djpretzel

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I don't understand... you give Anita credit JUST for getting people talking about a topic, being an "agitator," "agent of change," etc. even when you acknowledge that there are good reasons to have numerous objections to both the form AND substance of her actual work. If she's been productive in getting people talking, surely #gamergate has been productive in getting people talking, too. As for anything substantive/tangible, well...

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I don't want to derail TOOO much (I find myself saying that a lot... maybe that's a bad sign? ), but... couldn't one use this logic to say that Christians should abandon the name of "Christianity"? Or Muslims Islam? Or (secular example), feminists feminism? Or, based on North Korea being the only officially atheist country and being terrible, that atheists should look for a new banner, too? Plenty of movements/ideologies/whatever had completely ridiculous & unsavory origins and STILL have fanatical, extremist groups within them that make up some percentage. I think leveling objections and directing discourse at specific actions and ideas is preferable to urging name change as any sort of catharsis, but that's just me.... we've remained OverClocked ReMix since the beginning; there's something to be said for name recognition. Mobilizing a group to reinvent themselves under a new brand requires the type of leadership I'm not sure exists, in the case of #gamergate? That being said, I don't really feel comfortable equating #gamergate with any of the above, because I'm still cloudy on what the overall agenda is at this point in time. I'm not sure a cogent enough distillation exists to really grok what's being rallied for and/or raged against. What would #gamergate "success" even look like? Anyone?

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone - and props to timaeus for the breakdown, too! I didn't want to ramble on for too long in the writeup, but one of the reasons I wanted this to be #3000 is because I feel like it was kind of a risk, for me. It's not a genre that's rocket science, perhaps, but it's hard to get the details right with emulations, entirely in the digital realm. It's also not really a style I've done much work in, period, although it's the type of music I listen to all the time. At any rate, I wasn't exactly sure if people would dig it and see in it what I see in it - the allure of the core idea of doing "Dark World" as a laid-back, somewhat trippy 60's rock groove. I'm really glad it resonated with more listeners than I thought it might, and it really motivates me to do more music in general. I may never return to this particular style ever again, but I'm glad I gave it a shot, and I'm glad it found an audience!

Yep. It's already fixed on the live site, btw.

A consolidated 1-3000 torrent is imminent - stay tuned!

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Should be fixed now!

Aight, you weathered the storm. Agreed on most points.

Again, a point to Bleck. Larry, weather the storm, for on it comes... in LARGEFONT, no less ... Cultural criticism is not equivalent to fighting for equal rights. Do not delude yourself otherwise. When it comes to experiencing art, there are no rights, other than the right to abstain. That's almost the POINT of art itself!! If we're going to mount a coordinated response to Roger Ebert's stance that vidya games will never be art, we shouldn't start by treating them as LESS than art. Equating ideology-infused diatribes about "offensive" content in art to the direct opposition of legal injustice & civil rights inequalities is a phenomenally bad idea. I'm surprised you'd touch it with a ten-foot pole. One group is arguing that artists are misusing their freedom; the other group is arguing for freedom itself. These are not equivalent, in the same way that an orangutan is not equivalent to an umbrella. Anita is not Malcolm X. She's the 1960's grad student who wrote lengthy analyses of race in modern fiction that are long forgotten, while actual protesters were out getting shot, sprayed with water hoses, etc. fighting for tangible, real-world policy change that affected their lives. There's a difference, in the same way that the nation of Russia is larger than a Cocker Spaniel. Storm over, go clean yourself up.

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I'd contend that she's not advocating for what I could consider social progress at all, but I can certainly agree that she's close enough to the ballpark that many will simply misconstrue her message as the more reasonable, positive, & progressive sentiment I wish it actually were. That's basically what Larry is saying, and it's hard to argue against. Only time will tell. That does feel like a rather patronizing assessment, to me, but perhaps this is a situation where pragmatism & patronizing go hand in hand. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't dissect and critique things here. I still don't think someone deserves a free pass from making ridiculous claims and reductionist, stale arguments, even if there's a good peripheral cause...

She's making some people think about these things, that's true. She's pissing other people off into a blind rage completely devoid of thought and apparently even basic decency. And still others aren't really thinking per se, they're just blindly nodding their heads in agreement with anything sold to them as promoting equality. Net desirable effect? Uncertain... agreed on videos, though.

Here's the thing... her message, at its very core, only needs a couple tweaks for me to completely support it, 110%. It just needs to go from this: ...to this: The two statements are soooooooo frustratingly close. And yet so very, very far... if you think the first version is hyperbole/travesty, watch her videos Larry's more optimistic than I am; I don't think we get where we need to be until the discrepancy between the above statements is fully understood and appreciated, and Anita does NOT appear to be facilitating that. This shift should be motivated by a desire to improve the medium, not by fear of offending and suffering the consequences. Any outcome achieved by the latter is completely compromised and cancerous from the outset.

Ah, well, I don't feel the need to recapitulate dozens of pages of back-and-forth that I'll assume you read, but... she's regurgitating second-wave feminist rhetoric that was previously used to unsuccessfully argue for the censorship of pornography, and she represents a step backwards from third-wave feminism's more pragmatic emphasis on equal rights. In terms of the current style of games staying around, the way she forms her arguments makes it sound like she thinks they should not. If any of the things she cites as problematic and directly correlates (without a shred of causal evidence) with real-world behaviors and injustice are true, the current style of games should NOT stay around. You're not framing her shtick accurately. She's far more zero-sum than you're painting. Perhaps you're just saying "yes, yes, that's all well and good, but we know SOME of those games will stay around, and we'll have to be okay with that..." - in which case I think you'd be surprised how quickly you'd have a patriarchy sticker plopped on your forehead by someone who took offense at such defeatist (i.e. reasonable) notions. Whether or not she's gotten a lot of silly gamers mad at her for hatin' on they games doesn't read on that, as far as I'm concerned... I'm not personally threatened, I'm just disappointed. I'm disappointed at her most aggravated haters, sure, but they didn't have very far to fall in my mind. I'm actually MORE disappointed by the lack of intellectual maturity of that cross-section of the gaming world that takes her seriously and doesn't have the faculties or context to know that they're being fed second-rate dogma from a bygone era... it's more than a little embarrassing, really, although I bear the curse of a relatively flat learning curve when it comes to high expectations... There's also the commodification of outrage issue at play... or you can call it "the offense industry" if you prefer: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/09/16/the-offense-industry-on-the-offense/ - I think the Internet has really ushered in an entirely new sphere of content that one should be rightfully cynical towards. There's money changing hands, scandal and outrage sell, and moral compasses are being thoroughly milked for ad revenue. You plop an "equality" label on someone's agenda and people stop scrutinizing it. That same individual gets attacked/targeted by morons, and not only do people stop scrutinizing it, they champion it, because to do otherwise would be to endorse death threats & death threat mentality. Are you for Anita... or are you for Death? And threats? Pick a side. God forbid a third option exists... Now I think you're making the "it doesn't matter" because she's an "agent of change" argument, but that seems rather hasty. Right now we've got a divisive shit show. It's what happens after the dust settles that matters. Fingers crossed.

I think you have to COMPLETELY decouple the threats from the ideological arguments. I think we can agree that no one deserves death threats for arguing about video games, however inanely and polemically they may do so. I'm getting a little tired of these threats ballooning into media events, because I feel like they should be handled by the appropriate authorities and not become spectacle; most problematically, it gives attention to the perpetrators who clearly seek it, but I'm also afraid it imbues the targets with an unearned credibility in the eyes of some. Neither outcome is desirable; arguments should be evaluated on their merits & threats are the actions of cowards and do not facilitate that evaluation taking place. There's a colloquial thinking that goes something like this: The reasoning is that anyone desperate enough to threaten violence just to prevent an argument from being expressed must obviously hold a flawed counterargument. I think, instead, the point is this: anyone desperate enough to threaten violence just to prevent speech is pathetic. It doesn't really speak to the issue itself; people have done bad things in the name of GOOD causes, BAD causes, and everything in between.

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Well, if we're gonna use the word "obnoxious"... your entire response is obnoxious. "Hey buddy"?? You can't just accuse someone of cherry picking, by the way - you have to show how the data being cited is incomplete or is being carefully selected from a larger pool of data with less clarity or competing/conflicting results. You haven't done that, uh.... let's see.... at all. You've just made the baseless accusation, and then called the writing style obnoxious, and then said "hey buddy"... Also, uh... there's no specific hard & fast START date on third-wave feminism. So being glib and saying "Hey buddy" while in the same sentence asserting an unprovable point ("been around since the 70s") seems problematic. The term "third-wave feminism" itself was coined in 1992 as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism. The article also says: Basically - and I've really kept this civil and not personal as much as possible - you're full of shit. At least with regards to this specific post. Go now and become less full of shit in what way seems best to you. Cool. I think the breakdown of gender feminism vs. equity feminism is especially helpful - much earlier in this thread I was using "second-wave" and "third-wave" as poorly-chosen stand-ins for these two adjectives, which are far more descriptive & accurate. If I were putting on my "steel man" argument hat, as Dhsu called it (hadn't heard that before), I guess the only point I would make is that gender feminism can be wrong about sex differences being completely socially constructed but still be right about some of the specific aspects that are less biological and more cultural, or that show a clear cultural causation, etc. It's easy to pick apart a target that espouses a 100% nurture position on any given nature vs. nurture issue, but that just invalidates the thesis statement... some of the supporting arguments can still be viable. However, he is less concerned with those arguments because they are not specifically part of his focus with the book. He is not seeking to undermine feminism at all, or even gender feminism specifically, but rather the notion of the human mind being a blank canvas and social construction being the only brush.

Just revisiting this for a second, for everyone's benefit: http://www.pasadena.edu/files/syllabi/txcave_18360.pdf I found THE relevant excerpt from The Blank Slate available online!! Make me very very happy and read it There are numerous citations but unfortunately they are not included in the excerpt. Well worth buying the book; Pinker documents all his claims. This is a lot of what I've been saying, only much better. There's even a brief mention of Paglia. To clarify, Paglia is someone I find interesting and who tells hard truths and makes awesome points, but also goes off the deep end for me, personally, rather often. Pinker, on the other hand, is rock solid. If the only thing this thread resulted in was a few people reading this excerpt in full, I'd be damn happy. See if you disagree with ANY of it. If you do, I'd love to hear why, with specifics.

Your rephrasing is consistently getting things wrong... her first point is that feminism has "placed young women in danger" by "hiding the truth about sex from them" - the exaggerations about prevalence are part of that equation, in her view, not because they argue that rape is more common than one might think, but because of the contractual redefinition that she describes right in the second paragraph. She's saying that candy-coating reality doesn't change reality, basically. I'm not entirely sure how one would make that an evidence-based argument... I'm not a full-time apologist for Paglia; she is an agitator and will indeed lapse into bold statements for shock value or rhetorical effect. In this case, I'm not sure the claims are specific enough that I'd hold her to task for not supporting them, but I agree with your observation in general. Not when any discussion about not getting drunk at a frat party ends up in accusations of victim blaming, which again she explicitly discusses. Numbers & statistics are abstract... having real world advice about situations where you need to be cautious is, I personally think, far more valuable. As a common example, plenty of people who drive every day freak out about flying, in spite of the dramatic & publicized statistical difference in odds. When feminism closes the door on any guidance of this nature as somehow exonerating the male perpetrator and blaming the female victim - which I agree that it CAN be, coming from the wrong people at the wrong times for the wrong reasons - it nevertheless candy coats reality. Your point seems to be that feminism will help prepare women by scaring them through statistics. I know it sounded good when you wrote it, but think about it some more. I don't think it describes reality, and I think that even if it did, it wouldn't be a good idea. Paglia's point is that rape doesn't NEED its stats inflated, that being cautious (or even "afraid") is advisable, and that no amount of equality attained through legislation or cultural reform will change basic human psychology. Okay.... why not? It makes sense to me... she's arguing that feminism is out of sync with reality. Why would biology not be relevant to such a point? You need to re-read; these comments are not indicative of comprehension of the material. She was not at all making the argument that things were "better" in the past. Some of this might be coming from a lack of familiarity with her work, but when she talks about "towns and villages" she's talking human history... centuries, not decades... so your DOJ chart is kinda moot. I'd like to point out another way your DOJ chart is moot, just for educational purposes: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Violent_crime_rates_by_gender_1973-2003.jpg Violent crime, including rape, has actually decreased in general... To cherry pick a single type of crime and look to feminism as a compelling factor in its reduction would be to ignore the overall trend... However, it's all irrelevant, because she didn't claim what you're saying. She wasn't saying things were BETTER back in, as you put them, the "good old days," she was merely saying that campus life - going off to college, away from the home/community - represented a fundamentally NEW type of threat for women, absent historically effective (to SOME extent) protections. She then is ALSO making the claim that feminism is failing to prepare women for that new threat. Nowhere does she say that it would be preferable for said women to not be going to college in the first place, or that feminism directly created the threat. At any rate, I think you read the article too quickly and started forming arguments against what you imagined it said. I've done that myself before, no worries. You're also focusing on numbers, but none of her arguments really hinge on numbers. There's plenty to object to, though... personally, she's too pessimistic (even for me!), and I think she misses the role that technology can potentially play when she talks about things having ALWAYS been a certain way and insisting that they'll stay that way indefinitely. http://everything2.com/title/Camille+Paglia%252C+date+rape%252C+and+me Very interesting commentary on this article, worth reading!! It had been YEARS since I visited everything2... fun site to poke around on...

Well, it's Time, and it's a brief opinion piece. Try this: http://www.mtsac.edu/~jgarrett/RAPE%20AND%20MODERN%20SEX%20WAR.pdf You too, Andy. This is a more substantive version of what she was saying in the Time piece. See what you think. I'm sure you'll find objectionable passages but perhaps a bit of insight as well. Pertaining to Andy's question about her overall point: