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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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It's exactly the attitude that says women are naturally not attracted to math

Haaa that actually came up yesterday too... "My niece solved the math problem without me doing it for her!" And because I'm me I said "Pff math is easy." Which whatever I was obviously being an ass but then he said "Yeah but she's a girl"

 

Hilarious!!

 

But that's not what this thread is about so I'll stop venting.

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As he clarifies later in the tweet thread, it's any fiction where the political message is unsubtle enough for him to notice it. As far as I can tell from his words, throughout time, humanity has striven to create truly apolitical characters in artistic works in order to be appealing to everyone everywhere, but only with the power of mass media and focus groups in the twentieth century has that become truly possible. 

 

It's just idiotic. My brain just keeps sputtering "but The Time Machine?!"

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The Time Machine nothing. Art from the classical period was patronage based, and thus was frequently explicitly political. The terribly subtle political message being "I am fit to rule and those other assholes are not".

 

That's basically what Romance of the Three Kingdoms is about in its entirety.

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All that stuff is old, and therefor we'd be REGRESSING.  Therefore regressive.  C'mon folks, it's so obvious.  Move forward, get out of the SJW past. 

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The Time Machine nothing. Art from the classical period was patronage based, and thus was frequently explicitly political. The terribly subtle political message being "I am fit to rule and those other assholes are not".

 

That's basically what Romance of the Three Kingdoms is about in its entirety.

 

"ok, but it needs a part where i dunk on ghengis kahn" 

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To be perfectly fair he was referencing that weird MRA Thor scene that we were talking about in the Feminist thread, which IS a good example of how bad inserting politics into fiction can be when done poorly.

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But that's not the point he made, it's that literally inserting politics at all is regressive. There's politics in every single piece of media. Thor was written badly but Politics as a concrete entity is the same as a scene done well. 

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Oh, he's saying dumb shit for sure. But I hadn't seen what he was responding to mentioned anywhere and assumed it was something way different (like, "it's a game about queer people!" or whatever), and was surprised to find out it was a thing I also found dumb.

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Oh, he's saying dumb shit for sure. But I hadn't seen what he was responding to mentioned anywhere and assumed it was something way different (like, "it's a game about queer people!" or whatever), and was surprised to find out it was a thing I also found dumb.

 

Yeah, I think the original example is dumb as well. Cheesy dumb, though, as opposed to Biscuit's "this is dumb because it is another example of the SJW conspiracy" rubbish. Also, we probably shouldn't go pulling on the awkward dialog/cultural reference in comics thread.

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rhfRxje.png

Is it weird that this is more or less how I've been deciding who to follow on Twitter lately?

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Since a local games personality unwittingly retweeted some innocuous BasedGamer garbage about loving games, being passionate about games and (a vaguely threatening piece of advice) to make sure nobody ever makes you feel any different about games, I noticed they have a survey up to learn what their audience values in reviews. This might be a good time to broaden their perspective with a little input, although I doubt they'll listen to it. This is, after all, a site with the official policy of "outliers with drastically different opinions from the gamer norm will be eliminated"

 

If you simply want to have a good laugh, I can recommend browsing their openly accessible, shoddily written and entirely ridiculous outline for the site.

 

My personal favorite.

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So for the past fortnight or so Mark Kern has been railing against the GG Autoblocker, calling it a free speech issue and censorship and incensed that his ability to communicate with his peers is being restricted by an algorithm. Apparently his 'both sides have good points' rhetoric in his petition was, as per usual, a feint so that he looks even-handed even though he identifies with the shitty side.

 

Someone noticed only very recently that Mark Kern isn't actually on the automatic blocklist. All those blocks he's accrued from his 'peers' have been manual.

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I think he clarified that he was mostly railing against theblockbot, which is a blocklist maintained by atheism+ people (they exist, I guess?). I didn't look into it a whole lot, just read his rebuttal to Damion Shubert and the rebuttal to the rebuttal here - http://www.zenofdesign.com/fallout-of-the-block-bot-post/

 

Edit - Wait since when does TB use language like "muh soggy knees." Did he just legit turn into a channer?

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He just drops "ironic" channer lingo into his tweets like a dad trying to be cool for his kids. Been doing it for a while.

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Edit - Wait since when does TB use language like "muh soggy knees." Did he just legit turn into a channer?

 

He just drops "ironic" channer lingo into his tweets like a dad trying to be cool for his kids. Been doing it for a while.

This is not a new development, and it's not ironic. 

 

In the very early stages of Gamergate, TB would post on 8chan (with verification that it was really him on his official social media accounts, since it's an anonymous message board) and pal around with them in the same threads where they would plan ways to harass Zoe Quinn. 

 

Do not believe any of TB's claims to neutrality. It's not ironic anon image board misogynist lingo at all. He's just straight up part of the 8chan hate mob, without any of the distance that irony would require. To my knowledge he hasn't done it with public verification in months, but when it was very transparently a conspiracy theory fueled hate mob, before it even had a thin veneer of "ethics" or "consumer revolt" TB was actively and proudly part of it. If you were a participant at that time, you knew the "ethics" was bullshit, because you were there for the threads where people talked openly about what bullshit excuse they would use to harass Zoe Quinn. I think that when he was doing it publicly, he probably relied on the (bizarrely common) assumption by a lot of anon image board users that everything they do there is secret, because no dumb ess-jay-dubyahs could possibly penetrate the the mysteries of their public, non-password protected message board with no registration of any sort required. I would be shocked if TB stopped participating, he probably just does it discreetly as a regular GG anon now. (And he said as much at the time: He prefers to post as a regular anon, but he was making an exception for moral support or whatever.)

 

Boogie did this too, although in his 8chan posts he appeared to have something resembling a conscience instead of just piling on the hate train.

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Richard Dawkins is asking Twitter what GamerGate is. GG is flocking to get him on their side.

 

Frankly they can have him. Because the guy is a hate-monger in his own ironic right, and has kinda been falling off the deep end over the last couple years as far as sanity goes.

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Also there's a guy, Peter Coffin, who has been speaking out against Richard Dawkins, and I guess GamerGate is attacking Mr. Coffin via harassing his hospitalized wife.

 

Edit - Look up the death of Jacintha Saldanha. The short of it is a radio station pranked her and she committed suicide. That is what GamerGate is trying to accomplish.

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Look up the death of Jacintha Saldanha. The short of it is a radio station pranked her and she committed suicide. That is what GamerGate is trying to accomplish.

 

As I understand it, the radio station called in to the hospital pretending to be the queen of England, said "Oh hello there, could I please speak to Kate please, my granddaughter.", and then she transferred the call to someone else who spent several minutes being pranked (my quick Google didn't turn up the content, but also failed to suggest it was particularly objectionable). After the event, the hospital didn't appear to be angry at the staff.

 

So it wasn't targeted at a specific person, it wasn't exactly harassing, and when the suicide happened, the station apologized and donated at least USD$400,000. It sounds like you're being either way too harsh on the radio station, or too soft on Gamergate.

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Yep. Gamergate, led by Slade Villena, began a campaign insisting that his wife was not real, and he was trying to scam people. The distinction of sincerity and performance is always difficult in this kind of thing, but it's probably reasonable to suppose that this was at least for the ringleaders primarily a fishing trip - an attempt to shake loose more personal information that could be used to target Coffin.

 

One real issue here is that the more impressionable Gamergaters tend to believe their own press - so, while the guys at the top, directing the mobs, are probably pretty clear about their goals, the cannon fodder actually starts believing that the cause is not just righteous but benign. So, you get someone who is genuinely convinced of the importance of establishing the non-existence of this woman they have never encountered, to the point that they feel entitled not just to phone a hospital to try to get HIPAA-protected information out of the staff, and then post that information on Twitter, but also to think that they are justified in doing so and that, once that they've established after a concerted stalking campaign that the wife was real, a donation to support her care will make all the harassment OK. And, perhaps most jaw-dropping of all, decided to do that under their real name.

 

It's a little mind-boggling - the one thing they are meant to be good at is harassment, and they even managed to mess that up.

 

[Edited to fix link.]

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Link is broken.

 

One real issue here is that the more impressionable Gamergaters tend to believe their own press - so, while the guys at the top, directing the mobs, are probably pretty clear about their goals, the cannon fodder actually starts believing that the cause is not just righteous but benign.

 

I have seen a downright surprising number of people who clearly, sincerely believe "The feminists are coming to take away our Assassin's Creeds and our GTAs!" Starting from that error, I see where they get the energy and motivation for this stuff. I've never seen sincerity from the harassment side, but I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who can make one huge, baffling mistake can make two.

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TB has been auto-fellating his channel subscriptions and literally dropped the mic by stealing a joke originally made at his expense.

https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/579868880530718721

 

I think I'm done with video games. 

 

I'm not sure what this has to do with ethics in games journalism. Maybe everything. 

 

https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/579835248608817154

 

well... I'm not REALLY done. I mean come on, they're still rad. But man...

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What upsets me about TB and a certain kind of "gamer" is that he makes that joke and he has followers lining up to kiss his arse, talking about wanting it on a shirt, etc. etc. It's the same kind of weird mentality that sees dudes on Giantbomb.com use Jeff Gerstmann's face (or whoever's) as an avatar, you even see a bit of it with Brianna Wu and others on the "anti-GG" (ugh) side (though to be fair, that is often in the form of support following harrassment, as opposed to implicit support of incitement to harrassment, which is what TB's fans are doing) and it just exhausts me. TB and his ilk mock the "SJWs" for being a hive mind manipulated by sinister figures.....

 

Just, damn it. Blatant hypocrisy is an effective strategy, I'll say that much. 

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Because it's a hive mind that doesn't see TB as sinister so much as righteous. They know exactly what's going on and the people at the top are flogging it for all its worth. 

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