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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

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.
  - srslack 12y ago
    >you nutjob Great start. >However, a significant number are people from GamerGate that are tweeting negative things at me. Name and shame the harassers. Disagreement, however, is not harassment. If I enter into a very, very large public conversation on a forum, is it harassment if people reply to me specifically because they take issue with my characterizations? >It's never one person when GamerGate is involved. That's because it's an amorphous hashtag that anyone can take up. >I don't need to tie anything to GamerGate. You did. In your blog post. You blamed the harassment of Anita, Zoe and Quinn on GamerGate. It's not mincing words. You said that GamerGate supporters were the ones harassing Anita, Wu, and Zoe. Fact of matter. It's not my cause. I'm just tired of dishonesty. Stopped playing videogames when I was 18, thanks, and don't particularly give a fuck about consumer recommendation media being fundamentally underhanded. I'll stop short of appealing to relative privation: rest assured that this isn't "my cause." Harassment in tech is an important issue. How do we deal with anonymous trolls without burning down the forest?
    - Cushman 12y ago
      I'll take it on good faith that this is not "your cause", and just point out that this comment and others you've made amounts to a far-reaching denial of 'freebsdgirl's lived experience, to say nothing of other women you aren't directly replying to. Your message is clear and unnuanced: "I don't believe you." So, two questions: First, just, why? Do you have any concrete reason to try to second-guess these specific women's first-hand experiences? Second, do you really think that's a good default response to someone who comes to us from a place of vunerability? (Is this the "forest" you're so keen to protect?)
    - geographomics 12y ago
      You are completely missing the entire point to nitpick over a hashtag. Just mentally replace "GamerGate supporters" with "#GamerGate supporters" or even "#GamerGate hashtag users" if you feel that the former is an unfair miscategorisation. The issue here is a disgraceful onslaught of harassment by an abusive mob, not their nuanced opinions on ethical breaches in games journalism.
    - 12y ago
ivanca 12y ago
Unlike the article writer who is suffering by this harassment, Anita actually feeds herself from it. Such notoriety helped her get some of his goals, including being invited to the Colbert report and other high-profile shows. This is not a FreeBSD contributor we are talking about here, this is someone who actually makes a living out of being a professional victim, this is the only thing she does for a living.
- geographomics 12y ago
  The way I see it, this appalling deluge of harassment she receives will stop only if she becomes completely silent and stops expressing her opinions and perspectives to the world. As she actually makes her living out of speaking engagements and video production (as evidenced, for example, by her lucrative Kickstarter campaign), this is clearly an undesirable 'solution' to such harassment, meaning that such abuse will remain a pernicious side effect of her feminist critiques. As this harassment seems to be a permanent fixture, she really has only two choices. She can either completely ignore it and not acknowledge it in any way whatsoever. Or she can incorporate it into her commentary and reflect on it in the context of her wider work. Given that she evaluates from a feminist perspective, the sexually demeaning and misogynist elements of her harassment are certainly relevant and on topic. So I quite disagree with your characterisation of her as a "professional victim". It seems more that she is simply making the best of a bad situation, extracting some advantage from prejudice.
  - srslack 12y ago
    So, let's set aside from the people vehemently disagreeing with what is basically someone reading TvTropes and applying feminist theory to it without conceptualizing the terms she uses, like patriarchy. For example, is this harassment? https://medium.com/@cainejw/dishonesty-feminist-frequency-part-1-fe937f6a791e https://medium.com/@cainejw/dishonesty-feminist-frequency-pa... What exactly is the harassment, and is it widespread? A school shooting threat that is being handled by the FBI? That the FBI advises not to publicize, yet Sarkeesian did so against the recommendation of the FBI? Inviting copycat harassment to materialize. As a result, she's doing the rounds on cable TV channels. I believe the fundamental point some are making here is disingenuous, that critique and disagreement is enabling harassment to flourish. That critique and disagreement is "protecting", serves to cover, the harassers.

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.
- srslack 12y ago
  >you nutjob Great start. >However, a significant number are people from GamerGate that are tweeting negative things at me. Name and shame the harassers. Disagreement, however, is not harassment. If I enter into a very, very large public conversation on a forum, is it harassment if people reply to me specifically because they take issue with my characterizations? >It's never one person when GamerGate is involved. That's because it's an amorphous hashtag that anyone can take up. >I don't need to tie anything to GamerGate. You did. In your blog post. You blamed the harassment of Anita, Zoe and Quinn on GamerGate. It's not mincing words. You said that GamerGate supporters were the ones harassing Anita, Wu, and Zoe. Fact of matter. It's not my cause. I'm just tired of dishonesty. Stopped playing videogames when I was 18, thanks, and don't particularly give a fuck about consumer recommendation media being fundamentally underhanded. I'll stop short of appealing to relative privation: rest assured that this isn't "my cause." Harassment in tech is an important issue. How do we deal with anonymous trolls without burning down the forest?
  - Cushman 12y ago
    I'll take it on good faith that this is not "your cause", and just point out that this comment and others you've made amounts to a far-reaching denial of 'freebsdgirl's lived experience, to say nothing of other women you aren't directly replying to. Your message is clear and unnuanced: "I don't believe you." So, two questions: First, just, why? Do you have any concrete reason to try to second-guess these specific women's first-hand experiences? Second, do you really think that's a good default response to someone who comes to us from a place of vunerability? (Is this the "forest" you're so keen to protect?)
  - geographomics 12y ago
    You are completely missing the entire point to nitpick over a hashtag. Just mentally replace "GamerGate supporters" with "#GamerGate supporters" or even "#GamerGate hashtag users" if you feel that the former is an unfair miscategorisation. The issue here is a disgraceful onslaught of harassment by an abusive mob, not their nuanced opinions on ethical breaches in games journalism.
  - 12y ago

ivanca 12y ago

Unlike the article writer who is suffering by this harassment, Anita actually feeds herself from it. Such notoriety helped her get some of his goals, including being invited to the Colbert report and other high-profile shows. This is not a FreeBSD contributor we are talking about here, this is someone who actually makes a living out of being a professional victim, this is the only thing she does for a living.

geographomics 12y ago
The way I see it, this appalling deluge of harassment she receives will stop only if she becomes completely silent and stops expressing her opinions and perspectives to the world. As she actually makes her living out of speaking engagements and video production (as evidenced, for example, by her lucrative Kickstarter campaign), this is clearly an undesirable 'solution' to such harassment, meaning that such abuse will remain a pernicious side effect of her feminist critiques. As this harassment seems to be a permanent fixture, she really has only two choices. She can either completely ignore it and not acknowledge it in any way whatsoever. Or she can incorporate it into her commentary and reflect on it in the context of her wider work. Given that she evaluates from a feminist perspective, the sexually demeaning and misogynist elements of her harassment are certainly relevant and on topic. So I quite disagree with your characterisation of her as a "professional victim". It seems more that she is simply making the best of a bad situation, extracting some advantage from prejudice.
- srslack 12y ago
  So, let's set aside from the people vehemently disagreeing with what is basically someone reading TvTropes and applying feminist theory to it without conceptualizing the terms she uses, like patriarchy. For example, is this harassment? https://medium.com/@cainejw/dishonesty-feminist-frequency-part-1-fe937f6a791e https://medium.com/@cainejw/dishonesty-feminist-frequency-pa... What exactly is the harassment, and is it widespread? A school shooting threat that is being handled by the FBI? That the FBI advises not to publicize, yet Sarkeesian did so against the recommendation of the FBI? Inviting copycat harassment to materialize. As a result, she's doing the rounds on cable TV channels. I believe the fundamental point some are making here is disingenuous, that critique and disagreement is enabling harassment to flourish. That critique and disagreement is "protecting", serves to cover, the harassers.