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Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post. Feel free to speculate in the comment section about this person’s identity!
What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
The basis of liberal democracy (that is to say classical liberal, not what is currently referred to as liberal) is maximisation of liberty. Freedom of speech is the most important form of liberty, because without freedom of speech it is impossible to effectively organise defence of the other liberties.
This means first of all that the state has no power to prevent speech that is not libel or direct incitement to violence. Categorising something as ‘hate speech’ or ‘vilification’ does not allow us to circumvent this restriction. The state will utilise any tools available to it to silence criticism. Countries with laws that forbid blasphemy use them to punish atheists and religious minorities. Countries with laws that prevent criticism of the president or the monarch use them to silence dissent. It is naive to believe that laws made with the best of intentions will not be used to defend those in power.
Second, and more relevant to the current climate, people who consider themselves liberals should not take pride in shutting down opinions or speakers that they disagree with. A climate of fear surrounding expressions of unpopular opinions breeds conformity and group-think. Bad ideas flourish in such an environment.
Incorrect opinions, no matter how vile we believe they are, can be engaged with or tolerated but not silenced. If they are indeed as self-evidently bad as we believe, then they should be easy to defeat through straightforward argument. If there is some value to them, then we will benefit immensely from engaging with them rather than utilising social pressure to dismiss them.
The value of these norms is universal, and everyone needs to play by the same rules. The basis of argument must ultimately be facts, not identity. ‘Lived experiences’ can be a useful form of evidence in certain circumstances, but they can also make people unreliable – a white person who was mugged by a black man might have a genuine fear of black people, but their trauma should not be allowed to dominate the conversation.
Abuse and harassment are of course unacceptable, regardless of who engages in them. The best way to deal with them is to disregard them whenever possible, rather than trying to construct a narrative where being the target of abuse makes a person or a position more credible. It is particularly important not to be hypocritical about abuse – a harassment campaign does not become acceptable simply because it is being conducted by your side.
What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?
The underlying basis of my ideology is belief that freedom – free markets and free speech – are more effective and more just than unfree markets and unfree speech. Not only is freedom inherently a moral good, the best way to correct historical injustices is for people to be left alone.
When people are given special treatment because they belong to a disadvantaged group it reinforces the idea that they are weak and powerless. Members of that group and their allies wield that disadvantage as a club to silence criticism and continually demand additional advantages – which benefit a small elite but never the group as a whole.
If I could be convinced that free speech and free markets were actually ineffective at achieving efficiency and real justice (rather than the potemkin justice of eternal special treatment that ‘social justice’ advocates seem to want) then I would change my position.
Explain Gamergate.
Gamergate began as a reaction to the collusion between game developers (including, but not limited to, indie game developers) and game journalists. It was drawn into the culture war when the games journalists it criticised launched a coordinated campaign to tar these critics as misogynistic, basement-dwelling virgins. By framing it as a conflict between innocent women and vile men they successfully distracted attention from their lack of journalistic integrity.
Games journalists, as products of the humanities department of Western universities, tend to lean left in their politics. They also form a small, insular group closely tied to games developers. Their audience is much more diverse and less interested in the political content of games compared to their entertainment value. Over time, this divergence led to a contempt for their audience.
As a consequence, games journalists have consistently supported games such as Gone Home or Depression Quest which fitted their political agenda at the expense of games which are well designed or fun to play. At the same time, they promoted designers with whom they had personal or financial relationships and failed to disclose those relationships.
A series of scandals came to light in 2014, culminating in Eron Gjoni’s revelations about his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn’s relationship with journalists who wrote about Depression Quest and others who awarded her prizes at Indiecade 2012. Almost immediately, games journalists at a variety of outlets closed ranks, simultaneously publishing articles that characterised the accusations as a harassment campaign designed to drive women out of the games industry. Seeing that framing oneself as a victim of Gamergate was a good way to generate sympathy and publicity, several unrelated figures jumped on the bandwagon, suggesting that they too had been harassed. Moderators at Reddit and 4chan shut down all discussion, lending credence to the accusations of censorship.
Gamergate as it now exists is primarily a boogey (cis, white) man of the social justice crowd, a way of tarring any criticism as misogynist harassment and abuse and shutting out opposing viewpoints.
Thing of Things 
I lean toward thinking this is a sincere anti. They accurately and articulately sum up the liberal case against SJ as it currently exists in the first two responses, including some points that pro-SJ people seem to have a lot of difficulty understanding, as in the paragraph starting “Incorrect opinions…”.
Unfortunately the third answer is really terrible, and could easily be a pro-SJ person’s strawman version of what GG people believe. I mean, I’ve heard every claim in there made sincerely, so it’s not impossible that it’s sincere, but it’s unusual and very disappointing to see quite so many glaring inaccuracies in one place. The GG case is made so poorly as to raise some doubt that it’s sincere, but that could just as easily be the work of an anti-SJ person who didn’t previously know much about GG and is just doing a quick, uncritical summary of the first few broadly sympathetic claims they encountered.
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Huh, this was the first one that I felt pretty confident was a pro-SJ person impersonating an anti-SJ.
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I still want to commend the author for writing probably the best impersonation yet (assuming I’m right). I wouldn’t have called it on the first two answers. But the GG part totally blew it. The group of people who believes 3 has pretty much no intersection with the group that believes 1 and 2.
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I dunno. Did anyone ever really “promote” Depression Quest as an actual entertainment product and not a silly little art game? Is that really what anyone’s mad about, that the Games Media tried to sell them Depression Quest? Does anyone on the GamerGate side actually care about Depression Quest? They call them “Literally Who”, because they want to make a show of just how irrelevant they think Zoe Quinn actually is.
I think this is a well informed and charitable fake, but I think they’ve got the emphasis wrong.
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GamerGaters don’t care about Depression Quest itself, but they do care about the coverage it received. As the author said, they see that as part of a larger pattern of journalistic bias. Games that pro-SJ people like get rewarded with positive coverage, while games that they don’t like get punished with accusations of sexism/racism/etc. That shifts the incentives on game developers in a way that not everyone is happy about.
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I was really confused too. I put pro- because the gamergate response rang false to me. There’s reasons to dislike Gone Home that have nothing to do with the content and the idea that walking simulators are taking over the game market is just blatant poppycock. But like, it could be genuine and just uninformed about the games industry?
Tbh the whole gamergate bullshit seems mostly to have been done by people who knew nothing about the history of videogames (the erasure of female developers like Dani Bunten and Roberta Williams constantly annoys me) and the actual practices of the industry (anecdotally I haven’t heard Gamergate people getting mad at Activision or EA)… So maybe that’s not a very strong indicator.
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There is an interesting divide where SJ people seem to really like games that are mostly story telling, with no real challenge for the player, which many non-SJ gamers don’t see as actual games.
Among GG, there seems to be a fear that the games they like will be banned and only certain kinds of games are allowed. I don’t think this is entirely unreasonable, as many SJ justice people do want to ban things that they dislike and Sarkeesian has never found an truly acceptable mainstream game.
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To put it simply. No. That is not the reason. The majority of my pro-SJ friends play the full gamut of games – from Overwatch and other team shooters, to roguelikes, to shmups (usually bullet hell shmups), to MGS and other stealth games, to Pokémon (incomparable), to Metroidvanias to MOBAs. (Not that many mindless only-“Call of Duty” consumers but that might just be my friend-group – I personally only really play brogue, Angband, DoomRL, Duelyst (a card game kind of like Hearthstone on a board) and good bullet hells (that usually means Treasure or Cave, but there have been some exceptions)).
Look at games sales figures. Look at the sales of Gone Home or Depression Quest or any of the Gamergate boogeymen. Compare them to the sales of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1. You really have to ask yourself – would EA and Activision really throw away such a profitable source of revenue for art games that really don’t sell that well?
I mean the banning argument is ridiculous because videogames are protected speech – see the Supreme Court case in, I think 2010, that struck down the proposed California bill in a 7-2 majority (the 2 no-votes came from opposite sides of the aisle interestingly).
If you mean effectively ban by boycotting games that they don’t like, you’d have to accept that in order for a boycott to be effective, SJs would already have to be a huge part of the market. In which case, removing “problematic” things is no less justified than localization or making games that sell well. (What is patently ridiculous is when gamers throw a hissy fit over companies deciding of their own volition to include, say, nonbinary gender options or removing an Arabic verse when localizing from the original Japanese. If you want to preserve “artistic integrity” you should probably respect artists’ wishes)
Don’t worry. Anita Sarkeesian isn’t going to take away anyone’s games.
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To make it clear, there is no storytelling in most roguelikes (with the exception of Dwarf Fortress’s generated storylines and “go make lots of money”) and while the story of Dodonpachi made me cry, it’s barely expounded upon in the actual arcade game.
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@Aapje, I think that that’s a little unfair to Sarkeesian; criticizing a game is not the same thing as finding it irredemable. On the first “Tropes vs Women” video, she says:
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Aapje: I would say that a large part of the divide between SJ and GG is definitely that GG sees video games as games (as in, like football or chess) while SJ sees video games as a storytelling medium like film or books.
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@argleblarglebarglebah
I don’t think that’s the divide. The divide is SJ see’s what Anita does as criticism and GG sees it as calls for censorship. She often uses the language of harm, not the language of art-crit, and that’s what drives gamergaters nuts. To them, she sounds like Tipper Gore and Bill O’Reilly and Jack Thompson.
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The idea that walking sims are going to take over gaming is indeed absurd – and I work in the game industry, so I’d know – but it actually is something I’ve heard GG types say many, many times.
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@absurdseagull
I’ll concede that it’s probably more the SJWs that really like those kind of games, not the more reasonable SJ people.
As for banning stuff, the conservative right have found a way around free speech. They have pressured stores like Walmart into selling only censored movies and music. It’s perfectly conceivable that the traditionalists team up with SJ people in the future to get video games censored similarly, including from major outlets like Steam. By themselves the traditionalists already seem quite a potent boycotting force. The SJ people tend to be better at gaining disproportional power by putting huge pressure on people. So I can see the traditionalists doing most of the boycotting and the SJ side doing the (left-wing) media side & pressuring the decision makers directly.
It’s a fact that SJ people like Hillary Clinton have spoken out against violent games and thus may seek new (constitutional) ways to get the same result: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/senator-clinton-on-violent-games/
As for games like Gone Home or Depression Quest, I merely explained how some of the GG feel. It’s not my opinion that these kinds of games will be successful.
The example of this that I’m familiar with, a Baldur’s Gate sequel, was made by a new studio that continued the franchise. It’s perfectly logical for fans to complain that the new developers failed do provide good continuity. These complaints are frequently leveled for non-SJ changes (to games, movies, books, etc) and then most people can agree that people can have opinions about this without being hateful maniacs. It just happened that one of the developers was a SJ person who let her politics get the better of her, so she failed to write the material consistently with the rest of the game.
There were some SJ fans of the franchise who also considered it done badly. Of course, like is usual in the culture war, all disagreements were portrayed as ‘hate of trans’ by anti-GG (just as all of GG was stereotyped). I’ve heard a lot of people who became pro-GG merely because of the bad faith behavior by the opposition.
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The problem is that the culture war makes it impossible to have a conversation like “that character in Baulder’s gate was a product of shitty tokenism”. “No, that character is great, and here is why”.
As soon as you try to have that conversation the conversation you wind up having instead is “you’re a goddamn censor”, “no fuck you, you are a filthy basement dwelling misogynist”.
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@David Simons
I think that people draw the logical conclusion that the same kind of no platforming that some SJ people advocate for some ‘problematic’ things can be used for other ‘problematic’ things. At the very minimum, you have to concede that SJ ideologies provide no clear line of safety.
@Lawrence D’Anna
Exactly. There is also the dynamic that a lot of these people have been bullied for being nerds.
So where SJ sees themselves as punching up, quite a few gamers see themselves as an oppressed group. This is one aspect why GG became such a battle ground, IMO. There is a (lower case) social justice dynamic among nerds, where they see parts of SJ as oppressors.
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I definitely think they can, but for some reason many of them choose to express their opinions in an extremely hateful manner.
Some fans of other types of media (movies, TV shows, even books) are similarly high-strung, but I think such behavior is unhealthy no matter where it appears, and the fact that many gamers consider it normal is a sign that something is wrong with the culture.
“Oh, they’re huge fans, so of course they’re going to call the writer ‘inbred’ if they don’t like something” is not the right attitude, IMO.
Yes, many gamers probably have terrible life experiences and personal issues that make them act out this way. But guess what? As far as I can tell, the exact same thing is true of most perpetrators of “toxic social justice”. That doesn’t make either set of behaviors acceptable.
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I think it is an inevitable consequence of the easy access to the debate and anonymity, which means that people hold back less and also engage in debate even when they are drunk, tired, angry, etc.
However, there is also a culture of weak manning the opposition, by seeking out the worst comments and debating against them, rather than just ignoring them. I think that this is a greater problem. If people ignore the idiots as much as possible, the debate will be much better. If people focus on the worst 10% of the other side, the debate invariably gets to a point where the reasonable get really upset over being straw manned and they get angry as well.
When people walk down the street and a crazy street preacher shouts to them, most people would walk on, even if they were hard line atheists. People know that little good can come from engaging these people. Yet online, people do so far too often.
PS. My argument about many nerds feeling oppressed wasn’t justification for bad behavior, but rather to point out that this is victim culture clashing with victim culture. Now, my opinion is that one of these victim cultures is way less reasonable than the other, but I prefer this being argued with arguments rather than people trying to vilify the entire other side.
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Actually… You’re not going to like this, but I suspect that the “SJWs” who attack hardcore gamers, militant atheists, 4channers etc. are the meanest ones because they themselves come from these cultures.
“I can do whatever I want for lulz”
+
“Social Justice matters”
=
“I can do whatever I want for Social Justice, and actually you must do whatever I want, too”
“Loudly mocking people with incorrect beliefs is cool”
+
“Social Justice matters”
=
“Loudly mocking people with incorrect beliefs about Social Justice is everyone’s moral duty”
“Yelling insults at strangers is perfectly normal when you have strong feels about a game”
+
“Social Justice matters”
=
“Yelling insults at strangers is virtuous if your opinions on Social Justice are correct, but a heinous crime if your opinions on Social Justice are wrong”
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A not uncommon strategy by the bullied is to try to escape that by becoming bullies themselves, to curry favor with the ‘pure’ bullies. Someone like Arthur Chu is a pretty clearly example.
However, I don’t think it is fair to claim that all bad behavior is imported into SJ, as there are many social justice concepts that are/can be used as rationalizations for bad behavior.
A good argument can be made that some of social justice is a mean subculture:
http://feministing.com/2013/12/20/on-cynicism-calling-out-and-creating-movements-that-dont-leave-our-people-behind/
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Depression Quest is a synecdoche and yes, it was pushed pretty hard as The Amazing Thing You Must Play for a little while there. RockPaperShotgun was one of its biggest champions.
I voted genuine, because of the GG response. The fact that there was a coordinated effort to quash the story, and to reframe the story by attacking gamers as contemptible and deserving of punishment in a series of articles coordinated by a literal and not metaphorical conspiracy, is a HUGE deal, it’s why GG is a thing, and it’s something that anti-GG people never, ever, ever admit to. Even when they are trying to appear charitable, they do not admit “There was a literal and not metaphorical conspiracy of game journalists and moderators on gaming forums who acted in concert to suppress this story, and deliberately chose to release stories about how gamers were contemptible and worthy of punishment with the stated goal of making it so that people would no longer say mean things about their friend Quinn”.
Because it’s impossible to admit that that happened while still claiming GG is wrong or pointless. That’s basically stipulating all the underlying facts of a crime while pleading not guilty.
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@huitzil.
That’s my point though, I think a real one would have said something more like what you just said.
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@huitzil, literal conspiracy? Are you referring to the GameJournoPros message?
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Yes, GameJournoPros, where they coordinated their actions in secret to push an outcome none of them admitted they were attempting to create.
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There’s only one message from that mailing list that I know of that’s relevant though: one guy unsuccessfully proposing an open letter denouncing the people sending threats to Quinn. Do you have specific reason to believe anything more than that was going on?
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There is the Pinsof firing, where a GameJournoPros member asked the other members not to hire the guy.
There is the ‘no platforming’ of Kevin Dent, where a member asked the other members not to quote the guy.
In both cases, the request seems to have been followed by all GameJournoPros websites.
In general, the claim is that the group was a bubble where certain opinions were grounds for retaliation and blacklisting. For example, this is a story by a member who was sympathetic to GG, who got this treatment:
View at Medium.com
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I’m going for pro-SJ because of this one stumble:
It just rings slightly off for me when taken in conjunction with the rest of the reply. I’m not exactly sure why, but it doesn’t quite fit.
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It just seems like a tell that the author is American.
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“This means first of all that the state has no power to prevent speech that is not libel or direct incitement to violence. Categorising something as ‘hate speech’ or ‘vilification’ does not allow us to circumvent this restriction.”
This made me smile; almost everyone can conceive of “acceptable”, “common sense” limits to freedom of speech, but anything beyond that limit is Censorship and is Bad — but no one can agree on where exactly the limit should be.
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I thought that part was pretty solid. At least among academics who discuss the subject, this response did a decent job articulating the closest thing to a consensus view that exists.
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If by concensus you mean “concensus in America”. In Europe the consensus is that hate-speech is part of “acceptable limits”. In France hate-speech is genereally treated as a particular form of libel, for instance. Countries with blasphemy laws also often phrase them as libel laws.
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There’s a few bits here that seem off. What’s the bit about markets doing in there? And the third answer doesn’t seem to quite fit with the first two.
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I think the type of Anti-GG person who would post here would know that the game journalist Zoe Quinn slept with isn’t one who actually reviewed her game. That’s strawmannish enough I’m voting Pro SJ.
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That’s what tipped me too. This is the least convincing Anti so far.
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It seems like a genuine classical-liberal-style anti-SJ position, by somebody who writes using British spellings.
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After much thinking I chose pro, but this is a hard one.
The position is clearly a libertarian one and this is an easy position to mimic: ‘free markets are good and have better outcomes compared to the alternatives. The free market of ideas is also the best.’ Done. The thing is, such a simplistic argument is regularly argued by real believers, so one cannot call it fake based on its simplicity.
So I decided by the last answer, which is just a horrible pro-GG argument, with exaggeration after falsehood. But of course, it can just be a very misinformed anti-SJer as well.
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Tough one – the wiring style is unlike what you usually see on in ToT comments, which made it hard to judge. I voted an unconfident anti
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Bleagh, tough one.
Ultimately, I’ll go with fake on this one.
“When people are given special treatment because they belong to a disadvantaged group it reinforces the idea that they are weak and powerless. Members of that group and their allies wield that disadvantage as a club to silence criticism and continually demand additional advantages – which benefit a small elite but never the group as a whole.”
This line doesn’t strike me as how someone who argues about this a lot would phrase it. Like, I’ve used the “the real SJ is ASJ because teach a man to fish” line a few times, and it generally gets laughed off. Telling people that helping them is bad because it stops them from helping themselves just doesn’t work. Someone used to arguing this point, I believe, would come at this from another perspective.
Walter’s ASJ picks
#1: ASJ, unsure
#2: ASJ, certain
#3: ASJ, certain
#4: ASJ, unsure
#5: ASJ, certain
#6: SJ, certain
#7: ASJ, certain
#8: ASJ, certain
#9: SJ, certain
#10: SJ, unsure
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Voted genuine anti, but I am significantly unsure. I have no basis for my vote other than not seeing any significant tells.
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Upon reading the comments, the discrepancy between British spellings and stereotypically American opinions is definitely a significant tell, and makes me change my position to “probably fake”.
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Could be a Canadian. Lots of American cultural influences, but the spelling tends towards the British style.
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I voted that this was Pro. The first section was ok, but the second and third read like a bad parody of Anti-SJ arguments. That was my gut feeling, but a look at the poll suggests others do not agree.
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