JimB said:
You know, by your argument, UncleThursday, Anita Sarkeesian is a criminal (morally if not legally), and her supporters are her victims, people who have been swindled and misled by a practiced manipulator. I'd have hoped that you'd respond to this with a desire to help her victims by using reason and fact to expose them to information they need to help themselves with, but instead, you decide to attack. Further, I can't help noting that out of all the expressions of contempt you could have chosen, you went with the one that says a man who is not dominant over a woman is somehow deficient, as well as one that implies anyone who defends Ms. Sarkeesian is in it for sex.
It really makes me question what your motivations are, if to make your point you need to not only attack the victims of someone you assert is a predator but also do so with terminology that singles them out as foolish for being submitting to a whore.
I think my question speaks for itself. People go all gaga when she finally deems it time to release a new video and claim she is doing everything promised. They always conveniently forget that the promised delivery date was 3 months past when the
first video finally made it out. The delivery date that said all 13 videos would be out and DVDs sent to backers who pledged enough. At her current rate, it will take at least 2 more years to get the videos on YouTube, let alone if the DVDs will ever be sent out. But this is all fine and dandy when someone was paid a lot of money to do something?
If you paid me, or anyone else, a large sum of money to do something with an estimated delivery date, and it looked like I wouldn't get said whatever it is out to you until 3 or so years after the promised date, wouldn't you start asking questions? Especially if it was known to you I was doing something at least tangentially related to the project you paid me for and making money off of that instead of doing what you already paid me for? Or would you just sit back and say to yourself 'well, I'll get it when I get it'? Pretty much the entire rest of the world would be held accountable, but Anita Sarkeesian gets a free pass.
Again, let's be serious... if she had finished the videos by the end of 2012, as promised, would anyone really still be talking about her, now? Would colleges and media and other such be looking to get her to talk to them over a year later? Would she still be able to sell herself as a 'consultant' to game companies? The answer is, probably not.
Now, as to being a 'criminal'? No. Dishonest and fairly morally bankrupt? Sure.
The way she gained the money is very suspect (the spamming of 4Chan and Reddit with her Kickstarter link, her posting the video to YouTube with open comments for the first time ever, her screenshotting comments to show on her site and claiming they were all from gamers while knowing the majority were from pissed off 4Channers and Redditors)-- it seems fairly obvious she created the controversy to see just how much money she could bring in, even though her initial $6k was reached within 24 hours of the Kickstarter being set up. She still asks for 'donations' to keep FF up and running, even though she made over $100k on Kickstarter and makes however many thousands of dollars per speaking engagement (and don't think she is doing these for free). Her videos in this series are rehashes of the TvWiTV series she did before, even using many of the exact same lines from the script. Her 'research' is beyond poor, filled with falsehoods, lies by omission, purporting her own views as absolute fact, confirmation bias, uncited sources that she allows viewers to infer that it is her own original research (the LP videos that are uncited, leaving the inference that she recorded her own footage for them), and quite literally just using Wikipedia and TV Tropes as a direct word for word parts of her script (watch the 1st vid when she gives the definition of a DiD and read it on Wikipedia while she does... here's a hint, it's word for word, this can also be seen in definitions taken from TV Tropes).
JimB said:
Okay, if you think that isn't the solution to one in six women being the victim of sexual assault, [http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims] then what solution do you propose? If you have some better method in mind for stopping this epidemic of crime against women, then I would genuinely love to know what it is.
Those studies are heavily biased, truthfully. They have very loaded questions and are given out to only women on college campuses. An example of a loaded question: "Have you ever had sex with someone that you later regretted?" Note it isn't that you were forced into, or when you were unable to rationally give consent (too drunk, drugged, etc.). That you later
regretted. If a female student answers yes to that? It's counted as rape/sexual assault. Or how about "have you ever had sex after being nagged about it?" Again, answer yes, it's rape/sexual assault.
I think we all have had sex we later regretted. Does this mean we've all been the victims of rape or sexual assault? Many of us who have been in longer relationships have also been nagged into sex when one partner is horny. Does that mean we've all been raped/sexually assaulted? And, yes, women nag for sex when they're horny, too.
Also, don't forget the double standards imposed. If a woman is drunk, she can't consent; if a man is drunk, well that walking penis was just wanting to get wet anyway. He wanted it, she was raped. Men always want sex, so they can't be raped by women is the double standard. Which is false, by the way. In fact, according to US federal definitions, a man can
only be raped if something penetrates his anus or is inserted into his mouth. So, logically, only a man can rape another man or a woman has to forcibly insert something inside him for it to be considered rape. If he's drunk, drugged, etc? Well, he wanted it anyway (note the very use of the thing some try to use as defense if a woman is dressed in a provocative way?)! He got hard, so he wanted it (again, like trying to say the woman got wet, even though both male and female erectile functions are involuntary)!
And this doesn't even get into the whole 'women never lie about rape' thing, even though an alarming number of rape convictions are being overturned when it has been found out they were outrightly falsely accused and spent years in jail because of it. And the woman who blatantly lied? Slap on the wrist, at most, when compared to how long their supposed rapist spent in jail. He spends 5, 10, 15 years in prison? She might get 1 year for filing a false police report, unless the statute of limitations on that has passed, in which case she gets no punishment.
But, here's a nice layman's way to see just how inaccurate those studies are because of their loaded questions: Take a look at a picture of Broadway in NYC on any given day. There are literally thousands of people on that street, maybe over 10 thousand. Now, since we can't positively identify how many are men and how many are women along the whole street, it's easy to say half are men, and half are women. Now you have thousands of women, on a single street, and 1 out of every 6 has been the victim of sexual assault? That's potentially thousands of sexual assault victims and sexual assault perpetrators (if we assume this also means 1 in 6 men are sexual predators) walking down
one single street in America. Seems kind of absurd, doesn't it?
For a bigger picture, The US has about 350 million people. Again, assuming that half are male and half are female, that means 29,166,666.66 women in America, alone, are the victims of sexual assault. At that rate, the US is at epidemic levels of sexual assault, just against women. That's entire states' worth of populations being sexually assaulted. That's more people than were killed by the Bubonic Plague in Europe during the middle ages.
But, hey, studies with loaded questions that serve only to increase the desired result say it's true, so we have to believe that; right?
