Randi Harper is one of the women that Gamergaters love to hate the most. A software developer, she became Gamergate Public Enemy #4 — after the troika of Sarkeesian, Quinn, and Wu — when she developed a BlockBot that enabled Twitter users to easily shield themselves (insofar as this is possible) from possible Twitter harassment at the hands of Gamergaters and others of their ilk.
This little bit of software garnered her many months of vicious harassment herself, and ultimately a three-part smear series on Breitbart by Gamergate’s pet “journalist,” Milo Yiannopoulos.
Now one Gamergater is going after Harper’s Patreon supporters, using personal information taken from the crowdfunding site when it was hacked earlier this month.
After finding the names and addresses of Harper’s several hundred Patreon supporters in the leaked data, British blogger Sam Smith took it upon himself to “warn” these people of Harper’s alleged crimes against decency by sending a mass email to everyone he found on the list.
But to a lot of people — myself included — his supposedly friendly warning read more like a blackmail attempt.
One of the recipients of the email shared it with me yesterday. It starts off in a decidedly unfriendly manner:
I am the author of the major blog www.matthewhopkinsnews.com. I am sending you this email because your name appears in a list of people who donate to a Patreon operated by a person called Randi Harper. The list was confidential but has been hacked and placed online by unknown third parties. As a result of the leak you may be named, so please read this email carefully.
Smith — who goes by the name “Matthew Hopkins” online, styling himself as a sort of digital reincarnation of the original “Witchfinder General” — then lays out what he sees as Harper’s ethical failings, linking to Yiannopoulos’ three-part smear job as proof. Among Smith’s complaints:
Harper has … admitted to drug abuse, including attempting to smoke meth from a broken lightbulb. She also irresponsibly dyed her dog blue and accidentally allowed it to lick up her drugs.
Dyeing a dog blue may annoy the dog, but if done properly it will not harm it. And literally billions of human beings on our blue planet have used drugs at some point in their lives.
Now we come to the blackmaily bit, which Smith insists is not blackmaily at all:
You are supporting a person who is associated with some of the vilest imaginable extremism. …
As a responsible journalist, I can assure you I shall not be publishing the list. However, some of you may work in regulated roles with responsible access to information, vulnerable adults or children. There may be a lawful public interest in my contacting the relevant authorities (including an employer).
Smith went on to ask Harper’s supporters if they, personally, “endorse her extremist views” and if they felt “aggrieved at Ms Harper’s failure to safeguard your personal data.” (Never mind that it was Patreon’s job, not Harper’s, to protect the data on its servers.)
If Smith’s email was intended to rattle its recipients, it seems to have succeeded. The person who sent the email to me reported that “[i]t left me quite shaken and furious.”
If the email was intended to scare donors into abandoning Harper, it has apparently backfired in a big way. Indeed, Motherboard reports that, according to Harper,
Smith’s efforts has had the opposite effect: her backers have responded by doubling, and sometimes tripling their donations. Her campaign has jumped more than $1,300 a month in donations after the emails went out.
For his part, Smith insists, as he did in a post yesterday, that his email wasn’t intended to be threatening. He had simply
decided the ethical thing to do would be to warn the people concerned, reassuring them I would not release the data and also what might happen, as I thought the Patreon boilerplate warning insufficient.
That bit about there being “a lawful public interest in my contacting the relevant authorities (including an employer)?” That was
actually just boilerplate legal language related to UK law. Obviously I am analysing these supporters and in some limited circumstances I might be required to report things – for example if they were a risk to a child. As a person who may wish to enter a regulated profession, I would be expected to cooperate with the authorities. Far from being a blackmail demand it is just standardised ‘cover-yourself’ legal language.
I will have to consult with the monkey lawyers flying out of my butt on that one.
Some Gamergaters have insisted that Smith isn’t really one of them, which is a bit silly, considering that he is a regular on the KotakuInAction subreddit — one of Gamergate’s main hubs of activity — who happily posted a photo of himself hobnobbing with Yianopoulos at a #Gamergate meetup in London last April.
But it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of those posting about Smith’s email blast on KotakuInAction since word of it got out earlier this week have been strongly critical, blasting it as the sort of thing that (in their mind) only evil anti-Gamergaters would do. (Never mind that they haven’t.)
Of course, Gamergaters (and the mythic “third party trolls” they like to talk about so often) have been doing far worse to Sarkeesian, Quinn, Wu, Harper and many others among Gamergate’s favorite villains for more than a year now.
Still, the reaction to Smith’s blackmail-that’s-not-really-blackmail-honest suggests that at least some Gamergaters have a few sickly shreds of decency still living deep inside them somewhere. I can only hope they can nurse their decency back to full health before they ruin the lives of more people in their attempt to rid the game world of anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.
And I hope Patreon brings the full force of its lawyers down on Smith.
An excellent worked example of a dog whistle comes from back in 2011.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/margaret-cho-trolls-who-call-me-fat-and-ugly-are-admitting-defeat_5601cd1ce4b08820d91aa305
Short story shorter: When Internet trolls attempt to derail Cho’s arguments by calling her fat and ugly, she says, “You’re not offering me a cogent rebuttal.”
Ka-zing!
@sunnysombrera – Another dogwhistle you might recognize, especially if you’re in the US
“Thugs”
Definition (when used as a dog whistle): Young brown men and boys, especially in baggy clothes and/or hoodies*.
Implied reaction: White people, especially men, need guns (especially but not limited to the right to open carry them into any chosen venue) in order to fend off thugs.
* Was I the only one who was incredibly annoyed and amused (annused? amoyed?) by the chicken-sqwaking on Fox, et al, a few years back about, “OH, NO! THUGS AND THEIR HOODIES!!!”
I was working on a university campus at the time and was like, “You mean…hoodies like most of these kids wear most of the time? Oh, no – you mean hoodies like brown kids wear, probaby even some of these kids on campus if they happen to not be on campus.
Check.”
*squawking
“sqwaking” was an auto-correct plugged in by my phone when I wrote “squaking”.
And, oh wait, “a few years ago” was a misstatement:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/05/oklahoma-lawmaker-wants-to-ban-hoodies-in-public/
But there is this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/09/16/fox-newss-bill-oreilly-blames-trayvon-martins-death-on-hoodie/
Ah, thugs and hoodies
I’ve mentioned before that over here a stereotypical thug would be a shaven headed white guy with a broken nose (although as that description also fits me I’ll have to add #notallthugs!)
The hoodies thing is also neutral here, if anything it’s associated with chav culture, again that’s a white thing. Chavs are your “Jeremy Kyle” types, Burberry baseball caps and alloy wheels.
Our Prime Minister, David Cameron, was the source of much mirth when he tried to dispel the stereotype that such people were necessarily criminals with his “Hug a hoodie” campaign.
Luckily for him, he’s now more famous for having fucked a dead pig, so people have moved on from taking the piss out of that.
That’s what passes for political debate here.
Kat:
Well, unless the kid is René fucking Magritte, maybe he should work on making his meaning clearer.
I suspect the sign is meant to be an echo of that “this is what a feminist looks like” campaign. If so, it’s a fail. “This is what a feminist looks like” challenges stereotypes: it says “if you thought all feminists are ugly, bitter man-haters, think again”. By contrast, his “this is not what a rapist looks like” attempts to reinforce stereotypes: it says “rapists are recognisably disreputable, easy to spot, so if you get raped it’s probably your own damn fault”.
Kid probably has a great future in the Tory party.
@Alan re: political debate: One of the few regrets that I have about not having cable TV is that I no longer have C-SPAN.
C-SPAN sometimes airs footage from the House of Commons.
That’s some quality entertainment right there. /southern accent
@…dammit, I forgot who posted the Radiolab info/link and am on my phone so can’t navigate back to check:
*puts episode and queue*
Thanks for the rec!
To those with a chilly day/morning:
I hope that you have a fuzzy to keep you warm.
http://i.imgur.com/cQYDb0N.jpg
My cat loves me*.
* My body warmth.
She loves my body warmth.
She’s 10 and pretty much only likes people when it’s below 50 F.
Episode in* queue
*sips coffee*
Does this work where you are?
http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/hansard/commons/todays-commons-debates/read/
EJ,
btw, thanks for posting your session report. The thread was kinda dead so I didn’t respond, but it was a fun read.
I’m running a follow-up of sorts tomorrow, as it happens. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Laurier University has been locked down and classes cancelled due to a threat received by the FYI and RCMP. Spent an hour or so listening to an overhead chopper.
@pillowinhell
Another threat against a university.
Please stay safe. And if you feel like it, let us know the details.
The Laurier threat came from 4chan, because of course it did:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/wilfrid-laurier-university-lockdown-1.3274032
@pillowinhell
Stay safe. I found an article about it for anyone else curious. The threat was made on 4chan. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/wilfrid-laurier-university-lockdown-1.3274032
@Alan:
And this is why “conservative traditional family-values politician” is these days a dogwhistle for “secretly super-sicko badwrongsort pervert with actual blackmail-worth skeletons in closet”.
*sips her tea aggressively and gives a knowing nod*
@mockingbird: Your kitty has brought warmth to my evening.
Here’s the 4chan threat: http://imgur.com/LzZRgUM
@Patreon, please paddle that boy’s third point of contact. This is clear prima facie harassment and threatening.
I feel like Sex Signals was probably the most effective consent education strategy I’ve seen – at least when I saw it (fairly early on in their development). It presents itself as an improv comedy show about sex which goes into issues of consent really effectively. As a result it doesn’t (generally?) come off as “you must be a rapist” to these types. It didn’t get presented as a “lesson” so people seemed more receptive to it than they might have otherwise.
Howdy, thanks, and you’re right. This guy, if he knows what rapists do/don’t look like, should immediately get a job with the local police as a criminal profiler. He’ll clean up, I tell you!
I bet he thinks they all are black and wear hoodies.
(Item: I’m white. And I wear hoodies. Sometimes with miniskirts. Clearly, I am Asking For Trouble.)
Re: the Laurier threats
Oh hell. I lived in that area a few years ago; the University of Waterloo is three blocks down the street from Laurier University. I hope that the threats aren’t real; if a shooter can’t get at Laurier there’s another target within walking distance, one that might not be on as high an alert.
I hope everyone in the area is safe. This shit is awful.
I think the logic tends to go something like: ‘As a frozen peach person, I am against censorship; this criticism – if you stretch some concepts out to almost the breaking point and also squint really, really hard – could kinda-sorta be seen as a kind of censorship; therefore, I believe we need to stop this criticism.’ To most of us it’s plain that these folks are just using a ‘censorship’ boogeyman to try and shut down opinions that they disagree with, of course.
Even if the threat is probably, hopefully just trolling, it seems specific enough to potentially be investigated seriously and have charges brought. I hope something is done.