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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.
https://archive.is/2ciMR
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:
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:
The response from other users is as such:
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:
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:
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184
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.
https://archive.is/B8jBZ
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.
https://archive.vn/eBVCb
And:
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.
I remember the Nyberg story at the time, and a large part of the pushback was that some of the evidence proving that Nyberg was a paedophile was posts it had made under its previous male identity, which made it easy to shout about gamergaters "outing trans people".
Something similar happened with Aimee Challenor, except on a grander scale.
The serious point here is that "trans people deserve to have their pre-transition identities memory-holed under penalty of strong anti-discrimination laws and norms" and "people can self-identify as trans" implies that anyone can memory-hole their past. And this is particularly attractive to paedophiles and other scum.
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The curious part is that there are many things Nyberg could have said and done which would have got them into trouble even with their own side. Circular firing squads are hardly uncommon among these types of communities. Is it because the accusations came from outsiders? Is it because these particular accusations are not considered as awful as others?
If the KKK attacks someone for being black, and that person also happens to be a pedophile but very few people know that and the evidence of it is currently hotly debated, a lot of people will take issue with the KKK attacking them for being black.
10 years later, anyone who feels like it can go back and curate a narrative about that and say 'hey look, they were defending a pedophile'.
/shrug. Not all victims are good people, that doesn't mean you do a full background check and wait for consensus to form before trying to protect them. Even if, yes, that will sometimes get used against you in hindsight.
If someone defends Andrew Tate while saying they don't believe him to be a sex trafficker, I give them the benefit of the doubt and say they defend a right-wing asshole and are probably suffering from motivated reasoning in evaluating him. I don't say that they defend sex traffickers.
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Almost certainly the former. If these screenshots had been dug up and passed around by someone with progressive bona fides as a result of some internecine dispute, this would have gone down very differently.
A fact which often has good Bayesian foundations!
Given epistemic learned helplessness and the ability of the internet to invent narratives and fabricate 'evidence', considering the motives of the source when you hear a surprising piece of information meant to motivate you towards some action is often a good idea.
Frankly, reflexively defending someone with the rest of your in-group simply because your out-group attacked them does not have good foundations of any sort. "Considering the motives of a source" is generally a good principle, I agree. That just as much applies to your in-group as it does to your out-group, and defending someone from critique without knowing whether that critique has basis or not is not epistemically justifiable. The motives of those making a claim are ultimately irrelevant to the truth of a claim. "Being skeptical" does not entail "knee-jerk rejection", especially in situations when the evidence is already there for you to look at.
Regarding your other comment on this, I have no doubt that at least some of the people here were ignorant in some way or other (though some, such as Galvez and Ryulong, were almost certainly being dishonest). I tend to believe, however, that this lack of knowledge was because they actively decided not to look at or consider any of the evidence although, again, it was readily available to them at the time, then formed their own opinions based almost solely on preconception. It was wilful ignorance borne out of tribal partisanship that caused them to defend this, and that definitely deserves scorn.
Well, I would agree that believing something is correct because people like you/on your side believe it is double-counting evidence and improper.
However, I'm not sure that generalizes to discounting attacks, which are different from neutral beliefs. People who make the most vocal and virulent attacks against a side are not ussually the ones most motivated by a dispassionate commitment to the truth alone, and their vitriolic attacks are often motivated by more-extreme-than-median beliefs about the thing they are attacking.
These are reasons to expect that an attack will be less likely to be accurate than the median belief of the defender in general. I certainly admit that the most virulent attackers on my own side are often wrong or being misleading about my opponents, in ways that often make me cringe or make me angry at them. This belief about my own side's bulldogs being unreliable transfers to my beliefs about the other side's bulldogs.
There's also something to be said about when it is sensible to believe that your own side is more likely to be correct about something from the outside view, and I think this judgement often falls with defenders rather than attackers.
For example, I think people who personally know a lot of trans people well or follow a lot of trans creators or etc. are more likely to be in favor of trans rights than people who don't, and also that this personal knowledge makes them on average better informed about the topic.
On the other hand, I think strict gun control is probably a pretty good idea that would save a lot of lives, but I also know that the people who disagree with me know way more than I do about guns and gun culture, and so I actively discount my confidence in my position there and rarely advocate about this topic (or try to give this caveat when I do so).
I think it's often true that familiarity and actual knowledge breeds defense and allegiance more often than the opposite, and this gives defenders on average an epistemic advantage form the outside view.
Of course, there's an extent to which everything I have said are just-so stories that can be pulled out to justify one's own beliefs, but conveniently forgotten when those beliefs are challenged. I could tell a different story appealing to the metaphor of an investigative journalist, claiming that most people are happy to lazily believe whatever propaganda is convenient to them at the moment, and that the most virulent attackers are ussually the ones who have bothered to do their own research and actually found the proof of the problems that need to be addressed.
On the whole, I think my initial bent towards defenders is more often true, though both definitely happen; I would be less skeptical of the investigative journalist metaphor if attacking the other side wasn't so much fun that lots and lots of people seem to spend all their time doing it without any personal expertise justifying it, swamping the signal there.
I certainly believe that, BUT, I believe it about both sides of the issue equally.
If 99% of the people on both sides are participating in the flame war without really bothering to do the level of research needed to form truly independent opinions, then I'm not sure that the ones who coincidentally happened to be on the right side are any more virtuous than the ones on the wrong side. Perhaps if one side was consistently correct in these types of battles, and allegiance was based on observing that; but I definitely don't think that's true with regards to GG, it was a complete fiasco where both sides believed tons of wrong things at various points.
(or at least, that is my belief having lived through it, and I don't have any real desire to try to hindsight-argue about it now)
I think this is missing a big portion of the picture, which is noticing that when my side makes statements of neutral beliefs, they are often misconstrued by the other side as attacks. At the very least, they react strongly and sometimes harshly in a way as if they thought they were attacks. As such, when I perceive people from the other side as attacking me, my first and main concern should be how I am misconstruing their neutral statements as attacks. I should also understand that my own biases against these perceived enemies will make it almost impossible to avoid convincing myself that these are attacks so as to justify my dismissal of them on the basis that attacks are more likely to be false than mere neutral statements of fact. As such, I would require an extremely high bar of proof to be convinced that something by a perceived enemy is an attack, because if I allow myself not to have such a high bar, then I'll almost definitely fool myself into believing what's convenient for myself and my ego.
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I’m at work now, so can’t respond appropriately, but one point:
When making this post, I wasn’t necessarily trying to argue that GG was more virtuous (though I do believe they were) or that GG was more consistently correct (though I believe they were). Rather, the point of this post can be summed up in the following paragraph I wrote:
“[T]he 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.”
In other words, anti-GG liked to portray themselves as having the moral and intellectual high ground, and so did the media covering it. They were the ones that made it into a social crusade and claimed they were situated on the right side of history. The mainstream view was that GG were bigoted, biased tyrants using ethics as a shield for actual hatred, and anti-GG were brave activists attempting to “expose” the truth. But when stuff like this happens, it illustrates the falsity of that predominant viewpoint and the utter hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness of those claiming the high ground.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable that if you’re claiming moral and intellectual superiority, you should be held to a higher standard and be penalised appropriately if you fail to fulfil it.
I don't think the GG side was claiming to be evil and stupid?
Almost everyone is claiming moral and intellectual superiority almost always, those are the two main reasons people claim to be on any side of any argument. I would think?
I mean, yeah, I think the heart of the GG movement was trolls trying to harass and victimize women in retaliation for entering their cultural spaces, but my impression is that everyone on the other side vehemently denies that and claims that GG was a lofty movement rooting out corruption and tearing down the lies and abuses of the SJWs.
And the same for the anti-gg side, they claim themselves to be lofty defenders of etc etc blah blah and the other side calls them sjw snowflakes cancel culture etc etc blah blah.
There was a popular media narrative that proclaimed one side the good guys, sure; but both sides were claiming to be the good guys in their own rhetoric.
Also, on another note: We applaud the old-school ACLU for protecting the rights of Nazis to hold parades because we recognize that they were fully committed to defending one specific ideal, an ideal that was incredibly important to have someone protecting, and they didn't cares who's 'side' this put them on along any other axis. We decried them more recently abandoning this purity of ideology and considering other factors in their allegiances.
There's an angle from which defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption is not different from defending a saint against false charges of corruption. If the charges are false and you are restricting your defense to those charges, someone should be there to stand up for the truth and the integrity of the system that produces and considers those charges.
Of course, anonymous internet flame wars with millions of participants are never that clean. Obviously even if 99% of anti-gg people carefully restrict their defense to the charges of 'corruption in games journalism' alone, that's still 100,000 of the stupidest 1% producing memeable screenshots defending them against the pedo charges or saying they're a great person or whatever else.
Just like there are 100,000 screenshots of the vilest 1% of the gg side making rape threats and posting pictures of women's houses and etc. etc.
Whether a side can be fairly judged by screenshots of its worst members is an eternal question in these types of debates, and a surprisingly complex one once you get into the weeds on it.
There is a difference between believing you are good, but arguing that you have better policies and such, versus arguing that your side deserves to own a space because your side consists of a better kind of person. The anti-GG side went all in on arguing that the GG side consisted of horrible white male neckbeards who harass people and who should be kicked out of gaming for that reason, while they themselves were inclusive lovely people.
At the point where they argued that they were better than the GG people, it seems perfectly valid to point out when prominent members are, or defend abusers, pedophiles and other horrid people.
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It's a matter of degree. My perception from being in these spaces at the time that it happened is that GG believed on the balance that they were more correct than the antis, but they were more than well aware that there was a good amount of shit-flinging happening on all sides, and often tried to actively police their own communities in order to weed out that behaviour. Like users of KotakuInAction early on creating "Gamergate harassment patrols" and even Kotaku crediting Gamergate with tracking down someone who was sending threats to Sarkeesian.
There's also the fact that none of the criminal harassment was ever tied to Gamergate. I was in KotakuInAction when the whole thing was going on, and didn't see harassment being celebrated. In addition, the Gamergate surveys basically showed GG to have strongly left wing demographics, so that's some data which should be considered when you're evaluating them.
I will say I hardly ever saw any such caution on the anti side, who seemed to be impressively secure in the belief of their superior morality to the point where they seemed to believe they were just better people who could never be on the “wrong side of history” - in part, I think, because they were offered legitimacy by the mainstream in a way GG was not. I did, however, have an anti private message me to fling racial slurs at me (so much for being against harassment). So you might forgive me if my perception of this whole thing is very different from yours.
The case in question here is not "defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption", but defending a pedophile against verifiable charges of pedophilia. The claims that were being made against Sarah Nyberg in this case were not that she was corrupt, it was that she was a pedophile, and as another user here has already noted GamerGhazi, at the time, basically censored info on their subreddit that might suggest that she was. The defence against her pedophilia was at least widespread enough for the largest anti-GG subreddit to actively police the dissemination of information about it.
I mean, if you can find me something like the mods of KotakuInAction moderating KiA to be an active hub for harassment or something in a similar vein, I will concede the point that yes, "both sides". But I have my doubts.
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That's my impression too. The important thing in this instance was not allowing the opposing team to score a point.
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I think it is less that the accusations came from outsiders and more that those outsiders were just using the accusations to discredit her arguments via ad hominem.
That's a pretty poor argument when the main argument by prominent anti-GG'ers was that gamers are smelly neckbeards that harass people, evidenced by cherry picked random tweets by unknowns or fabricated evidence. If they genuinely had a problem with ad hominems, then they had every opportunity to reign in that behavior from their own side, but they didn't.
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Those arguments were what, again? GG is a force for evil on the internet and we all have an obligation to 'do better'?
I'm not sure exposing this person's dirty laundry qualifies as an ad hominem. Anti-GG mouthpieces made a big deal out of their moral superiority to their reactive, basement-dwelling, chuddish foes. Tearing off their robes and exposing them as mere creatures - and all the weirdness that entails - was practically a public good. But then I would think that given the level of disdain for them I carry, so take that FWIW. And if they wanted to circle the wagons for Nyberg because 'ad hominem' - to be understood as spotlighting a warped moral zealot as a problematic fraud - then double dumbass on them too.
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Is there a reason you choose to use the pronoun she for a male pedophile?
Mod intervention!
It's totally fine to express disagreement with the general concept of trans. It is less fine to make statements that flat-out imply trans is a thing. Not everyone agrees they're "male", and I think this falls under the whole building consensus rule.
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Presumably because there's no reason to let one's disgust with a pedophile inform as to whether they are actually trans.
My read is that joyful isn’t saying this person isn’t really “trans” but that trans people are just role playing in their chosen sex. I agree. Sarah is a male even if he calls himself a female. Just like how an 80 pound girl isn’t fat even if she starves herself because she sees herself as fat. Objective reality trumps personal identification.
I'm not entirely sure that's the reasoning behind the original comment. This site has quite a few people who seem unwilling or outright incapable of speaking about trans people without words or a tone of deep disgust. Note that joyful didn't say "Why do you use the pronoun she for a male?", but rather "why do you use the pronoun she for a male pedophile?" This should increase the likelihood of this being a disgust response in our eyes.
But even we granted that this is just about objective reality, it wouldn't have an impact on pronoun policy. There is no inconsistency between your view and the idea that one should respect the pronouns of others.
One of the ways in which sex differences are real and important is in regards to paedophilia. Male paedophilia is a much bigger problem than female paedophilia in terms of both how prevalent it is and in terms of how harmful it is. Using female pronouns for a male paedophile rhetorically downplays the seriousness of the situation.
Language comes with connotations, which are neither explicit nor objectively necessary inferences. Nonetheless spreading those connotations and that framing is the first step in winning a broader argument, which is why you get so many fights over what language to use.
I don't agree. I think that at least nominally, pro-pronoun people would consider it serious regardless of the pedophile's sex. Obviously, there are the usual caveats (humans can think one thing and feel another, etc.).
Maybe so, but when the average person hears "Sarah is a paedophile - she has openly admitted to a sexual interest in children", they make a number of reasonable assumptions:
These assumptions are true of female paedophiles. These assumptions may not be (likely are not) true of Sarah Nyberg.
Until the average person has fully internalised the idea that the pronouns a given person uses are wholly uncorrelated with their sex, affirming Nyberg's transgender identity carries with it the unavoidable side effect of downplaying the risk Nyberg poses to young children in the mind of the average listener. It's undeniably true that an adult female molesting a small girl is bound to be deeply distressing for the victim, but there's still a vast qualitative difference between that scenario and the scenario in which an adult male physically overpowers a small girl, penetrates her with his penis, infects her with an STD and possibly impregnates her.
I concur, but this sounds to me like an attempt to ensure Nyberg isn't allowed to escape the instinctive feelings associated with male pedophiles. Which is a goal you have to actually declare, otherwise I'm going to assume you don't think people's feelings should decide how pedos of either sex are treated.
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There’s a principle here of never letting a liar define the terms, and never letting a bad guy have an inch of ground lest he take a mile. There’s a heavily tribal “scissor statement” embedded in attempting to describe the situation, and Joyful’s question may be a disgust response to the concept of transgenderism-as-divisive-social-lie as much as to transgenderism-as-ugly-behavior.
Having said that, I’m personally fine with the OP having described this Sarah Nyberg pedophile consistently with the child-luster’s pronouns of identification. I don’t need to know the “deadname” of the kid-unsafe transwoman or be constantly reminded of fundamental lies via the narrator’s pronoun choice. The post is all about the tribal lines and about one side protecting a dress which hides an erection for little girls; I don’t need to see a humiliation ritual of that dress being verbally ripped off in every sentence.
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The reason for the choice of pronoun is obvious: That's the pronoun Sarah would want us to use. If you have a point to make, speak it plainly rather than asking stupid rhetorical questions.
Should you use the pronoun Sarah wants you to use or the pronoun for the gender you think Sarah is? If Sarah isn't in the conversation, does Sarah's preference even matter? Is there a "correct" language? Or is a word's correctness judged only on whether it facilitates a common understanding between speaker and listener? You obviously understood who all those "she"s and "her"s referred to, but would "he" and "his" have been a marginally easier read for you and other Motte readers?
I honestly don't know anymore.
If they were "he" at the time of the offense, I think that should be used. I don't think "Angelique raped six women over ten years and one of her victims described how she forced her penis into her mouth" is either clear or accurate, when Angelique was still going by "Ed" at the time.
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I’d like to suggest that for historical explanations we use their pronouns at the time, then change after the transition comes in the story.
I'm not sure we've ever actually had to enforce this, but the official policy with Motte pronouns is:
The good news about these policies is that everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable, which is probably about as good as we can get.
I think this is extremely silly and enshrines into the rules the disputed premises of one side of the culture war (i.e., that pronouns refer to self-described gender and not sex). I think that's quite uncharacteristic of The Motte. Why not just let people use whatever pronouns they want to use for other people, and if there's confusion then other users can ask for clarification?
Because people tend to use these things as a way to reinforce their beliefs and make it a hostile environment for others.
I think this falls generally under the "don't be antagonistic", "don't enforce ideological conformity", and "provide evidence in proportion to how partisan your claim is" clauses.
Aside from pronouns, does this rule apply to qualifiers as well?
Should commenters be modded for referring to Hamas as terrorists instead of the self-identified 'islamic resistance movement'? Using 'incel shooter' instead of 'supreme gentleman'?
The general antagonism clause applies as it always does, as do a bunch of adjacent rules. No individual word is banned, no individual word makes you exempt from the rest of the rules.
I could write both bannable and perfectly-fine comments with any of those above phrases. If you want to come up with a more specific example, I can tell you how I'd judge it.
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Some might argue that not being allowed to use the pronouns we think accurately apply to someone is enforcing ideological conformity.
As I said, "everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable". I'll take that over "one side is perfectly happy with it and the other side is not happy at all".
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This is confusing to me. Is the issue that the Wachowski sisters do not use the pronoun "they", but they did use "he" at one point?
It's to prevent people from maliciously using "he" by slipping in a historical sentence. You can write a post about the pre-transition history of the Wachowski's and only use "he", you can write a post about their entire history and use "he" for the pre- section and "she" for the post- section, or "they" for the entire history, but you cannot write a post where you use "he" for the pre-transition part, and "they" for the post-transition part.
Yup, exactly.
(You could also use "she" for the entire history if you wanted.)
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How can this be malicous? If one talks about what the directors of Matrix are up to today, mod-approved options "her" or "they" if one didn't use "he" to refer to them when they identified as men. The latter exception seems absurd.
It can be malicious if I think to myself "haha, using 'he' will trigger the trannies, so I will slip in a historical sentences to have an excuse to use 'he', and use 'they' otherwise to stay one the good side of the rules".
The rule also hits legitimate uses, but it's a compromise, that's inevitable.
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This needs to go to the sidebar, I think. I wasn't aware there's an official policy.
I'm honestly trying to figure out what to do with the sidebar; right now it's kinda just overly cluttered, and I'd like to slim it down. But I'm not sure how.
I've refrained from putting this up just because it doesn't come up often and doesn't seem worth the clutter right now.
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Gah! You really split the baby on that one. I think it's worse.
I have independently thought that is the best way.
Bruce Jenner won his gold medal in 1976. The identity known as Caitlyn Jenner didn't exist (at all probably, and certainly not publicly). So it's simply wrong to say Caitlyn Jenner won her gold medal in a men's Olympic event in 1976.
If people are capable of fundamentally changing their identity, then we should refer to their current identity now and their previous identity(ies) when speaking in the past tense in which the previous identity(ies) was(were) acting.
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How so? That’s how I’ve always referred to my trans cousin since they’ve come out. It seems the most intuitive way to speak about things to me. What’s your issue with it?
Would you use differently-gendered pronouns to refer to the same person in the same sentence?
Sounds like utter madness to me.
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My facetious proposal: respect the pronouns of well-behaved trans people, but disrespect the pronouns of those credibly accused of bad behaviour. On the theory that respecting pronouns is a thing done as a courtesy to your fellow human beings, but only extended to those who act courteously to others.
So Sam Brinton is born a He, gets to become a They by choice, but then as soon as he steals some lady's luggage he automatically reverts to a He again.
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Okay. None of my beliefs about Gamergate and who was right or wrong turn on the question of whether Sarah Nyburg was a pedophile and whether particular people defended her.
Why does anybody have to be right?
That's what I don't get about the whole thing. I was trying to explain to this someone the other day, and it was like, I'm not actually defending GG here per se, unless you look at context as a a form of defense. But in reality, there was a LOT of crappiness that was coming from that anti-GG community, that IMO laid much of the cultural groundwork for modern Pop Progressive culture as I call it. Was it worse than the GG people themselves? I don't think that's a relevant question. I think the real answer is that online activism is just...well...crappy, or at least it has a tendency to be such.
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How about which side was able to control the narrative enough to run defense for an open pedophile?
I understand that a lot of things were said/accusations made... So accusations made by one side against the other is suspect. But when one side says things about themselves, I think that is meaningful.
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I remember Nyberg also shared pictures of Dana with other pedophiles online.
https://archive.is/rD6TL
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I still don’t know what gamergate is or was, other than ‘a sufficiently massive train wreck that everyone involved on either side should be fired into the sun’, but I don’t see how it’s notable that a not-very-prominent participant is a minor attracted person.
I don't know a huge amount about GamerGate either. At least, not the start of it. We'll get to that.
The end part, the part that... well, not quite "matters", but the part that turned heads, was basically this: SJ openly declared culture war on nerdy men; the Grey Tribe ruptured fully from the Blue Tribe. I say it doesn't matter because the cracks had been growing for a while due to SJ's increasingly-censorious nature (indeed, Scott's criticism of SJ started a couple of years before GG); something was going to explode sooner or later, and it merely happened to be GG.
...all of which means there's a bit of an issue with reading up on it: since the Grey Tribe as a separate identity didn't actually exist for the most part until GG, it didn't have any narrative-producing institutions of its own, and the Red Tribe didn't care yet. So nearly all the media coverage is Blue propaganda intended to make the "pro-GG" side - the Grey side - look as bad as possible. Frankly, at the time I mostly bought it.
GamerGate is one of those cases, in hindsight, where each side had a public definition of what they thought it was about, and both of them were lying or self-deluding. This is necessarily a simplification, since neither side of GamerGate was univocal - both were unsteady coalitions and contained substantial diversity of motive - but it's one that helps make sense of it to me.
What pro-GG said GamerGate was about was ethics in game journalism. They were concerned about lack of disclosure, conflicts of interest, a journalistic field controlled by the industry it claims to report on, and to an extent (though GG was always a bit cautious and divided in expressing this) by journalists who were not culturally members of or sympathetic to their audiences.
What GamerGate was actually about, to pro-GG, was video games as a cultural scene being taken over and gatekept by cliques of progressive journalists, people alien to and contemptuous of the traditional gamer demographic, but who, by taking over journalistic institutions, arrogate to themselves the power to define who is and is not a 'gamer', and who also seize privileged access to publishers and developers and thus influence the types of games that get made. What it was really about was entryism.
What anti-GG said GamerGate was about was a harassment campaign. It was about a bunch of reactionary troglodytes who hate women and minorities lashing out to try to punish the diversification of video games, both as products and as an audience.
What GamerGate was actually about, to anti-GG, was a bunch of gross ugly people being gross and ugly in public, and worse, trying to exert control over a cultural or media sphere that anti-GG felt they were rightful custodians of. GamerGate was about a bunch of basement-dwelling virgins acting out their resentful misogyny against people who are leading the rise in diverse games. I realise this sounds very similar to what anti-GG said it was about, but I think the distinction is that the public anti-GG line was about behaviour ("they're harassing people") while the real feeling was about identity or even essential attributes ("they're gross").
In a sense, what GamerGate was about was control of 'gamer' as an identity - about who gets to decide what it means to play video games, what 'gaming' is as a subculture.
Seen in that light, I feel like the ultimate result of the controversy was probably a marginal pro-GG victory. Anti-GG got to control the narrative, to the extent that e.g. the Wikipedia article on GamerGate is pure anti-GG propaganda, but that control didn't translate into success because the traditional video game journalistic scene that anti-GG had their base in was becoming irrelevant. If I think about the movers and shakers who get to define gaming as a subculture now, it's all much more crowdsourced - it's streamers and YouTubers and content creators. If I think about the people with privileged access to gaming companies whose feedback changes the way games are made now, it's, well, it's content creators. It's not journalists. Asmongold doesn't have a journalism degree, but he has significantly greater access to Blizzard than anyone working for Kotaku.
It's not a total victory and journalism still matters - Jason Schreier, say, still has a lot of influence - but it's not got the stranglehold that I think it was felt to have in 2014.
Whether this is good or bad overall is a separate question - I think personally I prefer the streamer/content-creator-based world to the progressive journalistic clique, but frankly I dislike both of them - but insofar as it was about gaming as a scene, I think pro-GG have probably come out better than anti-GG have. Even if all the official histories favour anti-GG and will probably do so forever.
W/o evidence, this doesn't strike me as charitable as your "What GG was actually about, to pro-GG..." explanation. Pro-GG cares about entryism, but anti-GG is just about denying people who trigger a disgust response?
All right, that’s fair. I suppose I’m not unbiased. I remember the narrative from GamerGate at the time was obsessed with expressions of contempt towards them (e.g. that Sam Biddle tweet), but it would be unfair to present that as necessarily representative.
I'll admit that I might be reading a more general progressive politics of contempt into it - the smug style and all that. But it may not be helpful of me to pattern-match GamerGate to later cultural disputes.
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I think there's another layer to it, where even within behaviour the Blue perspective insistently defines GG as being a "harassment campaign" despite GG doing stuff other than harassment (most obviously, awareness-raising, and IIRC also boycotts) and TTBOMK only a tiny minority of GGers actually doing things normally considered to be harassment.
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Your breakdown of the motivations and rhetoric of both factions seems accurate.
I don't play many video games these days, but of the few recent ones I bought, Elden Ring seems celebrated in GG circles for being especially non-woke. Its character creation uses "Body Type A / Body Type B" rather than a gender option. Another celebrated non-idpol game, Hogwarts Legacy, apparently lets you play as a black male witch in the female dormitories in 19th century England, and has openly transgender NPCs.
Yes, traditional gaming journalism is a shadow of its former self, but that's just social media killing the legacy press. The culture of AAA games shifted with everything else. Calling the situation a pro-GG victory seems like telling a 1924 Russian white that he won the civil war because Lenin died.
Oh, certainly the last decade or so has been a defeat for social conservatism in video games. Actual conservatives have been consistly losing. Even in games or franchises that in my experience are particularly beloved by conservatives we can see this - BattleTech, for instance, has no gender selection for PCs, but merely lets you select 'pronouns', which can be mixed-and-matched with any body shape or facial features without limitation.
But I think it would be a bad misreading of GamerGate to see it as a social conservative response? GamerGate was never conservative.
Thus to take the case of Hogwarts Legacy - that game's success strikes me as much more compatible with the narrative that pro-GG won? The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy isn't "Hurrah for trans representation!" The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy is "boycott this transphobic filth". (Indeed that review is a perfect example of everything that drove GamerGate up the wall - a 'review' that barely touches on the game itself, which is mostly an autobiographical ramble, and which doesn't even seem to care about the question of whether the game is fun to play. At the time I remember pro-GGers citing this review as an example of what they were angry about - a review that seems more interested in passing moral judgement on a sin, in this case sexism or objectification, that it does in considering whether or not a game is fun or well-made.)
Pro-GG never cared about gay or trans characters in video games. Pro-GG was team "shut up and play video games", and was opposed to any sort of moralising. GamerGate was not anti-woke in the sense of "don't have LGBT characters in games". GamerGate was anti-woke in the sense of "stop lecturing me you puritanical douchebag".
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Yeah, in the context of gaming I'd have to say anti-GG won.
In the broader political context, it's hard to say, particularly since as I said something like GG was essentially inevitable.
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I have seen plenty of complaints about the latter from people who care about IDPOL.
My gripe with it is more that it makes absolutely no sense in the Harry Potter universe, they've got polyjuice potions, presumably other means of body altering via magic too. There shouldn't be any trans people who have a visible mismatch between their expressed phenotype and what they desire to be, let alone a glaringly obvious case.
They could easily have just had a character who you don't even know is trans until you dig into their backstory and figure out they're on it
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I don't think the red tribe cares about gamergate even now. "Some degenerate internet weirdos getting into it over something retarded, IDK and IDC, it's so stupid it really just demonstrates why the blue tribe shouldn't be in charge of things that they care about this enough to blow it up" is probably the median red tribe opinion when it's brought to our attention.
I mean, of course it doesn't care about GG; GG's long-past. But there've been quite a few Greys who've become Red-adjacent in the years that followed (the alt-right and alt-lite), which means this sort of fight gets more attention. Elon Musk buying Twitter and the AI debate are, of course, more important, but they're also centrally Grey-on-Blue conflicts (Grey-on-Grey-on-Blue in the latter case, since Grey has both Butlerian Jihadis and uncensored-AI-for-all types), and you do see Red media taking some sort of interest and sympathising with Grey.
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Even at the time, they were pretty divided? GamerGate made conservative media for a short time in 2014, but the reaction seemed to be mostly incomprehension plus a little contempt - look at those weirdo nerds.
There were a few people who thought it might be a chance to do outreach to gamers (re: Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart), but they didn't get that far. Even post-2014, there is still the occasional, token attempt to reach out - consider something like this, arguing that games are a conservative medium and describing GamerGate as a "gamer-led consumer revolt" against "the attempted control and corruption of leftist-dominated gaming journalism sites", but it never went past a few lone voices. The traditional right, overall, just isn't really trying.
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What exactly did gamergaters do that justifies "firing them into the sun?" I followed the movement pretty closely and I don't even know what you're getting at here.
Do you mean the 0.01% of people who sent death threats to Quinn/Sarkeesian/Wu and were loudly denounced by the rest of the movement? I think it's been established that there were about a dozen or so people who sent death threats and there are ~100,000 kotakuinaction subscribers. Can you name a social movement that has fewer than 0.01% of people who are psychopaths?
If you mean something else, could you please be explicit about what it is?
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I mean, one side completely owned the narrative, to the point where they felt secure in defending an overt pedo.
Isn't that tactic notable?
SJW’s will defend mass murdering dictators if they can be convinced he was on their side, it’s not particularly notable that they’ll defend pedophiles.
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Why use minor attracted person? First it is three words instead of pedophile. Like all woke language it is ugly. Second, it is often used to try to legitimize something we should keep highly hated.
In my humble and likely heterodox (for now) opinion, the proper terminology for what a "normie" might call a "pedophile" is "anti-agecuck" (as almost all men, because of basic biology, are inevitable sexually attracted to women under 18 not uncommonly and even pre-pubertal girls (due to humans being a K-selected species, meaning it is natural/reproductively optimal to develop romantic/sexual attachments to potential reproductive partners in anticipation of their fertility to already have a pre-existing pair bond available to enhance the nurturing of eventual offspring once fertility is achieved) and thus those who allow feminist age of "consent" mandates (which were the first major "wins" of the modern feminist movement) are inevitably cuckolded by younger, more enlightened/freer, or just more immoral men (guys who believe in the traditional narrative about the alleged irreparable harm that results from youth-adult sex but just don't care, who often tend to be non-White as conviction rates for child "molestation" show, giving this cuckoldry an interracial element), thus leaving "pedophiles" to basically exclusively oppose this (again, interracially-flavored and anti-White) cuckoldry), "non-agecuck" (for the same reasons as before), or "possessor of natural masculine sexuality" (due to there being little record of these modern feminist age-based attraction taboos in more natural, less artificially estrogenized times).
But until society has been freed from the grip of a memeplex I might deem "Judeo-feminist quasi-matriarchalism" or "talmudic-demonic-feminist quasi-matriarchalism", if I had to pick a phrase, enough to properly appreciate these terms, "pedo" is necessary for understanding. Thus "pedochad" is always an acceptable term as well.
"MAP" isn't necessarily inaccurate per se but I reject all woke newspeak right off the bat, and it is unfortunately that.
Note: As usual all of my posts are generally/almost always unironic (minus an allowance for a reasonable amount of rhetorical irony same as any other poster here might apply, but not in my fundamental perspective), good faith attempts to inject a perspective that I believe most are afraid to acknowledge into the conversation, and this one is included. (Including this disclaimer since I haven't posted here in a while and I had problems with people thinking I'm not serious even when I posted regularly.)
Edit: Copying the below for the reader's convenience, but updated:
The big increases in the age of consent happen in 1885 in the UK and between 1900-1920 in the US - by 1920 the (hetrosexual) age of consent in the UK had reached its current level 16, with an attempt to raise it to 17 failing in 1917, and it was 16 or 18 in every US state except Georgia. In the UK at least, this is part of the Victorian re-moralisation movement, which was heavily driven by women but explicitly dissociated itself from the first-wave feminists, who were still something of a joke. In the US, the timing suggests it was a Progressive thing - I don't know enough about Progressive-era US politics to understand the relationship between Progressivism and first-wave feminism, but they seem to have been allies. So on net I wouldn't say that age of consent laws were feminist laws.
During the sexual revolution, there are attempts (supported by some but no means all feminists) to reduce ages of consent or to undermine enforcement. In the UK, for example, Gillick (doctors can prescribe contraceptives to girls under 16 without the parents knowledge or consent) was widely supported by feminists on harm reduction grounds. Again, age of consent laws are not feminist laws. More recently, you see third wave feminism focussing on abuse of authority (such as teachers banging students) rather than how young the girl is.
As a separate point, the only licit sex with under-16 girls in the pre-age-of-consent era was after marrying them with the father's permission. It has never been socially acceptable for a man to seduce a 14-year-old girl.
I don’t see how this is evidence of anyone attempting to lower the age of consent or reduce enforcement? Age of consent laws in practice have never focused on minors of similar ages having sex with each other. The focus has always been on people over the age of consent having sex with those below it (with some allowances in jurisdictions with Romeo and Juliet laws), along with the occasional case of minors with significant age gaps.
The most common situation a doctor is prescribing birth control to a girl under 16 is when she wants to have/is having sex with her boy friend who’s about the same as her.
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Women like Helen Gardener (a suffragette and early advocate of atheism), Josephine Butler (also a suffragette and anti-coverture activist), and Frances Willard (also also a suffragette and president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, yes the one that successfully pushed alcohol prohibition (which was also a policy commonly promoted on women's welfare grounds, that male "drunkards" were a threat to women) as well), three of the biggest advocates of raising the age of consent in the 1800s in the UK and US, were absolutely feminists of the genealogy leading directly to modern feminism, even if some of them later may have felt that other feminists went "too far" (though as demonstrated in many if not most cases they did support women voting, so they wouldn't have disavowed later feminists on those grounds). (Second-wave feminists often disavow modern third-wave feminists, also feeling that they've gone "too far", because of their support of transsexuality; are these in some cases contemporaries of Andrea Dworkin not actually feminists then? Or they never were? Despite being as pro-matriarchal, anti-patriarchal, and in many cases straight up anti-man as it gets?)
So unfortunately I'm afraid your information is incomplete/incorrect. Of course there were general prudish Victorian anti-sex types (like Ellice Hopkins, who was still feminist in function but not all that explicitly, nor do I think she had much real intention of upsetting masculine authority or traditional gender roles, though she died in 1904 and might have become a suffragette eventually) mixed in (though even these were still usually women thinking they could dictate to men, which is de facto feminist), and of course because of the time period involved some of even the explicit feminists were organized according to Christian principles, but they were still feminists (that is, to be clear, many/most of them explicitly called themselves "feminist" (a term coined in the early 19th century), even again if some of them would eventually denounce other later women who also called themselves feminists. (Isn't it the inevitable end of many if not most progressives to feel that other later progressives have eventually gone "too far"? "I wanted X sure, but Y's crazy!" Were the Old Bolsheviks not real socialists or Soviet patriots in the end because they probably didn't much appreciate Stalin later purging them all?)
The fact that almost all age of consent raising advocacy of the time focused on the alleged welfare of women and girls as opposed to men/boys is proof enough of this. If biased gynosupremacy and gynocentrism isn't allowed to be considered feminist, then what is?
So yes on net modern age of consent laws are absolutely feminist in origin in that they are the product of gynocentric and gynocratic political organization and advocacy (quite often, again, by women who explicitly called themselves "feminist" at the time again even if in some cases they didn't necessarily agree with every other woman who would later identify as one). Only a modern man would even try to deny that. "Well, sure, they were women thinking they could dictate public policy to men on the grounds of alleged 'women's rights', but they weren't, like, burning bras or anything crazy!"
Even the purely "remoralization"-oriented stuff you highlight was mostly feminist in practice (even if not explicitly) as it was significantly feminized in terms of the composition of its supporters, policy aims, and rhetorical practices. Women thinking they know better than men what morality is and that they can or should dictate their emotionalized "care"-based "morality" over men's virtue-and-honor-based morality is feminist no matter what terms they couch it in and even if they pretend it's not explicitly pro-woman (even though in most cases as highlighted it was).
Were they totally feminists in a strictly modern sense? Well of course not because full modern context necessary for them to be so didn't exist. But modern feminists are even more extreme about the issue and often more supportive of higher ages of consent than ever before (as I've seen calls by some to raise it to 21, 25, etc.), so that still kind of proves the opposite of your point.
And again, a significant portion of them if not the majority of them were at least (usually not even only later but at the same time) very early suffragettes (which means most of them denouncing first-wave feminism seems unlikely, so I think you're wrong on that point) and thus I'd say that firmly qualifies them as feminists, given that the modern feminism movement still tends to claim women gaining the ability to vote as its own achievement.
This is true but this was driven mostly by (often gay) men (organizations like NAMBLA, Vereniging Martijn, etc., overwhelmingly male-led organizations), not feminists.
This has nothing to do with age of consent. You do realize that underage people can have sex with other underage people right? This is just general sexual liberalization stuff (which tends to not include stuff that men will actually benefit from, so no properly restoring men's dominion over younger girls/women in general).
Yeah, no. I'm afraid this is the point where anyone who reads stuff on social media outside of this site is going to instinctively call bullshit on you. Modern feminists and woke types have become utterly obsessed with anti-"age gap" rhetoric (when it's in the man's favor), like literally getting mad at a 27 year old man for dating a 22 year old woman-tier even when there's no authority-based relationship between them. Just search "age gap" on Reddit.
This is irrelevant. You conventionally sought the father's consent to marry women/girls of any age in those eras (outside of which sex was taboo for everyone of every age assuming a relatively modern monogamy-oriented culture), because a female was considered her father's property/ward before she became her husband's.
Again, no. Asking the father for permission to marry a girl/woman was a part of the courtship process which would have been considered (the acceptable version of) seduction back then. And you've already admitted that this was acceptable for most of human history. So it was definitely acceptable. (And that's not even getting into prostitutes, slaves, etc. where if anybody had any objections to having sex with them then it was almost certainly on the grounds of fornication/adultery/promiscuity, not their age if they were young.)
So I must regretfully say that I do consider your post basically entirely incorrect and confused about the facts in almost all areas.
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With parentheses unfolded:
Nice formatting man. Maybe I should start writing like this for some. But
should be:
With that being said I am a chronic post editor, word rearranger, and adder of little phrases into my posts to better clarify my meaning, so your nice post will probably be outdated soon enough, but I appreciate the effort.
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Presumably, to facilitate distinguishing those who commit sex offenses against children and those who are sexually attracted to children but refrain from acting on that attraction and wish to continue refraining therefrom. However much the former should be hated (though I seem to recall something about hating the sin but loving the sinner), it is not clear to me why the latter should be hated.
That distinction already exists: "child molester" vs. "paedophile".
It seems to me that, in practice, those are used as synonyms. Would the use of the new term make it more likely that people like those in the link would get help? I don't know for sure, but if the answer is "yes," then that seems like a good argument for using the new term. Assuming, of course, that our goal is to reduce the incidence of child abuse, rather than simply to identify targets for vilification.
I don’t see much of that. I recall watching Reddit on that very issue, and while they sort of managed to talk a good game about “wanting help” and so on, there were a lot of things about that discourse that made me suspect that “therapy” as they were looking for it was more of a fig leaf than a honest search for help.
I don’t recall any of them being focused on the potential harm actually molesting a child would cause, or any type of moral repugnance against molestation by people who claimed this condition. They instead focused on their situation, how they were mistreated, how they were at risk of losing everything, and how they were not allowed to be sexual as they wanted. At the same time, they were very quick to point out the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia. Now I get the risk of coming forward, but I just never noted anything that suggested that they really understood what molesting a child did to the child or that they even cared.
Second, they simply aren’t that interested in actually solving the problem or doing anything to make it more difficult to offend. They weren’t asking for drug intervention, they weren’t asking for in patient treatment. They weren’t even willing to inform anyone else or restrict themselves from working in places where they would have easy access to children either in private life or at work. What they wanted was once a week outpatient talk therapy and nothing else. That’s not much in the way of treatment and would not protect kids. The pedophiles attending would still be able to get jobs in places where they work with kids, they’d still have full libido, and nobody around them is alert to the problem.
I think you're right to be deeply skeptical of any "support" groups, but I think the problem is worse than any specific support group but would instead be inherent to them.
The average dangerous criminal knows that the crime they committed is morally wrong, but rationalise their crime to themselves due to some circumstance or exception that 'permits' them to commit that crime. The fancy term for this is Techniques of Neutralization. For instance, the average murderer is not a cold-blooded killer. They know murder is wrong. They'll repeatedly reiterate that they know murder is wrong. But there will be this one guy, this one exception, who absolutely deserved what he got, for whatever rationale they either had beforehand or constructed in the aftermath. So the average murderer commits only one murder, and usually do so in a fairly reckless way with minimal effort to avoid being caught.
Child predators do not behave like this. The typical profile of a child predator is someone who knows that the law regards their actions as wrong, that almost all of society regards their actions as wrong, but personally does not regard their own actions as wrong. This makes them an unusual combination of extremely opportunistic, far more apt at preparing and covering up their crimes than any equivalent, and also far more likely to be a serial criminal.
How to tell if you're not at risk of predating on children? The same way everyone else manages to not commit violent crime. The average human is attracted to adult men or women in some combination, yet can easily go their entire life without committing rape primarily because they believe rape to be wrong. A pedophile who seriously believes that molesting children harms them is unlikely to act on that impulse and unlikely to need or care about support, and hypothetically this is the majority in much the same way that the majority of people don't commit rape and don't need support groups to tell them not to rape. The real dangerous individuals are those who do not genuinely believe that their potential crime would harm children, though they may certainly make a good act of claiming to hold that belief. Nyberg's statements fit that profile.
And that's exactly the dangerous circumstance.
For this reason I don't think any self-created "support" group could ever be useful. If you join a such a group, then you believe yourself to be sufficiently at risk of committing such an act, which in the first place requires you don't think it to be morally repugnant. So these support groups end up self-selecting for people who don't think it's morally repugnant and will soon start constructing elaborate justifications of it for each other to use. Any actually productive support would need to be imposed externally and in a fairly hostile way, with the express intent of distilling the same sense of moral repugnance anyone else gets in such a circumstance.
None of this accords very well with what we know about sex drives, and about the behavior of many people with sexual proclivities that society deems immoral. How many people actually have the will power to resist their sexual urges, especially when, as for many of the people in question, they are solely attracted to underage persons? And, how many gay youth attempted suicide back when homosexuality was considered beyond the pale? Why did that mayor commit suicide the other day after he was outed as a transvestite? Odd behavior for people who don't think their behavior is immoral. And, I note that you provide no evidence for any of your claims.
This avoids the issue, which is the distinction between people who are attracted to children but do not want to act on that attraction, and people who who are attracted to children, think that is fine, and act on their attraction. And the first group has at least two subgroups: a) People who have acted on that attraction but want to stop; and b) People (usually younger) who have not yet acted on that attraction and don't want to start.
You have no idea which group is most numerous. More importantly, even if you are correct and the "it's perfectly fine" group is typical, that says nothing about how we should treat the other groups.
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People who need to rationalize things they want to do are way above average (in HBDIQ terms).
Average "dangerous criminal" needs rationalizing his urges as much as wolf, tiger or other predatory animal.
Thought process of average criminal is:
"I am thirsty." "I need some vodka." "No money left, not even a kopeck." "I really need vodka." "My neighbor is old woman with money. I smash her head with axe, take money, buy vodka." "This plan cannot fail, lets' go!"
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I think Scott covered this.
My approach also has the benefit of linguistic accuracy: if you're using "paedophile" to mean "a person who has raped or inappropriately touched children", that's an actual misuse of the term given that its literal meaning is "lover of children".
As are all of the "phobias"; the only reason people use faux-Greek is to sound intelligent/accuse opponent of anti-intellectualism anyway.
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Strictly speaking yes, but too many people fail to recognize that distinction for it to actually be useful.
I don't think I have any good reason to believe the progressive movement will have any greater luck with "minor attracted person" being made the term of choice.
True, but "minor attracted person" originated in academia in people studying pedophilia specifically because the distinction you mentioned had broken down to the point of being unusable. The progressive movement adopting the term is merely the inevitable progression to it too losing its distinction. I don't know that it is possible to ever maintain the distinction since the topic holds so much power over people's emotions.
I cant help but think George Carlin would have something to say on the matter.
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At this point, that's a mark against whatever is under consideration. "originated in academia" might as well be a synonym for "pulled out of someone's butt with zero basis in reality" for anything except the hard sciences.
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I have no dog in this fight, but I don't think we should keep anything "highly hated." Hate is a bad thing. I think that there is probably an optimal level of social scorn we should direct towards pedophiles in order to minimize the amount of pedophilia in the world, and I think we should calculate that amount rather than just go nuts and hope for the best.
My best guess is that the target should be just enough scorn to dissuade them from committing crimes, but not so much scorn that we dissuade them from seeking professional help. I'm reasonably confident we've overshot the mark. It's quite possible that a modest reduction in hatred directed at pedophiles would actually result in fewer children being molested.
Should we hate murderers? What about people like SBF who stole billions?
No. Again, hate is bad. Hate does not help you make good decisions, and hatred-based law enforcement mechanisms are not known for their efficiency. The appropriate angle to approach social engineering problems like "How do we stop people from committing fraud and/or murder in the manner that gets us the best value for our tax dollars," is heartless rationality, not hatred.
Hatred is for suckers. It makes you easy to manipulate and prone to error.
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Hatred for evil is appropriate. Pedophilia is evil. Controversial, I know.
This is both low-effort and building consensus. Put more effort into your arguments and avoid this kind of flat evidence-less claim, please.
Are you saying that the rape of children is not an inherently evil act? I’m not sure how I provide evidence for this. Is a simple moral fact not enough?
There are literally people disagreeing with you in the replies. Read those, and don't make universal moral statements if people are going to disagree with you, because then it's not fact, it's opinion.
So you’re saying child rape isn’t evil?
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Paedophilia the sexual preference is not evil. Rape of children is evil.
I'm not particularly defending Nyberg here; she did some stuff that crosses my line. A paedophile who sticks to loli hentai, though, is perhaps pitiful but not evil.
No. It is, in itself, evil. Even if never acted upon.
Why?
I am rapidly losing faith in humanity here.
This is very much like saying "the desire to genocide armenians is not evil, only acting on that desire is evil." Or "the desire to torture dogs is not evil, only actually torturing dogs is."
No. The desire to commit evil acts is evil. Pedophilia is evil, even if never acted upon. And everyone is right to be wary of anyone who claims to be, or appears to be a pedophile, because that is evil.
That said, it is laudatory to resist temptations and to refrain from evil, even if you desire to do evil. And the Lord will reward those who are faithful and commit no evil though they have the desire.
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Despite hatred of the sin being obviously appropriate, there is something to say for redemption being possible even for the worst of sinners.
Of course in practice this is so difficult that we literally need God to intervene to make it possible, but isn't the principle good?
Redeeming the worst of humanity, even as we may need to imprison them perpetually or even put them to death, is still something that ought to be attempted. And I've seen too many lives destroyed by blind hatred of even things that ought to be hated to recommend it to anybody.
All well and good, but the progressive movement is wedded to the idea that sexuality is something you're born with and which cannot be changed through outside interference. As such, no paedophile can be "redeemed": from the perspective of the progressive movement, if you are sexually attracted to children, you always will be, and nothing you do (or anyone else does to you) will change that. Ergo, every paedophile must be treated as a potential future child rapist.
If we were to move away from the "born this way" framework, acknowledge that sexuality is susceptible to direct outside intervention and that "conversion therapy" for paedophiles might actually work (at least in some cases), we can have a conversation about paedophilia as a sin distinct from the sinner. Until then, paedophiles will be forever irredeemable, as a consequence of the framework progressives called for to interrogate sexuality.
Don't forget that "born this way" is self-justifying as well as unchanging. If you're "born this way" it's "natural" and good and any shaming or even different treatment is bigotry.
Well the people on my socials most inclined to trumpet, and/or presuppose, the "born this way" narrative WRT LGBT+ people definitely don't apply that logic to pedos - think wood-chipper memes - regardless of whether that's consistent with other things they say.
Don't assume SocJus crusaders believe something just because you think it follows logically from other things they believe. They are, IME, almost all capable of compartmentalizing to an extent that makes my brain hurt.
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Because it’s a perfectly valid word and while I wouldn’t hire her to babysit, I wouldn’t hire a trans activist microceleb anyways. It seems like a very long top level post that has no point other than relitigating a pointless and toxic culture war battle.
It seems to me like you are demonstrating problem's point - you don't know or care about the issue, so you assume the mainstream take is correct. But the mainstream position is so helplessly corrupt and biased that this results in you defending a documented cp-sharing pedophile. On the grounds that it's pointless to talk about him, in the same thread where people are arguing about shoe on head's socialism and how anti-semitic hlynka is. I notice that I am confused.
Also it's three words.
Frankly I've noticed I can't predict at all how people will react to things here, or what the basis is for people liking or disliking a post. People here will consistently upvote, say, source-less rants about how they feel like immigrants degrade their home country as top-level posts (which I find to be immensely low-effort content), but will react badly to other posts even if more well sourced. I also don't feel like my post clearly broke any rules in a way most of the other contributions here already don't.
I mean, I understand that people don't necessarily care about this, and that's perfectly fair. There's lots of things I come across here that I don't personally care about either, but I just ignore it and move on. It's a consequence of being in a general purpose political community. I certainly don't go on to leave pithy, low-effort comments about how little I give a shit about what's been posted. I also don't think that it's completely irrelevant to the current political climate.
It seems that people here upvote and downvote posts based on a completely alien set of criteria to me, and I'm too much of an autist to predict what's acceptable posting and what isn't. The only thing I can find that's consistent is that even here, speaking about Gamergate in 2023 is low status, and will be treated as such. It's the closest thing to something everyone has silently agreed not to touch, and doing so is considered a faux pas.
There doesn't seem to be any rules or guidelines on upvoting/downvoting, so it would depend on the individual's own whims. I would think you should aim to upvote comments that add to the discussion, even if you disagree with what is said.
I think your observation is generally correct, people seem to in general upvote comments/posts that bash immigrants or is anti-trans, or anti-establishment, or anti-woke. Conversely, anything that can be seen as a defense to those things seems more likely to get downvoted, even if those are good comments with sound logical arguments and good sources. I think if you frame it in a way that it makes it sound like you don't personally endorse that line of thinking, but that this is how people that might defend it might think that way, you're less likely to get downvoted.
Ultimately the only way to know for sure is to get a direct answer from the people that are upvoting/downvoting in the specific pattern you are observing.
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Gamergate is definitely low status. Really though, that just makes it stranger - this is the motte. We left reddit specifically because we are incapable of not discussing low status things. We have regular discussions about the holocaust, physical differences between men and women, and whether or not rich people are just better than everyone else. They are easy enough to ignore when I don't feel like reading them, and I can't see what makes gamergate different.
When I'm confused I go back to basics. Who, in this space for discussion of controversial topics, benefits from talking about gamergate? People who want to crow about sjws, people who are interested in internet history, people who are interested in how mainstream opinions are formed. Who benefits from not talking about gamergate? More importantly, who benefits from trying to stop other people from talking about it?
In my experience, when a strict taboo isn't involved, the people who benefit from stopping others from discussing a topic instead of just minimising the thread and moving on are people who are afraid their previous position on the subject made them look foolish. Usually because they still maintain that opinion, but don't feel they can argue for it successfully within the constraints of the current environment.
I don't know that that's what's happening here though, I'm sure there are other reasons someone might do that and I just haven't encountered them, and my experiences are no doubt coloured by covid.
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I’m not actually defending it- I think anybody involved in gamergate on either side can redeem themselves only by entering a very strict monastery for the remainder of their natural lives. Nor do I think this pedophilia is good or defensible.
I simply do not think it’s notable that someone who made a name for themselves as an activist around gamergate is a horrible person.
You can say that you weren't defending him on purpose, but you are in fact defending him by dismissing and disdaining anyone attempting to talk about him. Also I don't think talking about video games online in 2014 makes problem just as bad as nyberg, and I find it hard to believe you do.
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I think it is an abusive of language; both to try to change the way we think about something and to make words ugly. I hate the new speak.
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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). Of this, most tweets don't even seem to break a hundred likes.
In fact, this whole damn thing seems fairly confined to people whose only power is on the niche pieces of the internet they occupy. The most egregious is arguably RationalWiki, but that site isn't some powerhouse or progressive mainstay. David Gerard's power on that site might be vast, but it's fundamentally limited.
"This story is small-time" wouldn't be a problem necessarily, even a murder in a small town matters. 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.
So I don't really think it's obvious that Nyberg and the anti-GamerGaters got what they want. The anti-Nyberg pieces are still up and coming up in top results.
Rarely a good defense of a movement. Worse so because Nyberg appears to have gotten that 15 mins (more like a few years). This is a classic example of pedo/LGBTQ overlap, and attempts to downplay the interaction are, IMO extreme bad faith.
Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?
Or to take a more relevant comparison - does Roy Moore discredit all conservative politics?
If no, how can Sarah Nyberg discredit all progressive or LGBT politics?
If there's a significant problem of a paedophilia/LGBT overlap, or the LGBT rights or more generally progressive movement committing to defend paedophiles, I think you need more than a single anecdote, especially one as small-time as this. Okay, Nyberg is a terrible person, and okay, defending her at all was a terrible decision born out of pure partisan allegiance. All conceded. But what does that prove?
I'd like to see a better case for this claimed overlap.
Because its like data point 1000, and pedophilia is a natural extension for the LGBT movement.
Man, you've been around here long enough to know that this doesn't fly. Three-day ban and frankly this is lenient because you've been here so long, but, like, that won't last forever, calm down with the accusations.
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To extend and confirm your logic, this is why all papists should be tied into a sack with a rock, a snake, and a badger and thrown into the river outside town, what with the prevalence of pedophiliacs in the church springing from it's policies and traditions.
Well, unfortunately, the Catholic Church is far out done by the public schools.
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If you have that many data points, perhaps you could point to a more rigorous argument?
I'm not dogmatically asserting the case is false. NAMBLA existed, and the line from LGBT rights simpliciter to more radical positions around sexual morality seems fairly intuitive - we saw the shift from gay to trans, there are spaces where there are now serious attempts to normalise polygamy or open relationships, and there was a brief attempt to add MAPs. I take the argument seriously.
But I'd argue that even then, there is something beneficial in asking for rigour, or in going to the effort of trying to construct a stronger than "it's like the thousandth time we've seen this" or "come on, open your eyes, man". Not only does it create a stronger argument that could be presented to skeptics, by going to the effort, you might come to understand your own position better as well.
Let's say you do the study, where do you get it published? What university are you allowed to remain at? Which newspaper will publish a story about it?
Once you ask that you see that a person asking for evidence will not accept the evidence that could come to be available.
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The part where a bunch of prominent anti-GG figures lined up to cover it up, despite clear proof. Anti-GG communities like GamerGhazi too, where the moderators set related threads to only show posts individually approved by moderators, not letting through any posts linking proof that the accusations were true. It is not a matter of a single semi-prominent individual being a pedophile who groomed an 8-year-old and shared pictures of her with other pedophiles online. It is the strong tendency in the SJW community (and SJW-aligned organizations and media outlets) to defend or censor mention of bad behavior by those with the right identity and/or enough SJW ingroup affiliation.
This is a tendency among many groups, but with social-justice it seems much stronger than normal, and they have more power to do so. The exception of course is violation of SJW taboos, so there tends to simultaneously be a witch-hunt atmosphere for harmless, trivial, or unproven behaviors even as worse and more proven behaviors are denied or excused. An unproven accusation of sexual harassment made decades after the fact against a white male non-SJW is damning, but someone like Donna Hylton can become a well-regarded activist despite having spent days torturing, raping, and murdering a man. This is part of it being a totalizing moralistic ideology, in which adherence to the ideology takes precedence over all other concerns. This was the root cause behind GG itself, the drive to cover up or defend the bad behavior of Quinn/Grayson and SJW-aligned game journalists in general. But we also see this tendency at work in countless other areas, from UK police being more concerned about racism than shutting down rape gangs to scientific journals and dataset providers adopting censorious policies that prioritize the censorship of ideologically-inconvenient research over the pursuit of science.
So I agree that this is probably a case of people with their brains poisoned by partisanship - people in general are strongly inclined to cover for their own tribe and excuse its slips, while simultaneously condemning every possible mistake by their opponents. I was around on the front lines during GamerGate so I saw a lot of this directly. Certainly one of the things I saw was the way that each camp seemed to zero in on the idea that if they could just prove that so-and-so supposedly representative member of the other camp was a bad person, that would somehow prove something or deliver victory - and naturally when they did that, the obvious response was for the other tribe to defend the member, no matter whether the accusations were true or false.
But here we are almost a decade a later and in hindsight it seems pretty obvious to me how silly that all is. Is Sarah Nyberg awful? Probably, yes. Is Milo Yiannopoulos awful? Probably, yes. But what any of that has to do with the specific issues at hand in GamerGate is beyond unclear.
To go up a level, I would tend to agree that social justice activists in particular seem especially prone to this sort of tribal partisanship. They have an ideology that nearly-explicitly puts group identity above all other moral considerations (one opponent calls it 'Associationist Manichaeanism'), so naturally that's going to favour extremely high in-group loyalty and similarly high distrust of people from outside. This has completely absurd consequences. So I don't think I disagree very much with your conclusion.
It's just that I can't help myself from being critical of bad arguments even for correct conclusions. The tribal tendency is bad, certainly, and I agree that social justice activists are especially (if not uniquely) vulnerable to it. I just don't think that dredging up a Twitter loudmouth from 2014 is a particular demonstration of any of this.
No, however it's certainly an example of the behaviour in question. I wasn't really trying to make that total, overarching point in this singular post though. I don't believe you need to address every single other case of when this has happened and try to address a general trend in a post meant to hyper-focus on a specific case of this behaviour.
Your claim is that investigating a singular case doesn't prove anything, but trends are made up of collections of individual cases, and without putting work into investigating these cases you can't establish that a trend exists. There's value in putting work into investigating examples that illustrate a larger trend. Sure, everybody here "already knows" that wokes are incredibly tribal and often unprincipled in the name of tribal identity and this doesn't necessarily give anyone who already believes so any new information. But to an uninitiated skeptic, especially one who's heard many examples of how terrible opposition to woke is, being able to rigorously cite many examples of this behaviour does build up the convincingness of the argument.
What if the existence of the trend is the thing in question, though?
That's the point of the original Chinese cardiologist example, right? You could write a detailed investigation of a horrific social justice activist like this every day for years and still not prove anything. All that would require is that there be a few hundred noticeably repulsive people advocating for social justice, and that the progressive movement, like all political movements, is prone to rallying around its own.
I tend to think that single examples can be significant if large movements form around them, or if statistically significant numbers of people sign on with them. I think you can draw conclusions from Donald Trump - one Republican like him wouldn't prove much, but the support of tens of millions seems enough to make that case revealing.
But I'd just be cautious about a case like this, especially one where I suspect the temptation to just point and laugh at the freak is very strong.
I mean, if you want to subject it to that level of scrutiny, very little other than a full-scale statistical analysis of wokists and their tendency to "rally around" clearly corrupt people, using other political tribes as comparison samples, would suffice to truly demonstrate the point (and in such a study having cases to analyse is still required). Anyway, I think we both know that doesn’t exist, and that TPTB would never conduct that study.
To say something that may get me in trouble, on a more practical level, I think we also both know in colloquial discourse nobody ever adheres to this standard or forms their opinions on it, except Rats, and when you're talking to normies these standards do not apply and you will have to address arguments that do not adhere to that standard of rigour in the slightest. You'll notice I've repeatedly talked about how convincing having these examples is to people. If they are throwing examples of, say, anti-woke bad behaviour at you, having examples such as this to throw back is necessary. Appealing to them with Rat hypotheticals like Chinese Robber isn't going to change their opinion and is going to make you look like you have no counterexamples. Trust me, I've tried, and in the beginning I cited heaps of good sources and made rigorous arguments that would very much make a rationalist piss themselves. In actual debate, this does not work and is completely unrelated to how normies conceptualise things, and you'll very easily find that your rationalist thought experiments fail miserably against an opponent and an audience that doesn't care. How argument should go is not how argument actually goes. Not now, not ever. I wish this was not the case.
Additionally, I'm not even sure how much people here adhere to that standard, either. Applying this standard consistently would exclude a huge portion of content on TheMotte (and an even greater portion of content on most other discussion spaces), and kind of feels like an isolated demand for rigour that almost nothing else here gets subjected to. I'm more than happy and able to submit to that standard of proof for the claims I make, but it is noticeable that in general the standard doesn't seem to be enforced in almost every other situation.
EDIT: added more
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It could be a Chinese robber fallacy but it doesn’t mean it is and sadly there is no good evidence (since it would be career suicide for someone to publish data showing the connection).
Well, no, but the positive case is the one that requires evidence. It seems to me that it's on the person asserting that Nyberg's case is significant to put those links together.
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Reddittors would say yes, but everyone else would point out that conservatives disowned strongly enough that he managed to lose a general election as a Republican to a liberal democrat in Alabama.
He lost 48% to 50%, though, right? With Alabama something like 62% Republican, that means perhaps a quarter of Republicans there who would have voted for him didn't, and the rest held their nose and voted for him anyway.
I suspect the vast majority of his voters believed the allegations to be false, so their votes aren't evidence of evil, but willful ignorance isn't a great alternative. The guy's denials were waffling, self-contradictory, and self-incriminating. "I don't remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother." is not the sort of thing you say when you're into adult women.
A lot of them are probably low information voters. I mean, yes, it’s higher profile than a typical generic Republican vs generic democrat contest, but the average voter is not very abreast of political news.
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It’s also not entirely clear that Moore was in fact trolling for minors.
Bro, he had sex with a 13 year old after confirming with her mother it was OK.
Are you getting him confused with Gaetz, who hired a prostitute that turned out to be 17? Because in that case it seems like you’re probably right. But while the Moore situation has blame to go around, it seems pretty clear he knew she was a minor.
Can you substantiate that? I recalled the girls he approached were older, and there were allegations of him chatting up teenagers above the age of consent at the time, and there was a single allegation of inappropriate touching but not rape. His Wiki bears this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore. And he won a defamation lawsuit about last year.
In the south in the late 1970s it was probably not at all uncommon for men in their 30s to date older teenage girls. Moore did and married one of them and is still married to her today.
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I recall their being a dispute re the facts. I’ll look into it.
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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.
I don't see how, realistically, litigating Nyberg's badness is going to change any public perceptions of GamerGate?
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? Ultimately, despite being roundly condemned, GamerGate got most of what they wanted (the decline in legacy media has continued apace and the centre of gravity in video game criticism and reviewing has in fact moved to crowdsourced or amateur media, with YouTube and Twitch exploding in popularity), and if you want to make the case that Ian Danskin is a hack (which, for the record, I believe he is), you don't need to dredge up nine-year-old internet drama like this. The case against Danskin can be made entirely from his public-facing videos, even with zero reference to GamerGate.
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. But even if someone is determined enough to wade through it all - nothing about GamerGate stands or falls with Sarah Nyberg. She's just not worth it.
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.
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.
For what it's worth, I'm not angry and I'm not expressing any displeasure at your top-level post. On the contrary, I entirely approve of top-level deep dives into weird topics of no immediate importance!
I just meant to comment on how persuasive I think it would be in a broader sense? This specific community probably has an unusually high tolerance for weird deep dives, and is also already strongly predisposed to dislike the whole media progressive clique that made up the anti-GamerGate side back in 2014, so here specifically you are probably preaching to the choir.
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Who was defending the movement? My point was that when you wonder why something gets swept under the rug, you should ask how large the thing itself was. It's unclear to me that Nyberg was another Sarkeesian or Wu.
Even granting the idea that she was, it would be wrong to say that the entire story was suppressed. As I said, even a naive search for just her name returns the articles talking about her being a pedophile. RationalWiki has no control over that, they can only dictate the content of their own pages.
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.
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.
People can forget to unfollow creators. There are YouTube channels with millions of subscribers that don't get more than a small fraction of that in terms of views. While some of this could be bots, it's also the case that people can just forget to remove a creator from their lists/feeds/follows. Remember, removing is an action, and unless you engage in periodic clean-up or you find a moral reason to dislike the account, you'd be disinclined to remove anyone.
Nyberg's real audience is probably much smaller than her listed count.
While Quartz had an obligation to make their statements factual, I don't think TYT have to cover the pedophilia allegations if they don't think it's relevant. A story about a bot that angers alt-righters is engaging enough for the left as it is.
I don't think it's a nothingburger either. But I don't think Nyberg is or should be anything other than a third or fourth point at best when talking about how Gamergate was villified by the mainstream. She's just too niche for it to be that strong unless you're a terminally online person with an interest in what is now part of the Internet's ancient history.
I didn't think they had an obligation to cover the pedophilia allegations, but I do think it shows that Nyberg and her actions were engaging and significant enough to warrant coverage. Just not the wrong kind.
To clarify, the primary point of making the post was not to demonstrate how Gamergate was vilified by the mainstream. It was to demonstrate just how far a good portion of the prominent figures in that culture war would go to defend and cover up and ignore acts that were frankly indefensible to score points against their outgroup, while at the same time claiming moral superiority.
The part where I said that I do believe the lack of mainstream coverage is because of the people it would implicate was just a side note towards the end of the post. It was not the main point.
This is the part I'm not getting. What is this "good portion"? Dan Olson + David Gerard +...some others? I genuinely don't understand how many people are supposedly involved here.
Leigh Alexander was a key player, who wrote off existing gamers with her nasty "gamers are over" piece. This, together with the support this hateful piece got from the gaming and regular press, who dismissed criticism of her piece as sexism, really energized the GamerGate side. Leigh really was one of the most prominent people on the anti-side, so her support of Nyberg cannot be dismissed as being from a niche player.
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I'm not exactly sure why "her last post was in 2018" would be an argument for Nyberg's relevance.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
But that's just me.
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.
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.
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.
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