Christopher

Have you watched Jay Smooth's It's only 3 minutes, but basically he makes a compelling argument that (even if you think someone is a racist), it's always more effective to address the "what they did conversation" rather than the "what they are conversation." I think most people have something like that in mind during this discussion. I know that this is what I had in mind, personally, when I suggested that whether or not TB hates trans people in his heart of hearts or has previously defended a trans person is irrelevant to his history of trans panic, including his most recent anti-trans screed.

I'm sure he doesn't actively think, "I hate trans people." But he did release a 15 minute rant explaining how all trans people are rapists unless they confess to TB's satisfaction that their whole life is a life. So, I would say how he feels deep down in his heart of hearts is really neither here nor there.

This is not a new development, and it's not ironic. In the very early stages of Gamergate, TB would post on 8chan (with verification that it was really him on his official social media accounts, since it's an anonymous message board) and pal around with them in the same threads where they would plan ways to harass Zoe Quinn. Do not believe any of TB's claims to neutrality. It's not ironic anon image board misogynist lingo at all. He's just straight up part of the 8chan hate mob, without any of the distance that irony would require. To my knowledge he hasn't done it with public verification in months, but when it was very transparently a conspiracy theory fueled hate mob, before it even had a thin veneer of "ethics" or "consumer revolt" TB was actively and proudly part of it. If you were a participant at that time, you knew the "ethics" was bullshit, because you were there for the threads where people talked openly about what bullshit excuse they would use to harass Zoe Quinn. I think that when he was doing it publicly, he probably relied on the (bizarrely common) assumption by a lot of anon image board users that everything they do there is secret, because no dumb ess-jay-dubyahs could possibly penetrate the the mysteries of their public, non-password protected message board with no registration of any sort required. I would be shocked if TB stopped participating, he probably just does it discreetly as a regular GG anon now. (And he said as much at the time: He prefers to post as a regular anon, but he was making an exception for moral support or whatever.) Boogie did this too, although in his 8chan posts he appeared to have something resembling a conscience instead of just piling on the hate train.

To get nerdy about it, the author has been even more specific: It's a fictional time period in the late 1800s, but where the opening of Japan has not occurred. So, it's after when the Black Ships came, except that that event never happened. Your analysis of the effect it's going for is spot on though, which is more important.

Are you aware of Shiba Ryoutarou? He was a wildly successful author of historical fiction, including some set in the Sengoku period, and he's pretty beloved, both in mass culture and by some members of literary elite. (Abe Kobo really liked him, although that's maybe a weird example because he was an outsider himself.) I don't know how many are translated, though. Glancing at Amazon, the ones in English appear to be set very late pre-Meiji and early Meiji... I honestly can't recommend a particular book either, because it's not really my thing. I just know a lot of people who read him, and his books get adaptations all the time. Japan (supposedly-- it's not really my thing) has a lot of good historical fiction, but what gets translated tends to either be pure literary fiction or popular but not literary fiction. It was written a few hundred years earlier than Sengoku era itself, but if classics are okay you could also just read Tale of Heike for warrior politics in Japan in the middle of an earlier civil war. The McCullough and Tyler translations are both fine. (Both are accurate. McCullough is a little flatter but more reliably readable, Tyler's is better when its good and worse when its bad.)

She didn't make it. She retweeted it. After that, 8chan coordinated a campaign to used the meme to send her death and rape threats, and eventually specific death threats including her address, which she documented with screen caps to have evidence of what was happening to her. It escalated in 24 hours from Brianna Wu retweeting a meme to gamergaters chasing her out of her home. She did not bring this on herself. A lot of people tweeted jokes about gamergate at that time: it was and still is fucking ridiculous. When Brianna Wu did it, they turned it into a crusade. She was no more involved than anyone else making fun of them on twitter in the aftermath of their disgusting harassment of Zoe Quinn. It could have happened to anyone. (Well, any woman, at least.) I'm not really a fan of Wu's perspective on gaming outside of gamergate and women in tech issues, but I followed what was going on in 8chan and KiA very closely. She was not poking them more than anyone else who was looking on aghast from the sidelines, unsure of how to react except to laugh at the absurdity.

Amusingly, the other Sarkeesian Effect guy is saying pretty much the equal but opposite thing: He fired me and kept all the money, so you should stop donating to him and give me all the money instead.

Not disagreeing that he's being tremendously self important, but youtube videos are always stuck at 301+ views for a while after they're first submitting. If you see a video at 301+ views, that just means it's relatively new. Accurate counts above 301+ don't kick in until later. I think it has something to do with preventing artificial inflation of view counts, or something? I don't remember. I'm torn between schadenfreude because two assholes are in a public fight that hurts both of them and being depressed because they're still getting $9000/month to do this.

I mean, he basically has, just without the explicit branding. Being a purely rational observer speaking from the perspective of absolute neutrality is his whole schtick. (It's also the schtick of a lot of nerds generally, but that's another issue...) And the tensions between the transparently false claim to emotionless rationality and the reality of constant emotional outbursts and hurt feelings in reaction to the the most minuscule slights are what make both him and O'Reilly (and Colbert, albeit self-awarely) comical figures. The gap between the public persona created by their observed behavior (emotional, constantly lashing out) and the public persona they're attempting to project (purely rational/logical/unbiased) is laughably huge. Total Biscuit is officially neutral on the issue of Gamer Gate like Bill O'Reilly is a registered independent. Both flaunt their nominal neutrality as proof of how they are above others' petty biases and emotions, but anyone who doesn't buy into that facade of "no spin" and refuses to pay deference to their status as perfectly rational neutral observers invokes a wildly disproportionate reaction.

Honestly I think like 67% of all this nonsense could have been avoided if the average gater had the reading comprehension and social skills necessary to understand that sometimes women also make jokes. The transformation of jokey offhand tweets into a nonsensical .pngs with MSPaint redlines and hourlong youtube rants that claim to reveal a nebulous conspiracy has always been a key factor in the harassment.

You're exactly correct. The immediate context of her comment was a gater with the username atlusnodded/John Galt pestering her on twitter. She was joking about the gamer libertarians created by people with low media literacy who played Bioshock, basically.

Someone on the gater subreddit made a screencap. It's pretty disgusting: He's basically been saying this in increasingly angry tones for at least half a year. Here is an equally bizarre conversation with him from when Chris and Jake tried to talk him down last October, also about Alexander. It's kind of weird that in his tantrum yesterday he claims that it takes a lot to get him to go after one person in particular, given he's been personally attacking Leigh Alexander on the basis that writing an editorial about the gamer identity on Gamasutra is somehow a breach of journalistic ethics for so long now. I guess I'm in agreement with Total Biscuit on one point, at least: Total Biscuit is garbage.

Common knowledge is wrong. See the linked Cato Institute map of botched SWAT raids. SWAT raids are dangerous and get people killed. SWATting is and should be understood legally as attempted murder. It will not be though, because that would require the government to confront how flawed SWAT raids already are, even before sociopaths on the internet get involved.

His stated motivation is the same motivation most American right wing reactionaries in political office use when they want to pretend they're not actually racist/homophobic: act like it's really all about a process issue, and that the discrimination is just an unavoidable side effect. The actual reason is just to be a jerk though, yes.

My experience as a listener of previous episodes was that it was not the audience/community, but Brianna Wu herself who kept pushing for an official Isometric GOTY. Brianna just thought they had an obligation to have a consensus for some reason, and she wouldn't listen to (didn't even notice?) the other three trying to subtly talk her down. The buildup to the GOTY cast contained the same awkwardness as the GOTY cast itself, played out in slow motion. I also like Brianna Wu's advocacy for women in tech, but her role in whole buildup to the GOTY episode and the GOTY episode itself has soured me a bit on Isometric. I wish the hosts were Maddy, George, Steve, and Gita Jackson (their non-Danielle guest for the GOTY cast). Brianna was just so dismissive of everyone else's opinions and experiences. Very frustrating. In a weird way, I think Brianna Wu is a good advocate for women in tech/games because she shares a lot of the same entrenched attitudes that Idle Thumbs mocks ("games are all about fun fun fun" "games need the highest graphics" "consumer is always right"), so she comes across as a fairly typical "gamer" who is also advocate for women. (As opposed to someone who might come across like an outsider for being too pretentious or whatever other bullshit excuse would be used to dismiss someone like maybe Jenn Frank or Samantha Allen.) But unquestioned assumptions like this aren't what I want to hear on a podcast. On the other hand: I really wish Maddy Meyers lived on in the bay area and could become a Thumb. She would be a great fit. (I know this is deeply selfish and unrealistic. She has her own life on the east coast and no reason to move somewhere even more expensive. And if she read this she would probably not like my criticism of Brianna here, because they're friends. I'm just creating an unworkable fantasy podcast lineup, that's all...)

Here is the conversation in context. It makes TB look much worse. TB is explicitly rejecting the premise that Leigh Alexander was correct to call out misogyny in gaming. The tweet screencapped above is one of his two arguments in support of the idea that misogyny is not a significant problem in gaming: (1) there are hundreds of millions of gamers, are they all misogynistic? and (2) but men also face harassment. TB says it is "thoroughly alienating and disrespectful" for Alexander to even suggest that misogyny is a problem in the gaming industry. In context, TB is saying the above to suggest that Leigh Alexander is a bad gaming journalist for calling attention to misogyny. TB is awful.

He works for Breitbart. He's definitely still going to write his book valorizing a thoroughly discredited right wing reactionary movement.

If you think that twitter screencap was gross, it just gets worse. Have you seen /pol/ thread where the 8chan founder discusses what he should write about on a neo-nazi website? (Note for people who don't know how image boards work: When the 8chan founder put up a post asking what he should write about for neo-nazis, he made the decision to pair the OP of that thread with a parody picture of a lynching.) Or have you seen his confirmation that it was really him from reddit?

You have somehow forgotten the NYT's most (in)famous reviewer, a woman who has already been targeted by Norman Mailer for her supposed hatred of white men, and who has already been targeted by nerds after her review of the final Harry Potter book.

This is still going, and their propaganda is as stupid as it ever was:

The person from IGDA Puerto Rico who was blocked was an example of the algorithm working correctly. He follows every major and many minor figure in gaterdom, many of them serial harassers. If he was just following out of morbid curiosity or to monitor harassment, he could have simply requested removal by contacting White List committee. Instead, he invoked the hashtag multiple times to summon a swarm of gaters to harass Randi and IGDA's central branch. It created a politically awkward situation for IGDA because someone associated with them is an unrepentant gater, but that incident was not an example of the blocker's shotgun approach. It was an example of the blocker doing exactly what it was set out to do. It predicted that he would engage in harassment, and he did. The blocker functioned perfectly, but IGDA was not prepared to deal with the fallout. To be clear, it's true that the blocker's approach does create false positives! This wasn't one of them. If anything, the problem in this case was that it was too accurate, uncomfortably so.

Is this confirmed anywhere but Frank Cifaldi's screenshot? I think he might be wrong. That doesn't look like a targeted campaign from Intel. It looks like one of those services that gives users ads based on their internet history. I hope he's right, but . . . edit: Nevermind, confirmed by Gamasutra.

Why, exactly? Total "John Bain" Biscuit posted this the very same day he sent a mob of angry gaters to harass Elizabeth Simins for being a woman with an opinion. At the very moment Total Biscuit was giving himself a big congratulatory pat on the back for being the most principled man in gaming for releasing this statement, Elizabeth Simins was dealing with the fallout of the hate mob that Total Biscuit sent her way. In that context, this olive branch feels incredibly disingenuous. Until he stops actively choosing to participate in a hate and harassment campaign that he has aligned himself with since its inception (when it was obvious that it was just about harassing Zoe Quinn, because they didn't have an alibi yet), it's hard to see this as anything but an opportunity to legitimize his actions to enable further harassment of women in the gaming.

I think it's pretty fair to criticize IGF as siding with them. Other judges, like this guy, have also made jokes about being biased. He was not publicly reprimanded or removed by IGF. (Christine Love is saying that the "asked to leave" is just bureaucratic and that Mattie Brice was removed, and I trust her to know.) In that case, it's pretty clear what's going on: Joking about being an IGF judge is a problem if and only a judge that is under constant surveillance and harassment by gaters. If a judge is being stalked and harassed by gaters, then IGF will publicly reprimand them and remove them from their position. It's a decision the IGF has made to side with a hate group that was already obsessed with attacking Maddie Brice. This is probably not their intention, but in practice that's de facto effect of their decision. If they want to not side with gaters, they need to either start combing through a lot of twitter records to fairly apply this rule and eliminate probably a lot more judges who made jokes, or they need to issue an apology and a denouncement of gaters ASAP.

Total Biscuit denounced GamerGate harassment of women . . . that he is personally friends with. On the other hand, he is fine participating in streams with people who have literally millions of youtube hits spreading lies and conspiracies about Zoe Quinn's personal life. That's just a necessary evil for him to talk to the moderate majority . . . of fans of the creators who make conspiracy theory videos about Zoe Quinn. It's weird that he talks about harassers as an abstract outspoken minority, when the major ringleaders of harassment are literally the people he is streaming with.