Ah yes, distributed grassroots misogyny. If only the """powers that be""" hadn't reigned back control of this vital, important movement to harass women online.

But because Twitter doesn't like nuance, those get collapsed into a single, simple and most outrage-inducing format. A black & white hero/villain narrative. Which also avoids having to deal with any critiques, regardless of validity.

Hoping that isn’t the case here, because I am perhaps inappropriately curious if an answer exists.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/new-chat-logs-show-ho...

It's an increasingly popular phenomenon that we need to be conscious of as a culture and not give credence to the trolls while also not using examples from the fringe to pigeonhole the whole.

I admit-despite being someone who plays a lot of video games quite frequently I didn't wade into these waters because from the sidelines it looked like a lot of people painting things with very wide brushes and a lot of static noise that made trying to sift through any of it more annoying than it was worth.

There are no generalizations in my comment which you implied.

But when the 4channers were first starting to use it this way, it could be dismissed as "what, it's just an okay symbol"...

The ambiguity ("it's just a joke, it's just this, it's just that") is part of their discourse.

* https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/proud-boys * https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou...

You do know that Gavin McInnes wife is an Indian right and he started the proud boys as a joke? Do do know that right?

I wouldn't believe everything you read from those sources. The SPLC just had to apologise and pay 3.3 million to Maajid Nawas because they called him Islamophobic and he is a Muslim. Maajid Nawas was suing them for deformation in the UK.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2018/06/18/splc-statement-reg...

None of these statements: 1) they have non-white members so they can't be, 2) the founder has a non-white wife, 3) the SPL Center was successfully sued for unrelated reasons by someone unrelated to the Proud Boys, or 3) "it started as a joke" refute the claim.

As far as I am concerned there is no evidence other than spurious claims from the SPLC and the ADL.

I gave you evidence that the SPLC throws the racism (Islamophobia is a very similar accusation) around too liberally and because Maajid Nawas is in the UK that has tighter defamation laws he was able sue them for a substantial amount of money. If the SPLC doesn't do basic research about Maajid Nawas, how can you trust they have done their research about the Proud Boys? The answer is you can't.

And sorry those statements do somewhat refute the claim. White-supremacists wouldn't have non-white people in their movement. White-supremacists wouldn't have children with non-whites (they call those people race-traitors). The movement was started as a joke (Gavin McInnes was on Joe Rogan Podcast 920 & 710 I believe it was one of these appearances where he specifically coined the term, but it could be an earlier appearance on his show).

So I can back up everything I've said. All I've seen presented so far from you is smear pieces by organisations that even Noam Chomsky has criticised in the past.

From what I could gleen there were some individual women that said disparaging remarks about a whole group of individuals and were surprised when they got push back from the rest of the community which btw included women.

I've noticed more generally that one person will say something quite rude about a whole group of people, people quite rightly tell them to shove it and leave them alone and then that individual claims harassment.

The entire accusation is bunk because it wasn't even the person accused of that didn't even review the game.

I have very little to do generally with games, but I've had a similar situation (but at a much smaller scale) where people have claimed bullying (no such thing happened) after basically upsetting a large number of the group.

I am also old enough and seen enough scandals play out similarly in other spheres of the media. I have actually been at an event and the media mis-represented what happened. So I wouldn't trust a journalist as far as I can throw them.

Then the villainization of anyone who disagreed with the activists approach as women-haters who think it’s okay to harass women only increased backlash.

Is it recency bias on my part to say it feels like this tactic is showing up in more places than it deserves to? The last American election cycle was terrifying to watch for precisely what you just described happening all across Twitter and elsewhere on social media.

Assent with {group_A} or be labelled complicit with {group_B} by default with little headroom for nuance or context.

No, but it is recency bias to think that it showing up in more places than it deserves to is novel. It has been an exceedingly common tactic everywhere for probably as long as civilization, or maybe language, has existed; it manifests in moral/religious/philosophical dualism, for instance, which is extremely widespread and ancient.

I’m not looking forward to the next election.

I mean, Jesus, just read the wikipedia article.

> Frank Lantz of NYU's Game Center wrote that he could not find "a single explanation of a coherent Gamergate position". Christopher Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon, told the Columbia Journalism Review: "The closest thing we've been able to divine is that it's noise. It's chaos [...] all you can do is find patterns. And ultimately Gamergate will be defined—I think has been defined—by some of its basest elements."

That's because there Was No Movement! The pattern recognition centers in human brains go beyond confusion when presented with a situation like this. You know how whenever Anonymous comes up in the news, it's always labeled "the online hacker group Anonymous"? It's utter insanity. It's not a group. It's not a movement. They don't have weekly meetings down at the VFA. It's just an asshole with a computer. And, in the case of Gamergate, there was a cultural zeitgeist involved. A thousand people send disgusting messages on Twitter; our brains have to believe there's a pattern, that there's organization. But what if there isn't? Because, well, there wasn't with Gamergate. It was just mob mentality.

Frankly, we're all better off just putting both sides of that whole shitstorm behind us, like most internet food fights. The assholes who harassed people were, well, assholes. The women they harassed didn't deserve what happened to them, but they also handled it very poorly. Streisand Effect hits. Now Anonymous has a spotlight, and you know they're going to abuse that. It's no longer about what they actually believe. Now, it's about Chaos. Because Chaos is Fun. You call them sexist. You call them bigots. They laugh. They don't care what you call them. But: You care what they're calling you. Now, they're in control. They have the power. You gave it to them.

Afterward, everyone rational is trying to figure out what happened, trying to derive a pattern and point fingers. It has to be someone's fault; we need content for this clickbait we're writing about it. The people involved are still laughing, because they're STILL controlling you. Just stop. Don't engage terrorists.

Right. Deplatform them, ban them, and prosecute them instead.

People want to gamble, too, and to drink alcohol, and to shoot heroin. That doesn't mean those things are good for them, or that it's axiomatically ideal either for them individually or for society at large to not have any restrictions on their ability to satisfy those desires.

I say let people go back to the manual RT

Jeff Bezos certainly thinks so -- why else would he have bothered patenting one-click buying?

Combining the fact that they have nothing insightful to say with the ego boost from being interviewed in visible articles means that people like this are going to say whatever they think will provide a punchy, clickbait headline for the less-discerning members of link boards to feed their biases with.

The only notable thing here is how hard HN falls for drivel like this.

This guy is clearly no guru. And the sensationalism of the title is just media being media.

I definitely wouldn't be making this comment were the article about @jack, or someone else that Buzzfeed could make the case was responsible for the design and development of Twitter early and over time.

Buzzfeed is the one writing the clickbait. Obviously they would not be the ones falling for anything. HN, collectively, put this article on the front page, treating shallow nonsense as if it's notable because it feeds our biases. It's a data point that speaks ill of the collective discernment abilities of HN (and the quality of the community) that we put content-free clickbait on the front page and discuss it as if it's valuable (or more accurately, use it as a fig leaf for soapboxing preexisting views).

This isn't some generalized "HN is full of dumb low-effort takes and clickbait" complaint; I got used to that years and years ago. But part of being on an online forum is pushing back against stuff like this and calling out low quality content when we see it.

> Tu quoque (Latin for "you also"), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s).

As the old saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I say people should get some exercise every day. In practice, however, I only get to the gym once or twice a week. That means I'm a hypocrite (and a lazy one at that), but it doesn't mean people shouldn't get some exercise every day.

But even if I accepted that pointing out hypocrisy is purely argument by ad hominem, I don't see how it would be irrelevant. If someone believes something radically different from me and therefore works towards radically different outcomes, I consciously try to stay open minded in case they know something I don't. If someone isn't consistent in what they profess and what they work towards, I don't feel I owe them that sort of hearing. At best, their ideas are good but they don't understand them well enough to represent them. Would you really call that unfair?