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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."
Wah.
I don't respond to AC's.
You're saying those who wanted them not cancelled were making threats equivalent to threats of actual violence?
I don't know about you but I think pulling out of participation of an event, or withdrawing an advertiser, is not actually quite the fucking same as making threats of on-site violence.
FML
Hmm... threats of hyperbolic violent harm that couldn't POSSIBLY happen or
Threats of actual economic harm that was ABSOLUTELY going to happen.
Definitely not the same at all.
I'm laughing so hard. I might piss myself. Please, send help.
This is just too funny.
First they cancel a harassment panel due to harassment, now they reinstate it due to more harassment.
Their submissiveness is hilarious.
Grow a fucking spine. No wonder nobody takes you people seriously.
Back in the stupid ages, people like that died young, or became slaves to others.
Oh, wait, it still happens now. I repeat, grow a spine.
They'll still not be taken seriously. They already doomed their panels, this is just more salt in the wound.
Please cite anything you said, the articles don't give evidence or anything. Quoting spurious accusations from known shit-people like Randi Harper or Leigh Alexander does not count as evidence. It's pretty clear you're too naive to be discussing these things.
[text on a screen] is a menace that has often resulted in real world violence
Oh, really? And where can we view these spooky words with magical powers?
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
I can't wait for day when we all look back on this drama and realize how silly we were back end.
It's strange how people on the internet will get emotionally invested in something so menial and use it as a battleground for their political ideologies.
And before someone says "Well its because of the..", No. Both side are guilty of this and both sides are equally annoying.
I have some bad news for you. You're one of the foolish reactionaries who went nuts over women fighting back against harassment. You're what's wrong with the gaming and reactionary dork communities. Anyone who calls civilized people "SJWs" is a dead-ender who needs to grow up.
When a story about online harassment shows up on Slashdot, it's inevitable that the harassers show up to the discussion. And their friends with mod-points.
And Dice gets the ad-clicks.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
But being able to harass someone while not even in the same city/county/state/country is relatively new.
Back in Victorian England, if you wanted to harass someone, you pretty much had to be where they were. I really don't see there having been a whole lot of harassment by telegraph. Maybe newspaper, sure. But that was about the limit.
Now? You don't even have to be in the same state to dox someone or SWAT them. So, the nature of harassment may not have changed a lot, the method of delivering it has.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Criticism != harassment.
One of the most well known SJW traits is equating criticism and calls for change with harassment. Are we to conclude you are projecting?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So what part of this makes it okay to make false accusations and generalizations against groups of people without any evidence? Some people might call this... bigotry.
If you're an adult, you got over being called names. Expecting others to sanitize your environment wherever you go is insanity.
Liberal journalists are all bending over backwards and tripping over themselves to prove how liberal they are. They're being played like a cheap crank activated organ.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's amazing that you know that the threats of violence at SXSW couldn't possibly have happened.
O great Karnak, what are this week's lottery numbers? I mean, if you're already peering into the future....
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
So you're accusing "SJWs" of bigger threats of actual violence than the ones that caused SXSW to cancel the panels in the first place?
Trolls have never once tried to pass legislation destroying the very foundation of free speech. They've never bullied a single university into kicking out students for daring to challenge the accepted liberal/feminist/race-hustling narrative. They've never threatened to alter the content of my videogames/movies/TV shows/etc. to portray some artificial liberal construct of "reality." AFAIK, they've rarely, if ever, drum-headed anyone out of their profession for saying the wrong thing.
They just occasionally shoot their virtual mouths off with hollow threats and juvenile insults.
So yes, SJW's are VERY MUCH so more of a threat to most us in our everyday lives than any trolls ever will be.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Yes. In fact, I'd argue that SJWs created the controversy in the first place. This is typically what happens:
1. Find some collection of attributes or institutions in the target cultural context to dominate. In this case, gaming/technology.
2. Feign offense and put on a victim routine, the louder the better. I believe they call it 'signal boosting'.
3. Use this victim status to garner sympathy and thus political power within the target organizations.
4. Use this power to 'reframe the narrative', ie dominate the discussion before it even begins.
5. Extract whatever cultural relevance this group has and use it to 'signal boost' up to the next target. When it inevitably dies, abandon the husk and move to the next target.
Yay for parasitical political philosophies!
That is, uses a colloquial term for a female genitalia to describe something bad.
And for being unable to take a fucking joke, I call you a dick. That is, I use a colloquial term for a male genitalia to describe something bad. Am I a misandrist now?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Calling someone an SJW isn't "harassment." If someone is so thin-skinned that they can't handle being labeled themselves (even as they themselves attempt to attach much more virulent labels to their critics), then they have no place in the debate.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I want to point out something interesting. Those men are referred to by their by their adolescent-y pseudonyms, but the women are referred to by their real names.
Well I could post leothepirate or thunderf00t's real names, but those pseudonyms? Those are the names they are known by, much like how Quinn, Haprer, Sarkeesian and Wu are the names they're known by. It's pretty simple isn't it. If I said Phil and Leo would you know their real names and how they played into this? The answer would be no.
Besides, when everyone is anonymous and using a pseudonym you don't know who that other person is. You're not clouding your views based on who they might be, their race, sex, or anything else. You're basing the merit of their statements and ideas. And I know that many on the far left, especially in the social justice circles and modern feminism have a real problem with merit and meritocracies which they call sexist, sometimes racist, and I've even seen merit called homophobic.
Om, nomnomnom...
I know right, what a dick.
Well, it's certainly a lot funnier than the labels that SJW's apply to their critics.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
That's great. I'm a grey beard and I'm "in this mess." And going by your post, I've been here longer than you, especially since I remember writing out games that came in magazines to play them. I'm disabled, my back is broken in two places, and I do game as well. You know what happened when this all started up though? There was this tag called #notyourshield, where those SJW's started saying that a disabled minority like myself didn't exist. They told women that game they don't exist, they told other minorities they didn't exists. And to round it all up, when people proved that they did exist and didn't agree with them. They started calling people house niggers, uncle toms, and so on. Oh SJW's full of love and kindness right?
If you've been gaming as long as you have, then you'll remember the ye olde days when gaming magazines would shill out for corps, and people who were friends without disclosing it. You'll also remember when the internet started catching on, how everyone and their brother started launching their own site and become their own game reviewer. You'd have been in that bluesnews/voodoo3d/etc clique that existed at the time. You'll remember that those gaming magazines started dying, and were replaced by online sites.
And you jump a head, you'll remember the Dorito Pope among other instances of corruption, conflicts of interest, and collusion. You'll also remember saying fuck this, and a few years after that you'd start seeing the rise of Let's Plays and 'tube related reviews of games and being happy with them. And jumping to the present, unless you buried your head in the sand you'll have remember the number of authors on the big name sites getting caught shilling for their buddies indie games, authors shilling for xyz companies games and so on.
SJW's pushing 'diversity' or what they claim as diversity is only a small part. It's claiming to be the only voice that can speak for you, or me. If you don't want to be in this mess, that's fine. The game journo's and the vast majority of those who were in Game Journo Pro's created it. You're now seeing the fall out. Oh and a fun bit, look up people like Arthur Chu, Geordie Tait, or Randi Haper or Zoe Quinn. Who've either wanted to commit or openly support violence, or doxing people who don't follow their lines of belief.
Om, nomnomnom...
People who call people "SJW" are the same people who think that only hippies and scumbags go to protests, or that women should just shut the fuck up and knit them a sweater.
Stereotype much, bro?
There is nothing unreasonable about faith. Faith is the understanding that you will not be able to investigate the underlying mechanism of the thing you are dealing with. Most people have to exercise at least a little of that every day, when even when discussing scientific topics.
Generally, religions have been matters of revelation, and not investigation. This does not imply that they are unreasonable, just that they cannot be investigated scientifically. You can reasonably choose to discard items of faith, if you choose to limit yourself to that which you can investigate scientifically, but faith is not the opposite of reason.
Science and the scientific method was the outgrowth of quite a few people, particularly minor clerics, who eventually developed the concepts of Reason and the scientific method. Preachers and such may certainly be irrational, but their job description does not make it automatically so, nor does faith mean that they disable their "reason" to accept it. It is eminently reasonable to accept that there is something out there that you don't understand and can't investigate which, nevertheless, may be true. Certainly, the concept of things like atoms and smaller particles were an object of speculation without the ability to investigate for thousands of years before we could design experiments for them. I wouldn't have called those ancient philosophers "irrational".
Nah, it's usually the feminists who have that problem. They squawk at people who criticise and try to get them removed from whatever platforms are in play. Typical examples include fired from jobs, kicked out of schools (eg Duke, Dalhousie), and of course, nuisance sexual harassment law suits. It's not the anti-feminists who are building soviet show trial style 'tribunals' in every institution they can in order to intimidate and shout people down. Anti-feminists aren't also building coalitions to censor speech they don't like either.
I'm hopeful that one day this trope will be as unfashionable as the ones about women.
I hope instead that no one will care about your bullshit. Worrying about what name people get called is a sign that civilization had brought us to a wonderful place where we have no real worries, and as a sort of auto-immune disorder, we obsess on this meaningless BS. Get over it, and become happier. Enjoy this wonderful civilization and its fruits. You live better than 99% of everyone who has ever lived, stop searching so hard for something to complain about.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There is nothing unreasonable about faith. Faith is the understanding that you will not be able to investigate the underlying mechanism of the thing you are dealing with.
False. That's not faith. That's simply acknowledgement of agnosticism.
Faith is taking one more step and believing something without evidence. It's taking something you don't know and simply switching it to the category of something you do know without actually learning anything new.
Most people have to exercise at least a little of that every day, when even when discussing scientific topics.
Science involves a lot of guessing. I don't think any part of science involves believing something is true without evidence. There's a difference. Science is very clear about when things count as hypotheses/conjectures, and when they count as theories/facts/etc (hint: it's after the experiment).
but faith is not the opposite of reason.
No faith is not the opposite of reason, for the same reason that dogs are not the opposite of cats. That doesn't mean that they are not mutually exclusive.
Science and the scientific method was the outgrowth of quite a few people, particularly minor clerics, who eventually developed the concepts of Reason and the scientific method.
I find this claim to be rather dubious.
Preachers and such may certainly be irrational, but their job description does not make it automatically so, nor does faith mean that they disable their "reason" to accept it.
I think their job description does imply some irrationality. Maybe they are not being irrational, but their job certainly involves inculcating others to be irrational. I would not assume that every preacher practices what they preach. It's quite common for them to exposed as conmen, and conmen are certainly acting rationally.
It is eminently reasonable to accept that there is something out there that you don't understand and can't investigate which, nevertheless, may be true.
That is reasonable. To then go that next step from "Something can be true even if we can't prove it" to "Something *is* true even if we can't prove it" is not reasonable.
Certainly, the concept of things like atoms and smaller particles were an object of speculation without the ability to investigate for thousands of years before we could design experiments for them. I wouldn't have called those ancient philosophers "irrational".
It would have been irrational to say "Atoms must exist even though we have no evidence", even if it turned out to be true.
I can say "I know this next die roll will be a 6". That is irrational even if the next die roll is a 6.
But ancient philosophers were not basing their speculation purely on faith. They were using logic to come to those conclusions. They were evaluating the reasonableness of substances being infinitely divisible vs. there being some indivisible smallest unit.
Not all evidence is empirical. Other forms of theoretical evidence like logical and mathematical consistency, are also valid sources of evidence.
I would also like to point out that since discovering "the atom" we have discovered subatomic particles like protons and neutrons, and even smaller particles like quarks which compose them. We also potentially have yet another level deeper to go with string/M theory.
As logical as it may sound that there be a smallest indivisible particle, it may in fact be the case (as pointed out by Feynman and others) that there may not even be a bottom. It could be smaller and smaller sub-particles forever in an infinite regression.
My point is this: There is a big difference between saying
1. I don't have any evidence, but I think maybe X is true (agnosticism + hypothesis)
2. I don't have any evidence, but I know X is true (faith)
One of those is compatible with science and one is not.
If you're an adult, you got over being called names. Expecting others to sanitize your environment wherever you go is insanity.
This exact same logic works right back at you.