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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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But its pretty fucked up when the women you are modeling the show after are, in fact, refusing to give up and continuing to do their thing.  Actually, the Belle Knox episode ended in a similar way, with the character slinking off into the night, kicked out of school, alienated from her parents and going back to porn work.  It stands in contrast to the real life Knox, who (as far as I know) is still in school and has publicly defended herself and her choices through writing and speaking. 

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Geez, I'm glad I didn't watch the show, just reading about it is depressing enough... It's practically sickening, I'm pretty sure GamerGaters are going cheer when they watch this episode.

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The SVU showrunner literally retweeted a message from a gator shitting on a game made by one of their targets.  :fart:

 

DTJhNzY.png

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Going back to the SWATting thing, the only thing that's going to curb that kinda bullshit is if steep punishments are levied (reckless endangerment of human life, see OJ Simpson's trial from just a few years ago) and those punishments / sentencings are highly publicized. The capture rate of the people doing it also has to be really high. Like if every instance of SWATting results in "we got the person who did it," people will knock it off for the most part.

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To be briefly fair to SVU, it's characteristic of the show that it ends on a downer.

The shock value the show goes for also takes away from the realities of what's going on. The end result is people thinking video games and any issues that arise from the industry are a joke.

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So gamergaters hate the SVU episode because it literally portrays gaters as rapists,

and gamergate opposing groups hate the SVU gamergate episode because it doesn't portray the actual issues.

 

Okay, great. Moving on. : (

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But its pretty fucked up when the women you are modeling the show after are, in fact, refusing to give up and continuing to do their thing.  Actually, the Belle Knox episode ended in a similar way, with the character slinking off into the night, kicked out of school, alienated from her parents and going back to porn work.  It stands in contrast to the real life Knox, who (as far as I know) is still in school and has publicly defended herself and her choices through writing and speaking. 

 

I don't know, that was complicated. The themes of that episode were kind of "The legal system/society at large fails these victims," and "There's nothing wrong with professional sex work." 

 

She read that script beforehand and made a pretty positive blog post about it afterwards.

 

^ I didn't hate the episode, but this is coming from my place of privilege in not being a gamergate victim.

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Going by Danielle's (who was a victim of GamerGate) Twitter feed, she didn't hate it either. But I don't know, it still grosses me out. My friend pasted the synopsis from NeoGaf into a conversation and I thought it was a GamerGate fantasy of how it should have played out. The main problem I have is with Raina saying 'Women in gaming, what was I expecting?' and concluding that they've already won, because the message is basically 'It's always going to be like this, so why bother?'. I feel like I need to watch it to understand any nuance in it, but I kind of don't want to go near it.

 

I've seen a few Gaters claiming the episode as a victory for them, but man, they'll post 'We've won!' in response to pretty much anything at this point, so who knows what that means.

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That's also a false dichotomy. This could easily result in the death of a "swatting" victim. All it takes is one wrong move and an itchy trigger finger. They need to crack down HARD on false reports that waste time and resources.

 

I don't see how it's a false dichotomy. Either the police vet any suspect calls, waste seconds and minutes doing so, or they respond to every call. How do they tell which are suspect? Do they need to vet before they vet? 

 

Sure someone could get hurt by the "SWATing" (which is clearly one of the reasons it's fucking awful) and obviously it's a huge waste of resources, but there's a calculated risk involved with it in the first place from the perspective of the police. They're not going to send a SWAT team (especially in the US where officers carry weapons) to something unless it seems utterly urgent and dire. 

 

The punishment for the act is also pretty weird considering many of the potential pranksters are children, who undoubtedly do not understand the potential consequences of what they're doing. I sent a pizza to someone's house as a kid, I thought their confusion and mild irritation was hilarious. I didn't think about the people who made the pizza or the delivery boy's time and possible loss of earnings. That shit just doesn't enter into a kid's head, so is cracking down on those caught doing it going to make a difference? 

 

If they're adults, then yes, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and I'm not arguing against that in the slightest.

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 The main problem I have is with Raina saying 'Women in gaming, what was I expecting?' and concluding that they've already won, because the message is basically 'It's always going to be like this, so why bother?'. 

 

SVU has had a lot of dire, bummer, seemingly hopeless endings, but I've always read them as saying "This is fucked up and needs to change" rather than "This is how it is and how it'll always be."

 

I can see why people would be upset. I just don't think the show is trying to send any kind of "Give up" message.

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I don't think that teenage obliviousness translates between the pizza industry and armed police with assault rifles, door knockers, and flash bangs.

They know how asinine an experience a prank pizza call is compared with the types of response units they'll typically see in action movies and Counter Strike.

I don't think anyone's saying that police should take longer to vet life or death situations (although I think it's a valid thing to suggest that armed response units have been called in as an unwarranted escalation to a police report when raids are premeditated actions rather than a rapid response) but some part of their process while on the scene has resulted in injustice. That injustice is the kind of randomised factor that may not be hoped for but is certainly invited when someone calls a swat reques on a victim.

I'm not sure about sentencing every shit that does this to multiple decades of incarceration but if someone is critically injured or maimed from their actions then I wouldn't sniff too hard at their punishment.

They're still greviously injuring someone by proxy or not. It may not be seen as passionate as other teenage cases of GBH or murder but I think a certain amount of equivelancy should be applied.

I don't think I'm wrong in saying that the experience of being swatted is enough to cause major mental health issues/trauma whether one is injured or not.

I'm not familiar with sentencing laws but if it were to sit between armed assualt and manslaughter/or attempted murder given each context then I'd say that's reasonable.

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SWATing should be treated like attempted murder. How can knowingly sending paramilitary police expecting the worst into the an unwitting person's home responsibly be treated as anything else?

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Personally, I appreciate the likening to terrorism. Remote terrorism seems like a good phrase to describe it. I don't know which punishment is worse, according to the law, but I think terrorism definitely applies, as I feel like the bigger effect of swatting is that it makes people scared to stand up to these people.

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I think terrorism is likely the most accurate term, but I also hate how overly used (and selectively applied) that word is. It's hard for me to endorse its use at all at this point.

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I agree that it should be considered both attempted murder (2nd degree, right? likely will result in death, but not premeditated death), as well as terrorism.

 

I don't think we'll ever see that attempted murder part. Actually, I don't the answer to this, but I suspect the state would be loathe to describe the use of the SWAT team as murder, and I also think they would be loathe to admit that simply deploying these officers carries a tremendous risk of wrongful death. 

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Nor would they want to use the T word for the same reason. No one in government wants to entertain the idea that the police terrorize some civilians.

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I think terrorism is likely the most accurate term, but I also hate how overly used (and selectively applied) that word is. It's hard for me to endorse its use at all at this point.

 

Yeah, that word now is way too loaded in meaning that trying to label something as 'terrorism', despite dictionary accuracy, is just not fair for many criminal activities (this last bit wasn't sarcasm, I sincerely meant it as not all criminal activities and its participant are equally guilty (huge difference in degree in crimes and guilty, etc.)).

 

SWATing should be treated like attempted murder. How can knowingly sending paramilitary police expecting the worst into the an unwitting person's home responsibly be treated as anything else?

 

No.  They clearly put the victim under very dangerous situation, but common knowledge is that SWAT or other equivalent paramilitary police forces are fairly well disciplined and doesn't just go around guns blazing so the more likely expectation is that no one dies but just gets their house breached.

 

If SWATing victim were to die during a raid, the person who called it in is most likely be guilty of manslaughter-being grossly negligent and causing loss of life.

 

 

I agree that it should be considered both attempted murder (2nd degree, right? likely will result in death, but not premeditated death), as well as terrorism.

 

I don't think we'll ever see that attempted murder part. Actually, I don't the answer to this, but I suspect the state would be loathe to describe the use of the SWAT team as murder, and I also think they would be loathe to admit that simply deploying these officers carries a tremendous risk of wrongful death. 

 

You can be convicted of murder for setting up a situation so that police kills your intended victim (there was a case like that in criminal law book).  But I am certain that criteria for passing that up to 'murder' is higher than SWATing.

 

In that case I mentioned, what the guilty party did was, repeatedly made phone calls to his neighbor, taunting him (the neighbor was admirer of general Patton so his calls were like "You and general Patton are faggots") to confront him (the caller) with a gun if the neighbor had any guts, then called the police multiple times reporting that his neighbor was disorderly with firearm.  The police came few times but the neighbor wasn't there so this guy continued doing this until his neighbor came out drunk with a gun, was confronted by the police, then got shot and killed by the police.

 

So in that case, two factors that separate it from most SWATing that I have read about are

1. repeated attempts until death took place

2. intimate knowledge of his victim, which allowed him to create a specific situation (get the victim drunk with a gun in the street, to be confronted by police who are responding to a call about a disorderly person waving gun in the neighborhood).

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SVU has had a lot of dire, bummer, seemingly hopeless endings, but I've always read them as saying "This is fucked up and needs to change" rather than "This is how it is and how it'll always be."

 

I can see why people would be upset. I just don't think the show is trying to send any kind of "Give up" message.

 

Yeah, fair enough; I can't really comment on the tone of the show, and how that portrayal felt in the context of the rest of the episode. It's enough for me to know that Zoe Quinn was disheartened by the episode, as someone whose experiences it's ostensibly based off.

 

EDIT: Steve Hogarty's review of the episode, having not seen it.

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I haven't seen the episode yet, but I've watched a good deal of SVU over the last couple years.    I'm not surprised the ending was tragic, mainly because most endings in the show are messy.  Others have been right to point out that the show typically doesn't end on a happy note, and from my experience it is usually more to do with the failures of the legal system despite the detective's best efforts.  I'm still interested in checking it out though, typically when SVU takes on a ripped from the headlines style topic the format they follow is to first describe the issue, then try to tie that issue into an investigation or legal dispute, then show how even with the best intentions the justice system as it exists is simply unequipped to truly deal with the problem.  SVU Ultimately in my opinion isn't a show about law and order, it's a show about survival.  While I imagine Zoe Quinn isn't giving up any time soon, many women have been bullied into leaving the industry, which I would guess is the reason they went with the ending they did.  Generally the point of their endings isn't to solve the conflict, but rather to show that real and irreversible harm has been done.

 

Edit: Got around to watching the episode, and my initial feelings pretty much remain the same.  I get that people don't like the ending, or perhaps what the ending represents, but that is more or less the point.  The show isn't about fixing the problem and putting a bow on it.  The ending is in the same vein as all their endings--the victim(s) must now begin the long and arduous process of living with what they have experienced.  It is depressing, infuriating, and perfect.

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I don't see how it's a false dichotomy.

 

There's a real dichotomy between taking all calls seriously or pre-screening all of them somehow, but there's a false dichotomy in your framing of this as "lives will be lost if they don't move out instantly" since, as has been pointed out, lives could just as easily be lost to the zealotry of this notoriously violent police force.

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On a big mountain biking forum I'm on, someone started a new thread by making a crappy offhand joke about feminism. A gater then leapt in within a few posts just to say "Anita Sarkeesian = Not a nice person". Then for five pages, all the other MTBers asked "Do you have proof of that?" and "That's not actually proof though is it?"

 

A few more gaters turned up, and it became more of a debate than that, but it was encouraging to see non-games people eviscerate and dismiss them so comprehensively.

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I think the case for SVU versus say something that's already terribly bleak like Black Mirror is that the latter is speculative versus something like SVU which sensationalizes a really chaotic and upsetting reality for many people who are victimized on a regularly basis. When the show sensationalizes something you experience every day (versus say, something that could happen to humanity at large as a consequence of our insatiable flaws) and it ends on a huge down note, how are you supposed to feel about that? I can absolutely see why Zoe felt disheartened since it's effectively taking the low notes from her very real, public experience and spinning some really brutal gold from it for the purpose of making money. Dramatizations are frequently heightened, yes, but it doesn't make reality more bearable when people are going to view it in that way.

 

I didn't watch it and I don't really have plans to, even if I'm a pretty diehard TV critic, I watched Empire instead, which is the kind of high drama I enjoy. 

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I kind of soured on SVU a few years ago as I came to regard its concept in a different light, but aside from that it took a notable nosedive in quality circa "The Stuckey Incident." Also, The few clips I've seen here and there looks like really bad video footage? I guess you got to cut costs somewhere. 

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common knowledge is that SWAT or other equivalent paramilitary police forces are fairly well disciplined and doesn't just go around guns blazing so the more likely expectation is that no one dies but just gets their house breached

 

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.

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