I specifically said *celebrating* those things; Brianna Wu's dog died of natural...

mafribe · on Jan 22, 2015

I note that you have not provided a single bit of evidence for GG killing dogs, SWATing and bomb threats. Instead you like to Guardian, WaPo HuffPo etc, desparate publications that are well-known uncritically to print everything that confirms their readership's prejudices.

Indeed you link to Sarkeesian's (or rather Jonathan Mcintosh) Twitter as evidence ... don't you think even random people might find such a source ... how can I put it delicately ... somewhat partial?

Indeed you admit "It's immensely hard to tie the events to specific people". So if it's hard, why do you do it? Given this methodological misinformation that you've carried out, I wonder if you are somebody who has something to hide, has skeletons in his cubboard and throws shade at anyone who challenges the official, mainstream narrative.

Let me close by challenging you again: please present concreat, actionable evidence, usable in a court of justice, that the alleged threats against Sarkeesian, Chelsea Van Valkenburg (aka Zoe Quinn) and John Walker Flynt (aka Brianna Wu) were carried out by who had a substantial GG affiliation.

ijk · on Jan 22, 2015

What, the New York Times wasn't objective enough for you? [1] You prefer the Washington Post? [2]

See, here's the thing: because of the way that GamerGate works, anyone who says that they're part of GamerGate is a part of GamerGate. To use just one example, the shooting threat in Utah was by someone explicitly claiming a link to GamerGate.

(And I never said that GG killed dogs, I said they celebrated the dogs being killed. Which is obvious if you read 8chan at the time.)

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/technology/gamergate-women...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/10/15...

mafribe · on Jan 22, 2015

Regarding "What, the New York Times wasn't objective enough for you?":

You really don't understand (or pretend you don't understand) how modern newspapers work.

1. Newspapers have ideological bias. In terms of domestic news, it's a liberal newspaper, so would automatically add a sexist anti-male spin.

2. Journalists are under heavy deadline pressure and badly paid. Typically most stories in a newspaper like the NYT are slightly edited press releases from some PR agency. The corrupt games journalists who are trying to cover up their wrong doings know this and produce press releases that smear GG, knowing that mainstream news outlets like the NYT will uncritically print them. You only need to look at the Wikipedia article for Chelsea Van Valkenburg (who currently calls herself Zoe Quinn) to see a prime example of a PR-agency hit-piece. Having worked in PR and journalism, I can smell the PR-style writing from a million miles.

3. Newspapers like the NYT are doing financially very badly and are desparate for page-views. And the damsel-in-distress narrative reliably generates such page-views. That's why the likes of Sarkeesian, Chelsea Van Valkenburg (aka Zoe Quinn) and John Walker Flynt (aka Brianna Wu) use them, and that's why the NYTs of this world print them.

Rest assured that the NYT writer responsible for editing the press release you linked to has done no fact-checking of substance.

As to "because of the way that GamerGate works": I'm afraid it's the other way round. Since there is no organisation, no formal membership, everybody can claim to be GG; moreover, Sarkeesian, Chelsea Van Valkenburg (aka Zoe Quinn) and John Walker Flynt (aka Brianna Wu) et al and their friends have strong financial incentives to run false flag operations, see their Kickstarters and Patreons and media adulation. So the only reasonable default assumption must be that they are running false flags. This default assumption should only be reversed in the presence of concrete, actionable evidence that would work in a court of law. So far none of this has been forthcoming.

I would also like to point out that the police clearly doesn't take these claims seriously, for otherwise we'd probably have seen some people being arrested or charged. After all anonymity on the internet is hard these days, and beyond the abilities of most.

mafribe · on Feb 2, 2015

Some interesting speculation about branding and hoaxing that are pertinent here: http://valleywag.gawker.com/the-shanley-show-was-the-whole-t... .