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Citation very, very badly needed. With all due respect, I think you're completely out of touch with what actual nerds (as opposed to the bullies colonizing nerd spaces) think. Apart from vocal progressives in Extremely Online forums, I have never encountered nerds who think that the invasion of politics (left wing or otherwise) into their beloved activities is a good thing.
For one thing, because you're wrong and approximately nobody wants to make the lives of your other friends worse. If you can't see that, then you need to take a step back (many steps back) and learn to view things from your opponents' perspective rather than your own.
For another thing, because that is how society works. We all have things we disagree strongly with each other on. Having a functional human civilization requires that we live and let live as much as we can. And sure, kicking people out of your hobbies based on your political disagreements does not by itself destroy that social contract. But it does undermine it, and like clockwork the illiberal attitudes of "let's kick the baddies out of our social club" turns into "let's kick the baddies out of good jobs" turns into "let's kick the baddies out of society altogether". It's important to fight this sort of toxic thinking on the small scale before people start to apply it on the larger scales.
I'm going to tap gattsuru's sign here. This is what they are under the mask; Outlaw83 is doing you the favor of taking it off. They want to crush you. They want you out of society, or at the very least on some ignorable margin. This is how society works... for them. There's no need for them to tolerate disagreement if they can simply boot out anyone who disagrees. Yes, it's a very illiberal attitude... but they're not liberals.
I think you mean faceh's sign!
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And then it's not politics, it's basic decency, and if you can't understand that then you are the problem.
I apologize for this heat-post.
The problem there has always been that the line between 'politics' and 'decency' is itself a political question. Moreover, when there are conflicts between your sense of decency and my sense of decency, whose sense of basic decency should prevail?
There's a joke that goes around some of the circles I'm familiar with - "Your politics are politics. My politics are just basic human decency." In other words, the other side's politics get treated as politics, and so downgraded in importance, whereas my side's politics are so important - they're common sense, just being kind, etc. - that they must be maintained or enforced at all times.
At some point I think it's best to just skip over the meta-debate about which view is 'politics', which view is 'decency', etc., because that's ultimately just a semantic dispute, and focus instead on the actual conflict. People have different preferences when it comes to the unspoken rules of conduct in a given social space. How will we reconcile those preferences?
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Prefacing this response by stating that I am on the side of Team Nerd rather than that of your interlocutor: this statement in particular seems false. In particular, it seems false in a quokkic, mistake-theorist’s way. There are absolutely many right-wing nerds who want to make e.g trans people’s lives worse. For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain. Granted, one can say that this is a defensive reaction to an SJW takeover of nerd hobbies—hence that old “why did you make us do this? We just wanted to play video games” image. But if that’s the case, then this is just arguing that the conflict is justified instead of arguing that there is no conflict.
In topic-oriented spaces, there are 2 genders: male, and political. Especially on the internet, where nobody knows you’re a dog- the only reason one would want their gender to be relevant is because you’re looking to leverage it as an advantage.
Which is why “tits or GTFO” is the expression- you either disclaim your protected status by doing something that demeans it, or you don’t participate. It is a gatekeeping expression to keep women away, but if you assume that at least some of them are naturally driven to make it all about themselves and that the highest-value women aren’t bothered, then it is useful.
Again, how is gatekeeping your hobby from those gosh-darned attention whores morally different from gatekeeping your hobby from the microaggressive white creeps?
It's about who was there first. If some Black Hebrew Israelite hobby club wants to keep whitey out, I'd hardly be offended.
Curious. In your opinion, then, people who had not been in the hobby before need explicit approval from oldies to adopt the hobby, create their own spaces for it and police those spaces as they see fit?
They're free to create their own, but what does that have to do with what we're discussing? It's not what happened.
Alright. In that case, if a particular venue was founded by people with views A, and they gradually accept enough people with views B that B can have sway in internal politics, the Bs are morally restricted from acting on their views, yet As are not?
"Acting on their views", in this case, being largely reduced to "which people do we want to play the game with".
Depends what you mean by "restricted". Once we're that situation, it's not particularly realistic for A's to restrict B's, so it's all rather abstract. I'd say A's have a valid grievance if they're made to feel unwelcome by B's, but not the other way around.
By the way, this isn't what happened either. The mechanism for the change was not democratic, nor was it about letting people voluntarily decide who'll interact with who.
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On 4chan? 4chan specializes in being outrageous, which also serves as a filter to keep outsiders away. Everyone gets attacked on 4chan.
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Sure - I don't deny that there are culture warriors on the right as well. That's why I said "approximately nobody", to try to make it clear that I meant the colloquial usage where people say "nobody" to mean "only a small minority". But I feel like maybe I should've just changed the phrase entirely, to make it more clear.
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In defense of assorted chuds, personally I see this less as a dreadful voodoo curse summarily invoked upon any transperson who dares show their face in chud-adjacent places, and more like a general chastisement against bringing identity politics into supposedly anonymous spaces. YWNBAW is basically "tits or GTFO" of the modern age - an insult that seems general on the surface, but in practice is levied specifically against those who claim to be women to get something out of it, be it attentionwhoring, enforcing consensus or jockeying for clout.
I could say the same about the treatment pale stale males like me get in today's mainstream board gaming. As long as I'm not trying to get something out of it, I do not receive the white genocide threats. (Neither do I see those threats in general, that seems to be mostly a twitter thing.)
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Yeah, I think that’s true in a lot of cases. But I also see a decent number of posters who seem to be absolutely “OBSESSED”, as it were, with “trannies” in a qualitatively different way than the former crowd. Working it into unrelated posts, bringing out barrages of buzzwords…. (Using your example, there’s a difference between your average anon who replies “tits or gtfo” to a low effort “as a girl, I don’t see why guys like these stupid cartoons so much” post, and an /r9k/ native.) At the very least, these latter anons’ actions are best described by conflict theory.
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