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SXSW Reinstates Panels On Harassment, Adds All-Day Harassment Summit (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, the South by Southwest Festival announced that it had canceled a pair of panels about online harassment after receiving threats involving them. The cancellation generated a massive outcry, including threats from media organizations to withdraw their support for the festival. Now, SXSW has announced that they're reinstating the panels as part of an all-day summit dedicated to talking about online harassment. They said, "By canceling two sessions we sent an unintended message that SXSW not only tolerates online harassment but condones it, and for that we are truly sorry. The resulting feedback from the individuals involved and the community-at-large resonated loud and clear. While we made the decision in the interest of safety for all of our attendees, canceling sessions was not an appropriate response." They've scheduled more than two dozen speakers for the event, and they plan to stream it live online. "Online harassment is a serious matter and we stand firmly against hate speech and cyber-bullying. It is a menace that has often resulted in real world violence; the spread of discrimination; increased mental health issues and self-inflicted physical harm."
As a native Austinite, I go to SXSW to hear new bands, see new films, see the cool stuff people do, tech-wise (such as put Wi-Fi antennas on homeless people), and other things. An all-day anti-bullying panel? For all the money I pay for a badge, parking, transportation, dodging wayward Prius drivers, and bail money, there are just far more exciting things to go see and do at SXSW than sit there and hear people kvetch about what victims they are.
You're thinking of SXSW Music. SXSW has split into 3 parts: Music, Film, and Interactive. This is SXSW Interactive. SXSW Music doesn't even start until SXSW is over.
There's also 7 different exhibitions: http://www.sxsw.com/marketing/...
Violent stalkers usually start with threats.
When you say "couldn't POSSIBLY happen', I think what you mean is, "It won't happen to ME so I don't care."
After searching through a few pages of /r/games and /r/gamernews you don't see a blip about this event, but if you look on /r/girlgamers it's right on the first page. Below is a response to the original cancellations from one of the SxSW panelists. You should honestly read the whole thing in the link provided. It gets nasty. REAL nasty and paints a perfect picture of what happens when a SJW with an agenda doesn't get his or her way right down to threatening to publicly shaming the event during their own panel.
https://the-cauldron.com/sxsw-s-astounding-ideals-of-cowardice-871764d3eb45
"Your conference is the corrupt, decaying edifice of the status quo, no matter how much you pretend otherwise, because you lack the common decency to take a stand against those who would hurt others merely because they’ve always been able to do so. The women who presented this panel knew there would be risks. Threats of violence, of bitter hate, of crude and salacious intimidation tactics—these women, and many others, deal with those risks every day, simply because they dare exist. They wanted to have a conversation about those risks, discuss ways of mitigating, or perhaps even solving them, but thanks to your impotent leadership, they now will not have that opportunity.
So I say to you, SXSW, and every one of your toadies who failed to stand up for what was right, even though it might have been what was difficult, that your conference is garbage. You, collectively, are garbage, a sad accumulation of fears squirming inside the skins of what could have been human beings, and I hope that one day, all of you will take stock of your lives and determine whether or not you are the people you wish to be. Until that day, you have proven yourselves unfit to steward nothing more than the ferrying of waste through your own body.
Sincerely,
SXSW Panelist For ‘The Art of The Own: Internet Etiquette and Sports,’ And You Better Be Damn Certain This Is Going To Be In The Panel —
Chris Kluwe"
An example would be Twitter who has banned people for claiming they posted doxs, or harassment like Leothepirate or Thunderf00t for example but allowed people like Quinn, Harper, Sarkeesian and Wu to run free, who've posted doxs, harassed people, or even sent their followers out to attack others. I think that's what they're talking about, the rules don't apply equally. If you're in the right kind of clique, you can do whatever you want.
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There's nothing there that says gamergate was involved at all. Here's a question, why would gamergate want it's own panel shutdown? It's not any different than the tinfoilers who claimed that gamergate tried to shut down their own gathering at Local16(which is an on-going investigation still), or claiming that they shutdown the SPJ Airplay event with multiple bomb threats(also an on-going investigation), where the SPJ actually gave them a voice, instead of what the media was claiming it was.
In my book it falls into one of two camps, either exceptionally devout SJW's did it because they believed they're doing the right thing(there is an extremely long list of SJW's who have faked things to get attention or try to stop something--from fake racism to claiming non-existent rape while claiming it was "to create a dialog) or for the lulz, or trolls doing it for the lulz. You know, people like Joshua Goldberg who was a prolific writer for a pile of left-wing sites like The Guardian, Daily Kos, Feministing, and had dozens of articles published by them. But, he uses the gamergate hashtag(which anyone can use) 35 times, when there are 3.5m+ tweets in it, but that automatically makes him a member of gamergate says the SJW crowd.
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It's entirely up in the air where the threats came from. It could be a Jace, it could be mattress girl, it could be the Jew going around his neighbourhood painting Swastikas, it could be me, it could be you.
We have known cases of SJWs getting people fired, which is why for the moment the violence of SJWs is more effective than the alleged threats of violence from GG/MRAs. For the moment SJWs have the power to ruin arbitrary people's career and they aren't afraid to use it, while GG/MRAs have the power to troll people online who make a career out of getting trolled online for pity bucks.
At some point GG/MRAs might become more violent, but going on the past you have more to fear from the SJWs.
Oh lookie, a person talking about harassment panels calls SXSW "pussies". That is, uses a colloquial term for a female genitalia to describe something bad.
Actually the use of the word pussy in this instance is simply an abbreviation of pusillanimous meaning "lacking courage or resolution." Get off your SJW horse because there's no reference to female genitalia to be found here.
Hey Gamer Gate -supporters-.
I'm a 44 year old white male gamer. And I do NOT support your mess. You don't just affect a couple of younger women when you act like asses. You affect entire groups. If all of the rest of this is TLDR; then so be it ... but understand that grown ups don't support your crap and you DIDN'T create this genre.
FWIW, I was downloading Doom on floppies before most of the "Gamer Gate" jerks were born. I was playing MUDs and MOOs before most of the people on /. in general had ever heard of the Internet (and I was on /. long before most of the people in this conversation). I was emailing co-workers via SMTP at other TV stations before Internet Service Providers existed (normally you'd insert email during college before ISPs but I mostly skipped college due to the nascent Internet allowing me to build a couple of careers with the knowledge I had self-taught before classes in such things existed).
I built many years of great income out of that self-knowledge and I still gamed. I was injured and ended up disabled. But ... I still play games.
However I rarely talk about gaming anymore. And I have to specifically avoid some games, or at least some servers, to avoid the worst of the worst. These days I am truly reluctant to even admit playing newer games due to Gamer Gate idiocy.
When I'm playing an MMO that has younger, usually male, voices on our raid server I use HEADPHONEs. Not because I care about not sending speaker feedback, my system is better than that, but because I get flat out embarrassed by some of the crap people say both jokingly (but with them often still agreeing with it and hiding it as humor) as well as matter-of-factly. I don't need my wife or our housemates hearing that crap.
Don't like SJWs? Well, as frustrating as it can be when someone fights microaggressions instead of getting to the core problem, the people supporting Gamer Gate (or who are part of the culture and support its basic morals by not disagreeing when someone who is vocally supporting them lashes out) CREATED many SJWs. Both sides have become so polarized that nothing good is getting done.
Good on SXSW for realizing that they allowed themselves to be bullied ... and by being bullied and canceling those events showed complacency towards a group who takes that as encouragement. But damnit SXSW ... this isn't new. It has been around for long enough that you should have known better to begin with. Had you stuck to your morals in the first place this would already be in a better place.
If there was a good way for an older gamer to show a younger gamer the reasons why they are wrong and how badly it is going to affect their own lives once they've fully grown up, I would. But there really isn't. Yeah, I can stop gaming with a few people and explain why (which I've done)... or if I'm leading the gaming group I can punt you when you refuse to shape up (also done) ... but that just forces those people to go play with people who are even worse about this. So these days online I just ignore it and casually bring up alternative views later on. Some people see it, some people don't. Some people improve, some people won't. But I'm not your father and gaming isn't the real world. You need to get out into the real world and start realizing how hateful and hurtful your actions are.
Get of my gaming lawn. Believe it or not you WEREN'T here first and the people who were are sick of this.
There was a time when the rest of the gaming population could stand geeky-proud about our gaming. Now we avoid even mentioning it because we DON'T want to be in the middle of this mess. If you don't like the way people are attacking you back then realizing they're reacting to you. If you get a kick out of it then you really are the problem. Cut it out. Grow up.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
One can SET the table, have a SET of tools, or SET something down. These are unrelated meanings which happen to have the same spelling, mostly because English speakers prefer their words to be shorter than the Latin and Greek from which they derive.
PUSI-ll-animous is latin for cowardly. A long time ago it was brought into English as "pussy" (other origins are also possible, it was a long time ago).
Some time later, cat or pussy was separately used as slang for vagina.
Two unrelated meanings that happen to have the same spelling because pusillanimous is "too long; didn't say".
GanerGate argues that "professional victims" harass themselves with fake threats to gain attention. Using that logic we can conclude that GamerGate is probably behind all threats made against GamerGate, since it profits from the drama.
Well considering every time their patreon start dropping those professional victims re-inject themselves into it and start claiming this like "gamergate did a driveby shooting" and so on. Gamergate doesn't profit on drama, drama hurts it more than anything. There's an easy way to disprove what you're saying though, if gamergate did profit from the drama then all those articles calling use harassers, doxers, worse than isis, there'd be hundreds of thousands of subs on Kotakuinaction, and posts would be hitting the autosage limit on chans. But that's not happening is it?
More seriously, in my experience when people start accusing others of dishonest behaviour based on some dubious circumstantial evidence, it's because that's how they think and how they themselves act. The fact that we have IRC logs of GanerGate channels where people discuss doing this pretty much confirms it.
I'm sure you've got plenty of proof on that. Since the only channels gamergate actually uses is: /r/kotakuinaction and GGHQ and GGR on 8chan.
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I think I can answer that: because whenever GamerGate has participated in a public forum, it has only been embarrassed and seen public support drop. For example, the recent event with that Koretzky dude from the Society of Professional Journalists turned into a monkey-show of GG e-celebs and floor-crappers. Public exposure is not GamerGate's friend. Remember Aurini's big documentary? ou think GG is gonna be helped by having Oliver Campbell explain how he's in deep cover for the FBI investigating the feminists? Or Ralph Retort talking about the ethics of doxxing bitches while cleaning out his ear with a toothpick? I repeat: public exposure is not GamerGate's friend. If the past year has taught us anything, it's that fact. Every event, every happening has just caused GamerGate's support to erode.
Really? You mean the same thing from the SPJ which has a gaming-only related journalism reward that only goes to sits that show they have no conflict of interest? Or people like Lynn Walsh who are on the savepoint panel because of it? Strange I don't seem to remember Cambell ever saying that, link? But if you're right and all that has cause GG's support to erode, then why do subs continue to increase, and why do subs and sites continue to consistently draw more people?
On the other hand, if you ask the question, "Why would the blue-haired SJWs want their own panel shutdown?" now you have something of a quandary. Every time they get their mugs in public, they have multinational companies throwing money at them (Intel) or they get invited to be on Colbert or to speak at the United Nations or they have their new non-profit anti-harassment organization funded. Their Patreons get more donors and they get to be social darlings. Public exposure is the SJW's friend. They suck that shit up, and having a panel at SXSW cancelled would be a disaster for them.
In summary, one party has nothing to gain and the other has nothing to lose.
Really GG has nothing to lose anyway. Gamers themselves have been bullied, called mass murders, the cause of all of societies ills since the 1990's. You're basically looking at one of the most bullied sections of society who've already been beaten down, and saying "no fucks are given." But if they had nothing to gain, or provided nothing then all those gaming sites wouldn't have changed their disclosure and ethics policies, the FTC wouldn't have changed their native advertising rules, and the media wouldn't be so obsessed with us as the "new 4chan" that hacks, rapes, destroys, doxes, and takes candies from babies. You literally can't go a week without some new article claiming that GG is evil, or GG did this or that because they're GG. It's almost turned into a dank meme all because of their hard work.
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The gamergate folks are the ones who are doxxing women they hate, stalking, sending death threats. That may not be what the original "it's about the ethics!" people thought it was in the first few hours of gamergate, but that's what it turned into.
The whole point of gamergate is that it was based on a lie; the lie from Zoe Quinn's ex that she was sleeping with a journalist. Which has no evidence of being true. However if it was a guy who slept with a female journalist I can guarantee you that these gamers would have said "way to go dude!" But a lot of gamers already hated Zoe because she had a non traditional game, so they were inclined to believe the lies. The journalist in question never reviewed her game anyway, so it couldn't have been about the ethics. The whole thing really boils down to a few people who hate Zoe Quinn and others from the deep recesses of their souls. I don't know why this hate is there, but it is clear. Every time any story about women shows up on Slashdot they come out of the woodwork repeating the hatred, and Slashdot is the most mild of all the forums.
There's nothing left or right wing here. Is about a group of people who hate certain women. When there's a youtube video where some moron says "here she is flapping her lips again instead of using them to suck a dick", is that *really* the sort of gamergate people that you want to be associated with? That's an attitude that should have died out before we crawled out of caves. I say let the market decide, if you don't like her games then just don't play them rather than start an online jihad.