Apparently Davis Aurini is capable of sometimes telling the truth.
As you may recall, the bald, semi-Nazi stain on humanity released his version of The Sarkeesian Effect (that was officially not his version of The Sarkeesian Effect) last week to something less than universal acclaim, with one critic describing the “film” as “worse than a dead squirrel in your wall.”
Ok, that was me.
Weirdly, it turns out that Aurini actually agrees with some of my criticisms. While still maintaining that his not-version of The Sarkeesian Effect is a “damn good film,” he admitted on a livestream last night that the section of his film critiquing Anita Sarkeesian’s alleged lies was “crap.”
He then suggested it would have been much better … if he’d actually watched Sarkeesian’s videos.
Yep. He spent a year — and tens of thousands of dollars of other people’s money — ostensibly making a film about Sarkeesian. But somehow he never got around to watching any of her videos.
ETHICS!
You can hear the whole segment on “Bechtloff’s Saturday Night Livestream: Secret Crisis of the Infinity Hour” on Youtube here. (The link should take you to the relevant portion of the livestrean, which starts just short of an hour and twenty minutes in.)
Here are the highlights.
In this first clip, Aurini responds to someone with a question about his attacks on Sarkeesian’s alleged dishonesty.
This clip ends a bit abruptly because Aurini was cut off by Bechtloff before finishing his sentence. Luckily, he went on to elaborate on his point. And threw in in a racial slur while he was at it, because why not?
And here he admits he didn’t bother to watch Sarkeesian’s videos.
It’s about ethics in making an entire film about someone without actually knowing anything about them.
EDITED TO ADD:
We Hunted the Mammoth has obtained this footage of Davis Aurini as a child.
H/T — Thanks to the alert reader who pointed me to the relevant section of the livestream.
“It’s all so convenient; you insist that anti-feminists are all terrible people and use the worst of us as examples (and then do everything in your power to make the best of us look like bigots, by taking everything we say out of context), but whenever someone does it to you, you’re all “NO that person is nut a feminist!”
I mean, its almost as if simply being opposed to treating women as if they are fully human is bigoted intrisically, whereas doing things that are contrary to the goal of equality is not actually an action in harmony with an equality movement’s philosophy… or something.
@Scildfreja
I applaud you for your patience and eloquence. Though the troll may not (who am I kidding, absolutely will not) appreciate your efforts, the mammotheers of this thread do. (And also having new reading material and studies available is a cool thing which I appreciate.)
A nice find, @C.S.Strowbridge! Your bibtex-fu is strong. I have a hard time finding papers that are free!
@What Is A Man, I know that reading white papers is really hard – they’re very dense and full of jargon that most people have to work at. That includes people in the field!
If you’re struggling to make sense of things, it’s usually a good idea to first read the abstract, then the introduction. Then I often jump down to the discussion section – you get what they found and a discussion on what that implies. Then you can go back up to their methodologies to see how they discovered what they did.
I hope that helps you!
Your example is a woman diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia, who shot a man she thought was stealing from her.
That’s an odd choice.
@C.S.Strowbridge
“You see I picked this example to insinuate that women are mentally unstable and feminists by extension are unstable as well, making them unqualified to argue their points. With that point I can get them to claim ‘not all feminists’, and then I got them where I want them, be just be too exasperated to argue.”
Or some other BS like that.
@Scildfreja
http://ponyfac.es/content/faces/48af58ae.png
Foolish Women & your Precious Science!
What is this, troll week?
So wait, hold up… Actually watching the series would have pushed back production a week? It shouldn’t take a week to watch a few YouTube videos. Given that, he likely estimates a week to watch the vids, prepare his own responses, and somehow make that function within a ripoff, I mean sample, of an entirely different work
A week? CGPGrey, Nerdwriter, etc. take weeks on just the research phases of 5-10min vids, not hour long docs. Then again, their stuff is actually good, so…
@Galt
I don’t think antifeminists are terrible people. They’re close minded conspiracists, entirely bankrupt of intellectual curiosity and lacking abstract empathy… but not necessarily terrible
@Catalpa,
Aw thank you 🙂 It is a terrible shame, really! These guys generally say that it’s all about rationality for them, and – well – the bedrock of rationality is to change your mind as new evidence presents itself! But they can’t. Their hearts are hard, and their minds have gone rigid with fear of being wrong.
They must be right, because their rightness is how they measure their worth. So the brain masks information that conflicts with their definition of self in its many marvelous ways. They starve for truth, with a banquet of knowledge in front of them. It’s sad, really.
Then I remember that their reaction to having their reality contested is to disgorge all the hate their adrenal glands can muster, and then I don’t feel so bad.
http://pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw9048-215658__UNOPT__safe_fluttershy_animated_image-macro_haters-gonna-hate.gif.gif
@Axecalibur
No you’re supposed to say that antifeminists are all terrible people so I can equate you to me! That way I can claim something something South Park version of middle ground to back peddle out!
Did I do it right? I haven’t been around enough 4chan tier bigots for a while, so I might be rusty in their reasoning department.
@Scildfreja
Must not make a doofy smile when in face of mlp gifs. Such positivity is making me, happy.
@ooglyboggles, their logic never changes so I think you’re pretty accurate.
@pandapool,
http://iambrony.steeph.tp-radio.de/mlp/gif/32180__safe_rainbow-dash_fluttershy_animated.gif
:3
@OoglyBoggles
:3 :3
@C.S. Strowbridge
Boom goes the dynamite.
@isidore13
Thank you for the compliment. Honestly such rigid thinking to me is like a rock cliff face to the waves. No matter how sturdy and stubborn, it’ll wear down to naught but sand in the face of waves. Waves in this case being people striving to be better and making things better for others. Well for them it’ll be the moral corruption that is the boogeyman of whatever generation you feel to be quite hateful.
@Scildfreja
Just, just
Sorry for the mess, my link fu is weak.
For the benefit of any reasonable bystanders who have not personally watched Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games:
It is possible that Anita Sarkeesian believes consuming misogynistic media makes people more misogynistic and/or that consuming violent media makes people more violent. However, that’s not the thesis of her videos, a necessary part of the argument, nor even a recurring theme.
All Tropes vs. Women is meant to prove is that many video games are misogynistic or have misogynistic elements. She takes tropes she believes to be misogynistic, explains what the trope is with enormous numbers of meticulously cited examples, and then explains why she finds it misogynist. Usually this is either because
–the game misrepresents women and women’s experiences by depicting stereotypes as truths
–because the narrative simply doesn’t care about women and women’s experiences
–or because the game encourages players to degrade, torture, or humiliate fictional female game-characters.
I can’t recall her ever using possible harm to real women as part of that argument.
@brooked
omfg if we could evolve (socially or biologically) to actually believe in properly evaluating …reality… instead of believing nonsense based on bullshit (& lets face it, everyone does it in some way to some degree) we might lose some of that captain kirk human nature, but we would gain a society wherein people actually do some real fucking resear h properly before jumping to conclusions…. that would solve like 90% of humanitys problems.
yeah,Even if video games don’t cause sexism/misogyny the response to Anita’s videos proves there is a lot of it in video game cultural .
What is your take on the threats that Anita has received what is a man?
@Fabe
Those aren’t really part of the GG movement, in fact the ones that claim they are, are a vocal minority when really ethics in gaem jurnalism. The threats are greatly exaggerated in breadth and depth and really it’s the anti GG’ers who are awful with how often they too doxx people and the journalists are really part of the corrupt conspiracy to—
You get the idea. I’ll find five internet pics of happy lizards and dogs and paste them, if what is a man/galt can manage to make a response that doesn’t sound like what I illustrated. Just as soon as I figure out how to link gifs and pics on this comment section.
Edit: Apparently all it is, is just paste the image, okay, here’s one to start.
http://i.imgur.com/rlPelST.jpg
Oh rasberry lizard, teach me your ways of balancing fruits on your head.
@Orion, I think the “show how it’s linked to real world misogyny!” line is our What-Is-A-Man friend claiming that misogyny is A-OK in fiction, cause fiction never affects the real world. It’s an extension of the “Violence in Video Games Doesn’t Cause Real Violence!” hue and cry. In other words, he’s conflating positions that he doesn’t like.
:O
quel suprise!
@OoglyBoggles, your link didn’t work! Embedding pictures here works like this. Just paste in a link with the following traits:
– it starts with http:// (https:// sometimes works, depending on your browser i think!)
– it ends with .gif or .jpg. .png might work as well, I’m not sure!
Otherwise just paste it in without HTML tags.
EDIT: Raspberry lizard!
@Kale, inorite? Unfortunately it’s impossible – evolution doesn’t get a do-over, it just sort of hacks things together with what its got, and what it’s got is a horrible mess of hormones and fuzzy pattern recognizers. Rationality’s sort of the peel of the orange. It’s a shame!
@OoglyBoggles
To embed an image just paste it on its own line.
It’s such a great paper that I have it book marked and have posted that link countless time.
Raspberry lizard needs it own song, like the baby monkey riding backwards on a pig has. It should be a Beatles-esque tune (psychedelic era Beatles, of course).
I like how we’re supposed to prove a broad, multifaceted, far-reaching social phenomenon using only a soundbite-sized citation. If you can’t prove something in one paragraph, it isn’t true.
This is the trope “complaining about shows you don’t watch”.
“I don’t like the show because of its fandom”