So an angry dude wandered into the S**t Reddit Says subreddit recently — one of the few feminist-friendly, largely manbaby-free hideouts on Reddit — and left a pretty amazing rant, attacking the SRSers as, well, see for yourself.
I’m not even going to bother fisking this one. I think it’s probably best experienced in its original wall-of-text form.
In case that image is hard to read, here’s the text:
You’re the most f**ked up group of people currently alive (self.S**tRedditSays)
submitted 1 day ago by LewisExMachina
I’m sure you’re gonna devour this account too, but whatever. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that every time I call you out my account gets spammed and your cronies try to doxx me, but I can’t let you keep doing what you’re doing. The harassment you put people through on a daily basis is way worse than anything /fatpeoplehate was ever accused of. Who knows how many men you’ve driven to suicide just because they have something between their legs. But you don’t fucking care, because they made a rape joke and that makes them worse than Nazis. I guess rape is worse than murder now. And since men can’t be raped any man who says he was raped has to deal with it while a female who says she was raped is instantly believed and rewarded for her bravery. And you think women have it worse? Fuck off, women are treated like little princesses while men are treated like shit. Maybe you have a point with the catcalling thing, but everything else you say is bullshit and based on lies meant to devalue men and increase the value of women. Soon you’ll force the government to add the ability to make more money (27% more) by just checking off a “I’m a woman” box on a job sheet. Us men will just say that we’re transwomen (since that’s also something you support) and get that money too, so you’ll be back to square 1 where men and women make the same salaries. If you want to make the same money then don’t take maternity leave, dipshits.
And what’s with all the hate on video games? You don’t even like video games, and we do. Why is that a problem. If something makes a group of people happy and it doesn’t inherently hurt anyone else then why is that such a bad thing? Women don’t want to play video games, they just want to police the development of video games and its community. !??!?!? Seriously just fuck off. Go fight for unisex bathrooms or showing your tits or something I can get behind rather than video games that you don’t even play. All of the girlfriends I had wanted nothing to do with video games and that was okay. How would you feel if we started policing makeup, saying that makeup led to violence and should be banned? You’d hate it, because it’s a stupid baseless accusation meant only to hurt one gender. Which is exactly what the attack on video games is.
I don’t know what to say here other then you probably all need to get laid, then you’ll calm down.
Indeed, a thing of beauty.
If I don’t like video games right this second it’s only because I was just playing Nethack when a never-ending party of orcs sent my wizard character to an early grave. And that was tragic because she could cast identify and had a magic marker. How many of these whiny-ass manbaby “gamers” play games where you have to reroll entirely if you die once?
It’s no great mystery, really. We actually have Nintendo to thank for that since they made a conscious decision to market the NES as a toy which meant they had to pick a gender to which to pander since toy departments were already pretty gendered by that point. Obviously everything worth doing is for boys and so here we are, everyone else having followed suit with later systems.
The early generations of console had been marketed in the electronics section as fun for the whole family. My experience, having been in grade school at the height of the Atari 2600’s popularity, is also that everyone either had one or wanted one, regardless of gender.
Further hilarity comes from the fact that these same douchebros who can’t brain the idea of girls and women playing video games will scoff at the idea that media of any kind influences people.
So true, and a very interesting point.
I just read something super interesting. The Swedish government has signed a contract with US Shipmanager to use the cruise ship Ocean Gala for refugee housing. This ship was formerly the world’s largest cruise ship and has been known as Stardancer, Viking Serenade and Island Escape in the past. In the 1980s it was used for getting people from New York to Bahamas, then Oslo – Copenhagen, then Los Angeles – Puerto Vallarta. In the 2000s it’s been a Mediterranean cruise ship. It had recently been turned into a “floating hotel”, and now it’s going to be used for refugee housing for up to 1790 people. This is pretty amazing to me.
Fun fact: Dungeons & Dragons was successful because, unlike its competitors, it was a wargame that women enjoyed and would play with men. They had an audience of about 30% women, a figure no other wargame audience was able to get anywhere close to. (Pun unintentional)
The stereotype we have is of roleplaying being an all-male hobby, but that’s not historically true, and it’s not been my experience, either, except when the group is bad in other ways. I’d submit that male gamers who think women and girls don’t really like games don’t ever see them because they steer well clear of him.
(Also also as school-aged girls are expected to use computers suddenly they all start playing games because that’s what they’re good for. Not hard to find a girl who’s played Minecraft, or is currently playing Minecraft and would like you to let them get back to it.)
A. Noyd: games where you lose everything if you die have become one of the hot design trends. No-one knows what to call them: the reluctantly accepted term is ‘roguelikelikes’ because they’re like roguelikes such as Nethack.
Merus says:
Oh, really? Are they bothering to put much depth into them or are they just making them gratuitously punishing? Because Nethack’s steep learning curve is offset by giving you plenty to learn. Like don’t throw pancakes at a mumak.
It’s not a trend, and not a recent one.
It’s just that there is exponentially more games, and games tend to be more distinctive, so it appear to have more of thoses games. But seriously, they were plenty of thoses in the 80′, in the 90′, and in the 2000
(ADOM player here, because Nethack is too random and too tongue-in-cheek)
Mixed with some sort of RNG, it’s a way to get players to keep coming back to the game, without having to spend time creating lots more levels/monsters/scenery.
Some of them are “same levels in a different order (with randomized rewards)” (Tower of Guns, Binding of Isaac, FTL), but some still bother to create new maps each time (Eldritch, Teleglitch), which for me was the important feature of Nethack and other dungeon crawls. And you still get to learn from the sting of losing a promising character to something you thought avoidable.
I remember that “mumak” was on my “oh crap, it’s one of those, can I deal with it yet?” list, but don’t recall any food-based interaction.
How is attacking feminist causes not attacking feminism directly?
They’re also really self-contradicting. They say that too much makeup is ugly, but hate the sight of women without any on at all. Then even if she’s wearing a reasonable amount they’re STILL “waaah makeup is deception!” As if it changes her entire appearance or something.
Bros, listen. If makeup was really that face-altering I’d have never made it past international borders, since I’m wearing makeup in my passport photo but I wear none when I’m travelling.
Fucking idiots.
Newt says:
For no reason whatsoever, I thought the pancake might pacify or tame the mumak. Instead, it aggroed. And the really stupid thing is that I was invisible and it hadn’t even noticed me until it got a flapjack in the kisser.
@Mwrus: I’m currently in three games, two 5e dungeons and dragons games, and one star wars game (the fantasy flights version). In the 5e games, there are more ladies than guys, which is super fun. In the Star wars game, i’m the only one, and the tone does shift slightly. i try to speak up when things are maybe getting a little too off-colour for my comfort level.
That being said, we play at a local game store sometimes, and most groups are all dudes. I don’t understand quite why, as our groups would have even more ladies if we had more DMs.
Perhaps its because i work in a geeky industry, and when someone sent around an email on work chat asking who was interested, there were lots of people of all genders to pull from.
It was odd sitting in with the other work group and seeing that the ladies not only outnumbered the guys, but were also the only ones in the space, minus one lady who works at the store.
I can’t recommend the fantasy flights game enough, i love the dice mechanic. I can’t wait to find my x-wing, i’ve had a minature to use for it for like a year! Drat this only playing every other week thing, and crunch time, and life and everything that stops us from playing. Drat it!
Well if there’s a chat bar they can copy and paste a URL. Obviously requires getting someone to deliberately open the URL but I’m sure you’re old enough to remember Rickrolling. Also, TF2 lets people spraypaint images they’ve uploaded onto walls and I’m sure some MMOs do the same sort of thing. Even if the developers take the problem completely seriously it’s not really practical to pre-screen everything, so at best complaining will get the guy banned after the fact. I feel reasonably confident you could get the images removed via complaining in any MMO, but less confident that the offender will face major consequences.
I’m sympathetic to MMO developers not actively policing their community because the community is simply so huge, but they absolutely should have tools for people to block messages. Somewhere in the SF Debris review of The Old Republic he has a lengthy rant on how it’s much harder to actually block someone than it should be; basically blocking someone means the character you’re playing stops getting messages from the character you blocked but this does not extend to other characters on either account. That’s not good enough.
Also, even if people get banned if they’re really committed they can get throwaway accounts pretty much endlessly. The internet has a lot of design decisions that seemed like good ideas when they were made, and it’s not actually possible to dependably ban a specific computer. It takes some effort to get around an IP ban but it can be done. The only real constraint on IPs is that at a given time a given computer will only see a given address on one network connection.
Quality of TF2 servers varies wildly, because they’re run by players. They absolutely have the tools to police the community on their servers but don’t always use them.
Did anyone see this?
Remember that NECSS thing Richard Dawkins got disinvited to? Well, he’s now been disdisinvited. Or reinvited.
http://necss.org/2016/02/14/statement-from-the-executive-committee/
He turned it down because of his recent stroke, though.
Gah, I was glad that they’d made a clear statement his conduct was unacceptable. I can see wanting to first address it by private communication, but once they made a public statement backing down legitimizes his behavior even more than ignoring it.
Most of them probably don’t even know the right term for that, and call it “Ironman Mode.”
The fantasy flight games, Star Wars and otherwise, are very divisive it seem. In my RPG circle, the average opinion is that it’s a scam, a badly done system made to milk money. Before I actually got online, I though it was the average opinion, but apparently a lot of people absolutely love it and want more of it.
From the hater point of view, the problem is that there is no good reasons for the custom dices, and the way the game is laid out make people pay several time for the same things, and don’t feel anywhere near as deep as the old d6 Star Wars RPGs.
I dunno if there isn’t a part of “hype hate” in that. But on the other hand, my only game with it was indeed awful, complex, and seemingly needing even more custom stuff than D&D.
(for the record, my RPG circle is very big, like 30-40 peoples, but very masculine. The one with very blatant sexist views tend to be shunted out of it very quickly, but we have problem attracting people who aren’t from engineering school, and the aforementioned engineering school already is like 90% male)
Care to elaborate? (I’m going to assume you are saying that in earnest – for now.)
@Imaginary Petal:
I saw and I was really pissed off with that. I’m generally growing pretty alienated from movement atheism as a whole: I’ve always said that people like me need to stay inside because a movement can’t reform if all the good people leave, but it’s starting to look as though I’m the only person who wants to reform it at all.
@Ohlmann:
I have some friends who’re really into the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games. I’ve played it once with them: it’s not really my sort of thing but it seems to work for people who love the Star Wars universe and want to do something that pulls them back into it. Within that context, the expensive parts and high production values treatment seems to be exactly what they want.
@EJ : I am an atheist, but I prefer to stay away from the whole new atheism debacle and from Richard Dawkins. I prefer that branch to wither and die and build something new and hopefully less hateful afterward.
That’s helped by being french. Being religious is the exception, not the rule, here, so there is relatively few reasons to band together.
Replace “Movement atheism” with “#GamerGate” and you’ll see why the only correct answer is to ditch them like they’ve ditched everybody who’s not a right-wing cishet white dude.
(… Shit, they’re practically the same thing at this point anyway.)
@IP:
I can understand his anger if he made the point that his stroke came after he was re-invited and thus had nothing to do with his stroke, and then that point was twisted to say that he was suggesting that his dis-invitation caused his stroke.
What I cannot understand is his continued touting of the “not as bad as” logical fallacy of relative privation as the height of dispassionate rationality.
For the love of all that is not holy, Richard, if you think that women in Western democracies should not complain about creepy, boundary-crossing behavior, or discriminatory and exclusionary behavior in the sciences, because women in more repressive cultures have it worse, then you and your followers should:
a) stop calling yourselves feminists, and
b) stop calling yourselves rational.
“Hey! Wouldn’t it be great if women in repressive Muslim theocracies had more rights? (Just as long as they shut up once they have the right to vote, to drive, and to education — once they have those things, we certainly wouldn’t want them to challenge the men in their societies to think about how smaller things also contribute to making women feel unwelcome in the powerful parts of their societies that historically have been dominated by men. Nor would we want them to ask men to consider how certain behaviors and attitudes give women reason to feel unsafe in their day-to-day lives. Nor to challenge the idea that a lack of de jure discrimination in one sphere means that there can no longer be de facto discrimination in that sphere. Heavens, no.)”
“Rationalists”, my arse.
They also can’t actually tell if someone’s not wearing makeup. They’ll show an image of someone heavily made up with a “natural” look and contrast that with an image of the same person done in a more flamboyant style as an example of deceptive use of makeup.
Another example of people who scoff at the idea of being influenced by media being, in fact, so in the thrall of popular media that they think skin with no visible pores, blemishes or irregularities is a thing that occurs in nature.
It really annoys me how these guys are making rationality and logic into dirty words.
Essentially, formal logic converts true premises into true conclusions. It’s outright inherently impossible to get a false answer from true premises and a properly-constructed argument. But it doesn’t provide any more checking than that. All logic tells you is that if your premises are true, then your conclusions are true. If the premises are false then the conclusion is nonsense. And it can be very hard to get enough certainty about your premises. It’s also been logically proven that not all true statements can be logically proven.
So I think it’s an extremely useful tool but get very suspicious of people who claim to rely on it exclusively. That’s generally a sign they’re not examining their premises.
@ sevenofmine
Maybe it’s my age but I have a real ‘uncanny valley’ response when it comes to photoshopped pictures. I know there’s always been a bit of airbrushing and good lighting etc with photos of celebrities, but at least people had vaguely human attributes. I know it’s all very subtle but it’s that ‘you don’t notice, but your brain does’ thing. Doctor Who fans may recognise what I’m on about if I say ‘Autons’. Somehow your subconscious just recognises that what you’re looking at couldn’t exist in reality so your brain rejects it; like improbable CGI in films.