No whining here - I think that’s a good example of someone being prejudiced because of discriminatory preconceptions. Everyone should show more empathy and listen more to improve their awareness and remain conscious that there are differences of perspective. I just think that condescending and sometimes ill-fitting admonishments to STFU because of how you were born are the exact opposite of helpful since promoting empathy, understanding, and fairness is the goal.
“Prejudiced because of discriminatory preconceptions?” Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but that sounds an awful lot like “she’s imagining it/making it up because she’s predisposed to seeing the world that way”. Please tell me that isn’t what you’re saying?
That’s the opposite of what I said. I said she was prejudiced (harmed) because of someone else’s (or several others) discriminatory preconceptions towards her and her abilities.
Gotcha. I couldn’t tell who was the subject and object there.
Timex
4345
I get it. And in that vein, my criticism wasn’t directed at the the underlying motivations, but rather at the tactical choice in presentation.
When faced with someone holding a different view, to get them to come around to or did we have two options. Either we force them into submission, or we bring them over to our side. Trying to force someone to believe something never works. People will always resist that kind of change, tooth and nail.
To win someone over, you need to make them see your side as their side. That means it never becomes a case where you need to defeat them in an argument, where you win and they lose. The most effective way to make progress is to find a state where you both win. Especially when you lack the strength to actually force them to submit to your will.
This is why i think the best way to combat racism and other forms of bigotry is to simply expose people to each other as humans beings. Bigotry exists when people don’t understand each other, and see each other as adversaries. In that situation, helping the other side is bad, because it’s helping your enemy and making you lose.
But when you strip away the adversarial aspect, then you remove the biggest source of resistance. Because then they are just another person like you. Helping them doesn’t hurt you, and even make you feel good. It becomes simply doing the right thing, and i think that virtually every single person in the world including the most extreme racists, wants to do the right thing.
Are you saying that all protected classes’ off the cuff statements should be accepted without question? I am not saying that she is wrong/making it up but is this the continuance of the “believe [x] all time” line? We are all subject to our preconceptions, perceptions and experience.
This is exactly the right approach in my opinion, and why identity politics is so detrimental. Racism will be defeated when we all look at each other and see something other than race as master status and they stop being “the Other”.
I think it has less to do with the failure and more to do with the success of Occupy. This isn’t frustration finding a way, this is emulation, combined with internet-isolation bubble radicalization and the low opportunity cost of moral-panic flash mobs enabled by social media.
Nesrie
4347
Everyone is free to be skeptical of claims, but I do know that when I can personal vouch that being a woman in certain gaming communities and playing games has exposed me to some pretty nasty comments and threats, I was asked, no more like demanded to provide written proof. There are a lot claims on this board that I have not seen others been confronted to provide documented proof of their experience… as if every woman who has ever experienced harassment or threats of any kind is required to report it to the local authorities or it’s just a false claim? What is it about this topic that makes people suddenly believe if they don’t see it, it can’t be so?
Teiman
4348
Well, you are a women, people want to get in your pants, and when they can’t, they get frustrated. The original state of many people is asshole, bastards and angry, then you turn them more angry and frustrated. They get joy from the suffering of others. Then you give then a reason to cause you pain. So of course, you get rabid angry assholes trying to produce pain on you because you are a women. And then theres the volume. Where a men would get one insult in the inbox, a women would get 10 for the same offense. Where a person is largely ignored or ostracized if male, if is women it will be dealt differently more active.
When thiefs ignore poor houses and target rich houses is not that they hate rich houses, more than hate the poorness of the poor. The idiots that attack a women, they would love to be loved by one.
For me this is 100% of what GG is REALLY all about. It’s a bunch of whinny child-men that are all frustrated at that time they got knocked back by a girl (How dare SHE deny me!) and just are not man enough to deal with it. So they got all vindictive and hacky and stalkerish and decided ALL women are to blame but they will start with those that are entering the realm of their sandpit, which is games. Very, very pathetic and sad, and nasty to boot, evil in a way. Everything else (journalism ha!) is just a smoke screen for this man-child frustration.
Sadly for women in the real world just doing their jobs or trying to be involved in the games/tech industry they are getting targeted by these losers (i use that term carefully, they are not losers because they got rejected by a girl at some point (we all have), but are losers by their childish reaction to that).
I think you hit the nail on the head for the most part, with the caveat that there are men who are very successful with women who also treat them with great contempt.
Also theives rob the poor all the time, sadly.
Some dude wrote a blog about how retweeting Milo cost him 2500 followers to the blockbot. He dislikes the idea of the blockbot, believing that people segregating themselves is a net negative on Twitter.
In it, he links a piece Kuchera wrote about Twitter, harassment, and how Twitter could address these sorts of problems without people having to resort to things like third-party blockbots.
Kuchera, in turn, lost his shit on Twitter because he (paraphrasing) “doesn’t want his work used by those who support harassment.”
I feel like I missed a step somewhere in there.
The step where talking about GamersGate was a good idea, maybe?
(But frankly, anyone who thinks retweating Milo (who has more than a BIT of a history) is a good idea…seriously? I can’t blame people for using unfollow-bots for that)
Alstein
4353
As far as I’m concerned, use of a blockbot isn’t a free specch issue, but it is a sign of a low-quality thinker. There may be exceptions, I’d understand locking things down if you’re being harassed, but if someone wants to harass you a blockbot won’t stop anything. People have the right to be narrowminded, but I have the right to think poorly of those people.
I can make up my own mind on who I don’t want seeing my stuff/interacting with me. (most of my blocks are of radical gators)
LMN8R
4354
I’m pretty sure it’s because Kuchera knows that Milo has been instrumental in direct harassment of countless women, and is not merely a humor figure as the other guy wrote about. He is directly responsible for the destruction of many peoples’ lives, and indirectly responsible for countless others.
A most sincere question: Like the anecdote above re: advice, are these attacks/comments directed at you originating because of your womanhood, or are they using your gender as a vector? Separately and generally, without delving into social/individual psychology, is it even possible to objectively know? And is that a distinction without a difference?
Nesrie
4356
I wouldn’t know exactly what drives these people. I think there are some that are just angry that there are girls in their clubhouse, and others feel like us being around takes something away from them. The second group seems to be the biggest claim in the GG group, but the first group is still there stoking the fire where they can. In many cases when I game with strangers, or are on message boards, they don’t know I am a woman. They don’t know until I use a mic, or I identify myself on the board like I do here.
My experience does not invalidate others by any means, I just know that when I chose to participate in Evolve’s beta for a night, I was going to encounter hostility… not an if but when, as soon as I put my headset on. It did happen, fortunately the scooby-doo like chases don’t last that long so the few times I did encounter it, it was fairly short-lived. And if discussing uncomfortable things, like the portrayal of women in games, might cause experiences like that to be less certain for girls growing up wanting to participate in games, I say try it. Years of doing nothing has done exactly that.
Isn’t that just trolling though? I mean, obviously trolls are gonna pick on you because you are a girl and they probably think that is the easiest way to get a rise out of you. Just like how they call men faggots, because that’s an easy thing to use to piss off a lot of men. I certainly can understand how that would get old really quickly, and I imagine it happens a lot because not only do you have to deal with trolls, but also those weird lonely type people too.
That’s a tad hyperbolic, no? He’s not Pol Pot.
Alstein
4359
Trolling can easily be harassment, and I seriously doubt Nesrie goes around using that word.
Yes, trolling can be harassment sometimes and is one of the reasons I seldomly play games online anymore. However she was responding to “A most sincere question: Like the anecdote above re: advice, are these attacks/comments directed at you originating because of your womanhood, or are they using your gender as a vector?” When it comes to trolling, it’s usually whatever works the easiest to piss the person off and get them to react. If it was a man with a lisp, or a country accent or any other countless things he would get trolled for those things, it’s not specific to being a woman.
Just as long as people who are worthy of respect receive it and can pursue greatness regardless of gender or race or sexual orientation I’m happy. The rest of the stuff is often just a distraction.
