"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Bjorn]

I'd really really love to hear what that guy thinks of GG, but I can't find an active twitter or anything.

 

I'm pretty sure this is the chap who ran it. 

 

[James]

Annoying thing about Zodiac MF #2: he frequently deploys the "fuck you if you disagree" tactic. We've all felt that at some point, but he uses it as if it actually wins the argument for him or something.

Anyway, fuck him for disagreeing.

[BusbyBerkeley]

Hah, I unfollowed ZMF on twitter when he came out as pro-gamergate. Not really surprising given his schtick, but I guess I've outgrown it since the AVC days. I still think he was pretty funny sometimes, but holy heck that meltdown is hilarious. "I'm a MAN and I SHOULD ALWAYS BE HEARD!!!"

[BadHat]

I'm pretty sure this is the chap who ran it. 

 

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Oh, awesome, that's him! Gonna have to look into what he's up to now...

[Undeadpool]

Hah, I unfollowed ZMF on twitter when he came out as pro-gamergate. Not really surprising given his schtick, but I guess I've outgrown it since the AVC days. I still think he was pretty funny sometimes, but holy heck that meltdown is hilarious. "I'm a MAN and I SHOULD ALWAYS BE HEARD!!!"

For me it was when he declared, essentially, "TORTURE FOUND US OSAMA BIN LADEN!! FUCK YOU WHINING LIBERALS!!!" parroting an out-and-out fallacy as if it were objective fact.

 

Yeah, dude's a real anti-establishment rebel...

[Deadpan]

So, TB's transformation to douchelord is complete I guess. Turns out that a zealous devotion to customers always being right leads to the idea that your own personal needs must be catered to at all times: not the best basis for reflecting on your own failings and shortcomings. Instead now we got the pied piper of bawling babymen who expect to be constantly coddled everywhere they go. Poor TB, so confused why people aren't more grateful for his input on how white privilege isn't real, why this charity stream isn't thanking him for bringing nasty people to them. Confused and angry.

[Problem Machine]

[Gormongous]

So, TB's transformation to douchelord is complete I guess. Turns out that a zealous devotion to customers always being right leads to the idea that your own personal needs must be catered to at all times: not the best basis for reflecting on your own failings and shortcomings. Instead now we got the pied piper of bawling babymen who expect to be constantly coddled everywhere they go. Poor TB, so confused why people aren't more grateful for his input on how white privilege isn't real, why this charity stream isn't thanking him for bringing nasty people to them. Confused and angry.

The short version is basically this:

 

I mean lets be honest, if you really think I'm followed by 390000 misogynist harasser then the last thing you'd want to to is antagonize me

"You should assume I'm acting in good faith, but even if I'm not acting in good faith, you should pretend anyway, because my fans will ruin your life for saying so." Ethics!

[Undeadpool]

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He has put out so many incredible comics about this topic...

[Blambo]

I'm kind of wondering how total biscuit would stand if he didn't feel like he has to grandstand in front of a million duckweeds.

[Deadpan]

"You should assume I'm acting in good faith, but even if I'm not acting in good faith, you should pretend anyway, because my fans will ruin your life for saying so." Ethics!

 

It's right in line with all the people now saying "This could have easily been prevented if they hadn't bad-mouthed GG," forever unaware that what they are really saying is "If you criticize GG, you deserve every bad thing that's coming your way." Super ethical, super charitable.

 

 

I'm kind of wondering how total biscuit would stand if he didn't feel like he has to grandstand in front of a million duckweeds.

 

I don't know, maybe in his case in particular many things would be different if he didn't operate so much on the lessons learned from talking into a microphone so many hours of the day: that is opinion is always interesting and worth listening to, in vapid games criticism as in social commentary. But in general, this desire to be credited for short-sighted good intentions despite making things worse is relatively common, as is this idea of apologizing as a sign of weakness that often makes people dig their heels in like that. Whether the audience they are performing their "strength" for is real or perceived doesn't make a huge difference, I think. On the flipside, one could have even expected him to be more understanding of concerns of unwelcome attention, since he has to live with it himself. Quite a bit of it, sadly.

[Merus]

As someone who played WoW when TotalBiscuit first made it big, he's basically always been a douchecanoe who thought he was the smartest motherfucker in the room. That kind of person is basically a smug git in private as well, because they don't have the understanding that other people might be more qualified to speak, or more interesting - so I imagine, without an audience, he'd be much the same.

 

One of my greatest joys in life is being the person in the room smarter than they are.

[Twig]

haha douchecanoe i like it

[Justin Leego]

One of my greatest joys in life is being the person in the room smarter than they are.

 

In your estimation, what are the main contributing factors to your status as Person Most Likely To Be Smarter?

[Merus]

In your estimation, what are the main contributing factors to your status as Person Most Likely To Be Smarter?

 

Many of these people, it turns out, tend to be the smartest person they knew growing up. At around one standard deviation or so above the norm, kids still have to work hard and pick up all those vital skills that have nothing to do with intelligence, and they tend to get the most value from their intelligence. Over two standard deviations, and life is so different growing up that many kids end up hitting a wall when their natural intelligence isn't enough to let them coast. At that level, the deficiencies are so obvious that many profoundly gifted adults have had the asshole beaten out of them, if they even manage to survive. Between that, though, their deficiencies aren't quite so crippling, so many of them don't have the experience of being outclassed, nor awareness of their own deficiencies because they've never had to improve.

 

This kind of makes them easy pickings: so long as you can keep up, for the first time in their life they're dealing with someone who won't respond to their deflections, and they don't know how to handle it.

 

This doesn't really answer your question. Let's just say I've had the asshole beaten out of me and leave it at that.

[Bolegium]

One of my greatest joys in life is being in a room filled with smarter people.

 

By smarter people I mean ostensibly 'intelligent' people who on average aren't actually smarter than you.

By joy I mean despairing at the fact that intelligence doesn't grant immunity from being a douchebag, and rather exacerbates it (helped by many of other privileges).

 

Long story short, high school at an academically selective one sucked, but at least that and a bunch of other experiences means it's much easier to stop myself from being a douchecanoe like TB.

 

 

*being surrounded by genuinely smarter, nicer, interesting-er people is indeed a very joyful experience. That's one of the reasons I like it here on the Idle Thumbs so much

[itsamoose]

I never followed him all that closely, but he's always seemed like the kind of person who wasn't interested in forwarding a debate in any meaningful way. He seems more interested in pointing out how a particular viewpoint or argument is misguided or wrong, which I suppose is part and parcel with being an online personality. I'm not sure if he is to blame for this style, as its something I've seen crop up in virtually all online discussions, that really are just a series of non sequitors or deflections (I believe this is called Whatabout-ism). Basically I can't decide if people like TB are the cause or the effect here, and as such don't really know how to engage that viewpoint.

[Problem Machine]

PSA: 'Intelligence' is a made up thing.

[Deadpan]

I never followed him all that closely, but he's always seemed like the kind of person who wasn't interested in forwarding a debate in any meaningful way. He seems more interested in pointing out how a particular viewpoint or argument is misguided or wrong, which I suppose is part and parcel with being an online personality. I'm not sure if he is to blame for this style, as its something I've seen crop up in virtually all online discussions, that really are just a series of non sequitors or deflections (I believe this is called Whatabout-ism). Basically I can't decide if people like TB are the cause or the effect here, and as such don't really know how to engage that viewpoint.

 

Maybe it's a little bit of both, and they're the self-affirming effect of a toxic culture. Like in this case, it's possible that TB had or picked up certain personality traits before his career, which then drew him to streaming, while at the same time his only persona maybe exacerbated those parts of his personality. And now he's generating more of his type, leading by example.

 

Very early on, I talked to one of the gaters, a dude with maybe 50 followers or so who went on about how he's trying to get into reviews and streaming because that seems fun. Saw that name pop up again when somebody passed around another of GG's unimaginably vile comments, and he's up to 1,900 followers now. That guy is probably feeling so high about his rapid rise to perceived stardom right now (which I'd trace back to GG's "Let's all follow each other because then we reach a lot more people" idiocy), thinking that this is the road to success and he just got to walk it a little further. And he can't be alone. There's got to be a whole bunch of people thinking that this is how they'll carve a name out for themselves.

 

In general, the question of how to deal with such viewpoints was what led me to feminist theory in the first place (thanks a lot early Anita-haters!), which has a long-standing and very interesting discussion on how to further its goals and how to win over other people, or at least get them to drop their open anti-feminist views. Obviously it's not a solved problem, else feminism would probably be a little more popular by now, but it's fascinating stuff to get into regardless. Very different viewpoints on how to approach people, whether it's worth appeasing them and how far you should go to make them feel included, whether you should just antagonize some outright, etc.

[Merus]

PSA: 'Intelligence' is a made up thing.

 

It's a bit more complicated than that, but I assume you're getting at how IQ tests largely measure your performance on IQ tests, and there's a lot of other mental behaviours that would be considered by the public as part of intelligence that aren't adequately assessed by tests. The kind of people who talk about their IQ as being a defining feature are absolutely wankers.

 

One of my greatest joys in life is being in a room filled with smarter people.

 

I only got to have this feeling recently, but I'm always really excited to chat with my friend Andrew who is super fucking smart.

[Problem Machine]

It's a bit more complicated than that, but I assume you're getting at how IQ tests largely measure your performance on IQ tests, and there's a lot of other mental behaviours that would be considered by the public as part of intelligence that aren't adequately assessed by tests. The kind of people who talk about their IQ as being a defining feature are absolutely wankers.

That, but also intelligence in general is mostly a social construct. It's a catch-all term used for describing a certain set of problem-solving abilities, and if we don't recognize abilities outside of that set they aren't recognized as intelligence. The entire idea of intelligence as something that can be ranked is kind of nonsense. It's all about specific aptitudes as applied to specific problems. And, as with what we define as physically desirable in terms of attractiveness, what we define as mentally desirable in terms of aptitude is very shaped by our culture and all of the baggage that comes with it.

[Deadpan]

That, but also intelligence in general is mostly a social construct. It's a catch-all term used for describing a certain set of problem-solving abilities, and if we don't recognize abilities outside of that set they aren't recognized as intelligence. The entire idea of intelligence as something that can be ranked is kind of nonsense. It's all about specific aptitudes as applied to specific problems. And, as with what we define as physically desirable in terms of attractiveness, what we define as mentally desirable in terms of aptitude is very shaped by our culture and all of the baggage that comes with it.

 

A Nature debate piece about the ethics of studying intelligence and race (or sex) that we read in a recent Gender Studies course basically made these points: 1) None of these are well-defined terms so much as arbitrary, socially constructed distinctions. 2) Even if they weren't, we lack the tools to analyze intelligence anyway. 3) Even if that was possible, such research would still not be worthwile because no good can ever come out of it, it will only ever serve to justify existing prejudice or establish an arbitrary ranking of worth.

 

Salient quote: "In a society in which racism and sexism were absent, the questions of whether or not whites or men are more or less intelligent than blacks or women would not merely be meaningless - they would not even be asked." It may not be a direct analogy, but what is true of group differences probably also applies to individual differences, which would be seen as far less significant in a more egalitarian society.

[Problem Machine]

That is very much along my own lines of thinking. It's certainly a useful point to raise: Exactly what use would it be to measure intelligence, if we could?

I used to be very self-congratulatory about my own intelligence, though I don't think I was nearly as insufferable as TB -- or, if I was, I at least had the excuse of being young enough not to know better. For me, the turning point came when I realized that the only meaningful, empirical measure of what a person can achieve is what they have achieved. Everything outside of that is just hot air. This is not necessarily to denigrate the accomplishment of scoring exceptionally well on an IQ test or whatever -- I just consider that a feat closer to, say, placing in the top 3 in a Starcraft 2 tournament than to actually writing a novel or scientific paper of merit. That is to say, it is a difficult task performed admirably, but doesn't necessarily have any significance beyond that. Even if one creates such a novel or paper, it isn't necessarily an indication of 'intelligence', whatever that is, but of an aptitude for writing novels or research. Which is, I think, actually a far better attribute to possess than some nebulous 'intelligence'.

[Denial]

Very early on, I talked to one of the gaters, a dude with maybe 50 followers or so who went on about how he's trying to get into reviews and streaming because that seems fun. Saw that name pop up again when somebody passed around another of GG's unimaginably vile comments, and he's up to 1,900 followers now. That guy is probably feeling so high about his rapid rise to perceived stardom right now (which I'd trace back to GG's "Let's all follow each other because then we reach a lot more people" idiocy), thinking that this is the road to success and he just got to walk it a little further. And he can't be alone. There's got to be a whole bunch of people thinking that this is how they'll carve a name out for themselves.

 

If memory serves, that was Operation Skynet. And yeah - I think that's a pretty big part of the thinking. If you are used to nobody paying any attention to you, having people suddenly telling you you're amazing can be very intoxicating. I don't mean to denigrate young casters or hobby writers for this, in particular, because I think it's also affected quite a few of the golden-mean "two sides" guys. Which is precisely the goal of the relentless lovebombing, of course...

[BadHat]

Patrick Klepek linked a great GG post-mortem on his blog. http://blogs.houstonpress.com/artattack/2015/01/why_gamergate_failed_a_look_back_at_2014s_most_ridiculous_movement.php

 

Nothing exciting or new here, but it does a really good job of expressing how ridiculous the controversy was (is), and more importantly how it failed to gain any favourable coverage. Near the end the author links to a google doc which is the skeleton of a crowd-sourced book that GGers are writing about themselves, I guess? Loads of placeholders, not much actually written. I had to skim most of it because the writing is hilariously aggrandizing, but this caught my eye (warning: bunch of slurs and dumb racism/sexism, nothing explicit).

 

CH 4: A brief history of the Social Justice movement in the US (include backers and key players). [might want a brief definition/history of cultural marxism and its ties to the social justice movement] throw in definition of oppression olympics for good measure.

words to define: privilege, oppression, racism (SJW definition)... more?

Begin by outlining SJW’s stance on the issue, try to follow on with their idea that patriarchy is everywhere. We could outright dismiss it because it’s accusing human cis males of being, well, human cis males, or we could follow up on their line of thinking - if we do, explain that it’s not men’s fault women can look like/BE sluts or trans or shit like that, it’s ruling class’s fault. Be extremely cautious here, it’s a slippery slope.

Describe SJW’s influence in comic books and the like and how it came to be, list reasons why gamers started to show active resistance in light of attempts on their hobby. Outline why SJW’s are wrong, support it with evidence, mention the statement of equity feminist, Christina Sommers, on the matter. Make a brief remark on how various delusions that SJW’s perpetuate are be encouraged by gaming press, follow on it in later chapters.

 

In the beginning someone should write about opressed people vs. their oppressors, which would be nerd/internet/4chan culture, vs. normalfags. Women vs. men, niggers vs. humans, but then say it's anons vs. normalfags… etc.

 

Jesus christ.