’s yet another community that I once identified with and now feel almost ashamed to be associated with (the other, of course, being atheism). I’ve been playing video games for longer than I’ve been an atheist, for over twenty years. Yet even if some cartoon supervillian was shouting, “I will end gaming forever, mwahaha!” I wouldn’t get up in arms over it. It’s not worth threatening anyone over – they’re just games. Yet that’s not even close to what people like Anita are doing. A line from one of her videos is that it’s possible to enjoy media while still criticizing it’s more pernicious aspects. That’s a totally reasonable position, and yet she still gets death threats for it. On reddit, saying anything even remotely positive about Anita is a guaranteed way to get downvoted into oblivion. In fact, once all I said was “Even if you disagree with her, let’s all agree that death threats are a bad thing” and while I didn’t get downvoted, I got replies informing me that she has made fake threats before so this one is probably fake too. I asked how it was known that she had faked threats before, and the reply was something about how the Twitter accounts sending her threats were only a minute old, so that somehow proves that she made those accounts herself. That’s some perfectly rational Spock-like logic there, right? The whole thing makes me want to ditch gaming for a new hobby, like model railroading. Though I’m sure there’s a contingent of sexists assholes there too, since it seems to be a trend.