SilverHunter said:
First off, before you start rambling and copy-pasting entire paragraphs from your other posts try and read a little more than your own narrow-minded view.
Wow. I'm just skimming this and this caught my eye. I can just tell already this response is going to be totally sensible, fair, unbiased, and based in pure rationale and not impassioned zealotry. Let's see if my prediction holds true...
I was speaking specifically to Zaydin's comment and his comment alone, I've already said my piece on this general mess above. Both sides have disgusting individuals participating in death threats and wholly uncivil behavior, and while you claim you won't waste time trying to defend one group, you seem more than eager to defend the other. That by its very definition is 'bigotry'.
Er, I hate to be a Grammar Nazi (now THERE were some right proper bigots), but "defending a group from harassment" didn't constitute bigotry. Here, here, I can help out.
bigot -a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.
I'm not seeing this from the former comments. Defending a platform is not bigotry, as the individual you have utterly dismissed and accused of "rambling" and being "narrow-minded" (that's a rather bigoted statement, now that I think about it) seems to be saying they stand fully behind the morals of so-called Gaters, but simply believes the hashtag they rally behind isn't worth defending. Makes sense to me, like saying "oh yeah, I totally agree with that Republican on this matter... but I'm not going to call myself a Republican because we agree on that one topic." That actually seems very fair and open-minded.
I'm not making any claim on what some ex said, nor did I ever state Adam Baldwin knew anything about this other than seeing an easy way to espouse his own political views into something that did not need it.
But the claims that some ex said are largely involved in the current state of affairs. It's not sensible to dismiss that element of the equation when that very thing kickstarted a large portion of this wonderfully wacky debate. And I don't see anyone, anywhere, saying you stated Adam Baldwin knew what he was talking about. But both of these are elements to a larger picture, and that picture is incomplete if you toss them out. They're certainly worth commenting on.
I'm also not so naive or idiotic to try and make an argument about what the German Swastikah means as compared to the cultures it originally came from. It's horribly pathetic, on your part, to try for such a weak argument. But if you want to go that route, would you call a practitioner of either system of belief a Jew-hating white supremacist for having the it painted on their door? Any decent human being certainly wouldn't I hope.
Godwin's Law notwithstanding, it's not "pathetic" because you aren't giving a counter-argument other than dismissal. But, sure, I'll bite on this. If you were in America and saw someone with a swastika proudly painted on their door, YES, the associated feelings, culture, and history of that symbol is deeply, irrecoverably rooted in bigotry, hatred, oppression, intolerance, persecution, and antisemitism. I mean, holy God, man, the symbol is OUTLAWED in the nation of Germany for a very, VERY good reason, so, no, you can't just paint one on your door and expect all that negative history to go away. Any "decent" human being would be understanding that using that symbol in this culture is highly insensitive and offensive and would, hopefully, opt not to parade it around. The symbol is a stigma to billions of people; nobody can claim ignorance of that.
And that, I think, is where I agree with posts earlier in the thread: GamerGate has become stigmatized. Is that fair? Hardly. But an intelligent, decent human being who genuinely does care about the industry would abandon associating with it as it grows more and more synonymous with hatred and intolerance day by day. Why is that name, GamerGate, so important that people would rather go down with the ship after it was sabotaged from within than sensibly jump into a lifeboat and move on (maybe to a better ship)? This ship has so many holes, you can't plug them all fast enough before more spring up. I mean, by all means, stand by your hashtags. Nobody can stop you. I just think it's tragically humorous to see so many care more about what their movement is called instead of doing anything about what their movement represents. Talk is so much cheaper than action.
Yes, boo hoo, the other side has been oppressed and persecuted too. That's not what this conversation is about. The conversation is about whether the GamerGate movement is too toxic to do any good at all, no matter how victimized people are on both sides. Is it too toxic? Let's have that discussion. If you think not, why do you believe that? How do you intend to change public perception of the hashtag group? What are you actively doing to promote its original goals? Who is your leadership? Who is demanding accountability? Who is going to the press? What plan does anyone have in place? Why is that a good plan? What is being done to root out the bad members? Is there even a way to police the members? Why isn't the group going after the hundreds of other more urgent problems in the game industry, such as Youtube buyouts, pervasive game DRM, mistreatment of video game developers and unacceptable crunch periods, console exclusivity backroom deals, unoptimized PC ports, broken game launches, game industry advertisements (hey, I notice Alien: Isolation is paying for the Escapist's web banners currently. How can we trust their review to be objective?), broken metacritic scaling ties to developer bonuses, and, YES, female developer and journalist harassment as a constant, unsolved problem?
The fact that THIS is what's getting people so worked up boggles my mind. I've been following game journalism since the 70s, and, trust me, it is SO MUCH BETTER than it ever was back then. As fondly as Nintendo Power is remembered, it was a Nintendo-published magazine that served as a mouthpiece to promote Nintendo-branded video games on Nintendo systems. We have more nonbiased, non-industry critics and reviewers now than we ever have in the history of the medium, and yet "journalistic integrity" has become this butchered rallying call over so many other damning industry practices.
If even half the energy spent here was directed at things like on-disc DLC, online passes, misleading E3 trailers and demos, broken game releases, game homogenization and distillation, microtransactions, F2P feature creep, forced and unwanted social elements, paywalls for story content, pre-order retail exclusives, console parity, annual game serialization, minority protagonist suppression, game piracy, region-locking, or graphics over gameplay, the whole industry would be a much better place.
But we get impassioned en masse over some of the most trivial, pointless things instead. Boggling.