So how much do some angry gamebros hate Anita Sarkeesian? Enough to send me death threats … for writing about the death threats sent to Anita Sarkeesian.
Shortly after my post on the threats against Sarkeesian went up on Thursday, I got these messages sent to me as anonymous “asks” on Tumblr. These were all in succession, in this order; I’m pasting each one individually instead of the whole bunch at once so you can read them in the order in which I got them. [TRIGGER WARNING: Violent threats; I’m putting them past the jump.]
.
.
.
.
There is a certain irony in that last comment, whether or not it came from the guy (and I’m pretty damn sure it was a guy) who sent all the threats that immediately preceded it. It’s pretty clear to me that Sarkeesian has no need to fake anything; obviously her haters aren’t exactly shy about sending death threats to people they don’t like.
And if this is what my inbox looks like for merely writing about Sarkeesian, I can only imagine what her inbox looks like. I suspect she gets threats like these all the time; the reason she called the police about several of the threats she got this week is that the threateners posted her personal information as well.
In the interest of full disclosure: Here and here are screenshots of these messages as they appeared in my Tumblr inbox; I’ve blurred out the personal information of the people sending me cat pics.
Needless to say, I’ve turned off anonymous asks on my Tumblr blogs.
IB is reaching Woody levels of boring and irritating, requesting a troll challenge to be put in place
For IB:
A threat is defined as “spoken or written words intending to intimidate or menace others”, see http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Threats
What David posted are threats. You don’t get to redefine words that already have a widely accepted and understood definition.
And I’m standing next to gilshalos in the standing ovation section.
What I see is people trying to define nothing as rape until the word has no use in real life, and others pushing back against that.
It’s kinda like racism. We got to the point where a black man gets murdered in cold blood for no reason, and people would rather claw their own eyes out than see the racism.
We all need to take threats very seriously. We didn’t take Elliot Rogers threats seriously and look what happened. Sorry I’m not trying to blame anyone, he is the one to blame.
I’m saying that there are people who laugh about it, think of them as jokes and those people will think its acceptable and they will keep doing it. We need to stop them as soon and as much as possible.
I’d say she’s both.
I think the IB troll has worn out their welcome with this last bit of victim blaming.
I’m so sorry, David.
Inanity, the only way you can know for sure is if you sent them yourself.
@David
What are you going to do about these threats?
That’s a rather pathetic attempt at baiting us, there. Sorry, IB22, you’re gonna have to come up with topics for your blog on your own.
More cute
Lea: Well yeah, but rhetorically that’s a less powerful statement. I’d like to believe she is merely in a haze of stupifying ignorance (certainly the almost contentless prose when she attempts to make an argument on her blog could lead one to think that) but rather I suspect it’s a lack of skill in argument, a weak grasp of persuasional English and a worldview which is inimical to other people’s freedoms.
Marry that to a resentment that she, and her ilk, are not able to dictate to the rest of us; and are losing ground on many fronts, well the only way to read the desires she expresses is one of malevolence.
So yeah, dumber than a box of rocks, and evil to her very bones.
You don’t realize that the only group that would profit from making the term “rape” mean everything and nothing are the people perpetrating it? You really don’t realize that the victims profit from a clear and universally agreed-upon definition that makes naming what happened to them easy?
I’m not seriously expecting you to answer, btw.
And yeah, I’m touchy on the subject. Having had to spend time with bodyguards to keep an eye out for someone who used a 14 year old to send a coded threat to kill me, when I knew him to be armed, and furious. That was a swell few days, let me tell you.
The letters delivered to my place of work were unpleasant, but sort of par for the course (I was a working journalist, doing opinion/editorial writing). It’s not as if I wasn’t findable. Those one just tries to shrug off. If they’d mentioned my address, or my loved ones, that would have been different.
So yeah, “they are fake, you have to know that”, gets my dander up a little (unless, of course there is some snippet of knowledge she’s not sharing with us).
I think we all need a red panda right now
As a point of note: the only way to spot the “real ones” is to have the person making the threat make an attempt.
Some people make threats for months (or years) before they carry out their intent.
So it’s not as if one can just say, “oh, they’d never”. Yes, most of them are just bloviation, but there’s no way to know: which is part of why they do it.
Dave, you have all the sympathy I can send.
Usually I’m all for “feeding the trolls” instead of ignoring them, because it can be a blast and it exposes their foolishness until they flounce in great glory. But I’m not bothering with IB22 from this point on because she’s only looking for blog material due to her lack of independent thought and critical reasoning to develop topics. I’d give her some pointers on good creative writing books to help spark ideas, or advice on how to listen to others, but like I said, I’m not bothering any more.
The threats are real threats. We can see them, they’re right there and someone sent them so their reality is not a matter of debate. I think what Insanity means to say is whether the threats are “plausible”. And zhe doesn’t fucking know that either. Zhe doesn’t get to decide if the threats David is getting are plausible. Only the person on the receiving end of a threat gets to decide how to react to it.
David, I’m sorry about this, for I, as many others, really enjoy this blog. I think, however, you can be fairly certain that the dudes who look big and tough when they can hide behind anonimity are pretty pathetic people in real life.
IF a person care so much about their video games that they would actually bother to send threaths to a person who writes about another person they think has offended their precious games, it goes without saying that they don’t have very fulfilling lives outside the gaming World.
Hey, can we just block IBS, now?
She’s basically telling someone (David) who got death threats to “stop whining about people who are just joking with you and totes not serious”.
I’m calling that over the line. I can laugh my head off at the antifeminist BS, but this? Not cool. People who say things like that are exactly why these threatening asshats have been able to get away with being threatening asshats for so long.
Mods? David?
If she got the same troll challenge as Woody, that would stop her posting. And then I could type:
Shut up Woody and IB.
Good job following up on your projection later in the same sentence. Unless you think that there are people who are trying to make sure that literally everything is considered rape?
InsanityBytes22, we all know by now that you hate men and feel entitled to their protection by virtue of your womanhood. Your posts on gender roles on your blog made that abundantly clear. You don’t need to work any harder to prove it, so could you please lay off David?
I’ve alerted David to the calls to moderate or ban ib22, just FYI.
Oh for the love of all the gods, twice over (at least).
Once for the assholes who think writing about someone receiving death threats means they should send some. And once for IB22.
Because fuck you. No, really, go fuck yourself, just indulge in your mental mastrubation somewhere else. But I’m masochistically curious, just what do you define rape as? And what definition has made everything rape? When’s rape a rape by your definition? I need to know to judge whether you’re an asshole, or grade a prime asshole.
Ugh, what a bunch of assholes. Sorry you’re getting so much hate, David.
David, sorry for all that you have to put up with from assholes like this, and thanks for continuing to do the blog in spite of it all.