Someone has violated the Holy Law of the online harassers: Thou Shalt Not Dox, because that might expose an asshole to the consequences of their actions. Guess who?
That rascally Rebecca Watson.
. @Bastille1790 I agree with @srhbutts 100%. People who harass have no right to keep their identities unattached from their words.
— Rebecca Watson (@rebeccawatson) January 3, 2015
So now gamergaters have decided to target her for destruction. You’d think they’d have learned by now that mobbing women on the internet a) makes them even more notorious, and b) confirms that gamergaters are a misogynistic hate group. It’s like a double strike directly against themselves, every time. Did they learn nothing from Anita and Zoe?
She’s going to be even more insufferable after this. But it’s going to be so entertaining watching gamergate continue to punch itself in the face.
jeez
RW is, like, so last week.
I mean, like, we used to blame her for, like, everything.
That’s what’s called an own goal. I would feel sorry for Rebecca Watson for getting even more harassment, wouldn’t it be that she eats these gamergaters/MRA assholes for breakfast. I wouldn’t be able to keep doing what’s she doing, that’s for sure.
Can somebody please explain to me the R Watson hate? Seriously, she strikes me as an ordinary, likeable person, in no way disagreeable. I assume her penchant for dyeing her hair funny colors is a personal affectation and not some reason to vilify her.
I just don’t get it.
Kamaka,
She is an outspoken woman advocating women’s rights. That’s sadly more than enough to attract hordes of harassing man-children.
She refuses to tell petulant, entitled manbabies that they are the center of the universe.
How dare you say we are a group dedicated to harassing women?! We’ll show you! We’ll get together and harass some women! Checkmate, ess jay double-yews.
@Kamaka: IIRC the feminist rift in the atheosphere was pretty much triggered by RW’s youtube post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKHwduG1Frk which would later be called Elevatorgate.
No surprise that she’s a prime target for harassers.
She said at a convention where misogynist fuckwit proposed sex to here in an elevator at 4:00 am, “guys, don’t do that”, impugning their imaginary ability to hit on any woman any where at any time.
And she was right. The fuckwit should have kept quit in a civilized, non-misogynist world.
Excuse my naivity. She’s driving them wild with her not very controversial style? She strikes me as a nicey-nice, lets go have a beer and play pinball kind of person.
This is all hard to believe.
@Kamaka
She expressed her distaste of sexual harassment at atheist/secular conferences and refused to take crap from Richard Dawkins with the appropriate demure reverence he and his fanboys demand.
Why “insufferable”, is that a joke?
I’ve always found her charming, funny and often insightful. She’s highly sufferable.
@Kamaka
It isn’t her style. It’s the speaking out at all.
NoR
No way, it’s all Elevatorgate? That’s it? A waterfall of hatred for years over THAT?
Yikes. Back to lurking.
Also, Wowbagger #5 nailed it since then.
Please post. I suspect we are ready, and need all the help we can get. *sharpens titantium fang*
OK, Ibis3, she crossed Master Dawkins? If that is so, I now understand.
My old friend NoR, perhaps I shall.
For those not following events on Twitter today, nobody has been doxxed. Gamer gaters are losing their shit right now over links to Gamer Gate FB groups. So… yea…
#13 Kamaka: yes, believe it or not, she sill gets a lot of hate mail about elevatorgate. And not just from Gamers, but from general MRAs, and from skeptics on the other side of the feminist debate.
Yeah, I’m confused about GG claiming they have been doxxed? I hadn’t seen anything like that. I know that the assholes did doxx srhbutts and pixelgoth on twitter. Assholes that they are.
Kamaka, even Dawkins is still throwing in sneering references to Elevatorgate, iirc. Don’t underestimate his and his fanboys’ ability to hold a grudge against any woman who dares fail to adore men.
Dawkins vs Watson
It rather hurts that the scientist who enlightened me to the correct way of perceiving the nature of existence is such a small minded~entitled twit.
@Kamaka I wouldn’t call Dawkins small-minded, but he definitely is proof that 1) compartmentalization affects everyone and 2) religion is NOT the root of all evils.
…So the problem is that there are FB gamergate groups that left their group public, and someone looked up “gamergate” on FB groups and found them, and some of those people had their RL names attached to themselves being in the gamergate FB group, and they’re claiming that’s doxxing? Hahahahahahaha NO.
I was there for the original “Dear Muslima” post, F.O. and I perceived that essay as very small minded indeed.
I did not believe “Dear Muslima” was written by Dawkins, though I was there participating in the thread where it showed up. Jadehawk had to beat me with a dead carp to help me accept the reality that it was indeed a post by Dawkins.
RW’s crime? She turned up to talk about atheism and skepticism , but she spoke while being in possession of a vagina
instead of a penis.
@Kamaka: yeah, I still can’t wrap my head around how such a supporter of rational thought could come up with such a blatant rational fallacy.
Aquired narcissistic syndrome.
Kamaka @13:
Yes, and no. From what I can gather, she’s a lot like the people harassing her: freewheeling and unabashed, someone who’ll never take shit from anyone and is happy to dish it back. She was a hard-core skeptic, one of the tribe, and while she was concerned with getting women more involved (hence SkepChick), Watson’s methods started off very much in line with the bro culture that dominated the community (hence Skep”Chick”).
Somewhere along the way, though, Watson caught a case of the feminisms. Maybe this was due to conversations with her fellow “chicks,” or maybe due to a mix of objectification, tokenism, and blatant sexism directed her way that made her realize the skeptic community had a problem. Not many people remember the circumcision controversy, for instance, but it’s not hard to see the gears turning:
Watson began arguing within the tight-knit skeptic community over sexism, and her no-bullshit attitude was now burning bridges and creating grudges. She became a traitor, a turncoat who was inviting the Feminist Menace into the skeptic community after earning a reputation as “another one of the guys.”
Elevatorgate was a match to that smoldering pile of tinder, and the resulting flare was visible even by people who didn’t know the backstory. It made a lot of people aware of the sexism problem, causing them to speak out about it and propose changes; but it also caused a lot of people to realize their community could be changed, and that if they didn’t become activists there was a real chance the skeptic movement would be overwhelmed by feminist woo. Both sides fed into one another, causing a positive feedback loop.
And thus, the current situation.
I first saw the “don’t do that” video months after the shitstorm started. It was a couple more weeks before I realized there wasn’t another, harsher video to which the shitstorm would have been closer to a proportionate response, and that was actually it.
Kamaka @13:
Yes, and no. The spam filter gods are not on my side, at the moment, so click here for the long version.
Kamaka: the funny thing is, Rebecca does, most of the time, appear to be a “let’s have a beer and play ping-pong” kind of woman. I think it’s only because of the unprecedented and unrelenting hate campaign based on “guys, don’t do that” (which quickly widened its focus from her and onto any woman online who doesn’t automatically sign on to some intrinsic male behavioural carte-blanche) that she decided to be far more vocal regarding feminism and SJ.
So, basically, the manchild hate-machine created their own nemesis (which I guess is what you do when you’re part of a privileged majority and notice somebody questioning your privilege; Christian fundies paint themselves as persecuted in much the same way) – and they’ve never let her forget it.
Fervent opposition seems to be the only actual shred of a moral standard that the Gamergaters actually have. Except for the fact that they seem to make more noise about it when abusers are outed than when people who are being harassed are doxxed as part of the harassment process….
anteprepro:
Well, it’s a matter of whether it affects them or not. When the people being harassed have their personal information distributed, the harassers aren’t affected (it actually makes it easier and more intimidating when harassing). And of course the ones distributing the information are individuals in no provable way associated with their group, so sure it’s bad but well, those victims shoulda just kept their mouths shut.
But when somebody wants to expose the harassers, well, that puts them in danger of other people–maybe people they know–finding out they are reprehensible people. If there’s a risk people might find out how horrible they are… they might have to censor themselves! That is just unacceptable.
Those three words “don’t do that” have created all this shitstorm?
“Don’t do that” – “that” being “hit on me cold, after not even a cursory attempt to engage me in conversation, alone at 4am in an elevator, however nicely, just after I’ve said I’m retiring for the night, after I’ve stated publicly that I do not like being hit on; by the way I have a freakin boyfriend” – was immediately strung out into “Rebecca is a feminazi who thinks anyone who tries an innocent come-on is a rapist” and then, amazingly, escalated from there.
Somehow, being advised not to try cold come-ons on women in small enclosed spaces an hour or two from dawn was the most heinous crime against manity (spelling intentional) imaginable. The shitstorm was already there, in hindsight; “don’t do that” was just the catalyst that brought it out into the open. Suddenly, everyone on FtB and/or who expressed support for Watson’s frankly very mild rebuke (it was calmly related and took up perhaps a minute of the video) was a man-hater or a mangina and former atheist/skeptic allies scrambled to demonise Watson and hurl abuse at anyone next to her. The Pit, AFAICT, was set up solely so people had a spot to share feminist slurs without getting banned by bloggers who didn’t take kindly to such bullshit.
And now we have Deep Rifts between atheists who give a shit how women (and POC and LGBT people) are treated and atheists who apparently don’t. Which is fine by me; I’d like as big a rift as possible between me and people who think social justice is some kind of jackbooted political correctness gone mad.
Kamaka: Basically. Or rather, it was a catalyst for the shitstorm in the atheist blogosphere.
Forgive my vague, possibly poor summary of things as I understand them:
Feminist and social justice issues have been becoming a larger issue across the internet around the same time in many of the nerdier and/or liberal-er segments. The debate in the atheist segment, especially as it pertains to Skepchick and FTB, went from the Elevatorgate manufactroversy to debates over skeptic conference harassment policies to debates about “outing” people who have been accused of rape. In addition to just basically arguments about feminism in general. Though Rebecca Watson has been hated as a Feminist Boogeyman ever since, things have moved on from Elevatorgate, technically, though some assholes on that side still do bring it up.
Gamergate is relevant to these issues in the atheist interwebs, but arose due to an entirely different, yet similar, debate in the gaming community: Gaming is not an exclusively male hobby now but women are still being excluded because “gaming” is still treated as a boy’s club, and games are still not representing women in a half-way decent fashion and are blatantly disrespecting women in general in addition to snubbing them as customers and as fellow gamers. The parallel to Rebecca Watson in gaming would be Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist who dared to make a video series about examples of sexist tropes in video games. Men across the internet whined and shrieked about how unfair and inaccurate and out of context and under-researched it all was, and accused her of not being a Troo Gamer, and grumbled and moaned and gnashed teeth about her misusing money from Kickstarter. Even non-gamergaters just take it as common wisdom that Anita is some sort of radical feminist extremist and bleat out how they “don’t agree with her” at the slightest provocation, because the gaming community is just filled with thoughtless, apathetic little “moderates”.
It is hard to say, really, what “starts” these shitstorms. The “start” always seems to just be an excuse. Elevatorgate was privileged assholes freaking out about not being to pick up chicks when they heard “Guys don’t do that”. Gamergate was privileged assholes freaking out about Ethics in Game Journalism when they heard a fradulent account of a woman having sex to get positive game reviews. Both were just excuses for sexists to defend sexism, and both were just springboards to get those types of assholes flying off to go harass women.
Thunderf00l is a good case study. He is an example of the link that bridges Gamergate to the atheism debates, and of just how little it takes to make these kinds of assholes go absolutely apeshit:
Elevatorgate led to discussion of instituting sexual harassment policies at conferences. To which ol’ thunder absolutely lost his shit. He ranted incoherently about how outrageous the idea was, adamantly defending his RIGHT to nibble on a woman’s leg without her expressly saying out loud that he his permission to do so. He lashed out at PZ and FTB and lost his writing slot here, and became the Slymepit Hero in the process.
Fast forward, and he begins posting ranting video diatribes about Anita Sarkeesian’s videos. He was absolutely outraged, for instance, that Anita was so dishonest and incompetent as to not note that in Hitman, even though you can totally kill some strippers, you lose points for doing so. Of course, his rage at her imagined dishonesty somehow prevented him from noting that one minute later she mentions games that penalize killing women in this fashion and explains that she finds it petty and not an adequate justification for having blatant sexualized violence as part of the game, and doesn’t change the fact that those strippers are just sexualized props.
So yes. “Get clear permission before you nibble on someone’s legs” and “Many video games have sexist portrayals of women” were enough to break the Foot of Thunder. Which you would think would be ridiculous and cartoonish enough that even the most casual of observers would chuckle or at least back away slowly. And yet he has supporters.
Don’t forget that the Prophet Leigh spread forth the message that all gamers are dead. Which in no uncertain terms means that anybody living who considers herself or himself a gamer is wrong. They did not die in the Great Gaming Gapture, therefore are False Gamers of the same unholy ilk as the Defiler, Sarkeesian. For that blasphemous insult she must pay. PAY!! As do all SJWs who claim the Gamer Gates of Heaven are closed.
(I’m a bit burned out over gamergate… sorry)
FYI, a timeline and archive of Elevatorgate is referenced here, for anyone who wants all the details:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2012/07/12/digital-archaeology-of-elevatorgate-a-timeline/
@speed0spank #19
Here’s the tweet they’re up in arms about:
https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl/status/551545777168719872
Radioactive Elephant @39
It also demonstrates his incredible dishonesty, as I doubt that someone who knows that you lose points for taking down civilians in Hitman somehow doesn’t know that those points can be completely recovered by hiding the body.
So, if you take down those strippers, that’s technically naughty and you will be chastised for it. But, if you promptly stuff them into boxes, then all is forgiven.
And I still get asked why I never finished that game.
Geez, the spam trap gods really are fickle! I’d better gather more male tears and do a ritualistic circumcision…
@38 anteprepro, thanks for covering the whole “harassment policy at conferences” angle. Thunderfap’s incandescent outrage at atheist conferences adopting conference codes of conduct that are nigh-ubiquitous among other groups and industries, and his disingenuous depiction of them as akin to obtaining written permission in triplicate to have a little flirt with someone, will live in infamy. When he joined FtB I was still a fan of his and I recall commenting to the effect that he was kinda missing the point and making a huge deal out of nothing (I held back my opinion of his shitty adolescent writing). Of course, since then I’ve realised that missing the fucking point and making a big fucking fuss is his entire M.O.
@42, some bastard:
I didn’t finish the first Hitman out of sheer fucking boredom. Maybe they threw in the optional stripper-killing in an attempt to “get edgy” and attract new players.
For someone who had these two interests simultaneously but never associated them (atheism and gaming) It’s been a little surreal to watch both of these communities freak out over the most basic feminism. It’s sad though too, cause it’s easy to project and imagine that you’re rational (or sensible or any quality you want to insert), therefore others who share your interests will be too when it comes to the issues that you identify as interesting and important to you.
Then you discover that the communities you freely associate with can be just as much of a mixed bag as the ones you grew up in and you still have sorting out to do. I’m repeating myself (from another random comment on FtB) but mostly just felt that surreal feeling looking back on all this and a desire to express it again.
It’s been good to see big names in both areas also speak up against harassment and in favor of involving more women and minorities, but, especially in the gaming example, it needs to be a lot stronger I think. The most infuriating aspect right now is that too many big names are still too neutral or unwilling to make stronger statements. On the other hand I’ve found a lot of people to respect and admire among those who do speak up very clearly.
The funniest thing is that these people don’t know that what they’re calling “doxxing” is Facebooks BUSINESS MODEL.
Facebook exists to catalog your interests, likes, relatives, schools, jobs, friends, friends-friends, friends-friends-friends, website visits, name, age. gender, pet preference, address, location, phone number, shopping habits, facial structure, and everything else – and then sell it.
If they are in these groups, then their employers ALREADY KNOW, if they are at all interested in that knowledge in the first place.
It’s like complaining that someone told Time-Warner that you have cable and subscribe to sports illustrated.
Wait, Rebecca is a video games journalist now?
Because it’s all about Ethics in Games Journalism, right?
Reminds me of a joke I read on twitter this week:
A GamerGater, a Nazi and a Paedophile walk into a bar. Says the GamerGater: “Don’t worry, I’m not with them, I just pay for their drinks.”
+++
anteprepro
I’d rather see TF as another guy whose atheist misogyny ship was losing its rats and who therefore jumped onto the train (remember he makes several K from his videos. GG’s are a huge market). Because I don’t remember him talking about videogames before…
Giliell #47:
He was making videos about Anita Sarkeesian’s videos long before Gamergate. So I think he liked the attention he got from the atheist misogyny and decided to branch out towards video game misogyny. But he’s been fighting feminists trying to “impose our ideals on video games” for a while. It’s interesting how much overlap there is really. It was jarring to see tangents about the issues in the atheist community during Gamergate conversations in a video game forum I frequent.
Radioactive Elephant
YouR’e right in that, but I think that basically the people who are harassing Anita are GamerGate, they just didn’t have a name. Hating on Anita became hugely popular and he jumped the bandwagon.
Jafafa Hots #46:
QFT
I’ve never understood why Facebook is so popular. The first time I heard of it, I set up an account, poked around for a few minutes, very quickly came to the conclusion that it used the idea of making ‘friends’ online to gather details about you and your interests and using them to make money, and decided I didn’t want to be a part of that. As such, the number of times I have logged into my Facebook account is precisely one.
Guys, can we all get into the habit of calling Thunderface by his real name of Phil Mason. The nom de plume is giving him a barrier between the person he is and the YouTube personality he puts forward.
I want the IRL him to be as tied to his words as possible.
Thanks All, for your thoughtful responses to my queries. I don’t get it at all, but I get it.
Now, back to lurking.
A GamerGater, a Nazi and a Paedophile walk into a bar. Says the GamerGater: “Don’t worry, I’m not with them, I just pay for their drinks.”
I laughed out loud; that was great!!
There are also, of course, huge differences between what GGs and MRAs expect from doxxing and what women, feminists and assorted minorities expect from doxxing:
They fear consequences of their actions.
Their probem is that their GF/wife might take a dim view on them fantasizing about raping and murdering women. They fear that their boss might fire them for finding out that they made threats on company time.
Their problem is not that now a bunch of people that possibly contain a “lone wolf superhero in their own mind” know their name and address and they have to leave their home to get to a safe place.
Of course, the fault is NEVER with them and their actions, nor is their boss an asshole who thinks they can control what their employees think*. the fault lies with the person who complains.
*Mind you, there are legitimate issues with superiors punishing employees for things they do in private. But making graphic threats are on a different page and so is maliciously diagnosing sbdy with an STI over teh internet.
Hj Hornbeck @#29, you seem to have a weird version of events.
As someone who has been reading Skepchick since 2007 … no. This is not actually true.
Uh, no. She’s always been a feminist, and Skepchick was always a feminist site/blog.
That seems a very edited version of events. Watson HAS ALWAYS spoken out against sexism. She wasn’t “arguing within” — she was merely speaking out against sexism.
Your entire timeline is weirdly skewed and makes Watson seem like someone she is not.
RW was one of the first women to gain a sufficient following to have crossed the Koolaid point. Link is to a well-known essay that defines that “point” and details all the techniques and tropes used against RW and any other woman fortunate enough to gain an audience on the internet.
Now — can somebody explain to me what the two tweets in the OP are supposed to represent? They look innocuous to me, how do they constitute “doxxing” (outing of the anonymous)?
Nothing was doxxed in the tweets. But RW did say she had no problem doxxing harassers in the second. She didn’t state explicitly she would, but the option is there.
marilove @55:
I’m not that surprised, it was re-constructed from tales of her early years in the skeptic movement told to me by other people, not all of them friendly to her.
OK, maybe it’s less that Watson “got” feminism than her feminism evolved over the years.
It’s easy to forget SkepChick started as a pin-up calendar, but that’s actually a critical point.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- wrote:
Sadly, this joke often works like this, too, due to kook magnetism: “A GamerGater, a Nazi and a Paedophile walk into a bar. He orders a drink.”
The main thing Elevatorgate proved was that Rebecca Watson was right. Not so strangely the MRA people and others who attacked her just don’t get this.
Hj Hornbeck, I suggest you don’t relay third-hand information to others to try to explain a situation you clearly don’t understand. You also don’t understand the calendar. I’ve no desire to do any searching to find anything else about that, but … yeah, you have a shoddy view about Skepchick and Rebecca in general. It’s almost like your view of her is coming from people who dislike her.
Just … if you don’t fully understand a situation yourself, don’t try to explain it as if you do. SEVERAL people have shared a much clearer timeline of what happened, that’s far more detailed and far more accurate than your admitted third-hand, rumor-mill information. You’re not helping.
(That said, she HAS evolved, but that doesn’t really mean much. She wasn’t on the radar until she spoke out against sexism, although she has been a long-time feminist. Your information is still weird and paints a weird picture about the situation and Rebecca in general and I don’t much like it.)
Why? Is a bunch of people creating a pin-up calendar using pictures of themselves and other volunteers supposed to be anti-feminist, or something?
Skepchick has always (to my knowledge) been quite sex positive. Sex positivity and feminism are not at odds.
. They call it .
David Marjanović @ 64
And all this time I thought “feminist hair” had something to do with not shaving.
marilove @61:
Fair enough. While I had no idea you started hanging around SkepChick in 2007, I’ve seen you as a regular over there for years. You know your stuff.
Gretchen @63:
Oh no no no no, at least not intentionally. I’m taking Watson’s history straight-up: she and other women on the JREF forum spotted the idea for a pin-up calendar and decided to turn it into a bit of ironic sexism. Skeptics are totally post-sexism, they’re waaay too smart to buy into the sexist crap in most of society. So why not mock the sexism found elsewhere by parodying it, with a diverse and smart set of women in sexy pin-ups? It fit perfectly with her thinking at the time:
Problem is, ironic sexism is still sexism. It’s harmless if you’re in on the joke, but if you’re not then it just winds up reinforcing the sexist views that people hold. That’s precisely what happened, and it really came back to bite Watson.
At my least charitable, I’d say Watson was all for feminism and equality, and was even actively trying to encourage it within the skeptic community, but she hadn’t done her homework and thought things through. In support of marilove, she does display some knowledge of feminist matters (“I think we should all sit down and talk about sex, exploitation of women, and skepticism.”), but it’s tough to call even that least charitable view “anti-feminist.” “Naive” is a better way to put it, and ignorance only becomes a crime if repeated.
But I didn’t mean the calendars were critical to show an anti-feminist slant, though. They’re critical as setup for what was to come: they helped make Watson a big name in the skeptic movement, kicked off her skeptic scholarships for women, gave her money to use as leverage to combat sexism, and gave her connections to the organizers of the biggest, bro-iest convention in all of skepticism. Those calendars made her dangerous to the anti-feminist part of skepticism, and worst of all they helped make her dangerous.
That stung. And it helps explain the animosity she faced in the JREF forums, too, well before any elevators got involved.
That isn’t the Holy Law. The Law is,
Thank you Ryan Cunningham. I actually had heard about that but just never saw the tweet in question.
I’m so irritated by GG and wish it’d blow over already. Its really similar to the split in atheism to me. You have all these people suddenly planting their flag firmly in the “total piece of shit” territory. Then you have people who try and play moderate but end up mostly giving lip service to the assholes while throwing the heavy criticism at the evil SJW menace. People like Total Biscuit (a game reviewer on youtube) and David Pakman (has a progressive politics show) have decided to play asshole moderate in this whole thing and I’m not fucking buying it. If you can look at a page where most the GGers hang out (KotakuinAction on reddit) and see maybe one story about what they think “ethics” entails, and the rest about harassment and bullshit, and think that is something you gotta be a part of – you do not deserve my attention or my money. You can fuck right off.
Re: “Feminist hair.” Apparently it’s a “thing” in certain internet misogyny circles to consider dyed hair a sign of evil. Like, a few months ago the Gaters even made neo-Nazi-inspired propaganda about Zoe Quinn’s hair and tried to spread it on Tumblr as part of a campaign to win themselves sympathy amongst the unwitting SJW crowds. (No, really.)
Jafafa Hots @46
Fucking hell, yeah. That’s why I closed my account with them about a week or two after opening it. They emailed my boss, who uses NO social media, and who I’d never mentioned (or my workplace, or any personal details) when setting the damned account up. Totally made my skin crawl that they were practically stalking us.
Didn’t Total Biscuit go full GG recently?
Yeah, he did. He seems to be kind of in the process of realizing that GG is a bunch of misogynist assholes who don’t know what ethics are. I have a feeling he will soon disavow GG and say it has been taken over by trolls or something, as if it hasn’t been that way since the start.
If only there were somewhere one could place bets on such matters.
Total Biscuit is a figure who likes to sound rational and even-handed and thinks he’s better than most at it. As such he put himself squarely in the “there are two sides to this” camp and dug his heels in when people pointed out the two sides aren’t the same. I get the impression he’s very much a hyper-skeptic type, he’s certainly pompous and willing to tell everyone else how things actually are rather than listen to people’s experience. Part of that (reportedly) probably comes from his perception that he’s just as (if not more) oppressed as women and other minorities because he’s British.
He also went through a fight with cancer recently which seemed to mellow him out. However it supposedly gave some people some bad ideas of how to attack him, contributing to his perception that both sides of the gamergate issue are the same.
Where on earth* are you an oppressed minority for being fucking British? That’s probably the most prestigious nationality one can have, a Teflon one where all the atrocities of past, present and future just wash off and leave you with the default “educated person who seriously knows culture”.
*apart from the inside of the person’s head, obviously
Ah but Giliell, we’re sooooooo oppressed ’cause we used to have an empire on wot the sun never set an’ all that, and now we don’t got one any more (except for a paltry few Brits who are multi-millionaires) and besides I don’t understand wot they are talking about in the shop down the road* they is all furrin’ an’ talking in furrin’ an’ my locality is no longer 99% white!!!!!!!! Woe, woe is us the map is not all covered in pink bits any more.
Do many Dutch and Portuguese and Spanish people sing this song, I wonder? I’m sure some do, I just wonder how common it is.
* (Turkish, as it ‘appens)
opposablethumbs #75:
Well, if we allow ‘overseas territories’ for ‘Empire’…
apologies for OT digression: Daz, do you just keep track of individual “What If”s that you particularly want to be able to find again, or is there any way of searching them? (I remember there’s an archive for the titles of the regular strip, but there isn’t one for the What Ifs???)
Nice one, btw! :-)
opposablethumbs
I remembered the article, so just googled ‘xkcd what if sun set british empire’ and found it straight-off. I’d be stuck for a way to find more-vaguely recollected topics on there.
And you’re welcome.
I find it sadly hilarious that there are varieties of misogyny. I wonder if good ol’ fashioned religion misogynists consider video game misogyny a “fad misogyny”:
“Pshaw! Darn New Age Misogynists and their videogames! None of this yootoob and forechin for me! When I was a young’un you had to drive to church t’other side of the county in the snow on a Sunday ta get yer misogyny…AND THAT’S THE WAY WE LIKED IT!!!”
opposablethumbs
It’s always telling when you hear them voicing fears of one day being in the minority while at the same time insisting that everybody s really equal right now.
*Russian
You must be thinking about a different country to the UK. Nobody here is under the illusion that this is an egalitarian society.
procrastinatorordinaire: Whatever you say.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1083966/Feminist-myths-making-equality-laws-unfair-men.html
Listening to leading Tories talking, they seem to be under the impression that everyone’s a multimillionaire.
Then again, I shouldn’t be saying much, the government here is if anything worse.
opposablethumbs and Giliell:
Actually, it’s a Polish store with Lithuanian ownership and Russian/Polish/Ukrainian/Lithuanian-speaking personnel of three or four nationalities. But then this one I’m thinking of is on Moore St. here in Dublin and you can get everything on Moore St. :^)
I could totally take RW in a game of ping pong.
Loser buys the beer.
Wait, what was this about again?
IIRC, RW made of point of not describing the guy in the elevator with such strong words. Whereas, some of the people who followed up on that and overreacted – those are the misogynist fuckwits.
But Elevator Guy was a misogynist fuckwit to even make the proposal in the first place, even if RW didn’t use the term. You know that. What is your problem?
@87
If I’m reading @86 correctly the problem they have is that despite RW putting it in the politest possible terms the misogynist fuckwits overreacted anyway, thus further emphasizing their misogynist fuckwittery.
Whereas I read where the misogyny of elevator guy was diminished/dismissed for some reason, compared to the later responders. There is no difference.
@ 55 marilove
You are wrong, and Hj Hornbeck’s speculation (@29) was essentially correct. You can read an account in Rebecca’s own words here:
I still don’t understand how “misogynistic fuckwit” is accurate to describe the guy in the elevator. Clueless and inconsiderate are more reasonable. I also thought this was RW’s clear position. I missed a memo.
EL @86: you’re right about RW’s position. She never accused the elevator-guy of anything other than ill-timed and inappropriate behavior that she found creepy (for good reason). All she said was “guys, don’t do that,” as in, don’t try to chat up women you don’t already know in hotel elevators at 4am because that’s not a place where a woman would feel comfortable talking to guys she knows nothing about.