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?
WWTH – yeah, that painful cold thing happens to me, though very rarely. No idea why.
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Words mean things. Words have consequences. Actions have consequences. Making pictures of Congressional representatives with crosshairs over their faces has consequences. Telling huge groups of people, some of whom will have violent tendencies – because it’s the fucking truth that huge groups of people contain all types including violent types – inflammatory things about a specific, identified individual with the intention of inciting hatred against that individual has consequences.
Maybe Chockanga wants to pretend this isn’t the case. Maybe Chockanga thinks that all words are just meaningless noises, like birds chirping, that sort of disappear into the air without making any kind of a mark. This is not a position grounded in reality.
So fuck the hell off, Chockanga, and take your poorly-reasoned bullshit with you.
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fuck off, Chockanga.
Dammit, Policy of Madness! You beat me to that pro-life comparison! I was just about to make it as well because it’s so damn perfect!
Really though Chockanga (if you’re still around), do you actually think that those pro-life people who were calling for the death of doctors who perform abortions weren’t even the tiniest bit responsible when someone else bombed the clinic in response to that toxic vitriol? Or are they responsible just because they happen to be part of the same movement as the bomber, but wouldn’t be responsible if they had said the same shit but were actually members of Stormfront? Really. I want to know precisely where you stand on this. You seem to be having trouble committing to your own stance.
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BTW, if you’re thinking that it’s almost morning in Switzerland so you’ll just go to bed and then come back to poop in this thread some more tomorrow? Don’t.
@lordpabu
Sorry not sorry!
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Yeah, comparing Thundfoot to Billy O’Reilly and his obsession with George “the baby killer” Tiller is a good one. Legally, it is not enough for O’Reilly to be held responsible for Tiller’s murder, but to pretend he didn’t contribute to the murder at all by riling up the religious right is ridiculous.
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Don’t forget Sarah Palin and Gabby Giffords.
I may have to buy this.
http://c3.cduniverse.ws/resized/630×630/books/651/9262651.jpg
I’ve decided to enforce Chockanga’s flounce.
But all this has led me to think more seriously about the responsibility Thunderf00t and others like him have for the harassment against Sarkeesian. May be worth another post.
Alternate title – Cats with Murder In Their Eyes.
Hooray, I slept through that boring troll. But I got to watch a John Oliver video I didn’t know about (dude, how could you use dogs and not cats!) and see a calendar that has not given me ideas because I appreciate having all my skin attached.
I see that the Swiss school system, if he was really from there, is just as bad as teaching critical thinking as a skill as school systems in other countries.
Shut up Woody.
Ooh, did you just wake up? Go check the thread with the title starting with Ladies. Apparently sperm banks are the feminazi Final Solution.
I would have loved a kitty supreme court. We all know they make all the final decisions and the rulings are final.
However, I can’t imagine they would have been able to get cats to behave long enough to make that video.
People contribute to the culture around them. If they make material that supports current attitudes that are generally oppressive and harmful to many people, then, yes, they are morally if not legally responsible in some small part for the harm that befalls the people marginalized by these notions.
For example, the shooting of Micheal Brown. Darren Wilson is the one who is responsible for murdering the young man, no one else pulled the trigger. However, pervasive racist attitudes throughout the US contributed to the atmosphere that made Darren Wilson feel as though he was justified in gunning Micheal Brown down.
Further, following the murder, some people released information suggesting that Micheal Brown had stolen from a convenience store prior to the shooting. They did not specifically say that Micheal Brown should have been shot for this, but the dessemination of this information fed into the narrative of black men being criminals and thugs and reduced the outcry and sympathy regarding this murder, despite the fact that stealing is not a crime punishable by death in the US and that Darren Wilson in fact had no knowledge of the events in the convenience store prior to the shooting, so it has absolutely nothing to do with the case whatsoever.
The people who released and promoted this information are morally, if not legally, contributing to the obstructing justice and upholding harmful notions inherent in our society, that lead to these crimes being committed.
Same goes for thunderf00t and all other GG supporters. In vitriolically attempting to point out every single factual misstatement said by Sarkeesian or any of the other targets, they reduce these women to being deserving of whatever harassment and abuse and threats that comes their way, even if the punishment in no way fits the ‘crime’.’
So, yes, troll, thunderf00t and so many others are contributing to a culture that supports harassing women and sending them death threats and I will hold them responsible for this.
*obstruction of justice
Except they don’t concern themselves with trying to point out factual misstatements. They say things like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she’s stupid, etc, but they don’t actually establish – factually – the counterpoint to what she says. Which means all the Chunderf00l videos are insult without argument, plus classic ad hominem (“she’s not a real gamer/she lied about being a gamer so she’s wrong”).
I LOL’d at the sperm banks bit in the other thread. Wouldn’t the requirement for women to use spermbanks mean that the serious men’s rights issues of spermjacking and welfare queens (there are no men on welfare) would cease to be “problems”?
^ Well, yes. I giving the detractors far more credit than they deserved with that bit.
Arrgh, I went to bed and missed everything! This,
and this
and the butchering of the Voltaire quote? The complete lack of irony in his use of “I’ll defend to death your right to say it” to argue that someone should not be given the right to say that Thunderf00t may be contributing to a toxic culture culminating in harassment and death threats? The backtracking, the refusal to grasp context, the worst grasp of ethics I’ve ever seen?
Boo. Oh well, at least from this it seems the GGers are now being released into the wild to harass non-game, non-journalist communities with their own very special brand of Ethical Arguments I Found In A Christmas Cracker: Beginner’s Edition.
Wow, if it weren’t for the extremely enlightening troll, I’d never have imagined that “ethics” simply means “behavior I approve of”, or that “doxxing” means “mentioning someone’s basic public identity when talking about them”.
What an educational morning it’s been.