Forum Overview :: Gamergate :: The presence of violence is seen as concrete, discrimination is subjective.

[quote name="serial malcontent"]I still think both sides are pretty stupid, but here: when someone gets physically assaulted and people find out about it, they tend to argue over who the assailant was. They don't argue about whether that black eye was really from falling on a doorknob. When a woman, for instance, is held back in her career or held back from front line duty or given a job in a position a lot of men were shooting for and someone talks about inappropriate behavior, that's a lot less easy to nail to the wall. Nobody's doing vaginal swabs of Zoe Quinn to collect concrete evidence and if it was ever on the table it wouldn't amount to as much as everything else. Instead, people are talking about did she and people around her do wrong and if so how much that weighs in at compared to death threats or whatever else. Can you imagine there being a group discussion anywhere near as big about whether the act of assault some kid perpetrated on another kid after playing pacman was worse than some teasing the kid endured? Even if the kid wrote a note about how pacman made him do it? It'd be open and shut that the problem was the act instead any of the circumstantial shit related to the case. Much less so with whether Sally can't become a manager because of a glass ceiling or because someone at the office once said she might be bad with people, worse than other managers, especially when Sally's boss has been told by lawyers that he is never ever to release her annual performance reviews or how they compare to the rest of the management candidates so only subjective input drives the discussion. Do you think Kotaku is going to release the smoking gun that killed expectations of adult journalism into impartial custody? Why would they? It's not in their interest. I still don't buy Last's runny bullshit arguments about causal chains because it starts from a viewpoint that reduces everything to mass culture instead of getting a grip on the behavior of individuals holistically: the only people whose behavior is centrally driven by things like videogames have nothing more significant in their lives. Pacman kid is only going to listen to the dark voice of the golden orb whispering for him to murder the bully if his family life is trash in the first place. Low self esteem girl is only going to hate herself and feel disrespected by Bayonetta if everything else already makes her vulnerable to thinking of herself as a sex object, whether she gets campy behavior or not. Everyone who has stabilizing factors will weather these assaults on rational behavior like a duck weathers water. This means Anita and her ilk are trying to solve problems which stem from people being empty enough inside to pick up life tips from something no deeper than Vogue or GTA. They're windmill-tilters. They're not even worth getting annoyed by, because they definitely don't take money and effort away from the majority of people who were going to be useful in curing ebola or honestly try learning to be better parents.[/quote]