Demonstrating the keen grasp of ethics for which they are so well-known, an assortment of assholes and trolls associated with #GamerGate and 8chan are eagerly sorting through the Ashley Madison data dump in search of people to smear.
The former #GamerGate bigwig formerly known as Internet Aristocrat, now calling himself MisterMetokur, helped to lead the charge on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MisterMetokur/status/633820133065031680
https://twitter.com/MisterMetokur/status/634074455485083648
Naturally, his Tweets on the subject received dozens of likes and retweets from card-carrying, hashtag-using #GamerGaters.
On #GamerGate hub 8chan, meanwhile, the anons of /v/ and /pol/ searched the hacked database for the email addresses of game developers, academics, media professionals, and anyone else they could think of.
Over on Reddit’s KotakuInAction, the regulars rejoiced in the discovery that Gawker writer Sam Biddle, a longtime #GamerGate bete noire, had briefly had an AshleyMadison account, which he (quite plausibly) explained he had used for research.
But not everyone on KiA accepted that explanation:
![g-divA nice grandson 18 points 3 hours ago With some writers, I'd totally believe it. But Sam? Yeah, not for a second. permalinksavereportgive goldreply [–]AntonioOfVeniceRuns /r/polygon Karma King of late April 2015 17 points 3 hours ago Sam Biddle deactivated his account because he didn't need it for an affair. Women are falling over each other to do it with this very attractive man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jtmFlUg56w permalinksaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]EddieDombrowski 8 points 3 hours ago Is that even a man? He looks like a child, how old is he? Acts like one too. permalinksaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]AcherosIs fake journalism [score hidden] an hour ago I can't tell if its the audio quality, or the song over him, or what...But he literally, actually sounds like he is mentally retarded. Like, I'm not even joking or being insulting. in that video, he actually sounds like he has downs syndrome. Guys...What if...What if we've been going after someone with downs syndrome this entire time?](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/biddle.png?resize=513%2C458&ssl=1)
It’s about ethics in using stolen data to humiliate enemies and make Down Syndrome jokes about them.
H/T — @srhbutts
@Pandapool
Obviously they need somebody to blackmail in order to get more buffs for Frost Mages now that Ghostcrawler’s with Riot.
Ehhh….If they had uncovered a few people who spend their off hours as furries, going to furry-focused events and furry specific parties, it might be more interesting. Think of all the furries vs gang members/furries vs cops/furries vs cartel death squad videos still needing to be made! (The furries always win.)
Well, the trouble is that “this view is sufficiently harmful to warrant releasing private information” is a huge gray area that could be used (honestly or dishonestly) to justify anything; for instance, I’m sure the GamerGaters would say that “ethics in game journalism” is so important that it warrants exposing Blizzard employees, however that works.
Plus it exacerbates the blackmail opportunities.
Plus “So-and-so is a hypocrite” was always a marginal argument anyway; people really go for stuff like that, but at the end of the day it actually says nothing about whether your position is right or not.
So it seems to me that the best position is just to say that the right to privacy always trumps the public interest. (Unless someone is directly being hurt, but that’s not “public” interest anyway.)
I found a site that purported to be able to tell you whether a given e-mail address was part of the dump. My cheating ex had about six e-mail addresses and I know he was on several dating sites, and none of them hit. However, one of the two e-mail addresses I use regularly DID show up, and I’ll be damned to the hell of bad whisky if I ever had anything to do with the site (I despise cheaters, that isn’t to say I despise swinging or open relationships). My husband laughed when I told him, because he knows me too well. (That address was also used once to create a fake Facebook account before I caught it; heaven knows where it’s been in the ~25 years since I created it).
Folks, Ashley Madison didn’t verify all the e-mail addresses people used to sign up for the site, so without some other verification that someone made a profile with their own information, found dates, etc., I think we should take this with a very large grain of salt.
I’m inclined to believe that most of the GamerGaters needn’t worry about exposure, because they don’t have a partner to cheat on in the first place.
As someone who once registered on Ashley Madison (using a burner email address) and probably didn’t delete my account and has used a similar site to pursue an affair, I have a great deal of sympathy with the exposed registrants. I’ve met many men from these sites for those initial coffees, and while some of them are super skeezy, most that I’ve met up with have been decent enough blokes who find themselves in an unhappy relationship, but not so unhappy that they want to tip everyone’s life into the bin or they lack the courage or self-esteem to make the break. I can’t judge them on that, I couldn’t do it either. It took a couple year long campaign of passive-aggressiveness and careful management to get rid of my abusive husband without being forced into poverty due to housing prices (it may happen yet).
I can’t see what public interest it would serve to expose someone like me, my lover or anyone else I’ve ever met up with – and they include cops, civil servants, minor tv personalities and a lot of people in the financial services industry. Having an affair isn’t as black and white as people think, hell, I’ve been excoriated in the comment threads on this blog and it probably will happen again now. People judge harshly and harm without knowing all the facts and feel perfectly justified in doing so.
Off Topic: Have you guys seen the latest 4chan-originated Facebook page of internet douchery, “Project Harpoon”?
I can’t donotlink it, for some reason (tried, and it just redirects to Facebook), but you can also look for it on Google News or something – basically, they take photos of plus-sized models (mostly women, of course, although from what I’ve seen they’ve thrown in an occasional male model because fat-shaming is for everybody) and photoshop them to make them thinner, with some “hilarious” caption about them being fat.
A few of the comments I saw on the page before giving up were to the tune of “What, don’t you know all models are photoshopped anyway?” (someone give this person a Missing the Point [un]merit badge) and something about women looking to feel victimized. And then I just gave up, because I do actually have work to do, and don’t feel like spending any more time on gross internet douches.
(A friend corrected me that it might be Reddit, not 4chan. Probably both? I don’t know.)
I’m having trouble feeling too badly for Mrs. Josh Duggar as she appears to be as loathsome a person as he. She married him and had his kids knowing about the kiddy fiddling.
I’m guessing she didn’t know about the hook-up accounts. I do feel sorry for her about being cheated on.
I bet you she stays with him anyhow….
“I was just researching some stuff.”
Tell that to her!
I don’t condone cheating. I think it’s a horrible way to treat your SO. I also think it’s none of my business when it’s outside of my own relationship. I have trouble understanding why the extramarital affairs of Blizzard employees have fuck all to do with social justice issues, or how it’s any kind of “gotcha” in comparison to the stalking, harassment and death threats perpetuated by gamergaters. The fact that they think these things are in any way equivalent says a hell of a lot about them.
I know GGers and redpill are distinct groups (united by common misogyny), but aren’t RPers always going on and on about how awesomely alpha it is to cheat on your wife because biotroofs? When academics and journalists do it, suddenly it’s terrible?
They’re all about making the other side look bad. That’s it. That’s the entire sum total of their belief system. There is no consistent moral core.
Oh, yeah. Someone mentioned a time or two something I forgot: research. Like I said it doesn’t necessarily prove anything that any journalists didn’t any dirty on the site because they had an account. There’s an equally likely chance there was legitimate research put into an article that might have gotten scrapped or something than they just wanted to get some sleaze on behind the scenes. I know I’ve had to go to strip clubs several times to analyze the crowds that go there and interview some of the dancers (male and female, equally “revealed”) for a story and would inform my girlfriend any time I went beforehand. She even came with me on some of the night runs. There’s no reason I can’t believe that journalists who write about tech and such wouldn’t have a similar reasoning, given the strange obsession with dating sites nowadays.
@Rui
Are links to KotakuInAction not enough evidence for you? Do you need screenshots with red scribbles on them?
That’s not what’s going to get you banned 😀
Since the fuck when was that “Pure unbiased advocacy”? He didn’t say “And I totally believe him, therefore it’s teh troofs forevar!!!” or even that it’s likely; he said it’s plausible. And it is plausible. The masses love to read articles like that. Biased would be pretending that it’s not plausible.
… Hmm.
@Rui
Aww, it’s so adorable when gators pretend they’re relevant, even scary. No, you’re really not.
No, that’s not what anybody on the left thinks. In fact, I’m going to echo scalyllama’s sentiment from earlier and shake my head over the sad fact that there are still people who identify as members of #GamerGate. That’s sort of hilarious and sad at the same time.
Well, this particular radical leftist doesn’t really consider #GamerGate at all anymore. It began with slimy individuals getting their rocks off on harassing women, it continued with a pathetic attempt to feign credibility and it ended with a whimper. Anyone still identifying as a #GamerGater is like a MRA: a pitiful reactionary stuck in the past.
Also, you can stop with the delusions of grandeur. G.W. Bush was one of the worst presidents in US history, if not the worst. Compared to his fuck ups, #GamerGate is like a fart during an earthquake.
Umm… there’s plenty of evidence of #GamerGaters saying those things. David just screencapped them. Can’t you read?
And no, we don’t pretend anything. We genuinely think #GG is terrible. We’re not hypocritical assholes like certain jerks David writes about here.
You just keep telling yourself that.
@John Sartoris
pfff, Gawker is a shitty internet tabloid, of course their writers would be making Ashley Madison accounts to look for famous (or even just non-famous CFO’s apparently) people to expose. I’m surprised it isn’t part of their job requirements.
So apparently the user base was almost entirely men, many of whom were pretending to be married thinking they could hook up with married women for NSA sex. There were a lot of fake women accounts, as well. It has also been reported that site didn’t use email verification (wtf who built that site?) so you could sign up an email that wasn’t your own. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33986228
This whole thing has grossed me out quite a bit, but from the sounds of it I’m mostly alone in that sentiment. I don’t feel comfortable knowing the intimate details of people’s marriages, and I definitely don’t feel comfortable with public shaming adulterers. Even if you genuinely believe that every one of the sites users is a monster who must be punished for cheating on their spouse, uh, spouses have this habit of living in the same house. For every married AM user who’s been doxxed, their innocent spouse has been doxxed as well.
Somewhat off topic but how can any member of GG think they are better at journalism the actual journalists? I’ve not read one thing written by them that would qualify them as a journalist.
This is probably as good a place as any for this link.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/20/sexual-harassment-women-curfew
Nothing you don’t already know. The usual tale of street harassment.
I love it when people say something stupid, but fairly innocuous and claim their big truth bomb will get them banned. It’s so adorable!
That said, Bush was a massive disaster and deserves all the criticism he gets. He allowed a huge terror attack to happen, blamed it on the wrong country taking us into an expensive and pointless war that caused tens of thousands of deaths and made hundreds of thousands people into refugees. He let a city drown. He tried to privatize social security. I could go on.
@ WWTH
Bush was an interesting case study. I would agree with you that his presidency wasn’t exactly a spectacular success.
One of my friends though was assistant secretary of state* for him so I got a bit of an inside view. He certainly wasn’t as thick as he came across. Get him on his own and he could speak very eloquently and knowledgably about politics and international affairs. He could quote authorities like de Tocqueville at the drop of a hat.
Part of the issue was his natural constituency was quite anti-intellectual so he played up on his “good old boy” image. The last thing he needed to come across as was an East Coast Intellectual (which, despite all the Texas stuff, the Bush family are).
As to 9/11 it’s complicated. In hindsight it’s easy to say there were some red flags, but intelligence work is all about signal to noise. There were thousands of other ‘red flags’ that lead nowhere.
[*Her other claim to fame is she was the first high level Govt official to use Twitter :-)]
GiJoel,
Re: josh dugger,
I always knew the day would come when this family would implode but I had hoped it would be in the form of a dugger kid coming out of the closet, or maybe one of the girls rejecting the family, leaving the cult, and having a happy independent life. Hard for me to find joy in their downfall when it involves sexual abuse. And his poor wife! Just had fourth child with this shitstain.
I mostly just do what my Game Informer overlords tell me to do. Metacritic has too many “I poured Mountain Dew on my controller and now I can’t play the game 0/10” reviews, and I’ve been reading Game Informer since I was around 10. They have youtube broadcasts of gameplay, too, and I’ve picked up some great games I would’ve otherwise missed (Dragon’s Dogma!). They weren’t super vocal about their opposition to GG, but they did at least denounce it.
That said, I for one could a damn about any reviews. I’m a big girl and can decide for myself if I like/want to play a game. Back when God of War was big, I wasn’t the only one of my group disgusted by it, but I was the only one who traded my copy within a week. No reviews needed to tell me that I couldn’t get behind a character like Kratos and would likely spend the rest of the game alternating between dry-heaving and wanting to stab him myself. Sucked, too, because I love Greek mythology. But seriously, fuck that guy. I ain’t helping him do shit. I’d rather help DMC’s Dante audition for Jpop bands.
I don’t think the hackers were justified in releasing people’s private info, though I admit the story’s interesting in a gossipy sort of way.
Also, re GamerGate… maybe the fact that “It’s about ethics in X” has become a running joke should tell them something? Something related to hypocrisy, maybe?
Is this a fake article from The Onion? Because if so this is funny as hell.