Problem Machine

Yeah i already want to replay it too. Probably will tomorrow.

I super disagree!

Ah. Nevertheless, grateful for the opportunity to clarify

Yeah that particular phrasing was a bit glib So basically fuck junior high English classes.

Just played. Wow. Intense.

Well, still sad that Danielle's leaving, but I have high hopes for new pod. Two hosts sounds a bit sparse though, so here's hoping for either plenty of guests or a third to round out the team at some point.

I still like Arthur Chu even if he has some learning to do. I do think that in their haste to poke holes in the specifics of what he's saying a lot of people are disregarding why he's saying it, being that certainly giving websites carte blanche to host any material with no responsibility isn't a valid solution -- something we readily acknowledge when it comes to child pornography, but very little else. To my sensibilities website legal responsibilities should more or less line up with those of the owner of a building. By default, they're not responsible for what happens there: Once they've been notified that their property is being used for illegal purposes, it's then their responsibility to work with law enforcement to make that no longer be the case, and if they don't they have some degree of culpability for any continued illegal activity. If a site is being habitually used as a locus of illegal activity, it's then their job to implement systemic changes to prevent that from happening in the future, and if they don't they are again culpable.. So, you know, while I understand that getting rid of a foundational law is probably not a good solution, it's at least a bad solution, and thereby a better starting point to the conversation than no solution at all.

Second track for this month, since I missed last month. I think this one's really special. The Drift of the Eyes

Except most of what he does are game reviews and podcasts, and he had tons of subscribers before he ever picked this fight. It's entirely likely that he benefits from these arguments in terms of pandering to a fan base, but a) I don't think that's why he gets into them and it seems unsupportable to say that he relies on confrontations like this for his career.

Much as I think the guy is a dipstick, I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that TB isn't a success in his field. So in his case he just picks fights with people more talented

Good job, Twitter.

Except at this point there are people whose entire online presence is more or less dedicated to being opposed to GG. The term finds new life as it fits the phenomenon of a specific countermovement which also has a number of similar facets to gamergate in terms of tactics (ie sealioning). The above post gives the impression of not having read the past few posts in the thread to understand the context in which this term is now being used.

It's a bit of a tricky one. Basically there are a bunch of people who are primarily known for butting heads with GG on Twitter: Whenever someone points out that this might not actually be a helpful thing to do, since prolonging this conflict just legitimizes it and gives GG more attention, they tend to get RT'd and swarmed by that person's followers. I don't follow a lot of the specifics, but it's definitely an indication of the phenomena that make GG a problem being way more widespread than many of us would like to think. I'm not sure what I could link to though, since I get a lot of this information from inference and from asides on the twitters.

So I guess Gita Jackson is quitting games journalism now, primarily because of harassment from anti-GG. This culture is so fucked.

Wow that is a creepy fuckin dude

They've been going after her generally for a long time, but I think these specific tactics and their ferocity are relatively recent

Yeah what they're trying to do to srhbutts is pretty fucked up and I can't remember if it's been mentioned before in this thread. Based on chat logs (of dubious provenance) where she admits to being attracted to underage relatives (while still saying she'd never acted on it) and unsubstantiated rumors of her sharing scantily clothed (non-nude) photos of said minors, they've justified on ongoing harassment campaign claiming she is an active and dangerous pedophile. Even if these claims were true, and they're as shaky, unsubstantiated, and scurrilous as claims come, they still wouldn't justify this ongoing and dehumanizing harassment. Of course, any time someone tries to point this out GG points to it as evidence that feminists are hypocrites and they'll even defend pedophiles if they toe the sjw-line... all the while, as busby points out, they're throwing stones from the mother of all glass houses here.

You know, just because I make an argument you disagree with doesn't mean I'm trying to 'gotcha'. I am trying to sort out where we actually fucking disagree with each other and where we're getting so tangled in semantics, assumptions, and conflations that we're talking past each other. The only exception to this in any regard was my post asking for your stance on Sherlock etc, which I posted because that I was so fucking sick of having my every point interpreted as an attack that I might as well actually try to directly address what I see as the gaps in your argument rather than try to establish any common understanding -- since when I try to do that you react to it like I just spit in your soup. In fact, when I said this wasn't an appropriate place to have this conversation you interpreted that as a 'gotcha', and now you're saying the same damn thing.

I think there's a strong case to be made against copyright as it is now but that's an in-depth legal and economic argument which would take a ton of time to get into and require me to do a shitload of research. As things stand, I'll reiterate my earlier point that whether or not companies have a right to do this shit, and whether or not they should have a right to do this shit, have no bearing on whether they should actually do this shit. I think that taking down LPs and related videos serves no one's interests and works against at least one and quite possibly both parties. Regardless of the specific legalities and ethics, there's just no good reason to go there, and the same is true of most derivative and fan work.

well it would basically require dismantling capitalism so

In this case the differentiation is primarily one of economic power. In other words, using economic might to strongarm your competition into doing what you want is a dick move, but the system as it is now is set up to favor these dick moves since the people who are capable of making them tend to also influence the laws. I use corporation primarily to express that power difference, because it's overwhelmingly the corporations that change the laws, even if artists then use them to fuck each other over later on. I guess to answer your point, I do think that someone in a position of entrenched power has different ethical obligations than one who is not, yes.

I'm not saying this conversation is pointless, I'm saying it's actually two conversations: One about how artists should ethically treat each other, and one about how corporations should be allowed to treat artists.

That's a shit place to start an ethics debate from. No matter what legal system is in place, it will be corrupted and weaponized by massive corps because that is what they do. Our entire culture is being monetized and sold back to us. Trying to pretend that we can have a reasonable conversation about this when massive entities that are legally equivalent to human beings will twist whatever we come up with is counterproductive. This is part of what I meant about the entire basis on which we were debating being poisoned by capitalistic assumptions. In other, perhaps less alarmist words: If the problem is exploitation by giant fucking corporations, we should be addressing that specific problem rather than why some specific exploitation is justifiable or not based on laws and ethics that were made to apply to human fucking beings. So, again, are we talking about ethics or economics? Because what needs to be said varies wildly based on which we focus on.