"Christie Blatchford is the Worst," blares the headline of a recent Canadaland blogpost about the Gregory Allan Elliot case.
It actually gets worse from there, as blogger Anne Theriault goes on to complain that Blatchford is insignificantly sympathetic to the complainants of the trial, and not hostile enough to the defendant. Theriault then goes on to spin on behalf of the complainants -- who in my own opinion, and based on the facts of the case are the ones who should really be on trial -- trying to pass off Blatchford's reporting as not sufficiently rooted in fact.
Yet, instead, it's Theriault's account that chooses to leave a vast swarth of fact out, and for reasons that strike me as fairly obvious.
For example, she makes no mention of the foul malfeasance in relation to not only Elliott himself, but towards Bendilin Spurr, a man who created an incredibly stupid online game in which those playing it could punch Anita Sarkeesian in the face until she's bruised and bloody.
For this, Guthrie targeted Spurr for harassment. In the online parlance, she doxxed him, and suggested that those participating in her harassment campaign against him should take care that he become unemployable in the Seault Ste Marie area.
When put on the stand, Guthrie expressed a stunning degree of callousness toward her target. She testified that she would feel no guilt whatsoever should Mr Spurr's life be ruined, or even if he took his own life.
Guthrie admitted that she also targeted Elliott himself, and declared that she actually thought herself entitled to attack and smear Mr Elliott without having to face a defense from him.
If that isn't demanding privilege, I don't know what is.
What's worse is that Guthrie and her supporters, via bail conditions, were actually granted such privilege. Guthrie's supporters continue to smear Elliott and can do so without without him having the opportunity to defend himself.
Theriault at least has the ethical wherewithal to identify herself as a friend of Guthrie and co-complainant Heather Reilly. However, this is where another interesting detail of the trial -- which I personally refer to as the Guthrie Trial, as that is who I personally believe should be on trial -- comes into play: that of the "August meeting" wherein Guthrie, Reilly and several other women involved in the WiToPoli community met in order to decide how they would communally attack Elliott.
Was Theriault, friend of these two women, present at the August meeting, wherein a conspiracy against Elliott was obviously hatched? If she was, this is undisclosed. I do have to admit that if Theriault were to claim she was not present at that meeting, I wouldn't be predisposed to believe her, as she has insisted on expanding the smear campaign against Gregory Alan Elliott to Christie Blatchford.
Theriault closes her blogpost by attempting to blame Blatchford's reporting for causing Guthrie and Reilly to be harassed. She offers less than a handful of cherry-picked tweets in order to serve as evidence of this.
There is some irony in this. First off, if the facts of the case, as revealed via testimony in court, are sufficient enough to provoke this scale of public disgust with these two women, perhaps Theriault has chosen the wrong horse to bet on. (Speaking strictly metaphorically, of course.) Second, if we are to be disgusted by harassment, perhaps there's a better horse for Theriault to bet on than one who herself was so proud of the harassment campaign that she instigated that she gave a TEDx talk about it, and actually bragged about the number of people she was able to get participating in that campaign.
But then we must consider one further point of irony: Theriault herself. The general line of smear against Gregory Alan Elliott by Guthrie's supporters is that he's a "creep" who doesn't respect people's boundaries.
Anne Theriault first got attention from the internet by spying on, and live-tweeting, some hapless couple's first date. Does this seem to you like someone who respects other people's boundaries?
In the final analysis, it's all incredibly ironic. Jesse Brown has managed to elevate Canadaland from some run-of-the-mill weblog into something of a destination blog because he frequently sets out to take the piss out of the mainstream media, usually on ethical grounds.
Well, this attempt on Christie Blatchord's reporting on the Guthrie Trial was an attempt that Brown should have simply declined to permit Canadaland to become involved in. Anne Theriault's ethically-dubious account of the story is ample fodder for anyone who may feel it necessary to take the piss out of Canadaland.
At least Christie Blatchford probably got a good laugh out of it.
Showing posts with label Anita Sarkeesian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anita Sarkeesian. Show all posts
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Monday, May 4, 2015
Joss Whedon Didn't Understand Social Justice Warriors
Joss Whedon must have thought himself very clever. Very clever, indeed.
See, Whedon was a man with a problem: most of the media properties he ever created or adapted had deeply conservative ideas at their core.
But he so desperately wanted to be one of who he thought the cool kids were. So he had to find a way to masquerade as a leftist. So first he made a video suggesting that electing Mitt Romney as President of the United States would result in a zombie apocalypse. (That there have been numerous violent outbreaks which roughly resemble the zombie apocalypse under Barack Obama simply reveals how insightful Whedon's leftist bleatings have been... not very.)
This wasn't enough. So Whedon decided to cozy up to who he -- with his epic lack of insight -- thought was the coolest kid of all: Anita Sarkeesian. He would masquerade as a feminist social justice warrior, even though nearly everything in nearly anything he ever produced was bound to disgust your average SJdub.
For a while, things were good. He helped Sarkeesian -- who despite having establishment feminists pushing her very hard down people's throats, is something of a nonentity within the media which she criticizes -- raise her profile. She at least seemed to be helping him evade criticism for the distinctly-non-social-justicey nature of his work.
Then Avengers Age of Ultron dropped, and Whedon began to receive harassment and threats over Twitter. But not from #Gamergate, who he liked to being like the KKK. Rather, it was all from the SJdub allies he had attempted to cultivate by associating with Sarkeesian.
This included Sarkeesian's producer and writer, Johathon McIntosh, whose attack on Age of Ultron contained eye-roll-inducing phrases such as "toxic hegemonic masculinity."
Somewhere Whedon is reading McIntosh's tweets and declaring "curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
Not-at-all-ironically, The Mary Sue -- a website typically obsessed with online harassment -- simply declined to recognize the virulent harassment of Whedon by radical feminists, who themselves did not understand the film.
(It was his own fault, really, Whedon had the gross misfortune to be born without a vagina, so of course TMS will ignore harassment of him by toxic radical feminists.)
The complaint of the toxic radical feminists in question was that the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansen) described herself as a "monster" after explaining how she was sterilized as part of her assassin training. (The detail that she was sterilized so that having a family would never distract her from being a killing machine somehow managed to elude them.)
Some demanded to know who permitted Whedon to write the Widow character. I can only presume they would have preferred she remain fertile so she could go on to have, like, a hundred abortions.
It's not Whedon's fault that he was targeted for concentrated harassment by toxic radical feminists. That's the fault of those targeting him. But it is his fault that he deluded himself about his place in the grand scheme of what passes for toxic radical feminist "thought."
In future he'll know better.
Friday, March 6, 2015
Anita Sarkeesian, Jonathon McIntosh and the Battle for the New Modernity
I'm sure this thought has occurred to Gamergate supporters from time to time as they ponder the contributions of Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathon McIntosh -- or, more specifically, the ideology they represent -- to the unethical mush that has become video games journalism.
At times some have certainly even wondered: do these two matter at all?
For my part, the answer is yes. But the threat these two pose to reason itself -- yes, to reason itself -- looms far greater than the quality of their academic work justifies. But in order to show this to be true, first the shortcomings of their work must be laid bare.
I'm certain this is another thought that has occurred to Gamergate supporters: just what is their problem, anyway? Why are they doing this?
The answer is both simpler and more complex than you may think: their problem is with modernity.
Just what is modernity? Perhaps most simply described, modernity is the prevailing ideological construct shaping the way in which we see the world around us. It's a combination of the technological, scientific, religious, intellectual and philosophical state of the modern world. Essentially modernity is what is modern.
Under no conditions is it, or should it be, static. In their book Empire, Thomas Hardt and Anthonio Negri explain how modernity evolved through the Renaissance into the Enlightenment, and beyond:
"Modernity is not a unitary concept but rather appears in at least two modes. The first mode is the one we have already defined, a radical revolutionary process. This modernity destroys its relations with the past and declares the immanence ofthe new paradigm of the world and life. It develops knowledge and action as scientific experimentation and defines a tendency toward a democratic politics, posing humanity and desire at the center ofhistory. From the artisan to the astronomer, from the merchant to the politician, in art as in religion, the material of existence is reformed by a new life.
This new emergence, however, created a war. How could such a radical overturning not incite strong antagonism? How could this revolution not determine a counterrevolution? There was indeed a counterrevolution in the proper sense of the term: a cultural, philosophical, social, and political initiative that, since it could neither return to the past nor destroy the new forces, sought to dominate and expropriate the force of the emerging movements and dynamics. This is the second mode of modernity, constructed to wage war against the new forces and establish an overarching power to dominate them. It arose within the Renaissance revolution to divert its direction, transplant the new image of humanity to a transcendent plane, relativize the capacities of science to transform the world, and above all oppose the reappropriation of power on the part of the multitude. The second mode of modernity poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire. The Renaissance thus ended in war— religious, social, and civil war."
The counter-revolution prevailed and the vanquished paid the price. Copernicus was forced to recant his heretical claim -- in time proven true -- that the Earth orbits the sun, and was imprisoned regardless.
But though the conflict was over the ultimate result had yet to be decided. An Enlightenment was coming.
The cultural conflicts that marked the Renaissance had to become the Enlightenment somehow. As Negri and Hardt explain, what was needed as a mediatory measure:
"The ontological dualism of the culture of the ancien regime had to be replaced by a functional dualism, and the crisis of modernity had to be resolved by means of adequate mechanisms of mediation.
...Nature and experience are unrecognizable except through the filter of phenomena; human knowledge cannot be achieved except through the reflection of the intellect; and the ethical world is incommunicable except through the schematism of reason. What is at play is a form of mediation, or really a reflexive folding back and a sort of weak transcendence, which relativizes experience and abolishes every instance of the immediate and absolute in human life and history. Why, however, is this relativity necessary? Why cannot knowledge and will be allowed to claim themselves to be absolute? Because every movement of self-constitution of the multitude must yield to a preconstituted order, and because claiming that humans could immediately establish their freedom in being would be a subversive delirium. This is the essential core of the ideological passage in which the hegemonic concept of European modernity was constructed.
The first strategic masterpiece in this construction was accomplished by Rene Descartes. Although Descartes pretended to pursue a new humanistic project of knowledge, he really reestablished transcendent order. When he posed reason as the exclusive terrain of mediation between God and the world, he effectively reaffirmed dualism as the defining feature of experience and thought."
It was with reason acting as the arbiter between science and religion that humanity was able to move beyond the fractious revolutionary/counter-revolutionary conflict of the Renaissance, and adopt what would eventually evolve into contemporary modernity.
That was a wordy paragraph. Allow me to simplify it, if more for my sake if not for yours: ultimately however you may see the world around you, you see it that way because Rene Descartes was successfully able to advance the idea that the best way to settle debate was to think about it rationally.
Centuries later that seems so intuitive. Yet when Descartes originally posed this idea it was threatening to a great many people still.
Descartes was considered to be the definitive figure in how this conflict would be settled. His mode of mediation endured for a very long time indeed.
But with the rise of post-modernity there are those who have sought to cast off the Cartesian intellectual order, so that arguments rooted nigh-entirely in emotion can be advanced over those who prefer rational thought.
The locus of intersectional ideologies which belched Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathon McIntosh represent the tip of the metaphorical spear. They and their academic progenitors have come to see nearly everything about modernity in its current form as intolerable, and so they have done whatever they to portray its very existence as a crisis. Wherever they have found evidence of such a crisis they have exaggerated it. Where they have found no evidence of such a crisis they have fabricated it.
Where Sarkeesian's and McIntosh's generation of activists largely differs from their forebears is in their revolt against reason. To listen to the discourse of third-wave feminism is to be assaulted with a continual barrage of the importance of feelz over realz.
In other words: how they can make people feel about a particular claim is more important about whether or not that claim is actually real.
A specific example: Sarkeesian's claim that video games normalize violence against women. There's no evidence for this whatsoever. In fact, the evidence openly defies this claim, as rates of violent crime have declined precipitously across the board.
But in presenting scenes of violence against women in video games, Sarkeesian wants you to feel as though this is a bad thing, with catastrophic consequences, and be angry about it even if the evidence -- what can be confirmed as real -- contradicts and disproves this.
Another example: the harassment Sarkeesian says she's received. She wants you to feel as though this is real and be angry about it even if she's never managed to produce convincing evidence of credible threats. Indeed, the alleged threats made against Sarkeesian -- particularly prior to a scheduled speech at Utah State University -- were deemed by police to not be credible.
Feelz over realz. Listen and believe. And reason be damned.
Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathon McIntosh are by no means the sole standard bearers for this anti-Cartesian shift, but for the time being they are the ones on whom I shall focus.
Consider this but the introduction. There is a long journey ahead of us. It's dangerous to go alone.
At times some have certainly even wondered: do these two matter at all?
For my part, the answer is yes. But the threat these two pose to reason itself -- yes, to reason itself -- looms far greater than the quality of their academic work justifies. But in order to show this to be true, first the shortcomings of their work must be laid bare.
I'm certain this is another thought that has occurred to Gamergate supporters: just what is their problem, anyway? Why are they doing this?
The answer is both simpler and more complex than you may think: their problem is with modernity.
Just what is modernity? Perhaps most simply described, modernity is the prevailing ideological construct shaping the way in which we see the world around us. It's a combination of the technological, scientific, religious, intellectual and philosophical state of the modern world. Essentially modernity is what is modern.
Under no conditions is it, or should it be, static. In their book Empire, Thomas Hardt and Anthonio Negri explain how modernity evolved through the Renaissance into the Enlightenment, and beyond:
"Modernity is not a unitary concept but rather appears in at least two modes. The first mode is the one we have already defined, a radical revolutionary process. This modernity destroys its relations with the past and declares the immanence ofthe new paradigm of the world and life. It develops knowledge and action as scientific experimentation and defines a tendency toward a democratic politics, posing humanity and desire at the center ofhistory. From the artisan to the astronomer, from the merchant to the politician, in art as in religion, the material of existence is reformed by a new life.
This new emergence, however, created a war. How could such a radical overturning not incite strong antagonism? How could this revolution not determine a counterrevolution? There was indeed a counterrevolution in the proper sense of the term: a cultural, philosophical, social, and political initiative that, since it could neither return to the past nor destroy the new forces, sought to dominate and expropriate the force of the emerging movements and dynamics. This is the second mode of modernity, constructed to wage war against the new forces and establish an overarching power to dominate them. It arose within the Renaissance revolution to divert its direction, transplant the new image of humanity to a transcendent plane, relativize the capacities of science to transform the world, and above all oppose the reappropriation of power on the part of the multitude. The second mode of modernity poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire. The Renaissance thus ended in war— religious, social, and civil war."
The counter-revolution prevailed and the vanquished paid the price. Copernicus was forced to recant his heretical claim -- in time proven true -- that the Earth orbits the sun, and was imprisoned regardless.
But though the conflict was over the ultimate result had yet to be decided. An Enlightenment was coming.
The cultural conflicts that marked the Renaissance had to become the Enlightenment somehow. As Negri and Hardt explain, what was needed as a mediatory measure:
"The ontological dualism of the culture of the ancien regime had to be replaced by a functional dualism, and the crisis of modernity had to be resolved by means of adequate mechanisms of mediation.
...Nature and experience are unrecognizable except through the filter of phenomena; human knowledge cannot be achieved except through the reflection of the intellect; and the ethical world is incommunicable except through the schematism of reason. What is at play is a form of mediation, or really a reflexive folding back and a sort of weak transcendence, which relativizes experience and abolishes every instance of the immediate and absolute in human life and history. Why, however, is this relativity necessary? Why cannot knowledge and will be allowed to claim themselves to be absolute? Because every movement of self-constitution of the multitude must yield to a preconstituted order, and because claiming that humans could immediately establish their freedom in being would be a subversive delirium. This is the essential core of the ideological passage in which the hegemonic concept of European modernity was constructed.
The first strategic masterpiece in this construction was accomplished by Rene Descartes. Although Descartes pretended to pursue a new humanistic project of knowledge, he really reestablished transcendent order. When he posed reason as the exclusive terrain of mediation between God and the world, he effectively reaffirmed dualism as the defining feature of experience and thought."
It was with reason acting as the arbiter between science and religion that humanity was able to move beyond the fractious revolutionary/counter-revolutionary conflict of the Renaissance, and adopt what would eventually evolve into contemporary modernity.
That was a wordy paragraph. Allow me to simplify it, if more for my sake if not for yours: ultimately however you may see the world around you, you see it that way because Rene Descartes was successfully able to advance the idea that the best way to settle debate was to think about it rationally.
Centuries later that seems so intuitive. Yet when Descartes originally posed this idea it was threatening to a great many people still.
Descartes was considered to be the definitive figure in how this conflict would be settled. His mode of mediation endured for a very long time indeed.
But with the rise of post-modernity there are those who have sought to cast off the Cartesian intellectual order, so that arguments rooted nigh-entirely in emotion can be advanced over those who prefer rational thought.
The locus of intersectional ideologies which belched Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathon McIntosh represent the tip of the metaphorical spear. They and their academic progenitors have come to see nearly everything about modernity in its current form as intolerable, and so they have done whatever they to portray its very existence as a crisis. Wherever they have found evidence of such a crisis they have exaggerated it. Where they have found no evidence of such a crisis they have fabricated it.
Where Sarkeesian's and McIntosh's generation of activists largely differs from their forebears is in their revolt against reason. To listen to the discourse of third-wave feminism is to be assaulted with a continual barrage of the importance of feelz over realz.
In other words: how they can make people feel about a particular claim is more important about whether or not that claim is actually real.
A specific example: Sarkeesian's claim that video games normalize violence against women. There's no evidence for this whatsoever. In fact, the evidence openly defies this claim, as rates of violent crime have declined precipitously across the board.
But in presenting scenes of violence against women in video games, Sarkeesian wants you to feel as though this is a bad thing, with catastrophic consequences, and be angry about it even if the evidence -- what can be confirmed as real -- contradicts and disproves this.
Another example: the harassment Sarkeesian says she's received. She wants you to feel as though this is real and be angry about it even if she's never managed to produce convincing evidence of credible threats. Indeed, the alleged threats made against Sarkeesian -- particularly prior to a scheduled speech at Utah State University -- were deemed by police to not be credible.
Feelz over realz. Listen and believe. And reason be damned.
Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathon McIntosh are by no means the sole standard bearers for this anti-Cartesian shift, but for the time being they are the ones on whom I shall focus.
Consider this but the introduction. There is a long journey ahead of us. It's dangerous to go alone.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Monday, February 9, 2015
No, Promoting Anita Sarkeesian is NOT Education
The internets are alive with the sound of grumbling, as the Anti-Defamation League has released, for public consumption, a lesson plan entitled "Is Gaming a Boys Club? Women, Video Games, and Sexism."
It's a classical example of so-called "social justice education" in all of its ideology fervour, ruthlessness and factual paucity.
Intended for grade 11 and 12 students, the lesson plan is meant to deliver the message of Anita Sarkeesian into high school halls where it can warp the minds of impressionable youngsters and mold them into fatuous social justice warriors... that is, if it can actually be done within its 60 minute time limit. Which it actually can't. (More on this later.)
Putting it most simply, this lesson plan is an absolute mess.
The lesson plan provides 20 "vocabulary terms" students are to learn, and directs educators toward the ADL glossary in order to define them.
This matters because critical theorists routinely seek to redefine common words in order to suit their agenda. So the definition intended by the progenitors of this lesson plan very much matter. But unfortunately of the 20 vocabulary terms listed by the lesson plan only one -- sexism -- is defined by the ADL glossary.
Their definition reads as follows: "Prejudice and/or discrimination against people based on their real or perceived sex. Sexism is based on a belief (conscious or unconscious) that there is a natural order based on sex."
I have no objection whatsoever to the first portion of this definition. The latter, however, seems designed to implant notions of "patriarchy" into students, and accordingly skews the definition of sexism to apply only to sexism by men against women. It seems intended to preclude sexism by women against men. That's likely not coincidental, as radical feminists constantly declare that there's "no such thing as sexism against men."
It's also not coincidental that those who express these views are some of the most enthusiastic and self-satisfied sexists a person could ever hope to not meet.
Sexism isn't the only term that appears on ADL's vocabulary list that critical theorists have often set out to redefine. Also on the list are the following words:
-Abusive
-Cyberstalking
-Gamer
-Harassment
To leave these key words undefined is a serious issue for this lesson plan, particularly as each of them could be defined -- or re-defined, as is far more likely -- to deliberately create a power dynamic within the lesson plan that is solely to the benefit of the Cult of Sarkeesian.
A case in point is a now-infamous tweet in which Sarkeesian complains about abuse at the hands of "angry YouTubers." As it turns out, those individuals had merely exposed the factual shortcomings of Sarkeesian's work. Yet Sarkeesian chose to mischaracterize this as abusive, solely because it's to her benefit to do so.
So this is a serious problem with the ADL's lesson plan. But it's not by any means the biggest one.
No, the biggest problem with this lesson plan is that it's structured in such a way as to make the voicing of a dissenting view impossible.
The following is a screencap from this PDF:
Notice that there is no option for those who have not witnessed what they would consider sexism in video games, nor is there any option for those who do not think sexist things have been said or done to them through video game interaction.
The message is clear: this lesson plan will not permit you to disagree with the assertions being made at any point. Students are to "listen and believe" and for God's sake, do not allow them to think for themselves.
This lesson plan also proposes a common tactic in so-called "social justice education": dividing students up into smaller groups. As other "social justice education" resources make clear, dividing students into groups is a means by which targeted students -- frequently described as "privileged learners" -- can be isolated from one another, and reduced to a minority among students who are thereafter being agitated against them.
In the case of the ADL lesson plan, this is compounded by the application of peer pressure. As students watch their peers place sticky notes on the "I have witnessed sexism in video games" and "people have said or done sexist things to me through video game interactions" signs, they will feel pressured to do likewise.
The lesson plan eventually moves into force-feeding the students Sarkeesian. This is unsurprising, as Sarkeesian seems to exist as a public figure not on the merits of her work -- her work has been found to be entirely lacking merit by everyone who has actually examined it on a factual basis -- but on the will of high-profile and privileged individuals to stuff her down peoples' throats.
If forcing students to sit through brief unmediated readings of Sarkeesian's work isn't enough, teachers are actually instructed to force her ideas down students' throats.
Apparently the one thing instructors cannot permit is for Sarkeesian's insipid "tropes vs women" to be discarded by students as unimpressive or unconvincing.
And while the lesson plan does theoretically provide for some time for students to discuss these concepts -- and perhaps even how they openly contradict one another -- it's worth pointing out that by the time this portion of the lesson arrives, the instructor has used up no less than 49 minutes of a 60 minute lesson plan. (Yes, I tallied it up, but not by much.)
There's still two more segments of the lesson to go: reading a Pew Research paper about online harassment, then discussion of it afterward.
Interestingly, teachers are pressured to emphasize harassment of women as part of that post-reading discussion, when in fact the study indicates that men experience more online harassment than do women. Of all the modes of online harassment discussed as part of the Pew study, only two -- sexual harassment and stalking -- are experienced more by women. That's of six modes of online harassment mentioned in the study.
It's worth noting that of all the resources used to formulate this lesson plan, the Pew study is the only one that is meaningfully peer reviewed. So the one and only meaningfully peer-reviewed source in the entire plan is misrepresented within it.
That's the kind of "lesson" this is. It's not really meant to educate students at all. It seems to me that the sole purpose of this lesson plan is to promote Anita Sarkeesian and help her settle her grudges by forcing her ideas onto high school students, thus helping to further fill the ranks of her "army."
That's not what classrooms are for. This lesson plan has no place in any classroom anywhere. Any teacher who willingly attempts to teach it is eminently unqualified to be a teacher, and should consider seeking a career better suited to their talents and temperament.
It's a classical example of so-called "social justice education" in all of its ideology fervour, ruthlessness and factual paucity.
Intended for grade 11 and 12 students, the lesson plan is meant to deliver the message of Anita Sarkeesian into high school halls where it can warp the minds of impressionable youngsters and mold them into fatuous social justice warriors... that is, if it can actually be done within its 60 minute time limit. Which it actually can't. (More on this later.)
Putting it most simply, this lesson plan is an absolute mess.
The lesson plan provides 20 "vocabulary terms" students are to learn, and directs educators toward the ADL glossary in order to define them.
This matters because critical theorists routinely seek to redefine common words in order to suit their agenda. So the definition intended by the progenitors of this lesson plan very much matter. But unfortunately of the 20 vocabulary terms listed by the lesson plan only one -- sexism -- is defined by the ADL glossary.
Their definition reads as follows: "Prejudice and/or discrimination against people based on their real or perceived sex. Sexism is based on a belief (conscious or unconscious) that there is a natural order based on sex."
I have no objection whatsoever to the first portion of this definition. The latter, however, seems designed to implant notions of "patriarchy" into students, and accordingly skews the definition of sexism to apply only to sexism by men against women. It seems intended to preclude sexism by women against men. That's likely not coincidental, as radical feminists constantly declare that there's "no such thing as sexism against men."
It's also not coincidental that those who express these views are some of the most enthusiastic and self-satisfied sexists a person could ever hope to not meet.
Sexism isn't the only term that appears on ADL's vocabulary list that critical theorists have often set out to redefine. Also on the list are the following words:
-Abusive
-Cyberstalking
-Gamer
-Harassment
To leave these key words undefined is a serious issue for this lesson plan, particularly as each of them could be defined -- or re-defined, as is far more likely -- to deliberately create a power dynamic within the lesson plan that is solely to the benefit of the Cult of Sarkeesian.
A case in point is a now-infamous tweet in which Sarkeesian complains about abuse at the hands of "angry YouTubers." As it turns out, those individuals had merely exposed the factual shortcomings of Sarkeesian's work. Yet Sarkeesian chose to mischaracterize this as abusive, solely because it's to her benefit to do so.
So this is a serious problem with the ADL's lesson plan. But it's not by any means the biggest one.
No, the biggest problem with this lesson plan is that it's structured in such a way as to make the voicing of a dissenting view impossible.
The following is a screencap from this PDF:
The message is clear: this lesson plan will not permit you to disagree with the assertions being made at any point. Students are to "listen and believe" and for God's sake, do not allow them to think for themselves.
This lesson plan also proposes a common tactic in so-called "social justice education": dividing students up into smaller groups. As other "social justice education" resources make clear, dividing students into groups is a means by which targeted students -- frequently described as "privileged learners" -- can be isolated from one another, and reduced to a minority among students who are thereafter being agitated against them.
In the case of the ADL lesson plan, this is compounded by the application of peer pressure. As students watch their peers place sticky notes on the "I have witnessed sexism in video games" and "people have said or done sexist things to me through video game interactions" signs, they will feel pressured to do likewise.
The lesson plan eventually moves into force-feeding the students Sarkeesian. This is unsurprising, as Sarkeesian seems to exist as a public figure not on the merits of her work -- her work has been found to be entirely lacking merit by everyone who has actually examined it on a factual basis -- but on the will of high-profile and privileged individuals to stuff her down peoples' throats.
If forcing students to sit through brief unmediated readings of Sarkeesian's work isn't enough, teachers are actually instructed to force her ideas down students' throats.
And while the lesson plan does theoretically provide for some time for students to discuss these concepts -- and perhaps even how they openly contradict one another -- it's worth pointing out that by the time this portion of the lesson arrives, the instructor has used up no less than 49 minutes of a 60 minute lesson plan. (Yes, I tallied it up, but not by much.)
There's still two more segments of the lesson to go: reading a Pew Research paper about online harassment, then discussion of it afterward.
Interestingly, teachers are pressured to emphasize harassment of women as part of that post-reading discussion, when in fact the study indicates that men experience more online harassment than do women. Of all the modes of online harassment discussed as part of the Pew study, only two -- sexual harassment and stalking -- are experienced more by women. That's of six modes of online harassment mentioned in the study.
It's worth noting that of all the resources used to formulate this lesson plan, the Pew study is the only one that is meaningfully peer reviewed. So the one and only meaningfully peer-reviewed source in the entire plan is misrepresented within it.
That's the kind of "lesson" this is. It's not really meant to educate students at all. It seems to me that the sole purpose of this lesson plan is to promote Anita Sarkeesian and help her settle her grudges by forcing her ideas onto high school students, thus helping to further fill the ranks of her "army."
That's not what classrooms are for. This lesson plan has no place in any classroom anywhere. Any teacher who willingly attempts to teach it is eminently unqualified to be a teacher, and should consider seeking a career better suited to their talents and temperament.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
About Anita Sarkeesian's Harassment Tweets...
...I almost hate to be the one to spoil this, but reading all those tweets -- all of which are undeniably awful -- one detail stands out:
Of all 157 tweets, only two of them mention #Gamergate. As such, the total harassment of Ms Sarkeesian attributable to #Gamergate is 1.2%.
Until you consider that one of those two tweets is this one.
Turns out that tweet doesn't meet any real workable definition of "harassment." This individual may be expressing an opinion critical of Sarkeesian, but that's not harassment. So the total percentage of harassing tweets attributable to #Gamergate is more like %0.6.
Someone better get ABC on this, stat!
So to all of those people who are sending Anita Sarkeesian: stop doing that, you morons. And to Sarkeesian herself: your shoddy research doesn't justify this, but your passive-aggressive tactics invite it. Don't confuse this for victim-blaming because I hardly consider you to be a victim.
And to Patrick Kulp at Mashable... just because your readers evidently don't expect you to do even this level of research doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
Of all 157 tweets, only two of them mention #Gamergate. As such, the total harassment of Ms Sarkeesian attributable to #Gamergate is 1.2%.
Until you consider that one of those two tweets is this one.
Someone better get ABC on this, stat!
So to all of those people who are sending Anita Sarkeesian: stop doing that, you morons. And to Sarkeesian herself: your shoddy research doesn't justify this, but your passive-aggressive tactics invite it. Don't confuse this for victim-blaming because I hardly consider you to be a victim.
And to Patrick Kulp at Mashable... just because your readers evidently don't expect you to do even this level of research doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
Monday, January 5, 2015
On #Gamergate, CBC's Massive Ethical Fail
After months of waiting, viewers and readers concerned about the CBC's #Gamergate coverage have finally gotten a response. And that response is... underwhelming.
As One Angry Gamer reports, CBC Ombudsman Esther Enkin has responded to these concerns by saying that everything with the CBC's coverage of #Gamergate is a-OK, despite the clear evidence that it is not. In particular, Enkin replied: "The fact that you reject the negative narrative does not mean it should not be discussed.”
Well. Is that what's been going on at the CBC? The negative narrative being discussed?
Well, a meaningful discussion of a narrative requires that both sides of it participate. And as it turns out, the CBC's coverage has permitted no participation by those on the business end of the "Gamergate harasses women" narrative.
This is made crystal clear by examining the following points of the reporting, on The National by Deana Sumanac-Johnson, and on the CBC's Community Blog by John Bowman.
Point 1 - #Gamergate has become a catchphrase for the online harassment of female gamers.
Sumanac-Johnson has repeated a claim made not by neutral observers, but by by #Gamergate's opponents. As such, Sumanac-Johnson has violated the CBC ethical code's guidelines on impartiality. It reads: “We provide professional judgment based on facts and expertise. We do not promote any particular point of view on matters of public debate.”
The story relies overwhelmingly on anecdotal evidence to support this claim. The anecdotal evidence may be offered by individuals judged by Sumanac-Johnson to have sufficient expertise to make that judgement, but expertise alone is not enough. Any judgement offered by Sumanac-Johnson must be backed by a sound basis in fact. Anecdotal evidence does not provice that basis, and should not be considered to provide that basis.
Sumanac-Johnson has taken numerous women on their word that they were harassed by #Gamergate. While it may not be unreasonable for her to take their word that they were harassed, it's not reasonable to take their word that they were harassed by #Gamergate. The hashtag has attracted a great number of third-party trolls, and Sumanac-Johnson seems to have made no effort whatsoever to confirm whether or not such harassment came from an individual truly sympathetic to #Gamergate's goals. If she did, that is not evident in her reporting.
Which takes us directly to the next point:
Point 2 - The exclusion of Jennifer Dawe.
When preparing reports, reporters make decisions not only regarding which facts to report, but also which facts to ignore. This also applies to voices. They make decisions not only regarding which voices to include, and which voices to exclude.
It's now a matter of public record that Jennifer Dawe, a game developer supportive of #Gamergate, was interviewed for this story. Yet her pro-#Gamergate voice is excluded while anti-#Gamergate voices were included -- exclusviely.
Dawe was advised that her interview could be published as a "reaction" to stories on #Gamergate. That would be very good in principle.
There was only one problem with that: Dawe's interview never aired. Ever.
Her voice -- that of a female video game developer -- was excluded from a story about alleged attempts to exclude female voices from video gaming.
That's rather ironic.
Point 3 - Gamerella.
Again, what is every bit as interesting about Sumanac-Johnson's piece isn't just information she includes, but rather information that she chooses to omit.
Sumanac-Johnson spends a great deal of time on the Gamerella gamejam, in which women interested in video games get together to to develop video games. There's nothing wrong with this in and of itself. Gamerella sounds like a great way to support women choosing to enter the video gaming field. However, the inclusion of Gamerella makes the omission of Zoe Quinn's past behaviour all the more interesting.
An early event in the #Gamergate saga was Quinn's attack on a gamejam with a similar goal. This one was organized by the Fine Young Capitalists, an Ontario-based second wave feminist organization.
Quinn accused them of "enslaving women," despite the detail that 8% of the proceeds from the sale of the gamejam's product would go to the woman on whose idea the game was based. Undeterred by this fact, Quinn then accused TFYC of being "transphobic" despite the fact that their policy on the inclusion of transexuals had been written by a human rights lawyer, and was later given a thumbs-up by an Ontario Human Rights Commissioner. (One of the few times that organization has been of any worth.)
As Quinn stepped up her attacks on TFYC, the tactics her supporters used included DDOS attacks -- which Quinn herself was clearly well aware of -- and hacking their IndieGogo page in order to shut it down. Quinn's Twitter output during these episodes seemed to indicate that she was well aware of what was going on and condoned it.
If the topic was harassment of game developers keeping women out of the video gaming field, why did the harassment -- often by third-party trolls -- warrant mention, but Quinn's harassment of video game developers did not? Particularly as Quinn's deliberate torpedoing of the TFYC gamejam reduced opportunities for women to get involved in the video game field?
Point 4 - Video games victimize women?
Anita Sarkeesian herself could have written Sumanac-Johnson's line about Gamerella participants demanding "games that don't victimize women."
Of all the clear signs that Sumanac-Johnson has subscribed to a particular point-of-view and is promoting it via her reporting, this line is it.
Even if Sumanac-Johnson were simply conveying the opinion of the participants of the Gamerella gamejam, why not simply have included footage of one of the participants uttering such a remark (provided that she had such footage)? Even the optics of Sumanac-Johnson appearing to editorialize in her report contributes to an appearance of bias.
Point 5 - The CBC's coverage of #Gamergate has exclusively been of an anti-#Gamergate angle.
Sumanac-Johnson's reporting hasn't been the only CBC reporting on #Gamergate. John Bowman, of the CBC's Community Blog, wrote an article going on at length about harassment experienced by female gamers in social media.
The article focuses intently on the harassment that Anita Sarkeesian -- allegedly at the hands of #Gamergate supporters, but with the number of third-party trolls active in the hashtag it's nigh-impossible to know -- and includes the following paragraph:
/
"It's difficult to understand why a series of videos on sexist portrayals of women in video games would bring about such an extreme reaction..."
No mention is made by Bowman of the number of Sarkeesian's critiques have been confirmed as factually inaccurate. In particular, her claims that Hitman: Absolution "invites" players to murder strippers during a mission that actually penalizes the player if they happen to do so. (YouTube playthroughs of that mission posted by players invariably feature the player sneaking around the characters rather than interact with them.)
To have someone insinuate that you're misogynistic for enjoying a game that is not in fact misogynistic, and is in fact demonstrably not misogynistic, would make anyone angry. That Sarkeesian and her followers insist upon giving the targets of her critique no opporunity to confront their accuser makes it that much worse.
(I have to take a time out here for some full disclosure: I've encountered and confronted misguided pro-#Gamergate individualswho believed it would be perfectly acceptable to produce revenge porn with a Sarkeesian look-alike character. This is a taste of the anger that Sarkeesian has inspired with her demagoguery. The number of pro-#Gamergate individuals active in that discussion who condemned and discouraged this outnumbered the misguided individuals in question. Take note: while this is anecdotal evidence, those accusing #Gamergate of harassing Sarkeesian -- particularly at the CBC -- carry a burden of proof they've never satisfied, and in fact never even tried to satisfy.)
From the way the CBC has reported on #Gamergate an otherwise-uninformed person would never guess that there's two sides of the story. That there's no debate. And that simply isn't so.
Deana Sumanac-Johnson knows this. She interviewed Jennifer Dawe. So while John Bowman can theoretically feign ignorance on this point -- though few would believe him based on the anti-Gamergate agitprop appearing in his Twitter timeline -- Sumanac-Johnson cannot.
At a certain point when there is enough evidence that the CBC has set aside the very notion of its own impartiality standards it simply cannot be accepted as coincidental. So for CBC ombudsman Esther Enkin to tell individuals lodging complaints that the narrative should be discussed is pure hogwash.
In saying that the narrative should be discussed she's not wrong. The narrative should be discussed. But perhaps the narrative should be discussed by those on both sides of it. Such as, say... Jennifer Dawe. And yet we happen to know full well that while the CBC discusses the "#Gamergate harasses women" narrative exclusively from an anti-#Gamergate perspective, they sit on an interview from a woman of a pro-#Gamergate perspective.
That's not discussing the narrative. That's dictating the narrative.
Discussing the #Gamergate narrative meaningfully requires both sides to discuss it together. If the CBC is serious about discussing the narrative, my biggest question is this:
When can we expect that Jennifer Dawe interview to finally see airtime? When can those of us supportive of #Gamergate expect any kind of opportunity to rebut the anti-#Gamergate narrative being pushed by the CBC? When will we see any kind of research put into any of the CBC's #Gamergate reporting?
These are questions Enkin cannot expect to sweep aside.
As One Angry Gamer reports, CBC Ombudsman Esther Enkin has responded to these concerns by saying that everything with the CBC's coverage of #Gamergate is a-OK, despite the clear evidence that it is not. In particular, Enkin replied: "The fact that you reject the negative narrative does not mean it should not be discussed.”
Well. Is that what's been going on at the CBC? The negative narrative being discussed?
Well, a meaningful discussion of a narrative requires that both sides of it participate. And as it turns out, the CBC's coverage has permitted no participation by those on the business end of the "Gamergate harasses women" narrative.
This is made crystal clear by examining the following points of the reporting, on The National by Deana Sumanac-Johnson, and on the CBC's Community Blog by John Bowman.
Point 1 - #Gamergate has become a catchphrase for the online harassment of female gamers.
Sumanac-Johnson has repeated a claim made not by neutral observers, but by by #Gamergate's opponents. As such, Sumanac-Johnson has violated the CBC ethical code's guidelines on impartiality. It reads: “We provide professional judgment based on facts and expertise. We do not promote any particular point of view on matters of public debate.”
The story relies overwhelmingly on anecdotal evidence to support this claim. The anecdotal evidence may be offered by individuals judged by Sumanac-Johnson to have sufficient expertise to make that judgement, but expertise alone is not enough. Any judgement offered by Sumanac-Johnson must be backed by a sound basis in fact. Anecdotal evidence does not provice that basis, and should not be considered to provide that basis.
Sumanac-Johnson has taken numerous women on their word that they were harassed by #Gamergate. While it may not be unreasonable for her to take their word that they were harassed, it's not reasonable to take their word that they were harassed by #Gamergate. The hashtag has attracted a great number of third-party trolls, and Sumanac-Johnson seems to have made no effort whatsoever to confirm whether or not such harassment came from an individual truly sympathetic to #Gamergate's goals. If she did, that is not evident in her reporting.
Which takes us directly to the next point:
Point 2 - The exclusion of Jennifer Dawe.
When preparing reports, reporters make decisions not only regarding which facts to report, but also which facts to ignore. This also applies to voices. They make decisions not only regarding which voices to include, and which voices to exclude.
It's now a matter of public record that Jennifer Dawe, a game developer supportive of #Gamergate, was interviewed for this story. Yet her pro-#Gamergate voice is excluded while anti-#Gamergate voices were included -- exclusviely.
Dawe was advised that her interview could be published as a "reaction" to stories on #Gamergate. That would be very good in principle.
There was only one problem with that: Dawe's interview never aired. Ever.
Her voice -- that of a female video game developer -- was excluded from a story about alleged attempts to exclude female voices from video gaming.
That's rather ironic.
Point 3 - Gamerella.
Again, what is every bit as interesting about Sumanac-Johnson's piece isn't just information she includes, but rather information that she chooses to omit.
Sumanac-Johnson spends a great deal of time on the Gamerella gamejam, in which women interested in video games get together to to develop video games. There's nothing wrong with this in and of itself. Gamerella sounds like a great way to support women choosing to enter the video gaming field. However, the inclusion of Gamerella makes the omission of Zoe Quinn's past behaviour all the more interesting.
An early event in the #Gamergate saga was Quinn's attack on a gamejam with a similar goal. This one was organized by the Fine Young Capitalists, an Ontario-based second wave feminist organization.
Quinn accused them of "enslaving women," despite the detail that 8% of the proceeds from the sale of the gamejam's product would go to the woman on whose idea the game was based. Undeterred by this fact, Quinn then accused TFYC of being "transphobic" despite the fact that their policy on the inclusion of transexuals had been written by a human rights lawyer, and was later given a thumbs-up by an Ontario Human Rights Commissioner. (One of the few times that organization has been of any worth.)
As Quinn stepped up her attacks on TFYC, the tactics her supporters used included DDOS attacks -- which Quinn herself was clearly well aware of -- and hacking their IndieGogo page in order to shut it down. Quinn's Twitter output during these episodes seemed to indicate that she was well aware of what was going on and condoned it.
If the topic was harassment of game developers keeping women out of the video gaming field, why did the harassment -- often by third-party trolls -- warrant mention, but Quinn's harassment of video game developers did not? Particularly as Quinn's deliberate torpedoing of the TFYC gamejam reduced opportunities for women to get involved in the video game field?
Point 4 - Video games victimize women?
Anita Sarkeesian herself could have written Sumanac-Johnson's line about Gamerella participants demanding "games that don't victimize women."
Of all the clear signs that Sumanac-Johnson has subscribed to a particular point-of-view and is promoting it via her reporting, this line is it.
Even if Sumanac-Johnson were simply conveying the opinion of the participants of the Gamerella gamejam, why not simply have included footage of one of the participants uttering such a remark (provided that she had such footage)? Even the optics of Sumanac-Johnson appearing to editorialize in her report contributes to an appearance of bias.
Point 5 - The CBC's coverage of #Gamergate has exclusively been of an anti-#Gamergate angle.
Sumanac-Johnson's reporting hasn't been the only CBC reporting on #Gamergate. John Bowman, of the CBC's Community Blog, wrote an article going on at length about harassment experienced by female gamers in social media.
The article focuses intently on the harassment that Anita Sarkeesian -- allegedly at the hands of #Gamergate supporters, but with the number of third-party trolls active in the hashtag it's nigh-impossible to know -- and includes the following paragraph:
/
"It's difficult to understand why a series of videos on sexist portrayals of women in video games would bring about such an extreme reaction..."
No mention is made by Bowman of the number of Sarkeesian's critiques have been confirmed as factually inaccurate. In particular, her claims that Hitman: Absolution "invites" players to murder strippers during a mission that actually penalizes the player if they happen to do so. (YouTube playthroughs of that mission posted by players invariably feature the player sneaking around the characters rather than interact with them.)
To have someone insinuate that you're misogynistic for enjoying a game that is not in fact misogynistic, and is in fact demonstrably not misogynistic, would make anyone angry. That Sarkeesian and her followers insist upon giving the targets of her critique no opporunity to confront their accuser makes it that much worse.
(I have to take a time out here for some full disclosure: I've encountered and confronted misguided pro-#Gamergate individualswho believed it would be perfectly acceptable to produce revenge porn with a Sarkeesian look-alike character. This is a taste of the anger that Sarkeesian has inspired with her demagoguery. The number of pro-#Gamergate individuals active in that discussion who condemned and discouraged this outnumbered the misguided individuals in question. Take note: while this is anecdotal evidence, those accusing #Gamergate of harassing Sarkeesian -- particularly at the CBC -- carry a burden of proof they've never satisfied, and in fact never even tried to satisfy.)
From the way the CBC has reported on #Gamergate an otherwise-uninformed person would never guess that there's two sides of the story. That there's no debate. And that simply isn't so.
Deana Sumanac-Johnson knows this. She interviewed Jennifer Dawe. So while John Bowman can theoretically feign ignorance on this point -- though few would believe him based on the anti-Gamergate agitprop appearing in his Twitter timeline -- Sumanac-Johnson cannot.
At a certain point when there is enough evidence that the CBC has set aside the very notion of its own impartiality standards it simply cannot be accepted as coincidental. So for CBC ombudsman Esther Enkin to tell individuals lodging complaints that the narrative should be discussed is pure hogwash.
In saying that the narrative should be discussed she's not wrong. The narrative should be discussed. But perhaps the narrative should be discussed by those on both sides of it. Such as, say... Jennifer Dawe. And yet we happen to know full well that while the CBC discusses the "#Gamergate harasses women" narrative exclusively from an anti-#Gamergate perspective, they sit on an interview from a woman of a pro-#Gamergate perspective.
That's not discussing the narrative. That's dictating the narrative.
Discussing the #Gamergate narrative meaningfully requires both sides to discuss it together. If the CBC is serious about discussing the narrative, my biggest question is this:
When can we expect that Jennifer Dawe interview to finally see airtime? When can those of us supportive of #Gamergate expect any kind of opportunity to rebut the anti-#Gamergate narrative being pushed by the CBC? When will we see any kind of research put into any of the CBC's #Gamergate reporting?
These are questions Enkin cannot expect to sweep aside.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Here Lies Critical Theory, Slain by #Gamergate
Recently, I was alerted to the deeper issues of #Gamergate. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's been going on since August of this year.
From the tone of the hashtag by which it proliferates, one may think that #Gamergate is a scandal of some sort. When I first began to hear of it in August that was the conclusion that I drew. My understanding of it at the time was that the hashtag was for discussion of a scandal regarding collusion between video game developers and video game journalists. That was partially true.
More recently, Victor Vargas explained to me that the real importance of #Gamergate was in defending the artistic medium of video gaming from so-called "social justice warriors" who demanded that the medium be subjugated to their extreme agenda.
For the uninitiated, #Gamergate is less a cohesive social movement and more a group of individuals who are concerned about the state of video gaming in general. They don't want to see the quality of video games as an artistic medium degraded by journalists who will not report honestly or ethically about games. That includes not only game "reviewers," but also those who report on video games via an op/ed format. This is where the social justice warriors become an issue.
If there's any one thing that these social justice warriors -- or SJdubs as I call them -- seem to excel at it's misrepresenting the medium in order to magnify, exaggerate, or outright invent examples of sexism or misogyny in gaming.
A prime example is that of Anita Sarkeesian. No one has dismantled and revealed her misrepresentations nearly so well as Thunderf00t has.
It turns out that Sarkeesian is not the only one misrepresenting video games in order to try to advance her toxic ideology.
Recently, a game developer by the name of Henry Smith published a blogpost mocking the notion that gamers could feel oppressed as gamers. It's as confused, disjointed, and internally inconsistent as any other piece of SJdub pontificating. For example, he dismisses gamers commenting on their perception of oppression as "white men with expensive toys."
Strangely, this overlooks the number of women, people of colour or LGBT gamers who may feel oppressed specifically as gamers. Surely Smith believes that such people are oppressed as women, people of colour or LGBT, but seems to insist that they cannot feel oppressed specifically as gamers.
Well, with gamers intermittently targeted by the media, government and assorted busybody groups, who could blame them? It seems like every time there's a mass shooting in the United States video games are put under the microscope and gamers examined as ticking time bombs.
Perhaps what troubles Smith about this idea so deeply is that "gamer" is self-identification that crosses the boundaries of race, gender and sexuality. Given the idea, popular among SJdubs, of intersectionality -- an idea that holds that individual identities are multi-faceted, and so an oppressed person may experience oppression on any one or multiple bases -- Smith simply isn't adhering to the critical theory ideology very well.
I suspect that what alarms him most deeply is that, despite the idea of the intersectional identity, a white person can even possibly be oppressed, or even permitted to feel oppressed. And in order to deny any white person who feels so oppressed that sense of entitlement, Henry Smith -- by all accounts himself a white male -- instead sets out to dictate to PoCs, women and LGBT how they may or may not feel oppressed.
It seems like he's failed to check his privilege... if you believe in that kind of tripe.
It's very lazy thinking. But it turns out that lazy thinking is something he excels at. Here's an excerpt from his blogpost, another little bit of kvetching that he didn't bother to give even the most basic amount of thought to:
It's enough to make you wonder if Smith has actually seen that ad, or bothered to think about it any further than using it as a jab against the so-called "sexist" video game industry.
That's a notion disabused by doing something so simple as actually watching the advert:
Just as Anita Sarkeesian blatantly misrepresented Hitman as allegedly "inviting" the player to murder strippers, Smith misrepresents the Advanced Warfare advert by amputating the context.
In Sarkeesian's case, she claims that Hitman "invites" (her words") players to murder strippers. And while the player does, indeed, permit the player to murder some strippers, Sarkeesian ignores the detail that the game mission in question not only does not require the player to do so, but discourages the player from doing so by penalizing them for the act. In fact, the game encourages the player to avoid any interaction with the stripper NPCs (non playing characters) altogether.
Not to mention that should the player listen in to the stripper NPCs' conversation they learn that these women have been traumatized by their exploitation at the hands of a man named "Dom." Listen to that conversation and it becomes clear that the game developers intended for the player to be disgusted by these women's suffering.
Many feminists would applaud that commentary on the exploitation of strippers -- unless they're one of those "sex work is empowering" lunatic third-wave types.
That's how Sarkeesian misrepresents Hitman. Smith misrepresents Modern Warfare by simply pointing out that it -- le gasp! -- features a skantily-dressed and breathtakingly-hot woman in it. And doesn't bother to acknowledge the context in which she's presented.
In the ad, the player falls into a stall in a bazaar from a very tall height. Instead of being killed on impact, he is instead stunned. While stunned the player sees a gorgeous woman is approaching him, cooing with romantic interest.
Then the "expert player" character -- played by Taylor Kitsch -- commands his immediate attention by shouting at him "what are you doing!? We don't kiss goats."
When the player looks back to where the woman was he sees that she has been replaced by a goat -- or rather that she had been a goat the entire time.
She was never real. She was a hallucination. And that's very telling. A deeper analysis of the ad could suggest that this even offers comment on the standard of beauty this woman represents: she isn't real. Her beauty is fleeting, and perhaps even illusory. And even if she was ever real, the idea that she is available to the player, sexually, romantically or otherwise, is just as illusory.
Who should be offended by that ad? Perhaps people who kiss goats. Henry Smith seems to think the answer to that question is "women," or at least "feminists." Yet when we examine the advert more deeply than he does, we find that the cause for offfense is far more questionable than he implies.
This is just one example of why I feel video gaming, and #Gamergate in particular, will ultimately provide critical theory with the grave this toxic ideology so requires. They've picked their target poorly this time.
The modern video gamer is well-educated and not particularly fond of being told what to do or what to think; perhaps less about themselves and their hobbies than anything else. The intellectual battle being waged over #Gamergate has laid bear the bag of tricks preferred by the SJdub hordes, and gamers are proving not especially susceptible to it. They excel at identifying and outing dishonesty and deception, and that has not worked to the advantage of the SJdubs. Not in the least.
Very soon we can look forward to the following epitaph: "here lies critical theory, slain by #Gamergate."
The world will be very much better for it.
From the tone of the hashtag by which it proliferates, one may think that #Gamergate is a scandal of some sort. When I first began to hear of it in August that was the conclusion that I drew. My understanding of it at the time was that the hashtag was for discussion of a scandal regarding collusion between video game developers and video game journalists. That was partially true.
More recently, Victor Vargas explained to me that the real importance of #Gamergate was in defending the artistic medium of video gaming from so-called "social justice warriors" who demanded that the medium be subjugated to their extreme agenda.
For the uninitiated, #Gamergate is less a cohesive social movement and more a group of individuals who are concerned about the state of video gaming in general. They don't want to see the quality of video games as an artistic medium degraded by journalists who will not report honestly or ethically about games. That includes not only game "reviewers," but also those who report on video games via an op/ed format. This is where the social justice warriors become an issue.
If there's any one thing that these social justice warriors -- or SJdubs as I call them -- seem to excel at it's misrepresenting the medium in order to magnify, exaggerate, or outright invent examples of sexism or misogyny in gaming.
A prime example is that of Anita Sarkeesian. No one has dismantled and revealed her misrepresentations nearly so well as Thunderf00t has.
It turns out that Sarkeesian is not the only one misrepresenting video games in order to try to advance her toxic ideology.
Recently, a game developer by the name of Henry Smith published a blogpost mocking the notion that gamers could feel oppressed as gamers. It's as confused, disjointed, and internally inconsistent as any other piece of SJdub pontificating. For example, he dismisses gamers commenting on their perception of oppression as "white men with expensive toys."
Strangely, this overlooks the number of women, people of colour or LGBT gamers who may feel oppressed specifically as gamers. Surely Smith believes that such people are oppressed as women, people of colour or LGBT, but seems to insist that they cannot feel oppressed specifically as gamers.
Well, with gamers intermittently targeted by the media, government and assorted busybody groups, who could blame them? It seems like every time there's a mass shooting in the United States video games are put under the microscope and gamers examined as ticking time bombs.
Perhaps what troubles Smith about this idea so deeply is that "gamer" is self-identification that crosses the boundaries of race, gender and sexuality. Given the idea, popular among SJdubs, of intersectionality -- an idea that holds that individual identities are multi-faceted, and so an oppressed person may experience oppression on any one or multiple bases -- Smith simply isn't adhering to the critical theory ideology very well.
I suspect that what alarms him most deeply is that, despite the idea of the intersectional identity, a white person can even possibly be oppressed, or even permitted to feel oppressed. And in order to deny any white person who feels so oppressed that sense of entitlement, Henry Smith -- by all accounts himself a white male -- instead sets out to dictate to PoCs, women and LGBT how they may or may not feel oppressed.
It seems like he's failed to check his privilege... if you believe in that kind of tripe.
It's very lazy thinking. But it turns out that lazy thinking is something he excels at. Here's an excerpt from his blogpost, another little bit of kvetching that he didn't bother to give even the most basic amount of thought to:
That's a notion disabused by doing something so simple as actually watching the advert:
Just as Anita Sarkeesian blatantly misrepresented Hitman as allegedly "inviting" the player to murder strippers, Smith misrepresents the Advanced Warfare advert by amputating the context.
In Sarkeesian's case, she claims that Hitman "invites" (her words") players to murder strippers. And while the player does, indeed, permit the player to murder some strippers, Sarkeesian ignores the detail that the game mission in question not only does not require the player to do so, but discourages the player from doing so by penalizing them for the act. In fact, the game encourages the player to avoid any interaction with the stripper NPCs (non playing characters) altogether.
Not to mention that should the player listen in to the stripper NPCs' conversation they learn that these women have been traumatized by their exploitation at the hands of a man named "Dom." Listen to that conversation and it becomes clear that the game developers intended for the player to be disgusted by these women's suffering.
Many feminists would applaud that commentary on the exploitation of strippers -- unless they're one of those "sex work is empowering" lunatic third-wave types.
That's how Sarkeesian misrepresents Hitman. Smith misrepresents Modern Warfare by simply pointing out that it -- le gasp! -- features a skantily-dressed and breathtakingly-hot woman in it. And doesn't bother to acknowledge the context in which she's presented.
In the ad, the player falls into a stall in a bazaar from a very tall height. Instead of being killed on impact, he is instead stunned. While stunned the player sees a gorgeous woman is approaching him, cooing with romantic interest.
Then the "expert player" character -- played by Taylor Kitsch -- commands his immediate attention by shouting at him "what are you doing!? We don't kiss goats."
When the player looks back to where the woman was he sees that she has been replaced by a goat -- or rather that she had been a goat the entire time.
She was never real. She was a hallucination. And that's very telling. A deeper analysis of the ad could suggest that this even offers comment on the standard of beauty this woman represents: she isn't real. Her beauty is fleeting, and perhaps even illusory. And even if she was ever real, the idea that she is available to the player, sexually, romantically or otherwise, is just as illusory.
Who should be offended by that ad? Perhaps people who kiss goats. Henry Smith seems to think the answer to that question is "women," or at least "feminists." Yet when we examine the advert more deeply than he does, we find that the cause for offfense is far more questionable than he implies.
This is just one example of why I feel video gaming, and #Gamergate in particular, will ultimately provide critical theory with the grave this toxic ideology so requires. They've picked their target poorly this time.
The modern video gamer is well-educated and not particularly fond of being told what to do or what to think; perhaps less about themselves and their hobbies than anything else. The intellectual battle being waged over #Gamergate has laid bear the bag of tricks preferred by the SJdub hordes, and gamers are proving not especially susceptible to it. They excel at identifying and outing dishonesty and deception, and that has not worked to the advantage of the SJdubs. Not in the least.
Very soon we can look forward to the following epitaph: "here lies critical theory, slain by #Gamergate."
The world will be very much better for it.
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