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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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Well success for me means I got them to acknowledge the parts of their argument that didn't make sense, or that their anger was misplaced. 

 

I'd vote against the term 'success' already. :)

 

Getting gamergate supporters to even listen, that might be the true feat. Acknowledgements and concessions are direct admittance of fault, of having been 'wrong'. That is almost impossible to achieve, and when I aim at achieving such confessions, I set myself up for a humiliating debate experience :mellow: Just like in your example, arguments may hit home days or weeks after a debate in good faith has taken place, and you may never get any 'satisfaction' out of it. That's probably the way it should be, because standing up for your values means just that. You have no obligation to convert gamergate supporters (the 'ego' thing to attempt), but you may have an obligation to correct falsehoods spread about your position. And boy there are quite a few.

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There have been studies that show that once some people have made up their mind about something that no amount of evidence will make them change their mind. http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want-to-be-right

Some people involved in gamergate illustrate this quite well ( some people on the other side do as well, I'm sure). In the abstract, it is interesting to see how no amount of evidence will get them to change their minds.

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There have been studies that show that once some people have made up their mind about something that no amount of evidence will make them change their mind. http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want-to-be-right

Some people involved in gamergate illustrate this quite well ( some people on the other side do as well, I'm sure). In the abstract, it is interesting to see how no amount of evidence will get them to change their minds.

I thought that study was about conspiracy theorists not working off a logic, but that they have a mental affliction that disables their ability to be convinced of their fears being wrong.

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I think the conspiracy theory mindset is so resilient because it has as a base premise that you have discovered something that casts doubt on all commonly held knowledge on the subject, so any contradictory information is part of the problem.

Going down the meme theory route and thinking of information as organisms I'm inclined to find it an admirable self defense mechanism in how simplistic and effective it is. Except for the part where it often devolves into a self destructive feedback loop of doubt. Just look at people like Alex Jones and David Icke to see men whose skepticism has distanced them so far from reality that they almost seem like castaways from a parallel universe.

The sense that you've figured out something nobody else has is immensely gratifying. If you're underprivileged it must feel like having an ace in the hole against a world that doesn't make much sense. I suspect it's also why sometimes otherwise very intelligent people and academics believe in absolutely outrageous nonsense, because they are used to being on the frontier of human knowledge and the feeling that the rest of the world just doesn't know any better.

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I thought that study was about conspiracy theorists not working off a logic, but that they have a mental affliction that disables their ability to be convinced of their fears being wrong.

I think "mental affliction" is stating it too strongly. I would just say that they are immune to changing their ideas. Their worldview is unshakable regardless of facts. The guy that is one of the authors of the study has a blog post where he notes that when Obama's "long form" birth certificate was released birthers decreased in numbers but since then their numbers went back up. http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2012/07/new-surveys-show-the-persistence-of-misperceptions-.html 

 

Relating tjis to gamergate, I can't tell you how many times I've tried to dispel the myth that Digra is funded by Darpa. Even when I explain why that myth is wrong, some people will just change their story to something like "Well, people involved in digra get funded by darpa!" as if that is the same thing. 

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Relating this to gamergate, I can't tell you how many times I've tried to dispel the myth that Digra is funded by Darpa. Even when I explain why that myth is wrong, some people will just change their story to something like "Well, people involved in digra get funded by darpa!" as if that is the same thing.

That is the basic assumption of any conspiracy theory. Any evidence suggesting a conspiracy is proof, and any lack of evidence just means the cover up was that effective. I think that why are you so angry guy said it best, it is a theory supported by theories. At some point belief is a matter of will more so than a matter of fact.

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The problem, just like with the 9/11 truther crap, is that there's not really a coherent 'conspiracy theory' you could dismantle or "debunk". There's a conspiracy faith, which tells them who the culprits are, and there are hundreds of purposefully unrelated artifacts of connections, correlations, questions or 'moments of doubt' all collected to point at the formerly chosen culprits.

 

If one of those artifacts is raised in a discussion, sure you can disprove it easily, but gamergate supporters are, just like any conspiracy theorist, well able to switch to any other artifact immediately, thus preserving the underlying conspiracy faith. In most cases, they can even revert to bringing forth the already disproven argument in another discussion again. 

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I think we can see that incoherence of ideology in their conflicting views that it is ridiculous to think that video games could contribute to sexism or racism while simultaneously having the theory that the Gates Foundation is using gamification to brainwash children.

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So Milo's bullshit of tweeting harmful stuff about others finally earned him a suspension from Twitter and it has GG flipping out. Mark Kern has picked up the slack on libelous bullshit in the meanwhile, and is directing the rage about Milo's suspension toward Anita Sarkeesian. Why? Who knows, it's Mark fucking Kern who is sad.

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Any indication of what broke the last straw for Milo?
 
/edit: Account seems fairly active still though...?
 
/edit2: Was Milo's head always this badly photoshopped...?
 
/edit3: Oh, I see. With tweets like "When my cousin got cancer all I could think was: thank God it’s not feminism" and of course the hashtag #feminismiscancer, Milo was cruising for a bruising. It lost him followers. And buzzfeed has hired him... let's see how that plays out.

712ced59f5eacd0e07f4ee7a3fb13368_buzzdec
 
 
I think I'm saving this screenshot for mid next year. Breitbart has indeed soared this last year, but then again, so did Trump. And yes I do have trust that a lot of US guys are coming to their senses in 2016.

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I think we can see that incoherence of ideology in their conflicting views that it is ridiculous to think that video games could contribute to sexism or racism while simultaneously having the theory that the Gates Foundation is using gamification to brainwash children.

 

And watch out for that new Mad Max, it's turning innocent men into feminists! If only those SJWs understood the influencing power of media, right?

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Looks like it.

 

Yiannopoulos now literally answers "What's so bad about feminism" with "It's cancer".

 

He thinks he can "win 2016" with this new era of purposefully being uninformed... and, worst of all, unfunny.

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Mark Kern has decided to take a stance on the issue of homosexuals being able to give blood; his stance is that gay people inherently have HIV. He's retweeting folks harassing gay people over it as well.

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It is weird - I just read the Ralph Retort on the Buzzfeed/Milo thing - and there is a piece in there (that I won't link because no one should have the hits for writing that) I had been missing from the wider discussion.

 

Milo is deliberately courting controversy - according to the piece - and because he is doing it for the 'lulz' this gives him reason to be celebrated. The abuse he then gets (some of it is really nasty) is delightful because anyone hurling abuse at him has now 'lost' (with the language being used I feel like we all lose).

 

However, because Sarkeesian and the like then say something controversial but are doing it sincerely - then that is to be derided or doubted. The abuse they then get is to be expected because anyone saying something controversial is going to get abuse and if they don't like getting abuse then they have 'lost' because people should only say controversial things for the 'lulz'. For a large part of the internet the actions of both individuals are no different and deserve the exact same response.

 

Except that in Sarkeesian's case she is saying "the portrayal of women in video games sucks"  and Milo's case he is writing "Feminism is Cancer".

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It is weird - I just read the Ralph Retort on the Buzzfeed/Milo thing - and there is a piece in there (that I won't link because no one should have the hits for writing that) I had been missing from the wider discussion.

 

Milo is deliberately courting controversy - according to the piece - and because he is doing it for the 'lulz' this gives him reason to be celebrated. The abuse he then gets (some of it is really nasty) is delightful because anyone hurling abuse at him has now 'lost' (with the language being used I feel like we all lose).

 

However, because Sarkeesian and the like then say something controversial but are doing it sincerely - then that is to be derided or doubted. The abuse they then get is to be expected because anyone saying something controversial is going to get abuse and if they don't like getting abuse then they have 'lost' because people should only say controversial things for the 'lulz'. For a large part of the internet the actions of both individuals are no different and deserve the exact same response.

 

Except that in Sarkeesian's case she is saying "the portrayal of women in video games sucks"  and Milo's case he is writing "Feminism is Cancer".

 

I feel like you've made a great synopsis of one of the particularly strange cycles of logic in 4channer thought: sincerely caring about a subject leaves you open to getting trolled about it, and getting trolled is bad because it's a sign of out-group status, therefore sincerely caring about a subject is bad. Of course, there are clearly subjects about which 4chan and 4chan-adjacent communities care, but there's this rigorous imposition of artificial distance in their "caring" that supposedly distinguishes cool dudes doin' it for the lulz from stupid mundies and their motivations. It's utterly bizarre to watch it played out, even five years ago I remember being in threads on 4chan where the tone totally flipped because of a collective awareness that too many people were enjoying themselves too sincerely and that must be the fault of anonymous out-group interlopers who are only able to be driven out by pervasive contrariness...

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It is weird - I just read the Ralph Retort

 

Yeah, Milo is doing it for fun and, well, professional gain. The Ralph Retort with his literal nazi rhetorics is doing it for the hate. One more odd alliance.

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I feel like you've made a great synopsis of one of the particularly strange cycles of logic in 4channer thought: sincerely caring about a subject leaves you open to getting trolled about it, and getting trolled is bad because it's a sign of out-group status, therefore sincerely caring about a subject is bad.

 

You're skipping over a step, which is why you're arriving at "caring is bad". It's not that getting trolled is bad, it's that feeding the trolls, falling for trolling is bad. The troll sets out to aggravate someone, and if you get aggravated, they've accomplished their goal, they win. The only way for the trollee to win is to realize "This person just wants to aggravate me. I should ignore them.". To do anything else is to, like a chump, play into the hand of someone whose goal is to upset you.

 

Having tweeted a dozen times that "feminism is cancer", Milo isn't just a cool dude doing it for the lulz, he is clearly trolling. Milo's the hero because people are biting, therefore he's winning, which means 4chan sees feminists as losing, and since they dislike feminists, of course they like Milo's actions.

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You're skipping over a step

 

This doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction: the reason people "fall" for trolls is because they genuinely care, the way to avoid that is to be snidely indifferent to everything, or even to become so jaded that you can occupy any position for the sake of argument, at which point you are the troll. Technically this weird mentality isn't against caring, but in practice it seems much easier for its followers to stop caring about things (at least any serious subject) than to constantly assess conversations for their level of sincerity. It seems to me that at a certain point channers stop going "Is this the time to have a real conversation or do I just go whatevs and mock this person" and simply default to "go whatevs and mock this person" because that way, in their minds, they can never be wrong.

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 to constantly assess conversations for their level of sincerity

 

I agree that this is very difficult, and it's great that you didn't go with mere black or white versions of these conversations here.

 

There's a very flexible slider between "trolling"/mockery/abuse and a good faith argument. And even if at any given moment of the conversation, for every participant, you correctly assess a percentage value of sincerity, it's still a matter of personal patience to decide what percentage is sufficient for you to keep up the conversation. :mellow:

 

I doubt that any halfway sensible sincerity values do pop up in chan forums though.

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Trolling is getting people riled up over nonsensical or fake things. Invoking actual oppressive shit and harassment and people getting agitated over being treated like shit is a normal human reaction and these chucklefucks want to pretend it's all irony but still use things that systematically dehumanize people to do it.

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"Trolling" as in ridicule, memeification and mocking a debate – well, it's something that happens in this thread as well, something that I do quite often.

 

What I wish for 2016, and what's likely to emerge as we've come so far, is a discussion of and clearer guidelines where 'trolling' becomes 'abuse'.

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