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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30042 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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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

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.

Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?

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.

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.

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.

Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?

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.

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

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.

Or to take a more relevant comparison - does Roy Moore discredit all conservative politics?

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.

but willful ignorance isn't a great alternative.

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.

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.

Bro, he had sex with a 13 year old after confirming with her mother it was OK.

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.

I recall their being a dispute re the facts. I’ll look into it.

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 agree that the mainstream consensus view of GamerGate is almost entirely false - but I don't see how you would go about changing it, or how that's likely to be a particularly beneficial use of time compared to other issues one could work on?

I'm not saying I'm personally going to change the mainstream consensus view in its totality. For some further context about why this exists, I did research on this "9 year old drama" specifically to try and present a different perspective to someone in my personal life who was exposed to the culture war at least in part through Gamergate and had certain preconceptions around the topic that weren't quite correct, and who also watches Dan Olson's channel - and this is drama that Olson was involved in and is relevant to an appraisal of his character. Trying to convince someone in meatspace is more valuable than trying to convince someone on some anonymous forum who doesn't know you. I decided that since I'd already done the work some of it should be put up since someone might find it useful. If it really invokes so much ire that this gets brought up at all, I won't put it up here and I'll exclusively write about other things.

Moreover, I'd suggest that posts like the top-level one here, to the eyes of anyone who isn't already deeply enmeshed in GamerGate-related drama, are going to come off as obsessive and weird. No casual observer would read that post and change their mind on GamerGate. It's too bogged down in trivial detail, and frankly comes off as a bit too close to cyber-stalking for comfort.

Frankly, being "obsessive and weird" is the only way I've ever gotten anywhere when it comes to politics, and when I'm writing here, I'm not typically writing for casual observers nor am I writing for the purpose of optimising my optics. I'm writing to make sure everyone can independently confirm every claim that's been made for themselves. A strong sense of skepticism and the ability to get yourself to sift through an impressive amount of trivial details almost no one would care about is the only way you're going to be able to handle the sheer wave of terrible reporting and misinformation that's thrown your way, and if that comes off as strange to some people, so be it. I suppose I've typical-minded too much, but I also don't feel like there's anything wrong with trying to get a full and comprehensive picture of how a situation played out.

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.

Rarely a good defense of a movement.

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.

Even granting the idea that she was, it would be wrong to say that the entire story was suppressed.

I'm not saying the entire story was suppressed, rather that the reporting about this subject has been slanted and that the media has been silent about this in a way they wouldn't be if the shoe was on the other foot. For you to consider something as "suppression" it basically needs to be scrubbed from the internet, which clearly isn't the situation we're talking about here.

This is rather something that hasn't reached the mainstream because no mainstream news sources will report on it in any honest way, and the ones that do report on it from what I've seen have simply painted Nyberg as the victim, such as this Quartz article that alleges that Gamergate spread "baseless accusations of pedophilia" about Nyberg. The Young Turks were willing to cover her, but not to talk about her pedophilia - to talk about her Twitter bot. It seems that the mainstream certainly doesn't consider her insignificant enough not to report on at all, rather they would rather just not report on her in the "wrong" way.

I'm not saying she was as nearly as big a deal as Sarkeesian or Wu, but this situation most certainly wasn't a complete nothingburger, either.

At the moment, Nyberg has 13.3K followers on Twitter, which is a fairly high number considering her last post was in 2018.

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.

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.

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'm not saying she was as nearly as big a deal as Sarkeesian or Wu, but this situation most certainly wasn't a complete nothingburger, either.

I 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't say "niche player", I said "good portion". The claim is that a large number/plurality of anti-GG progressives defended Nyberg, I want to see proof of that.

Secondly, Leigh's tweets, as linked in the top comment, don't even break a 100 likes. The one where she explicitly promoted Nyberg's medium article has 30 likes and 2 quote tweets, with the top response (at least on my end) is someone explicitly referring to Nyberg as a pedophile!

'Good portion' is a vague word that doesn't mean plurality and it definitely doesn't mean large number (you cannot interpret a proportional claim as a claim of absolute size).

In my experience, mainstream publications who write about this stuff tend to not link to the crazy abusers on their own side that they paint as victims, but instead 'summarize' the situation, which are often actually lies. Which makes sense, because if you actually send people to the Twitter of the crazies, they can see that the person is quite crazy, which undermines the narrative. So low like counts are not necessarily inconsistent with being held up as a hero and having influence.

So you can have extremists who are followed by relatively few people, but journalists are among them and they turn them into martyrs for their side. The complaint is actually about the media and other signal boosters doing this. No one would care one bit about Nyberg or Alexander if they weren't held up as heroes in places with a decent amount of reach, while being anything but heroes.

Anyway, I did a quick google search and found that even the Washington Post lied about it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/14/if-we-took-gamergate-harassment-seriously-pizzagate-might-never-have-happened/

The writer is the infamous Sarah Jeong, an anti-white racist who was hired as part of the editorial board of the NYT, until the truth came out, which is itself evidence of how good that side of the aisle is at criticizing their own.

I also found the QZ article mentioned above. I didn't find any mainstream media articles telling the truth. So in my completely unscientific half-assed 'study,' I found that 100% of mainstream media sources had lied.

That said, Nyberg seems to be very obscure overall. But I do find it illustrative that the media can't even be honest when it costs them so little. Simply switching up the narrative to explain that this person is bad, but wasn't at all central to anti-GG would have cost them nothing but a loss of one opportunity to bash the other side.

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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