Yeah, guys, pack it in. We’ve lost Stormfront, 8chan, and Breitbart. It’s over. Retroactively give the 2012 Presidency to Mitt and repeal the 19th amendment. CGI the Human Torch back into a white guy in post. Without outspoken racists and sexists, who will buy comic books?
Oh, what’s that, fem-Thor did gangbusters sales? Hmmm. And from pwk’s dispatches from the front lines, apparently the SJW menance has taken over REDDIT? Reddit! pwk, if you look at reddit and think “this place isn’t nearly racist enough for me, I bet there’s a conspiracy behind this” you may not have your finger on the pulse of the general public.
Timex
3682
I think this is the big point.
Comics have been in decline for a very long time now. The female Thor is just one in a long list of publicity stunts aimed at generating a short term spike in interest. It’s not really indicative of some kind of insidious SJW plot, as much as its indicative of corporate PR and marketing bullshittery.
Comics from the classic publishers, DC and Marvel, have recently achieved something of a second coming through their transition to cinema, but it hasn’t really saved the original medium that much I don’t think. i just don’t think comics in print form have the same appeal they once did, because kids have other alternatives for entertainment (largely things like video games and TV now), and in terms of printed graphic content, I think a lot of the smaller production houses are producing more interesting work from an artistic perspective (although that’s clearly just a subjective opinion, and as I’ve never been a hard core fan of comics, I perhaps don’t have the same appreciation of the classics as some hard core fans).
Overall, the stuff being complained about here, while kind of crappy, isn’t really “new”. It’s stuff that’s been going on for years as the comics industry has been trying to deal with the decline of their product’s popularity.
I would tend to think though that a better long-term move would be, rather than slapping boobs onto Thor, to make deeper and more realistic female characters.
Alstein
3683
One of my friends who has been harassed by the SJW crowd came up with an idea for Twitter that might help lower harassment some.
They should allow an option to make some tweets private, instead of just public/just private. I think that would help some people out.
As for comics themselves, I think the rise of manga in the US as a substitute for comics was fueled heavily by Sailor Moon bringing in a ton of girls into well, geekdom. Comics failed to appeal to women the way manga and anime did in the mid to late-90s, and I really do think that is having a major role to play in the decline of comics. Then Sailor Moon was followed up by a bunch of shows like Fushigi Yuugi, and the anime fanbase thesedays is pretty representative of the US population as a whole - above half male and half female. You can see it at conventions, where they went from 80-90% male in the mid-90s to around 50/50 today.
Comics failure to appeal to a diverse audience (not the comic movies, the comics themselves) really was a massive failure on the part of DC and Marvel. And now it’s bearing fruit into a 2nd generation, as some of those early Sailor Moon fans are now producing content themselves.
A “global” effort to simultaneously censor a bunch of major message boards. Why do you think it doesn’t require a conspiracy? Just thinking that it’s plausible that it could happen is pretty far off in moon landing hoax / JFK assassination conspiracy territory. One only has to actually read reddit for a bit to realize it is crazy talk. Reddit: the lowest common denominator of the Internet.
Or, alternately, he was shadow banned for being an offensive inflammatory drama manufacturer. Hmm which is it, a vast conspiracy of politicized forum moderators who are taking over (somehow?), or one dude being a jackass. Hmmmm!
Teiman
3685
What seems the SJW actually did was contact the hosting companies, and scare them with legal procedures. The hosting companies contacted the hosted websites, the owners of these website asked the moderators to follow.
So I don’t think the SJW had people in sites like 4chan, but they still managed to get the moderators there eliminating material. They found a scare tactic that is far more effective, and is going against the hosting company.
Sites like Reddit they have systems and procedures they can exploit, so yes, they took over many moderator positions and abuse these powers.
I am sure the NSA and countries like Iran probably have studied the whole thing, because before it, nobody whould have think a global blackout of information on the Internet was possible.
Maybe we have to thanks the SJW, because we have found a hole that can be exploited and disable our freedom. And have show how in many websites the freedom of expression is only a illusions … something that it was clear before, but not is more than a theory, is practical.
Freedom of expresion on the internet have to “up the game” to deal with this. But theres serius problems with it, because with the current model theres always somebody else (maybe your hosting company) that is the one that re-broadcast your message and the attackers can go against them to silence people.
steve
3686
How about “don’t post a message you wouldn’t want to see made public to Twitter?” Why should Twitter have a technical solution to what’s just an impulse control issue? What purpose does a private tweet have? If you don’t want to broadcast your innermost thoughts to the world, use a journal.
Claims presented without evidence or citation. Claim of a global conspiracy to achieve a goal no one can sanely articulate.
I think we have finally found the hardcore crazy that keeps this whole GamerGate thing fuelled in the face of nearly complete public disapproval.
Alstein
3688
Because there are things you’d want to send to your friends that you wouldn’t want to send out to the world? Seems like obvious common sense.
Some folks use Twitter as a journal
LMN8R
3689
Well technically it is a public rejection.
It’s them rejecting it. In public.
(Just don’t tell them that the readership of Kotaku, Polygon, etc. continues to increase, especially throughout last year when GamerGate was claiming victories against them)
But in that case, wouldn’t you just… text them? Or email them? Or post on a private message board? Or post on Facebook? Or LiveJournal?
Alternatively, it’s Teiman.
steve
3692
Then they’re not using it for its intended purpose, which is short public messaging, and shouldn’t expect Twitter to become an email, Facebook, texting, journaling, and scrapbooking app. There are plenty of obvious common sense alternatives that guarantee more privacy.
(That said, Twitter will probably add all of those features out of fear of competition that does offer these sorts of features, it will eventually get even more bloated and pointless, and die anyway.)
Timex
3693
If you want to post stuff to some journal that only certain folks have access to, that’s what Google+ works well for.
Alstein
3694
Twitter is much more common than those, and sometimes you want different types of friends on different networks. I would not want my military friends on Twitter. I would not want some of my civilian friends on Facebook.
No, Desslock, you started this discussion with the comic excerpt and the Brietbart article in the same post. And then you tried to shift the discussion to ‘no one’s complaining about change in general, just the politicization of the message’, claiming ignorance of the article you referenced in the first place. You either don’t read or understand the articles you reference, or you’re being willfully disingenuous.
Also. The only reason why this is a ‘political’ issue is because you absurd right-wing conservative reactionary types have made it so. Keeping the status-quo old-boy white, male, good-old-boy culture (in comics and video games) is the latest rock you’ve decided to make your stand on. It’s like that old Joss Whedon quote- someone asks him “Why do you continue to write strong women”, and he answers “Because you keep asking me that question”. The way things change is to bring the problems in them up. The reason they write situations like in that Thor book, is because that’s the reaction they get from the die-hard head-in-the-sand reactionary types. Let it go. Accept the change, move on, and let them get to the point where they don’t need to write stories like that.
This is probably the most astute thing I’ve read in this thread for a while. The local Anime con here is HUGE, and yeah, it’s at least 50% female. Is it any wonder that anime and manga have gotten so huge, when they actually attempt to appeal to more than 50% of the population?
What conspiracy? SJWs are just another subculture/tribe* No one thinks the goths are all controlled by the World Goth Society and needs to refute the World Goth Society every time they talk about our Cure loving friends.
The only difference is instead of doing um… goth things, SJWs turn up on social networks/forums (or users turn into SJWs) and act like social justice dicks.
Teiman mentioned SJW mods so i gave him a well known example. To be honest the best example is where they failed to become mods and failed to police a forum, got banned and had to set up their own special social justice safe space and is known to us all.
*Does their social network profile list “social justice” under hobbies and interests? That’s always a good sign, a bit like people who call vegan an interest (You’ll know who they are, they will tell you) That and Tumblr.
Teiman specifically spoke of a global effort to blackout undesirable communication in such a way that the NSA and Iran would the study how it was done for future reference.
Maybe you are talking about something else pwk, but for Teiman the apocalypse is already here.
Teiman
3699
Sorry but, do you know about the events that happened?
You don’t sound like know how many websites forums got into this blackout where threads where banned as fast as they where created.
I don’t like your style. Nobody here is talking about conspirations. You do that in a way to riducule other people opinions, its a ugly and distastefull strawman. I am a bit angry here, hope nobody notice :D
Quaro
3700
I remember the Giant Bomb CENSORSHIP uproar that you mention Teiman. It was because a mod on the forum posted, “Sorry, we really have no interest in allowing links to or discussion of articles that are full of seemingly baseless allegations and language that would get a post deleted over here. Just leads to far too many angry and dismissive threads.”
Moderating forums is not a conspiracy, or censorship. I remember the famous reddit thread. /r/games is heavily moderated, 90% of submitted stories are deleted by mods. It’s the opposite of /r/gaming where anything goes. That famous ‘censored’ thread was the meanest and nastiest thread I have ever seen on that reddit, full of rage and belittling and slurs. And it was the front page top story on a the most mainstream of gaming sites. It was the first time in my life I’ve really thought, “Wow, if this is representative of gaming culture now, fuck gaming culture.”
