Virtually all Chromebooks have an SD card slot. They all have USB. And while the cheapest come with only a little bit of storage built in, "not having enough local storage" is rare in the mid range and high end Chromebooks. So I don't feel like your criticism is entirely fair.
You are definitely encouraged to upload your data, and many applications don't even support local data (because they're websites!) But even that'll change as Crostini matures and becomes mainstream.
How about using the space for the useless second sim card for a real headphone jack?
Why not both? The SIM card slot is unlikely to be on the very edge of the phone where the headphone jack would be. Also, given it would also require a similar amount of space to a SIM card slot (ie, virtually none) what about a microSD card slot?
I might even consider considering (sic) an iPhone then not getting it because it's still too locked down if they did that.
Not even slightly, no. ChromeOS is a locked down operating system that's essentially gratis, not an externally managed operating system that you rent.
And while ChromeOS is locked down, it's possible to unlock for free in an approved, universal, supported way with some minor inconveniences. Additionally, Crostini promises to open it further even without switching the operating system into an unlocked mode, allowing arbitrary applications to run in a sandboxed environment.
So ChromeOS costs nothing, and is becoming more and more open. Windows costs money, is in the process of being locked down, and this article suggests it'll become more and more closed, and more and more expensive.
People who don't want to run an unsupported older version of XP are welcome to instead run an unsupported older version of Lubuntu (or whatever), so what is your point here?
Android moved to soft buttons years ago, they work great
No they don't. The moment an app needs to go full screen they fail miserably, requiring vague often-misinterpreted swipes from off the screen and as a significant number of apps need to go full screen, from movie players to games, this isn't a theoretical problem suffered by a small handful of people. Android's implementation is particularly shitty because it also allows you to rotate the screen at any angle, while only allowing the buttons to appear on the "real bottom" of the phone, which means the side of the screen you're supposed to swipe from is frequently not where you'd expect it to be.
I've gotten to the point I will not get an Android phone that doesn't have dedicated buttons. Thankfully there are still quite a few of them left, except at the very "high end" which are generally phones nobody in their right mind would want anyway.
UBI will do the same thing to basic cost of living.
I agree. Plus in practice you'll see a situation where, if you have high unemployment, UBI will be reduced as an incentive to get people to find work (and because the money isn't coming in), and it'll also face the downward pressures imposed by people complaining that they are working hard and paying high taxes while other people just laze around all day, encouraging politicians to reduce it.
And so you'll see it drop to below the cost of living. And at that point, someone will say "But look, the disabled and the temporarily jobless are being made homeless and are starving, how can we treat people like this!" and so new benefits, we'll call them "Disability" and "Unemployment", will be introduced, together with, perhaps, something for single parents who can't afford to work and look after their kids.
And then we'll end up with both UBI and all these benefits that UBI was supposed to make obsolete. And the question will be asked "What was the point of UBI again?"
Suppose you live solely on UBI and aren't comfortable "enough", what's your best, easiest way to get more money? Simply vote for whoever promises the biggest UBI increase in every election. Even if you work a little for some money in addition to UBI, how likely are you to vote for someone who will reduce, or even hold steady the current UBI? Would any candidate even dare to express the idea of not boosting the UBI?
Sure they would. In fact, I have the opposite problem to yours, I don't think UBI will ever be enough.
What you'd actually see is a situation where most people are working. Once that happens, most people would gladly trade lower taxes for a lower UBI, because they end up making more money than that. Even many people in the gig economy, which UBI would encourage (which by itself is a strong argument against) would consider arguments for lowering UBI attractive. If nothing else, the notion that there's a handful of people being lazy and living off your hard work would make people vote against their own interests.
So all of a sudden, this universal benefit which is supposed to cover the cost of living comfortably for everyone doesn't do that any more. People who today entirely legitimately get unemployment or disability would find they now have to get a job they can't get, or face eviction from their homes and possible starvation.
My scenario is much more likely than yours, for the simple reason that if you use UBI as a proxy for services from governments that benefit everyone, then that's what's been going on since Thatcher/Reagan anyway. Tax cuts in exchange for terrible basic services.
Paying people not to work destroys the ability to achieve.
I have many problems with the premise of the article, principally the fact it's begging the question, but characterizing a universal income as "Paying people not to work" is completely off base. The entire point of UBI is that it's issued regardless of whether you work. It's not like Welfare/Unemployment/Income Support.
Again, the article's central assumption is dumb, it was written by someone with the same mentality that those who smashed looms in the 1700s had. AI is just more automation, that's it. If automation has created jobs since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there's absolutely no reason to assume it'll stop now. But your characterization of UBI is off base, and the idea, however simplistic and dumb and Muskesque, deserves to be ridiculed for what it is, not what it isn't.
Or, you know, make your account private, and just share tweets with your screened followers, who at least have some understanding of context.
Twitter would be a much better place if it encouraged, rather than discouraged, accounts to private by default. Certain people would obviously make their's public, but much of the toxicity would disappear.
It was fairly obviously shock humor. If you don't believe this, ask why Gunn was never arrested given that some of the claims, if actually real, would have constituted crimes.
Which is not to say I approve of it or that it was a good idea to post any of it, but at the same time I'd hate for anyone to lose their job over something they did ten years ago, that caused no harm, and which they wouldn't do today.
To extend the life of your battery, we will now prevent this application from running in the background. This means it will be unable to function properly if it does anything in the background, such as checking for new messages or playing music. You should only enable this feature for games and other apps that only do useful thing when you're actively interacting with them, and not with, say, music or messaging/email apps. Do you want to disable this feature?
or did it say
To extend the life of your battery, we have optimized this app. To unoptimize, hit "Whitelist" below
The source is the WSJ that says it has seen a memo sent to a supplier asking for refunds. This has nothing to do with shorters "lying", either the WSJ has made something up, Tesla sent out a dumb, ambiguous, memo, or Tesla is lying. Shorters aren't in this story.
I would suggest it's most likely Tesla is lying given that they refused to show the memo to the writers of the story you're quoting. But it's possible, I guess, that the memo was poorly written.
1) Montana Skeptic has (via intermediaries) presented two entirely different scenarios for why he left Twitter. One was that he was just leaving to spend more time focused on his investments, and it had nothing to do with outside pressure. The other is that Musk called his boss and his boss made him quit. Given his penchant for spinning conspiracy theories... take whichever one you want with a grain of salt.
Or do some investigation. According to reputable news sources, MS was doxxed shortly before he shut down his Twitter.
You make the claim he's somehow announced somewhere he was leaving to spend more time with his investments, but curiously have to couch it, claiming it was "via intermediaries". It's hard to understand why you consider the comments of "intermediaries" to be just as valid as the comments of the people themselves.
2) There's a heavy dose of irony, in that just a few days ago Montana Skeptic was part of the troll attacks against Pulitzer-prize winning auto journalist Dan Neil (mad that he wrote a glowing review of the Model 3 in the Wall Street Journal) which ultimately led to Dan deleting his twitter account. He wrote a gloating post after they succeeded, which is kind of funny in light of recent events.
Several people have made this allegation that MS was trolling, but apparently such trolling managed to escape a single screenshot or archival link. It sounds to me like legitimate criticism got caught up in a symphony of criticism rather than MS's comments being somehow significantly problematic.
3) Fun Fact: Fossi (aka Montana Skeptic)'s employer is Stewart Rahl - a guy often described as Trump's only true friend, inflappably loyal. His office is in Trump Tower, two floors below Trump's.
Of the three points you've made, this is the most dubious and the one that most suggests you're more interested in smearing one of Musk's critics than you are of casting light into the darkness. It has no relevance whatsoever to anything here, and combined with the extremely dubious attempt to make it sound like MS was somehow being inconsistent with his explanations of his disappearance makes me wonder about your motives.
They could, but that wouldn't fix the problem here, the version number is a red herring. Mozilla, IE, et al, do not support Shadow DOM at all, not any version. They have plans, there's an about:config flag in Firefox you can flip to test their current implementation, but it's not enabled by default.
So, what people are saying Google should have done, in order to be "fair" to competitive free browsers including the one Google has funded for most of its lifetime, is to upgrade one of the most highly traffic'd websites on Earth to the "latest version" (not revision, we're talking major version number, so the one with API changes) of the framework they're using in order to achieve literally nothing at all.
There is no urgency for Google to do any of this until Firefox has Shadow DOM support, and it's absolutely the wrong thing for Google to do to try to rush an upgrade just to satisfy some competition checklist that has nothing to do with the real world.
This appears to be correct. Mozilla are in the middle of implementing Shadow DOM and there's an about:config flag you can flip to turn it on (although whether that means Youtube will automatically start using it is another question, most websites go by browser ID rather than probing for features alas.)
The notion this is tied to "version 0" is the bit that I don't get about the summary. It doesn't matter what version of Shadow DOM is targeted by Youtube, none of the major browsers except Chrome supports it right now.
On that basis, I'd say "Google making use of a good new standard that they happen to support but other browser makers haven't gotten around to yet, with a safe workaround for browsers that don't support it" is hardly the anticompetitive act the summary makes it out to be. I'd expect websites, be they Google or anyone else, to do the same thing.
That minimization of aerodynamic drag comes at a cost, namely keeping a leaky tube at a near vacuum while the system is in operation. What energy you might gain in reducing drag by a negligible amount (overland high speed passenger trains are already pretty good at this) is more than made up for by constantly having to pump air out of a tube that's hundreds of miles long.
it will be little to no energy to maintain, assuming tight seals.
Assuming virtually perfect seals. I suspect the energy consumption will be fairly dramatic for even the smallest leaks across several hundred miles of tube.
You'll notice that all these articles were written at the end of August. KIA/GG uses that of evidence of a system(at)ic attack. You're apparently agreeing with that analysis, simply on the basis of multiple articles being written at around the same time.
Buuuuut...
How many articles about Radical Islamic extremism were written on 9/12/2001? How many articles about gun control were published on 4/21/1999?
The articles weren't written out the blue. They were written because a conflation of right wing extremism among a vocal portion of the gaming community occurred at around that time. And journalists within the video game industry were reacting to it.
On August 16th, the "Zoe Post" was published. This was a post by the rejected suitor of a video game developer Zoe Quinn which made a number of allegations against her, essentially "slut shaming" her. Under normal circumstances, this would have been lost in the noise, one entitled whackjob bitching about a woman he couldn't have, but he promoted it carefully in a number of forums he felt might be sympathetic, including promoting knowledge that there was some form of relationship between Quinn and a gaming journalist (there was, but the journalist hadn't written about her since, and the Quinn's games are free anyway.)
Certain groups took the bait, and this was blown into a conspiracy, initially called (because this was an attempt to slut shame Quinn) "Five Guys" (and the related #burgersandfries) and The Quinnspiracy. "Internet Aristocrat" uploaded a video entitled "Quinnspiracy: The Five Guys Saga" on August 18th.
So, this was happening, and at the same time as this was happening Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic, was publishing the first videos in her "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" series - and was getting shat on for her work. She'd already been publishing these videos for a year at this point, and was pretty much constantly receiving threats and other harassment since she started. Unlike the Quinn stuff, it wasn't new, but it was increasing and becoming a very noisy part of the background by the time the gaming media noticed that, maybe, perhaps, some gamers aren't very nice people.
Let's go back to Quinn. By August 20th, the media was involved - not because they wanted to promote any viewpoint, but because the dubious link promoted by the author of the Zoepost between Quinn and a journalist had been relayed through the telephone game a few times and had now become "Quinn had sex with journalist in return for positive coverage." As I said earlier, this never happened, the journalist involved had not written about her since months before they had a brief relationship.
So now the media couldn't very well ignore it. They were:
1. Dragged into a bizarre attempt by a whackjob to harass a woman who wouldn't have sex with him.
2. Forced to defend themselves against bogus claims of corruption.
3. Continuing to watch the Sarkeesian saga play out.
And it got worse.
More videos were published. Sarkeesian was forced to leave her home due to death threats. And on August 27th, for some bizarre reason Adam Baldwin, of Firefly fame, decides to fan the flames and promote IA's video, captioning it "Gamergate". The name stuck.
Now, are you entirely surprised, given that was what was happening at the time, there were quite a few articles from journalists who were more than a little pissed off with the gaming community at that time?
Problem is, every time the far left gets caught in some racist and sexist moment. it automagically becomes a joke
Or maybe, just maybe, right wingers are unable to comprehend jokes and humor?
I still remember the feeling of disbelief I had pre-GG when someone told me what a terrible woman Jessica Valenti was. "She hates men" the poster cried. "She does?" I said with surprise, having just read an article by her on how great it is we celebrate Father's Day, and how grateful she was to her dad for being a positive force in her life and wonderful role model. "Yes, did you see? She wore a T-shirt captioned "I bathe in male tears!" She must hate men!"
You have to be spectacularly dumb to think the male tears thing is anything but a joke, especially knowing the context (Valenti had, at that point, suffered years of abusive death threats and other shitty behavior from so-called critics due to her feminist advocacy, almost all of which characterizing her work as anti-men) but it does seem like a sizable part of the group obsessed with so-called SJWs really cannot tell the difference between someone making fun of you by repeating your own language back at you (such snowflakes these people are!) and genuine beliefs.
So... you think the "white male lead is a problem" thing was serious, huh? You don't think... given how improbable it is that someone would say "Movies are failing because they do something almost every movie has done since Harold Lloyd was hanging from clocks at the top of tall buildings, and how similar the criticism is to the protests of the manosphere against movies like Rogue One with merely the roles reversed, that it might have been a joke?
A really, really, obvious joke?
A joke so fucking obvious I'm actually having difficultly believing you wrote an essay on how "the far left" says things apparently seriously and then pretends they're jokes, using this as the example, but, I have to believe it, because you did?
I'd make a joke about it, but you'd probably take me seriously...
Yeah, their boycotts of SW have fallen flat. The only one that failed is Solo, and that was despite being the closest movie to "what they want" (to the point there's what might be called an SJW Robot in it, that's played for laughs at the expense of so-called SJWs, and no women have purple hair!); it's almost as if cinema audiences want good films with diverse characters they can relate to, rather than stuff the SJW-obsessed want...
Never heard of Wrinkle in Time, but yes I was aware of so-called manosphere boycotts of Star Wars (namely Ep 7) and the new Ghostbusters movie.
The SW boycott was laughable both in aim (google "Little white cuck ball" for articles on it) and effectiveness. The Ghostbusters one... the film was genuinely awful, and I suspect the boycott actually had the opposite effect of that intended, as it became impossible to determine if the film was awful from the social media comments on it, so many people went to watch it despite seeing lots of awful reviews of it. While it, at best, broke even, it still managed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, something it really shouldn't have done.
As you say, both BP and WW also had "Wah wah SJWs!" type attacks on them and did spectacularly well.
When people have actually done the analysis, the people obsessed with "SJWs" tends to be a tiny minority on every website. The highest estimates of Gamegate, for example, seem to be around the 10,000-20,000 people range during its peak.
I think most people have no problems with women or black people and recognize that both are marginalized groups. In such a context, being more upset that someone found a joke in an old episode of Family Guy insensitive to one legged lesbian transgender women than blaming Americas problems on Latin Americans fleeing persecution is, thankfully, a minority situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Virtually all Chromebooks have an SD card slot. They all have USB. And while the cheapest come with only a little bit of storage built in, "not having enough local storage" is rare in the mid range and high end Chromebooks. So I don't feel like your criticism is entirely fair.
You are definitely encouraged to upload your data, and many applications don't even support local data (because they're websites!) But even that'll change as Crostini matures and becomes mainstream.
Why not both? The SIM card slot is unlikely to be on the very edge of the phone where the headphone jack would be. Also, given it would also require a similar amount of space to a SIM card slot (ie, virtually none) what about a microSD card slot?
I might even consider considering (sic) an iPhone then not getting it because it's still too locked down if they did that.
Not even slightly, no. ChromeOS is a locked down operating system that's essentially gratis, not an externally managed operating system that you rent.
And while ChromeOS is locked down, it's possible to unlock for free in an approved, universal, supported way with some minor inconveniences. Additionally, Crostini promises to open it further even without switching the operating system into an unlocked mode, allowing arbitrary applications to run in a sandboxed environment.
So ChromeOS costs nothing, and is becoming more and more open. Windows costs money, is in the process of being locked down, and this article suggests it'll become more and more closed, and more and more expensive.
People who don't want to run an unsupported older version of XP are welcome to instead run an unsupported older version of Lubuntu (or whatever), so what is your point here?
No they don't. The moment an app needs to go full screen they fail miserably, requiring vague often-misinterpreted swipes from off the screen and as a significant number of apps need to go full screen, from movie players to games, this isn't a theoretical problem suffered by a small handful of people. Android's implementation is particularly shitty because it also allows you to rotate the screen at any angle, while only allowing the buttons to appear on the "real bottom" of the phone, which means the side of the screen you're supposed to swipe from is frequently not where you'd expect it to be.
I've gotten to the point I will not get an Android phone that doesn't have dedicated buttons. Thankfully there are still quite a few of them left, except at the very "high end" which are generally phones nobody in their right mind would want anyway.
I agree. Plus in practice you'll see a situation where, if you have high unemployment, UBI will be reduced as an incentive to get people to find work (and because the money isn't coming in), and it'll also face the downward pressures imposed by people complaining that they are working hard and paying high taxes while other people just laze around all day, encouraging politicians to reduce it.
And so you'll see it drop to below the cost of living. And at that point, someone will say "But look, the disabled and the temporarily jobless are being made homeless and are starving, how can we treat people like this!" and so new benefits, we'll call them "Disability" and "Unemployment", will be introduced, together with, perhaps, something for single parents who can't afford to work and look after their kids.
And then we'll end up with both UBI and all these benefits that UBI was supposed to make obsolete. And the question will be asked "What was the point of UBI again?"
Actually you can get money for nothing, and you can even get chicks for free. Dire Straits wrote a song about that once.
Sure they would. In fact, I have the opposite problem to yours, I don't think UBI will ever be enough.
What you'd actually see is a situation where most people are working. Once that happens, most people would gladly trade lower taxes for a lower UBI, because they end up making more money than that. Even many people in the gig economy, which UBI would encourage (which by itself is a strong argument against) would consider arguments for lowering UBI attractive. If nothing else, the notion that there's a handful of people being lazy and living off your hard work would make people vote against their own interests.
So all of a sudden, this universal benefit which is supposed to cover the cost of living comfortably for everyone doesn't do that any more. People who today entirely legitimately get unemployment or disability would find they now have to get a job they can't get, or face eviction from their homes and possible starvation.
My scenario is much more likely than yours, for the simple reason that if you use UBI as a proxy for services from governments that benefit everyone, then that's what's been going on since Thatcher/Reagan anyway. Tax cuts in exchange for terrible basic services.
Thankfully it's completely unnecessary, but...
I have many problems with the premise of the article, principally the fact it's begging the question, but characterizing a universal income as "Paying people not to work" is completely off base. The entire point of UBI is that it's issued regardless of whether you work. It's not like Welfare/Unemployment/Income Support.
Again, the article's central assumption is dumb, it was written by someone with the same mentality that those who smashed looms in the 1700s had. AI is just more automation, that's it. If automation has created jobs since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there's absolutely no reason to assume it'll stop now. But your characterization of UBI is off base, and the idea, however simplistic and dumb and Muskesque, deserves to be ridiculed for what it is, not what it isn't.
Or, you know, make your account private, and just share tweets with your screened followers, who at least have some understanding of context.
Twitter would be a much better place if it encouraged, rather than discouraged, accounts to private by default. Certain people would obviously make their's public, but much of the toxicity would disappear.
It was fairly obviously shock humor. If you don't believe this, ask why Gunn was never arrested given that some of the claims, if actually real, would have constituted crimes.
Which is not to say I approve of it or that it was a good idea to post any of it, but at the same time I'd hate for anyone to lose their job over something they did ten years ago, that caused no harm, and which they wouldn't do today.
That's never been how it works. If you understood how it works, you'd have asked "Do people still allow themselves to be used by Facebook?"
Did the notification say:
or did it say
The source is the WSJ that says it has seen a memo sent to a supplier asking for refunds. This has nothing to do with shorters "lying", either the WSJ has made something up, Tesla sent out a dumb, ambiguous, memo, or Tesla is lying. Shorters aren't in this story.
I would suggest it's most likely Tesla is lying given that they refused to show the memo to the writers of the story you're quoting. But it's possible, I guess, that the memo was poorly written.
Or do some investigation. According to reputable news sources, MS was doxxed shortly before he shut down his Twitter.
You make the claim he's somehow announced somewhere he was leaving to spend more time with his investments, but curiously have to couch it, claiming it was "via intermediaries". It's hard to understand why you consider the comments of "intermediaries" to be just as valid as the comments of the people themselves.
Several people have made this allegation that MS was trolling, but apparently such trolling managed to escape a single screenshot or archival link. It sounds to me like legitimate criticism got caught up in a symphony of criticism rather than MS's comments being somehow significantly problematic.
Of the three points you've made, this is the most dubious and the one that most suggests you're more interested in smearing one of Musk's critics than you are of casting light into the darkness. It has no relevance whatsoever to anything here, and combined with the extremely dubious attempt to make it sound like MS was somehow being inconsistent with his explanations of his disappearance makes me wonder about your motives.
They could, but that wouldn't fix the problem here, the version number is a red herring. Mozilla, IE, et al, do not support Shadow DOM at all, not any version. They have plans, there's an about:config flag in Firefox you can flip to test their current implementation, but it's not enabled by default.
So, what people are saying Google should have done, in order to be "fair" to competitive free browsers including the one Google has funded for most of its lifetime, is to upgrade one of the most highly traffic'd websites on Earth to the "latest version" (not revision, we're talking major version number, so the one with API changes) of the framework they're using in order to achieve literally nothing at all.
There is no urgency for Google to do any of this until Firefox has Shadow DOM support, and it's absolutely the wrong thing for Google to do to try to rush an upgrade just to satisfy some competition checklist that has nothing to do with the real world.
This appears to be correct. Mozilla are in the middle of implementing Shadow DOM and there's an about:config flag you can flip to turn it on (although whether that means Youtube will automatically start using it is another question, most websites go by browser ID rather than probing for features alas.)
The notion this is tied to "version 0" is the bit that I don't get about the summary. It doesn't matter what version of Shadow DOM is targeted by Youtube, none of the major browsers except Chrome supports it right now.
On that basis, I'd say "Google making use of a good new standard that they happen to support but other browser makers haven't gotten around to yet, with a safe workaround for browsers that don't support it" is hardly the anticompetitive act the summary makes it out to be. I'd expect websites, be they Google or anyone else, to do the same thing.
I'm failing to see how an unobtrusive warning that the webpage you're looking at wasn't served securely is "breaking the Internet".
Good point, it won't be a true Windows clone until it forces users to download and install updates and reboots twice a week when it does.
That minimization of aerodynamic drag comes at a cost, namely keeping a leaky tube at a near vacuum while the system is in operation. What energy you might gain in reducing drag by a negligible amount (overland high speed passenger trains are already pretty good at this) is more than made up for by constantly having to pump air out of a tube that's hundreds of miles long.
Assuming virtually perfect seals. I suspect the energy consumption will be fairly dramatic for even the smallest leaks across several hundred miles of tube.
You'll notice that all these articles were written at the end of August. KIA/GG uses that of evidence of a system(at)ic attack. You're apparently agreeing with that analysis, simply on the basis of multiple articles being written at around the same time.
Buuuuut...
How many articles about Radical Islamic extremism were written on 9/12/2001? How many articles about gun control were published on 4/21/1999?
The articles weren't written out the blue. They were written because a conflation of right wing extremism among a vocal portion of the gaming community occurred at around that time. And journalists within the video game industry were reacting to it.
On August 16th, the "Zoe Post" was published. This was a post by the rejected suitor of a video game developer Zoe Quinn which made a number of allegations against her, essentially "slut shaming" her. Under normal circumstances, this would have been lost in the noise, one entitled whackjob bitching about a woman he couldn't have, but he promoted it carefully in a number of forums he felt might be sympathetic, including promoting knowledge that there was some form of relationship between Quinn and a gaming journalist (there was, but the journalist hadn't written about her since, and the Quinn's games are free anyway.)
Certain groups took the bait, and this was blown into a conspiracy, initially called (because this was an attempt to slut shame Quinn) "Five Guys" (and the related #burgersandfries) and The Quinnspiracy. "Internet Aristocrat" uploaded a video entitled "Quinnspiracy: The Five Guys Saga" on August 18th.
So, this was happening, and at the same time as this was happening Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic, was publishing the first videos in her "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" series - and was getting shat on for her work. She'd already been publishing these videos for a year at this point, and was pretty much constantly receiving threats and other harassment since she started. Unlike the Quinn stuff, it wasn't new, but it was increasing and becoming a very noisy part of the background by the time the gaming media noticed that, maybe, perhaps, some gamers aren't very nice people.
Let's go back to Quinn. By August 20th, the media was involved - not because they wanted to promote any viewpoint, but because the dubious link promoted by the author of the Zoepost between Quinn and a journalist had been relayed through the telephone game a few times and had now become "Quinn had sex with journalist in return for positive coverage." As I said earlier, this never happened, the journalist involved had not written about her since months before they had a brief relationship.
So now the media couldn't very well ignore it. They were:
1. Dragged into a bizarre attempt by a whackjob to harass a woman who wouldn't have sex with him.
2. Forced to defend themselves against bogus claims of corruption.
3. Continuing to watch the Sarkeesian saga play out.
And it got worse.
More videos were published. Sarkeesian was forced to leave her home due to death threats. And on August 27th, for some bizarre reason Adam Baldwin, of Firefly fame, decides to fan the flames and promote IA's video, captioning it "Gamergate". The name stuck.
Now, are you entirely surprised, given that was what was happening at the time, there were quite a few articles from journalists who were more than a little pissed off with the gaming community at that time?
Or maybe, just maybe, right wingers are unable to comprehend jokes and humor?
I still remember the feeling of disbelief I had pre-GG when someone told me what a terrible woman Jessica Valenti was. "She hates men" the poster cried. "She does?" I said with surprise, having just read an article by her on how great it is we celebrate Father's Day, and how grateful she was to her dad for being a positive force in her life and wonderful role model. "Yes, did you see? She wore a T-shirt captioned "I bathe in male tears!" She must hate men!"
You have to be spectacularly dumb to think the male tears thing is anything but a joke, especially knowing the context (Valenti had, at that point, suffered years of abusive death threats and other shitty behavior from so-called critics due to her feminist advocacy, almost all of which characterizing her work as anti-men) but it does seem like a sizable part of the group obsessed with so-called SJWs really cannot tell the difference between someone making fun of you by repeating your own language back at you (such snowflakes these people are!) and genuine beliefs.
So... you think the "white male lead is a problem" thing was serious, huh? You don't think... given how improbable it is that someone would say "Movies are failing because they do something almost every movie has done since Harold Lloyd was hanging from clocks at the top of tall buildings, and how similar the criticism is to the protests of the manosphere against movies like Rogue One with merely the roles reversed, that it might have been a joke?
A really, really, obvious joke?
A joke so fucking obvious I'm actually having difficultly believing you wrote an essay on how "the far left" says things apparently seriously and then pretends they're jokes, using this as the example, but, I have to believe it, because you did?
I'd make a joke about it, but you'd probably take me seriously...
Yeah, their boycotts of SW have fallen flat. The only one that failed is Solo, and that was despite being the closest movie to "what they want" (to the point there's what might be called an SJW Robot in it, that's played for laughs at the expense of so-called SJWs, and no women have purple hair!); it's almost as if cinema audiences want good films with diverse characters they can relate to, rather than stuff the SJW-obsessed want...
Never heard of Wrinkle in Time, but yes I was aware of so-called manosphere boycotts of Star Wars (namely Ep 7) and the new Ghostbusters movie.
The SW boycott was laughable both in aim (google "Little white cuck ball" for articles on it) and effectiveness. The Ghostbusters one... the film was genuinely awful, and I suspect the boycott actually had the opposite effect of that intended, as it became impossible to determine if the film was awful from the social media comments on it, so many people went to watch it despite seeing lots of awful reviews of it. While it, at best, broke even, it still managed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, something it really shouldn't have done.
As you say, both BP and WW also had "Wah wah SJWs!" type attacks on them and did spectacularly well.
When people have actually done the analysis, the people obsessed with "SJWs" tends to be a tiny minority on every website. The highest estimates of Gamegate, for example, seem to be around the 10,000-20,000 people range during its peak.
I think most people have no problems with women or black people and recognize that both are marginalized groups. In such a context, being more upset that someone found a joke in an old episode of Family Guy insensitive to one legged lesbian transgender women than blaming Americas problems on Latin Americans fleeing persecution is, thankfully, a minority situation.