Slashdot Mirror
Why the Trolls Will Always Win
It turned out that a man named Andrew Auernheimer was responsible for having harassed Sierra. Known as 'Weev', he admitted it in a 2008 New York Times story on Internet Trolls. There, he spoke to the lengths which he and his cohorts went to discredit and destroy the woman. "Over a candlelit dinner of tuna sashimi, Weev asked if I would attribute his comments to Memphis Two, the handle he used to troll Kathy Sierra, a blogger. Inspired by her touchy response to online commenters, Weev said he "dropped docs" on Sierra, posting a fabricated narrative of her career alongside her real Social Security number and address. This was part of a larger trolling campaign against Sierra, one that culminated in death threats."
Now, seven years later, Kathy Sierra has returned to explain why she left and what recent spates of online harassment against women portend for the future if decent people don't organize. The situation has grown much more serious since she went into hiding all those years ago. It's more than just the threat of Doxxing to incite physical violence by random crazies with a screw loose. Read on for the rest of maynard's thoughts. These days, malicious trolls have taken to SWATting, where harassers call police and make false accusations to induce a SWAT raid. One prominent example is that of game developer Chris Kootra, who experienced a SWAT raid on camera while playing an online video game recently. There is also the troubling trend of developing malicious software intended to harm victims directly. For example, posting images on epilepsy forums which flicker at rates known to induce epileptic seizure. Given that Sierra is epileptic herself, this kind of harmful trolling hits home personally. She writes:
[While not photo-sensitive], I have a deep understanding of the horror of seizures, and the dramatically increased chance of death and brain damage many of us with epilepsy live with, in my case, since the age of 4. FYI, deaths related to epilepsy in the US are roughly equal with deaths from breast cancer. There isn't a shred of doubt in my mind that if the troll hackers could find a way to increase your risk of breast cancer? They'd do it. Because what's better than lulz? Lulz with BOOBS. Yeah, they'd do it.
And yet Auernheimer, the man who put her through all this horror, has for entirely different reasons become a kind of 'Net cause célèbre for Internet freedom. After having committed a hack against AT&T where he obtained the email addresses of thousands of iPad users, he attracted the attention of federal authorities. In due course he was convicted and sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for identity fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. Many thought his conviction and sentence egregious. Weev attracted support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and prominent Georgia University Law Professor Tor Ekeland, and they worked together to craft an appeal and overturn the conviction. In April 2014, they succeeded. Auernheimer is now free.
Ekeland wasn't the only one bothered by the government's case. Even Kathy Sierra disagreed. Yet she's appalled that somehow she'd been dragged into supporting the very man who'd abused her.
But you all know what happened next. Something something something horrifically unfair government case against him and just like that, he becomes tech's "hacktivist hero." He now had A Platform not just in the hacker/troll world but in the broader tech community I was part of. ... But hard as I tried to find a ray of hope that the case against him was, somehow, justified and that he deserved, somehow, to be in prison for this, oh god I could not find it. I could not escape my own realization that the cast against him was wrong. So wrong. And not just wrong, but wrong in a way that puts us all at risk.
The lawyer Ekeland, in recent commentary at Wired, continues to defend Auernheimer as having been wronged by an overzealous prosecution, the precedent of which could have significant ramifications for 'Net freedom. "...the crucial issue here is not weev or his ideas but the future of criminal computer law in the U.S. You may think weev is an #@$hole. But being an #@$hole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers."
Which leaves Sierra lamenting that Auernheimer still hasn't been charged and convicted for what she considers the real crime of harassment he'd committed, harming her and countless others. Where's the justice? Inciting violence and dissemination of "fighting words" are not free speech. Yet, as she admits, unless you're a celebrity, you're "...more likely to win the lottery than get any law enforcement agency to take action." So there is none. "We are on our own," she laments. "And if we don't take care of one another, nobody else will."
Thus, Sierra returned to push back — to push back against prominent journalists and members in the tech community who'd conflate prosecutorial violations of due process with the right to disseminate harassment and cruelty.
I came back because I believe this sent a terrible, devastating message about what was acceptable. ... To push back on the twist and spin. I believed the fine-grained distinctions mattered. I pushed back because I believed I was pushing back on the implicit message that women would be punished for speaking out. I pushed back because almost nobody else was, and it seemed like so many people in tech were basically OK with that.
Auernheimer, for his part, remains unapologetic. Responding to Sierra on Livejournal, he writes:
Yesterday Kathy Sierra (a.k.a. seriouspony), a mentally ill woman, continued to accuse me on her blog of leading some sort of harassment campaign against her by dropping her dox (information related to identify and location) on the Internet. ... Kathy Sierra has for years acted like a toddler, throwing tantrums and making demands whenever things didn't go her way. She rejects any presentation of polite criticism or presentation of evidence as some sort of assault on her. She was the blueprint for women like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, who also feign victimhood for financial and social gain. Kathy Sierra is the epitome of what is wrong with my community. She had something coming to her and by the standards set by her own peers in the social justice community, there was nothing wrong with what she got.
Some people never change.
You win, dude.
Has a way of catching you out in the end.
Time for a Second amendment solution.
Best Slashdot Co
It's about anonymous online sexual harassment, particularly when it's done by packs playing the part of street gangs.
Trolling is like ranting about systemd in response to every single /. article.
Don't try to play the sex card, that guy is an asshole. Do you think the reactions 'round here would be different if it had been a woman harassing a guy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is a tale between two people. Not two groups of people.
Trolls of this nature are unusual and they don't just target women. They target everyone.
You learn very quickly that you don't put personal information on the internet or you will get doxxed.
Is this guy a bad guy? Was she a victim? yes and yes. But it would be guilt and victimhood by association to say that there is a general issue with trolls or that they focus on women especially.
We can see what is going on in Infinite chan... the creator of that site, a gentleman with some sort of bone disorder is being Doxxed regularly. The trolls are calling it "cripple chan" and going after him because he's trying to create an alternative to 4chan.
Understand. I am not defending the trolls. Far from it. I'm just saying that they're not as pervasive as some would imply. They are a small group of very active trolls. You take basic precautions and do your best to avoid being a target. As to who is more or less likely to be a target? Anyone being obnoxious tends to get some focus. Being obnoxious doesn't mean you're right or wrong. It doesn't mean you don't have a point or do have a point. It just means you're annoying for some reason or other. And people that are being annoying do tend to get focused by trolls.
You get used to it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I really wish we could just drop the sexism part of this right now. Both genders get attacked by these people.
The second issue is if you want Anonymity than you will have this issue a lot.
Third is the simple fact that it is just a small number of folks causing the issue. The trouble is that it does not take a lot of folks to cause a good amount of harm.
The issue is that some people make heroes out of the idiots that do this when they do it to someone they do not agree with or like.
It really needs to be a time where all attacks are looked down on and discussion takes it place.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
He's a dick. On his nice days.
More bullshit from the "people regularly threatening women in public is no big deal" crowd.
Nobody said women are "always victims" but you shits have absolutely nothing to attack unless you can craft fake arguments to dismantle. You're trapped in a room with straw walls closing in, and only you can dismantle, their evil insidious not wanting to tolerate misogynistic assholes in public spaces.
People are bigots to other groups too, and feminists, by and large are quite reasonable in their acknowledgement of that.
Who's not being oppressed? People who are being told that maybe they can't threaten the lives of women freely. Those people are meeting the boundaries known as "the law" and "common decency" and feeling just so oppressed by it.
The problem is not feminists or anti-feminists.
The problem is sociopaths, and sociopaths come in all genders and races.
Sociopaths are very good at mobilizing well-intentioned humans for their own purposes.
Humans tend to conform to the desires of sociopaths instead of confront them, because natural selection did not historically favor humans who opposed sociopaths.
Without trolls under them. How is one to know what is idiotic without trolls? Trolls are a priceless commodity that need to be nurtured and protected so as we as a society don't lose sight of what is right and wrong. And Karma is some bullshit some asshole made up as to bring glory to their conduct that they don't deserve. People always want credit for shit they are SUPPOSED to do. What goes around doesn't come around. Shit happens. End of story.
There's two closely related problems at work here, I think. The first is that, in general, women have to work twice as hard for half as much respect. I have no answer to that.
But the bigger problem at work here is attackers have to work half as hard for twice as much payoff. The primary reason that "These attacks would never have happened if the interviewee was a man" is because for years men have shrugged off/ignored these attacks, so it takes a huge amount of attack to get a response. When the victim is a woman, it only takes a few short sentences to get EVERYONE riled up.
The mindset of a troll is the reaction is the reward. Therefore, they are 10 times more likely to make those sentences, as the desired reaction will happen. The Trolls generally believe it's "Harmless fun", but once enough bad-press/opinion starts to roll, social proof (See the writings of Robert Caldini for more info) get going and the threat of harm becomes very real.
But acting upon it is.
Nobody really cares if you know a fool proof way to kill the prez (well, aside of some professional paranoiacs). As long as you don't act upon it, you're fine. If you DO, though, don't expect to remain free (or, for that matter, alive) for any measurable stretch of time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In any unmoderated discussion the loudest and most insistent voices win. This has been true since democracy started - "politic" meaning roughly in the original Greek "To shout down"
We see this in our current political system as well - wingnuts running the show in both parties because reasonable people won't speak up.
Time and again I've seen this on forums I've been on that have been unmoderated, such as the OkCupid forums. After awhile, only the rudest and the crudest remain there along with those willing to tolerate them.
Yes and no.
Sociopaths are a problem, but we're also facing people who think there shouldn't be consequences for how they attack others. That's not a symptom of anti-social personality disorders(they tend to know that what they do is condemned and lack the self control to stop themselves). That's strictly a matter of people who specifically think what they're doing is acceptable. Which suggests, as lots of people have said with various evidential justifications, that culture is part of the problem.
Anti-feminists, on the other hand, are only a problem in that they will cry "false flag" at literally every situation that implicates a culture hostile to prominent women, turning every discussion about solutions into long drawn-out dismantlings of their conspiracy theories.
Here is the short paper by Jospeh Reagle "Free as in sexist. Free Culture and the Gender Gap" :
http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/3381
mirror:
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/3381#author
Very interesting.
In the fact that it specifically threatens them with bodily harm?
Oh.
"Where is the threat in words on a screen?"
You are a dumb fuck.
And, apologies for replying to myself, this actually is WAY closer to "News for Nerds" than a lot that has been posted lately. It's about someone teaching a programming language getting trolled on the internet, how detailed the trolling was and how she dealt with it, as well as the legal repercussions of the trolling. How much more "News for Nerds" does it get?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think he's referring to the following:
"I came back because I believe this sent a terrible, devastating message about what was acceptable. ... To push back on the twist and spin. I believed the fine-grained distinctions mattered. I pushed back because I believed I was pushing back on the implicit message that women would be punished for speaking out."
I wouldn't be surprised if some of his "trolling" was gender based, but I don't know why she has to make some sort of connection between internet trolling and gender. Exactly as you said, had this been a guy it would have been exactly the same - up until the comment quoted above.
There is a convenience store near where I live where one of the cashiers is for lack of better words an asshole. A girl I know at work attributed that to racism. I think a lot of times if you consider yourself in some minority or group, and you meet an ass, you often jump to conclusions about bigotry etc.
Auernheimer is one of the reasons we nice people can not have nice things. The worse problem is his supporters supporting his underhanded crusade against anyone he doesn't like. He is a threat to the safety of his targets to the extent that it most people would be imprisoned for decades for doing what he did. The message our justice system say to would be Auernheimers is "don't screw with the businesses and don't get caught threatening and underhandedly attack people" meaning doing what he did to Kathy Sierra is OK as long as you do it in a way that law enforcement won't care about it.
WHO CARES?!
I truly don't understand this. When I was a young awkward geek with very specific interests, I would have absolutely LOVED there to be women around with those same interests. Us guys totally loved the few geeky girls that were around and always wished there were more.
Yet today we see guys trying to scare the women away. What the hell changed?
Some people just like to see others suffer. It's a shame that his punishment was overturned. Freedom is not infinite, in the real world we don't have the freedom to cut each other with knives, why would we need that freedom on the internet?
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
This isn't about women, or trolling, or "culture". Andrew Auernheimer is a fucking sociopath loser who has no concept of what it means to live in a society of decent human beings. that he thinks he is "fighting the rich" or "part of the struggle" is fucking meaningless. It's just the stuff he tells himself to try to give some meaning to his pathetic, pissant little life where no one gives a fuck about him or who he is.
I think that the reasonable people do speak up. The trouble is that the press doesn't cover their input to the discussions. We end up only hearing from the extremist crazies because that's what the press thinks will attack more ears and eyeballs and sell more advertising.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
First, shooting the guy is _not_ a solution. The problem is not him, but what conditions allowed a vermin like him to arise. You solve the general problem, then instances won't come up again. Well, sickos will always exist, but then they will be just a bunch -- much easier to handle. The way things are now, there are loads of trolls. And that is what we must end.
Second, next time I hear someone talk about spying is OK because he who does nothing wrong has nothing to fear, I guess I'll nominate the guy for the igNobel prize. Privacy is necessary exactly because of these trolls. Stop defending illegal actions from authorities: that is a crime, too.
Third, it's not about gender, it's not about that particular woman. Some people wield a post like a little piece of power and dream about destroying things. Great minds build, small minds destroy -- because that's what they can do at most. Evil has a way to make great guys frustrated with trolls... and that might turn some themselves into trolls, too. Let's not fall for that dumb trap.
Fourth, even troll judgment must take time to allow reflection. Remember last time when that Boston bombing occurred? IIRC, someone killed the wrong guy out of haste. It's not fun when they say you look like someone bad and decide you're better off this world. When you got 7 billion people, there's a good chance that someone looks just like you...
Fifth, trolls do not win. Winning should be reserved for great accomplishments, not foul play. Imagine a basketball game with a final score of 6 to 4 (they usually end in the hundreds range IIRC). This is not winning. There has been some badly thought out responses like /. automatic moderation; it doesn't work. But that doesn't mean there isn't a solution. This problem is akin to rescue a broken neighborhood: it's hard to do, but not unfeasible. We need expert help to exterminate weeds.
Because to be beaten by a woman would utterly destroy them.
If they can scare the women away, they can preserve their illusion of superiority (in a mythical competition in a mythical world).
There are more gamers in the world now, and with the Internet we're all far more connected than we used to be.
There are a lot of sociopaths and other unpleasant, selfish people in the world. Some of them play games.
You do the math.
But she was making the hobby of video games look bad, she deserved it!
That may sound insane but it's what I've learned from reading Slashdot.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
In any unmoderated discussion the loudest and most insistent voices win. This has been true since democracy started - "politic" meaning roughly in the original Greek "To shout down"
Not quite... Politics (from Greek politikos "of, for, or relating to citizens")
FFS, stop trying to spin the Gamergate content. So far every single submission has bought hook, line, and sinker into the lie that it's about misogyny and harrassment, to avoid talking about what the game journalists did (and still do), and how they colluded to cover it up. This is the worst so far.
/. At least users are still in charge of moderating the discussion here, unlike most of the gaming press sites where even speaking against the groupthink is banned immediately.
This is transparent and embarassing and I never expected it out of
"What is the threat with squiggles on a piece of paper?"
"What is the threat of vibrations in the air?"
"What is the threat of someone pointing a metal tube in your direction?"
I hate to be rude, but that line of logic sounds quite sociopathic, and a good line of reasoning for offending someone and justifying the actions.
No, children, the trolls were not here first. Some of us remember that human beings inhabited the Internet before the Eternal September.
I actually think 4chan is kind of an interesting study in this behaviour.
When you exclude external activities, and look at discussions within 4chan, it can be surprisingly level. When you give everyone anonymity and let them be the biggest assholes they can be, you end up with a culture that shows little reaction to horrible social behaviour, making horrible social behaviour boring. It makes for an interesting forum for discussion.
Kathy Sierra did no such thing. Making shit up just makes you exactly the like the OP I was chastizing for needing a straw-argument to dismantle, all the while feeling SOOOO oppressed.
As for the 1 in 5 women thing... well
The CDC just recently verified that number that MRA types have been insisting is biased. Every study comes up with markedly similar results about that.
Politics comes from politeia, which comes from polis (city) and a suffix meaning person. It has nothing to do with shouting down.
This is not a problem exclusive to women.
As a man you can also get your life disrupted by death threats, unordered pizzas/taxis/products and doxxing.
It's probably easier to get singled out for it as a women, but if you are subject to it as a man you'll get much less support to cope with it. This is reflected in the offline world too as a MUCH higher suicide rate for men compared to women. Trying to construct this as some purely misgyonistic issue is just reinforcing the gender bias of men as some disposable soldier caste and is likely to aggrevate misgyonistic tendencies overall in society.
If you insist that this is just about females then you're a proponent for gender privlege and not equality.
She has a point around the Tech community. Maybe the whole reason the Tech community is so masculine is because of the treatment women receive when they enter it. I've seen time and time again women (of different sizes shapes and looks) from other departments walk through IT and get either pervy looks or guys who are too shy to answer their queries.
I'm glad to be a guy, but I feel for them...
Kathy Sierra has written several books that were very helpful when taking java exams. She has the ability to clearly explain things that not many people have mastered. She also created the javaranch.com site which is a great place to look when you have questions about java. I appreciate her contributions to the community and wish there were more people like her.
Let me stop and mention here that last week weev caused a storm when he wrote a racist screed for a white supremacist website. As usual I found out about it when my twitter timeline lit up with exhortations to do something about my client, the unpopular defendant. To me his bigoted viewpoint is just noise; the crucial issue here is not weev or his ideas but the future of criminal computer law in the U.S. You may think weev is an asshole. But being an asshole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It is math. If 1% are sociopath, those 1% will attack women and other "outsiders".
The probability that the 1% sociopaths are men is 100x higher than they being women, because of the skewed gender statistics.
Thus, you will have "men" scaring "women" away.
But if you think about it, calling these people "men" instead of "male sociopaths" is a choice you make in order to make the reality you want to see. Groups like these are really arbitrary. You could just as well say "sociopaths" or "weirdos" and remove the gender attribute.
It is your choice. That is why lies, damned lies, and statictics rules.
Derpy do. You didn't threaten me. Everyone knows what "fuck you" means. The article on the other hand, mentions people photoshopping a woman's face with bruises and abrasions with the caption "Women are like grass, they need to be beaten and cut sometimes" after she voiced an objection to some torture porn.
That's a fairly targeted and overt threat.
Words on a screen with her address, social security number, and a made up story designed to manipulate the public into wanting to do something to her? I can imagine a campaign like that being rather frightening.
Oh do fuck off. Gamergate isn't "predominantly male".
I love how you conflate disregarding constant, unsubstantiated claims of false flags with believing they can't exist. It shows just how deep in your own conspiracies you've gotten.
In the context of the Internet, the word "troll" used to mean, (according to Wikipedia):
"...a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion."
The campaign that Kathy Sierra was a victim of goes far, far beyond this. How does it make sense that one word is used to describe such a wide range of behaviour? It's like calling a violent rapist a 'cad'. Trolls, (in the original sense of the word), are assholes. Auernheimer and his associates exhibited obsessive, psychopathic, downright evil behaviour and attitudes. We should never equate mere assholes and psychopaths - doing so trivializes destructive psychopathic behaviour while making assholery seem much worse than it really is. And the latter is perhaps more dangerous; it gives authorities one more excuse for implementing draconian laws in response to minor social infractions.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
There's no competing against an Old Ike story, hot grits, or the granddaddy of them all, a well hidden goatse redirect.
Why the hell is Weev such a dick?
Really? Why? It's so beyond pointless.
"politic" meaning roughly in the original Greek "To shout down"
Bullshit. The word "politic" is derived from "polis", the Greek word for "city". So "politics" is the art of running a city (or city-state, as most cities were back then), not the art of shouting your opponent down...
The same technique is used by Marc Morano to silence climate scientists:
Whether one agrees with that message or not, there’s no denying that its tone is drastically different from much of the email Hayhoe has been receiving after Limbaugh’s denunciation, Gingrich’s decision to kill her book chapter, and the repeated publication of her email address by an influential conservative blogger who ceaselessly campaigns against climate science and climate action, Mark Morano. - http://texasclimatenews.org/wp...
Morano has sicked his minions on her for the crime of publicly discussing her scientific findings. Here is an example of the vitriol she is now receiving: Nazi Bitch Whore Climatebecile [] You stupid bitch, You are a mass murderer and will be convicted at the Reality TV Grand Jury in Nuremberg, Pennsylvania. AGW has never been anything but a Rockefeller depopulationary eugenical scam. [] After the Grand Jury indicts you, I would like to see you convicted and beheaded by guillotine in the public square, to show women that if they are going to take a man’s job, they have to take the heat for mass murder, just like the men do when they get caught. If you have a child, then women in the future will be even more leery of lying to get ahead, when they see your baby crying next to the basket next to the guillotine.
The original meaning in Greek politikos is "civilian" or "civic". Shouting doesn't have anything to do with it.
I wish people would fuck off with calling shit (blahblah)gate.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
It's not the same guys. Don't attribute the bad behavior of a few sociopaths with the majority of guys who still enjoy the company of women. What's that hashtag? #notallmen
[John]
Shit better not happen!
In any unmoderated discussion the loudest and most insistent voices win.
If this were true, systemd would be gone, dice wouldn't own slashdot, and they'd stop accepting submissions from Bennett Haselton.
Blame Adam Baldwin.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of his "trolling" was gender based, but I don't know why she has to make some sort of connection between internet trolling and gender. Exactly as you said, had this been a guy it would have been exactly the same - up until the comment quoted above.
There would have been one major difference, though: it wouldn't have happened. Trolls love to bully women. Women do visibly get the shitty end of the stick on the internet.
(FYI: I'm a guy.)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Why post AC? Are you afraid of the same thing happening to you?
>> Do you think the reactions 'round here would be different if it had been a woman harassing a guy?
Clearly you haven't been hanging around this site for very long.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It's a mix of two things.
Firstly you have frustration and anger that women don't seem interested in these guys. Like that Rodger guy they really can't see what is wrong with them and vent that anger by attacking women, who must all be stupid evil manipulative whores because they only sleep with guys they can get something out of and never the poor troll.
Secondly the trolls are in serious need of some men's liberation. I bet you know exactly what a "real man" is. Masculine, strong, breadwinner, protects his woman, has loads of cool stuff. Now ask yourself what a "real woman" is. Not so easy to define.
It wasn't always that way. Back in the 1960s the ideal woman was the model 1950s housewife. A mother, good at cooking and cleaning, beautiful but homely, always trying to satisfy her man. Women's lib changed that. Women became free to break away from that model, be what they wanted to be, not get neurotic about their weight or finding a husband by age 25. Now they get to decide what matters to them, not what society expects of them. Men need that too. These trolls only feel threatened because they are so insecure, and see women participating in any traditionally male dominated area as a threat to the ideal they are trying to live up to.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is not a problem exclusive to women. As a man you can also get your life disrupted by death threats, unordered pizzas/taxis/products and doxxing.
It's probably easier to get singled out for it as a women, but if you are subject to it as a man you'll get much less support to cope with it. This is reflected in the offline world too as a MUCH higher suicide rate for men compared to women. Trying to construct this as some purely misgyonistic issue is just reinforcing the gender bias of men as some disposable soldier caste and is likely to aggrevate misgyonistic tendencies overall in society.
And who do you think is out there telling men to keep their feelings bottled up until they explode? Women? Misogyny hurts men, too.
We aren't but that will change if they keep pushing their agenda in our hobby. Generally speaking, I don't care of the gender of a player, as long as he or she plays well and is the same for the vast majority of the players I've met online. That said, there are plenty of assholes online as well, but they are not particularly targeting women, they target everyone (for instance, I no longer play in expert in L4D and I immediately leave the game if the team choses to switch to expert because 90% of the time thats initiated by trolls whose only goal is to incapacitate the entire team)
But all that is past water and we are used to it, what changed in the past few years is the undeserved influence that trolls that happen to be female con artists like Sarkeesian in the gaming industry. If you like to play games, take a deep breath and watch her "Tropes vs Women" videos in youtube (I will NOT accept any liability for brain damage) and we can discuss it further.
Listen the the podcast on 5x5 called "overtired". In episode 15, the incredible Christina Warren describes the shit that she gets every day, and how she deals with it. I have some hope that a younger generation of women like Ms Warren will be able to react to attacking idiots without disappearing from the 'net.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Nothing changed. Most people are jerks some have it worse than others. I figured that out the first time I went online to play a deathmatch.
The vile putrid things out of these peoples mouths was sad and pathetic.
My wife, I have converted into a 'gamer'. At first she had no interest. Now she plays more than I do. Have not counted lately but I think she has me beat on the number of games she owns. No small feat mind you as I own thousands and I have to keep up on it to insure no duplicates.
When you first find out about 'online' it seems wonderful and cool. Joust against others with the same interest as me, GAMES!!! Then you find out they are not playing the same game as you. They are playing a different game. That of bully.
My wife has a pretty good theory. Basically they feel like you can not touch them. So they say whatever putrid thing comes to mind. These people are borderline sociopaths. They however do not carry their thin veneer of being nice over to the 'online world'. As there is no consequences to them personally. She says calls it 'the safety of their keyboard'. Which really sums it up very well.
So nothing really changed other than the group got much larger and the sociopaths figured out easy victims for their disorder. It is one of the reasons the whole youtube 'use your real name' thing blew up on google. A good amount of their audience do not want people to know who they are so they can basically be bullies on the internet.
Even people you would consider 'normal' turn into vile hateful things on the internet. They just put on a good show most of the time. The internet has stripped away the humanity people at least pretend to do in real life.
Basically at this point if a games main selling point is 'online'. I skip it, no matter how cool the game is.
Is investigating alledged victims' claims allowed? Or is it harassment and oppression?
Easy: They aren't.
Women, on the other hand, are trying to scare women away from gaming by painting gamers as this huge misogynist group that exists solely to stalk women and send them rape threats.
I'm assuming you're talking about #GamerGate. What's happening is that feminists are attacking gamers, claiming that they're all misogynists out to rape them. They're trying to claim that games are inherently misogynist (Sarkeesian) and that gamers hate all women (Quinn). When gamers disagree, all of a sudden a "campaign of harassment" materializes from out of nowhere.
See #NotYourShield. Women always have been and always will be welcome amongst gamers. Feminists who claim that all men are rapists, who claim that games are inherently misogynist, who claim that they're constantly harassed, on the other hand: they're not.
That's what you're seeing: gamers fighting back against a troll campaign by the feminists who are painting themselves as victims. Don't fall for it.
We just had an article a few days ago where the male architect of systemd got similar hate. We all condemned that too, the difference is there was no one in that thread arguing there was some double standard.
I really wish we could just drop the sexism part of this right now. Both genders get attacked by these people. The second issue is if you want Anonymity than you will have this issue a lot.
The ironic thing about this statement is that if we had TRUE anonymity, the sexism would NECESSARILY be dropped...you wouldn't know what sex the person was. However, women go out of their way to explicitly state that they're woman thus ruining their anonymity, and leaving the door unlocked to have that bit of personal info exploited.
I wish I could find a link, but there was a good explanation on /b/ about "tits or GTFO" and the idea was that, nobody knew what sex you were until you attempted to use this fact to your advantage. At which point, you had devalued yourself in the eyes of that group for being sexually manipulative and they wanted you to show your tits or leave. Obviously, it was stated more eloquently than this, but it made perfect sense.
This is what you Americans wanted because you hated goodness, truth, and beauty.
People who don't think that is threatening, should post their own SS#, Address, Children's names on a picture on the internet and see what happens. I mean, if there is no threat, what are they afraid of?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The same thing happens to people with a penis all the time and no one cares. It is a evolutionary and societal thing to protect women and consider whatever happens to a man to be their problem to deal with.
Feminists are not fighting to change this. They are not after equality. The attention this is getting IS unequal to the attention male "victims" get. For people that care about equality, it is disgusting.
It doesn't suggest that at all. It does suggest that these kinds of attacks on women are worse, and well, that's pretty obviously true. Can you imagine a male blogger on his private blog receiving that kind of over-the-top campaign if he considered moderating comments?
Or Jewish. Or gay. Or black. Or of a different political party. Or with a different opinion on a subject.
"Trolls" (they aren't trolls, they're ass-holes) will attack anyone for anything that the ass-holes do not approve of.
Anything.
The ass-holes are not attacking women because the ass-holes are misogynists. The ass-holes are attacking because that is what ass-holes do. Their attacks are phrased in misogynistic terms because the target is a woman.
Except you douchebags have been wrong every fucking time.
Like when you pretended there was no police report for the threats that made Sarkeesian move out of her house, without even a hint of investigating it.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, this is an obvious manifestation of misogynistic stereotypes of women being manipulative liars, not any sort of rational consideration.
They aren't, it is just a narrative to stir up trouble and you have fallen for it. Just because there is a predominant demographic in a group, that does not mean any action by any individual in that group can be attributed to the entire group.
Why are blacks dangerous? They aren't. Why are illegal immigrants drug mules? They aren't. Why are all women feminists? They aren't. Why are all gamers misogynists? They aren't.
Haha yeah sure it isn't. It's also about journalism not misogyny right?
There's two closely related problems at work here, I think. The first is that, in general, women have to work twice as hard for half as much respect. I have no answer to that.
No they don't. They have default respect because vagina. They have to work twice as hard to remove the suspicion that they're not in an organization to "make it better for women" which has the negative effect of shitting it up for profitability and stress level of the male employees. It's quite different, and the latter suspicion, given what we've seen over the last 5 years, is rational.
It's so beyond pointless.
Worse (for him) is the fact that his identity is known now.
At some point he'll target the wrong victim, and he will end up dead - all "for lulz".
"Lame" - Galaxar
It isn't exclusive to women at all. There are plenty of men's lives that have been ruined by false claims of rape. Hell, if I wanted, I could make the same claim about entire races, as Al Sharpton created a fiction that people STILL believe to this day, which was proven false a long time ago.
Trolling is easy because WE (all of us) want to believe the worst in humanity. Humanity is flawed, often terribly so. But we are also exceptional. And often, we are both, at the same time.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
does that number include 'i was not really feeling it but had sex anyway', 'it was a drunken sex therefore the consent was invalid', 'construction workers catcalled me the other day' and 'the guy confused about my feelings toward him attempted to kiss me'? [checks the article... yep]
The definition of sexual assault is so broad it can mean pretty much anything depending on who you ask, which only waters down the words 'assault' and 'rape'. I can only assume it's done to manufacture the perception of a dire crisis despite the crime statistics steadily going down.
Exactly, I'm not at all dumb or a fuck, whatever happened to "I'm rubber and you're glue?"
Bullshit. I'm not going to deconstruct this "there's a double standard" argument every fucking time.
Let's go over the differences here:
A. The threats in this case specifically made it clear that it was because she was female. Like the threateners made absolutely zero pretense at hiding that. If you argue with this at all, I'm going to assume your entire argument is predicated on it. Consider carefully.
B. I personally, along with a lot of other slashdotters have indeed condemned internet threats directed at the architect of systemd just a few days ago. Who is male.
You and the "i kan reed" are both right. You humans in general have a very strong mentality to act as "herd". And is very easy for psychopaths take control of these herds and it is very difficult for reasonable people to avoid this, since to convince a flock that they are doing something wrong is necessary that the flock can be able to think, and this is beyond the capacity of the herd (as many have already noticed, an individual is more intelligent and reasonable than a group of humans).
I'm seeing a great example of that right now in my country's elections (Brazil), where the flock moved by the local media (newspapers and television) wants to kill and segregate all who do not conform to the "shepherd" (the media). And the situation is so bad that if the flock win, I may have to leave the country to stay alive.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Did you even read the main story. It cites the SWATting of Chris Kootra, who is a male gamer. Regardless of whether you think that women suffer disproportionately from this kind of crap, the trolls are out of control.
We are the 198 proof..
Is investigating claims allowed or isn't it?
Once again I have the "obsessed with false accusations of rape" reality denier. Because you are a person who believes in an a world where women are serial liars, and you're inured to observational evidence about it by some mental block I don't get.
But here. Here's how wrong you are about false rape accusations.
False accusations do exist but those 2-5% of cases are for our justice system to handle, and not a widespread systemic issue(and there's all sorts of clues as to when an accusation is made up).
Also unfortunately, our judicial and prison systems do not understand this either. People aren't maliciously the way they are. They get broken for a reason. Our prison system acts as a punishment and as a profit center for for-profit companies who run them. They should be a place where the broken people put into them can receive the discipline and structure they need to cope with an adult world without endangering society or themselves in the process. If we ever actually manage to reach that point, I think our species would be able to evolve just a little bit more. I don't have high hopes that it's possible.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is not a problem exclusive to women. [...] but if you are subject to it as a man you'll get much less support to cope with it.
That's true, and an independent yet important problem as well. However, I think we can agree that when men get less support (or even suffer stigma from not being "manly enough" to cope with it, which is pure BS), women face an echo chamber of aggressive misogynistic a-holes, ready to take on a crusade against them on a scale that most men never face. Just read the first comments here. In short, the harassment of women is more intense (from more harassers) and is pandemic.
Of course it is, but your "just asking questions" is bullshit. The way you assume it's a likely situation is your problem.
She clearly didn't fabricate this fucking case, because the evidence made it onto the damn news, and faceboook has fucking records. Now you can "investigate" well established facts all you want, but the fact that you didn't even look at the article before "questioning" the threat is your fucking problem
> After having committed a hack against AT&T
Is this that thing where he looked at the public page that AT&T offered freely? And please don't equate it to yet another unlocked house door, which is still designated property. It was more like leaving your "private" shopping list posted on a Public Notices board.
I think weev is a fucking douche, but I won't let that turn me into a puppet that can have right and wrong blurred or manipulated. Or "misstate" his life details to advance my agenda.
> she opined that maybe forum moderation wasn't a bad idea
> suddenly, death threats
I'm sure I'll be burned at the stake for being a witch here, but maybe, just maaaaaaybe, I should listen to the voice of logic that's whispering "there's a rational gap here; maybe, just maaaaaaybe there's more to the story than this."
Or maybe there isn't. Hard to know. The more time that's passed, the more we're stuck with mere He Said She Saids. I'm sure there were assholes involved, at least.
When I was a young awkward geek with very specific interests, I would have absolutely LOVED there to be women around with those same interests... Yet today we see guys trying to scare the women away. What the hell changed?
Nothing but the volume. I loved geeky women back then, and some geeky men were hostile. Now, I still like geeky women, and some geeky men are still hostile.
Nothing has changed, except the amplification of the extremists on both sides. The extremists on both sides want to drive a wedge to consolidate their base, just like the Republicans and Democrats. They use kernels of truth wrapped in emotionalist rhetoric to do it.
Black people aren't gangbangers. Muslims aren't terrorists. White men aren't aryan supremecists. Women aren't hyperemotional basket cases.
And male geeks aren't misogynists.
When you pick a bad characteristic of a subset of a group and label the whole group with it, that is prejudicial sterotyping. Doing so does not help feminism or technology.
Men aren't trying to scare women away from gaming, assholes are.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
if its vaginal society, it must make you a complete c*nt
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Don't try to play the sex card, that guy is an asshole. Do you think the reactions 'round here would be different if it had been a woman harassing a guy?
True enough. But why shouldn't everyone be protected against death threats and harassment? Why would women get special justice (anybody remember "equal justice")?
Kathy Sierra has returned to explain why she left and what recent spates of online harassment against women portend for the future if decent people don't organize.
Why not just say against people? "I was harassed and received many death threats" - "So, what, dude? Man up!"
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I am not anti-feminist, but what I am about to say is likely something they might say. The problem with many Feminists (and others) , is that they cry wolf. And there is a whole group of people that follow after those claims, repeating them ad nausium, long after proven false. Earlier this week, there was a suggestion that we need more women in IT, and it was due to some sort of latent sexism or whatever in the industry. The reality is, IT might have all the women interested in it, and that women aren't really all that interested in IT careers. Crying "sexism in IT" is not helpful in the discussion, and quite frankly, tends to end any discussion. The cry itself is a kind of "troll" comment. It requires no thought, and causes great harm.
Is there sexism in IT? I'm sure there is. Is it endemic to IT? I'm pretty sure it isn't.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Upbringing has a well understood implication on anti-social personality disorders. Very early upbringing. (Warning, "I watched a documentary" level knowledge) Parents who are scared or nervous around their children greatly increase the likliehood that that child will turn out sociopathic.
But in spite of its primarily environmental cause, we don't have any known treatments for it. It's a disorder, and that sucks.
And, of course, upbringing affects more substantive things like beliefs and behaviors. How that in turn interacts with culture is extremely complicated and is probably not within the bounds of currently understood sociology.
So you're saying That is the lesser of two weevils? :-)
With apologies to Paul Bettany in Master and Commander
What is there to take his word over her word, or even to take either's word at face value? Exceptional claims require exceptional proof, and all that... The safest stance, without lots of corroboration, is for me to assume that they've both got serious issues. Sometimes the simplest explanation might be the correct one. I'd love to be shown otherwise, but whatever I could find online was just rather unconvincing.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Humans tend to conform to the desires of sociopaths instead of confront them, because natural selection did not historically favor humans who opposed sociopaths.
This is true. But this is why we have codes of honor (machismo, chivalry, etc.) in various societies. Courage, honor and a duty to defend the weak. Yes, these traditions were somewhat mysoginistic as well. But we can update them to suit modern society.
Natural selection dictates that we protect ourselves from harm. So we avoid violent sociopaths. Or leave them to law enforcement, the people who are paid to confront such threats counter to the laws of natural selection. But weev isn't a physically dangerous individual (unless he gets hold of a gun). So the nature of an on-line confrontation and resulting harm wouldn't be life threatening. So unless we want some institutionalized Internet police force to be imposed upon us, we need to face some risk and stand up to these sorts of threats to social order as individuals.
Or, like in medival times, a system of Internet 'knights' could arise to do battle with the trolls in exchange for public recognition and reward for their efforts.
Have gnu, will travel.
I call B.S. on playing the sexism card. Trolls are trolls regardless of who the target is. This particular troll is particularly obnoxious. Had Ms. Sierra used a gender-neutral nom de guerre, I dare say that the results would have been similar with the exception of the SSN aspects.
Not the Same Anonymous Coward.... But Seriously though. Treating this as a gender issue is just as paternalistic towards women and wrong towards men as other forms of gender bias. What happened to her was just plain wrong not because she was a woman, but because you don't treat any person like that and it should be just as offensive regardless of her gender.
In the long term if you treat women as a specially "protected" class then it is just as likely to lead us back to that form of protection becoming repressive. Most of the societies that treat women unequally and often poorly, say they are doing so to protect them from men or in order to treat them with greater respect than men. And I think they mostly believe this and it isn't just the cynical argument on some people's part that others would like to believe. Paternalism is really the most insidious and widespread of gender bias. Violence towards women is also real and an important issue to address, but you address it by making violence towards anyone unacceptable and not just by saying you "never hit a girl", well you never hit a boy either or anyone.
Bottom line is that a gilded and well intentioned cage is still a cage. And separate is not equal.
Weev is an asshole, no question and it'd be nice if he were reprimanded for his crimes.
Somehow though, I have to be another one of those assholes and say that trolling is a big issue, but not solely a women's issue. If you want an example of trolling that reached an entirely new level and has most definitely contributed to the failing mental health of an autistic man, look up the story of Christian Weston Chandler.
Trolling isn't new, it's always been mind-boggilingly terrible, but we couldn't be arsed to do anything but laugh back when the victims were usually mentally ill and male.
you ain't going to convert misogynistic trolls who think they are above women, the sort of fundamentalist religionist type that thinks their place is in the kitchen
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Or maybe, many women want to be treated that way by sociopath predators like Politicians. A lot of women are attracted to power and wealth and tolerate the abuses because it garners them access to their goals, and IT people offer no such attraction or access.
Sorry, but being socially awkward is not a crime, and perpetuating stereotypes of men in IT is just as bad as your claims of sexism in IT. I'll paint you with the same brush you paint others with, nice n broad.
I happen to be in IT, and the women in IT I know are strong healthy and don't let a little social awkwardness affect their view of guys in IT.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Sounds like someone with a self-esteem problem around women and highly jealous of them
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
HAHAHHA!
That number includes stalking now?
this
Oh, so it's entirely genetic, and that's why 20 years ago, the field's gender mix was almost 60-40 and now 85-15. Because genetics change dramatically over short timespans.[1] [2]
Bio-determinism bites. And it's an easy, lazy, insufficient answer. I, and others, are prepared to accept that there exist biological gender differences. But, given human history, you can't say that gender differences are strictly biological without evidence. And you can examine socioeconomic factors that influence gender-based occupation decisions. In the previous link, girls(and boys) with higher self-esteem are more likely to avoid gender-typical job roles. Rather substantially, if you can actually read the article, and not just the abstract. Primitivistic psychoanalysis suggests that people who fill gender-typical jobs are likely following social pressure, than innate instincts.
Sexism in IT is real, I mean, hell, ask a transgender person whose seen both sides. But even if that were 0% of the problem, it wouldn't imply genetic determinism.
Why the Trolls Will Always Win
They don't.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...
And sometimes they really don't.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Wrong. The reason I don't want people to know who I am is because one of my goals in life is to avoid the judgements of others. That is to judge me rather than some online persona I may choose to have. We escape here where we can be ourselves. In the real world we can't necessarily. But that does not imply we're trolls, engaging in trolling, doxxing, or any other kind of sociopathy.
You're talking about a very small subset of assholes. The "gamergate" (god I hate typing that) thing is about a few obnoxious assholes and some SJWs. It in no way represents the vast bulk of people who play video games. That's the problem. It takes just a few vicious sociopaths to ruin shit for everybody.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Humans tend to conform to the desires of sociopaths instead of confront them, because natural selection did not historically favor humans who opposed sociopaths.
Ah... and the reason that cheetahs run much slower than 1000 kph is because natural selection did not favor cheetahs who ran faster than 1000 kph. (Perhaps sonic booms disrupted the mating rituals.)
So you would advise that your NSA friends curate all online discussions, right ?
I don't think it's just a narrative, but I also don't think anything changed in the culture. Rather, we've just made it waaaay easier for the .1% of men who happen to be crazy and/or psychopaths to be really loud about it, totally drowning out the other 99.9% of the male population who aren't crazy, aren't starting disgusting trouble, and thus aren't noticed. I like to think that most geeky guys are like you, still, young and old. The crazy ones just get all the press.
I don't think it's a concious decision about scaring someone away. The reason some people do this trolling is probably not even obvious to themselves, it's a deep psychological cause and effect. The incidence of trolling towards women may also be over-represented if women are more likely to take this kind of abuse seriously, especially threats, and also if women are more likely to report the experience in public, instead of silently wtirhdrawing. I can't back up any of those theories, but they should be considered before concluding that the abuse is especially bad towards women.
If it turns out that women are indeed "trolled" more than men, that wouldn't be a surprise either. There is so many expectations related to dating and relationships, and the "creepy" label is dealt at the slightest deviation from the norm (this seems especially bad, almost ridiculous, in the US, based on TV and movies). If failure at dating constitutes the majority of ones experience with the other sex, it's not that surprising that some minority of people online will react in devious ways. Don't know how to fix it, but if more kids had friends of both sexes that may be a start.
20 years ago, was DotCom bubble. Go back 40 years. If you're going to cast a wide net, cast it all the way back to the start of the industry, watch the bubble come and go, and watch the rise and fall of women in IT.
Selectively picking arbitrary points to compare is lazy insufficient answer. ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
There are real people killing by the hundreds every day in Syria and Iraq because the U.S. arms industry and their shareholders need freshly hacked meat for their biz to thrive.
And now these Precious Girls(TM) are offended by etheral bits from idiots ???
Those pussies should grow a thick skin and delete comments. Done.
You perceive women as having a privilege of being given the "benefit of the doubt" and getting public sympathy by default (that you claim men do not receive).
Suppose we accept your premise: Why not solve the imbalance by encouraging people to extend those same social privileges to us men?
Those privileges, that you claim are exclusive to women, make the world a more compassionate and understanding place. I think we need more of that for everyone.
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
We all condemned that too,
Really?
You had the sense to condemn this one.
Here's some prime victim-blaming.
A bit more.
And this one fits nicely.
To be fair, many of the other +3 or higher ones condemning him also included the text 'but collecting money for an assassination is over the line.'
What does the bubble have to do with it if it's purely genetic?
What do genes care about cultural artifacts like bubbles?
You're the one alleging a mechanism to explain a phenomenon. I've supplied counter-evidence, you really ought to be able to back up your pet hypothesis better than "nuh uh"
"Do you think the reactions 'round here would be different if it had been a woman harassing a guy?"
Considering about half of this site is firmly SJW material - yes.
Are you that blind?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What a wonderful person you are. Welcome to the rule of the jungle, or what ?
Here is a little dirty secret: if the people of Viet Nam, Chile, Iran and so on had the same grudges against you Americans, they would call for all of you treated just as you described Mr weev should be treated.
Granted, he might be an asshole, but sure as hell he is a very tiny asshole as compared to A$$holes like Bush, Blair and Fuld. Or Erdogan. A guy who arsonizes the next house and then calls the firebrigade (German SAM forces) to protect his house from contracting fire, too.
I'm calling you names because you're being a disingenuous little shit.
And here I always thought it came from a combination of 'poly' meaning many and 'tick' meaning blood-sucking parasites...
I JUST SAID
Nobody said women are "always victims"
Can you approach this debate honestly even once?
> What a wonderful person you are. Welcome to the rule of the jungle, or what ?
It's all a jungle. You may not believe it, but that doesn't change the jungle.
Yes, I was in that threat condemning not just the threateners but the condoners too. See?
I agree with you. This is not trolling. Trolling is a art.
I used to troll slashdot under another account. It was great fun. I'd see a good target story and write a well-structure comment. The first paragraph would be something on topic and sensible. The second would introduce minor logical flaws, which in the third paragraph would explode into completely ridiculous conclusions that would incense slashdotters, like that the only way to ensure privacy is for the government to monitor all communications at all times or something. Then you sit back and watch moderators only read the first paragraph and mod you +5 insightful, and then people come along and actually read the post and get enraged and write 12 paragraphs about how wrong I am. Then it gets moderated down to +1 troll, then people realize it's funny and it winds up at +5 funny. It was good fun.
But sociopaths threatening and harassing people not just on the internet but spilling over into real life (phone calls, calling their boss, their customers, etc) is not trolling. It's...criminal. Online trolling can be ignored, but I think the only way to stop that kind of behavior is legal action.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Since you brought up politics, this harmless "words on a screen" sounds a lot like what resulted in the shooting of Senator Gabrielle Giffords. There are way too many crazy people in the world to be putting people's personal information out there. This is also much like what happened to Valerie Plame during the Bush administration.
Where's the Like button.
It's not genetic. People grow up with different desires and motivations in different time periods. Maybe in 20 years from now it will be popular for men to be nurses. That doesn't mean their genetics have changed, just what they want to do.
It was very common millennia ago for men to carry purses (for their coins), men don't today. It doesn't mean our genetics have changed since then, just our ideals of what we want and don't want to do.
Women just don't want to be in IT right now, it doesn't mean the world is ending. If women wanted to be in IT but were being oppressed, that's a problem. But they don't. End of story.
The most extreme nutcase posts from both factions, indeed in all factions on every issue fought about on the internet, is composed of trolls who fake being a member of a particular community. For example: The most extreme racist posts on conservative blog comment sections are made by trolls whose real community is DailyKos or DemocraticUnderground. When your philosophy is "anything goes" relativism, any kind of slimy tactics are okay.
> What, you mean like facebook?
You didn't even make a point with that comment. Just give up.
It isn't hard. I'll use small words so that you can understand. You assume people are good and have good intentions unless they demonstrate (sorry word too big, "show") that are not. The lady in this case did nothing to show she is a bad person. She just made a comment about comment moderation (long word, I know). The other guy made threats and thinks whites are better than every other color. He has a history of doing things that show he is a bad person.
Easy enough to understand? Slashdot really should have cut off registration once they reached the six digit IDs
It's ok. I understand you're just doing it to keep from being bullied yourself, by people like you.
This is the real answer to these kinds of trolls: doxx them and have them killed.
They do things like this online that they wouldn't do in real life in large part because there are no consequences. We can change that.
Argument by analogy:
If blacks don't want to vote because of KKK threats, that's fine. That's their choice. It's not something I need to concern myself with. Maybe it'll change in the future.
I believe GP was saying that the particular study cited had a questionable definition of "rape", not that the victims were lying. The survey didn't ask if they were raped. The survey asked questions about if this happened or that happened, then the researchers call it rape, even if the "victim" was perfectly happy with what happened.
One question was if they engaged in sex while drunk or high to the point that they couldn't really give informed consent, or if their partner initiated sex while they were asleep. The researchers then called that rape, which is many cases it probably was. In other cases not - I recently spoke with a woman who didn't remember having sex with her husband one night when they were drunk. It just so happened that he videotaped about two minutes of it, and after he starts, then backs off she says "what are you doing, I thought we were going to have sex?" Upon viewing the tape, she wasn't bothered about it. Since she didn't remember it and was too drunk to really give consent, this study would call that rape. The woman doesn't think it's rape, but the researchers say it is.
I've actually talked to my wife about some of these situations ahead of time. I've told her I'd very much enjoy being awoken by her in a special way, and she said it's fine if I massaging her and such while she's asleep, waking her with sexual contact. The RESEARCHERS call that rape, we call it a great way to wake up.
The researchers also called it sexual violence if the partner did any of these things (quoting from the survey):
doing things like telling you lies, MAKING PROMISES ABOUT THE FUTURE WHICH THEY KNEW WERE UNTRUE, threatening to end your relationship,
or threatening to spread rumors about you?
wearing you down by repeatedly asking for
sex, or SHOWING THEY WERE UNHAPPY?
So letting my wife know I'm disappointed that our last two date nights were cancelled and I'd like to have a romantic evening is sexual violence, as defined by these researchers.
Sexual violence is an important issue. These researchers trivialize it and create more problems when they define "showing they were unhappy" as sexual violence.
The first guy was right. We should just shoot all the assholes. That would eliminate all the lawyers and politicians too. Win-win.
Sigh. Slashdot is truly dead. If there's one site on the whole fucking internet where editors should know what's a troll, it's this one.
You and the articulist live in an imaginary world in which anything that doesn't conform to your lunatic world vision must be pre-processed and converted beforehand into a straw man so that you can dismiss it, as newspeak made you unable to understand concepts outside of your little box.
Since slashdot got bought by the NWO, I only enter the site to watch what kind of bullshit they feed you daily, with cherry picked data and biased writers.
Right. Let's just nuance the whole thing away by zooming back to "the big picture." So that ultimately the message becomes "badness is bad."
We can feel oh so clever and advanced by doing so.
Alsi, fuck that.
But with your home address, SS# and Children's Names.
That is the key, the goal. And this goes for all issues of speech. Regardless of "libel" and slander", or anything else. Words do, and always will mean nothing. The response is the only relevant piece in the matter.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"harassment" = "ever received an unwanted text or email or phone call." Wow, I wonder how they got one in five. Congratulations on verifying a bullshit metric.
Investigating is fine. Asserting that the claims are false until the investigation occurs -- and then continuing to do so after the investigation proves the claims are true -- is bullshit propaganda, and undermines your professed cause.
They aren't. Some women see people attacking them and assume "They're attacking me because I'm a woman". And the media loves to play this narrative. The real reason people get harassed isn't because of their gender, it's because they're idiots.
You're both right and wrong. Everyone should have the benefit of equal justice. The problem is that, at this time, there's a gender-specific problem, and if the targets themselves aren't willing to push back, why should they expect anyone else to?
I've been harassed bot online and in the real world. After almost a decade, one cyber-dummy lost their job when the police got involved. Works for me. Another, a real-world case, had to take out ads in the news section of the two largest newspapers a couple of months ago to apologize for trying to publicly humiliate me.
Everyone says "somebody ought to do something" but if nobody does, the problems will persist. When you're the one being attacked, you've just been nominated as that "somebody", even if you don't want to be.
There's no need for an "anti-troll squad", or an organized fight against these idiots. That will just give credence to those who cry "femi-nazi".
All that's needed is for good people to stand up for what's right when they're attacked.
The three rules:
1: What is the right and just thing to do?
2: Then why the heck aren't you doing it?
3: You should never get this far. Goto 1.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You haven't proven women in IT are being threatened by the IT version of the KKK. And until your post, nobody even suggested that women were being threatened by IT KKK types.
But if you mention Somalia, you'll gain street cred in the Strawman crowd, but only if you do so in the next 30 minutes.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The threat is in the plausibility.
"I want to rape and murder your unborn children" has no plausibility of happening.
"Yo bitch, who lives at 123 Fake Street in CityName, ST, with her husband, 1 year old baby girl, 2 cats, and a hamster, I want to..." is very plausible of happening.
Time to graduate the 5th grade, dude. You're not insightful, just another woman-hating dickhole and more evidence of the systematic misogyny you claim doesn't exist... But of course you don't see it like that and will disagree, but whatever. Yes, you will claim you love and respect women, yadda yadda... but it's clear you harbor some anger and resentment toward women for whatever reason. My suggestion: Find a real cause to rail against, one that will actually improve the world, instead of just complaining about feminists and their secret agenda.
My question is, why does this anger you so much? Since you're such an intellectual powerhouse, perhaps you can figure that one out, and then realize the problem is within yourself...
From the methods section
The specific types of sexual violence assessed included rape (completed or attempted forced penetration or alcohol- or drug-facilitated penetration) and sexual violence other than rape, including being made to penetrate a perpetrator, sexual coercion (nonphysically pressured unwanted penetration), unwanted sexual contact (e.g., kissing or fondling), and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences (e.g., being flashed or forced to view sexually explicit media).
Those are the categories they questioned about. If you really think that forced penetration or alchohol/drug facilitated penetration isn't rape, I've got news for you, son.
Here is the correct way to handle it:
1. buy a gun
2. stop the sexist bullshit about how it's all because you're a woman
3. ignore them
I played WoW and we would have women in our guild from time to time, and nobody fucking cared. We certainly wouldn't invite a subpar player in our raid just because they are female. They were very few women who were in hardcore raiding guilds, because women would rather play Candy Crush.
weev and others don't think the rules apply to them.
Well, there's rules against murder (it's totally possible to do it, so no actual impossibility there other than the illegal nature of it).
So when weev thinks the rules don't apply to him, LET US NOT APPLY THE RULES TO HIM.
Of course, I'd beat the shit out of the little twat and post a Youtube clip of the event for full publich punishment effect.
And continue to do so until the dicksack ran away to hide under a new name and manner.
However, I don't think that weev will accept that THOSE rules don't apply. Because.
does that number include 'i was not really feeling it but had sex anyway', 'it was a drunken sex therefore the consent was invalid', 'construction workers catcalled me the other day' and 'the guy confused about my feelings toward him attempted to kiss me'?
From the women I've talked to (with the gory details), the 25% number is quite low. Or as Whoopie Goldberg would have classified it, "rape-rape".
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
>This has been true since democracy started - "politic" meaning roughly in the original Greek "To shout down"
Really? Here's what etymonline.com has to say:
politic (adj.)
early 15c., "pertaining to public affairs," from Middle French politique "political" (14c.) and directly from Latin politicus "of citizens or the state, civil, civic," from Greek politikos "of citizens, pertaining to the state and its administration; pertaining to public life," from polites "citizen," from polis "city" (see polis). Replaced in most adjectival senses by political. From mid-15c. as "prudent, judicious."
polis (n.)
"ancient Greek city-state," 1894, from Greek polis "city, one's city; the state, citizens," from PIE *pele- "citadel, enclosed space, often on high ground" (cognates: Sanskrit pur, puram "city, citadel," Lithuanian pilis "fortress").
Funny how the bullies always pick on people that won't fight back. A few thousand to the right people and you couldn't hide anywhere without disappearing from the net.
The following is all subjective, so be warned. :)
From what I've seen (admittedly second and third-hand) the people attacking women are generally doing so at least in part *because* they are women. On the other hand, attacks against men are rarely gender-based, but rather based on other factors like religion/ideology/actions.
If this is true, then even if the numbers of attacks are the same, it would not be unreasonable for the attacked women to feel it differently because they are being attacked for something they *are* rather than something they *think*. (And actually I suspect this same feeling may hold true for race-based attacks against people as well.)
Weev made a good point so I don't know why it's being completely ignored here. The same people who denounce him have long since since decided that the harassment techniques he's accused of are legitimate means to their own ends. Is harassing, threatening, doxxing, campaigns to get people fired from their jobs, suddenly OK when you are on the side of justice and righteousness? Or do they always make you a rotten human being? Many people in this discussion are playing both sides of that argument, but Weev is not one of them.
By the way, I watched the Sierra thing unfold. Without in any way justifying the harassment against her, her blog was world-class marketroid fluff of the type that is universally hated here. That was a earlier in the web's history so I don't blame her for fucking up her moderation, but nowadays that type of blog would require moderater-approved commenting or you couldn't control your transparently bullshit message (which is exactly why the blog imploded.) I wish there were verifiable logs of the events that happened because I have seen a lot of flat-out lies spread by her which have been picked up and repeated uncritically (example: "someone posted a picture of a woman being violently suffocated" actually it was a piece of clipart of a woman with a pair of panties on her head over her mouth. Another example: "an entire website denegrating her was created" actually it was a website made up entirely of a clipart actress, making fun of worthless Internet marketers spewing Internet buzzwords interspersed with articles about lipstick and shoes and didn't mention her once. It was called "Kat Herding.")
The internet was a much better place back when it was by the geeks and for the geeks. Now just about any idiot can and does use it.
That was also back when if the sysadmin thought you had gone too far, your account would just be closed and a warning message about you sent to other admins in the area. Back then it was easy to blacklist someone from every ISP within the local calling area. Remember when we had to pay by the minute for long distance?
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
However, some people hate the other sex and therefore want to pillory them.
In male dominated areas, exclusion of women by those few men takes place.
In male dominated areas, the mere fact of male domination is taken as a priori proof of evil in the men in the majority by those few women takes place.
And vice versa for female dominated areas (though very much less so, since society is 100% happy with female victimhood, less so for male victimhood when the only significant discriminatory factor is the sex of the participants.
I've noticed people tend to get busted for the wrong crime fairly often, or busted on the wrong day. An old friend of mine started selling drugs, buying and selling abusable prescription drugs. He got busted for selling pot, which he apparently doesn't do, and he wasn't selling anything at the moment.
I can't think of anyone I know who isn't a criminal, yet ended up in jail. It's kind of odd, but in some ways it makes sense.
No, he just needs his teeth punched out....
I am the original AC.
"What a wonderful person you are. Welcome to the rule of the jungle, or what ?"
What makes my statement incorrect? I would not kill him nor did my statement say that I would. However, I would not shed a tear if I read his obituary. In fact, I would be happy about it. I'd be happier if he publicly stated that what he stood for is wrong and apologize. But I am not a big enough idiot to believe that will happen.
So while you can feel better about yourself and your higher moral authority, some of us are realists. Some people are actively hurting the world as a whole, and this jerkwad is one of them. If he dies, the rest of us benefit.
I'll send the ice axe me, then. Worked for that Mr Trotzki.
@NSA: Just kidding to make this guy think.
Yes we were. Some of us remember that cats like Sootikin and Choad inhabited rec.pets.cats before the Eternal September.
The difference is that back then, trolling meant nothing more than trying to get a rise out of people online, no doxxing intended (or needed, as back then a lot of USENET posters used real names, because they were dependent on an institution for access). Back then, just like today, users could block each other (and try to evade those blocks), and service providers banned disruptive users. But just like today, the people who started a newsgroup invasion with the intent of getting some laughs out of it, tended to lose control of it, and for every lulzy participant, there were thousands of lurkers, and of those lurkers, some of them crossed the line into personal (albeit electronic) harassment, bogus death threats, etc.
It's been 20 years since alt.tasteless invaded rec.pets.cats, and the more things have changed, the more they've stayed the same.
I don't beleive he is calling them liars, I beleive he is saying the incredibley broad definitions used for the questions make a wide verity of things classified as Assault and Rape. While those other things, which also aren't acceptable, we have words for them generally Harrassment, and Regret. The blurring of lines between regret, harrassment, assault, rape really cheapens the word rape. Let's work to prevent it all, but let's not over inflate things.
I read through your article, and the only pieces of actual evidence it provides are a tweet by someone I've never heard of, and a screenshot of a one-line email purportedly from the SFPD.
So far, in this case, I haven't seen any piece of evidence presented, *by either side*, that I couldn't fake in less than an hour. It seems a terrible shame to me that we're having these immense internet arguments which may completely lack any factual foundation. Since there aren't any journalists I trust not to push one side or the other of the story, and official bodies don't seem inclined to make official statements regarding an issue still in progress, I guess our only option is to wait a year and see if anyone is in jail for harrassing Sarkeesian, or if she's in jail for wire fraud - or if, as I suspect, neither comes to pass.
A good question, the answer is nothing changed. Men aren't trying to scare women away from gaming, that would be idiotic. What we have is assholes being assholic, and other assholes jumping onto the bandwagon to push their own agenda. There are examples of utter lunacy on both sides, and both sides think they are virtuous and right... Where have we seen this before?
He involved her kids.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
You have been saying "more women", however.
And this is one female, one male.
Last time I did maths, that was equal, not unequal.#
YMMV.
Again, she's not being mocked for being a woman, any loudmouth idiot politician who tries so hard to make himself look like an even bigger dimwit than they actually are would have gotten the mockery.
I think there's a lot of examples to go around. FROM BOTH parties!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There were always girls into geeky interests. They were just invisible to you because what you really wanted was a *conventionally attractive* geek girl. You are just as sexist as them.
When there were only a few "geeky girls" around, they were a novelty, and there weren't enough of them to affect change in the workplace. I remember those days. We had lots of highly sexist/racist terms people would just throw around without thinking. Look up "BCH, RCH, and GCH" and the mnemonic for remembering resistor color that begins "Black boys" for example (I won't repeat them). Cheesecake calendars and centerfolds were also displayed prominently at desks. And the women there had to tolerate it. They had no choice if they wanted to stay.
But starting in the early 90's, women starting getting enough power to force companies to enact sexual harassment policies. The calendars disappeared and some topics of conversation became forbidden at work. And many men resented this.
So the trolls learned from this, and thus any woman who starts to be listened to in other male-dominated areas must be destroyed as soon as possible. This is what Kathy Sierra said in her posting. Because, by default, they are not deserving of the attention.
It's the same dynamic that has kept Rush Limbaugh on the radio for 30 years.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
He doesn't hide the fact that his normal pattern and practice is to act like a complete asshole, especially online. Therefore, if someone says he was being a complete asshole online, that matches with what one would expect from him.
To me, it's similar to if someone were to tell me that my friend Christina delivered a pizza to their house. Christina was a pizza-delivery person for several years, so the statement is likely true, absent any evidence to the contrary.
And who do you think is out there telling men to keep their feelings bottled up until they explode? Women?
Actually, yes. The stoic guys get the girlfriends. The guys who communicate their feelings get the friends who happen to be girls. It's not explicit, but the message does originate from women.
Why does it seem that the first response to these kinds of problems is always legal? To sue someone? Is it just because that's what is expedient to existing victims? Because it won't help future potential victims. Even changing the law or boosting enforcement won't get at the root cause.
The fact is that sadly, sociopathic behavior like this is socially acceptable. Every time a woman speaks up, half of the crowd chimes in to defend the sociopath. "It was her own fault", you say. "Women are such whiners; this happens to everyone", you say. And let's be clear: it's easy for a woman to think women are unfairly targeted when she's come to know so many others who have been targeted, and the harassment is often sexual. There's a point to be made that women are perhaps too often thin-skinned. But often this point is made regardless to the severity of the harassment (total destruction of career, made to feel unsafe and insecure even in her own home or the home of her family, made to fear for the safety of that family). And most of the people making this point, especially in a place like Slashdot that allows people to post anonymously, make their point with misogynistic slurs. It's only understandable that this position is almost always attacked as "blaming the victim" when there are only a couple of rational voices in the mob.
How can the law help us? Will it stop people from being sociopaths? Not any more than drunk driving laws made people stop driving drunk. Drunk driving used to be just as socially acceptable as wife beating and criminal harassment. What changed? MADD and systematic messaging from law enforcement and driver's education told entire generations of new drivers that it is not acceptable. Now drunk driving is the sort of thing only completely irresponsible people do, right? While that doesn't mean nobody does it, it does mean nobody defends the behavior. We need a single message to spread to every single child regarding harassment: this is not OK.
Sociopaths are bad for society, which means that even when they aren't attacking you personally, their assaults still hurt you. Every time a Kathy Sierra is harassed out of her comfort zone, we lose another intelligent perspective. We lose the voice behind javaranch.com. And to all you lonely nerds out there: we lose one more woman that understands and appreciates what you do. One more woman that might have shared your dreams and obsessions.
What can we do about sociopaths? First, we can learn to defend ourselves. My first rule of the internet is to use a pseudonym, and keep your pseudonym separate from your family and local friends. Never attach any pictures or personal information that could connect your pseudonym to you. Never, and I mean never take a nude picture of yourself.
Remember though that none of this is a guarantee. All it takes is more effort to uncover who you are and where you live. So the second step is to support the victims. Now, I understand some of you are a bit obsessed with fraud, and think these victims are just seeking attention. You attack the victim's credibility. Stop. You don't have to personally believe the victim, but it does no good to cast doubt. Victims don't even want attention, and they definitely don't want to be assaulted even more. So many victims don't report crimes against them because they don't want to relive the experience, or because they are afraid of people like you. What victims (should) want is for their life to go on as if nothing happened, while also making sure the same thing can never happen to anybody else. What you can do is direct your attention toward the problem instead of the victim. Attack the crime, even if you don't believe it happened. You might say, "Harassment is wrong, and I am appalled to think this kind of thing even happens." You might say, "I actually have trouble believing the story because it's so unthinkable that someone could be this much of a sociopath." You might say, "I though this sort of thing never happened, and it certainly never sh
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
First, let's skip over the whole idiotic concept of twitter as a serious medium of communication (quick, here's 140 chars, tell me everything you know), and go to places that you can actually write coherent sentences - that'd be anywhere from email, to usenet, to websites that allow long comments (or your own website).
Back in the day, we used to get trolls on a usenet group I was a regular in. Some where drive-by shooting, never seen again; frequently, we made sarcastic comments about their post. Then there were the longer posts, from someone who might even come back.
Y'know, I understand that about 1,000 years ago and more, if a bard, or someone, made a satire of you, you might as well kill yourself, because no one would ever forget it (admitedly, they didn't travel a lot back then, and the supply of humor was a lot smaller).
Our answer was to MST3k that person. Doing so, of course, requires intellegence, a good familiarity with language, and frequently, some basic logic. I don't think *anyone* everr came back after being misted....
It's a much more elegant solution, and more enjoyable to everyone else, than to simply JUMP DOWN THE ASSHOLE'S THROUGHT WITH COMBAT BOOTS ON.
mark "come on, meet me at x, and show me that you meant that crap"*
* Now, my sword, my walking stick, or just 911?
Asserting the claims are false until the investigation occurs is called INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY.
You know, justice.
Do you think the claims that the act was not rape should be thought wrong until the investigation? Because I don't think they bother with an investigation if both agree it was a crime.
Or is it only good to accept the victim's word over the accused if it's a female victim?
In any unmoderated discussion the loudest and most insistent voices win. This has been true since democracy started - "politic" meaning roughly in the original Greek "To shout down"
Would be awesome if it were true: The modern word 'political' derives from the Greek politikos, 'of, or pertaining to, the polis'. (The Greek term polis will be translated here as 'city-state'. It is also translated as 'city' or 'polis', or simply anglicized as 'polis'. City-states like Athens and Sparta were relatively small and cohesive units, in which political, religious, and cultural concerns were intertwined. The extent of their similarity to modern nation-states is controversial.)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
"Women are like grass, they need to be beaten and cut sometimes"
A little off-topic, I know, but... who the hell beats their lawn? Mow it, sure, but beat it?
Trolls love to bully anyone who isn't them. If there's an easy target then it doesn't matter if it's a woman, a homosexual, a jew, etc. Any group of people who hide their identity in order to avoid bullying, thus under-representing themselves. And they have a good reason to do so, if you consider how easy it is for trolling to escalate the moment a proper sociopath enters the fray. But it's silly to focus only on the women or pretend they're the ones who have it hardest just because they're the ones we've decided to preoccupy ourselves with first.
> If you really think that ... alchohol/drug facilitated penetration isn't rape, I've got news for you, son.
When CONSENT is facilitated by EXCESSIVE alcohol, that's rape.
When my wife is stressed out and tense, so she wants to relax with a margarita and have a romantic evening, that's not rape.
When people decide to go out and party, to have a few drinks and hook up, that's not rape - that's college.
When a woman with vaginismus finds that a glass of wine helps relieve the symptoms, that's not rape.
This song is not about rape:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
To expand on this point just a bit. The (military) organization I work for very carfully tracks sexual misconduct, sexual harrassment, asssult and rape. Recently, they have changed the way that the statistics were organized to make an overal sexual crime statistic. This statistic is tracked monthly and is breifed to ever person in the organization ( a few thousand people) every year, as part of our training on preventing workplace violence. Over the last few years our numbers were moving in a great direction, we had an over all reduction of about 40% of sexual based crimes. However, when we asked the breifer for some more details, it turns our instence of Rape, as in violent sexual assualt resulting in unwilling sexual congress, had almost doubled in the past 3 years. All of the reported instances of more minor things had gone down significantly. This was considered not only acceptable, but a good thing. Allowing the most serious crimes to sky rocket while mitigating the less grevious ones is a horrible course of action in my mind.
Proper statistics needed. I'm willing to believe it, but I seem to remember reading of many guys who were basically ruined by this kind of response. What didn't happen is that a proper psychopath took the ball and ran, a psychopath who apparently happens to have something against women. It still didn't end very pleasantly for the person who opted to consider forum moderation, but it's tough to tell if that's because of trolling in general or just a small number of weev-like extremists, whom we could probably deal with.
besides your other bullshit, this is also bs: "wingnuts running the show in both parties"
Proof?
Sierra comments that part of the problem is that she doesn't have the protection of a celebrity. This is an important thing to discuss. Celebrities don't have the choice of being exposed to the public. The rest of us do. In the early days of the internet, just about everyone would use a handle (a pseudonym.) For some reason, that changed over the years and many people just their real name for everything on the internet. When you put your name and picture up on the internet you are exposing yourself to the public and have to accept the risk that goes with doing so. You have to deal with the concequences. Obviously harassment is wrong but there is a limit to what law enforcement can and should do aobut it.
"What is the threat with squiggles on a piece of paper?"
"What is the threat of vibrations in the air?"
"What is the threat of someone pointing a metal tube in your direction?"
You.. I.. what? I'd say you fell for a slippery slope fallacy, but that generally requires there to be an actual flow of one line to the next. What you said.. it's just a complete non-sequitor.
To put it into a car analogy, it's like saying that giving someone apple pie is threatening because a drunk person doing 90 on the highway is threatening. There is absolutely no logical flow to get from giving out free apple pie, to doing 90 on the highway while drunk.
Wrong. 2-5% of rape accusations are PROVEN false.
The percentage of rape investigations that are dropped because the accusation was simply impossiblebut nothing was done beyond stopping the investigation or dropping charges, is much higher.
Try Rumney's "False allegations of rape." from The Cambridge Law Journal (2006).
Or maybe "False Rape Allegations" by Eugene J. Kanin from the Archives of Sexual Behavior (1994).
Hell, just read the damned Wikipedia page. It shows that every time the researcher steps beyond the narrowest definition, the number jumps to the 20%+ range.
That's a huge problem for a crime that is almost impossible to defend against.
Really? Let's list people who have been mocked like Sarah Palin. I'll start: Michelle Bachman. Your turn.
If your purpose was to demonstrate how this cancer infects even Slashdot, then congratulations. +4 Insightful my ass.
Also, you're wrong. When weev dies, another will simply take his place. A hierarchy is basically institutionalized bullying, and we are still indoctrinated into hierarchies. Weev is operating from the axioms thought to him by the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert, only the Internet has stripped away the facade of civility and revealed the dynamic as it really is: "Put up with my bullshit or get the choice between starving to death or going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison."
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
How about doxxing him in return?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Other than the whole interview with weev in the NY Fucking Times in which he admits doing what she said he did.
That would be frightening for any person, regardless gender.
Manipulative liars exist regardless of gender. That's the problem with taking anybody's claims at face value and assuming a purported victim is automatically legitimate. False accusations *do* happen. Granted, they are rare, but the possibility is a serious one because you could convict an innocent person of something they didn't do. Even without a criminal conviction you can ruin their life by getting them fired or being jailed pending trial or some other assessment. I see no grounds for automatically assuming a victim's claims are true. This is not justification for being insensitive about their claims, but you can help them to deal with the tragedy of being a victim and simultaneously investigate their claims more objectively. That's what the police do.
It's therefore not unreasonable to ask for documentation of people following through with their public accusations about someone else's supposed criminal activity. Such a request is not driven by gender. It's driven by a desire to see people receiving due process when accused of being criminals.
Sounds like the gun control debate. It isn't the words on the screen that's the problem, it's the mentally ill person that's the problem, and our society's unwillingness to address the issue of mental illness.
You're both wrong. Poli, from the greek word 'many' and tics, 'bloodthirsty insects'.
Another poster commented that trolls were a problem back in usenet days. Trolls were just a lot more limited in what they could do.
And who do you think is out there telling men to keep their feelings bottled up until they explode? Women?
Pretty much everyone, women included. Men and women see those who are ruled by their emotions and spouting off about their feelings, as simpering wimps, unworthy of respect. Nothing turns off a women faster than a man dropping his stoic exterior and whining about his feelings.
Yes. People wouldn't be complaining about "playing the sex card."
They would be feminizing the guy, calling him a wimp or worse.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
lol no
Its because they're men and thats how we bond, through veiled threats of violence and trolling. You're a woman, of course you don't understand.
There have always been women at the top in any game (not many, admittedly, but that's probably because not many play.
look we don't like you there because we want a place where boys can be boys, since your PC-ification of the world stretches everywhere else.
This is combat. There are no equals here.
Trolling is like gaming.
Some people go home and start up their killing simulator 2014.
Other people fire up firefox and troll people by threatening to kill them.
It's just a different way to unwind.
cast it all the way back to the start of the industry
Here you go. Most computers were women.
In 1943, the United States Army authorized a secret project at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering to develop an electronic computer to compute artillery firing tables for the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. The project, which came to be known as ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was completed in 1946.
Previous to the development of the ENIAC, the U.S. Army had employed women trained in mathematics to calculate artillery trajectories, at first using mechanical desk calculators and later the differential analyzer developed by Vannevar Bush, at the Moore School. In 1945, one of these "computers", Kathleen McNulty (1921–2006), was selected to be one of the original programmers of the ENIAC, together with Frances Spence (1922– ), Betty Holberton (1917–2001), Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman (1924–1986), and Betty Jean Jennings (1924–2011). McNulty, Holberton, and Jennings would later work on the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer developed by the Remington Rand Corporation in the early 1950s.
Men originally saw computing as a "woman's job."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If you put your name to something unpopular in public, people may hate you for it. That's never been any different. That's why we have had anonymous pamphleteering and pseudonyms for as long as we have had free speech, and we protect them. This is not a women's issue or a feminist issue. And it's not a "civil rights" issue either. People like Sierra and Citron are not fighting for civil rights, they are a privileged and entitled elite who think that if they speak, the masses should listen in awed silence, no matter how offensive their speech may be. They want the same status that Catholic priests used to have: unquestioned respect and authority.
Fortunately, it's not going to happen. Use your head before you speak in public. And if your entire life is based on publicity and notoriety, realize that that the benefits you received from that can quickly turn into a liability when you fall from favor.
He likely lives a lifestyle where he doesn't give a damn. Considering his unapologetic response, that almost certainly seems to be the situation. Doing that sort of bullshit won't work. Neither will putting him into Club Fed.
A Mexican or Turkish prison, on the other hand, might just be the ticket.
They problem may very well be sociopaths, but the victims tend to be women who step outside of their traditional roles.
The there are the stalking murders of Rebecca Schaeffer and Mia Zapata plus what happened with Sarah MacLachlan, so to pretend that it's simply "sociopaths" is a gross over-simplification.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
It's because women are emotional and actually react more strongly than men.
Like Joe Biden? He actually thinks he has a shot at becoming President in the next term.
I guess that is more or less confirming your hypothesis though.
... Either do what SomethingAwful.com does (charge $10 for unlimited posting) or charge 1Ã per post. The Trolls will diminish quite quickly, especially if You choose the latter approach.
That's not a threat either.
"I know where you live and I'm coming to kill you" is a threat.
"Here is this persons address. Do what you must" is harassment or something.
True fact: paid shills are filling this thread with nonsense in the hopes that they themselves won't be discussed. And they're not even good it it! This happens every time paid trolls are discussed. It would be ironic if it weren't deliberate.
It is the leaders of the contrarian community who are repeatedly publishing contact info of targeted climate scientists and encouraging the crazies to get in touch directly.
I, like you (somewhat), am peeved by the overuse of the word "hack". Asking AT&T for email addresses and getting them is not a hack any more than stealing someone's password from their wallet and using it to deface their website. Which also isn't "hacking", for those too dense to realize that stealing the keys isn't "hacking" just because it involves a computer.
I do think that the "unlocked door" idea is valid, though. If it were a personal home, then it ought to be unlawful to go up to that home (or personal computer) looking for unlocked doors. But that doesn't mean AT&T should be able to claim that defense, because it wasn't a personal home. It was their public storefront. If they posted a list of customer credit card numbers on a bulletin board visible through a window, it would be criminal negligence on their part. Reading those numbers isn't a crime, although using them for a crime would be...a crime. Even if it was behind a metaphorical door, an unlocked door in a storefront leads to a public space by default, where the same rules should apply.
Metaphors can be useful as long as they are a bit more accurate. Let's not conflate the difference between a private and a presumed public space.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
The Social Security Number is way overused and unfortunately treated as a password rather than as a somewhat (but not always) unique number meant to distinguish one citizen from another for tax purposes. The misuse of that number by banks, credit agencies, and for that matter government bureaucrats is what makes its disclosure so horrible. Otherwise it would be no different than simply disclosing your name or treating it like your phone number.
Cute, but not true. The original word is polis (I was going to be fancy and do it Greek letters, but then I realized I'd never get them intact into Slashdot's broken system) meaning city.
Thus, you will have "men" scaring "women" away.
But if you think about it, calling these people "men" instead of "male sociopaths" is a choice you make in order to make the reality you want to see. Groups like these are really arbitrary. You could just as well say "sociopaths" or "weirdos" and remove the gender attribute.
It is your choice. That is why lies, damned lies, and statictics rules.
More and more, I find it amusing that men lament women just don't want to come hang out at their clubhouse. Then when women do show up they are too frequently called uppity "bitches" and "cunts". While I do appreciate that men want to create a space for activities that they want to engage in, I just can't help but recalling that old maxim: you attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. Of course, this means that men in these online communites will have to make a choice. Side with the sociapathic trolls or with the women? Trying to have it both ways just isn't going to work.
Not even close:
Middle English politik, from Middle French politique, from Latin politicus, from Greek politikos, from polits citizen
Stop spreading misinformation, troll.
I have to disagree with you about javaranch. It might be one of the worst sites for when you have questions about java. Almost every single discussion thread on that site is someone asking a question and getting one of two responses:
1) Why do you want to do that? That's stupid, you should do this instead. (which to be fair is a pretty common response across the net)
or
2) You've violated Rule X of the javaranch posting rules.
With most threads either ending right there or devolving into an argument over the rules or why the person wants or needs to do what they're asking and why doing something else isn't an option. Javaranch is horrible.
Right. Let's just nuance the whole thing away by zooming back to "the big picture." So that ultimately the message becomes "badness is bad."
ObMrMackey: Being bad is bad, m'kay? Cause it's bad, m'kay?
Why would you bother to defeat Sin and bring forth the calm, if Sin will just return some time in the future?
Because the calm is worth fighting for, even if it only lasts a short while.
And who do you think is out there telling men to keep their feelings bottled up until they explode? Women? Misogyny hurts men, too.
I've based my living on telling how I'm feeling about topics, mostly technicals, but sometimes also organizational. I just don't use threats, but rational thoughts and arguments. Nobody says you can't say or show how you feel. You're just not entitled to abuse other people. Having a bad feelings is about _YOU_, nobody else. Learn to deal with it. What YOU ARE FEELING is nobody's fault but your own.
Period.
Anybody who feels bottled up really needs to acknowledge their feelings and start taking responsibility for them. Nobody else really can anyways.
If your purpose was to demonstrate how this cancer infects even Slashdot, then congratulations. +4 Insightful my ass.
Also, you're wrong. When weev dies, another will simply take his place. A hierarchy is basically institutionalized bullying, and we are still indoctrinated into hierarchies.
So it's unshaven, unkempt, probably unwashed, Turtles all the way Down ... ?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Keep up the strawman arguments. Nobody ever opposed verifying the accusations. But when you turn those verifications into a full-blown investigation into the accusor, you know darned well you've gone too far and in the wrong direction, troll.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Right, like social engineering up a password isn't "hacking" or any tech wizardry. There will be "unauthorized access" charges, though. You'll be accessing data that's designated as restricted by virtue of the password's barrier. Getting inside a designated-private wallet is also a no-no.
Even if AT&T put a pathetic sticky note of a label at the top of the page saying "This is private data and only Bob, Sally, and Jim are supposed to access it.", I would consider that a means of designating it a private document, even in located in a public space with absolutely zero security, and I would be much more comfortable with a charge of "unauthorized access".
In such a case you could still bust AT&T for negligence, if you like. Handling the goods/data of others means an obligation of security; the above paragraph only meets the much easier obligation of non-disclosure. As in, don't go telling everyone your customer's data. But their giveaway in 2013 didn't even meet that basic obligation.
My dad was part of the Civilian Engineers working state side during WWII (Radiological research aka RADAR at MIT) There simply wasn't that many men stateside, especially during the latter parts of the war. I would suggest to you, that women in IT back then was done partly out of necessity, rather than gender based roles.
He told stories of walking down the streets of Boston and having people look at him funny, as he wasn't in uniform, as if to ask "Why aren't you fighting son?" I can only imagine what it was like seeing very few young men on the streets of America because every one else was off to war.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Trolls love to bully anyone who isn't them. If there's an easy target then it doesn't matter if it's a woman, a homosexual, a jew, etc.
OK, so internet bullies make up stories based on a fictitious sexual history of their female targets. What common analogue is there for Jews targeted by trolls due to their race/religion?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The problem is that we really do live in a two caste society and women really are higher caste, with hundreds of laws that protect them and give them grossly unfair advantages.
Help!!!! I'm being oppressed! I just can't post comments with treats of death, rape, or other violence to online forums without some feminazi or SJW calling me on my bullshit. How will I ever be able to make it in this two-caste society when I am so obviously disadvantaged?!? Life is just sooo unfair!
Do you not know what "facilitated" means? No.
Getting someone drunk to get them to have sex with you isn't okay.
Actual fucking question for disingenuous jerks:
When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people have ever
had vaginal sex with you? By vaginal sex, we mean that {if female: a man or boy put his penis in your vagina} {if male: a woman or girl made you put your penis in her vagina}.
{if male} made you perform anal sex, meaning they made you put your penis into their anus?
made you receive anal sex, meaning they put their penis into your anus?
put their mouth on your {if male: penis} {if female: vagina}?1
put their mouth on your anus?1
made you put your mouth on their vagina or anus?1
made you put your mouth on their penis?1
put their fingers or an object in your [if female: vagina or} anus?1
Clearly fucking rape. The question includes the phrase "unable to consent". You have zero legs to stand on. Making shit up about the methodology to invent a narrative where it's "not rape" is basically utterly shitty.
> Yet today we see guys trying to scare the women away. What the hell changed?
What you actually see is people (including women) trying to keep sexists calling themselves feminists away from their hobbies.
You may have posted anonymously but I'm going to back you up on that. I think I had like five domains blacklisted on Google when they used to support that feature. The ones I remember were w3schools.com, experts-exchange.com, and javaranch.com.
Never, ever anything useful on any of those sites.
(Not that this really has anything to do with the article or that I doubt her skills with the Java language. I just found javaranch to be utterly useless.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
When men try to defend themselves they get called crybabies, whiners and basement dwellers by feminists. Misandry hurts women too.
That's stupid.
People are vile and self-centered. They will take advantage of you given the chance. Even if they don't have any ill will, chances are that they will be careless and cause you trouble just out of ignorance and stupidity.
Then you've got entire industries filled with professional trolls.
You also have the possibility of people that are just annoying. That may be intentional or not. This was a well known problem back in the days when you had to troll someone personally. People (including the law) understood that a backlash could be triggered under various conditions.
Although once things get out of hand it really doesn't matter who the victim is. Anyone that's looking at this issue and fixating only on the female victims is probably an annoying trollish git.
If harassment and stalking are real problems then they should be treated as such and gender should not even be part of the discussion.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If someone killed weev, the world would be a better place.
Win win dude!
You are begging the question. Nobody except for maybe a few real lunatics has a problem with more women in gaming.
The problem is _some_ women coming to the party late and then wanting to change everything. This is why the main targets are the people who whine incessantly about scantily clad women, or violence against women in games (never mind that 99% of violence in games is against men).
By all means people should make and buy the games they want, and people should make all sorts of games for all sorts of people. But that's not at issue - at issue are professional whiners trying to change someone else's games and trying to make them feel bad for liking boobies.
I have to say it...too much resemblance to Richard Farley.
Asshole? Really? That kind of harrassment is not a joke,it's pure fear and stress, which are killers for sure. More than i hope that someone gives this guy the taste of the kind of fear he dishes out, i hope no-one else has to beon the recieving end. I'd feel little sympathy if the guy was lynched for sure.
It is so wonderful that not all adult females are the weak pathetic girls that you are portraying women to be. Forget the "misogyny" of others. YOURS is far more dire than that of any "woman hating man".
Many of us despise victims, idiots, and helpless people. This is not just limited to "women" but "women" are a class of people for which these kinds of characteristics are considered tolerable or even desirable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Do you not know what "facilitated" means? No.
I'm not sure that you, so if you think that's in question here you might want to look it up, along with vaginismus and stress/tension.
That one question covers things that are rape, assuming there's neither PRIOR consent nor implied consent. I clearly and carefully explained to you two actual instances of PRIOR and implied consent, in which the "victim" didn't see themselves as a victim. One one case I told you about, the prior consent was explicit, expressed. Don't you think it's a little odd for the researchers to claim someone was raped when the person themselves feels that they had a romantic evening with their spouse? Do you think you can convince my friend she was raped, because she thinks she had a good partying with her husband.
Aside from that one question, which isn't bad, did you notice the questions I copied and pasted for you?
This study calls it sexual violence if you choose to cheer your mate up because they were "showing they were unhappy".
I come home stressed out, irritated that the damn database admin keeps screwing things up. My wife knows what will cheer me up, and she decides to do so. That's categorized as sexual violence in this survey.
You seriously trivialize rape when you pretend that consensual activity between adults in a loving relationship is the same as an assault. It's not. It's actually okay for your wife to cheer you up with a BJ. It's okay for you to reciprocate.
Just like it's okay for you to not use bittorrent - wtf what was wrong with that AC is the other thread? :)
Or take out their knee caps. Don't go lethal when you can shame-maim. Maybe that's just the Italian in me.
> men face an echo chamber of aggressive misogynistic a-holes
Not really. They do get more press, however.
About the only thing that Facebook doesn't have is the SSN. The rest of it is right there either explicitly out in the open or made trivially easy to figure out by what you've already exposed on Facebook.
Even without Facebook, those other details are readily available to anyone with the slightest bit of motivation. It's been this way since before the Internet was a consumer thing.
Your attitude is a good example of "ignorance being bliss".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No, children, the trolls were not here first. Some of us remember that human beings inhabited the Internet before the Eternal September.
Thank you. Usenet, for example was a welcome, tolerant, even useful place. You could reasonably trust someone on misc.forsale to send you what you expected after receiving your check. I suppose in those days, if anyone ever posted something bad, their sysadmin would receive an e-mail and the would-be troller would have his account suspended... and that would be that. Internet was a privilege, and short of getting a job in computers or defense, graduation meant leaving it forever.
Fuck. The Eternal September was 21 years ago. Kids have grown up big enough to legally drink since then, never knowing a net that was free of Nigerian Prince scams or murder by Craig's List. Whose on my lawn? Get off my lawn!
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Ah, classic Adequecy-style trolling. Great stuff... and Poe's law means it's almost impossible to tell from the real thing.
Doxxing? That's not a troll thing. Fake doxxing, where one sockpuppet doxxes another -- that's a troll thing since before the term "doxxing". Not real doxxing.
They asked the people themselves, if they were unable to consent. That's not ambiguous.
No one cares what other questions are on the survey, because we're talking about one stupid point contested by an AC. I see no reason to discuss the rest of the results, except as some kind of deflection about how you're totally and completely wrong about the rape part.
There's nothing stopping a blogger from blocking comments on their web pages. When cnn posts something it knows people will hate it doesn't allow comments on the article.
The study found that female bots received on average 100 malicious private messages a day while the male bots received an average of 3.7.
Yes, depending on the blog or blogger. I've seen it. Hell, look at here and the beta site. Crazy people are crazy and just pick on whatever's different.
It's only more intense because the feminists try to make it seem like a problem exclusively plaguing women. By explicitly saying "women this" or "women that", you are alienating men who also face the same problems and this leads to resentment. I believe this potential is where most of the aggression comes from.
Auernheimer is a blight on the human species and a criminal.
Women are more vulnerable (on average!) than men to harassment and similar behaviours.
Both statements can be true.
It's harassment, and it's harassment that would have been targeted toward anyone espousing the same views, and it's wrong. But it's not a threat.
People need to learn that trolling is a natural response on the internet because of the size of the audience and the relative safety of being able to say what you want without consequence. These "victims", female or otherwise, are causing these reactions (often intentionally in order to get further attention) by publicly espousing a view that many recognize as fucking bullshit. In meat space, this often gets no outward reaction. People may think you're a fucking idiot and may hate you, but they won't outwardly say it in a place where you can see it. On the internet, with an expanded audience and relative safety, the odds of one person calling you out on your bullshit increases greatly. Once that ice is broken, others feel validated, and will join in to express their own views.
This is all fine. If you can't handle disagreement, often angry disagreement, don't have a forum / comments section on the same site you post the shit people will disagree with.
The trigger that escalates it from angry dissent to trolling is the reaction. The instant you try to argue with or censor the angry posters you unleash the trolls. Whether you're right, wrong, or winning or losing the argument doesn't matter. When you start an argument online with an angry poster you're just inciting them to continue as well as providing entertainment for those watching. This entertainment feeds the "for the lulz" mentality of any potential trolls watching it, and shit escalates.
When a troll targets someone, they will always attack what they perceive as vulnerable. Race, religion, gender, sexuality, physical appearance etc. are all bright red targets in the eyes of a troll because the troll knows they can get an emotional response by targeting those things. Emotional responses extend the flame war, providing more lulz.
Splitting because Slashdot's "lameness" filter triggers primarily on length.
They only attack these things because of the reaction it will get.
The proper way to deal with trolls is to:
Ignore the trolls.
Prevent the trolling by not censoring/arguing with angry dissenters.
Prevent the angry dissent by not making yourself a target for angry dissent by posting bullshit people will call you out on.
Now, it's perfectly within your right to post bullshit. However, you should expect angry dissent as a reaction. It's also very possible to post non-bullshit and still get angry dissent through no fault of your own.
In both cases, the key is your reaction. Never try to censor the dissenters, and never get in a flame war with them. If you really must respond, do so carefully, without being a bigot (people have different opinions and dismissing someone else's without fair consideration because you've already form your own is the definition of "bigotry"). Remember that if your response is seen as emotional in anyway, or if you seem personally upset about the thing you're responding to, it will be entertaining to potential trolls.
If you've gone ahead and made yourself a target and you're actively being trolled, just stop posting. Ignore any and all threats of violence online - they're about as real as the kids in IRC who threaten to pwn ur box because you beat them in Quake.
Splitting because Slashdot's "lameness" filter triggers primarily on length.
If you receive any meat-space harassment or threats, or if your doxxed beyond name, address, phone number, and place of work (all of these are essentially public information that anyone can get), contact the police. Not the media. Not Twitter. Not Facebook. The police.
TL;DR: Welcome to the internet. Don't feed the trolls.
Oh, and as a preemptive response to the inevitable "victim blaming" accusations, I'll point out the difference between blame and responsibility. If I get hit by a car when using a crosswalk, the blame will likely fall on the driver, though the ultimate responsibility falls on me to be safe when crossing - look both ways, wait for the walk signal, wear bright or reflective clothing at night, not linger in the street to pick up a penny, etc.
We accept risk management as a part of everyday life. It's your own responsibility to reasonably minimize the risk to your own life and property. None of this affects where the blame falls in any given situation, be it online or offline.
Actually, the report that article links to lists the figure as 2-8%, not 2-5%. And the problem with that figure, as with all such figures for false accusations, is that that is the percentage of people who get caught making false accusations. It doesn't include the people who successfully get away with it. The actual percentage of false accusations is necessarily going to be higher, since the successful ones are never counted as false accusations.
Similarly, there are "all sorts of clues" when someone does it badly. Those naturally wouldn't be there if someone was doing it well.
You two are so clearly hot for each other. Sheesh, get a room guys! Just have sex and get it over with.
You want someone who was mocked like Sarah Palin, you need to go back to Dan Quayle. But George W. Bush himself got close, actually. (And all three for good reason)
ONE QUESTION asked if they were unable to consent. I said that question is pretty good. We agree on that. So I'm not sure why you keep bringing that question up. The question isn't perfect, and I showed you two real-life examples where it incorrectly labels something as rape, but that question is good enough. "Showing they were unhappy" is a horrible question. So we have a survey interpretation with some pretty good questions and some pretty bad ones. The results, therefore, are somewhere in the middle.
> Clearly fucking rape. The question includes the phrase "unable to consent".
Let me put it this way and maybe you'll understand my point.
When my wife woke me up via a blow job, I was "unable to consent" - I was out cold when she started.
I woke up very, very happy. I say I was not raped. Are you going to try to convince me that I was raped?
* You'll notice I already gave you this actual real-life event, and another like it, several posts ago.
TL;DR
So here's the problem. That doesn't sound like a threatening comment targeting to women, it sounds like a comment targeting the topic of torture porn. Tasteless for sure, but not really surprising. If you publicly condemn something people like on the internet you should damn well expect to see it thrown back in you face in a mocking and mean way. If someone can't take that then they should keep their opinions to themselves. But certain groups decide to take offense to it. To take it personally, when 9 out of 10 times it's not. Every single opinionated person who posts on the internet has experienced that but only certain people see it as a "targeted and overt threat". Who was threatened? All women? That women? Shit like that minimizes actual threats where people are legitimately in danger. Going all chicken little on every shitty thing posted on the internet has led to the situation we're in now where people ignore the real problems.
Now posting peoples personal information or the like is definitely out of bounds, but things like you mentioned are part of internet culture. For better or worse.
Matthew Moulton...your mother wants you to get out of the basement
I think you're misunderstanding the situation. The people posting the bullshit -- they're the trolls. They post bullshit, and when someone calls them on it they say "look at the nasty misogynist basement dweller denying the obvious truth". Then they rub their hands with glee and post more bullshit. Repeat until some psycho actually makes a threat (or, if necessary, fake one), then they jump up and down about how all their opponents are violent psychopaths and so disagreeing with them is to be a violent psychopath. Then they win (I guess?)
There's instances of this from other blogs doing the same thing. One example that stands out in my mind is from LGF. Where a user bombed comments on hot air(during a low moderation period) to claim that "hot air supported racism." Then was lauded for what they did on their home site.
Om, nomnomnom...
Every women I know claims to have been raped. When telling their story about 25% actually were. The vast majority were "I got really drunk and didn't know what I was saying." Some were "I didn't really want too but he kept trying so I gave in." Neither of those is rape. Different problems that need to be addressed, but not rape. I've seen these people blacked out. With some people you really can't tell the difference between kind of drunk and blacked out.
Never been accused of rape myself, but I avoid those situations because we currently live in a victim culture. Everyone is a victim and no one is responsible for their choices. Most guys (or people in general) who found out that someone close to them was truly raped would do something about it.
That movie was horrible and boring. The fact that anyone might actually memorize a quote from the movie was unthinkable until now.
No mod points but AC needs to be visible:
Here's your statistics.
The study found that female bots received on average 100 malicious private messages a day while the male bots received an average of 3.7.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
They aren't. Some women see people attacking them and assume "They're attacking me because I'm a woman". And the media loves to play this narrative. The real reason people get harassed isn't because of their gender, it's because they're idiots.
Which is why silent bots get 25 times more harassment if they have female names than if they have male names.
Over-rated yeah. Horrible & Boring? It has been a while since I've seen it so could be. Surprised CinemaSins hasn't "reviewed" that one yet.
I'm an audiophile so I use it to test my sub placement & volume. The ship battle is a treat. :)
i.e.
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/...
I don't even know anything about the case you're talking about and I don't care to read about it, but I will say that I address all unsupported accusations, whether from a man, woman, child, monkey, dolphin or all-knowing sky fairy... with a grain of salt and a query to show me the evidence.
A large chunk of crimes reported are false reports. It's not a majority, but it's enough to be scary and justify investigating all accusations carefully.
How can you spend so much time on Slashdot, making so many posts, and be so completely full of shit? Do you get tax write-offs for being more shit than human? One article you linked actually suggests that "Gender Neutral" legos are somehow MYSOGYNISTIC. Fuck that noise, and fuck any idiot that buys into that shit, like you. Get a fucking life. If these women spent more time trying to solve problems rather than just bitching about them and hoping that men will come and solve it for them, there'd be none of these shitty, inane, first-world problems. Then they could focus on things like real rape, you know, the kind that happens in Africa when a woman has to choose between violent sexual insertion and getting her head chopped off -- not the kind where she saw some dude's weiner on an internet ad.
and you suffocated , no one would care.
see the difference ?
So one person on the entire planet investigates the actual claims made, while THOUSANDS of outlets pushed the story that a poor girl got called scary names on the internet (by boys, allegedly?)... and you're trying to twist that to be sexist against women?
How much mercury do you add to that Kool-Aid you drink every morning? Do you do it for flavor, or is your stupidity intentional?
If you can identify a KKK-like group that is systematically threatening women, by all means, lets go stop them.
If not, i'm confused what the analogy is.
It doesn't suggest that at all. It does suggest that these kinds of attacks on women are worse, and well, that's pretty obviously true. Can you imagine a male blogger on his private blog receiving that kind of over-the-top campaign if he considered moderating comments?
Can you also imagine a male blogger getting trolled and trying so hard to accept the role of victim in the hopes that someone will white-knight for him?
It's mostly due some girls that aren't actually into games and just use it to get "nerdycred", but don't actually play anything considered worthy or are actually interested in getting good.
And the same happens to male "gamers".
Both are generally called several things like "casual gamers", "call of duty audience", "TBBT public" etc..
Of course, several girls that are actually interested in games get caught in the crossfire.
Once again I have the "obsessed with false accusations of rape" reality denier. Because you are a person who believes in an a world where women are serial liars, and you're inured to observational evidence about it by some mental block I don't get.
A man is physically much stronger than a woman of a similar fitness level. If such a man uses his superior strength to force a woman to do something she doesn't really want to do, that man commits a crime and we prosecute him.
A woman is mentally and emotionally much stronger than a man of similar intelligence in the context of manipulation or who has power in a relationship. If such a woman uses her superior manipulation and mind-game capabilities to force a man to do something he doesn't really want to do, that woman gets no consequence whatsoever and the man is told to stop being a pussy.
That's a reality and it is frequently and almost universally denied because it's not politically correct. It could be that the particular women who press charges and are willing to testify in court aren't liars - the whole ugly legal process tends to rule out the psychotic daddy-issue ones who just want attention. It could also be that they consider lying under oath risky and women are generally risk-averse so that 2-5% figure comes from the small minority of women willing to take that risk.
But it's a fact that right or wrong people will take their common everyday experiences and tend to extrapolate that into other situations they aren't personally involved in. There really are a lot of lying manipulative women out there. A woman who doesn't treat a man that way is hard to find (I am fortunate I found one. These are the same women who complain that "all men are pigs" when their own lack of integrity is what pushes away the good men who aren't. It's not hard to understand how this can color (or if you like cloud) the perception of greater issues like false accusations in court. Women have themselves to blame for that one and the first step toward treating them like equals is holding them responsible for their decisions the same way men are.
Of course that kind of real equality doesn't "sell" as well as the "equal means extra privileges" kind of "equality" so many promote so they can pretend to feel like noble white-knight champions of the downtrodden victims.
Hear, bloody hear. Hell, invasions/raiding happened in the BBS scene, and one can consider prank calls an early form of trolling. Plus ça change indeed.
I remember growing up I was taught that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me."
Have you ever considered that, just possibly, something you were taught at school wasn't 100% accurate? That perhaps bullying, intimidation, threats may in fact have a serious adverse psychological effect? Do you really believe that sort of behaviour is OK? (hint: it's not OK!)
people making fun of someone for being a complete fucking cunt.
Can you give more details on exactly what you mean by "being a complete fucking cunt", and why it deserves such an unpleasant response? Or is it just a case of "I don't like them, so anything goes"?
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
You're forgetting one thing: She's a woman crying victim on the internet. In the words of "SocJus" we need to "Listen And Believe".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
You want to know what happens when a woman harasses a man? We already have a living example, Here's a transgender feminist explaining how that works out even when that woman is a domestic abuser who has the GNAA doing dirty work for her.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
No, we just react differently even though we have evidence men are harassed more. When a man is harassed on the internet, even by his domestic abuser nobody gives a shit or they go after HIM. When a woman is harassed on the other hand it's the end of the world and a civil rights issue.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Ignore the trolls.
TFA addresses this: if you ignore the trolls, they escalate.
Prevent the angry dissent by not making yourself a target for angry dissent by posting bullshit people will call you out on.
Which "bullshit" are you talking about here, specifically? You basically seem to be saying that you should never post anything online that anyone may disagree with. Do you really think it's right that a small, but angry, minority should be able to silence others through threats of violence and intimidation?
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
Considering I've seen the abuse Jack Thompson got yes I can. What I can't see is anyone giving a shit, unlike when a woman gets any sort of trolling whatsoever then it's suddenly the end of the world. The difference isn't in the trolling or even the amount, it's in the fact people actually *care*.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Really? Then why is this transgender feminist basically the ONLY feminist publicly calling out the fact feminists have closed ranks to defend an outright domestic abuser? Where's that "by and large" you were just talking about? As Wythe writes the sanitization and apologia for abuse and bigotry in social justice is a staggering problem, women brave enough to build girls schools in pakistan are afraid of targetted revenge attacks for being a "gender traitor".
If anything you said were true there'd basically be people in the streets right now over the racism, sexism, and transphobia rampant in Social Justice circles and the deliberate targetted attacks against women and minorities speaking out against primarily affluent white social justice warriors.
The truth is you're the one packing straw to fabricate a moral panic. Jack Thompson got trolled like many prominent people do and nobody gave a fuck, hell most people mocked him. When it happens to a woman suddenly people like you consider this the end of the world.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I'm a guy and I have been harassed by a relentless troll in the past after I presented a position that the troll strongly disagreed with. He did a google search of everything he could find out about me and pasted the results all over the place repeatedly. Lesson #1: Don't Use Real Name.
Table-ized A.I.
Because it's not biased at all to deliberately exclude men raped by women from the categorization of "rape" and instead hide them as "other" then go on to sell people on the idea that it's men behind all of this using the word "rape".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Out of 20 major studies a majority found a rate at minimum double that, and nearly half had a rate of 18% or higher. And that was counting flat out false accusations, not just railroadings and witchhunts which overwhelmingly target black men.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Yes, actually, considering that men who don't conform to that gender role are attacked using slurs like "neckbeard" and "dudebro". In fact feminists went so far as to commit felonies to shut down a suicide prevention conference because hey fuck men.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I wish I still had mod points, because this is the beginning and end of the issue. Unfortunately, most people are not able to see these issues objectively, but instead react to the emotional shouts from the extreme with which they are more closely aligned (which is usually pretty far from their beliefs, but just a tad closer than the opposing extremist views).
And the largest group of zealous, uncriticizable, "well intentioned" people being manipulated right now is... http://theflounce.com/harassme...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
And "feminists" like you go around crying about anti-feminists pre-emptively every single chance you get to drum up that moral panic and outrage.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
You keep insisting you care about equality and then you do things like cite David Futrelle, a toxic rape apologist and pathological liar. Do you know why people said there was no police report? BECAUSE THE POLICE TOLD THEM THERE WAS NO POLICE REPORT. It wasn't until LATER that the police changed their story and mentioned that they had sent her to the feds.
Reporting what the police explicitly tell you after direct investigation is the exact OPPOSITE of "without even a hint of investigating it".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Did anyone say genetic? No, you brought up genetics as an attempt to straw man Archangel Michael. Just another completely dishonest tactic to make it utterly impossible to ever stray from your dogma. Do you get that it's stuff like this that actually hurts women?
Do you know what actual women in the industry say? They say the fearmongering from people like you is what drives women away. Hell one of the most respected women in linux called you on this too.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Yes, actually, considering that men who don't conform to that gender role are attacked using slurs like "neckbeard" and "dudebro".
I don't think "guys who communicate their feelings" are the ones being called neckbeard or dudebro.
In fact feminists went so far as to commit felonies to shut down a suicide prevention conference because hey fuck men.
Well, I'm sure you have a valid citation for that, and not, say, a link to a video of protesters at a speech on "men's issues and the double standards of feminism" (rather than a "suicide prevention conference") cheering when someone random pulls a fire alarm.
Nobody is trying to scare women away. Men get the Same Shit, the only difference is men are taught to ignore it or deal with it. Women are taught to damsel themselves and be helpless victims. Nobody cares when men get trolled or doxxed or swatted, when women get so much as trolled it's the end of the world.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Your theory falls flat when it turns out men get the same shit women do and the difference is in how everyone ELSE reacts. Men are expected to deal with it or ignore it, women get a crusade against the troll because "ZOMG MISOGYNY!"
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
It's simple. How do you bully nerds and geeks and gamers if you're still busy pretending "geek is in"? You find an excuse everyone will approve of and nobody will dare question. http://theflounce.com/harassme...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Over a million tweets averaging between 30-50 thousand a day is hardly a "few", nor are people who raise $70,000 for feminists to fund female game developers "obnoxious assholes".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
People are vile and self-centered.
Don't generalise from what you see in the mirror. There are plenty of decent folks out there. It's just that the minority assholes get more attention.
You are forgetting that you are trying to defend an asshole by demonizing the victim.
I know many women in IT. And in other tech fields. Some of whom I've worked with. I've witnessed plenty of anti-female behavior. The most common I've seen is the assumption that anything a male suggests is intrinsically better than anything a female suggests. Next most common I've seen is paternalism. Rarely (but not never) do I see more overt forms (being in software development, calling a woman a "code c***" is an insult I've heard more than a few times). I know this is tame compared to what many people talk about.
And I know some people would consider this not sexism.
These subtle forms of sexism are probably just as bad. They may whisper, but the message they whisper is all the more effective for having been whispered - it's often easier to dismiss the obviously sexist comment than it is the clam, gentle voice "offering assistance".*
Sexism in IT and other tech fields is very real and all too common.
*I am NOT saying offering help is a bad thing. It is how it's done. However subtle, there is a difference between offering help to someone who is considered an equal and to someone who is considered an inferior.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Howard Dean.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't know whether he was or wasn't a pedophile, but he sure molested a lot of little kids...
but around here we're a representational democracy. Now, when our voter turnout gets above 50% you might have a point, but for now the gov't protects those what put 'em in office, and with our low as crap voter turnout that's gonna be whoever pays for the tv ads and voter reg drives.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Trolls love to "bully" women because they're the easiest group to get a rise out of.
While the benefits of anonymous speech are often promoted, I have come to believe the dangers of it, more specifically the dangers of trusting anonymous information, are too often overlooked by our society. It seems people are too willing to give credence to rumors and anonymous tips. It isn't that I would eliminate anonymous speech, rather I wish there were forums for open speech where people actually stand behind their words and people could then decide for themselves which story seems to have a more credible backing. There are plenty of examples of both men and women being very unfairly and wrongly harassed and accused online (how on earth did the discussion go down that rabbit hole anyway). I just wish people would put a little more effort into checking out a story before believing it.
I am a crackpot
At least you know what you are.
Women talk about it as a women's issue because women get the vast majority of the death and rape threats many of which have personal details and need to be taken seriously..
> Can you imagine a male blogger on his private blog receiving that kind of over-the-top campaign if he considered moderating comments? ... yes.
I've been a mod a few times and I've been called every racial epithet, been called a short, fat slob and every other such thing, as well as getting mail bombed with really disgusting porn. I did not react to it, I banned the assholes, and in the case of the mailbomb, I tracked the loser down and had him kicked off his ISP.
It helps when you know they're just trying to get a rise out of you, when you know that they don't actually know anything about you, etc. If you hate trolls, you really want to AVOID publicity, because showing that you're easily trolled is the best way to attract these losers. Once you understand how they work and that they're just looking for an issue that makes you angry, it puts you in control over them rather than the other way around.
People are vile and self-centered. They will take advantage of you given the chance. Even if they don't have any ill will, chances are that they will be careless and cause you trouble just out of ignorance and stupidity.
You really need to get out of the basement and start to meet some real people. Doing something like missionary work (even for the Pastafarians.... it really doesn't matter) or selling calendars door to door. Something that can give you a chance to actually meet ordinary people who do ordinary things.
Most people are compassionate and care about others. A small minority think of those others as marks or suckers, but that is the problem of that small minority. Trolls like you are talking about are definitely a small minority of the small minority who have some personal issues with society due to genetics or disposition and personality.
As for the misogynist attitude among several posts, I agree this is equal gender opportunity here. Women do things a little different than men, but the brutal asshats among women are just as cruel as any men. They can also screw over men if they want to get their claws into you. Luckily, even among women those are a minority.
Nothing about the GP post you were replying to was stupid and IMHO was spot on for the situation described.
If someone killed weev, the world would be a better place.
The world woulbe be even better if that one do not kill Weev - no matter how he asks. O:-)
I have played female characters on MMORPGs before. This is usually just for variety (it is always a secondary account) and to explore the game in a slightly different dimension.
I never try to hit on guys or even act feminine, but I neither confirm nor deny my gender in that situation as well (it is usually assumed I'm female when I'm not). Most of the time it is just some shy kids who try to hit on me (where I say something like "in your dreams... dude" or something else just as pithy) and try to shrug it off. Most of the time it really doesn't even matter, but there are a couple of creeps who go overboard.
It is definitely a different kind of experience in that situation in terms of the social interaction.
This is not trolling. Trolling is a art.
I see what you did there, grammar nazi troll. ;)
Is this Cramer or sumdumass? Wait, wait, lemme guess, Karmashock!
It is sad that the Trolls abound but the knights are in retreat.
Why can't ladies be engaged and corrected politely?
Trolls should be slain.
However going after the trolls, then the laws is like chasing ashes without putting out the fire.
Start with electing people who want smaller government. (not just pork for their people)
Then revamp voir Dire. Jury selection. First 12 people unless they are close friends to the people in the case.
NOT the stupidest 12 the lawyers can pick out.
Then there is a chance that the bad laws can be corrected.
Tell Washington to stop spending MY Money!
This isn't a gender specific issue though. It is a cyber-bullying issue where both law enforcement and ISPs need to be serious about stamping out this behavior and setting forth explicit policies about harassment and engaging in not just banning those individuals but reaching out with handcuffs and letting them know there are consequences to on-line behavior. Where needed, laws may even need to be enacted because this stuff is getting out of hand.
One group I will acknowledge is at least trying to do the right thing is the Wikimedia Foundation, where explicit policies are in place along with active involvement of the WMF legal counsel to turn over evidence to law enforcement of the country where somebody does this kind of serious death threat. It has happened on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects over the years, and while I have not faced such a threat I would take seriously, I have seen it done on behalf of others.
Facebook on the other hand is a steaming pile of manure and doesn't care what happens to its users. I could name other groups but it is an issue that can and should be addressed in a larger forum.
Am I the only one here eating all this delectable irony up? I mean the ARCHANGEL MICHAEL is sitting here bitching about the government telling him what to do when his religion pervades every aspect of this very same government? Or that his religion has such a sordid history of tyranny and murder? I mean you're worried you might be killed in a "death panel" but you're obviously cool with some Inquisitions right?
You guys better hurry the hell up before I eat up all this delicious irony. Hey Mike, could you sprinkle some more of that on my popcorn here? I can't get enough!
See my subject: You've got it wrong - I don't want a "wannabe woman" weirdo!
APK
P.S.=> I go for normal REAL females ... apk
Check your privilege
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I don't think that anyone doubts that there are real instances. Claiming that it's all of the most extreme proponents on all issues is quite a big claim, and I think it does need some proof.
Hell, I can't think of many more extreme nutcases than the Westboro Baptist Church, and they're apparently genuine.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
There are many things I can think of which really should be done to Weev. None of them are fatal.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
To be fair, she was also mocked for being a woman, just not by the liberal press.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
This isn't a gender specific issue though.
It's only a gender-specific issue because people like weev act in gender-specific ways. If people like him went after both genders equally, or all ethnicities equally, or all sexual orientations equally, then the conversation would be different (even if the most appropriate solution is completely identical).
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Probably true. Weaker sex[*], easier to scare.
[* If women weren't weaker than men, there would be no "women's" category in sports.]
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
"I no longer read most of his posts, and when I do read one, I just quickly scan it for something to troll him with." - by tomhudson (43916) on Tuesday April 26, 2011 @11:01PM (#35949346) Journal
"you do realize that all you're doing is pointing out to others just how easy you are to troll, right?" - by tomhudson (43916) on Friday April 15, @08:45PM (#35835824) Homepage
"I never stalked you - only trolled you for a week" - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday April 18, 2011 @12:47PM (#35856834) Journal
"Wait until he starts on another kick, then reply to him as an AC. It's the new meme". - by tomhudson (43916) on Sunday May 09 2010, @08:29PM (#32150544) Homepage Journal
"HOWTO: trolling the hosts file guy in one easy step The next time you see a post by him, just reply anonymously. And to really mess with his head, reply anonymously to your anonymous post, disagreeing with your first anon post" - by tomhudson (43916) barbara.hudson@ ... a - h u dson.com on Saturday April 16, 2011 @01:38PM (#35841122) Journal
Those are only a SMALL sampling - I have TONS more from you: You're clearly a mentally disturbed psycho whose inability to accept himself as a man made you do something as STUPID as a sex change - now you take your bullshit out on others like myself? You're whacked...
Even Smitty_One_Each noted that about you & your "trolling" you sick fuck -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
* Modding down the last time I posted this too http://slashdot.org/comments.p... only proves your guilt on all accounts noted!
APK
P.S.=> Then there's also your many only KNOWN sockpuppets on /. you kept active @ the same time for trolling/harassing others + libeling them & modding yourself up with and those who get the best of you DOWN with http://slashdot.org/~BarbaraHu... = http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson... + http://slashdot.org/~Barbara%2... )
...apk
Winning a discussion doesn't mean you actually effect change.
Then I'd hardly call it a win at all.
To the winners go the spoils.
That's how you evaluate who the winner is. As it looks so far, systemd is winning the day by taking over many linux distros, Dice is still driving content here, and they just love posts by Bennet and will take as many as he can provide.
Given that, who do you think is winning?
In before the weevsuckers start swallowing...too late.
Was it really necessary to call this article "Why the trolls will always win"? Couldn't it have been "Let's fight back against trolls"? Or "How one person survived a malicious troll attack"? The whole point is that people who were attacked ARE fighting back... and if the trolls think they will "always win", then they can't imagine how wrong they are. People are not lying down and taking it anymore, and that's what this article is really about. It needs a different title.
Another problem is the term "conspiracy theory".
Something related: what is the difference between a stubborn person and a headstrong person? Well it depends on how you look at it.
Now, what is the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a whistleblower? Again, it depends on how you look at it.
As long as we keep shoving what we don't like in to the "conspiracy theory" corner because either we don't like it or there's no direct evidence, we're not going to progress any further.
And by the way, speaking of evidence for conspiracy theories: how would you suggest it be obtained legally? Most of it will never have been written down or if it is, it's behind corporate networks.
So it's a Kafka kind of situation.
Along with everybody that also too part in criminal activities with him.
It's really just that simple.
The reactions around here would be FAR different if it were a woman harassing a guy. Far worse, in fact. There would be fewer people making excuses for 'her', for starters.
That's two seperate events, and the one you're talking about was where domestic violence victims were trying to speak about being turned away from shelters or threatened with arrest. You just shot yourself in the foot bringing that up.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The trolls causing problems may claim to be part of the group, that uses a social forum, but that does not mean it is true.
Criminals lie. If you don't believe one thing they say, then you should not trust anything they say.
These days computers are easy enough to use, there is no reason to believe they are even "geeks".
Imagine criminals in a prison, allowed to use the prison library computers for "education", signing on to random sites just to harass people... 8-P
I'm sorry but as a woman in tech, kindly slag off with the whiteknighting and "omg womens need to be defended from trollz".
Most of us are not treated poorly and I'm sorry but you'll notice some trends with the people who are treated that way.
That's not to condone harassment but to deny people flamboyantly say upsetting shit and then are shocked and appalled
when people send inflammatory shit right back "Because they're a woman' is annoying."
That dude clearly had issues but it's not "everyone on the internet' and Zoe Quinn has said some pretty disgusting shit to other
women. She tells people she's a misogynist in person as a joke and her and her friend Maya pick on other women and trans people.
Kotaku etc using her as a meatbag to get more clicks (because that's all it really is) and being surprised when people don't respect her work
because all they know about her is 'wahhh harassment' is just willful ignorance.
Journalists: Stop making "Harassment of Female Developers" news. Make their games news WHEN THEY ARE GOOD.
The sorts of analyses that can be conducted using game-theoretic formulations can be used to see what happens when a population is unable to defend itself because it swears off retribution in kind. The numbers are pretty dismal, without strong cooperation by the good people there is a sort of inevitability that the nice go extinct. Until the mid 1800's outlier antisocial behavior ran a high risk of being met by termination, which might not be a deterrent, but it sure reduces recividism. Once we became too civil to retaliate in kind (or stronger) we run the risk of losing to the trolls.
The ability to be anonymous just makes it harder to stop trolls, and any strong efforts to prevent anonymity are met by claims that the internet needs to support anonymity if it is to deliver freedom in the lands of tyranny.
All of this is fodder for great movies (where the bad guys are pursued by the good) but only if the bad guys hit equally evil players will they find meaningful retribution. If the trolls were to accidentally cost the Russian mafie some serious coin, they might find a knock at their door that would be much worse than having the FBI come a-knocking. (This is the plot of one of my tech-fi stories).
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Social engineering a password (usually) involves no tech wizardry. It is a skill that anybody can pick up that doesn't look like a headless guy in a suit...hunched over a computer screen typing code. The social engineer is the guy you just assumed was a building janitor. Calling every computer-related crime "hacking" brings along a lot of baggage that isn't always appropriate to figuring out how to catch criminals and prevent the crimes.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
I will agree that weev is acting like an asshat and targeting women. I don't think you can make any further generalizations beyond that or try to group him with any specific group unless they are calling themselves the "he-man woman hater's club" (something that came from the Little Rascals movie serials in the 1930's... and even that group was tongue in cheek as they had a girl as a member).
Some guys target women, some women target men, or some jerks simply target "marks" or something else that is weak in their view.
I dunno about weev specifically, but that's not a bad alternative name for the MRA movement.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Sounds like Andrew Auernheimer was jealous of Kathy Sierra. She accomplished something and he desperately wanted to and couldn't, so he instead sought to damage or destroy her. Comparing her accomplishments to his, he was, is and always will be nothing more than a pathetic, psychotic loser. He's no benefit to the computing community, but a cancer that should be excised and incinerated.
Real trolling requires witt and while infuriating the target should cause generally great laugther (eg. by seemingly playing along and letting the target run into a self-built wall). Threats are just a hate crime and should be procesuted.
You are partially correct.
However, the use of women as "computers" long pre-dates WWII (late 1800's) - in the sciences and particularly in astronomy where women made a couple of the most important 20th century discoveries. That they were common in WWII was a largely a continuation of existing practice.
He is not just a troll, he is most likely a JEWISH troll, that is the only reason he is getting away with his crimes!!
That's two seperate events, and the one you're talking about was where domestic violence victims were trying to speak about being turned away from shelters or threatened with arrest. You just shot yourself in the foot bringing that up.
Me: Do you have a citation for your claim?
You: No! And you just shot yourself in the foot by bringing up another event!
Nice try, but it doesn't work that way. If you can't support your claim when called out, no amount of deflection is going to hide that fact.
The level of sexist viciousness that many women get on the net greatly exceeds the level of regular asshole harassment that men and women get. Similar problems happen in real life, but anonymity on the net (which I'm all in favor of, for lots of reasons) gets abused much more against women.
I've read too many articles like this recently to keep track of who said what, but one of them pointed out that women especially get attacked by trolls when they're starting to become well-known and people are listening to their opinions. Kathy Sierra, for instance, started the Head First line of programming books, which I found useful, and got enough sexist trolling that she left the business. It's happened to other authors I know as well. And of course there are the trolls who hate having women in gaming.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You: "Oh I know exactly the event you're talking about but I'm going to try poisoning the well and conflating two different times the same hate crime was committed"
Me: "So not only do you know exactly what I'm talking about, you also just brought up a second where domestic violence victims were silenced"
You: "You can't support your claims, you're deflecting you're deflecting!"
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
You: "Oh I know exactly the event you're talking about...
... as evidenced by the fact that I asked about it, and confused it for something entirely different!"
Me: "So not only do you know exactly what I'm talking about..."
I see that you're having an argument with your own imagination, and losing. Sad.
death threats and false claims of prostitution is not what I call trolling... this is just criminal behavior.
trolling is harmless, like saying you like apple in a windows post.
saying you will rape OP's mom and kill his dad because he posts about windows, is not trolling.
I agree. It's more related to bullying than to trolling. In swedish there is the term "näthat" (meaning web hate) addressing the phenomenon.
I can has pride. Y u shame?
No, children, the trolls were not here first. Some of us remember that human beings inhabited the Internet before the Eternal September.
WTF are you talking about? Trolling was a high art long before Eternal September. I recall seeing some pretty incredible trolling on Usenet long before the AOL masses were unleashed onto the Internet.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
nah, thats not pretty for the group of "moderated-trolls" that such trolls(?) are that agressive against ladies, who just wanted to be like "elfs" or "elves" - in this case a "doxxer" like that is not a "troll" any more - looks like this ex-troll could have been changed by stuff like falsified plastic "salt" in the supermarkets ?! (=chrystmeth or worse krokodile) ... whatever - here we dont know the backgrounds concerning parts of pervert industrial interests on collecting datas only by data-mining with "help" of "clue-less" contract-workers and their opposites as mobbing people or "trolls" or "doxxers" or what ever it is today only for data-collecting and again only for new "games" or just for "entertainment" ??? - (concerning t-r-o-l-l there are terms like "f-a-w-n" or "s-p-i-r-i-t-of-the-f-o-r-e-s-t" - a fawn is the antique word (greece?) for troll (word troll comes from scandinavia?) - ... only for entertainment and for data-mining by specialization with help of "forensic" groups for this ... - this is nothing any more to do with what people want of life ... so the different streams with thoughts about that "internet" makes things get worse are not that wrong ... ??? - ... who wants to complaint about this posting ?! - it is this way too - what people order and what people consume, they get this back too ...
but-all-in-all these inhibitious extrescences like in decadent days of Roman Empire or worse than that
I read through my above post and have decided to shorten and revise it. It really is too long and despite my efforts at the time still went on a couple of unrelated tangents. I know this is still long, but at least it is better organized. So, for the tl;dr crowd:
Why does it seem that the first response to these kinds of problems is always legal? To sue someone? Is it just because that's what is expedient to existing victims? Because it won't help future potential victims. Even changing the law or boosting enforcement won't get at the root cause.
The fact is that sadly, sociopathic behavior like this is socially acceptable. Every time a woman speaks up, half of the crowd chimes in to defend the sociopath. "It was her own fault", you say. "Women are such whiners; this happens to everyone", you say. And let's be clear: there's a point to be made that women are perhaps too often thin-skinned. But often this point is made regardless to the sexist nature (rape threats) or severity of the harassment (total destruction of career, made to feel unsafe and insecure even in her own home or the home of her family, made to fear for the safety of that family). And most of the people making this point, especially in a place like Slashdot that allows people to post anonymously, make their point with misogynistic slurs. It's only understandable that this position is almost always attacked as "blaming the victim" when there are only a couple of rational voices in the mob.
When you strip away the fact that women are the most common victims, you are left with the uncontroversial problem: sociopaths. Even when they aren't attacking you personally, their assaults harm society and by extension harm you. Every time a Kathy Sierra is harassed out of her comfort zone, we lose another intelligent perspective. We lose the voice behind javaranch.com. And to all you lonely nerds out there: we lose one more woman that understands and appreciates what you do. One more woman that might have shared your dreams and obsessions.
How can the law help us? Will it stop people from being sociopaths? Not any more than drunk driving laws made people stop driving drunk. Drunk driving used to be just as socially acceptable as wife beating and criminal harassment. What changed? MADD and systematic messaging from law enforcement and driver's education told entire generations of new drivers that it is not acceptable. Now drunk driving is the sort of thing only completely irresponsible people do, right? While that doesn't mean nobody does it, it does mean nobody defends the behavior. We need a single message to spread to every single child regarding harassment: this is not OK.
Stopping sociopaths and the harassment they inflict means we have to focus on their actions, not the possible failings of their victims. The victim has already been through enough and doesn't need you to tell them to toughen up. You don't even have to personally believe the victim! Attack the crime, even if you don't believe it happened. You might say, "Harassment is wrong, and I am appalled to think this kind of thing even happens." You might say, "I actually have trouble believing the story because it's so unthinkable that someone could be this much of a sociopath." You might say, "I thought this sort of thing never happened, and it certainly never should." Casting doubt on the victim doesn't help anybody. It just makes you the kind of asshole that future victims are afraid will attack their credibility if they seek help. And if they're lying, let that come out at trial; our public discussion cannot come nearly as close to justice for the specific people involved. All we can do is try to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future by making clear that it is unacceptable.
Changing the law is a nice idea, but people tend to be pretty resentful of laws that don't match their personal beliefs. That's why the above is so important. You will never get people to report harassment and support victims just by passing laws. This is where we are
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
This isn't trolling at all, it's fabrication, fraud, harassment, libel damage, destruction of someone's life.
This is not fucking trolling. It's a smear campaign among other things, who the fuck though they could call this trolling? Some angry fucking minecraft kid who got mad that his house was turned into a penis so he wants to outlaw trolling?
Trolling is baiting someone into a fight, not the destruction of their life.
Get it out of your thick repressed fucking heads that this kind of sick behavior is not god damn fucking trolling, and stop trying to use the wrong fucking words to make something you don't like illegal and drastric and super fucking wrong.
Her only crime was infecting the world with the* dumb-down "Head First" books.
Her sentence was beyond harsh, and the trolls inexcusable. But she should take a rep-hit for foisting such crap on the world.
There is a difference between a legal accusation and a poll.
Any poll that includes non-sexual assault scenarios as sexual assault is 100% invalid.
There is no gray area in sexual assault and these "studies" are nothing but gray areas.
1 in 5 college women? 100% Bullshit
In my state across all state-funded universities there were less than 20 sexual assaults last year. ~20 too many to be sure, but nowhere near 1 in 5.
If they published 1 in 500 they would be believable and credible.
1 in 5 is pure pandering.
By white-knighting women and rushing to their defense you are explicitly saying that women need the protection of men.
Your political correctness is loaded with misogyny.
Because DocSavage64019 is your real name?
There is no difference between hiding behind the AC label or an anonymous handle.
Ekeland wasn't the only one bothered by the government's case. Even Kathy Sierra disagreed. Yet she's appalled that somehow she'd been dragged into supporting the very man who'd abused her.
But you all know what happened next. Something something something horrifically unfair government case against him and just like that, he becomes tech's "hacktivist hero." He now had A Platform not just in the hacker/troll world but in the broader tech community I was part of. ... But hard as I tried to find a ray of hope that the case against him was, somehow, justified and that he deserved, somehow, to be in prison for this, oh god I could not find it. I could not escape my own realization that the cast against him was wrong. So wrong. And not just wrong, but wrong in a way that puts us all at risk.
derail?