"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[SecretAsianMan]

Cracked decided to share their piece on GamerGate. Guess what the GG reaction is? (HINT DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS)

http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/a-90-second-guide-to-determine-if-your-internet-cause-bs/

 

I didn't read the comments but I couldn't help but notice the sponsored links that surrounded the article, including "Check out the 25 Hottest Daughters in Professional Sports" and "16 Stars Who Have Breast Implants and Don't Hide It!".  One step forward and two steps back and all that.

[SecretAsianMan]

Also don't read the comments for that article. I accidentally did and participated to some extent, but it seems like the prevalent thought is "if her work isn't of an academic/scientific quality and she is dishonest or misrepresents some small fraction of her evidence in her Feminist Frequency videos, why should I believe her?" or basic arguments like "what reason would I have to just believe someone over someone else?"

 

Sometimes I really hate men's demands for logical explanations for everything, false equivalences, and walls of text.

 

Well clearly one example that's not completely, 100% accurate disproves the entire theory.  Unless that example discredits GG, then it's cherry picking.

 

I don't necessarily mind the use of logic to examine a social issue, but the use of that logic only when it's convenient is just a disgrace.

[Griddlelol]

 false equivalences

 

I've come to the realisation that false equivalency isn't a proper fallacy. Whether something is similar enough for comparison is really subjective. 

[JonCole]

False equivalence is tricky, but as SAM mentioned re: logic I see people drawing equivalence seemingly more out of convenience than arriving at it due to subjectivity. Like, "do I need another bullet point to support my argument? sure do, let's make something equivalent!"

 

Common thing I've been reading -

1. Any given person is as trustworthy as another until evidence suggests otherwise. This is logical.
2. Anita lied (read: misrepresented) in her portrayal of how prostitutes are treated in Hitman.
3. Anita's trustworthiness score has decreased below the default trustworthiness rating.
4. Anita claims that she was harassed, zero-follower egg-avatar Twitter guy says that she wasn't.
5. Since Anita's trust score is -1 and Twitter guy's is 0, I should therefore trust Twitter guy more than her.

[James]

I don't see what the problem is. Trustworthiness is a simple scalar variable that values get added to and subtracted from, much like moral standing and health. It's a perfectly straightforward game life mechanic.

 

[uNIVERSALLY UNDERSTOOD SYMBOL FOR SARCASM]

[feelthedarkness]

i was wondering what Adam Baldwin's stake in this was. It seems like a real cultural cache step down from TV acting to arguing game journalism on twitter? It makes sense that people are trying to tie a young angry demographic to right wing politics, except for the part where they already locked up the angry white vote.

[brkl]

My guess is that he's kind of dumb, maybe. He's just on board with it.

[tegan]

what the fuck has adam baldwin even done since firefly

[brkl]

He's been to conventions.

[SecretAsianMan]

He was on Chuck I think.

[Ben X]

Chuck and that thing he's in now (and wasn't he in at least one of the. Half Life 2 episodes?).

 

EDIT: ninja'd

[feelthedarkness]

He's on the michael bay seaman drama The Last Ship.

 

either way, diving into this muck is intensely uncool for somebody in the business of being cool! 

[Twig]

He was really good in Chuck. ):

 

Of course he played a super conservative dude in Chuck, too, so maybe he was so good because he was playing himself.

[Nachimir]

Edit - I should note, I recently saw a tweet from a GamerGater that declared (some wording is off), "If you aren't with us 100%, you're against us, gtfo."

 

I find it really weird that they have a movement centred on a hashtag, that anyone can join in with, but also put so much effort into trying to state things it is and isn't "about". I mentioned it offhandedly on Twitter, but it has massive overlaps in patterns with the EDL recruiting from far-right groups in the UK, then spending a lot of time and effort trying to convince people they're "not racist" (they're arguably just xenophobic instead, but in practice it doesn't make much difference: They often form disaffected feeling mobs that turn violent).

 

I've been away and not really looked for the past week, but I saw a troubling tweet today that said (not verbatim) "We know the other side is losing when they attack the roots of our movement rather than our actual cause". No matter how direct the line that can be drawn between abuse and #gameghazi, it seems any kind of collateral damage is acceptable to supporters and the past doesn't matter.

 

(it's a donotlink link, thanks to whoever started using that earlier!)

 

One thing I picked up from gaters is that donotlink is just an intermediary, and the target site still gets traffic (that might not be the reason you use donotlink, but if you're trying to deny sites hits it's worth knowing). That's why they use http://archive.today instead, which in itself is an interesting aspect of their movement: there are sites they never do this to, and sites they always do this to. Suspicion of corruption or alignment with social justice gets a site this treatment, which in turn seems to reinforce gater perception that it must be guilty. For some I'm sure it's just ideological disagreement, but in any body of text they put together, it creates a really clear us/them divide that probably has reinforcing effects.

[Malfsyde]

It's going to be awkward if I ever watch Firefly again now that I have learnt Adam Baldwin is kind of a douchetard.

 

 

I've come to the realisation that false equivalency isn't a proper fallacy. Whether something is similar enough for comparison is really subjective. 

 

In what example would it be subjective? Like most fallacies there are cases where they are valid and cases where they aren't. I think the difficulty with false equivalences is more to do with whether or not the apparent differences are actually relevant to the argument or not.

 

For example someone could argue that getting healthy and loosing weight are the same. For an obese person wanting to loose weight through exercise and nutritious diet it wouldn't be a fallacy, but for someone with Cancer that is loosing weight from their chemotherapy it is a false equivalence.

 

Feminists and Nazis are ostensibly a false equivalence that Gaters like to use, but if their argument was simply that they are both forms of the human species then it wouldn't be.

[Bjorn]

One thing I picked up from gaters is that donotlink is just an intermediary, and the target site still gets traffic (that might not be the reason you use donotlink, but if you're trying to deny sites hits it's worth knowing). That's why they use http://archive.today instead, which in itself is an interesting aspect of their movement: there are sites they never do this to, and sites they always do this to. Suspicion of corruption or alignment with social justice gets a site this treatment, which in turn seems to reinforce gater perception that it must be guilty. For some I'm sure it's just ideological disagreement, but in any body of text they put together, it creates a really clear us/them divide that probably has reinforcing effects.

 

I don't necessarily mind driving traffic to a site, I like donotlink simply to avoid leaving a trail back to the Idle Forums. Not like gaters couldn't end up here anyways, but some of the more toxic, virulent, obnoxious places I've linked, I'd rather they not be able to look at their site's analytics and decide to engage here with their bullshit. I've tried talking with some of them in comments sections and seen enough Twitter conversations to know I'd rather just keep it away from here.  It's why I've also tried to avoid actually using certain names when talking about stuff, since I know some of these folks regularly search for their own names just to wade into arguments wherever they are mentioned. 

[Henroid]

I'm trying a new angle of argument when engaging GamerGate supporters: Suggesting if they've considered they're out of touch with people-in-general. The point being that society at large is getting more aware of issues that, say, women face. And because of that, it will spill into all media, games included. Which is true by the way - that's very much what's happening, but it's in no way negative. Social issues / awareness is always a good thing.

 

My success rate so far is two out of three; one person blew by it with their paranoid preachings, but the other two immediately backed down. One noted he still didn't agree, but his aggression immediately halted.

 

Again it's not meant to be condescending or mean-spirited, but I do want to try and get people to open up to other lines of thinking about this issue. I hope this worked in those two instances.

[Synnah]

So uh, Wikileaks made an appeal to GamerGate... Except it seems like they were using the hashtag to get more people to read Wikileaks? I don't know.

[Henroid]

It felt like a "hey, there's more important shit going on" statement. I saw lots of GGers taking it as absolute support though because "Censorship!" Except instead of censorship it's people not wanting to waste time talking about it.

[Synnah]

Yeah, I guess it could be read that way. 'The pattern of censorship & cronyism they see' could be taken as agreement that it's something that actually exists, or the suggestion that they've just imagined it. I'm not actually sure what Assange's stance on GG is, or whether he even has one; someone brought it up in his Reddit AMA, but the question was just about censorship on Reddit, so his answer was just about censorship in social media. It's weird that WikiLeaks would tweet about it at all, then. 

[juv3nal]

So apparently even 4chan has had enough of the gaters: https://twitter.com/Chuck_Nasty_/status/512005780758073344

4chon.net/v/index.html  seems to be the new safe haven for #GamerGate in the face of 4chan's censorship and hard shilling

 

just let that sink in for a second "in the face of 4chan's censorship"

we are officially in bizarro world

[MadJackalope]

Holy shit is this thing still going on? Dadgumit. 

[tegan]

Oh boy, now the internet has a place even worse than 4chan.

[miffy495]

On the plus side, we're able to watch as the worst people effectively ghettoize themselves even FURTHER beyond 4chan.

[Nachimir]

So apparently even 4chan has had enough of the gaters: https://twitter.com/Chuck_Nasty_/status/512005780758073344

 

just let that sink in for a second "in the face of 4chan's censorship"

we are officially in bizarro world

 

Gamergate thread deletion has been going on for weeks there, it's just been on and off. No one knows exactly why; at first the gaters assumed it was a rogue mod.