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But enough about JK Rowling!
To make myself clear: I was there, David. I was refreshing the threads on /r/TumblrInAction back in 2014, seeing the TFYC game jam fall apart months before the whole situation exploded after Eron's post, browsing and saving all the screenshot compilations. And much of what you allege is just that, allegiations. Strangely left little to no pixel trail. One specific extant thing I remember that could be treated as harassing was Rich Kyanka's review of Revolution 60. (Well, extant in the form of screenshots, the review itself has been removed from steam it seems).
There was probably a nonzero amount of threats, yes. Everyone gets those. I get anon death threats on tumblr once every few weeks, and I don't even post that much!
And if your argument to the latter is that it's bad and nobody should get those - don't. I very much prefer the internet in which I get an occasional hate mail to the one in which such a thing is infrastructurally impossible, because it would have to look much more like the Chinese internet. A site like the one we're on would be illegal/impossible/dangerous to host, for one.
(And if the argument to that is that my preferences aren't universal and we should have accommodations for people who want a controlled equilibrium rather than a free-for-all equilibrium, then of course we should! Facebooks and Linkedins for the normies on one end, SA, chans and niche subreddits on the other! The thing is, van Valkenburg herself spoke about frequenting Something Awful, so I find it wildly implausible that she was unprepared to handle some amount of heat. Or is that too mythology-building?)
But, arguendo, if the amount of insults that you're insinuating is true, this seems largely comparable to the 24/7 firehose of junk that's been directed at Rowling for the past five or so years. She has the courtesy to sometimes provide screenshots and quote tweets of those, even. I know that UK has some pretty strict laws about speech, so that probably reins in her domestic antifans a little. But other than that, nobody cares. There are no sympathetic articles, no wikipedia articles about the phenomenon. Why is it that some women are more equal than others?
I've noticed that the people who tend to emphasize how bad online abuse towards women is tend to carve out an exception for Rowling because she's someone who managed to convince lots of people to voluntarily hand over billions of pounds to her and as a result has substantial resources at her disposal. In a very real way, this is an honest and straightforward way of analyzing the situation based on the privilege framework that such people tend to subscribe to. The fact that such a thing is an exception rather than the rule would have been an interesting observation at some point in the past, but that seems banal now.
Rich people and major celebrities getting harassment and flack has always been the norm. Whether or not that's morally 'ok' is a complicated and long-argued question, but 'they can cry themselves to sleep on their piles of money' feels like it has been the general consensus going back at least to the 80s (probably earlier, I just wouldn't be aware of it before then).
GG offended sensibilities by applying the same level of catastrophic scrutiny to folks that most would consider 'normal people', names you've never heard of who don't own a vacation home and don't have much real-world influence.
Yes, like Eron Gjoni, who was an abuse victim, abused further by anti-GG.
When I say a person or group is bad, it doesn't mean I'm saying their opponents or political opposite is good. That is arguments-as-soldiers thinking.
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If someone is famous enough to be an obvious example, then they're privileged and so don't count.
If someone isn't famous enough to be an obvious example, than no one's ever heard of them or knows to use them as an example, so they are ignored.
Gina Carrano is famous enough to have been heard of, but doesn't have billions. If it could be demonstrated that she suffered serious online harassment and that this harassment has been ignored, would that advance the conversation, or would the answer be that she's still too privileged?
I think the claim of privilege would probably be thrown to see if it would stick, but I suspect most people would predict that it wouldn't stick due to the fact that she's not all that "privileged" even merely by Hollywood standards, to say nothing of the standards of Rowling. It doesn't help that her skin isn't super white, though I don't know if she has any actual heritage that would win her some oppression points.
I can only speculate about what the actual tactic would be. There are a couple common tactics that immediately come to mind. One is just minimizing the harassment she faced, saying that it's unfortunate, but why do you care about that when there are literally trans people getting genocided every day in America? The other is just retreating from the position that women deserve special protection because they're women and saying she fucked around and found out or played stupid games and won stupid prizes. This is actually the same basic position as the people who call out the Sarkeesian defenders of the world as catastrophizing what was standard part of online discourse that was already cliche 10 years ago. Of course, logical inconsistency has also been a cliche in discourse in general, and so this shouldn't be surprising; that said, when an ideology specifically denigrates things like logical or rational thinking as being something white oppressors imposed on the rest of us, my guess is that followers in that ideology are more susceptible to pushing logically inconsistent behavior and rhetoric.
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Yeah, that's not the reason. Posie Parker isn't rich as far as I can tell, and they're more than happy committing actual physical violence against her, and any detrans girl gets as much or more shit flung their way as Sarkeesian did.
Sorry, I miswrote my comment. The part that says
should have said
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What I'm getting from this is that you agree this pattern of abuse exists and that it plays the causal role I'm talking about, but would also like to criticize the left for attacking a person and then not banning people over that?
My response I guess would be that there's some ways in which the situations are different and some ways in which that's real hypocrisy, but bleh. That's a boring conversation, the same one we have every day about everything.
I'm just making a point about what it would take for this to explode the way past instances have.
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I do hope this is autocorrect pulling a fast one on you, rather than some veiled "I have your dox" threat.
I assumed it was some kind of reference that I just didn't get.
I would laugh my head off if it was an autocorrect of Isildur.
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