So I was idly perusing Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield’s Twitter yesterday, and I came across an alarming tweet. It seemed as though Bloomfield had somehow penetrated the 47 levels of security protecting the Feminist HIgh Council to discover incontrovertible evidence of Operation Wicked Succubus. You know, the feminist plan to eliminate all men (except for me).
https://twitter.com/BloomfieldJanet/status/523458962704699393
Her followers were aghast:
And naturally one of them brought up #GamerGate.
There were a few others, but you get the idea.
It never occurred to any of them to, you know, try to find out just who the bald man advocating killing all men was. Or who exactly he was talking to.
So I decided to do some serious investigative journalism to see what I could uncover. I typed out “‘eliminate men as a gender’ security” into a little known internet “search engine” called Google, and boldly clicked on the first result.
This led me to a Tweet with a URL in it. Bravely, I clicked on that URL and found myself looking at a video of a presentation at something called Monitorama PDX 2014 — clearly the code name for one of the Feminist Conspiracy’s conventions.
I looked it up in Google and discovered a web page for the event, which had been held in May. It was described as an “An Open Source Monitoring Conference & Hackathon.”
Ah, clearly a clever Feminist code name.
And then I decided to look up the name of the speaker: James Mickens. Turns out the guy works at Microsoft, one of the companies at the center of the Misandrist Conspiracy. Mickens is also the author of a number of papers, with titles like “Pivot: Fast, Synchronous Mashup Isolation Using Generator Chains” and “Mugshot: Deterministic Capture and Replay for JavaScript Applications.”
Obviously, some high level feminist theorizing.
Then I decided to watch the video. And I was shocked!
Because it wasn’t a speech about killing all men after all. It wasn’t even a feminist speech. No, it seemed instead to be a highly technical talk about internet security issues, illustrated with a lot of silly slides. Like this:
And this:
I must confess that I didn’t get the overwhelming majority of his jokes. But he audience seemed to find these slides, and much of what he said, hilarious. So if you ever need to hire a comedian who can joke about Synchronous Mashup Isolation Using Generator Chains, Mickens is your guy.
So where does the whole “kill all men” thing come from?
Well, I skipped ahead a bit in the video until I found a section in which Mickens talked about the dumb things people do that can undermine even the most sophisticated security setup.
His example: gullible, horny men who are tricked into “friending” hackers on Facebook posing as hot babes — even when there are pretty obvious indications that the hot babes aren’t really hot babes at all.
Things like: saying they graduated from Central University, even though there is no school by that name in the US, or spelling the name of their profession wrong.
These are all good clues, he said, that the hot babe you just friended on facebook was really this guy:
Given that men are regularly duped with simple tricks that play on their horniness and gullibility, Mickens joked, maybe the real goal for people trying to design secure systems should be the elimination of all men.
So that’s where the slide comes from.
And by the way, that whole bit of his killed — not as in “killed all men” but as in “got giant laughs from the mostly male audience.” Expecially the part about killing all men.
If you want to see the whole bit, starting with Mary and ending with “eliminate men as a gender,” it starts at around 20:40 in the video.
Men’s Rights Activists: more gullible than guys who friend Mary from Central University on Facebook.
NOTE TO EXTREMELY LITERAL-MINDED MRAS: That bit about the feminist plot to kill all men (except me) at the start of this post was a joke. Feminists don’t really intend to kill all men (except me).
Or do they?
Woohoo! A failed flounce! (sorry, I’m having a bit of fun with this one)
Stop. Wrong context. The fallacy was invoked when you made this argument:
1. There is a situation where you associate hypothefutrelle’s language with the SCUM manifesto
2. There is a situation where David associates the language of a death-threat sender with a group.
Conclusion. These situations are therefore the same because of associating language, and therefore 1 is just as sleazy as 2.
You haven’t shown that 2 has all the properties that 1 had to make it sleazy. And it wouldn’t be sleazy if it had the same properties as 2.
Then I vote yes for Mr C’s hoodie.
I wouldn’t say that they referenced the grapes of fox on purpose either, because that would be giving them too much credit. At least there’s something we agree on.
and I agree, cute cat is too cute and not awful.
Equal rights and equal responsibilities. Where have we heard that one before…
Game journalism ethics, equal rights and equal responsibilities… what next? Atheism should just be about lacking a god belief? The US is fostering a culture of entitlement?
You have a side, dude, even if you want to pretend you don’t. How about you come clean and at least pretend you’re doing this all in good faith?
Cute animals can improve any thread.
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Or at least stick the flounce.
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Saying the speaker says things that fosters an environment where other people feel like they should do horrible things, feel like those things are not horrible, and actually get away with doing the horrible thing is not unethical. Saying that the speaker contributes to the horrible thing happening is not unethical.
What is unethical is encouraging the horrible thing and fostering an environment where the horrible thing is normalised and excused.
Another thing that is unethical is trying to get the people calling out the unethical behaviour to shut up, while ignoring the truly horrible behaviour. And it’s even more ridiculous to pretend you’re the most ethical person in the room because you have had an empathy bypass.
The internet is lovely sometimes. This is what pops up when you google “fennec flop”:
http://crittercamp.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/1/6/10162167/7407267_orig.jpg
“You haven’t shown that 2 has all the properties that 1 had to make it sleazy. And it wouldn’t be sleazy if it had the same properties as 2.”
I already wrote that it’s unethical to associate people to criminals when they’re not accomplices to the crime or part of the same organization following the same purpose.
Both 1 and 2 are associations of people who shouldn’t be associated, based on some ideological and linguistic similarities.
It’s sleazy to do it on a such flimsy basis as Futrelle did or I would in the thought experiment. Especially in the case of thunderfoot for 2. I don’t care much about the MRAs, many of which explicitly advocate violence against women. For all we know it could have been a MRA who wrote the threat.
Thunderfoot never did. He’s been associated to the death threat just because both refer to feminism as “poison”.
If the criminal actually made an attempt on Anita Sarkeesian’s life, the media would quickly look for someone else to blame, since today guilt by association is a favorite fallacy of the infotainment business. Futrelle’s blog could be visited by sleazy journalists looking for controversial news, and thunderfoot’s name could be associated to the one of the criminal on the media.
This could have serious repercussions on Thunderfoot’s career, especially if we consider how media frequently lack nuance.
The criminal is still at large and might threaten Sarkeesian again or worse, actually attempt on her life. Thunderfoot doesn’t deserve to be associated with a possible terrorist act.
I’m just now realizing that the hypothefutrelle hypothetical was really off base. In the hypothetically, hypothefutrelle is associated with Valarie Solonas, and it is feared that he might try to kill someone the way Solonas did.
But David didn’t try to say that thunderf00t might go on to send a death threat just because of a similarity of language. At all. That wasn’t even close to the point.
It’s like a Freudian slip or something… you get a sense of what the other person thinks based off of little details and conflicts like that.
TIL that because snakes and beer yeast both have cell walls and mitochondria, they are exact analogues to one another, so if you can say a factual thing about one (“snakes are legless vertebrates and obligate carnivores”), you can say the same factual thing about the other. Did you know that beer yeast are legless vertebrates and obligate carnivores?
“I’m just now realizing that the hypothefutrelle hypothetical was really off base. In the hypothetically, hypothefutrelle is associated with Valarie Solonas, and it is feared that he might try to kill someone the way Solonas did.”
That’s not what I wrote. I wrote that is feared that someone else might be inspired by Futrelle to try to kill someone the way Solanas did.
10!!
11!
Lol Thunderfoot’s “career”.
@Chockanga:
Good for you. I disagreed. If that’s the premise that makes your argument work then you aren’t going to convince me.
Elliot Roger: the media blamed everything under the sun, especially mental illness, while not once mentioning misogyny or MRAs. Darren Wilson: again, the media blamed everything under the sun, especially mental illness, but didn’t really engage the topics of racism or a corrupt police force.
Guilt by association is not common in the slightest.
RE: thunderf00t:
Thunderf00t took up a single paragraph in David’s post. Why the hell are you so invested in this one brief mention and this paranoid hypothetical while casually dismissing the associatons with MRAs, despite the MRAs having no obivous ties to the author of the death threat and despite you clearly saying it was wrong to associate simply based on language when I made the hypothetical with the speaker and the KKKer?
Mr. Nuance, when you said “if the death-threat author doesn’t turn out to be a fan of Thunderf00t, you owe an apology,” where you actually saying that that was the only thing you think is required for moral culpability?
After accusing Sarkeesian of being a liar in several threads and then PZ of being a doxxer as well as David of casting aspersions on some d00dz character by mentioning he has been part of the he man woman haters club, your time is up troll. As usual trolls destroy their own arguments by their specious and bizarre follow up arguments and then to make matters word FAIL to stick the flounce!
Double LOL at Thunderfoot’s “career.” Shouting on YouTube does not a career make.
Ah, misread that. I see the connection now, though there’s a huge problem where in one instance you have the writer being influenced by the killer’s work, while in the other you have a potential killer being influenced by a writer’s work. The hypothetical still doesn’t work out well as an analogy, and it still suffers from the problems I already mentioned.
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BTW, I can disengage if people want… Feels like I might be the only one enjoying this tedium and keeping it going.
Not in the current universe.
“Why the hell are you so invested in this one brief mention and this paranoid hypothetical while casually dismissing the associatons with MRAs, despite the MRAs having no obivous ties to the author of the death threat and despite you clearly saying it was wrong to associate simply based on language when I made the hypothetical with the speaker and the
KKKer?”
It’s unethical to associate the MRAs to the criminal, too, but I have no personal sympathy for them since some of them actually threaten physical violence.
Thunderfoot, as far as I know, never did, and this is why he has my conditional sympathy. If you’re aware of any threats of violence he has made please let me know.
“After accusing Sarkeesian of being a liar”
Sarkeesian is a proven liar. She said she had been a fan of video games since she was young and then people found a video where she said she hasn’t been a fan of video games before she started “Tropes Vs. Women”.
She said that people are supposed to carry around dead female characters in Hitman and that the game is carefully structured to provoke arousal from a power fantasy when the game actually penalizes you for killing civilians.
And I could go on.
“PZ of being a doxxer as well”
PZ provided doxxing material to the Skepchick team and encouraged them to doxx Skep Tickle.
“as David of casting aspersions on some d00dz character by mentioning he has been part of the he man woman haters club”
Didn’t he associate Thunderfoot to the death threats, however flimsily?