problem_redditor
No bio...
User ID: 1083
I agree that the mainstream consensus view of GamerGate is almost entirely false - but I don't see how you would go about changing it, or how that's likely to be a particularly beneficial use of time compared to other issues one could work on?
I'm not saying I'm personally going to change the mainstream consensus view in its totality. For some further context about why this exists, I did research on this "9 year old drama" specifically to try and present a different perspective to someone in my personal life who was exposed to the culture war at least in part through Gamergate and had certain preconceptions around the topic that weren't quite correct, and who also watches Dan Olson's channel - and this is drama that Olson was involved in and is relevant to an appraisal of his character. Trying to convince someone in meatspace is more valuable than trying to convince someone on some anonymous forum who doesn't know you. I decided that since I'd already done the work some of it should be put up since someone might find it useful. If it really invokes so much ire that this gets brought up at all, I won't put it up here and I'll exclusively write about other things.
Moreover, I'd suggest that posts like the top-level one here, to the eyes of anyone who isn't already deeply enmeshed in GamerGate-related drama, are going to come off as obsessive and weird. No casual observer would read that post and change their mind on GamerGate. It's too bogged down in trivial detail, and frankly comes off as a bit too close to cyber-stalking for comfort.
Frankly, being "obsessive and weird" is the only way I've ever gotten anywhere when it comes to politics, and when I'm writing here, I'm not typically writing for casual observers nor am I writing for the purpose of optimising my optics. I'm writing to make sure everyone can independently confirm every claim that's been made for themselves. A strong sense of skepticism and the ability to get yourself to sift through an impressive amount of trivial details almost no one would care about is the only way you're going to be able to handle the sheer wave of terrible reporting and misinformation that's thrown your way, and if that comes off as strange to some people, so be it. I suppose I've typical-minded too much, but I also don't feel like there's anything wrong with trying to get a full and comprehensive picture of how a situation played out.
I'm not the person who made the claim about the pedo/LGBT overlap, and I didn't actually set out to make a point about that (though I will say NAMBLA was a bit too close for comfort with the early LGBT movement, I wouldn't necessarily think it automatically discredits all LGBT politics).
Rather, the point I was personally trying to prove was more defensible - just to point out that many of the people who engaged in anti-GG (including some very prominent ones) were willing to provide cover for terrible behaviour while at the same time being moralistic crusaders who claimed that those who would disagree with them were bigoted. Sarah Nyberg herself is less interesting than the reaction to her. You'll see people bring up Gamergate even today in order to make a generalised point about how "the alt-right" functions or something or other (like an Ian Danskin video I addressed here or this Kotaku article posted just on Tuesday), and having these examples of undeniably bad behaviour on the anti-GG side (which seem to have been quite widespread) helps to counter that.
You shouldn't concede ground to your opponents or let them define the narrative, even concerning culture wars that are long over, because these things can be used against you. And having many little examples like this can help tip someone's perceptions of who it is they've been associating with. I'm not saying this alone is a bombshell piece of evidence and it's not like I'm stating that you can "discredit" all of progressivism with one instance of misconduct, it's just something that taken jointly with plenty of other evidence (some of which was outlined in my other post on the topic) can help to demonstrate an overarching point.
At the moment, Nyberg has 13.3K followers on Twitter, which is a fairly high number considering her last post was in 2018. The people who defended her, such as Dan Olson, are fairly prominent even now (Olson is a fairly popular YouTube documentarian nowadays, who's roughly BreadTube-adjacent). He accused 8chan of hosting CP and yet changed his twitter handle to include "Butts" in solidarity with Nyberg.
Even granting the idea that she was, it would be wrong to say that the entire story was suppressed.
I'm not saying the entire story was suppressed, rather that the reporting about this subject has been slanted and that the media has been silent about this in a way they wouldn't be if the shoe was on the other foot. For you to consider something as "suppression" it basically needs to be scrubbed from the internet, which clearly isn't the situation we're talking about here.
This is rather something that hasn't reached the mainstream because no mainstream news sources will report on it in any honest way, and the ones that do report on it from what I've seen have simply painted Nyberg as the victim, such as this Quartz article that alleges that Gamergate spread "baseless accusations of pedophilia" about Nyberg. The Young Turks were willing to cover her, but not to talk about her pedophilia - to talk about her Twitter bot. It seems that the mainstream certainly doesn't consider her insignificant enough not to report on at all, rather they would rather just not report on her in the "wrong" way.
I'm not saying she was as nearly as big a deal as Sarkeesian or Wu, but this situation most certainly wasn't a complete nothingburger, either.
I mean, yeah? Is that surprising? Why would a mainstream org even care? Progressive hypocrisy isn't that hard to find and it's over some nobody? Even if I ran the most anti-woke paper in existence, I probably wouldn't dive into the specifics of one pedophile and her progressive defenders from the Gamergate era.
The mainstream tends to love excavating initially niche things and making them into huge stories, as long as it conforms to their preexisting ideological bent. They kind of control what is niche and what's not, and typically the things that get dragged into the spotlight are culture wars they feel they have a good likelihood of winning. The media dictates the cultural reach of a story as much as it responds to it.
In addition, I would like to record as many instances of progressive misconduct I can find. It's not just the magnitude of these instances that matter - the frequency at which it occurs also matters when you're trying to convince normies of your point, and finding more than a few fairly egregious instances and being able to document them exhaustively - niche or not - does help you. And some of the people who supported Nyberg - such as Leigh Alexander and especially Dan Olson of Folding Ideas - are not niche.
That's fair, but I don't think this is the best example of how Gamergate was poorly treated. The nicheness of the story itself overshadows the "progressive hypocrisy/culture-warring" aspects, imo.
I mean, I agree, but I've already covered the main thrust of my point as to how Gamergate was poorly treated in my previous top-level thread about it and don't really care to write about what I've already addressed a second time. This just builds on that. The issue is that at this point I've covered most of the major, mainstream topics in the culture war that I have strong opinions about. I am very much a specialist with a very limited scope who espouses the approach in this blogpost: "So if you want to stop being an NPC, simply say “I don’t know” to all the matters that don’t concern you. And that will give you the time to not be an NPC on all the matters that do".
I've addressed the topics I care about (mainly identity-progressivism) ad nauseam in many forums IRL and online for years, and so most of the new information that I'm coming across is necessarily going to concern less mainstream topics and situations. Of course, I definitely don't expect everyone to care about the minutiae of the culture wars I look into. But this is a weird forum with weird people that may or may not find it interesting. If there's a place on the internet at all it belongs to, I think it's this one.
Nyberg appears to be some small-time individual who got 15 minutes of fame and has moved on to doing whatever she does now. Her twitter feed is mostly about plugging her own stream/Patreon, quote-tweeting some lesbian novel bot, and talking about trans politics from a clearly pro-trans perspective (and I mean in the normie online progressive way).
I definitely agree that at the moment she's not someone with a huge amount of cultural reach (she did have more during Gamergate), I posted this more because it's probably the most stark illustration of just how unprincipled a good amount of the progressives engaging in that specific culture war were.
But it's worth considering that when you search up Nyberg on Google, you get her twitter, a LinkedIn profile, and then a Medium piece which clearly comes down on the side that Sarah is an actual pedophile. DuckDuckGo straight up links to the "Why you shouldn't stand with Sarah Nyberg" piece at number 1.
Interesting, it doesn't show up like that for me on Google. The very first result is Intelligencer, which links to this article speaking with a good amount of mirth about Sarah Nyberg's Twitter bot that exists to troll the "alt-right" online. The second result is to her Twitter. Further down, articles about the whole debacle do show up, and I will concede that the information about Nyberg being a pedophile is on the internet and can be found - but only as long as you know about Sarah Nyberg in the first place, and almost always from non-mainstream sources.
My comment at the end of the post was more to do with the fact that any memory of her 15 minutes of fame (and how she was defended by the progressive camp) doesn't really exist much on the internet. When you search up "Gamergate" you often get long lists of what the mainstream perceives that Gamergate did wrong, and meanwhile things that the anti side did that's objectionable - even something as objectionable as this - has been mostly scrubbed from the general discourse around the topic. I've seen people in real life that know absolutely nothing about it, and essentially just parrot stock anti-GG talking points from videos and articles they've found around, and often they are surprised when I tell them these things. Hell, my dad at one point read something about the topic and I had to disabuse him of certain notions about how it all actually played out.
It's not impossible to find sources that are congenial to Gamergate, but they're a definite minority, and represent the parts of the internet that are frequented almost exclusively by the terminally online.
When Progressives Defend Pedophiles: The Curious Case of Sarah Nyberg
In my previous thread about Gamergate where I challenged a speech Ian Danskin made on the topic for UC Merced, I said it would probably be the last thing I would write about the incident for a long while, and this is certainly flouting that.
But this writeup is not about the core issues of Gamergate. Rather, it's to highlight an egregious instance of misconduct from the progressive camp that is far too damning not to write about. It's definitely old news now, but sometimes this stuff needs to be dusted off so it won't languish in some archived page in the asshole of the internet where progressives would undoubtedly rather have it stay.
So who is Sarah Nyberg?
Sarah Nyberg (srhbutts on Twitter) is a trans woman who became a prominent anti-Gamergate figure through constant attacks on Gamergaters on various forums and articles. Included among the things she's participated in is repeatedly dragging 8chan through the dirt over accusations of child porn and for being an "active pedophile network".
However, just 6-10 years before her involvement in anti-GG, Nyberg herself was an open pedophile who actively defended pedophilia, posted borderline CP on the forums of FFShrine (a site she ran), and also actively lusted after her 8 year old cousin, whom she called her little girlfriend (often abbreviated to "lgf"). This hugely came out in the mainstream when a series of videos was made about her by TheLeoPirate, and culminated in an article being made on Breitbart about her... leanings.
The original "slam dunk" evidence against Nyberg came from a series of WebCite archive pages, which came directly from FFShrine. Unfortunately, they can no longer be accessed - there is a reason for this, but I'll address that later. For now, just keep in mind that the primary trove of evidence that was initially used to indict Nyberg is currently missing, but they are online in various forms, in screenshots, videos and so on. Regardless, one can start building an extremely strong case for her pedophilia - and can do so even without the benefit of these sources.
The first part involves proving that the "Sarah" on FFShrine was in fact Sarah Nyberg, and that's a trivial task, since FFShrine was outright registered under her name. In addition, here she is on her main Twitter account, openly admitting to it being her site.
GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over.
Oops.
In addition, Sarah has had more accounts under different names. The email her site was registered under was called retrogradesnowcone.gmail. com, and you can see a user called retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums admitting they run FFShrine. And just to properly cement that retrogradesnowcone is Sarah, here is Sarah on Twitter approvingly posting a Ravishly article with her face in it with the caption "my face is out in the open", and here is a Hotornot profile called retrogradesnowcone with the very same photo of Sarah's face in it. Sarah also shares her pictures under her handle retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums here.
In short, srhbutts on Twitter, Sarah on FFShrine, and retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums are all the same person: Sarah Nyberg.
To begin, let's look at the logs on FFShrine. While the WebCite pages directly archiving the chat logs from FFShrine are not directly accessible anymore, there are images on the internet, taken from there, which are still up. One can also confirm that these WebCite archives contained in that pastebin page were directly archived from 2005 FFShrine logs when combing archive.is for archives of the WebCite pages.
Among the images of the WebCite logs floating around, there are a few which are quite incriminating. Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat". Here, Nyberg says again "Dana is my cousin that I miss very much <3" and notes she doesn't know what to tell her cousin's parents to make it not seem weird. Then states she wants to kiss her, although don't worry, she wouldn't unless her cousin wants to learn how to kiss or something. Here, Nyberg confirms that Dana is 8 years old and here, Nyberg admits Dana gives her erections.
In addition to this, a former user of FFShrine, Roph, also uploaded further leaks of FFShrine IRC chats to his own website, slyph. org. Although slyph. org is no longer working, you can download the zip files of these IRC logs once uploaded there at archive links such as this one (warning, the logs will auto-download). Things get even worse here, and here are some of the more incriminating sections of the logs:
In file 2006-12-29.035011.html, Sarah posts a bunch of links to photos on 12chan and asks "how old are they", along with one she calls "cute ^T^". The response from a user called thetruetidus is "below 10 - Sarah ???"
In file 2006-12-30.101829.html, she posts links to online organisations for "girllovers and boylovers", then again posts a bunch of links to photos. Then subsequently says this:
(18:55:54) Sarah: yea i no
(18:55:56) Sarah: there' sa nipple
(18:55:59) Sarah: alert alpott
In file 2006-12-31.015010.html, she posts yet another set of links to photos on 12chan (which, by the way, makes her denunciation of 8chan incredibly hypocritical), then says when linking one of them:
(11:18:27) Sarah: [LINK CENSORED] she looks drugged :(
The response from other users is as such:
(11:19:43) LiquidCruelty: The one where she looks drugged
(11:19:44) Sarah: LiquidCruelty
(11:19:45) LiquidCruelty: that's CP
(11:19:51) LiquidCruelty: I can see underage twat
(11:19:52) ivorynight: ya
(11:19:54) ivorynight: i see some vagin
Sarah's response is to say that "nudity isn't CP, also I can't see anything", and in response LiquidCruelty and ivorynight state "Oh bullcrap" and "well take some vitamins and try harder, I know you went over this with a magnifying glass". In another section from the same file, Sarah states she's 6 on the inside but admits "I just turned 21".
To further confirm the veracity of the logs, there was a period of time where the latest IRC chat lines from FFShrine were embedded on her video game music download site Galbadia Hotel, archive pages of which Roph posted on KotakuInAction. Let's see some of these chat logs (which are direct archives of the page, by the way):
On 2006-01-29, Sarah states "thank heaven for little girls" and expresses concern over the fact she "only sees her lgf a few times a year". When asked when she's seeing her again, she responds "at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I'd tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly !" On 2006-03-05, Roph asks her "so who is dana? =o". She responds: "dana's my lgf ^________^ - little girl friend !" It's notable how well the content of the logs embedded here match up with the ones previously mentioned, and the fact that she continuously tries to get close to Dana just to get herself off in secret without informing anyone of what's happening is frankly quite unsettling (and that's not even addressing the posted pictures of children). And just to confirm that the Roph who owned slyph. org and posted the IRC chat logs is indeed the same Roph in the FFShrine IRC chat, here's him linking to slyph. org in the Galbadia Hotel IRC chat lines.
In addition to the evidence from FFShrine and all the related sites, there's also her postings on the Venus Envy Comic forums under the handle retrogradesnowcone. In this thread in the Venus Envy Comic forums on 2006-01-14, Nyberg openly admits "for the record: yes, I am a pedophile. no, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. no, I don't-- I wouldn't ever-- have sex with children. no, I don't look at child porn." Just remember, this is someone who later in the year went on to say "nudity isn't cp" on FFShrine and decided it was perfectly acceptable to post photos of a potentially drugged kid on internet forums - photos which users went on to identify as having "underage twat".
A user named DJ Izumi, in that thread, goes on to post chat logs from elsewhere where Nyberg, again under her retrogradesnowcone handle, talks about her "lgf" and says an array of other questionable things. Such as:
Quote:
[01:20] [LINK CENSORED] > nambla ;-;;
Quote:
[01:27] that site I tried to show you? it's a site for lesbian pedophiles. jftr
Quote:
[01:57] ;-;; this is making me miss my lgf
[01:57] lgf?
[01:57] little girl friend.
Quote:
[03:08] I don't think it's right to do sexual things with a child, not because a child can't consent, but because in the context of society it can really @#%$ them up. in a more sex-positive society I don't think it'd be a problem
Quote:
[03:11] I'm attracted to (usually) about 6 to 12. been attracted to as low as 4 but that's atypical
If further evidence is still required, I'd also note that Nyberg was known as a pedophile as early as 2007, long before Gamergate was a thing. As user ItsGotSugar writes about FFShrine in October of 2007: "Another character [on FFShrine] was Sarah, an administrator who was allegedly a pedophile. (Don't ask me whether "she" was really a girll; it was hard to tell.) I think Sarah had been expressing an unhealthy fixation on children from the very beginning, and I could only hope it was all some disgusting in-joke that had gone on for too long." Similarly, in 2010, 4 years before Gamergate existed, user BasilFSM notes that "You know what the worst thing about this Sarah is? She/He's a known pedophile. That's deplorable in itself."
Furthermore, in this interview with Milo there's this accusation by an anon called "M" accusing Sarah of initiating inappropriate roleplay with her, despite knowing that she was underage, and she would say things like "mommy tickle me where it's wet". And later on in the interview M states that her claims were ignored on Twitter. Keep in mind, this is an unsubstantiated allegation, but it is an unsubstantiated allegation that aligns with what we do know about Sarah. While this alone is not something that the argument of Sarah's inappropriate behaviour can rest on, the contents of all these disparate pieces of evidence align so well with each other that it's honestly quite implausible that all of this has somehow been faked by Gamergate (a common accusation by anti-GGs looking to defend her).
Nyberg herself on Twitter and elsewhere has also made statements that often basically are tantamount to an admission that these logs are hers. Apart from the open admission by srhbutts that "GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over", there's this Twitter thread wherein she tries to defend herself with this response: "View the unedited logs. Everyone behaved in similar ways".
Eventually, Nyberg writes a medium article responding to the whole thing where she never concretely refutes the claims against her, never even claims the evidence against her has been faked, but defends herself by stating that she was "just being an edgelord". She states "Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. Since then, I’ve learned that intent isn’t magic, and a playground of the taboo isn’t particularly conducive to moral growth. That I’ve grown past the person I was back then is something I am deeply and forever thankful for." She tries to paint it as regrettable teenage edgelord behaviour (she was 21) that she's grown out of, paints the people accusing her of being a pedophile as acting in bad faith, and casts herself as a victim of Gamergate harassment.
So even Nyberg cops to these logs being hers. And it's noticeable how her response to this is the anti-GG version of The Toxic Gossip Train. Even a good portion of the comments on her medium article are incredibly disgusted with how she treats the whole thing, with one stating "I’m sorry but I don’t think you get to just wash your hands of it and claim edgelord status. From the looks of it you were pretty deep into the role. Vieweing, discussing, and distributing child porn. That’s not edgelord that’s criminal." Another states "Pedophilia is a serious accusation. The evidence against you is disturbingly accurate. Your sob story won’t help you." In the same fashion as Miss Ukelele, the point of this post is not to issue an apology, she's essentially trying to trivialise her acts, claim victimhood and scold people into shutting up about her behaviour. It is true that "teenage edgelords" claim extreme views all the time, and sometimes objectionable ones. But what Nyberg did clearly falls far beyond that.
Yet in the light of Nyberg's medium article, the progressive crowd immediately comes out celebrating her and calling her stunning and brave. Here's Leigh Alexander's reaction (yes, that Leigh Alexander) as an example:
Definitely read it.
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625
It's amazing how over and over again the women targeted by these nobodies have the grace to make their experience useful to others
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184
anyway remember to please respect and support women in your field always, and do not define them by these experiences others created
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643803653082644480
Writer for Houston Press and Cracked Jeff Rouner had a particularly flabbergasting reaction, which was to send Nyberg a photo of his kid wearing her new hoodie to cheer her up. He would later go on to delete this post.
In contrast, other people who knew her from way back when start picking apart her article. Roph notes "Sarah is right in that ffshrine had “edgelords”. I was one, too. I visited 4chan almost daily, used the current hot memes and phrases, joked about stuff. Shared the funny, hot or shocking meme images. Many people there did. Then why does nobody give a damn about any other user in all those logs (which are absolutely genuine, don’t get me started)? Because none of us were paedophiles. An open, proud, adamant, often very defensive paedophile. Defensive of paedophilia. Often justifying it through various arguments. Attempting to normalise it."
Plasmatorture, a former mod on FFShrine, notes "The amount she talked about it and the great lengths she went to convince everyone that she was a suffering martyr for having these feelings she knew she could never act on (supposedly) made it pretty damn clear she wasn't just trolling. That's like 5+ years of playing the long con. No troll has ever had the patience for that." CoryMartin similarly notes "The members of FFShrine and other communities you and your members mixed with (crankeye, kefkastower) didn’t interpret your ongoing demonstrations and admissions of pedophilia as you being an edgelord: they took it as you being an actual pedophile. It was taken as fact, and you had no issues with people knowing it at the time. I believe I was around 14 then, and it certainly creeped me out. Either you’re incredibly inept at comedy to the point where even people who interacted with you casually on a daily basis thought you were serious, or you’re deliberately lying to cover up something about you that most people would find deeply troubling. I think the latter is far more likely."
Now, all of this would just be hearsay if we didn't have the chat logs, as well as Nyberg's own admissions that she did in fact author these logs. However, with these corroborating pieces of information, they become part of an ever-strengthening case against her. Yet despite this evidence, news articles often gave her the Zoe Quinn treatment, painting her as an Oppressed Victim which Nobody Had Any Reason To Be Angry With, such as this article by The Verge that links to Nyberg's genuinely terrible medium article as the only source on the topic and states that she was "subject to one of the biggest and nastiest organized harassment campaigns of Gamergate".
After the initial video and after Nyberg's sordid internet history came to light, anti-Gamergaters started attempting to damage control to an almost incredible degree. One instance of this was when Randi Harper posted lists of Gamergate supporters on public facebook groups. To be charitable, these people publicly associated with Gamergate, so this doesn't constitute doxxing. To be less charitable, part of her stated reasoning for engaging in this behaviour was to "take the attention away" from her pedophile friend Sarah Nyberg. Other anti-GGs, including currently prominent YouTube voices such as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, were there and openly encouraged this behaviour, with some calling it "noble" of Harper to divert attention away from Nyberg's pedophilic behaviour. All this can be found in Crash Override, the anti-GG chat group Zoe Quinn and others were using to coordinate plans.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:22 AM] Randi Harper: i'm talking to amib in DM.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:29 AM] Randi Harper: all of this is going to take the attention away from sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:32 AM] Dan Olson: and the second biggest #GamerGate Ultras, is fully public.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:37 AM] Randi Harper: i'm going to become GG enemy #1, i'm hoping.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:41 AM] Charloppe: ty for that randi
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] SF: That's really noble of you.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] Charloppe: she needs some peace right now
And:
[04/01/2015, 9:48:38 AM] Athena Hollow: <3
[04/01/2015, 9:48:57 AM] Athena Hollow: They had to fucking SCOUR FOR MONTHS to find the shit on sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:03 AM] Athena Hollow: and got fucking LUCKY on that.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:13 AM] Athena Hollow: fuck them.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:26 AM] Athena Hollow: they joined a goddamn public facebook group. fucking morons.
Notice what Athena Hollow in particular says about this. There's not even a denial of what they found. She only cares that GG got "lucky" by discovering Sarah's pedophilic behaviour and she's angry they could use it as a cudgel against anti-GG in general. This is what an unprincipled tribalist looks like. Imagine being so utterly unscrupulous that you would provide ballast and cover for a pedophile to win internet points against Gamergate.
It gets worse. You know why you can no longer access any of the original WebCite caches that were used to implicate Nyberg? The reason is because of an upstanding citizen called Izzy Galvez, who was another anti-GGer who was also part of Crash Override. In a Twitter thread, he gleefully posted images of him actively working to conceal evidence of Nyberg's pedophilia from the public (archive link here). The images in question demonstrate that he sent emails to WebCite claiming the material was being used for harassment, which resulted in WebCite making the snapshots of her domain unavailable to the public.
Not only did Galvez actively try to conceal information, he also attempted to manufacture misinformation to try and paint the logs as faked. He makes a post on GamerGhazi supposedly providing screenshots that supposedly show that the logs were last edited in 2015, therefore they were were "tampered with by GG" to add pedo material. The screenshots actively redact any identifying information about the site to make it appear that these are from FFShrine, but as this source notes in reality these screenshots came from Roph's backup of the logs in slyph. org, and not actually from the FFshrine website. In other words it "only proves that Roph uploaded files in 2015, NOT that the files were edited in 2015, or that they were created in 2015".
There's plenty of other instances of progressives trying to provide cover and ballast for Nyberg, such as an article by Margaret Pless entitled "5 Reasons Why I Stand with Sarah Nyberg" (which was then fully rebutted by this medium article called "5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg"). But of course, any discussion about Gamergate isn't complete without a discussion of how RationalWiki has covered it.
RationalWiki, as you can imagine, fervently defends Nyberg, courtesy of an obsessive anti-GGer called Ryulong who frequently vandalised the Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on anything even slightly related to Gamergate, and who was even funded by GamerGhazi after he posted his GoFundMe on there and it was stickied by an admin. Because of Ryulong, RationalWiki is hosting two contradictory (and false) defences of Sarah Nyberg: "Timeline of Gamergate" claims that Nyberg was simply "expressing disgust at pedophilic roleplay" (this is completely unsupported by the link they use to back it up). "List of Gamergate claims", on the other hand, tries to state that, okay, "she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses" - a claim that, as you can see by the evidence provided so far, is based on an attempt by Nyberg to misconstrue her own behaviour. A recent (2021) attempt to correct these false claims on RationalWiki by a person called Doris V. Sutherland resulted in the edits being completely reversed by a user called TechPriest, and the argument eventually reached the talk page. Without warning, Doris was then completely banned by the RationalWiki moderators, with the only rationale being "gator sock" - despite the fact that if you read Doris's article she is clearly not in favour of Gamergate.
Doing research on this post made me want to scrub myself with sandpaper, and the fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible. Unfortunately, most of the incriminating information now resides in heterodox news sources at best, now-defunct blogs and sites that have to be reached through archive links at worst, and as a result this information has pretty much disappeared from the eyes of the public. Most "authoritative" sources and large scale collections of information are strictly policed to make sure that reporting is sufficiently congenial to the progressive viewpoint, and the only thing the public ever hears is a skewed view of the entire affair.
This is, in real time, how history gets written. Once all the dissenters disappear for good, all this stuff will be forgotten, and the only thing left will be a bunch of seemingly authoritative articles that will cause people to harbour a distorted view of how the culture war actually played out.
You understand this is going on your permanent record, right?
As I said, I'm not ecstatic about it. It's probably one of the biggest marks against myself I've earned while I've been there, and while it didn't affect any deadlines or critical tasks (I was able to finish all my work) it probably does have an impact on perceptions of reliability.
At the risk of sounding self-aggrandising, though, I will say I'm not too concerned about people's perceptions of me in the long run since I am aware people are generally happy with my performance. In the org I work at, there's a monthly meeting where you can nominate someone who's performed particularly well, and last month I received three separate nominations. I am told regularly that people have good things to say about me, and often have to be pushed by my superiors into going home. The reason why I was "smashed" enough to sleep 11 hours was not because of any particularly indulgent behaviour, it's because I have consistently tired myself out for the past month or so.
The main practical concern I have at this point is more that this could happen again and I want to incorporate protections against that into my routine. But if three alarms isn't enough to make me get up and stay up, it's hard to imagine something that will.
Well, TIFU.
Today I managed to achieve the incredible feat of making it to work over two hours late. I was so smashed that I slept for 11 hours, through an alarm, and made it to work at 11:35 AM. Was expecting to be raked over the coals once I got there and apologised, but instead my superior repeatedly told me it was alright and that she was just worried if something had happened to me.
While I am usually a very reliable worker and often work close to 50 hour weeks (for a job that pays far lower than the median Australian salary), I don't feel good about it. At all. I stayed three hours after close of business just to try and make up for it and got off work at 8pm, something I was told I didn't have to do but did anyway. I feel especially bad because my superiors are genuinely nice to me and even though the job is tiring, requires a lot of task juggling, and doesn't pay very much at all, that's not their fault and I would really like to not disappoint them.
Why do you let clients demand things like that? Can't you clearly define deadlines and turn around times upfront? Make them pay rush fees if they really need to?
I'm a graduate who works with other people on clients, work gets delegated downwards to me. I'm not involved in client management to the degree where I would be able to tell them to fuck off. I do communicate with clients insofar as it's relevant to me finishing the job, but setting boundaries with clients would be a clear breach of my ambit.
Why when others have plans, are you expected to do the work? Is this reciprocal? Can't you make "fake" plans and stand firm?
I didn't make "fake" plans since I want to see just how much progression I can milk out of the job. If burning my candle at both ends does absolutely nothing for me, I'll scale back my participation.
As to whether it's reciprocal, I don't know. I may not end up being the one doing the work, since one of my superiors has said that they might be able to do the work if their schedule allows for it. So that's a possible indication that they would try to accommodate a schedule I had.
Why do you work after work hours? Do other people do this? Is it part of the industry or is it just you?
Yes, other people do this. To varying extents. I have been told that I work quite hard and that I don't have to stay so late completing client work. But the reason why I do this is because if I don't get tasks off my plate early, I'm going to be absolutely overwhelmed later when things start coming due and clients start making stupid requests that derail my plans.
For example, one of the earliest clients I started work on back in September did not respond to a query that we sent them, and made us wait for a month. When their representative/intermediary responded in the middle-to-end of October, her stated reason was that she was on leave and that none of her staff were able to deal with our query. Then reminded us she wanted the work done by 31 October. Making this worse is that this was a period where I had another client's deadlines coming due. I had to work almost exclusively on these two clients and drop the rest of my existing client work to deal with it, and have just been getting back to working on my other clients now.
Once I sent the financial statements and income tax returns off to her (very late in the month), she found a discrepancy between the client's internal financials and ours, then passed it back to me to investigate this discrepancy. It turns out our numbers were correct and this discrepancy was the client's own damn fault because they posted an adjusting journal twice in the prior year, which affected current year balances. Then after she was told this, she then came back with yet another issue - this time it was a trivial nitpick about the presentation of prior year figures, which meant I had to adjust it and send off again.
This kind of thing makes it impossible to properly plan my time, so I just get all the work out of the way early so I won't be too swamped once a client does something utterly irritating like that.
Automating away a bunch of my work has actually been in my mind. There's often no standardised format to the data though (sometimes a client will just throw us various bank statements, rental statements and other such documents and we'll just have to use those). This isn't an insurmountable problem and I do want to do it, but I haven't had sufficient downtime to pursue that goal yet.
So here's an admittedly fairly trivial matter that's been on my mind lately. This is a bit of Fun, bit of Wellness, take it mainly as a lighthearted question because it's really not weighing on me too badly all things considered.
It's Friday and I'm home after 10 hours poring over numbers in Excel spreadsheets. I find that after a workday like this it's hard to get myself to do anything at all, it's almost as if there is a daily quota of mental effort I can expend on things. Once I devote all of that to preparing people's financial statements, income tax returns, business activity statements and so on I can't devote any more of my focus to my own projects and endeavours. Not to mention memory limitations, I am now using a significant portion of my storage capacity to track goings-on at work (made worse by my clients' numerous demands, which I will mention later) and remember the appropriate accounting and tax treatment for various matters as well as the relevant circumstances of each of my clients. The work itself isn't necessarily super difficult in and of itself, it's just that there are a lot of clients asking for a lot of different things.
It's quite hard to coordinate anything after work too, because my clients are often absolute fucking children who expect they be catered to on a timeframe that suits them - for example, they want things to be done at a certain time yet sometimes take forever to provide the information necessary to do the work they request, and their delays sometimes require me to stay long after close of business. Yesterday, I had scheduled something with a family member at 6pm, and near close of business the client returned with over a dozen transactions they wanted me to process (while this is something that happens on Thursdays the client usually provides the relevant info earlier in the day), and I was forced to complete the work hastily and hand it over to a reviewer - who unsurprisingly found errors. Said reviewer was not happy about that, and I have stopped planning anything after work because of this. Compared to other stuff that's happened though, this is a small matter - this same client requested that we do work over the Christmas period for them, when the office is closed and people are expected to take annual leave. Please note, they sprung this on us in November, when almost everyone else working on the client had already made travel plans, and as a result I might be the one who has to do that work.
I can't really list anything significant I do outside of work at the moment, because as it is right now the work week smashes me enough that I can't build up the level of focus necessary to actually do things. In other words, I feel as if I'm becoming my work, and I'm not sure if I like that.
How do you not be a boring person after work? Help, please.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
You guys underestimate how shit the psychiatric services are in the third world!
Oh trust me I know, I grew up there (and had an impossible time finding any halfway-decent mental health services there when I needed it). By suicide watch I just mean an informal one made up of friends and family.
Glad to hear you left him with company, and good on you for talking him down.
Do you know if anyone's around to watch him at the moment, like a family member or another friend? It's probably incredibly impractical for you to do so (and it's not really your sole responsibility), but it definitely doesn't sound like a good time for him to be left alone. After someone tries to make a death cocktail for themselves and threatens to use a knife when prevented, suicide watch seems like a perfectly reasonable measure.
The standard reply to this was, "This is what they asked for."
I'd add that what people deserve is a matter that is able to be litigated, not a matter that is unilaterally decided by the beneficiary and that everyone else is obligated to blindly agree with. Making "what people asked for" the basis for one's reasoning is untenable, as even in a situation where someone has been wronged and everyone agrees they deserve compensation there are indeed requests that can be made which are unreasonable or disproportionate or just plain impractical. Just because you deserve something doesn't necessarily mean you deserve to get what you want. And these are holes that can be poked even after one has assumed that the progressive framing of poor Indigenous outcomes is correct, and I don't.
The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board. It may be fashionable to dehumanise your outgroup and form representations of them as evil and stupid that justify not listening to them or trying to sympathise with their concerns. But the reality is that if you fail to try and properly understand the rest of the country, and form caricatures of them that simply do not align with how they really think and act, you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.
The entire Yes campaign has seemed to believe that the morality of an indigenous Voice is so self-evident that they don't even need to try and form much of a coherent argument in favour of why it's a good decision (well, outside of empty sympathy-mongering, sloganeering and other such tactics that attempt to substitute actual argument for emotional appeal, I believe @OliveTapenade has covered that topic in detail in this thread and in previous ones too).
One of the main arguments I see in favour of the Voice is that Indigenous outcomes are poor, it's the fault of whites and therefore Something Needs To Be Done. But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help? It's also unclear why providing help even requires any amount of differential treatment based on race at all (if the Indigenous are disproportionately poor, any policy focusing on socioeconomic status instead of ethnicity will also disproportionately help the Indigenous while also not neglecting other Australians in need). The woke arguments simply have not addressed these issues and do not stand up to this kind of scrutiny. Regurgitating empty platitudes about "listening to people affected" are not arguments, they are slogans, and not particularly convincing ones either.
The reality is that it's not as clear cut as they think, and their failure to make sensible arguments in favour of the policy or properly acknowledge the arguments of their opponents drives home to people just how intellectually vacuous the argument in favour of the proposal is and has always been. It really seems like Yes just can't conceive of reasons why one would vote No, and instead of actually dealing with the core-level issues inherent to the proposal they are supporting it mainly on vibes alone.
This is what I mean when I say they have "hugely lost touch with the rest of the country". Of course, I won't interrupt my enemies in the middle of making a mistake.
One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were.
The amount of resources there are behind progressive politics is pretty much always immense, basically every influential institution was supporting Yes. At the entrance of my train station, there were Yes campaigners outside for days, handing out flyers to people. Even bodies that should strictly be impartial such as local governments (City of Sydney) were putting up advertisements all over the place telling people to support the Voice, which is frankly inappropriate and clearly overstepping the bounds of their ambit. As you note, it ended up being very clear that this was not some grassroots campaign for change, but a well-funded, dominant group filled with people who have an overwhelming influence over what the public gets to hear and see.
It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them. Then every single time people turn against their policies, there always seems to be such a great amount of surprise and dismay that people would disagree with them, and a knee-jerk assumption that the reason for lack of support can simply be chalked up to stupidity or racism. Perhaps some of it is performative, but I do think that they really believe it.
I've been refreshing the counts for the past few hours, and this referendum failed even harder than I thought it was going to as well. 60% rejecting the proposal and losing all states is a pretty damning result for The Voice. I'm particularly surprised by Tasmania's rejection, because it was a state that Yes supporters were relying on to support the referendum, and surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes.
Something that Mundine stated in the aftermath of the referendum results did resonate with me quite heavily:
Warren Mundine, the leading no campaigner, has credited his side’s focusing on migrant communities for helping defeat the referendum.
Mundine spoke to Sky News, noting “some of them come from countries where they were second-class citizens” and were open to a message about the voice causing a divide.
We knew that the migrant community is 50% of Australia, either born overseas or their parents have been born overseas. We deliberately target that group.”
I'm the kind of migrant that has experienced this, and am incredibly opposed to affirmative action. Progressives might think their ideas are revolutionary and new, but their mindset of victimhood, group accountability and unequal racial treatment on that basis is basically endemic in many third-world countries, and many migrants have been on the wrong side of policies that look and quack a good amount like progressive politics.
As a result, I was in support of No from the very beginning, and though I couldn't vote in it I am happy with the outcome of the referendum. If the Voice had ended up with too much influence it would essentially have been a permanent, constitutionally mandated lobbying group which constituted an outright subversion of a proper and impartial democratic process, if it ended up with too little influence it would have basically been useless. Both would have warranted a No vote.
Haven't written anything significant in one of these Wellness threads for a while, suppose now's a good time.
I'm currently in my fourth week of my first job at an accounting firm after a year or so of actively looking for a job (after recovering from years of chronic illness that derailed a lot of my plans). A lot has been thrown at me so far and it's been fairly exhausting. Despite how draining it can be, this is a development I'm fairly pleased with, and I'm even more pleased with it given that I have a reasonable level of certainty that I got in because of merit and not identity. During the job application process, I had a practice of entering "prefer not to answer" to any identity-based questions that could work in my favour, especially if the organisation indicated they would like to diversity hire (an all too common sight in Australia).
There is one thing that has been causing dissonance though, and it's the gulf between how I perceive myself vs. how other people seem to perceive me. So far people have told me that I have been doing well, and according to my superiors everyone who has worked with me has offered up very positive feedback. I am frankly very perplexed by this - I consider the rate at which I've been picking things up to be normal and expected, if not slower than I would personally like. I do attempt to be as fastidious as possible in my work, but I get the sense that I sometimes ask questions in excess and miss things that should be obvious. Note, I'm not complaining about the positive feedback in any way and I'm glad they consider me to have been performing well, but it's genuinely surreal to see how different their evaluation of my performance is from my own.
Perhaps I'm just used to unreasonably high expectations and perhaps my idea of "basic competence" is biased upwards, but I feel like short of actual mental retardation it's very hard to mess up what I'm currently doing. And it sometimes makes me think that the other shoe is going to drop, and other people are eventually going to see me in the way that I see myself.
In the US, where people and income are easier to keep track of, a third of custodial parents who are owed child support receive nothing.
I looked into the Census Bureau source that this statistic is based on, and the data seems to be based off self-reports by custodial parents, it is not being based off any kind of formal tracking of child support (that method of doing things poses problems too, as it does not include payments made through unofficial channels, but I won't get into that at the moment). Here are some selected quotes:
In this report, child support supposed to be received refers to the amount due as self-reported by the custodial parent. This amount includes both formal, court-ordered support (awards), as well as informal support agreed to between parents.
Of the 6.4 million custodial parents with child support agreements, 88.2 percent reported that these agreements were formal legal orders—established by a court or other government entity—while 11.8 percent reported informal agreements or understandings.
A total of $18.6 billion of child support was reported as received by custodial parents, amounting to 62.2 percent of the $30.0 billion that was supposed to be received in 2017 (Figure 6). ... Overall, custodial parents reported receiving $20.6 billion directly from non- custodial parents for support of their shared children in 2017, which included $2.0 billion received by 505,000 parents without child support agreements.
The technical documentation, which can be found here on the Census Bureau's website, notes this, too: "All household members 15 years of age and older that are biological parents of children in the household that have an absent parent were asked detailed questions about child support and alimony." It is asking the custodial parent, the one with the child in their household, not the non-custodial parent. And looking at the questionnaire used to assess child support payment makes it very clear that the intended target of the questionnaire is the recipient, not the obligor.
Here are some more selected quotes:
S300INTRO DO NOT READ
THE NEXT QUESTIONS ARE ABOUT WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN ACCORDING TO THE (AGREEMENT/UNDERSTANDING/COURT ORDER/COURT AWARD)
IF THE RESPONDENT TELLS YOU WHAT THEY RECEIVED, PROBE TO MAKE SURE IT WAS WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO RECEIVE
S313a So you said you were SUPPOSED to receive $X (per month, per week, every other week, twice monthly, per year) (including back support), is that correct?
(1) Yes (2) No
===>_
S313b How much child support, in total, were you SUPPOSED to receive? ENTER THE AMOUNT
===>$,_ .00
S326INTRO DO NOT READ
THE NEXT QUESTIONS ASK ABOUT THE CHILD SUPPORT THE RESPONDENT ACTUALLY RECEIVED
S335 What is the correct amount of child support you ACTUALLY received in 2013? ENTER DOLLAR AMOUNT
===> $,_ .00
I could not find an equivalent questionnaire asking the non-custodial parent what they paid.
This is not, in any way, a trivial source of bias and needs to be kept in mind when you're using these statistics, but the Census Bureau does not disclose this as being a significant limitation of the data - despite the fact that they have used this methodology for a while and despite the fact that this census data has been used for decades to drum up huge social scares around deadbeat dads with no acknowledgement of the possible bias involved.
These caveats were outlined decades ago by Sanford Braver, who states in his book "Divorced dads: shattering the myths" that to answer these questions completely accurately, respondents would have to remember twelve to twenty-four different payments over the past year. In the absence of precise information, many if not most respondents will just try to make up a best estimate, which is a circumstance that allows for an incredible amount of bias to enter into one's results - even worse when you consider that many people are deeply angry at their exes. And if the census officials come to their conclusion based on reports by custodial parents that is going to hugely distort things, the effect being that the results will come with a built-in bias against non-custodial parents.
Braver conducts a study himself where he solves this problem by asking matched sets of custodial and non-custodial parents, and unsurprisingly, custodial parents (mostly mothers) report a much lower percentage of payments made than non-custodial parents (mostly fathers). 13% of mothers report receiving nothing despite being owed support, but only 4% of fathers report paying nothing despite being obligated. When looking at the overall payment statistic, divorced mothers report receiving between two-thirds and three-quarters of what they are owed, and fathers report paying better than 90 percent of what is owed. If we were to do what the Census Bureau did and interview the non-custodial parent only, child support nonpayment is barely even a problem at all!
He states, after this, "I am certainly not arguing that interviewing only fathers is what the Census Bureau ought to have done. I don't believe that noncustodial parents' reports should be uncritically accepted as truth, either. To me, it merely points out how erroneous the present practice of accepting the mother's report as truth without qualification is. When studying something as emotionally wrenching as divorce, it's nearly impossible for people to answer without bias. Indeed, both parents' reports are likely to be biased. In the absence of trustworthy objective official data to the contrary, it seems safest to assume that noncustodial parents are probably overstating child-support payments made, and custodial parents are probably understating. Thus, the truth lies somewhere in between, and our findings can best be thought of as "bracketing" true child-support compliance. In short, we must conclude that how much child support is not being paid remains in substantial dispute, but the amount being paid by divorced fathers is almost certainly higher than most official estimates. Deadbeat divorced dads are nowhere near as numerous as the stereotype portrays".
As to the divorced dads who don't pay, Braver notes that you can’t assume that this represents wilful noncompliance - the single biggest factor relating to nonpayment is typically unemployment and when you exclude fathers who experienced a period of unemployment from consideration, the compliance rate rises dramatically.
EDIT: a small correction
This whole thing is genuinely hilarious, the fact that the "mummy" bears an uncanny resemblance to E.T. and the repeated assertions by the press that scientists managed to "draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating" makes this perhaps the most unintentionally funny thing I've read in a while. Guys, I measured the velocity of a moving car using mass spectrometry, please believe my results.
At this point, I would be glad to never hear about ayy lmaos again - I'm actually interested in the topic but the ayy craze has crossed the line into sheer parody. It's particularly frustrating because there are more credible (albeit circumstantial) pieces of evidence out there they could grab onto like the Viking Lander biological experiments, but their case has hinged around ridiculous UFOlogy and eyewitness testimony and now apparently they're resorting to using ridiculous E.T. looking mummies that obviously aren't faked at all.
I would not disagree that some MRAs have a view of gender relations that resembles conflict theory (but as you already noted, many MRAs are also mistake theorists or are a blend of both). However, in contextualising this viewpoint it's necessary to note that the predominant feminist view of gender relations is itself an antagonistic one (patriarchy theory), it arose much earlier than MRAs, and much of feminist political activism is informed by this idea. And when you stand in opposition to conflict theorists, you need to understand that they believe they are at war and will treat it as such. Perhaps their belief is mistaken, but through their actions they have created a dynamic that's fundamentally indistinguishable from what you'd see if conflict theory was true.
In other words, the funny thing about conflict theory is that it’s self-fulfilling, to some degree. Once it is believed by enough people and acted upon, conflict theory frameworks then actually become a somewhat correct framework to view the world through, regardless of the prior validity of the theory. So when the primary lobbying group that purportedly works on behalf of women is essentially treating gender relations in this way and actually getting what they want, I do believe that does indeed introduce a strong aspect of conflict to the relationship, and I think the "conflict theorist MRAs" are simply perceiving this fact. Gender relations might not inherently be one of conflict, but in the current environment, they have gained a distinct shade of antagonism wherein one side seeks to incessantly improve the position of "team woman" in some shockingly zero-sum ways, and while they do feed into the gender hostility as well it's clear that the conflict-theorist MRAs were not the primary progenitors of this antagonism. The way I see it, a large part of the purpose of their rhetoric and activism is to create some kind of necessary counterbalance to trends they didn't start, and they're doing this without benefits such as the backing of institutions.
Once again, I don't like how things are going and find the entire thing to be almost excruciatingly tiring at this point, but once someone starts a memetic arms race (and I do indeed place the blame primarily on feminists for instigating that arms race) it's almost impossible to stop.
I sometimes vote if someone has written something I think is insightful. So I do cast votes very occasionally, but they're virtually all upvotes - I basically never downvote or report people for that matter.
FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.
In contrast, I find it exceptionally hard to sympathise with this sentiment, given the state of the overall culture. It's been quite surreal to watch various women taking offence at the fact that in a few places online, some of which have been sequestered, men are saying mean, denigrating and in their opinion untrue things about women.
I've seen it put like this: "[This] upsets you. You find it unjust and unfair and unjustifiable. What if that was what you saw when you watched CNN or MSNBC? Read Slate or Salon or the Guardian or the Washington Post? What if it was constantly trending on Twitter? What if your HR department instantiated it in company policy? What if your union promoted it as a true fact that needed rectifying? What if the American Psychological Association, in their guidance for treating women and girls in crisis, was promoting the ideas espoused by /r/TheRedPill and recommending treatment practices based on them? What if this narrative had convinced your country or state to reverse hundreds of years of jurisprudential advances, and return to an era where due process is an inconvenience that should be abandoned? That's what men see when they turn on the TV or open the newspaper. It's what they're confronted with when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, or the mental health profession."
The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations. Such viewpoints have actively influenced law and public policy. And yet a commentator on some nowhere forum online can make @FarNearEverywhere "want to introduce mandatory castration for all men". Well, I suppose in some way you kind of understand how the "extremist" redpillers feel, then.
I understand how this would be frustrating to some women who find themselves attacked when they personally did nothing to contribute to that state of affairs, and I do wish gender relations weren't the way that they currently are. But quite frankly, I don't think many women understand that this kind of thing is just daily background noise for men. And if the red pill is a response to anything at all, it's a response to the fact that said anti-male cultural trends have been allowed to go on for so long without any significant correction. Even if their defection is anti-social, it's a reaction to incredibly dysfunctional social conditions that they did not create. You can't make situations that resemble a boot stamping on a human head forever and expect people to never chafe under it and never create their own compensatory rhetoric - this is just a classic example of "You reap what you sow".
Would I like to see better sexual relations? Yes. Do I think things are headed somewhere bad? Absolutely. But the redpillers did not start this, they don't have institutional power, and in accordance with this they are not the ones upon whom I place the obligation to change first.
EDIT: clarity
So, I belong to that portion of gay men who are completely uninterested in women. I have never felt particularly attracted to women in any manner nor feel any desire whatsoever to have sex with them. If a woman propositioned me, I would indeed turn her down. Perhaps it is my autistic inability to see things from others' perspectives, but the idea that women are so impressively attractive to men to the point that men are willing to endure the contradictory and punitive norms around courtship that are placed on them (which is apparent even from an outsider's perspective) is frankly wild to me.
I absolutely think that a portion of people in the rainbow community are reacting to social incentives and there are those who do so in order to extract benefits from the current social environment (non-binary being a popular one in certain circles), but there are people who are exclusively gay.
I wasn't claiming she was relevant anymore. Acknowledging that people drop off the map doesn't also exclude acknowledging that there was a time when they had more relevance.
More options
Context Copy link