5 ms·

You had been target of completely sexist discrimination and many of the perpetrators should be on Jail, but Annita Sarkeesian and a few like her are a completel

by ivanca 12y ago

You had been target of completely sexist discrimination and many of the perpetrators should be on Jail, but Annita Sarkeesian and a few like her are a completely different subject: http://youtu.be/WuRSaLZidWI http://youtu.be/WuRSaLZidWI We always look for people with the same motivations and the same struggle than us so I blame no one who relates to her.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Anita Sarkeesian isn't a completely different. She is a woman in tech (more specifically, video games) who is harassed for speaking out about sexism in video games. Perhaps some of her essays have inaccuracies, but none of this justifies the horrible abuse she gets on a constant basis. Also, Thunderf00t's videos on her seem to focus on single details as if her entire argument would fall down, when it wouldn't, and by repeating something enough times until it seems to be true. I'm hardly the best person to talk about these, though.
- geographomics 12y ago
  Totally agree. Personally I think Anita provides quite a fresh look at the portrayal of women in video games and other pop culture, and it's interesting to hear her perspective even if one disagrees with it. It just seems thoroughly unhinged to mount a campaign of sexual harassment and death threats in response, rather than countering with a reasoned line of argument, or simply just shrugging it off.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    I haven't found Anita's videos particularly compelling as unique analysis, but that's become an utterly tertiary issue to the completely insane crap which has happened to her, and started happening, at the mere idea that she would make them.
    - ivanca 12y ago
      No, you don't understand, the crap that has "happened to her" is how she is making a living out of it, unlike the poster of this article and anyone actually suffering from it.
- rmc 12y ago
  Gamers for a long time wanted people to treat games as art, as high class, as legitimate forms of media and entertainment, like how they treat books, tv shows and films. But people deconstruct and criticise films and books, and when people started doing that with games, the gamers got aggressive and violent.
  - pjscott 12y ago
    "The gamers" got aggressive and violent? You're tarring a large and varied group of people based on the actions of a vocal few.
- ivanca 12y ago
  No, this is not about some inaccuracies, she many times has declared to have some very extreme perceptions: "Not a coincidence it’s always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture." Source: http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/26/on-friday-anita-sarkeesian-called-out-toxic-masculinity-on-twitter-heres-what-happened-next/ http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/26/on-friday-anita-sar...
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Is that really an extreme statement?
    - ivanca 12y ago
      Yes it is. Psychotic and mental illness are very serious issues, and trivializing them as caused by "masculinity" is as sick as it gets.
      - geographomics 12y ago
        Why do you claim that this is trivialising mental illness? The potential influence of culture on mental health is surely a topic of some pertinence and interest.
      - wpietri 12y ago
        Is your claim that there is zero correlation between violence and culturally constructed notions of masculinity? Or that there is no relationship between guns and cultural notions of masculinity? Because both of those things seem obviously wrong to me. For example, I love "guy movies" with guns and explosions and macho nonsense. But it is enormously gendered. Take the movie Salt, where Angelina Jolie played the sort of role typically reserved for guys. There was enormous discussion about having a woman in a role like that. The script was substantially reworked because a woman took the title role. Neither would have happened if this stuff weren't heavily gendered. Also, psychosis is very serious, but are you really asserting that all mass shooters were experiencing psychotic breaks at the time of their actions? I've only seen a couple of psychotic breaks up close, but those poor people hardly seemed capable of planning the purchase of a happy meal, let alone making and and carrying out a carefully crafted, months-long plan to murder a bunch of people.
geographomics 12y ago
Could you elaborate on what you mean by a completely different subject? One possible reading of what you are saying is that the harassment of Anita and others with feminist perspectives is justified, but perhaps that is not quite what you intended.
- srslack 12y ago
  The 'harassment' of Anita is the result of a few trolls. Gamergate even identified one troll, a Brazilian videogame 'journalist.' Death threats were sent to Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn by the GNAA. http://theralphretort.com/gnaa-trolls-admit-gamergate-sabotage/ http://theralphretort.com/gnaa-trolls-admit-gamergate-sabota... https://archive.today/gTA9s https://archive.today/gTA9s https://web.archive.org/web/20140913162412/https://twitter.com/TheQuinnspiracy https://web.archive.org/web/20140913162412/https://twitter.c... The problem lies in equating a twitter hashtag with several trolls. GNAA gets off on infuriating all parties. Where is the proof that these trolls are GamerGate supporters? Randi links to none.
  - freebsdgirl 12y ago
    I am really so very tired of seeing people say this. I'm going to explain this once, and I'm only doing this here because despite my reservations over the community, I know that HN is generally a place where people are intelligent enough to realize that words mean things, and those meanings don't usually change because we have feelings. Harassment does not just mean threats. Harassment is not limited to words that contain threats of rape, death, violence, or some other kind of ruin. Harassment means "aggressive pressure or intimidation." Look it up. It's in the dictionary. I have a directory that contains over 70k json files. Each file contains a tweet that mentions my name. These files were generated over the past 6 weeks. Not every mention is negative, nor is every mention about GamerGate. However, a significant number are people from GamerGate that are tweeting negative things at me. Every morning, I would wake up, make coffee, and plop down in front of my computer to see what I had missed. This has been my routine for as long as I can remember. Despite the long-term harassment I've faced, it was not until GamerGate that I would wake up to a seemingly unending stream of hate in my twitter mentions. It's not one person. It's never one person when GamerGate is involved. It's the whole goddamn mob. This is why I wrote ggautoblocker - because there is no block button for a mob. What precisely would you call it when hundreds or even thousands of people direct so much of their time and energy to repeatedly contacting a single person who has never talked to them before with messages of hate, insults, attacks on credibility, and threats of getting that person fired? I would call that harassment. I might even argue that that mob harassment is worse than more serious threats coming from a single person. I don't need to prove anything to you. I don't need to tie anything to GamerGate. That's your hang up, not mine. If I thought you weren't so biased that you would warp data to meet your own ends, I might give you the full list of tweet IDs (distributing the json itself would be against ToS) in the name science. You care far more about your cause than you do harassment in tech, and that's telling. You came here to argue a hashtag that only matters to the people that use it. This is bigger than you.

by ivanca 12y ago

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

Anita Sarkeesian isn't a completely different. She is a woman in tech (more specifically, video games) who is harassed for speaking out about sexism in video games. Perhaps some of her essays have inaccuracies, but none of this justifies the horrible abuse she gets on a constant basis. Also, Thunderf00t's videos on her seem to focus on single details as if her entire argument would fall down, when it wouldn't, and by repeating something enough times until it seems to be true. I'm hardly the best person to talk about these, though.

geographomics 12y ago
Totally agree. Personally I think Anita provides quite a fresh look at the portrayal of women in video games and other pop culture, and it's interesting to hear her perspective even if one disagrees with it. It just seems thoroughly unhinged to mount a campaign of sexual harassment and death threats in response, rather than countering with a reasoned line of argument, or simply just shrugging it off.
- XorNot 12y ago
  I haven't found Anita's videos particularly compelling as unique analysis, but that's become an utterly tertiary issue to the completely insane crap which has happened to her, and started happening, at the mere idea that she would make them.
  - ivanca 12y ago
    No, you don't understand, the crap that has "happened to her" is how she is making a living out of it, unlike the poster of this article and anyone actually suffering from it.
rmc 12y ago
Gamers for a long time wanted people to treat games as art, as high class, as legitimate forms of media and entertainment, like how they treat books, tv shows and films. But people deconstruct and criticise films and books, and when people started doing that with games, the gamers got aggressive and violent.
- pjscott 12y ago
  "The gamers" got aggressive and violent? You're tarring a large and varied group of people based on the actions of a vocal few.
ivanca 12y ago
No, this is not about some inaccuracies, she many times has declared to have some very extreme perceptions: "Not a coincidence it’s always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture." Source: http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/26/on-friday-anita-sarkeesian-called-out-toxic-masculinity-on-twitter-heres-what-happened-next/ http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/26/on-friday-anita-sar...
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Is that really an extreme statement?
  - ivanca 12y ago
    Yes it is. Psychotic and mental illness are very serious issues, and trivializing them as caused by "masculinity" is as sick as it gets.
    - geographomics 12y ago
      Why do you claim that this is trivialising mental illness? The potential influence of culture on mental health is surely a topic of some pertinence and interest.
    - wpietri 12y ago
      Is your claim that there is zero correlation between violence and culturally constructed notions of masculinity? Or that there is no relationship between guns and cultural notions of masculinity? Because both of those things seem obviously wrong to me. For example, I love "guy movies" with guns and explosions and macho nonsense. But it is enormously gendered. Take the movie Salt, where Angelina Jolie played the sort of role typically reserved for guys. There was enormous discussion about having a woman in a role like that. The script was substantially reworked because a woman took the title role. Neither would have happened if this stuff weren't heavily gendered. Also, psychosis is very serious, but are you really asserting that all mass shooters were experiencing psychotic breaks at the time of their actions? I've only seen a couple of psychotic breaks up close, but those poor people hardly seemed capable of planning the purchase of a happy meal, let alone making and and carrying out a carefully crafted, months-long plan to murder a bunch of people.

geographomics 12y ago

Could you elaborate on what you mean by a completely different subject? One possible reading of what you are saying is that the harassment of Anita and others with feminist perspectives is justified, but perhaps that is not quite what you intended.

srslack 12y ago
The 'harassment' of Anita is the result of a few trolls. Gamergate even identified one troll, a Brazilian videogame 'journalist.' Death threats were sent to Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn by the GNAA. http://theralphretort.com/gnaa-trolls-admit-gamergate-sabotage/ http://theralphretort.com/gnaa-trolls-admit-gamergate-sabota... https://archive.today/gTA9s https://archive.today/gTA9s https://web.archive.org/web/20140913162412/https://twitter.com/TheQuinnspiracy https://web.archive.org/web/20140913162412/https://twitter.c... The problem lies in equating a twitter hashtag with several trolls. GNAA gets off on infuriating all parties. Where is the proof that these trolls are GamerGate supporters? Randi links to none.
- freebsdgirl 12y ago
  I am really so very tired of seeing people say this. I'm going to explain this once, and I'm only doing this here because despite my reservations over the community, I know that HN is generally a place where people are intelligent enough to realize that words mean things, and those meanings don't usually change because we have feelings. Harassment does not just mean threats. Harassment is not limited to words that contain threats of rape, death, violence, or some other kind of ruin. Harassment means "aggressive pressure or intimidation." Look it up. It's in the dictionary. I have a directory that contains over 70k json files. Each file contains a tweet that mentions my name. These files were generated over the past 6 weeks. Not every mention is negative, nor is every mention about GamerGate. However, a significant number are people from GamerGate that are tweeting negative things at me. Every morning, I would wake up, make coffee, and plop down in front of my computer to see what I had missed. This has been my routine for as long as I can remember. Despite the long-term harassment I've faced, it was not until GamerGate that I would wake up to a seemingly unending stream of hate in my twitter mentions. It's not one person. It's never one person when GamerGate is involved. It's the whole goddamn mob. This is why I wrote ggautoblocker - because there is no block button for a mob. What precisely would you call it when hundreds or even thousands of people direct so much of their time and energy to repeatedly contacting a single person who has never talked to them before with messages of hate, insults, attacks on credibility, and threats of getting that person fired? I would call that harassment. I might even argue that that mob harassment is worse than more serious threats coming from a single person. I don't need to prove anything to you. I don't need to tie anything to GamerGate. That's your hang up, not mine. If I thought you weren't so biased that you would warp data to meet your own ends, I might give you the full list of tweet IDs (distributing the json itself would be against ToS) in the name science. You care far more about your cause than you do harassment in tech, and that's telling. You came here to argue a hashtag that only matters to the people that use it. This is bigger than you.