problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
Several. Note, I watch games more than I play them, in part because games are often not compatible with Mac especially early on in its release and my computer also often lacks the appropriate specs to properly run them. This means I tend to gravitate towards story-heavy games, where the enjoyment is mainly on the narrative and less on the gameplay. You can find a synopsis of any of these games online, so rather in this post I will try to sell these games to people who haven't played them before.
The main one that comes to my mind is SOMA, which is perhaps the piece of media that did the most to get me interested in sci-fi. In this game, the protagonist is a man who has brain damage and goes in for a new experimental brain scan to explore treatment options. During the scan, he blacks out and wakes up in a mysterious facility. This is a relentlessly bleak and nihilistic game that tackles topics like consciousness, brain emulation, artificial intelligence, morality and so on and while there's probably not much new there for the seasoned Mottizen who I assume is intimately familiar with all of these topics, it places its philosophical musings in the context of a very affecting story that stayed with me long after the credits rolled. The part where you have to extract the security cipher from Brandon Wan, as well as the ending, are some of the scenes that I still think about from that game today. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this game is probably one of my all-time favourite pieces of narrative media in general, and I always strongly recommend it to people who haven't played it or experienced it in some way.
There's also OMORI. This game is very unlike the previous in that it doesn't grapple with Big Themes or Big Ideas and rather tackles a more personal story. Now, it is an RPG Maker game, which are typically horribly written and put together, but this one is quite well done. You play as a hikikomori who routinely loses himself in a dream world he's made to cope with reality called Headspace, and watch as his mental state slowly unravels. This game is willing to go to incredibly dark places, and the last third of the game in particular is especially fantastic (albeit very emotionally draining). I do have my gripes with it - the game has a huge amount of unnecessary padding, for one, but the story more than compensates for it. And there's a late-game plot development which might be seen as cheap, but which I personally think works very well and which the game wouldn't be the same without.
The Good Place is decent, but anyone thinking of watching should keep in mind that it does bludgeon you over the head with progressive-isms which are immensely hard to ignore. Zero HP Lovecraft, whatever you may think about him, has a pretty good summary of how the ideology is interwoven through the show's plot.
You are getting flak here, but I agree and I sympathise with your core principle in that I, too, don't really care about the race of the people in an adaptation. Why these decisions were made is more my concern, and I don't think there's any possible way to separate the work itself from the larger social and political context that these decisions were made in.
I think one of the best windows into this is to look at historical fiction and how it is portrayed. As a case study let's look at the film Mary Queen of Scots. It casts Lord Thomas Randolph, who was an English ambassador, as a black man. He was not. He was Caucasian. Meanwhile, David Rizzio - Mary’s Italian secretary, who in real life was of white Mediterranean ethnicity, is portrayed by a Puerto Rican actor. So why did they portray it this way? Is it because they simply thought the actors could pull off the role? No: "Defending her adaptational decisions, the film’s director Josie Rourke acknowledged “we know that the characters that Gemma and Adria and Ismael Cruz Cordova [play] were white” and hence “those are people of color playing those who were historically not people of color.” However, Rourke, claiming influence from her theater background, asserted she demanded at the outset of studio discussions that she would not “direct an all-white period drama”. Instead, in justifying her choices Rourke contended her work was “a restorative piece” and that through her casting decisions “the past becomes the present”." Another example of this occurring is in Vikings, where Jarl Haakon, Norway's de facto ruler from 975 to 995, is portrayed as a strong, independent black woman.
Of course the woke will argue that criticisms of these decisions have nothing to do with a desire for seeing historical accuracy. I will give them this: They're correct about that. The historical inaccuracy of these adaptations isn't in and of itself what makes people angry. But they're wrong that the critics are motivated by bigotry and just not wanting to see black people in their films. What makes people angry (generally speaking) is the fact that the decision was an attempt to promote their personal political agenda at the expense of accuracy and integrity, and that it is considered taboo to speak about this even when the creators openly admit to it in public. And of course, this is not just the case in historical fiction but also completely fictional settings where people will often fill the cast to the brim with PoC and women and gay people regardless of how realistic it is for that setting, and regardless of how true it is to the original work if they're adapting an existing IP.
These were ideologically motivated decisions, not ones made in the interest of doing the work justice. As another user here noted (I think this was on the old place?) the point of these kinds of adaptations are "not to make changes out of respect to the source material, but to vandalise the original property to the point where the adaptation is unmistakable political graffiti, with the subconscious intent of proving that they are able to exact their political will anywhere and everywhere without being challenged". And when fans of the IPs point out the clear insincerity, they get lambasted for being horrible racists and sexists and homophobes who Just Don't Like Women And Minorities.
This is why they can't just make new IPs - it's not just nostalgia-baiting. It's more that nothing from the predecessor culture can be allowed to survive untainted. They openly admit to having those intentions, too, only in nicer language. We need a new, updated version of Cinderella with a feminist narrative, a gatekeeping gaslighting girlboss protagonist and a black, "genderless", drag queen-looking creature that is supposed to be a Fairy Godmother, and where the evil stepmother is only the way she is because a man victimised her. All your beloved idols, your myths, your practices will be perverted to serve the successor ideology, and you will remain quiet while we co-opt everything.
Apart from what other users have brought up, there's also the fact that experiments in multicellularity appear very early on in the fossil record. Our oldest evidence for it consists of macrofossils that were discovered in the Franceville basin in current-day Gabon, in what would have been a shallow oxygenated delta at the time, and which have been dubbed the "Francevillian biota" or "Gabonionta". They are dated to 2.1 Ga, in the early Paleoproterozoic.
The emergence of this biota follows the Great Oxidation Event approx 2.4-2.1 Ga, an event where cyanobacteria caused a mass extinction by producing oxygen, something which is toxic to many anaerobes. The interaction of free oxygen with cellular components produces an oxygen radical called a "superoxide anion" which is capable of triggering a chain of destructive reactions in the cell. Aerobes are only capable of withstanding this because they possess enzymes called superoxide dismutase which essentially "neutralise" the superoxide anion (and if exposed to too much oxygen can still experience hyperoxia).
Before then, Earth had a reducing atmosphere practically free of oxygen, and the GOE changed the environment into an oxidising atmosphere, with oxygen levels being as high as 10% of their present atmospheric level by the end of the GOE. And it also seems that oxygenation is a factor which is a prerequisite for the development of large multicellular organisms. Only aerobic respiration can produce enough energy for a complex metabolism, and although there are some exceptions, few multicellular life forms are anaerobic.
The Francevillian biota are surprisingly complex considering how early they appear. There are a number of forms the fossils take. Some look like elongated pearl-strings that end in a "flower". Others look like really bulbous nipples. They exhibit patterns of growth determined from the fossil morphologies that are suggestive of intercellular signalling and thus of mutually synchronised responses that are the hallmarks of multicellular organisation, and there's also evidence that they were capable of moving around in search of food resources - there are string-like tracks at the site which might represent mucus trails.
A particularly striking feature of the Francevillian biota is that they are isolated in time. No structures similar to them are known from earlier times and the biota are conspicuously absent from the overlying layer of black shale. It is notable that their disappearance also seems to roughly correlate with an occurrence called the Shunga event. What caused it hasn't been conclusively pinned down, but it involves the creation of one of the oldest known petroleum deposits on Earth, indicating the demise of a massive primitive biomass. The Shunga reserves in the Lake Onega region of Russia alone preserve up to 25 × 10^11 tonnes of organic carbon, and deposits of about the same age and having similar carbon isotope chemistry have been found elsewhere in northwest Russia, as well as North America, Greenland and West Africa, indicating that this was a global event. The organic blooms associated with the Great Oxidation Event abruptly cease, and oxygen levels drop back down to pre-GOE levels.
In short, these fossils seem to represent a first experiment in megascopic multicellularity that arose during a period of oxygenation and subsequently died off when the environment shifted against them. This seems to indicate that multicellularity can start developing relatively quickly, and part of the reason why there was a delay is because the first experiments in multicellularity were abruptly stopped in their tracks.
Which raises the question as to what would've happened had the extinction not occurred. This was a very crucial point in the evolution of life and small changes in the initial state of a system can lead to huge downstream ramifications, so how different would life be today if they had been able to develop?
I'm trying to stay away from politics for now, but I feel a bit compelled to add to your comment.
As someone who's been involved in them before, Internet communities dedicated to the arts are probably the worst in this regard. There was a Discord server I was in a couple years back dedicated to a specific electronic band where the very same thing happened to me, except it was more farcical than this. So, some background - I was an early user of the server, I was casual friends with one of the mods there, and while little interesting conversation could be found from them they were at least pleasant to talk to. At first, the server was a fairly low-key place where one could talk about a certain artist's works, share their own music, etc. I came to be known as a regular there.
At some point, after an influx of new users, the server took on an explicitly political bent, despite (if I remember correctly) a rule stating no politics in the server. People would speak at length about politics and always from an incredibly progressive viewpoint, and when people would bring up concerns about the politicisation of the server the response was "Some people don't have the privilege of not thinking about politics". You had regular bashing of people like Jordan Peterson in there. You had users openly endorsing sentiments like "I hate men", stating that there was value in these open and unabashed statements of group hatred because it might enlighten people about their "privilege". The progressive conceptualisation of identity-based privilege and oppression, as well as the directionality of that oppression, were all taken as unchallengeable fact in that server and it never needed to be rigorously proved or demonstrated, just asserted.
Quite predictably, there was also talk about the underrepresentation of women in electronic music. The answer was always that some nebulous socialisation of sorts dissuaded them from trying their hand at it. Inherent or innate factors were not considered. As far as I know, no studies on the gender difference in empathising-systemising (E-S) or the impact of E-S on music preferences were ever linked there. It's also worth noting that the server at this point was also filled to the brim with purportedly gender-dysphoric people who identified as something or other. IIRC, one of the most political people on the server at the time I was there was a trans woman from Iran. I remember this person posting video of their "interpretive dance" which basically consisted of them uncoordinatedly jumping up and down on their bed while a song played in the background. I swear to God, I am not making this up.
I made quite a lot of attempts to argue that politics should be out of the server, that it didn't belong in a server dedicated to an electronic artist, and nobody really acted on it - instead, they continued having political discussion in complete contradiction to the rule. Eventually, I decided that if they didn't want to adhere to an ethic of "no politics", I would not be bound by that rule either. When they were having one of their many progressive-leaning discussions, I decided to outline some of my problems with that ideology in as polite and moderate a fashion as I knew how. I garnered responses, and before I could answer them a moderator came in and stated that things were "getting too political". The politics rule was conveniently invoked, and the entire conversation was shut down in a manner that allowed progressives to have the last word.
I left the server for a bit, and when I came back, things didn't seem to be that much better. I had only a bit of time to speak with some of the users there before I was abruptly banned from the server, and a longstanding friend of mine (who was still in there) posted me the text of conversations involving the mods - including the one who I was friends with for a good while - where they were shit-talking me. Stating that I had expressed "harmful things", and that I "creeped them out". My "harmful" take was stating that the relations between the sexes aren't characterised by oppression.
Apparently the topic of my banning still comes up with some regularity every now and then in that server.
I'm aware, I'm just being facetious - rather, I'm pointing out that there are a lot of Aphex Twin tracks which are probably not suitable for small children (something which I assume the contents of the links I provided would immediately make clear).
That's one of my favourite artists and is certainly suitable for children. After the RDJ album, I recommend showing them the accompanying EP, Come To Daddy, and the title track's music video.
Seconding Since I Left You by The Avalanches. That album is definitely a classic and is full of fantastic stuff. Check out the title track, Electricity and ETOH for a sampling of what the album has to offer. It has a bit of a sound collage feel (being a plunderphonics album) and it might be a bit more crunchy and loose than you want, perhaps, but the album really offers a seamless experience.
There's also another Australian band called Parcels which would probably be a good fit for you - not only do their tracks do have the "fun, bright, easy to follow" and "danceable" quality you mention, they make music in the same vein as Daft Punk (french house). Here is an early EP of theirs, titled Hideout, and here is their first album, also titled Parcels.
Currently listening to the Charley Crockett album you posted and am liking some of this, especially Clown. If you like folk, I'd recommend you have a listen to Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, which is a masterpiece of songwriting and one of the more depressing albums I've listened to.
I've been listening to a lot of electronic music recently. For a link to some of it, I posted a list of the electronic albums I've been enjoying not too long ago, and have been updating it as I go along for future reference in these music threads (at the time of this post, it stands at 35 entries). It is basically the antithesis of the music you've posted. I’ve bolded the albums that I think might confuse and/or outright annoy people, which makes up 20 of the 35 albums (and some of which are among my favourite albums of all time, with Exai in particular being my favourite album of any genre). You can take the bolding either as a warning or a challenge.
I'm reading Neven Sesardić's Making Sense Of Heritability (in conjunction with many other papers and blog posts). It's a book that addresses the arguments of anti-hereditarians who claim that heritability is not a good estimate of genetic contribution to variance in a trait because of interactions, gene-environment correlations and so on. Sesardić is incredibly critical of anti-hereditarians, and very good at pointing out the flaws in their reasoning. I'm currently at the part where he explains how the equal environments assumption is tested.
His writing is quite accessible for a newcomer to behaviour genetics, and the book is quite thorough in its scope. I actually think this is a book people who are in any way interested in the topic should read, if they haven't already.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
I spent my Easter falling down the rabbit hole of behaviour genetics and HBD after discovering Shaun's video purporting to debunk The Bell Curve.
Fuck.
On that topic, Emil Kirkegaard has a post about sex differences in rationality. It speaks about a test called the Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) which seeks to measure tendency towards rational thinking, with a higher total CART score implying higher performance on the test.
A 2016 book by Keith Stanovich found on the topic of sex differences: "[I]t can be seen that the total score on the entire CART full form was higher for males than for females in both samples and the mean difference corresponded to a moderate effect size of 0.52 and 0.65, respectively. ... Moving down the table, we see displayed the sex differences for each of the twenty subtests within each of the two samples. In thirty-eight of the forty comparisons the males outperformed the females, although this difference was not always statistically significant. There was one statistically significant comparison where females outperformed males: the Temporal Discounting subtest for the Lab sample (convergent with Dittrich & Leipold, 2014; Silverman, 2003a, 2003b). The differences favoring males were particularly sizable for certain subtests: the Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning subtest, the Reflection versus Intuition subtest, the Practical Numeracy subtest, and the Financial Literacy and Economic Knowledge subtest. The bottom of the table shows the sex differences on the four thinking dispositions for each of the two samples. On two of the four thinking dispositions scales—the Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale and the Deliberative Thinking scale—males tended to outperform females."
There is also a possibility to indirectly measure sex differences in rationality by checking who believes irrational things, but "it is important to sample widely in beliefs without trying to select ones that men or women are more apt to believe". Kirkegaard draws attention to a 2014 study that does such a thing. This study instructed participants to select on a five-point scale how much they agreed or disagreed with a claim, and "scores were recoded such that a higher score reflected a greater rejection of the epistemically unwarranted belief". The unsupported beliefs were grouped into the categories "paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscience". In all of them, men scored higher than women, suggesting greater male rejection of unsupported beliefs in every category.
In other words, if one sex was more likely to distort reality in line with their biases, I would expect it to be women.
Let's nuance the picture a bit. According to this article: "[I]n 2016 and 2020, CES data shows that the top two income quintiles (i.e., 80%–100% and 60%–80%) preferred the Democrat (i.e., Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden) over the Republican (i.e., Donald Trump) more than the twentieth through sixtieth percentiles did". Support for the Democratic Party by income is currently a U-shape where people in both the lowest and highest income quintiles are the strongest Democrat supporters - in fact, in 2016 and 2020 it seems that those in the highest income quintile have been a bit more pro-Democrat than those in the lowest. There's also the fact that in ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Biden outpaced Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million. In the rest of the country the two were knotted closely together.
The parties are switching bases, and I don't think this represents a shift in the beliefs of the upper class, rather I think this represents a shift in the parties and their policies. Over the years, the two parties have slowly converged when it comes to economic policy, and the ideological battleground has shifted to the social. Democrats have been adopting the brand of radical progressivism that has long had purchase with the upper class whereas their economic policy has slowly drifted moderate, and this serves the interests of their newly elite voter base.
I too only learned to play rote what other people wrote in my music education, and this was something I found to be utterly mind-numbing (in my case, I played piano). But when I was 15 or 16 I picked up how to use a digital audio workstation and started making electronic music, a hobby which I now think I'm pretty good at.
In my experience, formally learning music theory isn't that essential. Don't get me wrong, a grasp of theory helps, but it's not absolutely necessary for composition and most people who are intent listeners do intuitively pick up some sense of theory while listening to music (and you pick up even more when trying to make things).
As with anything else, getting good at making music mainly involves slowly gaining experience through trial and error and spending thousands upon thousands of hours on it. I'm fairly certain that a good amount of the artists you like aren't thinking about it in terms of formal theory, they're making things and keeping what sounds good to them, discarding what doesn't, and learning along the way.
I see the key part of that quote as "one way or the other."
If reparations are owed "one way or the other", that's still arguing in favour of reparations in some form regardless of whether the colonised benefited or not.
Regardless, it does seem to be that the argument that reparations are unjustified because "the colonized benefited from colonization" does not really address the argument that colonization was an inherent wrong
Sure, but as already noted my original comment wasn't really meant to address that argument, since even if it is true, arguing that colonisation was an inherent wrong doesn't in and of itself justify guilt let alone reparations because often the people responsible are dead. To adapt the hypothetical a little bit, if my grandfather kidnapped your grandfather and enslaved him but taught him to read, and so after he escaped he became richer than he would've been had he not been kidnapped, this could be argued to be a moral wrong. Nevertheless, I think it would be unfair for you in the present day to claim grievance and demand that I take responsibility for the actions of my grandfather because he committed a moral wrong. In the case of colonisation, it's even worse because a whole nation of people is implicated regardless of whether they even have any ties to those at fault. It's the worst form of guilt by (involuntary) association.
As a pedantic note - this hypothetical ignores that it's also the case that colonisation improved health and living standards while the colonisation was happening and in some cases had legitimacy via the support of locals, whereas in this hypothetical the slavery probably resulted in a loss in life quality and improvements came only after it ended, but it demonstrates the point that even if you make that concession it doesn't change much.
(an argument, BTW, which which I completely disagree: As far as I am concerned, it is an argument manufactured (or adopted, since it is really a Western idea) by local elites and foisted upon the hoi polloi; it is essentially, "Your oppression by outsiders is immoral! It is we who should be oppressing you!")
Yes, I agree completely. Local elites do also tend to like blaming the West for the state of things, instead of placing the blame where it belongs (since said elites and officials are often in fact responsible for the myriad issues in their communities and countries). I think this is an aspect of the public discourse that actually hurts people in these countries, instead of helping them, and the culture of guilt in the West really only helps foster and intensify it.
My comment was specifically created to address the arguments of people demanding reparations. I appropriately scoped my point for making the claims I did in my original comment: "This is not necessarily a case in favour of colonialism and colonial policy, but if someone wants to claim that whites should feel some sort of endless historical guilt for the plight of third-world countries today and subject themselves to a system of racial reparations, they’ve got another thing coming." As a result, any supposed "counter" to my original point which is not related to the discussion of reparations is attacking a point which I did not make. I would also add that I do not necessarily believe colonisation was moral, but I also do not believe responsibility for colonisation is inherited, and thus the hypothetical still fails. The way people argue for intergenerational guilt is to claim that the effects of colonisation still persist, but if negative effects attributable to colonisation aren't demonstrated, that argument isn't an effective counter.
Furthermore, I would also dispute your characterisation of the reply to me. The argument that was being forwarded by my interlocutor was that reparations should, in fact, be paid. To quote: "One can easily make the case that reparations are owed one way or another for the original act of victimization." The user's other comment in this thread is also pretty clearly forwarding a case for it.
EDIT: added more
If someone kidnapped you and turned you into a slave for 10 years but while enslaved you spent more time than before reading books and so after you escaped you became richer than you had been before I kidnapped you, it would not invalidate the argument that the person who kidnapped you owes you something.
Firstly, your hypothetical isn't exactly analogous to the situation under discussion, since in your hypothetical it is not the act of victimisation that directly caused the richness of the slave, whereas when it comes to colonialism it was what the colonisers did which ended up improving health and living standards (and it did so while the colonisation was happening, which is yet another dissimilarity to your hypothetical).
Secondly, in line with your stated moral principles, I hope you are in favour of Arabs compensating the Assyrians and approx 50 other ethnic groups for the 7th century Muslim conquest of the Levant. Or hey, as mentioned, the Norman Conquest of 1066. According to this article people with Norman surnames today are overrepresented at Oxbridge and elite occupations like medicine, law and politics. Reparations sure seem to be in order.
Alternatively, we could let bygones be bygones, instead of demarcating a special class of victims and making grievance inheritable. But that's just what my preference regarding public policy is, as a person who grew up in a post-colonial country themselves.
Yes. It is relevant, however, in the context of demanding reparations and other forms of coercive political action as remedy. Without proving that colonisation is the reason for the poor state of any given population of people it's about as pertinent to anyone's present plight as the Norman Conquest.
Another interesting piece of information that people don't particularly like to acknowledge is that colonisation might actually have benefited the colonised countries' economies and resulted in improved health and general wellbeing when compared with the counterfactual situation.
For example, countries like Kenya benefited from the establishment of a cash economy, the modernisation of infrastructure, and the spread of Western medicine. There’s a study which used height data as a proxy for nutrition and health to investigate how well Kenyans did under colonial rule. It notes that “however bad colonial policies and devastating short-term crises were, the net outcome of colonial times was a significant progress in nutrition and health.” Other numbers quoted in that article show improvements in the health infrastructure as well as a steep decline in infant mortality during the colonial period.
This article, in trying to explain the end of colonialism, speaks of a population explosion that occurred pretty much everywhere in the colonised world, and notes that while sometimes this was a result of immigration, in most colonies it was a result of population growth. "[P]opulation increase during the colonial period presumably was not an exogenous event, but rather a result of changes produced by colonialism itself —specifically, increased employment opportunities and decreased mortality due to the introduction of European technologies." The author suggests the increased population resulted in more subversive activity and extralegal appropriation of profits which might explain decolonisation.
Interestingly, it was not during colonialism, but during independence that the situations of many of the colonised countries became how it is today. This World Bank report notes "Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess. Many countries have lost professionals with valuable skills to more prosperous neighbors or to the developed world because of poor motivational practices, poor governance, internal conflicts, and civil wars. Guinea presents the most classic example of this decline. At independence, Guinea had a highly motivated public service, with clear rules on recruitment, promotion, and appointments to senior positions. Public sector infrastructure - roads, telephones, and so on-were adequate and well functioning. All these have broken down today."
And once the "colonisers" left, African politics became quite the corrupted hellhole. "[O]nce the political imperative of independence was achieved, the tools of nation building became a double-edged sword, increasingly coming to serve the ends of patronage in the struggle to retain and consolidate power. In this struggle, economic logic was the loser, resulting in factories located miles from critical inputs, paved roads extending into useless bush, while areas of high agricultural output were left unexploited for lack of transport. The heavy and often corrupted and corrupting hand of the centralized autocratic political system reached into all branches of the public service, controlling public administration, the judiciary, the private sector, and civil society."
Even the worst example of colonial exploitation, the Congo, had a better deal under colonisation then it does now. The Congo Free State under Leopold II was pretty bad, yes. On the other hand, the Belgian Congo was... okay, relatively speaking. Infrastructure was built, and living standards improved to a degree that would not be seen there at any point after. I think Moldbug makes a convincing case for it here, and it's notable that some Congolese after independence expressed a wistfulness for the days of colonialism. This Time article details such a perspective from a Congolese man.
"We should just give it all back to the whites," the riverboat captain says. "Even if you go 1,000 kilometers down this river, you won't see a single sign of development. When the whites left, we didn't just stay where we were. We went backwards."
“The river is the artery of Congo’s economy,” he says. “When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations — cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 3,000 people, 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned.” Using a French expression literally translated as “on the ground,” he adds: “Everything is par terre.”
This is not necessarily a case in favour of colonialism and colonial policy, but if someone wants to claim that whites should feel some sort of endless historical guilt for the plight of third-world countries today and subject themselves to a system of racial reparations, they’ve got another thing coming.
I agree that whether Gjoni posted to 4chan or not isn't particularly central. However, the 4chan thing is a very small portion of what I wrote - the post of mine is broken up into 4 parts. Part 1 is an introductory section which exists mostly just to demonstrate the sheer carnival of trivial-but-damning errors that Danskin makes, errors that shouldn't exist when you're speaking authoritatively on the subject for a university. The meat (and the primary point of making this post) is part 3 and 4, which demonstrates that Grayson and Quinn had a glaring conflict of interest that went completely undisclosed when he was reporting about her.
With regards to your other question about whether GamerGate was my first time, yes, it was my introduction to the culture war, and admittedly it has a special place for that reason alone. I still think, however, that it's important not to let your culture war opponents define the historical narrative in the way they want, even on seemingly small things like GamerGate. Ceding ground to them like this gives them the ability to smear you later on and justify increasingly censorious behaviour towards those who oppose them, and at this point I'm adopting an approach of not giving an inch where I don't think it's warranted.
Finally, GamerGate is not in any way my main focus and it is also not something I'm going to be writing about often. This thread is probably the last top-level thing I'm going to be writing on it for quite a while.
... and the response I always saw was along the lines of "there's plenty of ethics problems in video game journalism; somehow all the ones you come up with involve women and totally not organizing internet mobs against them on purpose".
This is just repeating the previous claim, with the focus now moved from "harassment" to "not necessarily doing the harassment yourself but purposefully inciting harassment by drawing undue attention", a claim that's much more difficult to falsify because it requires information into one's intention and other relevant details that often don't exist.
As to the "somehow all the ones you come up with involve women", that ignores the centrality of Nathan Grayson to the whole "Quinnspiracy" drama, and furthermore there were plenty of ethical breaches identified by GamerGate with a female reporter/male dev, or those which did not involve women at all.
A few examples from the Deepfreeze site (a source which takes a pro-GamerGate perspective):
"Perhaps, though, Grayson’s most blantant impropriety is the overwhelming coverage given to his friend, sound designer Robin Arnott. Author of Oculus Rift game Soundself, Arnott received an abnormal amount of coverage from Grayson. Grayson plugged him six times in three months, with the bulk of the coverage for Soundself coming from Kotaku."
"Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Philippa Warr, who wrote three articles about Sunset without disclosing her friendship with Alexander, has also written three disclosure-less articles about her friend, indie developer Terry Cavanagh — the same Cavanagh that also received coverage from Jenn Frank, who didn't disclose she provided the game's voice acting."
https://deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=unfair
The Quinn story blew up because it was the spark that lit the powder keg, and because there was a salacious story (The Zoe Post) behind it, which meant it had legs.
With any self-organized group, there's always the question of who the True Scotsmen are. The pro-GamerGate side wants to focus as narrowly as possible while the anti-GamerGate side wants to cast a wide net and talk about all of the fallout.
Sure. But No True Scotsman only applies if and when the people doing the thing you want to exclude actually identify as being part of your group. If there is no proof that the severe, criminal harassment was in fact done by people involved in GamerGate, it's much harder to pin these things on them. Furthermore, only focusing on the harassment and blatantly ignoring the members of GamerGate who actively policed and discouraged harassment is indeed its own form of No True Scotsman.
EDIT: a word
Gamergate always seemed like a lot of the two sides talking past each other
Sure, I think we would disagree on which side is doing most of the "talking past".
The counter to "there's lot of ethics problems in videogame journalism" was never "no there aren't", it was "duh, everyone knows that; no one takes videogame journalism seriously. Why are you harassing women about it?".
This sane-washes the anti-GamerGate stance. The general anti-GamerGate stance, exemplified by Danskin, was not "well, there are ethics problems, but harassing people is a step too far", it was the stronger claim that "You people are misogynists who are just using ethics as a cover for your misogyny". Often, it does in fact veer very close to claiming that there was nothing to complain about ethically, as evidenced by Danskin's dismissal of the idea that there was an ethical conflict of interest in the Quinn/Grayson case.
As to why people got harassed, it's because it's the internet, and everybody who's even remotely controversial gets harassment. The mistake of anti-GamerGaters is to characterise basically the entirety of the harassment as being ascribable to GamerGate, when there were a large number of third parties that existed to stir shit. It, furthermore, also ignores that GamerGaters also received harassment and threats during that whole kerfuffle, and ignores their actual attempts to stop harassment. Cathy Young expounds on that argument here:
There was certainly some appalling harassment toward Quinn, Sarkeesian (who canceled a university lecture in October 2014 due to an email threatening a massacre), feminist game developer Brianna Wu (who received a death threat mentioning her home address after she mocked and trolled GamerGate), and some other people, not all of them women. Web developer and GamerGate opponent Israel Galvez was targeted by a fake 911 call that resulted in a visit from a SWAT team, a scary tactic known as “swatting.” But several caveats are in order:
(1) None of the criminal or severe harassment was ever tied to anyone known to be involved in GamerGate.
The FBI spent months investigating GamerGate-related harassment; as documents show, it ended up only issuing warnings to one man who admitted sending an email threat as a “joke” and to another who had made harassing phone calls to a woman with whom he had argued in a chat room. Neither was a known GamerGater. And, while the FBI found evidence that some of the harassment around GamerGate originated on 8chan, a site known as a GamerGate hub, some of it was linked to the forums on Something Awful, frequented by anti-GamerGate, anti-8chan posters.
When GamerGaters blamed the harassment on outside trolls, it looked like an excuse or a far-fetched conspiracy theory. But Kerzner, a neutral GamerGate observer, agrees that “there was a sizable number of third-party trolls that caused the vast majority of the really bad stuff.” There was at least one fairly well-documented instance in which the swatting of a GamerGate critic was traced — according to The Verge, hardly a GamerGate-friendly publication — to a troll from an 8chan board dedicated to “general anti-social mayhem,” where “users joked about Gamergate supporters ‘taking the fall’ for the attack.” A November 2015 post by a notorious troll known as “Wild Goose” also appears to confirm the existence of a troll nest that went after “SJWs” and “gaters” alike.
(2) While the harassment related to GamerGate was quite real, there was also a drastic failure of journalistic skepticism in reporting it.
Of course, questioning people’s reports of being victimized by harassment and threats is something that should never be done lightly. But honoring that principle shouldn’t preclude basic fact-checking.
For instance, in late 2014 and early 2015, there were scary reports of a GamerGate “psychopath” named Jace Connors who had made a series of videos threatening Wu; one of them featured knives, another a man in a skull mask. The most bizarre one showed Connors ranting dementedly against Wu after crashing his car, supposedly on his way to her house.
In February 2015, the videos were revealed to be a satirical prank; “Jace Connors” was actually sketch comedian Jan Rankowski while the man in the skull mask was one of his sidekicks, and the purpose of the videos was to troll and mock GamerGate. Yet more than two months after this disclosure, the skull mask video was still described as an instance of horrific GamerGate harassment in a Boston Magazine article.
More oddly still, Wu’s own New York Times op-ed last month asserts that GamerGaters “shot videos wearing skull masks” and displaying knives they threatened to use against her. When I reached out to Wu for comment, she initially replied that she received “many” such videos and that only GamerGaters themselves had ever claimed they were satirical — even though Wu herself was quoted commenting on the hoax in a February 2015 article in Verge. In a subsequent email, Wu reiterated that she was sent other videos matching the description during that time; however, none are mentioned on her Twitter timeline. (The closest is a screenshot of a tweet with a photo of what looks like a boy wearing a skull mask and holding a toy gun, and with a threat to kill Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu.) It seems likely that the reference in the op-ed is to the debunked “Jace Connors” incident.
(3) At least some of the portrayal of GamerGate as a harassment campaign had to do with speech that, while arguably unpleasant, was not threatening.
This speech ranged from polite but persistent unwanted attempts at debate (nicknamed “sea-lioning,” from a 2014 web comic) to video blogs criticizing someone’s work.
(4) GamerGaters themselves were targets of serious harassment, a fact hardly ever acknowledged in the mainstream media (with a few exceptions such as David Auerbach, then at Slate.)
A number of GamerGate supporters were doxxed (i.e., had home addresses and other private information posted online) and reported threats. In 2015, two offline GamerGate events I attended — a meetup in Washington, DC and a panel examining the pro-GamerGate side of the controversy at a Society of Professional Journalists conference in Miami — were disrupted by bomb threats that forced evacuation of the building. This received virtually no coverage.
Given that GamerGaters were defined as the “bad guys” in social justice discourse, many supposedly right-thinking people felt free to engage in startlingly hateful invective toward anyone involved. In November 2014, Geordie Tait, a Bay-area writer for the gaming website Star City Games, posted a series of tweets literally calling for a Holocaust of GamerGaters; when criticized for trivializing the Holocaust, he responded by saying that the Holocaust was “not as bad as what women have suffered.”
Even people who were not GamerGaters but were seen as too GamerGate-friendly (or even too neutral) were sometimes targeted. YouTuber John Bain, a popular video game critic known under the nickname “Total Biscuit,” who strongly condemned harassment but also took the view that GamerGaters had some valid concerns, said that he was inundated with abusive messages while undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer, including messages wishing for his painful death. (Some GamerGate critics also vilified Bain after he succumbed to cancer last year.) Kerzner was a victim of false rumors intended to undermine her career — rumors that chat transcripts disclosed in 2016 seemed to confirm came from anti-GamerGate activists.
(5) Many GamerGaters not only denounced harassment toward their opponents but actively tried to curb it.
Early on, some members launched a “#GamerGate harassment patrol.” In October 2014, Kotaku reporter Jason Schreier, a strong GamerGate critic, acknowledged on Twitter that GamerGaters were rallying to report a troll who was doxxing journalists. In a Kotaku article a month later, Schreier credited GamerGaters with tracking down a man responsible for a string of threats to Sarkeesian (though he still suggested that the climate created by GamerGate had probably egged the perpetrator on).
problem_redditor
1yr ago
I'm aware of how it looks. That being said, Danskin's UC Merced talk is from 2021, so if the woke are still talking about it, I see no reason why they shouldn't continue to be countered and called out on their misstatements. Furthermore, I am aware of several occasions where users on TheMotte have stated that they'd like to know more about GamerGate from a non-mainstream source to get an alternative opinion, and I thought this video would be a good jumping-off point to get into the topic.
4/4
22 March 2014: Grayson publishes an article in RockPaperShotgun called "A Game And A Chat: The End Of GDC Spectacularmathon". In it, Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest is featured again.
Some quotes:
"Part one’s guests include Papers Please creator Lucas Pope, Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn, and Boon Hill dev Matt Ritter. Part two, meanwhile, brings in such luminaries and champion toe fighters as Gone Home writerly brain man Steve Gaynor, Kotaku features editor Kirk Hamilton, resident Vlambeer madman JW Nijman, Action Henk‘s Kitty Calis, and RPS god heroes Cara Ellison and Hayden Dingman."
"Among many other things, we talked everyone’s favorite GDC moments, diversity in the gaming industry, the virtual reality fuuuuuuuture’s growing pains, my Lost Levels talk, and what happens after you release a game like Papers Please or Depression Quest."
So again, Quinn and Depression Quest are highlighted alongside far larger games like Papers Please. Just like all the others, this isn't incriminating on its own, but it does form part of a larger pattern. No conflict of interest is reported.
23 March 2014: Quinn openly admits she hangs with Grayson on Twitter.
Quinn: @tha_rami I'm headed over to butter to hang with @Vahn16
25 March 2014: Quinn and Grayson speak again on Twitter and send "solidarity" to each other. Quinn is calling Grayson "friend" and they are confirmed to be emailing each other.
Quinn: Realizing the degrees to which working on my art and career has destroyed like 95% of my personal life.
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel I am sending solidarity from my lonely bedroom work perch. I will be here until 5AM or so, I'm thinking
Quinn: @Vahn16 solidarity from the skies, friend. Also answer your damn email
https://archive.md/mmArt#selection-1387.0-1393.63
30 March 2014: Zoe Quinn speaks with Leigh Alexander on Twitter about going to Vegas with Nathan Grayson for a planned collaboration, the DAY BEFORE Grayson wrote an article about her.
Quinn: @leighalexander good thing I'm launching a gonzo games zine this week I guess
Alexander: @ZoeQuinnzel omg no way i wanna know about this
Quinn: @leighalexander it involves me and @notquitefrodo and @Carachan1 and @Vahn16 all going to vegas.
31 March 2014: Grayson writes an article in Kotaku featuring Quinn, and it's his most incriminating yet. The article is called "The Indie Game Reality TV Show That Went To Hell". This happens only three days before they go to Vegas (where they have sex). The topic of the article is about the failed GAME_JAM which Zoe Quinn was involved in. He paints Quinn as the "good guy" in the drama that ensued and at the very end, he posts about Quinn's desire to start her own game jam.
"And while the experience was trying for all involved, it was also rife with important lessons. Quinn summed it up:"
""There was this amazing thing that happened after the production was over. Without any organization or prompting, we acquired and shared some refreshments around, set up some multiplayer games, invited production staff to just come be people and play with us, and had a spontaneous pop up party more or less. It was the first time I had started to feel like myself at all since landing in LA. I started to remember what life felt like off-set again, and it reminded me of what I love about game jams and the indie community in general. It felt like such a complete contrast to the 24 hours that preceded it, and a thought clicked into my head.""
""I want to run a game jam. I'd love to have the LPers do what they're so often so brilliant at and bridge the gap between the games and the audience, and do it super low-tech, low-budget, documentary style. Capture the inspiration, the hard work, the 3am delirium and the dumb jokes that come with it. Show people how we all band together and support each other through the deadline. That's what I want to show the world about game jams. That's the ambassador I'd rather be.""
This is incriminating because at least less than a month later, in April 2014, Quinn went on to solicit donations for her own game jam, called Rebel Jam, despite having no start date and no determined location. Clicking on the "donate" button goes to what looks like a personal Paypal account. Even more importantly, Rebel Jam never actually ended up happening. I'm going to be charitable and assume that Quinn couldn't get enough funding, but there's also the more unpleasant possibility that I don't think I have to mention.
Either way, it doesn't matter because this looks pretty bad regardless of the point of Rebel Jam. Grayson and Quinn's exchanges definitively seem to imply that they are close, and him creating publicity for her projects definitely violates any code of journalistic integrity.
Again, no conflict of interest is disclosed.
2 April 2014: Quinn states that the Vegas trip is the next day.
Molinari: @legobutts @ZoeQuinnzel Did I hear someone's coming to Vegas? :o
Quinn: @OneMrBean @legobutts Yeah! I'm going there tomorrow for a few days with @Vahn16 and @notquitefrodo
2/3 April 2014: Grayson and Quinn go to Vegas and even tweet at each other during the car ride.
Grayson: I've lost track of the number of hours we've been on the road (1? 2?!?). I've eaten both my bags of mini-Reese's. Morale dwindling
Quinn: @Vahn16 what the hell you already ate all that?
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel MY FOOT IS ON YOUR CHAIR WE WILL USE HUMAN SPEECH DAMMIT
Quinn: @Vahn16 I don't sound like a human right now tho also you just tweeted me telling me we were gonna talk instead of tweeting you boob
https://twitter.com/UnburntWitch/status/451535398980706304
3 April 2014: Grayson posts a vine while in Vegas which features Quinn.
Grayson: The most Las Vegas thing I've ever seen in Las Vegas
Here is the vine in question. You can see what looks like Quinn's hair in the bottom right when you play the video. It's easily distinguishable because of just how oddly coloured it is.
At some point during the Vegas trip, they start having sex. This is corroborated by Gjoni's logs in The Zoe Post, and it is backed up by Grayson's admission in the Totilo article where he states that they started a romantic relationship in early April.
5 April 2014: The end of the Vegas trip. Grayson and Quinn act all mushy on Twitter talking about how they'll "miss each other's faces", and a mutual doesn't seem very surprised to see this lovey dovey behaviour.
Quinn: @Vahn16 yep definitely miss yer face already
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame
Quinn: @Vahn16 <3 <3 <3
Harper: @ZoeQuinnzel @Vahn16 Guys, gross. At least invite me next time so I get to be all lovey too. sourface, bitterface
Quinn: @NikaHarper @Vahn16 fuck yes you are invited as HECK
https://archive.is/t56H4#selection-4233.1-4233.73
So let's recap what we have here. Grayson and Quinn seem to have been good friends whose relationship strengthened overtime (just going off their Twitter exchanges alone), and throughout the time they knew each other Grayson wrote not one, not two, not three, but four articles featuring Zoe Quinn all of which brought attention to her future or current projects in some way. The fourth of these articles is the most blatant, undeniable and egregious, and in it Grayson unashamedly shills for Quinn's upcoming game jam project that she solicits donations for (and which never actually ends up happening). And that article is set only a few days before they have sex in Vegas.
As a journalist, if you have a conflict of interest you have to recuse yourself or disclose the conflict of interest, and Grayson did neither. Grayson's excuse was that since they supposedly didn't have sex until a few days after the GAME_JAM article was published, they weren't in a "relationship" at the time, so it's apparently fine that they were at the very least friends before then and were doing a lot of stuff that indicated their blatant personal conflict of interest. But as this redditor notes: "personal conflicts of interest are not limited to people you are having sex with, and putting the sex a few days after the article doesn't really make it notably more ethical".
Funnily enough, Totilo himself stated back in August 2014 on Twitter that "reporters who are in any way close to people they might report on should recuse themselves". Wonder where that principle went.
https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/501817475097702402
Anyway, I hope you've noticed just how different the reality is from the portrayal in Danskin's talk to UC Merced, where he makes sure to completely brush over anything at all that might imply that there was a breach of journalistic ethics. The treatment of Gamergate by the mainstream has been an attempt at historical revisionism par excellence, where any indication of unethical behaviour has been stripped out of the record and replaced with some narrative where no one ever had any justification to be angry and Quinn was only ever a Poor Oppressed Victim being unjustly attacked by a virulently misogynist mob. It is an example of where if you repeat a falsehood enough, people will accept it as truth.
Just the Wikipedia page on the paradox of tolerance suffices, which features a direct quote from Popper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It's fairly clear that Popper's original formulation of the paradox of tolerance was in large part about being intolerant of people who are themselves intolerant to open, rational debate and who are ready to win arguments using force. You cannot have things like free speech if you aren't willing to suppress people who would take it from others.
Now it has been warped into "Tolerant people accept all [attributes]. So people who express opinions which aren't accepting of all [attributes] need to be suppressed by any means necessary". And it should be noted that what constitutes "not accepting" under the progressive formulation of the term covers an absolutely massive scope. Belief in aggregate group differences that create differential outcomes, disbelief in progressive narratives of intergenerational guilt, and even opposition to actual race and sex discrimination promoted by the woke coalition are all categorised on a scale of intolerant to Literally Denying People's Right To Exist. At this point it covers practically every instance where someone disagrees with progressive talking points.
The hilarious part is that in Popper's original formulation of the paradox, the very people quoting him would be the "intolerant". They misuse Popper's paradox of tolerance to justify silencing the speech of their outgroup, and don't see how this makes them exactly the type of "intolerant" people Popper was talking about in his paradox.
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