As most of you are no doubt aware, Reddit recently banned the incredibly shitty FatPeopleHate subreddit for harassment. Naturally, members of Reddit’s many other incredibly shitty subreddits — including KotakuInAction, the main GamerGate hangout on Reddit, and of course the Men’s Rights subreddit — are afraid they’ll be next!
“The new age of reddit has begun,” wrote one worried Men’s Rightser. “Admins ban /r/FatPeopleHate (and 4 other subreddits that the admins fail to disclose) for “harassment”. It is only a matter of time before this subreddit gets banned too.”
Meanwhile, in KotakuInAction, a “megathread” about the bans has garnered more than 1100 upvotes and inspired nearly 500 comments.
In that thread, one KiAer has helpfully provided a list of the subreddits Reddit has shut down in recent days. As you can see, most were variants on FatPeopleHate, hastily created in an attempt to get around the ban of the original FatPeopleHate (or just to annoy the site admins); others were offensive in other predictable ways. I’ve highlighted some of the more, er, interesting of the bunch.
My point here?
If you look at a list like the one above and think “oh, no, my favorite subreddit will be next,” then maybe, just maybe, there is something terribly wrong with your favorite subreddit, and probably with you as well.
Men’s Rights: the only self-proclaimed “civil rights” movement outside of literal Nazis that puts itself in the same category as “/r/fatn*ggerhate” and “/r/transf*ggots.”
NOTE TO READERS: My strep throat is better but not gone, and I also have other non-blog things I need to tend to this week, so posting will probably continue to be a bit light.
I think this is pretty much always the case. Say a white dude tries to come up with something as offensive as possible. If he’d just grab a topic at random, as long as it was super offensive, he’d be just as likely to come up with, say, a topic about how we ought to avenge thousands of years of oppression of women by chopping off the dicks of all dudes and then killing them, and after that procreate artificially, as a topic about how it’s a-okay to rape women and children. He’d be just as likely to come up with a topic about how white people are literal devils and ought to be exterminated in order to let blacks inherit the Earth, as a defense of nazism. But we know that’s not how it works.
And few people are, at the end of the day, willing to defend complete moral relativism. If all moral values merely depends on arbitrary likes and dislikes and therefore cannot be defended or refuted by rational argument (note that one might argue, and lots of metaethicists do, that morality depends on our emotions and attitudes, but that these can still be more or less consistent and so on, and that we can therefore still have rational arguments about moral matters and show that some moral positions are untenable), you can’t even say that, e.g., the holocaust was wrong, or that raping little kids is wrong. Nor can you say that free speech is good and censorship is bad, that indoctrination is bad and thinking for yourself is good, that intolerance is bad and tolerance good and so on, since these are moral positions as well.
Yes! What Dvärghundspossen said. I wish I could express myself that clearly.
Hmmm, that Men’s Rights London graffiti worries me a little bit – especially when it comes with a date.
5th August 2015 is the last day of the London International Youth Science Forum, falls during Camden Fringe, the day before Film4’s Summer Screen…
I have no idea what they’re planning to do on a Wednesday, to be honest. Don’t they have jobs to go to, what with men being all busy maintaining civilization as we know it an’ all?
On Topic: Chiming in with everyone who thinks Reddit needs much better housekeeping than this. I think there is plenty of depravity and illegal activity on the Dark Web without it spilling into mainstream forums. Nazis and paedophiles have no place in our public parks, and they have no place on widely-used internet platforms either.
If Men’s Rights London are planning something on a wednesday, that means I’ll have to cancel my weekly RPG session in order to go and
laugh at themcounter-protest. Dammit, Men’s Rights London, have you no shame?@Judas Peckerwood: My apologies for assuming you were a troll.
I’m glad it was a different format, because I would have been really bummed if MRAs decided to their shit on my birthday. : |
*to do their shit
Goddamnit, I spotted a typo right as the page redirected. ; n ;
I couldn’t finish reading THAT Cracked article. It just made me sick.
Off topic: I’m re-watching the Batman animated series, and holy shit does it look different now that I know so much more about male entitlement and abuse. *shudder*
You have the Mad Hatter who decided to use his mind-control device to get the girl he wanted even though she was in love with someone else, thus forcing her to stay with him and do what he wanted.
You have Firefly, who was a pyrotechnics expert for a concert tour became an arsonist when his girlfriend, the lead singer, fired him after he got creepy after they broke up. (There was a scene where he talked about how she dressed and he said “I remember you used to dress like that for me…” and then called her a tramp when she rightfully told him off and asked him to stop, and then proceeded to burn the stage down and attempt to burn her alive.)
Mr. Freeze tries to drop a reverse fusion bomb on Gotham after his condition worsens and his wife is revived and she marries the doctor who cured her disease. He says he wants everyone to feel the “loss of hope” like he has because he can’t go back to Nora anymore.
Then of course you have Joker and Harley’s whole relationship, which is an academic thesis in of itself. (Though I will say it’s super important that Harley has a degree in Psychology. Because it shows that anyone could be a victim of abuse, even someone who’s studied it and knows the signs.)
Divines above, the villains only get worse and worse the older I get and the more I learn. I still kind of pity Mr. Freeze though. But only a little.
@Paradoxical
How could his wife marry someone else? Isn’t she, you know, his wife and they live in a country that doesn’t do polygamy? Or did they divorce first?
Also, you’re watching it on Netflix? Does Netflix have commentary and bonus features or would that only come from the boxset? (If Netflix doesn’t have boxset features, they totally should. Like, a dollar a month more gets you behind the scene stuff.)
What about the Penguin? You could argue that “outcast rich child goes to the sewers and raises an army of vermin to destroy the world he feels rejected him” is a pretty fair retelling of Gamergate, in retrospect.
Maybe?
I understand the argument – and from a meta perspective, it certainly seems as if “I prefer my preferences because they’re my preferences, so maybe its the same for other people and actually banning things is a problem” is an argument you can make. It works. It’s fine.
However, I always have a difficult time agreeing with it explicitly? It’s like old hat of tolerance meaning people must tolerate also a lack of tolerance, because if not, they’re intolerant, ha-ha, no,you are the real zombies.
The stances seem the same, sure, from a far enough point. Sure, the universe has no real concept of justice and its all profoundly meaningless because our frail human psyches are adrift in a void of amoral, profoundly neutral exigencies where-in our attempts at structuring the world around us is only pre-supposing intangible structures where none exist, and I only wear pants because of the social recrimination of my peers when I don’t, there is no “it” because even “it” is construction of the human mind. Whatever.
However, if you have to default to: “From the perspective of a speck of dust in the galactic core, these issues are the same” your magnification of ethical debates is off by a factor of 10000000x.
In actual point of fact there’s still a difference between a stance that argues: “It’s okay to mock people who hate, because hate itself is mockable” and a stance that argues: “Entire classes of people are okay to mock because that class of people is inherently mockable”. One is about the act of hating. I wouldn’t have a fucking problem with MRA ideals if they weren’t so profoundly horrible. Tautological, sure, but also true. If they stopped hating things, I’d stop having a problem.
“Tolerance” does not infer also tolerating a lack of tolerance, because not tolerating is pretty explicitly a loaded moral value whereas the mere act of assuming people are, at core, not your business to mandate lives to, is a statement of absence. To infer moral weight to a set descriptor (“race”, “class”, “body fat %”) isn’t the same as prefering no moral value for any class. They’re different ethical formulations. Even in a morally relativistic sense the two principles aren’t just symmetrical mirror versions of each other, even if you can glibly quip that: “Oh, but you just prefer not preferring! My hatred of X is no different from your hatred of hatred! We both hate!”. No, you hypothetical dolt cropping up my argument, that’s a category error of pretty significant proportions.
Ît’s like saying MRA’s and Feminists are “the same” because one wants “male supremacy” and the other wants “female supremacy” and both seek political power, mock their opponents, have ideological grounding for their assumptions, argue for an explicit structure of social norms and hold long winded internet discussions. It only works if you assume a sufficiently distanced perspective and boil down individual differences in outcome to some category of general statements.
So no. They’re legit different things in your head because they’re legit different things. I respect your dedication to people being allowed to have opinions, though. Morality might not be absolute if you’re incline to moral relativism – but there’s still profound differences between stances that encourage greater general expression and stances that specifically limit the greater expression of certain sub-groups, and claiming they’re the same because what is good, what is evil, do we even know, is a slight of hand trick for people who haven’t read enough books on moral fucking theory.
Well, considering that he became a super villain and has been in and out of Arkham…I’d say that counts as grounds for a one-sided divorce. Either that, or someone told Nora that Dr. Victor Fries is dead, and, honestly, I wouldn’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to wake up out of a cryosleep and find out that my spouse became a super villain hellbent on destroying the city I live in. Or previously lived in, as became the case with Nora. She and her new doctor husband left Gotham.
And no, I’m not watching it on Netflix.
Except I feel like Penguin has more of a legitimate grievance. He’s got a physical disfigurement that caused his parents to reject him and abandon him. (There’s also mentions in Arkham City that his family was also financially ruined by the Waynes.)
GooberGate has temper tantrums over people saying their game of choice isn’t the best game ever and girls wanting to play games and discuss them in an academic setting in a way they don’t personally agree with, while they try to claim it’s all about “ethics”.
At least the Penguin is (somewhat) honest with why he’s the way he is. It’s partially due to stigma surrounding physical deformities, and it’s partially just because he’s a bad guy who does bad things. (And he actually does things instead of hiding behind a keyboard.)
There’s no sugar-coating who the Penguin is or what he does by the writers. GGers try to re-write their history to crust it with as much sugar as they can muster all the time.
Also, according to the wiki, there was a point where Nora Fries gets revived in the Lazuras Pit and becomes a villain herself. :O
I want the box set of Batman someday because I fucking LOVE commentary. By far, my favorite commentary is on Invader Zim. Richard Horvitz tries to make jokes last longer then they should, Rikki Simons really hates the attention he’s gotten for doing the voice of GIR, everyone pokes fun of Andy Berman, they ate Triscuits very loudly for one episode – it’s great!
Hope you get better better soon, David. Remember to hug your kitties, they have healing powers trust me I am a wizard.
@ej(…)
I’d happy to come with you to support a counter-protest
Re the Penguin: Now that I think about it, he reminds me of nothing so much as the Sad Boner guys with his obsession with physical appearance.
“Women dislike me because I’m ugly, so it’s reasonable for me to act hatefully.”
No dude, women dislike you because you’re acting hatefully. If you stopped acting hatefully then they might change their minds. You are not entitled to them liking you, and they have breached no contract with you. Ugliness really has nothing to do with it.
Likewise, the Penguin has constructed a mythos for himself in which he’s the hero and society is evil, decadent and corrupt, so any amount of terrorism or extortion is merely a just act in his mind. It lets him revel in his monstrosity and makes him such a fun villain.
I appreciate the point you make about the difference between him and the GGers, but to me the overriding difference is simply one of reality: the GGers actually hurt real human beings. The Penguin didn’t. I can forgive him for hurting fictional people and love him as a villain, but loving GG is harder because their victims aren’t simply paper cutouts and set extras.
@autosoma:
Let’s see if we can find out where they’re planning it. We can make some placards – does anyone have any suggestions?
@ EJ
There are no placards that have ever bettered:
“Down with this sort of thing”
and
“Careful now”
(Maybe you have to be Irish/British to appreciate those)
Once again Married to the Sea provides:
http://www.marriedtothesea.com/050615/reddit-meetup.gif
On topic: I’ll let Tychus do the talking for me:
Oh my God, that “Reddit Meet-Up”photoshop has to become an image macro!
(you wouldn’t know what the sign originally said, would you?)
Poor TorontoEscortReviews, though!
Meh. I just use reddit for nosleep (free amateur horror stories that may/may not be true).
Also, regarding Batman: TAS, there was the first three seasons and then the fourth that picked up years after that and things kind of changed. There were also comics (one story I love is the Scarecrow going postal on some college guy who raped one of the Scarecrow’s students. Batman’s last line in the comic leave much to be desired, but the story as a whole was good). With Mr. Freeze, I thought he started spreading pain after he had everything amputated below his neck, which is why he felt unworthy of Nora? I dunno, I just interpreted that episode differently. Also, check the episode “Growing Pains” and then look up what the word “anima” (sounds similar to Annie) means in Jungian psychology. Blew my mind a little.
Danger Mouse is on Netfilx!
Including episodes I have never seen!
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/c8/75/26/c87526de3eedd2d90abc1decdd30a1ec.jpg
and Reddit sucks.