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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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If the community picks out one specific woman who works at SBI and decides to make a hate circle around her, publish her home address and start SWATing her residence,

Conflating "the community" as a whole with very particular (and dubious) accusations about a few specific people is doing a lot of work for you here. I would go so far as to say that the gamergate you are describing doesn't exist -- which makes it simple to predict it won't happen again. (Actually, maybe that makes it more likely: things that never happened are happening all the time.)

Some people have a political commitment to toe the party line on GG, regardless of the thin air it turned out to be.

I remember when the stock line was "Gamergate is driving women to suicide online". I don't recall any body counts materializing, or any posted receipts, but everybody moved on as if they hadn't proclaimed an utterly vacant falsehood. They memory holed that particular spike of hysteria, casually downgrading back to the ambiguous but exploitable terrain of 'harassment campaigns'.

If there is a single death I can even tangentially connect to the GG saga, it would have been the suicide of Zoe's ex-boyfriend after she marked him for a feeding frenzy. That there was a concerted effort to suppress the criminal, dead-fucking-obvious irony of this among journos and fellow indie developers showed me how strong the woke meme game is when it matters.

You're saying it was stochastic terrorism, and can't be held against any group or movement?

That's cool with me, but keep in mind I'm going to say the same thing about BLM and the distinction between protestors and rioters/looters.

  • -12

We're both smart enough to think of a dozen exceptions that make this apples-to-oranges: but sure. I'll take blame for all the death threats made by Gamergate (if you can find any that were more than rumor) if you take blame for all the deaths, arson, destruction and damage of Black Lives Matter. This is a fun comparison!