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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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If he did post his zoe relationship retrospective on 4chan at the time, would it make the smallest difference to any of the participants?

This objection could be made to refuting anything, whether current or not. If you refute something, it's probably not going to make any difference to the person whose post you've refuted. And the people on your side already know the truth, so it won't make any difference to them either.

I don't think so. If rationalwiki released a video of gjoni beating quinn, that would matter quite a bit. Or I don't know, clear proof of video game journalists selling articles for sexual or monetary favours. Whether gjoni posted his tale to 4chan otoh, is not central in any way.

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.

Called it lol. OK, that's largely fair.

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