Falling said:
It's not inconsistent if properly qualified. (And this mess for the entire month has been fraught with hyperbole and sorely lacking in qualifiers.) It is demonstrably true that a large number of people jumped on Zoe after her ex? spread their trash out on the lawn, metaphorically speaking. Demonstrably true because there was a whole bunch of posts from a whole bunch of people.
I'll agree so far, lot of angry people involved.
Furthermore, the beginning was rift with conspiracy theories, and even sucking Anita's work into the hurricane of controversy (for some reason, I'm still not sure.)
That would be because Zoe got treated with a defense tactic the same as anita did: dismiss it as misogyny. Also her connection to the "sjw" crowd and her history with claiming harassment and getting publicity during the wizardchan incident.
Again, demonstrably true due to a whole number of posts by a whole lot of people. Now. They may not have been the majority. They may not have been representative. But like youtube comments, they are pretty dang visible, and none too pretty. So it is fair to say that there was a significant part of Quinspiracy (as it was originally called) that posted sexist comments, and even harassed. Maybe the newest iteration- one GG- has purged the radical elements and moved on to bigger and better things, but for awhile, it was picking up some odd cowboys along the way (that white nationalist dude that wanted to make a video on the Anita effect for instance.)
Here is where I have to jump in and actually stop this train of thought, since you skipped a step. You have to demonstrate that hateful comments, even ones that use sexually identifying slurs, are actually fueled by a hatred of women. This is sort of a big part of the contention, actually.
See, I have glasses. And if I piss someone off, they might make an insult based on that fact. Now them mentioning it doesn't mean they hate glasses or people with glasses, just that they are dicks and grabbed at whatever they saw as a point I may get offended by.
Thus the comments about Zoe or Anita or whoever are not demonstrated as misogynistic, and are instead assumed and repeated as such. Ironically, the sort of defense against misogyny sends a message to people who want to insult her that her gender is a point of weakness and thus they tend to make reference to it more.
Even dismissing that aspect of contention that has been used to slander the entire group, you must compare the response she got with the backlash people who reported on the issue got, such as Mundanematt, IA or even later arrivals like Jaydfox. You will see the level of hate and bile thrown their way is equivalent, only they do not get the media reporting on it or spend the excessive amount of time pointing to it and then to their back account link.
furthermore the attempts to paint those who disagreed with her as sexist kinda shows you are lumping their actions all together as motivated by gender first, Or white nationalists kinda suggest you are arguing that their personal politics are relevant to why one side can be lumped together as a whole to blame all for the actions of individuals, but the other, not so much.
In this case, we simply do not know. Was it one person, was it a group of people? What we do not have are widespread DDOS attacks coming in at the quantity of the dog-piling comments on Zoe. Short of thousands of sock puppets, you can't generate that level of furor on the internet without a whole of people. You can DDOS a website with a very small group of people... or only one person.
I'll agree that you can do that with a small amount of people, yes. Though that fact alone tells us nothing about the motivations, alliances or ideology about them. Or, for that matter, even their size, as it only adds to possibilities, it doesn't actually remove any.
Think of it terms of concentration. With enough terrible people originating from a certain movement, you can say that they are at least somewhat representative of whole. (Until you try and purge 'em like Buckley and the John Birsch Society.) But if your sample is one (maybe, we don't know yet which 'side' they are), then yes you can certainly say it is an individual. (And should also be ostracized from the group.) Look, any new thing is going to attract some really terrible people. I really haven't seen what the tumblr crowd does... I am equally disinterested in them as I am of 4chan. Maybe they have a bunch of ridiculous posters, if so they need to rein them in. But what I have seen on this side from the fallout of Quin... is quite bad. That too, needs to be reined in. Especially this conspiracy nonsense. That garbage has been there from the beginning. But considering this was one attack on one website... yeah at this point, I'm thinking it's not something that's permeated one side or the other. Probably an individual or group of individuals.
Now I have to disagree with a few aspects of this. First is that it dismisses the amount of terrible people on the other side. and there are a lot of terrible people who are anti-gamergate. Some of them actually the journalists questioned. Secondly is just circles back around to a fallacy of association. And then a fallacy of ridicule by mocking them as conspiracy theories when there has been a demonstrated conspiracy between members of the journalist to censor discussion on the topic thanks to the leaked group chat.
So yeah, I still think it is very intellectually dishonest to claim that this action is the work of individuals but the harassing and threats are representative of the entire gamergate movement.
I mean, look back over your argument. Because people were angry at zoe at the start, it means the entire movement is forever painted as misogynists and harassers. But the journalists who are not only being utterly monstrous on twitter to people, including threats, insults and doxing, and have had their own supports doxxing and harassing people too, well suddenly the actions of those people are just randoms?
It is not consistent application of reason.
