I'm totally fine with the plot being in Lucas's hands. That is the part that he's best at. The problem is with the script and directing; those should be kept as far away from him as possible.
Absolutely. The quality of content is far better than on FB or Twitter. When G+ was a year old or so, an image was circulated comparing the most discussed people on 3 social networks. On Facebook and Twitter is was Rihanna and Justin Bieber, on Google+ it was Einstein. I'm regularly having interesting political, philosophical and ethical discussions there. And most importantly to me personally: it's probably the best RPG community on the Web.
Looking only at the number of public posts is fairly meaningless; lots of people share only to specific circles in order to not spam their followers on one topic with posts on a different topic. Even more people don't post much themselves, but are very active in other people's conversations. It's a social network, after all, not just a blogging platform. But people love to use the lack of public posts to shame Google for some reason.
It's not that all is perfect, though. The quality of the content took a serious hit through the integration with YouTube (home of probably the lowest quality comments on the web). And through pushing birthdays and phone numbers of my G+ contacts to my calendar and phone, Google seems eager to punish people for having any Google+ contacts at all. Google should stop fucking about and just give us more tools to manage our stream so we can follow more people on topics that interest us, without having to see their posts on topics that don't interest us.
What sucks about Google+ is that Google tries to artificially inflate the numbers by forcing it on YouTube and other services, and they seem to be actively punishing people for using both Google+ and any other Google service, but on its own, Google+ is great. It was great during its early days before Google started to mess it up. The people who use G+ use it a lot and post far more interesting stuff on it than you're likely to see on FB or Twitter.
Google should learn to be happy with having something good, rather than ruining it by forcing it on people and then punishing them for it. And they should work to improve it further, rather than adding crap. I mean, who ever asked for polls, of all things? We want better tools to manage our stream. That's Google+'s strength, but there's so much more that could be done here. Instead we get polls.
Wrong. On some estimates so far, that group is actually a minority of the small and microbusinesses affected by these measures. It certainly isn't "most".
Really. Maybe I learnt something new today, or maybe we're talking about different things. You see, I'm not talking about Grandma's Handmade Socks or the local pizza delivery service - they're not worried about cross-border commerce. These businesses are the vast majority of microbusinesses. But they are not affected by this measure.
Every small-time RPG publisher selling a few PDFs per week is affected by this. And many believe they're even affected if they don't live in the EU. Some have announced they won't be selling to EU countries anymore (which still means they need to figure out where their customers are from, of course).
Big part of the problem is that information is sparse and very late. The law may be from 2008, but most shops only heard about this a few weeks ago. So now people are panicking. Justified or not? Nobody really knows.
I got the impression that this was already the rule for physical objects. And there it makes sense, because at least you know what address you're shipping it to. It'd be crazy to do this only for downloads and not for physical stuff.
By the way, the argument that is significantly hurts the common market, is a really good one. I'm sure that should be able to get some people to take a closer look at the effect of this new rule; it goes completely counter to the primary purpose of the EU. I've also heard from a number of non-EU shops that they're not going to sell to the EU anymore because of this. I think a lot of people are panicking a bit too much, but the result for EU customers is clearly a very negative one if this means they can only buy stuff from local or very large webshops.
The summary calls it a tax increase, but the tax rates aren't changing (or if they are, it's up to the individual member states, not the EU). What the EU is doing is closing a tax loophole that allows big companies (Amazon and the like) to put their European office in a tax haven so they don't have to pay any sales tax in the EU. But now they have to pay the VAT rate in the country where the customer is, rather than where their own office is.
In principle that's totally reasonable. What upsets a lot of people about this new rule is that small time PDF publishers may have to register for sales tax in 28 countries as well as collect data on where their customers are (and the rules for that are really confusing) and keep that data for 10 years, when previously they didn't have to know anything about their customers (because they just downloaded the thing, and payment was handled by a payment provider), and they didn't even have to pay any VAT at all because they were below their countries VAT limit, due to their low volume of sales. The new rule doesn't seem to specify any minimum.
But the cheap option here is the direct connection over the hub. It's the longer flight with the layover on the very same hub, where you still end up in the same plane, that's mysteriously cheaper than the one directly from the hub. It's as if the Brussels-Schiphol part has negative value.
Here in the USA it's all about screwing the traveller.
If this was true, why are the airlines constantly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy with razor-thin margins? They should be rolling in cash, and they're not. Why?
Because screwing the customer is actually not such a smart business plan as some business men seem to think. Screw your customers and they screw you right back.
Not entirely true. I've heard that the same thing has been true (and might still be) when travelling Brussels-Schiphol-USA. That is sometimes cheaper than simply Schiphol-USA, even on the same plane. Or maybe the EU has put a stop to this. It's certainly a sign of weird pricing shenanigans going on, and the EU is generally not a big fan of that.
After the rocket program had been cancelled, NASA wanted to cancel this test facility too, until Congress forced them to continue working on it for no good reason.
The decision of Google comes as response to new Spanish legislation that gives publishers the right to claim compensation for republishing any part of their content.
No, if this was the case, it'd just be a rehash of the German situation. No, the problem here is that it gives publishers the obligation to claim compensation. This law is specifically designed to prevent the German situation. So other newspapers can't decide they'd rather have Google's traffic anyway, and thereby undermine this boycott of Google News.
It also fixes another problem that big Spanish newspapers had: on Google News, you could just as easily find small, independent news sites that were critical of the current (conservative) government, as the sites of the major newspapers (which are mostly supportive of the government). Outside Google News, the small press is a lot harder to find. This law removes competition for the big guys as well as criticism about the government. Win-win for big corps and the government. Lose for the people and the small independent press.
Also:
This follows news of services of startup Uber being forbidden in countries like Spain as well as Germany and some city councils worldwide like Delhi, or other services like AirBnb being put under pressure to cope with local laws in other jurisdictions.
This issue has nothing to do with Uber and Airbnb not complying with local laws. There is nothing wrong with foreign companies having to obey local laws in they want to operate there. This, however, is a new law that will hurt the small Spanish press (Google won't be hurt that much, since they don't make money on Google News anyway).
By the way complaints against Uber and Airbnb (which should have been irrelevant to this story but now aren't because of the stupid summary) are not that unreasonable; they're side-stepping consumer-protection regulations that exist for good reasons. In some places they're also side-stepping monopolies or cartels, which is great of course, but some of the laws they're running afoul of are actually good laws.
As a final word, Uber are by now well known to be a bunch of thugs who need to go out of business as soon as possible.
But Google doesn't make any money on their Spanish news site; they were driving traffic to the sites of the companies that are now banning Google News from Spain.
It's not anti-American to recognize that countries that are not the US have laws that differ from American laws. The US has just as much history of legally protected rackets (software patents, spying on behalf of American corporations, banning Tesla from selling cars, telco monopolies, in fact, I think the US has a far worse record than Germany on this).
So why is it to anti-American to expect companies to obey the laws of the country they operate in? Maybe because American companies are used to buying laws? Guess what: that's what just happened in Spain. That mess is as American as you can get.
Yes, that Spanish law is stupid, but the summary is stupid for trying to connect it to Uber and Airbnb. Uber, by the way, are a bunch of thugs who even many Americans agree should go out of business as soon as possible.
I definitely call bullshit on that. Men are harassed in Law (did you know that men are not considered guardians of their own legitimate offspring in England?),
That is absolutely wrong,
Children Act 1989 section 2, particularly: (4)The rule of law that a father is the natural guardian of his legitimate child is abolished.
Source: England and Wales Statute Roll (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/41/section/2)
Stick that up your arse, naysayer.
Naysayer? I'm condemning it. I'm saying that law (if true) is wrong. If you'd bothered to read the rest of my comment before jumping to incorrect conclusions, you'd have seen that my position is that both parents should have equal responsibility for the care of the child, and nobody should jump to lazy shortcuts based on assumed gender role expectations. Look at the real situation. Of course if one parent hasn't been pulling their weight, it makes sense that in case of divorce the other parent gets main custody, but this should always be judged on a case-by-case basis, and never on lazy assumptions.
Feminism is exactly about equality. Holding women down, because there are also some areas where patriarchy turns against men, is totally non-constructive. You should be joining the fight, not sabotaging it.
Still it pays to look for that collaboration, instead of turning it into a battle of the sexes. Most importantly, we should be attacking the very concept of gender roles; they're holding everybody down.
There have been multiple statistical analyses plainly proving that the "attack" and "harassment" narratives are provably false.
So I looked at the first one of those, and it doesn't at all do what you claim it does. It's sloppy at best. Why did you link it?
Par for the course in GamerGate, I'm afraid. They love sharing irrelevant links to distract from the real issue, and then claim it was always about that. I have seen the behaviour often enough that I often don't even bother clicking anymore. Every time I do click, I end up wasting my time looking for the thing they claimed was supposed to be in it.
I admit it. I can't get the story of GamerGate straight. And do you know why I can't get GamerGate's story straight? Because GamerGate themself can't get their story straight. GamerGate's story keeps changing every day. (Of course every time it has always been their story, like the war with Eastasia.)
I assure you, this is absolutely the first time I've heard anyone from GamerGate even claim that they have addressed corruption around Shadows of Morder. When I addressed this in a conversation with a GamerGater a few weeks ago, he said exactly that it was okay, because it was a good game, and that it was the terrible corruption around Depression Quest that was the real reason for GamerGate. I've heard other GamerGaters explain that it wasn't really corruption because it was marketing and surely a company should be free to do that sort of thing? I have never seen this addressed in the name of GamerGate, I have never seen anyone claiming affiliation with GamerGate address this. And you are the first person I've met who claims that GamerGaters have addressed this. But maybe they have. Still, they're not giving remotely as much attention to it as they're giving to Depression Quest.
As for slurs, you claim that all the slurs come from the anti-GG side, and yet all the slurs I've seen first-hand, have come from people defending GamerGate. A post about random racists on the internet (props to the person who addressed that, by the way) recognizing an image apparently related to GamerGate (I admit I wouldn't have recognized it as such) doesn't exactly prove that they are representative for people opposing GamerGate. Everybody I know who has criticized GamerGate (and of all the gamers I know, nobody supports it) is quite the opposite of that.
I'm not claiming that all critics of GamerGate are perfect. Every random group of internet people has its fair share of bastards, but the bastards don't dominate as much as they seem to dominate in GamerGate. There's a very good reason why GamerGate has such a terrible reputation. That didn't come from nothing; it is exactly because of the behaviour associated with GamerGate. Read Ken White of Popehat has to say about it. The only people who claim to have a positive impression of GamerGate are the GamerGaters themselves. And their story is honestly not very credible considering the chat logs where they discuss how to sell their story to the outside world, and what stuff they shouldn't be doing anymore. The end result is that by now, their story sounds quite reasonable to anyone not familiar with the history. But most people have a better memory than GamerGaters realize.
University of Utah confirmed that threat was completely un-credible and there was no credible threat to the students or anyone else.
Are you aware that they have a website? Read it. They confirm the threat, and they increased the security, but they also say that, according to Utah law, they can't ban weapons.
I definitely call bullshit on that. Men are harassed in Law (did you know that men are not considered guardians of their own legitimate offspring in England?),
That is absolutely wrong, but that is just as much a feminist issue as women who want to work. Men being regarded as unsuitable as parent is because of traditional gender roles: women take care of children, men make money. Men should of course have equal rights to guardianship of children as women, and if they don't, that's just as much a sign that feminism isn't done yet as the fact that women make less money than men.
men are harassed in the workplace (some jobs you can't get if you have a penis - simply because you have a penis),
I'm not aware of any job where men are actively being kept out (though I don't doubt they exist), but I know a lot of jobs where women are actively kept out of. Of course both are problems, and both need to be solved, and they are in fact both the same problem. But you are delluding yourself if you think this issue is worse for men than for women.
men are harassed constantly, and IT IS WORSE if you're white and straight because that makes you a legitimate target for militant feminists.
I'm a straight white man, and I'm certainly not being harassed constantly. Have you ever really taken a good look at the kind of harassment that almost every woman faces on an almost daily basis? What we face is really truly nothing compared to that.
But I'm not denying that there are idiots on the feminist side. Particularly bizarre are the "all sex is rape" people, but they are widely recognized as idiots, and when necessary, criticized appropriately. But I've also had some guy turn me into a bigotry strawman, putting words in my mouth, and finishing off with advice that was actually worse than anything he falsely accused me of. Those things do happen, I am well aware of that. And if you find that hurtful, you should really take another look at all the crap that's often directed at women, because really, you've got to be blind if you don't see what an order of magnitude that's worse than what we face.
So you're against requiring a driver's license before you can drive a car?
Sometimes the license isn't just about permission, but about showing you have mastered the skills necessary to do the thing without endangering anyone.
I can certainly understand the desire to do away with anonymity, particularly in light of crime, but also harassment, threats and doxxing that are plaguing some communities. But as usual, there's two sides to these kind of things. Not every government is equally benevolent, and dissidents and whistleblowers also need anonymity to be able to leak the information necessary to address the abuses by the powerful.
Gamergate is about revealing corruption in the gaming industry.
It's certainly what they like to claim, yet they're mainly concerned with the massive corruption surrounding a little indie game that's free and not making anyone any money, while they're ignoring the very large scale corruption surrounding major publishers demanding positive reviews in exchange for money and review copies (Shadows of Mordor anyone?). I have addressed this with GamerGaters before, and they defended it, stating that Shadows of Mordor is objectively good, while Depression Quest is objectively bad. And that apparently makes one type of corruption okay, and the other type a really serious problem.
There is as much men involved in this corruption, hell, there is more actually.
And yet it's the women that keep getting attacked. Who even knows the names of the men involved? GamerGaters keep harping on about Zoe Quinn, despite her being supposedly irrelevant to what their cause is really supposed to be about.
This has absolutely nothing to do with attacking females.
And yet GamerGate started with attacks on women, and any woman that speaks up about GamerGate gets doxed (see Felicia Day), whereas men don't (Chris Kluwe, for example).
Every supporter of gamergate has been reasonable, calm, and argues things like a reasonable adult.
That is not exactly my experience with the ones I've tried to argue with. Every single one started with these exact same arguments, and every single one came up mostly with irrelevant arguments, ended up talking about Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian were killing their hobby, and when they ran out of arguments, slipped up with a dose of homophobic and misogynist slurs (which at least one of them then tried to cover up).
I haven't seen any calm arguing like a reasonable adult yet.
Every attacker of gamergate has been violent, sending death threads, making up BLATANTLY fake images to make themselves look like victims, and very publicly attacking people on Twitter as well.
That kind of hyperbole is not exactly helping you acquire the image of a calm and reasonable adult.
There has been zero evidence they have put forward. "Legit" mass shooting threads, nobody found, none of it, despite all the paranoia in America over it these days.
None of it, expect of course that the University of Utah confirmed it, and a lot of people there have received this message. Read it for a fine example of crazy reactionary misogyny.
They need SERIOUS help. Especially Zoe Quinn. She is delusional and mentally broken. You can see it in any interview she does, trying to play it up as if she was a victim. You can see the smugness in her face behind that horribly fake sad form.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm totally fine with the plot being in Lucas's hands. That is the part that he's best at. The problem is with the script and directing; those should be kept as far away from him as possible.
Absolutely. The quality of content is far better than on FB or Twitter. When G+ was a year old or so, an image was circulated comparing the most discussed people on 3 social networks. On Facebook and Twitter is was Rihanna and Justin Bieber, on Google+ it was Einstein. I'm regularly having interesting political, philosophical and ethical discussions there. And most importantly to me personally: it's probably the best RPG community on the Web.
Looking only at the number of public posts is fairly meaningless; lots of people share only to specific circles in order to not spam their followers on one topic with posts on a different topic. Even more people don't post much themselves, but are very active in other people's conversations. It's a social network, after all, not just a blogging platform. But people love to use the lack of public posts to shame Google for some reason.
It's not that all is perfect, though. The quality of the content took a serious hit through the integration with YouTube (home of probably the lowest quality comments on the web). And through pushing birthdays and phone numbers of my G+ contacts to my calendar and phone, Google seems eager to punish people for having any Google+ contacts at all. Google should stop fucking about and just give us more tools to manage our stream so we can follow more people on topics that interest us, without having to see their posts on topics that don't interest us.
What sucks about Google+ is that Google tries to artificially inflate the numbers by forcing it on YouTube and other services, and they seem to be actively punishing people for using both Google+ and any other Google service, but on its own, Google+ is great. It was great during its early days before Google started to mess it up. The people who use G+ use it a lot and post far more interesting stuff on it than you're likely to see on FB or Twitter.
Google should learn to be happy with having something good, rather than ruining it by forcing it on people and then punishing them for it. And they should work to improve it further, rather than adding crap. I mean, who ever asked for polls, of all things? We want better tools to manage our stream. That's Google+'s strength, but there's so much more that could be done here. Instead we get polls.
Wrong. On some estimates so far, that group is actually a minority of the small and microbusinesses affected by these measures. It certainly isn't "most".
Really. Maybe I learnt something new today, or maybe we're talking about different things. You see, I'm not talking about Grandma's Handmade Socks or the local pizza delivery service - they're not worried about cross-border commerce. These businesses are the vast majority of microbusinesses. But they are not affected by this measure.
Every small-time RPG publisher selling a few PDFs per week is affected by this. And many believe they're even affected if they don't live in the EU. Some have announced they won't be selling to EU countries anymore (which still means they need to figure out where their customers are from, of course).
Big part of the problem is that information is sparse and very late. The law may be from 2008, but most shops only heard about this a few weeks ago. So now people are panicking. Justified or not? Nobody really knows.
I got the impression that this was already the rule for physical objects. And there it makes sense, because at least you know what address you're shipping it to. It'd be crazy to do this only for downloads and not for physical stuff.
By the way, the argument that is significantly hurts the common market, is a really good one. I'm sure that should be able to get some people to take a closer look at the effect of this new rule; it goes completely counter to the primary purpose of the EU. I've also heard from a number of non-EU shops that they're not going to sell to the EU anymore because of this. I think a lot of people are panicking a bit too much, but the result for EU customers is clearly a very negative one if this means they can only buy stuff from local or very large webshops.
The summary calls it a tax increase, but the tax rates aren't changing (or if they are, it's up to the individual member states, not the EU). What the EU is doing is closing a tax loophole that allows big companies (Amazon and the like) to put their European office in a tax haven so they don't have to pay any sales tax in the EU. But now they have to pay the VAT rate in the country where the customer is, rather than where their own office is.
In principle that's totally reasonable. What upsets a lot of people about this new rule is that small time PDF publishers may have to register for sales tax in 28 countries as well as collect data on where their customers are (and the rules for that are really confusing) and keep that data for 10 years, when previously they didn't have to know anything about their customers (because they just downloaded the thing, and payment was handled by a payment provider), and they didn't even have to pay any VAT at all because they were below their countries VAT limit, due to their low volume of sales. The new rule doesn't seem to specify any minimum.
But the cheap option here is the direct connection over the hub. It's the longer flight with the layover on the very same hub, where you still end up in the same plane, that's mysteriously cheaper than the one directly from the hub. It's as if the Brussels-Schiphol part has negative value.
Here in the USA it's all about screwing the traveller.
If this was true, why are the airlines constantly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy with razor-thin margins? They should be rolling in cash, and they're not. Why?
Because screwing the customer is actually not such a smart business plan as some business men seem to think. Screw your customers and they screw you right back.
Not entirely true. I've heard that the same thing has been true (and might still be) when travelling Brussels-Schiphol-USA. That is sometimes cheaper than simply Schiphol-USA, even on the same plane. Or maybe the EU has put a stop to this. It's certainly a sign of weird pricing shenanigans going on, and the EU is generally not a big fan of that.
After the rocket program had been cancelled, NASA wanted to cancel this test facility too, until Congress forced them to continue working on it for no good reason.
I already read this story on my old fashioned paper newspaper last Friday. Is internet news slow today, or is my newspaper unbelievably fast?
Some big errors in the summary:
The decision of Google comes as response to new Spanish legislation that gives publishers the right to claim compensation for republishing any part of their content.
No, if this was the case, it'd just be a rehash of the German situation. No, the problem here is that it gives publishers the obligation to claim compensation. This law is specifically designed to prevent the German situation. So other newspapers can't decide they'd rather have Google's traffic anyway, and thereby undermine this boycott of Google News.
It also fixes another problem that big Spanish newspapers had: on Google News, you could just as easily find small, independent news sites that were critical of the current (conservative) government, as the sites of the major newspapers (which are mostly supportive of the government). Outside Google News, the small press is a lot harder to find. This law removes competition for the big guys as well as criticism about the government. Win-win for big corps and the government. Lose for the people and the small independent press.
Also:
This follows news of services of startup Uber being forbidden in countries like Spain as well as Germany and some city councils worldwide like Delhi, or other services like AirBnb being put under pressure to cope with local laws in other jurisdictions.
This issue has nothing to do with Uber and Airbnb not complying with local laws. There is nothing wrong with foreign companies having to obey local laws in they want to operate there. This, however, is a new law that will hurt the small Spanish press (Google won't be hurt that much, since they don't make money on Google News anyway).
By the way complaints against Uber and Airbnb (which should have been irrelevant to this story but now aren't because of the stupid summary) are not that unreasonable; they're side-stepping consumer-protection regulations that exist for good reasons. In some places they're also side-stepping monopolies or cartels, which is great of course, but some of the laws they're running afoul of are actually good laws.
As a final word, Uber are by now well known to be a bunch of thugs who need to go out of business as soon as possible.
But Google doesn't make any money on their Spanish news site; they were driving traffic to the sites of the companies that are now banning Google News from Spain.
It's not anti-American to recognize that countries that are not the US have laws that differ from American laws. The US has just as much history of legally protected rackets (software patents, spying on behalf of American corporations, banning Tesla from selling cars, telco monopolies, in fact, I think the US has a far worse record than Germany on this).
So why is it to anti-American to expect companies to obey the laws of the country they operate in? Maybe because American companies are used to buying laws? Guess what: that's what just happened in Spain. That mess is as American as you can get.
Yes, that Spanish law is stupid, but the summary is stupid for trying to connect it to Uber and Airbnb. Uber, by the way, are a bunch of thugs who even many Americans agree should go out of business as soon as possible.
I definitely call bullshit on that. Men are harassed in Law (did you know that men are not considered guardians of their own legitimate offspring in England?),
That is absolutely wrong,
Children Act 1989 section 2, particularly:
(4)The rule of law that a father is the natural guardian of his legitimate child is abolished.
Source: England and Wales Statute Roll (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/41/section/2)
Stick that up your arse, naysayer.
Naysayer? I'm condemning it. I'm saying that law (if true) is wrong. If you'd bothered to read the rest of my comment before jumping to incorrect conclusions, you'd have seen that my position is that both parents should have equal responsibility for the care of the child, and nobody should jump to lazy shortcuts based on assumed gender role expectations. Look at the real situation. Of course if one parent hasn't been pulling their weight, it makes sense that in case of divorce the other parent gets main custody, but this should always be judged on a case-by-case basis, and never on lazy assumptions.
Feminism is exactly about equality. Holding women down, because there are also some areas where patriarchy turns against men, is totally non-constructive. You should be joining the fight, not sabotaging it.
Still it pays to look for that collaboration, instead of turning it into a battle of the sexes. Most importantly, we should be attacking the very concept of gender roles; they're holding everybody down.
There have been multiple statistical analyses plainly proving that the "attack" and "harassment" narratives are provably false.
So I looked at the first one of those, and it doesn't at all do what you claim it does. It's sloppy at best. Why did you link it?
Par for the course in GamerGate, I'm afraid. They love sharing irrelevant links to distract from the real issue, and then claim it was always about that. I have seen the behaviour often enough that I often don't even bother clicking anymore. Every time I do click, I end up wasting my time looking for the thing they claimed was supposed to be in it.
I admit it. I can't get the story of GamerGate straight. And do you know why I can't get GamerGate's story straight? Because GamerGate themself can't get their story straight. GamerGate's story keeps changing every day. (Of course every time it has always been their story, like the war with Eastasia.)
I assure you, this is absolutely the first time I've heard anyone from GamerGate even claim that they have addressed corruption around Shadows of Morder. When I addressed this in a conversation with a GamerGater a few weeks ago, he said exactly that it was okay, because it was a good game, and that it was the terrible corruption around Depression Quest that was the real reason for GamerGate. I've heard other GamerGaters explain that it wasn't really corruption because it was marketing and surely a company should be free to do that sort of thing? I have never seen this addressed in the name of GamerGate, I have never seen anyone claiming affiliation with GamerGate address this. And you are the first person I've met who claims that GamerGaters have addressed this. But maybe they have. Still, they're not giving remotely as much attention to it as they're giving to Depression Quest.
As for slurs, you claim that all the slurs come from the anti-GG side, and yet all the slurs I've seen first-hand, have come from people defending GamerGate. A post about random racists on the internet (props to the person who addressed that, by the way) recognizing an image apparently related to GamerGate (I admit I wouldn't have recognized it as such) doesn't exactly prove that they are representative for people opposing GamerGate. Everybody I know who has criticized GamerGate (and of all the gamers I know, nobody supports it) is quite the opposite of that.
I'm not claiming that all critics of GamerGate are perfect. Every random group of internet people has its fair share of bastards, but the bastards don't dominate as much as they seem to dominate in GamerGate. There's a very good reason why GamerGate has such a terrible reputation. That didn't come from nothing; it is exactly because of the behaviour associated with GamerGate. Read Ken White of Popehat has to say about it. The only people who claim to have a positive impression of GamerGate are the GamerGaters themselves. And their story is honestly not very credible considering the chat logs where they discuss how to sell their story to the outside world, and what stuff they shouldn't be doing anymore. The end result is that by now, their story sounds quite reasonable to anyone not familiar with the history. But most people have a better memory than GamerGaters realize.
University of Utah confirmed that threat was completely un-credible and there was no credible threat to the students or anyone else.
Are you aware that they have a website? Read it. They confirm the threat, and they increased the security, but they also say that, according to Utah law, they can't ban weapons.
Because they are harassed for it, yes. Does not an unjust attack require a defense?
What surprises me is how many men get defensive when harassment of women is addressed. As if they consider that a personal attack.
Everybody, man or woman, who wants equality between men and women, and recognized that this still requires work, is a feminist.
I definitely call bullshit on that. Men are harassed in Law (did you know that men are not considered guardians of their own legitimate offspring in England?),
That is absolutely wrong, but that is just as much a feminist issue as women who want to work. Men being regarded as unsuitable as parent is because of traditional gender roles: women take care of children, men make money. Men should of course have equal rights to guardianship of children as women, and if they don't, that's just as much a sign that feminism isn't done yet as the fact that women make less money than men.
men are harassed in the workplace (some jobs you can't get if you have a penis - simply because you have a penis),
I'm not aware of any job where men are actively being kept out (though I don't doubt they exist), but I know a lot of jobs where women are actively kept out of. Of course both are problems, and both need to be solved, and they are in fact both the same problem. But you are delluding yourself if you think this issue is worse for men than for women.
men are harassed constantly, and IT IS WORSE if you're white and straight because that makes you a legitimate target for militant feminists.
I'm a straight white man, and I'm certainly not being harassed constantly. Have you ever really taken a good look at the kind of harassment that almost every woman faces on an almost daily basis? What we face is really truly nothing compared to that.
But I'm not denying that there are idiots on the feminist side. Particularly bizarre are the "all sex is rape" people, but they are widely recognized as idiots, and when necessary, criticized appropriately. But I've also had some guy turn me into a bigotry strawman, putting words in my mouth, and finishing off with advice that was actually worse than anything he falsely accused me of. Those things do happen, I am well aware of that. And if you find that hurtful, you should really take another look at all the crap that's often directed at women, because really, you've got to be blind if you don't see what an order of magnitude that's worse than what we face.
So you're against requiring a driver's license before you can drive a car?
Sometimes the license isn't just about permission, but about showing you have mastered the skills necessary to do the thing without endangering anyone.
I can certainly understand the desire to do away with anonymity, particularly in light of crime, but also harassment, threats and doxxing that are plaguing some communities. But as usual, there's two sides to these kind of things. Not every government is equally benevolent, and dissidents and whistleblowers also need anonymity to be able to leak the information necessary to address the abuses by the powerful.
Gamergate is about revealing corruption in the gaming industry.
It's certainly what they like to claim, yet they're mainly concerned with the massive corruption surrounding a little indie game that's free and not making anyone any money, while they're ignoring the very large scale corruption surrounding major publishers demanding positive reviews in exchange for money and review copies (Shadows of Mordor anyone?). I have addressed this with GamerGaters before, and they defended it, stating that Shadows of Mordor is objectively good, while Depression Quest is objectively bad. And that apparently makes one type of corruption okay, and the other type a really serious problem.
There is as much men involved in this corruption, hell, there is more actually.
And yet it's the women that keep getting attacked. Who even knows the names of the men involved? GamerGaters keep harping on about Zoe Quinn, despite her being supposedly irrelevant to what their cause is really supposed to be about.
This has absolutely nothing to do with attacking females.
And yet GamerGate started with attacks on women, and any woman that speaks up about GamerGate gets doxed (see Felicia Day), whereas men don't (Chris Kluwe, for example).
Every supporter of gamergate has been reasonable, calm, and argues things like a reasonable adult.
That is not exactly my experience with the ones I've tried to argue with. Every single one started with these exact same arguments, and every single one came up mostly with irrelevant arguments, ended up talking about Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian were killing their hobby, and when they ran out of arguments, slipped up with a dose of homophobic and misogynist slurs (which at least one of them then tried to cover up).
I haven't seen any calm arguing like a reasonable adult yet.
Every attacker of gamergate has been violent, sending death threads, making up BLATANTLY fake images to make themselves look like victims, and very publicly attacking people on Twitter as well.
That kind of hyperbole is not exactly helping you acquire the image of a calm and reasonable adult.
There has been zero evidence they have put forward. "Legit" mass shooting threads, nobody found, none of it, despite all the paranoia in America over it these days.
None of it, expect of course that the University of Utah confirmed it, and a lot of people there have received this message. Read it for a fine example of crazy reactionary misogyny.
They need SERIOUS help. Especially Zoe Quinn. She is delusional and mentally broken. You can see it in any interview she does, trying to play it up as if she was a victim. You can see the smugness in her face behind that horribly fake sad form.
So it is about Zoe Quinn after all.