"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Mangela Lansbury]

I've seen people on KiA call TB buttery, so it can only be that they think he's a real biscuit that could use some help maybe not being on the bland side.

[BadHat]

I haven't used the phrase "cognitive dissonance" in a while but I'm gonna have to dust it off for this one.

 

 

The person who vocally supported gamergate, ladies and gentlemen.

[Brodie]

 

perfect. well done

[Vainamoinen]

As noted by David Futrelle, reaxxion has finally taken down the infamous John Birch article, decribing it as "a simple case of plagiarism" and patting themselves on the back for their morality.
 
Why gamergaters internationally are apparently falling for literal 1960's US ultra right political rabble rousing hate speech rhetoric is not approached as a subject by "ethics officer" Sam Roberts of reaxxion, at all.

[Brodie]

Ethics Interlude 1: Poems

Gentlethumbs,
It is with mirth and a not insignificant amount of concern for your mental well being that I bring to thee- The Poetry of Milo.
As tweeted and commented by Chris Kluwe.

 

 

Edit: lack of coffee, garbled.

[osmosisch]

Honestly, that made me more sad than anything. I'm not good at laughing at broken people.

[Mangela Lansbury]

Making fun of poetry for not being long enough or having too few words just makes you look like an asshole.

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, there's enough really horrible stuff to pick apart in the subject matter, I think?

[feelthedarkness]

i think the aggressive Wagner/Nietzschery is worth a chuckle, or at least an unsurprised disappointed head shake! 

[feelthedarkness]

agressive caucasery

undergraduate sophistication

i am borne on wings of the platitudinous

jim goad, i'm coming home

[Denial]

There is a balance of abreaction and sympathy, definitely. I get that with Totalbiscuit, to a degree - my mother had the same cancer, it's exhausting and undignified, the possibility, no matter the odds, of recurrence is a constant weight on the mind, and the treatments are draining and uncomfortable. I wouldn't blame anyone for not being at their best.

 

On the other hand, I think he's probably revealing a lot more than he might think, and not necessarily getting good feedback on it (he has an intern whose job it is to pre-filter what people are saying to and about him online, IIRC).

 

After the agreement with Rosen not to talk further about Gamergate, he's been playing a long and embarrassing game of "not touching, can't get angry", whereas Rosen seems to have moved on pretty quickly. Watching the transition from praising Intel's diversity campaign and telling Gaters that it was irrational to write it off because it happened to involve FemFreq to the parroting of Gamergate-approved language about "trust fund babies" in about a week was pretty sad. And his latest "not touching", the release of a 4-page Twine game to show that Twine games aren't proper games, just highlights a regrettable failure to understand that engine complexity is not a diagnostic or evaluative criterion. That is, the mechanical process of making a Twine game is pretty simple*, whereas making a Twine game that is any good is hard. And, of course, the skills that went into creating Depression Quest transfer to, for example, the narrative design of Framed.

(It's notable that these games intended to point out how shitty "SJW" games are are never any good - see also Oppression Quest, Gone Homo - no, really - and so on. The possible exception is Dear Esteban, which is distinct, I think, because created by someone who loved Dear Esther, but also saw in it elements that were susceptible to affectionate parody.)

 

So, yeah. I think on the whole I'd be happier without the insights into people's psyches, really.


(*In fact, Twine isn't a good tool for what he wanted to do. It would have been quicker to have built it in NotePad.)

[feelthedarkness]

stars light the feeding sky

my feed. feeding frenzy

i command the swarm

i am the double lightning bolt s in ethics

[Twig]

Making fun of poetry for not being long enough or having too few words just makes you look like an asshole.

I don't think that's what he was doing, though.

[Vainamoinen]

I don't think that's what he was doing, though.

 

I got the same impression. And that is, for all it's worth, an art critique. I'd rather focus on the issues.

[Nachimir]

It seems a bunch of lines were plagiarised from Tori Amos lyrics too:

http://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/2shsnb/chris_kluwe_livetweets_reading_through_milos_book/cnpnm5q

 

Maybe that's why a reason that, when the terrible poetry came up on Twitter a few months ago, he tended to just block and run instead of his usual mocking engagement?

[SuperBiasedMan]

Make sure you catch the Thumbs reference.

[Deadpan]

As noted by David Futrelle, reaxxion has finally taken down the infamous John Birch article, decribing it as "a simple case of plagiarism" and patting themselves on the back for their morality.

 

Why gamergaters internationally are apparently falling for literal 1960's US ultra right political rabble rousing hate speech rhetoric is not approached as a subject by "ethics officer" Sam Roberts of reaxxion, at all.

 

You can always tell a good correction by how much time it spends talking about other sites and why don't they clean up their mess, Mom. UGH!

 

On a related note, here's a fun thing I found inside BasedGamer's official material.

[Bjorn]

I hadn't actually read the "apology", that's a stunning piece of work. I should send this whole thing to the guy who runs Regret the Error. I've followed him for years, and have never seen a retraction or correction like that.

[Brodie]

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[–]happierplanet 41 points 10 hours ago

OMG. How many Tori Amos lyrics can you plagiarize in one thin, red, self-published volume of overwrought and weirdly anti-Semitic verse?

1.

Milo: "Though I shaved everywhere you'd been"

Tori: "I shaved every place where you been, boy, I said shaved every place where you been" ("Blood Roses")

2.

Milo: "I was looking for a Saviour/Beneath these dirty sheets"

Tori: "I've been looking for a saviour in these dirty streets/Looking for a saviour beneath these dirty sheets" ("Crucify")

3.

Milo: "You're addicted/To cocaine and Calgon"

Tori: "She's addicted to nicotene patches" ("Spark")

4.

Milo: "But you couldn't keep boo-boo alive"

Tori: "But she couldn't couldn't keep baby alive" ("Spark")

5.

Milo: "Maybe next I'll give Judas a try"

Tori: "Maybe next I'll give Judas a try" ("Spark")

I'm not even done reading this shit yet.

[–]happierplanet 30 points 9 hours ago

And there's more! He's not even trying now. Just cribbing song titles and lyrics word-for-word.

6.

Milo: "Hello Mister Zebra"

Tori: "Hello Mister Zebra" ("Mr. Zebra")

7.

Milo: "You got you some horses"

Tori: "I got me some horses" ("Horses")

8.

Milo: "Maybe, together/We'll make mother well"

Tori: "And maybe together/We'll make mother well" ("Horses")

8.

Milo: "Muhammad, my friend/I'm getting very scared"

Tori: "Muhammad, my friend/I'm getting very scared" ("Muhammad My Friend")

9.

Poem titled "Ratatouille Strychnine." This is a lyric in "Mr. Zebra."

From above mentioned reddit thread.

Plagiarism is ethical, right?

[Ozzie]

I noticed that Milo quoted (or plagiarized, dunno) from Firewalk with Me (the first three lines in the picture) and Mommie Dearest (the first one). Taken together with the riffing off Tori Amos' lyrics, his poetry is quite the patchwork of foreign sources, I'd say.

I thought Chris Kluwe's commentary and the poems were an uneasy but funny read. I dunno if Kluwe tried to make fun of a GG figurehead or if he wanted to dig up more dirt on him (in the latter case: Milo already did far more far worse in spotlight than write an obscure poetry book). Kluwe certainly has a certain overzealous glee with which he rips the book apart. By the way: he doesn't complain so much about the shortness of the poems than about the way they're laid out on the page, with many pages not featuring more than three lines on them.

If Kluwe did this because he wanted to dig around to find more dirt on Milo, then I would share the concerns. It's a kind of behaviour GG indulges in after all, and it's off the mark, irrelevant. But I think he's merely poking fun at these people, with which I don't have a problem with. He may be lead by a certain morbid curiosity, in which case this isn't any different than what the AVGN or the Nostalgia Critic do. *shrug*

[Bjorn]

Man, I mentioned gamergate in passing in a Facebook thread about hypermasculinity and geek culture, and in no time a guy had written an essay about how geeks aren't that way, it's jus the corporate takeover of the geek world that has made it look that way.  I've mostly avoided mentioning gg in social media, so that's the first time I've seen the rapid response team go into action. 

[Vainamoinen]

a guy had written an essay about how geeks aren't that way, it's just the corporate takeover of the geek world that has made it look that way.

 

Uh, yeah. Precisely. The corporate takeover, reinforcement, nay creation of the geek/gamer culture/identity, that is the problem. I'm glad whenever someone close to GG even SEES some kind of corporate influence.

 

Usually, I get the "let the market decide" argumentative treatment instead.

 

But the market created their "gamers" in the first place;

some of the problematic games are actually loved by those who do also find them problematic;

and a target group that isn't served can not decide with their wallet.

[Denial]

I noticed that Milo quoted (or plagiarized, dunno) from Firewalk with Me (the first three lines in the picture) and Mommie Dearest (the first one). Taken together with the riffing off Tori Amos' lyrics, his poetry is quite the patchwork of foreign sources, I'd say.

 

To be fair, this is poetry heavily influenced by Modernism - TS Eliot is specifically cited in the dedications, and the imitation is clear, down to the Greek and Latin quotes at the beginnings of sections. Something Eliot did was pull bits and pieces from both high and low culture - Sanskrit devotions, lines from music-hall ditties - to represent the fracturing of discourse. Of course, one thing about that is that Eliot had a huge breadth of cultural knowledge, and thus didn't pull a lot of lines from the same artist, or even the same relatively narrow cultural milieu.

 

Coincidentally, of course, many of the Moderns were also more or less associated with a reactionary movement intent on threatening others until, exhausted by conflict and fearful of more violence, they stayed quiet as isolated and brutalized marginalized populations were attacked. But that might be a little bit Godwinny...

[Ozzie]

To be fair to me, too, I have no clue about poetry.

I couldn't quite tell if those copied lines were meant to be noticed as quotes or not. I would say they were meant to, considering they prominently stand at the beginning of the poems, are pretty much verbatim quotes and the wire hanger line is infamous, after all.

Anyway, Milo's poems seem incredibly obnoxious to me. And just a tad anti-semitic, racist, misogynistic,...par for the course, really.

[juv3nal]

Honestly the most disturbing thing about the poetry is what he has to say in the author's preface about his previous book. if he considers that one "juvenilia, extraordinarily self-indulgent and, truly, not real poetry" I cringe to think of what it might be like.