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.
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.
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.
The second amendment is not supposed to be the appeals court for the first...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For some reason, it's culturally acceptable for men to learn how to defend themselves from sociopaths (who, like all predators prefer soft targets to hard targets).
However if anyone ever tries to talk about teaching women any kind of self defense, the accusations of "victim blaming" start up immediately.
Which is exactly what you'd expect sociopaths to instigate. Of course they'd oppose any effort to turn soft targets into hard targets.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree. If a small group of trolls are being trolls, and you "do your best to avoid being a target", they've won. A small group of trolls have had a chilling effect. We need to do more to uncover and punish that kind of behaviour. And, was Kathy being obnoxious when she was targetted? I don't see any evidence of that, and even if she was, I don't care. That's no excuse for death and rape threats.
The thing that astonished me most about trolling is, there was a case over here (UK) where someone was targetted with rape threats for organizing a campaign to get a woman onto our banknotes, and one of the trolls sent to jail for it was a woman. Which tells me it's nothing to do with sexism, and all about personal power. Sexual threats are just a tool in the box.
Sexism is just a tool that the trolls use where appropriate. It's all about personal power. For example, one of the trolls sent to jail for harrassing Caroline Criado-Perez was a woman.
I really wish we could just drop the sexism part of this right now. Both genders get attacked by these people.
Both do, but it *is* sexist. It is far more widespread and vicious towards women. Ignoring that is not helping.
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
Trolls of this nature are unusual and they don't just target women. They target everyone.
In a pinch, yes a troll will go after your default WASP male. I once saw a troll reduced to attacking someone for being Canadian. (!)
However, what they target is a perceived weakness. If they find out you've posted in nudist or drug forums, they'll go after that. But if you are a woman or a minority, they don't even have to do research to find your weak points. They can paint you as driven by your sexual urges and/or overly sensitive and emotional, and a large amount of the audience will be receptive to that message because that is the preexisting prejudice for those groups. So if you are female or a minority (or God help you, both) you will always be their first target of choice.
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).
"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.
Precisely. Women tend to call for help or say comments hurt their feelings or otherwise give the EXACT reaction the trolls want.
They do the same thing to most men and... no reaction.
This is what is causing the focus on women. Not that the trolls are against women though I'm sure some are... but that the women often do not know how to deal with bullies.
Men are taught how to deal with bullies from a very young age. You toughen up or you're a weakling. The boys will literally call you "a girl" if you complain.
To not be "a girl" boys must hide their feelings and laugh off abuse. And then at some later date... taking some revenge is generally considered par for the course.
Women need to understand that they can't rely on men or society to come to their aid on the internet. They're going to have to take care of themselves and toughen up a bit. Crying foul just causes a troll feeding frenzy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
No, children, the trolls were not here first. Some of us remember that human beings inhabited the Internet before the Eternal September.
It's a shame that his punishment was overturned.
From a karmic point of view perhaps, but the conviction was based on an insane reading of the law. The law was bad and fundementally anti freedom, and it's worth having a hundred trolls like him than a law like that.
However, he should be convicted for harassment.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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
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.
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.
I'm not sure I understand your point.
Gamergate was all about mysoginy. As has been pointed out, hitching up with the gamergate guys in order to complain about journalist corruption is a bit like marching with the armies of Sauron because you don't like the feudal inheritance of title at Minas Tirith.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-...
Gamergate is ans always was primarily abiut mysoginy and harassmet. Anything else has been a poor attempt to legitimise it afterwards.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Dying before being brought to justice only means you got away with it.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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'
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 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.
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.
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.
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
His behaviour is extreme, but not as uncommon as you think. There is a lot of trolling and hate out there, and it can't all be a small number of sociopaths with sock puppet accounts.
More over there is a general problem with more low level stuff. Any technical video by a woman on YouTube is full of comments from social retards asking to marry her, or offering pathetic complements about her appearance in the vain hope she might respond. Stuff like the recently celebrity photo leaks are pretty bad too, when you see the number of guys egging them on or even demanding to see their favourite wank fantasy nude. Photos of Matt Smith appeared, but strangely there were not a similar number of comments from women demanding them to be posted.
Concentrating on extremes isn't always helpful because people dismiss them as just that, extreme and therefore not part of a more general problem. The question is are they just lone extremists with a mental illness or are they extreme but supported by a large amount of less extreme trolling. In a different environment would be have acted that way? If people didn't "like" his posts or watch the YouTube videos of other trolls in their hundreds of thousands would people like him be confident enough and feel supported enough to behave that way?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
The Second Amendment is the appeals court for the whole Constitution. When the laws and government that is supposed to uphold those laws don't, the last resort is a well armed "victim". So, you're actually wrong, it is an appeals court.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
And they do that to men as well.
Ever been Swatted? A friend of mine was swatted twice.
The troll called the police, said there was a murder in progress, and men with machine guns showed up at my friend's house... kicked the door down, slammed him to the ground, handcuffed him, searched his home, and then questioned him in a hostile manner for about an hour before leaving.
So I know how bad this can get. But saying they go after women is just false. They do not. They go after everyone. You make it easy for them or you do things that annoy them or you show that they're getting to you... and they'll just keep doing it.
People need to learn how to deal with bullies and trolls. The answer is not some PSA talking about feelings and awareness. That is useless clueless bullshit. If you want to have a positive influence on this situation, then you need to get people that are reacting badly to trolls to react in a more effective manner.
Know what the troll wants and what the troll needs... and deny that troll both.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
The answer is not some PSA talking about feelings and awareness. That is useless clueless bullshit. If you want to have a positive influence on this situation, then you need to get people that are reacting badly to trolls to react in a more effective manner.
I completely agree. We don't need our fucking awareness raised. 99.999% of us know it's wrong to threaten to rape somebody and call the police or their boss or whatever. When the vast majority of us who didn't do a damn thing wrong now get lumped in with the actual perpetrator and then lectured to, it has the opposite effect. I am now less likely to be concerned with the plight of [insert victim group] because they're accusing me of having all sorts of attitudes I don't have.
And I bet the trolls love it. Look at gamergame (I hate typing that). One deranged lunatic makes some not particularly credible threats against a woman who completely overreacts to what was purely online harassment at that point, goes full social justice warrior and starts attacking the entirety of "men who play video games" for the actions of one asshole. Those people get offended at being generalized as some kind of subhumans chafe and attack back, and the troll sits there gleefully watching thousands of people scream at each other for some tiny little words he wrote on twitter. At no point is the actual perpetrator punished. He is rewarded with a great show. And now people are more likely to dismiss harassment of women, because their experience has been this Sarkessian woman overacting to something and making ridiculous accusations against a bunch of people who didn't do anything.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
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.)
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.
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.
The UK has laws that make it very easy to punish people for making defamatory, abusive, and/or libelous statements, without any need to prove how much actual damage they caused, if any.
The US has free speech.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
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.
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.
And there is a huge problem pulling numbers like this, which is a large part of what statistics is all about. We can use this as our reference. Note that this is related to physical abuse, and not verbal abuse. Statistically we would have to increase the suppressed reports of abuse when dealing with non-physical abuses.
Domestic violence against men refers to abuse against men or boys in an intimate relationship such as marriage, cohabitation, dating, or within a family. As with violence against women, the practice is often regarded as a crime but pressures against reporting complicate issues.
How about this report which shows numbers are intentionally skewed in favor of women victims.
If one adds in rape (606,000 victims) the total is 5,427,000 women-but there is an issue of double-counting of an incident as both rape and intimate partner physical violence. (Emphasis mine).
Finally we can look here.
Men and boys are less likely to report the violence and seek services due to the following challenges: the stigma of being a male victim, the perceived failures to conform to the macho stereotype, the fear of not being believed, the denial of victim status, and the lack of support from society, family members, and friends.
In the case of men and boys, not only are they more likely to self suppress reports of abuse but they will not be heard if they do. Meanwhile, crimes against minorities and females are often double counted due to various laws.
Reports of non-physical abuse become more complicated, because men and women do not see the same things as abuse. Lets take a very easy subject: Link your image to a porn actor/actress. Most men would not take this as an insult, most women would.
How about name calling for another. Calling a person "slut" for example would not necessarily be considered abuse by the male, and would more likely be considered abuse by the female.
If you want more references and studies, simply search for "are men less likely to report abuse than women?" in your favorite search engine.
Lastly, as I stated above, this whole argument is a tangent to the real issue which is "Trolling" or "Abuse". While you go pull more made up numbers to back your tangent, nothing gets done to resolve the real issue.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.