Yesterday, I noted some of the nasty transphobia that had shown up in a recent /gg/ thread on 8chan, undercutting somewhat the claims to respectability we’ve been hearing a lot of from GamerGaters recently. Well, 8channers noticed my post, and weren’t exactly pleased about it.
But their responses to my post, well, they didn’t exactly suggest that the transphobia I saw in the earlier thread was some sort of fluke.
Oh, sure, some of the commenters complained, as my critics often do, that I had “quote mined” the earlier thread.
Sitting cheek by jowl next to these comments were comments of a rather different sort. Trigger Warning for threats, transphobia, homophobia, etc.
So, yeah, there’s really no need to posit vast conspiracies sending paid shills to shitpost on 8chan when it’s pretty clear a sizeable portion of their userbase is happy to post crap like this for free.
And there’s no need to mine for quotes like these when there are so many of them just sitting right there on the surface.
Transphobia has nothing to do with being afraid of Transsexuals. It’s being afraid of Transsexualism itself, usually viciously lashing out against it because they are afraid of being associated with it. There are other causes etc. but that’s usually the core.
It would really help if most GamerGaters would have at least rudimentary education about the things they talk about.
I love* how one of their go-to defenses of their horribleness is “well anyone who looks at *chan for two seconds can see all kinds of horribleness so it can’t be us”.
Someone mentioned in another thread the effect the forced anonymity has on the anarchic culture. I’d bet a lot of it has to do with how you always have ready-made and impossible to disprove rationalizations for any cognitive dissonance or bizarre paranoia. Pretty sure screening your mind so much from the sunlight would probably cause problems with mold, at the least.
Wtf, where did that asterisk come from? It’s like my phone auto-flagged the sarcasm. o.O
David, I know you don’t write this blog *just* so people will say this :)), but you rock and those execrable 8channers should go step on lego.
There is no need whatsoever to quotemine them; gold is laying there right at the surface, ready to be…stepped carefully around.
To the trans phobics
http://i.imgur.com/Nhl37cZ.jpg?1
Hmmm maybe I should have typed ‘1000 Lego miles’ ah well
@fruitloopsie, I like it, it’s like, “Yo, this is where you get off the blog.”
Their anonymity is also a big fat phony, because it comes with the caveat that you’re assumed to be a white man until proof in contrary. And you better not give that proof in contrary unless you’re going to throw other people under the bus to please the Not So Faceless Collective. It’s uniformity through erasure.
This is why I’m glad that my state passed that law that says you cannot defend yourself for the murder of a transperson by saying you were “scared” or “shocked” by your discovery that they are trans. (The “Panic Defense” I think it’s called.)
I can only hope that the rest of the country follows suit.
At one of my jobs, a co-worker from another department began transitioning from M to F. HR had a meeting, as I’m sure they were supposed to, but I heard some very inappropriate transphobic comments and jokes in the workplace. She left the company shortly thereafter. I’m ashamed that I never stood up and said “hey, that’s not cool”.
I know 8chan doesn’t care that it’s not cool and if I said anything they’d just call me an SJW *insert slur here*, but I’m grateful to David for documenting it and for him and the lovely commentariat to say “hey, that’s not cool”. Thank you.
You know, I knew 4chan was a pretty dreadful place in general, but it’s only through this that I’ve seen the full extent of just how hideous the things these people say are – and the extent of the lack of their self-awareness.
(8chan was started by people who were kicked off 4chan for being a bit lowbrow for the site, is that right?)
Why is the world so full of horrible? D:
Davidknewton – if by ‘a bit lowbrow’ you mean ‘too vile and repugnant even for 4Chan’, then yes. 4Chan is still a wretched hive of scum and villainy, to be sure, but apparently there are depths to which even they refuse to descend.
those depths being similar to reddit’s: shit that brings the site bad pr and possibly also the attention of law enforcement
“I’m about as scared of trannies as I’m scared of schizophrenics which is to say not very”
Probably didn’t get out enough to meet a proper paranoid schizophrenic… They can be really scary. Never met a scary ‘tranny’ though. But I am quite sure there may be scary examples of that as well 😉
I used to have a weird sense of respect for 4chan: yes they were always a vile cesspool of trolls trolling trolls, but that was something they embraced. 4chan never pretended to be on the side of good: they were villians, and proud of it. And when chaotic evil is the expectation, the things that are morally neutral or ambiguous, like the formation of Anonymous, were hard not to see as mildly redeeming.
But then GamerGate came along, and suddenly the trolls were trying to convince us they’re civil, rational people fighting the good fight against the oppressive SJW’s. I lost that tiny spark of respect when that happened. You don’t get to be evil and self-righteous.
And then the mods of 4chan itself said “fuck off, we’re not doing this here” and started banning GamerGate threads, and the ‘gaters went to 8chan.
So I don’t quite know what to think of 4chan anymore.
David, you rock.
You are the bestest ferrets in cat suits in a David suit I’ve ever met, and I’m glad I found this place.
Seriously, you are a fine person.
These guys would be hilarious in their hypocrisy if they weren’t so repugnant and awful.
Well, if you think about it, to these gamegaters, it probably does seem as thought they’ve been quote mined.
Their idea of war is sitting around triggering and threatening dissenters from their parents basement, their idea of important topics is video games— David is literate and reads what they say, it’s probably like frightening sorcery to them.
So, screencapping their actual shit (the visual equivalent of quoting verbatim) is “making shit up”?
Need more palms, I’m running out of face.
Even those these guys seemingly subsist mainly on cognative dissidence, I don’t think even they actually believe these stock defenses about doctored screen shots and shadowy SJW posters who deviously make them look bad. As if David, or any reasonable person, would waste that much time on these schmucks. He just has to pop on their shit boards, skim a bit to gather up some terribleness and then hightail it out of that hellhole.
@Bina
I have a solution to your problem:
http://i.imgur.com/tV5XOdr.jpg
Bina
http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140605204230/villains/images/3/39/Spy_kids_robert_patrick_robert_rodriguez_014_jpg_gkng-1-.jpg
I think that “quotemining”, in this case, means “didn’t include all the comments that weren’t terrible”, as though there’s some parts-per-million threshold the shit has to cross before you’re allowed to object to it. Unfortunately for them, human decency is not an urban water treatment system and we are not required to tolerate shit just because it’s an infinitesimal amount.
On a related note, I need to go dump out this glass of city tap water, because I just seriously grossed myself out.
Ah, 4chan, even in my right-wing teenage years, you were too much of a huge collective of assholes for me to view you without contempt.
Well I guess this is 8chan but it’s the same people, different outhouse.
They really have no idea how human beings function outside their poisonous little subculture, do they? I imagine they are – or were – sitting over there fist-bumping each other over how they put David in his place, not even realizing that they were proving his point.