I’ve been struck recently by how the “Gamergate” schmucks – and make no mistake, you are schmucks – seem determined to use absolutely irrelevant arguments to try and advance their stupid, frivolous cause.
(And it is a stupid, frivolous cause. Game reviews do not merit a “-gate,” because they have been fundamentally crap for decades – it is open knowledge that better than ninety percent of them are bought-and-sold marketing pap, they are mostly pointless recitations of the game’s technical specifications anyway, and if a reviewer tries to get substantive, gamer nerds will start with the death threats because they didn’t give a perfect score to the game they wanted to be perfect. So anybody saying that this is the hill they have to die on is an idiot. But I digress.)
I am reminded, frankly, of what happened with conservatives who decided that Darren Wilson had to be defended when he shot Michael Brown to death, and how they began harping on whether Brown had shoplifted just prior – which was irrelevant, because the police admitted the shopkeeper had not reported the theft and Wilson had no idea about it. Then they harped on how Michael Brown’s autopsy showed he had marijuana in his system – which was irrelevant because so what, you can have pot in your system for weeks after smoking it, and more to the point pot doesn’t turn you into a savage monster who needs to be shot to death last time I checked. Then they started complaining about how all those black people were rioting, which A) was mostly not true and B) didn’t have anything to do with Michael Brown because he was dead and therefore could not riot so much. Right now they’re harping about releasing his juvenile record, which is not relevant because who gives a shit about his juvenile record.
The point of all of these irrelevancies is to try and cast blame for other incidents to muddy the waters, to try and make Michael Brown look like he deserved to be shot, when in context there was really no cause for him to be shot. (The context in this case of course being the multiple eyewitnesses who didn’t know each other and who all gave basically the same story – of Wilson executing Brown – within hours of Brown’s death, but conservatives decided that they didn’t count because, well, all the eyewitnesses were black and you know how black people are.)
Which brings me to Zoe Quinn and Lamergate. Gamergate. Whatever.
It is not relevant if Zoe Quinn and Eron Gjoni had a bad relationship (which, clearly, they did) to the issue of “was it right for Gjoni to post private message logs on Tumblr.” Because it’s not: it’s simply gross, shaming behaviour. If Gjoni wanted to rant about his ex, he could have anonymized the details and nobody would have said that was inappropriate. (Self-pitying wank, maybe, but not inappropriate.)
(To the jackasses on John’s post claiming that Quinn was gaslighting Gjoni: jesus christ do you even realize that gaslighting is a power/control mechanism and breaking up with someone repeatedly – as happened with Quinn and Gjoni, by Gjoni’s own admission – kind of invalidates the entire point of gaslighting, which is to seclude and isolate the target. I know you read somewhere that gaslighting was bad but yeesh read past the first sentence sometime.)
It is not relevant if Quinn cheated on Gjoni to the issue of “is it appropriate for some anon 4chan loser to post nude pictures of Quinn.” It is not relevant if Quinn slept with a Kotaku reviewer to the issue of “is it appropriate for Quinn to receive death threats.” Frankly, it isn’t even relevant if Quinn slept with a Kotaku reviewer to the issue of “did Quinn get a good review because of sex” because Quinn isn’t the reviewer and the moral onus for writing an unbiased article falls on the journalist, not the subject – never mind that there is precisely zero evidence whatsoever that said Kotaku reviewer ever influenced any writing at Kotaku about Quinn’s work.
It is not relevant if Quinn is an awful human being (I don’t know and I don’t care, although I expect she is like most twentysomethings: generally well-meaning, but confused and self-interested) because Quinn’s private life simply does not impact, in any way, the pathetic sad lives of the 4chan assholes who have harassed her.
(And yes, I don’t believe 4chan either, because why the hell would you believe anything emanating from a community which, inherent in its site design, encourages irresponsibility for one’s words and actions through anonymity? I mean, let’s go back to Michael Brown for a second: have we all forgotten that 4chan encouraged the Darren Wilson fundraiser for laughs? It’s a poison place filled with poison people; it makes Reddit look like a circumspect garden party by comparison, and that is indeed the very point of the site, to allow people to wallow in this sort of thing anonymously with no consequences. Why would you ever trust their word?)
In short: I have not seen one complaint about Quinn that is relevant to the issue of the horrible things that have been visited upon her. I have seen whining and piteous, pathetic wank, most of it either obfuscating the basic truth that this is about looking for excuses to attack Zoe Quinn for her gender, or alternately proclaiming that “this is bigger than Zoe Quinn” because some have at least enough insight to realize that maybe the wildly sexist assault is counterproductive, but they don’t want to apologize really so they jump straight to “we need to move on and address the REAL issues.” As if death threats were some kind of amusing sidenote.
And if you take offense with that – hey, go over to Davis Aurini’s Youtube page and start commenting there. I’m sure he can swirl his glass of whisky and cluck his tongue in such a way as to make you feel at home.
