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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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I highly recommend people watch this 6 video series attempting to explain the GG phenomenon. It's one of the best videos on the topic I've seen.

Edit: slime beat me too it. I removed my link, but am leaving my encouragement to watch the videos.

Edited by ewokskick

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Most of you will probably know that I'm not as hostile to TB as most of you guys...

 

that bullet point list that Vainamoinen put up is very accurate minus some of really bitter stuff in between the lines and in the end.  So it is basically that in a very bitter tone and more targeted lines toward Rowen.

 

Overall I'm sad about both Rowen getting piled by trolls wanting to get an 'apology' out of him and trolls using cancer as a ground to make their trolling nastier to TB (I'm not suggesting that would excuse that audio cloud... just... still... blah).

 

I'm going to focus my thoughts on Maddy getting good gig at Mary Sue for now, this shit is way too stressful :)

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All 6 parts of this are pretty good:

Excellent, actually. Incredibly, incredibly excellent.

This guy deals out the truth in such big chunks that I am starting to draw up badges for him right this instant.

As a heterosexual man, I want to kiss this guy on the mouth.

Where is that patreon, dammit.

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All 6 parts of this are pretty good:

 

Top comment is Sargon of Akkad accusing him of bias. That's all the recommendation I need!

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So on a completely different topic, but one very, very related to the ethics of the enthusiast press, I found this interview with a fired columnist for Guns and Ammo magazine to be fucking fascinating.
 

Homogenous media communities with very different understandings of reality, where challenging prevailing assumptions is out of bounds, may be growing in popularity. "People are looking to media now to be a cheerleader for their point of view," Brownstein said. "There's less interest in dialogue over competing points of view than there is for affirmation of [the reader's] own point of view."

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Excellent, actually. Incredibly, incredibly excellent.

 

Eh, I don't mean to be a stinker, I enjoyed those videos a lot, but his conclusions seem somewhat at odd with his deliberations on how complicated real-life problems are. It's hard to know which is the right thing to do, but talking to the Angry Jacks in your life is definitely the right thing to do apparently. I generally hold the same philosophy of arguing for men to talk to other men about feminism so women aren't constantly expected to give Feminism 101 lectures about it if a dude so much as tweets at them, but I also usually suggest doing this with men that are already part of your life, like friends and family. This can be a challenging thing to do because it might have consequences for personal relationships in your life, but that goes both ways and consequently your friends can't really gnore your position on this as easily as a sockpuppet Twitter account.

 

People who are upset enough about this to yell about it on the internet are probably beyond our reach, and while that probably doesn't mean we should never respond to them, it does make thinking about the consequences of that action a litle more complicated: What if we are teaching them that they always deserve a response and suddenly they feel even more upset that all these women never deem them with one? What if we're giving the image that feminism is defined by men, and so they begin to feel they too should have a say in it? And even if we address all those concerns, there is still the simple question of whether or not this really is the best use of our time or if it might not be spent more fruitfully talking to people you already know, or doing some real-world local activism.

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Top comment is Sargon of Akkad accusing him of bias. That's all the recommendation I need!

 

Actually, you should need more than that. :)

 

People who are upset enough about this to yell about it on the internet are probably beyond our reach, [...]

 

No, you're not a stinker at all. You can be, ahem, enjoying these videos immensely while being critical of some aspects.

 

Video number six asks quite an herculean task of us, one I had certainly given up in the meantime. And I'm not sure whether I can or want to respond to this call. It can make an Angry Jack out of yourself very, very quickly. :mellow:

 

And now I'm going for a run instead.

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All 6 parts of this are pretty good:

 

The breakdown of the symbiotic relationship of the Gamergate "allies" was quite well done.

 

After the last video ended, the next thing that youtube decided to auto-play for me was a rebuttal video that, in the 30 seconds I watched, included "false flag" and "North Korean hackers" in response to the discussion of conspiracy theories.

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I think the second video was the most interesting if you don't have time to watch over an hour of content. They are all pretty great though.

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You can be, ahem, enjoying these videos immensely while being critical of some aspects.

 

Heh, nice.

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Eh, I don't mean to be a stinker, I enjoyed those videos a lot, but his conclusions seem somewhat at odd with his deliberations on how complicated real-life problems are. It's hard to know which is the right thing to do, but talking to the Angry Jacks in your life is definitely the right thing to do apparently. I generally hold the same philosophy of arguing for men to talk to other men about feminism so women aren't constantly expected to give Feminism 101 lectures about it if a dude so much as tweets at them, but I also usually suggest doing this with men that are already part of your life, like friends and family. This can be a challenging thing to do because it might have consequences for personal relationships in your life, but that goes both ways and consequently your friends can't really gnore your position on this as easily as a sockpuppet Twitter account.

 

People who are upset enough about this to yell about it on the internet are probably beyond our reach, and while that probably doesn't mean we should never respond to them, it does make thinking about the consequences of that action a litle more complicated: What if we are teaching them that they always deserve a response and suddenly they feel even more upset that all these women never deem them with one? What if we're giving the image that feminism is defined by men, and so they begin to feel they too should have a say in it? And even if we address all those concerns, there is still the simple question of whether or not this really is the best use of our time or if it might not be spent more fruitfully talking to people you already know, or doing some real-world local activism.

He's reconsidered that stance following a discussion with Lindsay Ellis and Zoe Quinn. The conversation itself is pretty interesting as well.

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A rebuttal to Why Are You So Angry came up in my recommendations while I was watching something totally unrelated so I stupidly clicked on it and it's

 literally watching it in real time, while vaping, saying nothing until a thought occurs to him.


Why Are You So Sublimely Incompetent?

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Oh, and a random complaint. One of those times you can spot a headline and know exactly who wrote the article: "GOG Galaxy Is A Smart, Pro-Gamer Alternative To Steam" showed up on Forbes yesterday penned by pro-consumer, GamerGate-apologist Erik Kain, just to further drive home the relationship between GOG, TotalBiscuit (who participated in a number pro-GamerGate conversations with Kain last year), and Kain (who I used to be a fan of before he clarified his position as a toxic garbage human).

 

I love how the headline specifically speaks to GamerGate by implying Steam is anti-gamer and obviously in the pocket of Big Leigh Alexander, but the article never actually explains what that means, except for GOG being DRM-free, which isn't new in Galaxy and has its own drawbacks, and calling Steam a monopoly, as though gamers would give a shit if that were even true.

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Steam kind of does hold a monopoly on PC gaming though. I like what GoG does a whole lot and think they are really cool in ways that Steam isn't.

Also I just made some throwaway trolly tweets with the gg hashtag and people bit on them if you want to browse my twitter mentions. These people are so strange.

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An interesting point re: TB was brought up by Dan Olsen on twitter, noting the systemic issues that contribute to his thickness on some of these issues.

The direct-to-creator communication model is simply not scalable.

 

I don't think this necessarily excuses his behavior, but it does make you think about how skewed everything is from his perspective. It's genuinely hard to interact with someone with 2 million followers without being SOME kind of sea lion.

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I love how the headline specifically speaks to GamerGate by implying Steam is anti-gamer and obviously in the pocket of Big Leigh Alexander, but the article never actually explains what that means, except for GOG being DRM-free, which isn't new in Galaxy and has its own drawbacks, and calling Steam a monopoly, as though gamers would give a shit if that were even true.

 

Valve has more market share in PC games distribution than google has in search engines or Amazon has in ebooks or Apple in digital music distribution. Valve isn't just "a" monopoly. It is THE monopoly, I'm sorry. And it's very valid to point to that, because this is an absurdly shitty market situation. I've been doing that pointing for years, and refuse to use the service, far more due to this simple fact than due to DRM concerns.

 

However, that doesn't make that article in any way worth its salt. In particular, gamergate has always veered in the direction of the monopolies and sought their support instead of making any move to antagonize the big players. Big developers and the big publisher are the dealers; gamergate supporters seldom risk attacking them and have yet to organize attacks against them in the same way indie developers are attacked. This is an un-gamergate thing to do. Electronic Arts makes exemplary "SJW games" and just loves this consumer revolt; Warner Brothers has yet to experience a real backlash for the core ethically rotten Shadow of Mordor review exclusivity contracts; Valve introduces Curator and no one talks about the conflation of press and publisher. A two person indie studio happily tweets having bribed Anita Sarkeesian with 40k$: THAT's gamergate material.

 

The technical amenities Valve as a 1.5 billion dollar server farm provides will always be the preferred haven for a consumer revolt so incredibly scared of losing any kind of comfort in their medium.

 

GOG didn't publish e.g. Hatred (for undisclosed reasons) to their customers' cries of censorship and direct threats of leaving for Steam, while Gabe Newell indirectly yet personally endorsed the product (!). Especially due to GOG's necessarily limited catalog range, is not unreasonable to think that in the future, the total freedom gamergate customers seek won't be found in a second hand store of 20 year old products. If GOG hopes to gain more sales by supporting gamergate ideologues, they can expect just about the same success as AMD. :mellow:

 

 

 

 

A rebuttal to Why Are You So Angry came up in my recommendations while I was watching something totally unrelated so I stupidly clicked on it and it's this guy literally watching it in real time, while vaping, saying nothing until a thought occurs to him.

 

I saw that, and I felt so very sorry for the guy. :mellow: Could you remove the link, possibly? No need to call out gamergate's jumping jacks. Those tend to get shit from fellow fighters as well.

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An interesting point re: TB was brought up by Dan Olsen on twitter, noting the systemic issues that contribute to his thickness on some of these issues.

 

I don't know, PewDiePie seems to navigate that minefield fairly well. I think this is just who TB is, with or without the platform. Is he any different now than he was in his WoW Radio days?

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I don't know, PewDiePie seems to navigate that minefield fairly well. I think this is just who TB is, with or without the platform. Is he any different now than he was in his WoW Radio days?

 

Contributes to isn't the same as being the entire cause of. PewDiePie handling these factors better doesn't mean that they're not still affecting both of them but the two people have dealt with it in different ways.

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Yeah I don't think it excuses all of TB's bad behavior, but it is a good reason why more nuanced communication with him is at this point extremely tricky if not impossible. There was a bit of side-discussion in that tweet thread about how TB has made it a moral imperative to interact with feedback even when that's really not good for him, but he's painted himself into a logistical corner.

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I guess my thinking is that nuanced communication was never possible with him. There may be more roadblocks to it happening now, but it doesn't seem like he was ever venturing down that road regardless.

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Um, TB was the guy ranting about his IQ on message boards a decade ago, right?  I'm not convinced that he was ever a person capable of being reasoned with. 

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Yeah, I think the issue is rooted more deeply than this. Obviously being exposed to this constant deluge of comments isn't going to help (his fanbase being the sort of people who are nasty in tone even when trying to be supportive), but his own positioning as a consumer rights guy almost makes it necessary to keep that channel open. And when you play to the crowd that cares so intensely whether a turn-based game runs at 30 or 60 fps, don't be surprised if they have a lot of garbage, nitpicky complaints about your own work too I guess.

 

I don't want to say he deserves that crap, nobody does. But it makes it seem strange and stranger that he continues to support their outrage. Maybe it's just a business move or maybe he genuinely believes in these incredibly petty crusades, but either way I'd feel more sorry for him if it looked like he made any attempt to listen to reasonable criticism instead of the toxic garbage that's... kind of the basis of his editorial philosophy? Or at least stopped acting like attention from his fans was an unequivocally good thing - I'm sending people to your charity stream, I'M HELPING.

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