erykweb said:
The main one being Leigh Alexander's. I just reread it, and frankly, she is right. The old demographic labeling of what people stereotypically think of as a "Gamer" was already fading.
Um... I hate to point this out, but it's a stereotype that she herself piled into, deliberately creating the biggest strawman I have seen outside of political blogsites.
She reinforced the stereotype not to dismiss it as false, but to say that the gaming community needed to target and run the stereotypes out. Classic lynch-mob rhetoric.
This movement, all of this harassment, is the nail in the coffin- proof that that label no longer fits the stereotype
You just completely reversed the standing rhetoric about Gamergate: supposedly, "all of this harassment" (which is constantly laid in whole at the movement's feet) is proof that the label DOES fit the stereotype. Maintaining the stereotype is most of what I have seen to date from that side of the fence.
Then those very same people over react
Ah, there you go, bringing it 'round full circle. Which, again, brings us back to the point that the stereotype is just that: a falsehood like every other stereotype. They always serve one goal: to point to an extreme minority of persons with negative features, and expand that image to smear a far larger community.
Yeah, they threaten and harass her en masse. They did a great job proving her point.
To date, I've seen no "threatening and harassing" of Leigh Alexander that would exceed, say, what the average CNN sportsdesk jock gets in his email folder on a daily basis. Again, using the stereotype to argue that the stereotype fits.
This is what GG has become; an excuse for people to throw hate at others.
I have no idea what GG you're witnessing, because that's not what I've been observing from within it for the last month.
Do you want to know who the last (and only) person I saw making a death threat while using the #Gamergate hashtag was? "Kill Anita". I went directly to that person's account to give them what-for, even as other GGers called him out for condemnation in more public circles...
...and I found anti-GG posts, to anti-GG threads, using the #StopGamergate2014 hashtag.
So yes. To date, the only actual threats I have seen from someone where evidence actually showed they might have had any affiliation to GamerGate, were from its opposition.
Oh, by the by, the USU Police and FBI investigated Ms. Sarkeesian's death threats and dismissed them as no threat.
http://www.usu.edu/ust/index.cfm?article=54179
But feel free to keep treating debunked assertions with no basis in reality as deadly personal threats that not even the Secret Service would take seriously if they ended up in the President's inbox.
