DrVornoff said:
Did I say "silence?" I just said to stand up to them. Is it really that difficult to turn to some loudmouth douchebag and say, "Dude, quit it. You're not helping."?
You can't stop stupid people from being stupid, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't stand up to them when they get on their soapbox and presume to speak for you.
How am I to do that, exactly? When Zeel talked about hating the ME3 endings, he and I spoke with once voice. When Zeel talked about ANYTHING else, my level of distaste for both his message and his method of delivery was so palpable you could cut it with a knife. How then do I "stand up" to Zeel and prevent his message from reaching your ears? Do I scour the forums for posts by him, and try to shout him into silence? You are talking about the words and actions of demographic that are, by definition, attention seeking and immature. No amount of "standing up" to them is going to change the volume or tenor of their behavior.
The Retake ME3 "movement" (and god, I hate calling it that, I just can't think of what else to call it) actually began with the STATED GOAL of offering constructive feedback instead of name calling and aggression. They actively requested calm, effective discussion, and deliberately donated to charity to try and color their "cause" in a positive light. Merizan praised their efforts as the right way to protest, and said she was proud to serve a fan base that behaved in such a fashion. Their reward for this behavior was to be branded by "journalists" and backlashing community members as crybabies, whiners and entitled children, and to have their little movement get colored by the shitty behavior of EVERY SINGLE IDIOT who didn't like the ending and felt the need to let the world know about it. Did you argue with a stupid person, who had stupid reasons for not liking ME3, and expressed them in stupid ways? Well, that's now the public face of Retake ME3!
How does anyone "stand up" to that? Why does anyone have to specifically issue statements of non-affiliation every time someone stupid opens their mouth? Perhaps you are a man. Every time a man does something stupid, do you need to seek him out and stand up to him, or be tarnished by his behavior and beliefs? Do I need to HEAR you say "I am against rape", and until I hear you say it, I must assume you are pro-rape, because you are a man, and a man raped someone?
Essentially what you're trying to do here is establish justification for ad hominem attacks. You want to be able to undermine a perceived demographic based on the behavior of certain individuals, and since you realize you can't attribute that behavior to all of them, you've chosen a new angle of attack, which is to blame them for not "standing up to it". As though we all had a moral imperative to kick the soapboxes out from under the feet of everyone we disagreed with, on the off chance they might presume to speak for us.
Again, it is your responsibility to think for yourself, to treat individuals like individuals, and to judge arguments based on the merits of the argument, and not on the behavior of some of the people who might be issuing them.
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