There’s a lot of stuff flying around the Internet right now about “Gamergate”, a supposed scandal at the supposed heart of supposed gaming that supposed gamers are supposedly crusading against. As you may be able to guess from all the “supposed”s, there’s a lot of bullshit out there. So first, I’ll sum up what “Gamergate” is.

It started with Zoe Quinn, an independent game developer. She had an ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, and the break-up was ugly. Gjoni started airing their dirty laundry online, specifically on 4Chan, starting on a blog he created specifically to do so, posting evidence that she’d cheated on him. Naturally, people were extremely upset that he’d apparently hacked into her private chat logs that she’d cheated on him that she was sleeping with game journalists. Yes, that’s what they’re all upset about! The slight against gaming journalism! Because it’s their ethical responsibility to avoid conflicts of interest because it’s her responsibility to avoid forcing them into conflicts of interest with her sexy ladyparts.

Quinn responded by pointing out that a) her bad break-up is none of the Internet’s business, b) her ex-boyfriend is not an unbiased source for discussions of her behavior, and c) none of the game journalists ever did anything unethical as a result of these relationships. 4Chan responded, as all reasonable Internet gaming enthusiasts do, with doxxing, death threats, and slut shaming. Followed by calling Quinn a liar for accusing them of doxxing, death threats and slut shaming. Oh, and they also insisted that they couldn’t be misogynists, because they prominently backed a group of female gaming developers who weren’t Quinn (called the Fine Young Capitalists). While discussing on their boards how nobody could accuse them of misogyny if they backed a group of female gaming developers who weren’t Quinn, so they should do it as another way of getting back at her.

The Internet then exploded a bit, with several prominent gaming websites and several celebrities (including Joss Whedon, who gets special mention in all this because Joss Whedon is one of the patron saints of the Internet) pointing out that this is all a huge shitshow that gives gamers a terrible reputation. This led to a bunch of people a) claiming that this wasn’t about feminism and they weren’t misogynists, it was about journalistic ethics and they were merely concerned about the clear ethical issues involved; and b) Quinn was a lying (insert gendered slur here) who had it coming and by the way her lies and sluttiness are also a reason for Anita Sarkeesian to shut up too because they both have ladyparts so they’re in on it together!

This, in turn, led to a lot of people being banned from comments sections as trolls. At which point the cry of “FREEZE PEACH!” went out across the land, and the trolls insisted they weren’t being banned for being trolls, they were being banned because journalists hated being called out on their clear pro-sexy-ladyparts bias. Which led to Kotaku telling their journalists they couldn’t contribute money to games they wanted to see made, because hey sure why not.

At this point, there are a number of people out there saying, “You know what? If this is what being a ‘gamer’ is associated with, fuck gamers everywhere. I’d rather see that particular label die in a fire.” And people coming back with long, defensive posts that can all be tl;dr’d down to “#notallgamers”. Oh, and Anita Sarkeesian had to move out of her home because she’s getting death threats from people who know her address over her latest video about women and video games, which isn’t actually related to any of the stuff with Zoe Quinn but should help you understand why people are calling gamers an entitled culture of creepy fucked up sociopaths right now.

So now that you know what’s going on, what do I have to say about it? Apart from all the opinions that I not-too-subtly encoded into the above summary, of course. Well…

1) Zoe Quinn is not responsible for this shit. Whatever went on between her and Eron Gjoni is none of my business, your business, or literally anyone’s business in the world except for her, Eron, and the other people directly involved in the break-up. I am not their relationship counselor, and am not going to pass judgment on anything either one did to cause the break-up, because I don’t know about it and neither do you, even if you read Gjoni’s posts on the subject because it is not a particularly great leap of logic to suggest that someone upset enough to hack into other people’s private communications and post them online a) may have some other relationship issues, and b) may not be self-aware enough to admit to them in public.

Either way, Gjoni’s posts are plain and simple an attempt to make his ex’s life miserable by airing dirty laundry online. This is not a “journalistic scandal” that needs to be exposed by public-minded gamers for the good of the industry, it’s an ugly break-up that some assholes have taken as a chance to pile onto a woman they already didn’t like that much due to her twin decisions to make games and be female. You know how you can tell? Simple. The gaming journalists involved are getting a free pass. They made the decision to sleep with someone involved in the industry, despite knowing that this could be viewed as a conflict of interest, and they have not suffered any consequences from their employers or from the gamers involved. If this was anything other than slut-shaming, they’d be getting fired or at the least suspended, and they’re not. Primarily because they didn’t slant their coverage to be pro-Quinn one little bit. If anyone tells you that Quinn’s bad behavior is responsible for her current position, they are either lying to you or to themselves.

2) I don’t believe 4Chan when they say they didn’t do it, and I don’t fucking care. It does need to be mentioned at this point that 4Chan insists that Quinn is faking all the harassment she’s receiving, and using them as a convenient target to make herself look good because she knows that nobody will believe them due to 4Chan’s reputation as a hivemind of vicious, unrepentant shitbags who love making people’s lives miserable. To which I point out: Hey, maybe you would be more likely to be believed if you weren’t a hivemind of vicious, unrepentant shitbags who love making people’s lives miserable. It is just as easy to fabricate evidence that other people are fabricating their evidence (“we have undoctored screenshots proving that their screenshots are doctored!”) and 4Chan explaining that they didn’t do anything wrong this time is a bit like the Joker pleading ‘Not Guilty’. (And this also goes for anyone claiming Sarkeesian, or Phil Fish, or anyone else involved is faking evidence of harassment. The claims are weak, and frankly if you default to believing the harassers over the harassed, then that should indicate that you need to sit down and have a long, hard think about what that says about you.)

3) If gamers want people to stop talking about “the death of gamers”, they need to do more than just point to all the people who aren’t harassing women. Look, I like video games as much as the next person. I like games in general as much as the next person. But the fact of the matter is, when someone is getting death threats for suggesting that video games and the people who play them have issues with women, it makes me not want to be associated with public enthusiasm for video games. Because that is the face of the brand right now. “Gamer” = “maladjusted manchild who can’t take criticism and endlessly harasses anyone who disagrees with them”. It is going to take a stronger response than “Hey, I didn’t do that!” to counteract that. It is going to take pushback. It is going to take calling out the bad behavior in no uncertain terms. If you’re concerned that you’re being rude to a fellow gamer, or that you’re not giving a fellow gamer a chance, or that gamers need to stick together? This is a good time to fall for the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. People who do this shit aren’t really gamers. They’re assholes who play video games.

4) The Famous Young Capitalists need to be careful about who they’re getting involved with. On the one hand, I feel tremendous sympathy for them in all this. They’re pretty much just innocent bystanders who are being used as props, and they do seem to have some legitimate beefs with Quinn (that are also not anybody’s business, really, unless you’re interested in the minutiae of professional gaming development). But on the other hand, just like gamers in general, the FYC do need to realize that one of the strategies that unreasonable people use to avoid being called to account for their actions is to count on them being reasonable. They count on people saying, “Well, I believe in the principle of free speech and free association, so I don’t want to flat-out tell these people to fuck off, because shutting down conversation is the kind of thing unreasonable people like them do.” But that’s the whole point–the other side is not arguing in good faith. They are only keeping the lines of communication open to allow them more opportunities to harass. They are using the Fine Young Capitalists to make themselves look reasonable in order to continue making women’s lives miserable through threats and intimidation. And so while I won’t tell the FYC that they have to stop, I will ask them: Do you enjoy being used like that? Is whatever you’re getting out of this in money and publicity worth it?

5) Joss Whedon is not actually the patron saint of the Internet. I love his work, I think he’s a great guy, and he should legitimately be proud of himself for having spoken up in defense of Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, because the people who are being assholes about this are making a good effort to harass and assault everyone who stands up for them in order to isolate them and silence them. (I’ll admit to a tiny, marginal amount of worry about posting this entry. But the more people that speak up, the less time and effort they can devote to any one of us. The remedy to isolation is unity.) But people like Joss Whedon are not the heroes, here. Just being a celebrity who’s willing to call himself a feminist doesn’t make him special. The people who are special are people like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian who get motherfucking death threats and go on with it anyway, because they’re not going to be silenced when they’re doing the right thing. They’re the heroes. Joss Whedon is the sidekick.

(UPDATE: Edited to correct a factual error–Gjoni did not go straight to 4Chan, they picked up on it all on their own. This makes him look marginally better and them look marginally worse.)

Some some of you may have heard that story about the venerable Canadian history magazine The Beaver changing its name because of the confusion it caused over exactly what kind of magazine it was, and apparently also because a lot of school Internet filters blocked it.

It was a funny enough story that even the New York Times ran it, but it got me wondering: now that pubic waxing is apparently de rigueur among young women, are female genitals even called beavers anymore? I mean, when the hair is gone, the resemblance pretty well disappears.

So will “beaver” wind up being one of those funny little linguistic artifacts, like calling a remote control a “clicker” decades after they switched from sonics to infrared, or should the magazine just have held out until we start calling women’s privates “chinchillas”?

Bonus: Apparently the term “beaver” in this sense was popularized by Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions. I couldn’t find Vonnegut’s drawing of a beaver anywhere online, so here is his rendition of an asshole.

Not too long ago, I jokingly argued in favour of politicians being killed before they reach their natural expiration date. It might not have been a particularly good joke–that was certainly the opinion of a number of commenters–but it was a joke. I’d hope anyone reading it would be able to divine the post’s humourous intent, rather than a murderous one.

In the absence of any additional context, I can’t determine the intent of the person who posted the “Should Obama be killed?” facebook poll from the screen capture at Pam Spaulding’s blog. Perhaps there’s a clue in the Obama image attached to the poll–it’s too small for me to see clearly on any of my immediately available monitors.

Spaulding points out that facebook users can flag the poll as offensive, and she and TalkingPointsMemo.com (where I first learned of the thing) are reporting that the facebook poll app is currently down. There’s some debate in comments over whether the two situations are related, but even if they aren’t, it seems likely that particular poll won’t reappear.

I really wish there was some indication of what the creator of the poll was trying to accomplish by creating it. Knowing whether it’s the work of Trey Parker or Orly Taitz would help me. Part of me wants it to be the work of an artist who’s trying to make some sort of point. Another part fears it was written by some hapless schmuck who just didn’t see how another stupid facebook poll could create problems. God knows I’ve publicly posted things without considering how they might affect those who read them. If I gave that too much thought, I wouldn’t post anything at all.1

The commenters at TPM, at least, don’t seem to have as much problem as I do ascribing intent to the pollster. I haven’t read all the replies to the post, but the general concensus there seems to be that the person who created the poll is attempting to incite the pollees in some fashion. And they probably are, but on the basis of the available evidence, I’m not sure the pollster’s attempting to incite what the TPM commenters believe they are. The discussion of (and general support for) serious legal ramifications for the pollster worries me for a number of reasons. Some of them are even not entirely selfish.

It takes a lot for words to offend me2. So, absent a more specific indicator of what the pollmaker was going for, this poll doesn’t really bother me. Beyond the question of whether it’s tasteful to ask if someone should be killed3 , beyond the writer’s sense or lack of same in specifying the sitting US President as the potential target, what did this person do?

They asked a question. Given the nature of the question, who asked it is something the Secret Service is understandably going to want investigate. I’d think the people who answered “Yes”, if there were any, are also going to find themselves under a bit of a microscope–if I was the SS, I’d be more worried about those folks than the pollster, myself.

It was a provocative question, and I don’t know why the person who asked it wanted to provoke people. Until I do, the degree of vitriol being aimed at the (as far as I know, anonymous) questioner makes me uneasy.

People saying “This guy’s an ass”–that reaction makes sense to me.

Accusing the pollster of deliberately inciting people to violence against the President? I’ve got to admit, I don’t see it, but I’m 1) Canadian, 2) inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, and 3) not as a general rule the biggest fan of politicians.

Wanting the person responsible arrested, solely on the basis of the phrasing of this particular poll…? Chris is a million times more qualified to discuss that than I am, but I’d hope that such an action would be an overreach, even for the American legal system. If it isn’t, that’s a legal net cast mighty wide–wide enough to catch artists, comedians, bloggers with a dubious sense of humour…

-Foley

PS: I wonder what the reaction would’ve been if the poll’s subject had been whether Dick Cheney should be killed. Or Osama bin Laden.

Disclaimer: The positions expressed in the preceding post–actually, in every post Andrew Foley’s ever made–do not necessarily reflect the opinion of MightGodKing.com, Christopher Bird, or Andrew Foley. Nothing to see here, move along.

1. Which is partly why you haven’t seen anything from me here recently. After five years of blogging, knowing someone’s actually reading this stuff is more than a little disconcerting. [↩]
2. Upsetting me, on the other hand–? Dead easy. [↩]
3. Probably not, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be funny or shouldn’t be asked. [↩]

George Galloway plans to sue Jason Kenney, Bernie Faber and CTV.

Ezra Levant on George Galloway’s being barred from entering Canada:

Good friends, and friends of freedom of speech say I’m not being consistent — that I should be for Galloway’s right to be wrong. I am; I don’t think he should be arrested for being a racist, terrorist-loving buffoon. I think he should be arrested for raising money for a criminal terrorist organization. That’s not speech I’m against, that’s fundraising for terrorism I’m against. But that’s not my main point: my main point is that Galloway has no “right” to come to Canada. He’s not Canadian.

I’m all for his free speech — elsewhere.

First off, charges that Galloway has raised money for Hamas are wildly overblown. His participation in/organization of the Viva Palestina aid convoy only qualifies as “aid to Hamas” on the grounds that Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinian people, and thus any aid to Palestinians (the vast majority of whom only manage to survive now thanks to various international aid programs and food donations) has to go through Hamas.

(This would be one of the many reasons that the quasi-official nature of Palestinian governance is a neverending bugbear from an international law standpoint: if Hamas is the legitimately elected government of Palestine then without an official declaration of hostilities Canada can’t actually do anything (because you can’t really say that an entire other country is a criminal organization without completely debasing the term), but if Hamas isn’t a legitimately elected government then Canada is ignoring gross human rights violations on the part of Israel that it has sworn to uphold and is thus violating its own treaty obligations. Many other First World countries have this same thorny issue, which is why none of them ever really officially decides what Hamas actually is.)

Of course, that aid also has to go through Israel, but apparently the fact that the Israelis let the entire convoy through – except for a fire engine and boat which the Egyptian government pre-emptively disallowed, and if anybody can explain why a fire engine would be dangerous please let me know – would imply that they didn’t think Galloway’s “fundraising” was dangerous to the state of Israel. Considering that the aid consisted entirely of humanitarian materiels (food, blankets, toys for kiddies, et cetera), it’s not surprising that the Israelis would let it through. Then again, until the Americans complained, the Israelis weren’t letting dried pasta into Gaza. So who knows.

Oh, and as much as Bernie Faber of the Jewish Defense League might claim otherwise, Galloway wasn’t “smuggling” goods to Hamas. Smuggling traditionally does not involve the type of political grandstanding for which Galloway is known. Because that’s not smuggling. Galloway has never been caught committing any sort of crime, and this is because Galloway knows exactly where the line he can’t cross is. One might, if one was so inclined, draw parallels to religious bigots who have a good grasp of the boundaries of criminal hate speech laws and who metaphorically are all too willing to walk right up to that boundary and wiggle their ass at it.

But none of this is the real issue. The real issue is that Levant’s suggestion that this is an immigration or administrative problem is the worst kind of semantics. It’s semantics because this is entirely about the Conservative government choosing to abridge Galloway’s ability to speak in Canada, using a cheap excuse to do so.

Consider the staggering incongruity of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in complaining that Galloway supports a terrorist organization when Kenney himself attended a rally of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran in 2006, less than a year after the Canadian government declared it to be a terrorist group and a declaration which was upheld by the current Conservative government as recently as this past November. (In fairness, once people found out about Kenney’s attendance, he first claimed that he hadn’t attended the rally, and then when pictures showed up of him at the rally, claimed he hadn’t known it was the PMOI holding the rally and that he had been tricked. Given that Jason Kenney is a very, very stupid man, this is actually slightly plausible. But only slightly.) Given this context, you might think that Kenney’s judgement of Galloway’s potential security risk is suspect, but apparently Ezra Levant trusts him.

Levant’s argument is that Galloway’s supposed criminal acts (for which he has never been tried, because no judge would ever convict him, because as much as certain parties might wish otherwise delivering food and medicine to Palestinians is not yet a crime in Britain or Canada) are good reason to prevent him from speaking in Canada. That’s his position. He can say “no, I think it’s a good reason to bar him from entering Canada and thus as a consequence he can’t speak,” but when Galloway’s entire purpose for visiting Canada is to speak then the two are obviously conflated and pretending otherwise is, as stated, nothing more than semantics.

It’s just the sort of useful semantics that lets Ezra Levant pretend he isn’t an enormous hypocrite, that restricting George Galloway’s ability to speak isn’t restraining free speech because he can describe it a different way thanks to the technicalities of Canada’s constitution. But of course he is being enormously hypocritical, because freedom of expression isn’t derived from the concept that it’s something that just sort of belongs in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but from the idea that speech has intrinsic value in and of itself. Levant has spent the better part of the last few years passionately arguing the latter point; now that it’s become inconvenient for him to do so, he has cheerfully abandoned it.

Which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.