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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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