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?
“What’s your morning height, as opposed to your evening height?”
Exactly the same. Do you have any other stupid questions?
Anyone spit on you in an elevator lately?
“Anyone spit on you in an elevator lately?”
I live among polite people.
Although someone offered me coffee in an elevator once. It was a beautiful day.
You need to watch the vidya at this link because and I quote, “it is the best thing in the history of television.”
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/10/scalia-comes-rather-well#comments
Chockanga, did you read that link freshly squeezed cynic left you? It covers the reasons why calling Anita a liar based on what she had to say about Hitman is flippin’ ignorant. You definitely need to check it out.
Here, I’ll post it again.
http://pettie.us/excuse-dismantle-thunderf00ts-anti-sarkeesian-video-screenshot/
I can even quote parts of it in easily digestible chunks if you need assistance.
Wait, is this what we’re doing? This is your argument? “Thuderfoot has never threatened anyone with violence”?
Nothing about journalism, games ethics, Anita, PZ, ect ect? Just this: “Thunderfoot has never threatened anyone with violence”.
Because… A) This is kinda impossible to prove, since it’s like, impossible to prove a negative and B) has literally nothing to do with your original objections.
So my question (I guess I’m with you kirbywarp in still engaging): Does being such a vocal supporter of GamerGate not contribute to the culture of harassment surrounding the movement? Especially when GamerGate has been (almost exclusively) associated with harassment and misogyny?
There’s always spray paint, but that still means getting too close.
You think this is a thesis. You are wrong. What does “associate” mean? As far as I’ve been able to tell, it means that nobody is allowed to mention TF, in passing, in a blog post about terrorists. But that’s just a guess on my part because you are skating around the point like you’re afraid of it.
If you really believe that it is always wrong to associate people with criminals, you should be arguing this for the MRAs. The MRAs are the ones that are actually being correlated to the terror threat. TF was just mentioned in passing. The fact that you can’t be fucked to take your “thesis” to its clear conclusion is why it is not a thesis, but half-assed bullshit.
Anita says that the game is explicitly designed to make you derive perverse pleasure from desecrating the female characters. The game explicitly penalizes you for killing civilians.
Are there many people who kill and abuse the female characters anyway? It seems so. Did the producers know this and cater to theirneeds? Since the producers read reviews, Probably, but then again you can kill pretty much everyone in Hitman.
However I stand corrected. She’s not a liar, she just gives a very uncharitable interpretation of the producers’ intentions. I still don’t think they encouraged people to kill the female characters, since the game penalizes you for that action, but it’s more than possible that they might have designed the setting knowing that some people might want to kill the female characters in question.
I apologize for calling her a liar in this specific occasion.
@thebewilderness
John Oliver is the best thing to happen to current events since ever, and I say this as a die-hard Stewart fan. I’ve heard his bits being described as “the best thing in the history of television” multiple times now, more or less.
@SittieKitty:
I’ve backed off with engaging for now. When you engage in an argument for 4 hours, then the dude just repeats all his assertions and further gripes about nobody willing to engage in a proper discussion, it really deflates the fun balloon. Maybe I’ll jump in again later, and just copy-paste my previous comments when they become relevent again.
Uh, yeah – why do you keep crawling back here? It’s incredibly pathetic.
So now gamers have “needs” to kill and abuse female characters.
BUT THERE IS NO MISOGYNY IN GAMING.
@the bewilderness: I am all kinds of excited over the idea that people are going to start creating Supreme Court footage of Justice Dogs to go along with the audio! Oh, let the internet take John Oliver up on his challenge. It’s all I want for Christmas. I ask for so little…
Not all gamers are this boring, right?
That’s it? You stand corrected! Your ethics are on display big time d00d.
@Chockanga:
If you want to criticize what Anita says in her videos, you need to the actual video. There’s a link. To prove you watched it, give me a timestamp in that video of when she discusses hitman. Then we’ll talk.
No, I’m not being lazy, why do you ask?
Please quote the specific lines in the video, and link the video you’re quoting from and the time.
Can you imagine trying to wrangle that many dogs for however log. I bet they expended some serious resources on that. Criminy!
Lol, ninja’d, glad we had the same thought though.
(if you want to know what prompted this challange, it was when you said “Did the producers know this and cater to theirneeds,” since that is extremely related to the actual main point of Anita’s video)
(18!)
Replace ‘more than possible’ with ‘pretty much guaranteed and you’ll understand the issue. Do you have any idea how much work programming games is? How much thought goes into design and concept? That shit doesn’t just happen naturally. The producers of Hitman made strippers fun to kill. It doesn’t matter that they dock you points. That’s still part of the fun. I remember playing Need for Speed for the first time (I think it was during the N64 days) at my cousins house, and I thought it was just so damn cool that I could drive like a maniac and get the cops to chase me. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the point of the game, and you had to start over if they caught you, but I was a trouble-maker at heart and had fun creating chaos.
But cars are one thing. Allowing women to be the objects upon which these violent fantasies are enacted is something else entirely. It’s sick and far too pervasive in this culture.
“Does being such a vocal supporter of GamerGate not contribute to the culture of harassment surrounding the movement? Especially when GamerGate has been (almost exclusively) associated with harassment and misogyny?”
It’s possible that thunderfoot might not know about the full extent of the harassment. It’s unlikely, but I give him the benefit of the doubt. The MRAs seem more aware of their own actions.
“If you really believe that it is always wrong to associate people with criminals, you should be arguing this for the MRAs. The MRAs are the ones that are actually being correlated to the terror threat. TF was just mentioned in passing. The fact that you can’t be fucked to take your “thesis” to its clear conclusion is why it is not a thesis, but half-assed bullshit.”
I AM arguing this for both the MRAs and Thunderfoot. I’m simply saying that since some of them are actually connected to violent threats I can understand where Futrelle was coming from, even though I don’t approve his choice. It’s a bit like condemning the actions of the protagonist of Death Wish when he kills the friends of the men who raped his daughter, while understanding his motivations.
To keep the metaphor going, Thunderfoot is an innocent bystander who just happened to hang around them once and was killed by the vigilante anyway, because he thought he was a friend of the rapists, too.
@SittieKitty:
Heh heh, yeah. The accusation concerning hitman never resonated with me, because from what I remembered, the point was not that games give you points to murder women, it’s that they design game worlds where such murder with no real game-related consequence besides point loss is possible. I just can’t find the exact time to check on that, but I remember it’s in the context of the rest of the video.
That hardly comports with your claim that Tfoots career is yelling at women on youtube.