9 ms·

> Regardless of what you think of her, you have to admit she's on the far end of the political spectrum. "Women should be treated as equals" and "harrasment is

by lambic 11y ago

> Regardless of what you think of her, you have to admit she's on the far end of the political spectrum. "Women should be treated as equals" and "harrasment is bad" are opinions on the far end of the political spectrum? I think I just became an extremist.

exstudent2 11y ago
Well, this definitely isn't the place to get into a debate about her views but they are more radical than you suggest. She has every right to think this way, but to claim that she's middle of the road is disingenuous. Here are some samples of fairly aggressive feminist thinking that I don't think the mainstream would go along with: https://archive.is/wmzhs https://archive.is/wmzhs https://archive.is/WJU15 https://archive.is/WJU15 https://archive.is/0snds https://archive.is/0snds https://archive.is/Fkals https://archive.is/Fkals While it's undeniable that she did receive some harassment, she also has labeled anyone who disagrees with her as harassers and misogynists. She's also famous for coining the phrase "Listen and believe" which is in direct opposition to "innocent until proven guilty". So yeah, I'd consider her pretty radical.
- tptacek 11y ago
  The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games? Your initial argument about this person is facile. A pretty solid chunk of the "mainstream" throughout the world would also have problems with the "radical politics" of GLAAD. It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread. You should cut your losses on this unproductive subthread, which, as you clearly knew when you started it, can't possibly remain on-topic.
  - exstudent2 11y ago
    > The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games? She's a video game critic. > It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread. I'm not familiar with all of the other members. Feminist Frequency stood out because they're an organization I know about.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      That's the point. Everyone's got advocacy organizations that disturb them. Plenty of Americans and Europeans will have problems with Islamic advocacy, too.
      - exstudent2 11y ago
        My point is that regardless of where someone sits on the political spectrum (even if I agree with them), they shouldn't have input on what should be an open platform for free speech. Twitter is most obviously not that at this point, but the language in this announcement claims that they are making these changes to help grassroots activism. What they really mean is grassroots activism that they agree with.
        ultramancool 11y ago
        Yeah, that's definitely my biggest concern - that this will basically be used as a partisan political tool for head bashing. Hopefully they've got some civil libertarian type organizations in the mix that can add some balance to this.
        protomyth 11y ago
        > Hopefully they've got some civil libertarian type organizations in the mix that can add some balance to this. I don't see one in the mix. I do see some suicide organizations that would be helpful in a different context[1]. I am still thinking what I should think of this: http://dangerousspeech.org/guidelines http://dangerousspeech.org/guidelines 1) I cannot help but think of the lost opportunity in social media of addressing people who feel "outside". Things like this won't help at all (and will probably hurt), but it seems the greater reach in media and data collection could actually help find people to engage with so they don't slip into suicidal spirals. I guess there is no profit in it, and history does show some scary chapters when such things are done by people with poor intentions / power motives.
        comex 11y ago
        > My point is that regardless of where someone sits on the political spectrum (even if I agree with them), they shouldn't have input on what should be an open platform for free speech. In other words, you're saying no one should have input on it? There should be no rules at all? Twitter is fairly unusual even among social networks, and different from most "normal" websites, in that it makes it relatively easy for random strangers to contact semi-famous people. Most of the time this is a great thing. But if you're annoyed by speech on, say, stormfront dot org, you can avoid it by not going there. If people are saying horrible things to you on Twitter, you can avoid it by blocking them - which works up until the point you become infamous enough among a specific subcommunity that a constant stream of random people show up in your mentions, most of them relatively innocuous (but annoying), some of them nastier than that. (And it's not like only misguided people have large numbers of haters - regardless of what you believe about Sarkeesian in particular, a look at mainstream politics is enough to refute that.) Personally, I would prefer a decentralized social network where different subcommunities could use software to define their own interaction policies, much like the Internet as a whole. But Twitter is a centralized service; most users use the official apps (as is required to get the full feature list) and must rely on Twitter's centralized management to filter out both spam and abuse. There's no way around it short of a radical overhaul of the service. I would support adding civil libertarian organizations to the mix of advisors, as a sibling comment mentions, for a variety of reasons. One reason is similar to why we have an adversarial system in law - if most people support an idea, such as free speech, in principle, but nobody is really dedicated to defending it and the easiest way to accomplish other goals is to compromise it, the slippery slope can easily become steep without people really noticing. Another is just that it's easy for these issues to be overpoliticized, especially when you have a physical presence in Silicon Valley. But all that said, there must be rules. If you don't like that, go somewhere else. Who knows, maybe GNU Social will take off.
- lambic 11y ago
  All those samples seem like valid critiques of the portrayal of women in video games. How is this extreme or "aggressive"?
  - cyphar 11y ago
    They aren't, mainly because it's painstakingly clear she hasn't played the games (or whoever writes her script hasn't played the games). She talks about what happens in the first 5 minutes and pretends that <female character that you cared about dies> is sexism.
- dang 11y ago
  > this definitely isn't the place to get into a debate about her views Then why did you introduce the topic, in violation of the HN guidelines? Please take a good look at the inundation you triggered and don't do it again.
  - exstudent2 11y ago
    I was trying to respond directly to the question I was asked. So I know better next time, which guideline was I violating? Feminist Frequency is a council member so it seems pointing that out is on topic.
    - dang 11y ago
      The one about classic flamewar topics.
      - exstudent2 11y ago
        Understood. It's a bit unfortunate that we can't practically discuss a company the size of Twitter adopting a very specific set of controversial political beliefs. I agree that there's probably no way to mention it without starting a flame war though.
cyphar 11y ago
She doesn't believe in the concept of innocent until proven guilty (investigation into rape accusations is immoral, just sentence the male). Not to mention that she has such a broad defintion of terms like "rape" that it's quite disgusting to see her heralded as a defender of women's rights. And her video game criticisms (which is her whole thing) are so far removed from the actual content she's reviewing (inventing anti-women tropes that don't exist) that I'm not sure she knows what she's reviewing. There's lots of other bullshit (she's literally the mouthpiece of Macintosh, has lied to all of her backers and has cried wolf about harassment that didn't happen of she invented). So yes. She's an extremist, and I'd argue she's barely a feminist (if you use the "equality for women" to mean that women and men should be treated equally and not women t treated "more equally" than men).

by lambic 11y ago

exstudent2 11y ago

Well, this definitely isn't the place to get into a debate about her views but they are more radical than you suggest. She has every right to think this way, but to claim that she's middle of the road is disingenuous. Here are some samples of fairly aggressive feminist thinking that I don't think the mainstream would go along with: https://archive.is/wmzhs https://archive.is/wmzhs https://archive.is/WJU15 https://archive.is/WJU15 https://archive.is/0snds https://archive.is/0snds https://archive.is/Fkals https://archive.is/Fkals While it's undeniable that she did receive some harassment, she also has labeled anyone who disagrees with her as harassers and misogynists. She's also famous for coining the phrase "Listen and believe" which is in direct opposition to "innocent until proven guilty". So yeah, I'd consider her pretty radical.

tptacek 11y ago
The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games? Your initial argument about this person is facile. A pretty solid chunk of the "mainstream" throughout the world would also have problems with the "radical politics" of GLAAD. It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread. You should cut your losses on this unproductive subthread, which, as you clearly knew when you started it, can't possibly remain on-topic.
- exstudent2 11y ago
  > The best "radical" quotes you have from this person are criticisms of video games? She's a video game critic. > It is fine for you to disagree with any or all of the organizations on this advisory committee. It is less fine for you to pick out individual members of it and try to make your problems with them the subject of the whole thread. I'm not familiar with all of the other members. Feminist Frequency stood out because they're an organization I know about.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    That's the point. Everyone's got advocacy organizations that disturb them. Plenty of Americans and Europeans will have problems with Islamic advocacy, too.
    - exstudent2 11y ago
      My point is that regardless of where someone sits on the political spectrum (even if I agree with them), they shouldn't have input on what should be an open platform for free speech. Twitter is most obviously not that at this point, but the language in this announcement claims that they are making these changes to help grassroots activism. What they really mean is grassroots activism that they agree with.
      - ultramancool 11y ago
        Yeah, that's definitely my biggest concern - that this will basically be used as a partisan political tool for head bashing. Hopefully they've got some civil libertarian type organizations in the mix that can add some balance to this.
        protomyth 11y ago
        > Hopefully they've got some civil libertarian type organizations in the mix that can add some balance to this. I don't see one in the mix. I do see some suicide organizations that would be helpful in a different context[1]. I am still thinking what I should think of this: http://dangerousspeech.org/guidelines http://dangerousspeech.org/guidelines 1) I cannot help but think of the lost opportunity in social media of addressing people who feel "outside". Things like this won't help at all (and will probably hurt), but it seems the greater reach in media and data collection could actually help find people to engage with so they don't slip into suicidal spirals. I guess there is no profit in it, and history does show some scary chapters when such things are done by people with poor intentions / power motives.
      - comex 11y ago
        > My point is that regardless of where someone sits on the political spectrum (even if I agree with them), they shouldn't have input on what should be an open platform for free speech. In other words, you're saying no one should have input on it? There should be no rules at all? Twitter is fairly unusual even among social networks, and different from most "normal" websites, in that it makes it relatively easy for random strangers to contact semi-famous people. Most of the time this is a great thing. But if you're annoyed by speech on, say, stormfront dot org, you can avoid it by not going there. If people are saying horrible things to you on Twitter, you can avoid it by blocking them - which works up until the point you become infamous enough among a specific subcommunity that a constant stream of random people show up in your mentions, most of them relatively innocuous (but annoying), some of them nastier than that. (And it's not like only misguided people have large numbers of haters - regardless of what you believe about Sarkeesian in particular, a look at mainstream politics is enough to refute that.) Personally, I would prefer a decentralized social network where different subcommunities could use software to define their own interaction policies, much like the Internet as a whole. But Twitter is a centralized service; most users use the official apps (as is required to get the full feature list) and must rely on Twitter's centralized management to filter out both spam and abuse. There's no way around it short of a radical overhaul of the service. I would support adding civil libertarian organizations to the mix of advisors, as a sibling comment mentions, for a variety of reasons. One reason is similar to why we have an adversarial system in law - if most people support an idea, such as free speech, in principle, but nobody is really dedicated to defending it and the easiest way to accomplish other goals is to compromise it, the slippery slope can easily become steep without people really noticing. Another is just that it's easy for these issues to be overpoliticized, especially when you have a physical presence in Silicon Valley. But all that said, there must be rules. If you don't like that, go somewhere else. Who knows, maybe GNU Social will take off.
lambic 11y ago
All those samples seem like valid critiques of the portrayal of women in video games. How is this extreme or "aggressive"?
- cyphar 11y ago
  They aren't, mainly because it's painstakingly clear she hasn't played the games (or whoever writes her script hasn't played the games). She talks about what happens in the first 5 minutes and pretends that <female character that you cared about dies> is sexism.
dang 11y ago
> this definitely isn't the place to get into a debate about her views Then why did you introduce the topic, in violation of the HN guidelines? Please take a good look at the inundation you triggered and don't do it again.
- exstudent2 11y ago
  I was trying to respond directly to the question I was asked. So I know better next time, which guideline was I violating? Feminist Frequency is a council member so it seems pointing that out is on topic.
  - dang 11y ago
    The one about classic flamewar topics.
    - exstudent2 11y ago
      Understood. It's a bit unfortunate that we can't practically discuss a company the size of Twitter adopting a very specific set of controversial political beliefs. I agree that there's probably no way to mention it without starting a flame war though.

cyphar 11y ago

She doesn't believe in the concept of innocent until proven guilty (investigation into rape accusations is immoral, just sentence the male). Not to mention that she has such a broad defintion of terms like "rape" that it's quite disgusting to see her heralded as a defender of women's rights. And her video game criticisms (which is her whole thing) are so far removed from the actual content she's reviewing (inventing anti-women tropes that don't exist) that I'm not sure she knows what she's reviewing. There's lots of other bullshit (she's literally the mouthpiece of Macintosh, has lied to all of her backers and has cried wolf about harassment that didn't happen of she invented). So yes. She's an extremist, and I'd argue she's barely a feminist (if you use the "equality for women" to mean that women and men should be treated equally and not women t treated "more equally" than men).