Hogwarts Legacy Will Allow For Transgender Characters

[Nick Calandra]

OK, but what are people actually doing in response to Leavitt's involvement? They're just... complaining. Sometimes loudly.

So what? I mean, he made videos specifically to make his points known; the right to reply exists. There's no power being leveraged other than that. And if the studio sees that as a PR nightmare, isn't that just a consequence of making highly opinionated videos?

We can't say he can say whatever he wants and then people can't respond in kind. And actions have consequences.

I think this is where things are shifting a bit though.

It's one thing to voice your complaints about this guy, the content in his videos, etc...but it's going a step further than that.

The articles being written? Fine. The research going into the articles? Not fine.

You can see this for yourself by visiting a bunch of the different articles and they ALL share the same talking points, the same exact video links, etc.

They put a bunch of labels on him such as being an anti-feminist, which isn't true. In one of the videos they literally linked to him being anti-feminist, he specifically says that he is in support of feminism, just not certain brands of it. I don't know how that's controversial when people also have different takes on brands of masculinity...

They called him alt-right and in none of the videos I watched did I see any indication of that to be true. In fact, none of the articles even EXPLAIN why he's alt-right, they just say that he is.

They say he "attacked" "social justice warriors" (I can't even keep up with all the labels on people anymore), but in all the videos I watched again, he didn't incite anybody. He very calmly lays out his points, explains them with polls and other forms of research, and that's it. He didn't do a Quartering and just highlight what people said and then let the dogs out and they're acting like he did. All you have to do is look at the comments on his videos and you can see that it's largely discussion about the topics and not just blindly hating people.

They even went as far as to say he was promoting a toxic work environment, with no claims from anyone to support this. It may be true or not, but we don't know because they didn't talk to literally a single person from the studios.

Not to mention, Warner Bros KNEW about the content of his videos. He disclosed it to them and they hired him anyways. Now he's "resigned" and just due to the fact he's going to make a video explaining what happened, because he's pretty much been forced to by the stories written about him, now members of the press are already writing about how he's going to be an awful alt-right grifter before he's even had a chance to tell his side of what's going on.

Maybe he will be or maybe he won't, but the press has their mind made up and it's just wild to me the level of irresponsibility this has shown. The other ironic thing is that with all these labels on him, I can tell you from experience with talking with other people that he's going to have a hard time finding work in games again because anywhere he goes, the media is going to make it a story and highlight the studio that hired him with negative press. So what's left to do? Well, I guess court the audience that's supporting him now thanks to how the press covered this story.


So yea, it's absolutely fine to criticize and disagree with this guy, but the media went a step further than that and put a lot of damaging labels / assumptions on him that they provided literally ZERO evidence for. I shared a thread about this on Twitter, but I deleted it because I know what will come my way for calling this out...

I can completely disagree with the guy, think he has cringe video titles / thumbnails and is courting a certain audience that I vehemently disagree with, but this was ugly. It wasn't good journalism and watching this all go down and how quickly the public just fell in line with it without doing one ounce of research on the guy has made me feel extremely uncomfortable this past week.

I totally agree there should be consequences for actions, and if this guy was anything like The Quartering and specifically played up a grift to incite mobs after the media he disagrees with and then turn around and play the victim? Fuck yea, I think he should be removed from having a platform because of his irresponsible use of influence.

This Troy guy though? He's about as far as you can get from someone like The Quartering, whose only intention is to rile people up for his own financial gains.

Even funnier is that I have publicly questioned the reporting on this, and this Liam guy that started is definitely going around and namesearching himself / subject to find anyone that doesn't support the narrative and is blocking them, including me.

That's the current state of social media. If you don't automatically believe in the story that's being laid out in front of you, you're against them and you support the "opposition" or whatever you want to call out. I can't tell you how many times I've been attacked by people just for wanting more information on the story because that's supporting "both sides". I've given up trying to reason with people like that. As a journalist, it's my damn job to know as MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE, before making a report. I don't know how we've gotten so far away from that...you know how far up your own ass you have to be to write a story making these kinds of allegations against people without knowing for 100% certain that it's the truth?

It's crazy.

 

[Silvanus]

The right to disagree sure.

But sending messages to the company and tweeting the company demanding he lose his job is not. Its through public pressure that he stepped down as happens all over the place.

Disagreement is perfectly fine so long as it is relevant to the matter at hand.

I mean if people can just demand companies and projects and people get shutdown for things that happened years ago, then why arent people cancelling Disney? After all it was the happiest place on Earth so long as you werent black or jewish.

Or do people understand that times and opinions can change and grow over time? And perhaps this guys opinions have nothing to do with his desire to just make a fun video game.

People do condemn Disney; there's plenty to criticise. They're powerful enough to insulate themselves from the effects of bad PR.

The demands have no particular power. Its just criticism, even if it's sent to a company-- companies have always received feedback of all flavours and should be open to it. Why is criticism of this specific thing off-limits?

 

[CriticalGaming]

People do condemn Disney; there's plenty to criticise. They're powerful enough to insulate themselves from the effects of bad PR.

The demands have no particular power. Its just criticism, even if it's sent to a company-- companies have always received feedback of all flavours and should be open to it. Why is criticism of this specific thing off-limits?

Read Nick's reply above, I think he summarized the problem very well.

It isn't just criticism, it's false labeling and in many cases outright lies. If you are going to demand someone lost their fucking job you damn well OWE it to them that your facts are correct. Instead they just throw out accusations, which get picked up by more and more people who don't do any of their own research and it snowballs into this poor game dev being the next Hitler, and that isn't right. And if you can't see the fact that that is what is happening then you are blinding yourself to it on purpose. And don't think it's limited to this one dev guy either, it happens all over the place.

 

[Nick Calandra]

Read Nick's reply above, I think he summarized the problem very well.

It isn't just criticism, it's false labeling and in many cases outright lies. If you are going to demand someone lost their fucking job you damn well OWE it to them that your facts are correct. Instead they just throw out accusations, which get picked up by more and more people who don't do any of their own research and it snowballs into this poor game dev being the next Hitler, and that isn't right. And if you can't see the fact that that is what is happening then you are blinding yourself to it on purpose. And don't think it's limited to this one dev guy either, it happens all over the place.

I totally get accountability culture, but it's so, so hard to take some of it seriously when I've seen people, prominent people in media even, had their past tweets / content dug up and the first thing people do, if they're in the right circle, is absolve them of it and acknowledge they've grown as a person. Then the very next day, turnaround and go after someone else that had their old skeletons dug up and aren't in their friend group and it becomes a social media shitstorm without a second thought.

If you want true accountability, then cooler heads need to look at these situations, because right now it's not that. It doesn't feel genuine to me, just people living in their echo chambers and profiting social points for it. There's obviously cases where this stuff works and puts truly shit people behind bars (Weinstein, etc), but I think that's becoming the exception and not the norm right now.

 

[Silvanus]

SNIP

That's all quite fair; the media have a moral responsibility to weigh their words more carefully, and to research the subject at hand before chucking terms like that around. From what you describe, it sounds like they generally fell well short, which doesn't hugely surprise me. Which is a common failure for all sorts of media, right and left; you can't open a tabloid without some kind of poorly-researched op-ed.

I was talking more about ordinary members of the (online) public, rather than known pundits. CriticalGaming seemed to be extrapolating their gripe onto all sorts of "woke" complaints and topics they just don't like coming up in online discussions: it went well beyond a point of rigour in reporting.

 

[Nick Calandra]

That's all quite fair; the media have a moral responsibility to weigh their words more carefully, and to research the subject at hand before chucking terms like that around. From what you describe, it sounds like they generally fell well short, which doesn't hugely surprise me. Which is a common failure for all sorts of media, right and left; you can't open a tabloid without some kind of poorly-researched op-ed.

I was talking more about ordinary members of the (online) public, rather than known pundits. CriticalGaming seemed to be extrapolating their gripe onto all sorts of "woke" complaints and topics they just don't like coming up in online discussions: it went well beyond a point of rigour in reporting.

Oh yea, this is hardly limited to what people consider "woke" media. The anti-sjw pundits or whatever do the same exact thing just in a roundabout way.

Then there's people like me, and most reasonable people, that are stuck in the middle where you're like...yea, I support the general idea of people being accountable for things, but creating a whole controversy out of someone having opinions you don't like to the point where they get "not fired" with no evidence to show / prove that they fostered a toxic work environment or really any of the accusations leveled at the guy other than he supported the IDEA of a certain bad-faith movement?

I literally watched a PR / Media person call this guy out as being an awful person, and in the very next tweet when he got called on it, admit he hadn't even watched the videos lol. Like I said, hard to take seriously when the groupthink about these things is so painfully obvious, if you're the least bit curious and look into it, there's always more to these stories.

I think it's dangerous though that if I come out criticize the reporting of stuff like this, I get labeled as someone that supports GG, or Troy, or whatever when I most certainly do not. It's why it's hard for me to speak up on it on Twitter, though I think I've been pretty vocal about it during streams and The Escapist Show.

 

[Silvanus]

Oh yea, this is hardly limited to what people consider "woke" media. The anti-sjw pundits or whatever do the same exact thing just in a roundabout way.

Then there's people like me, and most reasonable people, that are stuck in the middle where you're like...yea, I support the general idea of people being accountable for things, but creating a whole controversy out of someone having opinions you don't like to the point where they get "not fired" with no evidence to show / prove that they fostered a toxic work environment or really any of the accusations leveled at the guy other than he supported the IDEA of a certain bad-faith movement?

I literally watched a PR / Media person call this guy out as being an awful person, and in the very next tweet when he got called on it, admit he hadn't even watched the videos lol. Like I said, hard to take seriously when the groupthink about these things is so painfully obvious, if you're the least bit curious and look into it, there's always more to these stories.

I think it's dangerous though that if I come out criticize the reporting of stuff like this, I get labeled as someone that supports GG, or Troy, or whatever when I most certainly do not. It's why it's hard for me to speak up on it on Twitter, though I think I've been pretty vocal about it during streams and The Escapist Show.

It's tougher to identify where the responsibility is when a job is lost. I feel like it rests more on the employer than the pundits, unless of course those pundits have been reporting actual falsehoods, or they've been using a particularly far-reaching platform in which case their responsibility to weigh their words becomes very-high-priority.

But if we're just talking about lower-level game commentators, and we're just talking about criticism (even exaggerated/vociferous criticism), then surely the preponderance of responsibility there is on the employer. It's their responsibility to investigate and provide transparent, trustworthy follow-through on that investigation. That obviously doesn't mean knee-jerk damage control responses like firing them off-the-bat. In this case, for instance, Troy specifically said he felt his position was secure and he left of his own accord.

As such I'm not so much seeing the problem here. I haven't called Troy Leavitt anything, so I have nothing to prove in particular, but I went and watched a couple of his 2/3-year-old videos out of interest and to gather some context. And... honestly, I can see why people have a problem. His defence of John Lasseter essentially boiled down to "it ain't illegal, and it's not as bad as other much worse stuff". When he said something along the lines of "I'm a straight white male, so according to some people my mere existence is a problem!" I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull.

Not worthy of a summary firing from the employer, considering how old they are, certainly. But worthy of criticism, and worthy of people bringing it to the attention of other people in case it makes them re-evaluate whether they want to get the game. I'm not going to go throwing highly-charged language at him on a forum, because for all I know he might have recanted all that, and anything I'd have said would have been a bit redundant anyway. But I'd have been lairy of giving him my money, and I'd have been glad that I read about it before rather than after buying the game.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Oh yea, this is hardly limited to what people consider "woke" media. The anti-sjw pundits or whatever do the same exact thing just in a roundabout way.

Then there's people like me, and most reasonable people, that are stuck in the middle where you're like...yea, I support the general idea of people being accountable for things, but creating a whole controversy out of someone having opinions you don't like to the point where they get "not fired" with no evidence to show / prove that they fostered a toxic work environment or really any of the accusations leveled at the guy other than he supported the IDEA of a certain bad-faith movement?

I literally watched a PR / Media person call this guy out as being an awful person, and in the very next tweet when he got called on it, admit he hadn't even watched the videos lol. Like I said, hard to take seriously when the groupthink about these things is so painfully obvious, if you're the least bit curious and look into it, there's always more to these stories.

I think it's dangerous though that if I come out criticize the reporting of stuff like this, I get labeled as someone that supports GG, or Troy, or whatever when I most certainly do not. It's why it's hard for me to speak up on it on Twitter, though I think I've been pretty vocal about it during streams and The Escapist Show.

My beef is that a lot of these situations are this but only a few of them get called out. As an example, there was a woman many months ago that was trying to make it out as if a Youtube personality, Gawr Gura, was trying to appeal to pedophiles with her avatar, and make it seem like her subscribers also bully her and generally make a toxic and oppressive atmosphere. Anyone that knew anything about it would be able to tell you how off base the accusations were but there was nothing different about this case from numerous other ones where someone makes a hit piece on someone in an attempt to get the internet mob to lynch them other than this woman not having a voice that reached wide enough and Gawr Gura being too niche for the mob to get interested in.

I specifically tried to drum up discussion about another situation like this over half a year ago about the controversy about The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion, where for YEARS media personalities and journalists had just assumed that it was a case of Disney completely ripping off the concept of someone else but anyone that had actually watched Kimba would know how completely different the stories were and it took one guy doing an hours long video on the situation, painfully spelling out all the differences, to make any kind of change to this assumption.

I'm glad that you're talking about it here at least, but at the same time, everyone thinking, "If I speak up then I'll be put in the crosshairs too and nothing will change anyway." is the kind of situation that should be ringing alarm bells in everyone's ears.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Okay, and?

Like, we're all the way back to "you can find anybody saying anything if you look hard enough" with the Gawr "second most popular vtuber in history" Gura stuff, and the Disney/Kimba stuff is just a popular misconception that means nothing. (that misconception is the only reason most know know about Kimba, slso, fuck Disney)

These aren't "controversies", and most of them don't get "called out" because at any given moment there's a million similar stupid things happening. Turns out, anybody can say any stupid thing they want on the internet. And there's lots of stupid people.

 

[Nick Calandra]

It's tougher to identify where the responsibility is when a job is lost. I feel like it rests more on the employer than the pundits, unless of course those pundits have been reporting actual falsehoods, or they've been using a particularly far-reaching platform in which case their responsibility to weigh their words becomes very-high-priority.

But if we're just talking about lower-level game commentators, and we're just talking about criticism (even exaggerated/vociferous criticism), then surely the preponderance of responsibility there is on the employer. It's their responsibility to investigate and provide transparent, trustworthy follow-through on that investigation. That obviously doesn't mean knee-jerk damage control responses like firing them off-the-bat. In this case, for instance, Troy specifically said he felt his position was secure and he left of his own accord.

As such I'm not so much seeing the problem here. I haven't called Troy Leavitt anything, so I have nothing to prove in particular, but I went and watched a couple of his 2/3-year-old videos out of interest and to gather some context. And... honestly, I can see why people have a problem. His defence of John Lasseter essentially boiled down to "it ain't illegal, and it's not as bad as other much worse stuff". When he said something along the lines of "I'm a straight white male, so according to some people my mere existence is a problem!" I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull.

Not worthy of a summary firing from the employer, considering how old they are, certainly. But worthy of criticism, and worthy of people bringing it to the attention of other people in case it makes them re-evaluate whether they want to get the game. I'm not going to go throwing highly-charged language at him on a forum, because for all I know he might have recanted all that, and anything I'd have said would have been a bit redundant anyway. But I'd have been lairy of giving him my money, and I'd have been glad that I read about it before rather than after buying the game.

I mean, you summed it up on your own. He can say extremely stupid things and people can criticize and roll their eyes over it all they want. People are allowed to say dumb things and be challenged on them and learn from them.

Don't forget in this situation that the company had already decided to hire him and he disclosed his channel. So what factor is different now? It became a controversy because it was manufactured to be one by people in bad-faith (that's my opinion on it considering hardly anyone watched the stuff before reporting on it).

You can also vote with your wallet and not support that guy, or the studio he works for if you believe his views are wrong.

The line is crossed for me when they're given labels like "alt-right" and allegations are printed that they're toxic at work with no proof to back that up.

 

[Nick Calandra]

I'm glad that you're talking about it here at least, but at the same time, everyone thinking, "If I speak up then I'll be put in the crosshairs too and nothing will change anyway." is the kind of situation that should be ringing alarm bells in everyone's ears.

I think it is. We're having these conversations during The Escapist Show, streams etc. At this point I think it's more important to drive viewers away from all this reactionary culture towards more reasonable minds where we can discuss these things openly.

I think the problem is you just don't know where that "line" is for people anymore. Anyone that works here on The Escapist has a pretty good idea of who I am, and that I'm extremely reasonable and am doing everything I can to promote a positive, inclusive community that can also have hard to have discussions when needed while staying respectful and civil.

At the same time I can also be extremely critical of the media. I personally think I'm quite good at analyzing it and I've always been someone that gets right to the source of the information to decide for myself...I also have direct experience being dogpiled / attacked / belittled by the very same people that pretend to "be the good guy" like Pitts, Gaddo etc.

So yea, a bit hard for me to take all these people that want "accountability culture" to be a thing seriously sometimes when I've had direct experience with a lot of hypocripsy and people that engage in a lot of groupthink on these things.

 

[Gyrobot]

I think it is. We're having these conversations during The Escapist Show, streams etc. At this point I think it's more important to drive viewers away from all this reactionary culture towards more reasonable minds where we can discuss these things openly.

I think the problem is you just don't know where that "line" is for people anymore. Anyone that works here on The Escapist has a pretty good idea of who I am, and that I'm extremely reasonable and am doing everything I can to promote a positive, inclusive community that can also have hard to have discussions when needed while staying respectful and civil.

At the same time I can also be extremely critical of the media. I personally think I'm quite good at analyzing it and I've always been someone that gets right to the source of the information to decide for myself...I also have direct experience being dogpiled / attacked / belittled by the very same people that pretend to "be the good guy" like Pitts, Gaddo etc.

So yea, a bit hard for me to take all these people that want "accountability culture" to be a thing seriously sometimes when I've had direct experience with a lot of hypocripsy and people that engage in a lot of groupthink on these things.

From my experience with communities where the right/libertarian has some form of control, the left and progressive were often isolated and destroyed in a humiliating manner. Being treated in an uncivil manner as they made accusatory theories and refuse to accept anything but their own truth. For example I tried debating civilly about certain hot button subjects like sexual content in gaming and none of these weebs/right will ever think of the idea of nuance and minding what was acceptable and rely heavily on their phobia of the Left Wing/Progressive and being as uncivil as possible to shut you down and poison your opinion of them that future debates have you more and more hateful than ever that even progressive forums find it infractable despite being the groupthink.

To clarify, my opinions got so badly tainted by the far right shouting me down that I was at one point arguing with Orientalism and hateful opinons and praising anything remotely progressive. Because you are for it or against it and I am just so badly burned by it.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

To clarify, my opinions got so badly tainted by the far right shouting me down that I was at one point arguing with Orientalism and hateful opinons and praising anything remotely progressive. Because you are for it or against it and I am just so badly burned by it.

And my experience is the same but with the left being the oppressive people and the right leaning people being destroyed and humiliated. This is why "sides", "teams" and partisan politics are so terrible.

 

[Nick Calandra]

From my experience with communities where the right/libertarian has some form of control, the left and progressive were often isolated and destroyed in a humiliating manner. Being treated in an uncivil manner as they made accusatory theories and refuse to accept anything but their own truth. For example I tried debating civilly about certain hot button subjects like sexual content in gaming and none of these weebs/right will ever think of the idea of nuance and minding what was acceptable and rely heavily on their phobia of the Left Wing/Progressive and being as uncivil as possible to shut you down and poison your opinion of them that future debates have you more and more hateful than ever that even progressive forums find it infractable despite being the groupthink.

To clarify, my opinions got so badly tainted by the far right shouting me down that I was at one point arguing with Orientalism and hateful opinons and praising anything remotely progressive. Because you are for it or against it and I am just so badly burned by it.

I think that's going to happen in any community where one side of the conversation is the only one that's correct, to be fair.

I mean ResetEra is by far and away looked at as a very progressive forum and because I covered Kingdom Come: Deliverance in a documentary, they tried to dox me and paint me as an alt-right / GG supporter, with one person even fabricating interactions they had with me and saying I deleted tweets proving it, and they just went along with it.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

OK, but what are people actually doing in response to Leavitt's involvement? They're just... complaining. Sometimes loudly.

So what? I mean, he made videos specifically to make his points known; the right to reply exists. There's no power being leveraged other than that. And if the studio sees that as a PR nightmare, isn't that just a consequence of making highly opinionated videos?

We can't say he can say whatever he wants and then people can't respond in kind. And actions have consequences.

Actually there is some power being levelled here.

The power of mis-information and properganda.

From sites claiming he's alt-right or Anti-Feminist (Note feminism isn't some singular belief system in reality but contains tons of branches) to likely some of the 65+ articles claiming he holds even more extreme positions. Few debating anything he actually said in the videos often relying on pure mis-information.

So is it NOT a power imbalance when basically a huge propaganda machine has fired up to smear him across multiple publications where he hasn't been allowed to respond directly there to the allegations? It's why often the right to reply is important. People in some areas of the press are saying all this but Troy can't reply to them there.

If you want to push for actions have consequences then be prepared for a number of people in the industry to suddenly find themselves out of their positions too.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Maybe he will be or maybe he won't, but the press has their mind made up and it's just wild to me the level of irresponsibility this has shown. The other ironic thing is that with all these labels on him, I can tell you from experience with talking with other people that he's going to have a hard time finding work in games again because anywhere he goes, the media is going to make it a story and highlight the studio that hired him with negative press. So what's left to do? Well, I guess court the audience that's supporting him now thanks to how the press covered this story.

Some people just want villains to fight and if they can't find them they'll happily make them

How Hatred Came To Dominate American Politics

To anyone following American politics, it’s not exactly news that Democrats and Republicans don’t like each other. Take what happened in the presidential debate…

fivethirtyeight.com

Better to make some-one the villain or enemy from a populist perspective than to actually try to work with others to find common ways forward unfortunately. It's likely in part responsible for the toxicity growing on social media as people push for politics to be more of a major thing. It's why the UK also is somewhat resistant to a lot of this stuff because of the long standing tradition of thinking all Politicians are wankers and to be made fun off and Politics as a whole should be taken a bit less seriously (see the number of Joke political parties the UK has including ones like the Death Dungeons and Taxes party or the Teddy Bear's Tea Party).

So yea, it's absolutely fine to criticize and disagree with this guy, but the media went a step further than that and put a lot of damaging labels / assumptions on him that they provided literally ZERO evidence for. I shared a thread about this on Twitter, but I deleted it because I know what will come my way for calling this out...

Unfortunately it will happen sooner or later anyway and well at least you tried to call it out.

I can completely disagree with the guy, think he has cringe video titles / thumbnails and is courting a certain audience that I vehemently disagree with, but this was ugly. It wasn't good journalism and watching this all go down and how quickly the public just fell in line with it without doing one ounce of research on the guy has made me feel extremely uncomfortable this past week.

Welcome to the past many years for me. I mean certain people weaponised the term terrorist in the past too. It's the power of weighted words to distort reality as such and make people not want to question things.

I totally agree there should be consequences for actions, and if this guy was anything like The Quartering and specifically played up a grift to incite mobs after the media he disagrees with and then turn around and play the victim? Fuck yea, I think he should be removed from having a platform because of his irresponsible use of influence.

Except The Quartering does regularly say not to go after or contact the people he talks about and that he doesn't want that because he knows it will be used as evidence against him (and presently is with people accusing him of swatting a person because some random person who claimed to be a fan of his swatted a person who 6 months ago The Quartering covered in a video).

I mean even more recently we got Anita taking shots at Liana Kerzner on twitter


Also while people might go "She blanked out the name" yeh twitter's search function makes it easy to find and all this happened because Anita was accusing Ninja of being responsible for harassment for not 'dealing with' his fanbase somehow.

The Quartering is a Keemstar esc drama merchant mostly but he's also the guy who was physically attacked at a convention by some-one over his views and some of the stuff I've seen people doing toward him crosses line E.G. mocking him because his wife is infertile......... no really.........

This Troy guy though? He's about as far as you can get from someone like The Quartering, whose only intention is to rile people up for his own financial gains.

Even funnier is that I have publicly questioned the reporting on this, and this Liam guy that started is definitely going around and namesearching himself / subject to find anyone that doesn't support the narrative and is blocking them, including me.

That's the current state of social media. If you don't automatically believe in the story that's being laid out in front of you, you're against them and you support the "opposition" or whatever you want to call out. I can't tell you how many times I've been attacked by people just for wanting more information on the story because that's supporting "both sides". I've given up trying to reason with people like that. As a journalist, it's my damn job to know as MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE, before making a report. I don't know how we've gotten so far away from that...you know how far up your own ass you have to be to write a story making these kinds of allegations against people without knowing for 100% certain that it's the truth?

It's crazy.

I'll save you a spot in the pit. Honestly this is one of the reason I kind of want alternative social media sites like Newtumbl to grow and thrive because there my timeline is just comic book panels, art drawings and old movie posters people are posting and not the constant hunting for a new enemy.

 

[Trunkage]

I think that's going to happen in any community where one side of the conversation is the only one that's correct, to be fair.

I mean ResetEra is by far and away looked at as a very progressive forum and because I covered Kingdom Come: Deliverance in a documentary, they tried to dox me and paint me as an alt-right / GG supporter, with one person even fabricating interactions they had with me and saying I deleted tweets proving it, and they just went along with it.

Qanon is popular with the Right AND Left. Conspiracy theories can happen on both sides. We just see the Right side in the media more often... mainly because they keep threatening to kill people

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

People do condemn Disney; there's plenty to criticise. They're powerful enough to insulate themselves from the effects of bad PR.

The demands have no particular power. Its just criticism, even if it's sent to a company-- companies have always received feedback of all flavours and should be open to it. Why is criticism of this specific thing off-limits?

and yet the people who called for others to #Canceldisneyplus were faced with mockery by people saying they'd double subscribe instead but those same people are also the ones who were so offended by Gina Carano's posts because it references concentration camps. Meanwhile Disney they company they're determined to support was thanking workers and officials who run modern day camps........

The demands may have no power but the misrepresentation and outright lies are designed to push people to take further actions or at least push the more unhinged people to take action.

A historical example being when the push because of how harmful A Clockwork Orange as a film was and how awful Stanley Kubrick was for creating it. It wasn't until after his death it was revealed the film was pulled in the UK because of people sending threats complete with covert photographs towards his family.

This isn't one side either the more crazy elements on both sides do it. Hell people who work at some labs that test on animals (mostly drug testing etc) have been targeted and faced threats from animal rights campaigners as an example.

Or hell how at Ever Green College when students tried to write over graffiti attacking one of their professors?

That's all quite fair; the media have a moral responsibility to weigh their words more carefully, and to research the subject at hand before chucking terms like that around. From what you describe, it sounds like they generally fell well short, which doesn't hugely surprise me. Which is a common failure for all sorts of media, right and left; you can't open a tabloid without some kind of poorly-researched op-ed.

I was talking more about ordinary members of the (online) public, rather than known pundits. CriticalGaming seemed to be extrapolating their gripe onto all sorts of "woke" complaints and topics they just don't like coming up in online discussions: it went well beyond a point of rigour in reporting.

Problem is those are the people being paid attention to because of the nature of the echo chambers at present.

To expand it to other stuff there was a big cry that anyone objecting to Battlefield V was a sexist who hated women. I made a complaint based on the Demo that the default skin for the Assault class was a black guy and had people try to spin it was racism. My actual complaint was maybe don't make the single default black guy skin the frontline troop mostly likely to be getting shot and killed while claiming to be doing this in the name of diversity and progress when in reality it makes the game look like something from a South Park joke.


Actual complaints get ignored unless "the right people" with "The right kind of perceived view" make them. Battlefield V could have made the engineer class default skin black and that would have come off as progressive and not so problematic.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Okay, and?

Like, we're all the way back to "you can find anybody saying anything if you look hard enough" with the Gawr "second most popular vtuber in history" Gura stuff, and the Disney/Kimba stuff is just a popular misconception that means nothing. (that misconception is the only reason most know know about Kimba, slso, fuck Disney)

These aren't "controversies", and most of them don't get "called out" because at any given moment there's a million similar stupid things happening. Turns out, anybody can say any stupid thing they want on the internet. And there's lots of stupid people.

Not everyone has a platform given to them by the press and the audience noise silenced so there is no-one able to challenge the claims made from said platform.

From my experience with communities where the right/libertarian has some form of control, the left and progressive were often isolated and destroyed in a humiliating manner. Being treated in an uncivil manner as they made accusatory theories and refuse to accept anything but their own truth. For example I tried debating civilly about certain hot button subjects like sexual content in gaming and none of these weebs/right will ever think of the idea of nuance and minding what was acceptable and rely heavily on their phobia of the Left Wing/Progressive and being as uncivil as possible to shut you down and poison your opinion of them that future debates have you more and more hateful than ever that even progressive forums find it infractable despite being the groupthink.

To clarify, my opinions got so badly tainted by the far right shouting me down that I was at one point arguing with Orientalism and hateful opinons and praising anything remotely progressive. Because you are for it or against it and I am just so badly burned by it.

What's funny is, removing sexy from games was more of a right wing position not that long ago. You say the people opposing you are Weebs / right wing but 10 years ago or less they'd have been considered the left wing and you the right on the issue.

Qanon is popular with the Right AND Left. Conspiracy theories can happen on both sides. We just see the Right side in the media more often... mainly because they keep threatening to kill people

I mean yes but also no.

It's just the sportlight is shone on the right wingers more.

E.G. Dobson (Blue bear comic artist dude) was banned from twitter and eventually I think Fecebook too for threatening to kill people, on twitter it was threatening to kill Trump.

I'd say there's probably equal crazy on both sides and equal threats now but you can say "Don't let people know peace" when directed at certain groups but saying "We ill make our voices heard" is seen as a threat.

 

[Silvanus]

Actually there is some power being levelled here.

The power of mis-information and properganda.

From sites claiming he's alt-right or Anti-Feminist (Note feminism isn't some singular belief system in reality but contains tons of branches) to likely some of the 65+ articles claiming he holds even more extreme positions. Few debating anything he actually said in the videos often relying on pure mis-information.

I've clarified above that I wasn't really referring to actual reporting outlets there, but to average online commentators. CriticalGaming's post seemed to be talking quite broadly about people complaining, not restricted to members of the press or professional pundits. The latter have a greater responsibility to weigh their words.

and yet the people who called for others to #Canceldisneyplus were faced with mockery by people saying they'd double subscribe instead but those same people are also the ones who were so offended by Gina Carano's posts because it references concentration camps. Meanwhile Disney they company they're determined to support was thanking workers and officials who run modern day camps........

OK, well, I can't really comment about that because I've never seen that hashtag or seen an online campaign to that effect. It can't have been especially large.

A historical example being when the push because of how harmful A Clockwork Orange as a film was and how awful Stanley Kubrick was for creating it. It wasn't until after his death it was revealed the film was pulled in the UK because of people sending threats complete with covert photographs towards his family.

Right, but that obviously crosses the line into threatening behaviour, stalking, and harassment. I'm talking about mere criticism.

To expand it to other stuff there was a big cry that anyone objecting to Battlefield V was a sexist who hated women. I made a complaint based on the Demo that the default skin for the Assault class was a black guy and had people try to spin it was racism. My actual complaint was maybe don't make the single default black guy skin the frontline troop mostly likely to be getting shot and killed while claiming to be doing this in the name of diversity and progress when in reality it makes the game look like something from a South Park joke.


Actual complaints get ignored unless "the right people" with "The right kind of perceived view" make them. Battlefield V could have made the engineer class default skin black and that would have come off as progressive and not so problematic.

The issue is that I remember that discussion. And that wasn't really how the complainants were presenting the case back then. You're presenting quite a... convenient description of the whole discourse.