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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."
First by cancelling the panels due to threats, then by reinstating them due to threats!
The lesson to learn here kids: threats works!
Harassment isn't a growing problem; it's getting media attention at this time.
Throughout all of history, even in the Victorian age, people have fucked other people's wives; why do you think mistresses are a long-time common theme of a man's life in old stories, or weddings end with something about reasons two people shouldn't be married? The priest isn't asking you if the bride is a lying bitch; he's asking if the bride's dad secretly fucked the groom's mom one drunken night and so the dude is marrying his sister. We have a huge narrative about how the moral fiber of society is degrading, how teenagers are starting to sexualize themselves, how you never had people fucking their teachers in the 1920s or 1950s, teen pregnancy is the new thing, etc; all of that's been a constant theme through history, and teachers kept on fucking 12-year-old schoolgirls right through the ages where we pushed marriage from 12 to 18.
The same narrative is happening with harassment. It's a problem, sure; it's not a new or growing problem, though. Harassment has been with us since man figured out how to call some other man an ignorant little shit in front of his friends in order to elevate his own social status. Now instead of being afraid to leave your house because the big kid from school is waiting around the corner to jump you and give you a wedgie, you're afraid to get on Facebook because the big kid from school is waiting to tell you your tits are too small. Same shit, different day.
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Jesus Christ. Let's tackle a few of these.
Goldberg created alts that spouted ridiculous arguments he would later cite on his main account, the one he attached his name to, as "crazy SJWs". Those other accounts were to create strawmen for his real account, again, the one using his real name, to attack.
Your LMGTFY link points to one college student nobody's heard of making a false rape threat and links to articles claiming Anita Sarkeesian never reported threats to authorities. Here's a citation. Short story: Asshole MRAs (and GamerGate supports) call the SFPD, and the person who answered claimed to not know of any reports made by Sarkeesian. Turns out the SFPD immediately passed that info along to the FBI from the beginning. Even Milo, Gamergate's ""intellectual leader"", admits that.
But the narrative that Sarkeesian made up the threats is too useful to admit is wrong, so the original articles stay without noting that further investigation proved them wholly incorrect. Then people like you reference them, hoping that readers won't dig deeper.
Any time someone makes threats against one of the people Gamergate hates, they blame third-party trolls. Conveniently, these trolls magically disappear when threats are made against Gamergate events. Gamergaters love to ignore the fact that an infamous 8chan troll took credit for the threats. 8channers love going after "SJWs", but they fuck with Gamergaters on occasion as well. Because of lulz or whatever.
It's sad that Slashdot is taking these conspiracy whinings so seriously, but I'd encourage people to do some research. To date, Gamergate has accomplished nothing aside from calling their enemies whales and trannies while claiming the mainstream media is out to get them. Perhaps it's not surprising that they're hailing Breitbart Tech, yes, that Breitbart, as a savior of tech journalism.