formerly /u/squirrelrampage on Reddit

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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Three big harassment campaigns that pre-date GamerGate were…

    • The harassment of Kathy Sierra by the neo-nazi Andrew “weev” Auerheimer and his followers
    • The backlash against “Mass Effect 3” and - particularly - how people like Casey Hudson, Jessica Chobot and Jennifer Hepler were singled out for personal harassment
    • The harassment of Anita Sarkeesian after the launch of the Kickstarter for “Tropes against Women in Video Games”

    None of these events incorporated all of the elements that would lateron form the core of GamerGate, but they can be seen as test runs, particularly insofar as many of the same actors (such as Auerheimer) were involved, as the core of the attacks were often misogynist and queerphobic, and because much of the harassment was conducted in the same way, weaponizing social media in order to single out individuals which were blamed for a whole slew of (often non-existing) problems/faults/…
































  • To add to what SpookyBogMonster already said: On an international stage the big proponents of these views nowadays are Xi Jiping’s faction in China or North Korea, while even Cuba (which had upheld these views for a long time) have now abandoned this position.

    In the US and in Europe, it’s a fringe position among leftists, mostly popular with those who also hold favourable views of Xi Jiping’s China and North Korea. It’s a very vocal minority though and infamously one of the key developers of the Lemmy platform is one of those.


  • Because it is not a coherent political standpoint, the justifications are all over the place. Ultimately people are being bigots and they come up with slew of explanations to justify their bigotry. So the arguments vary…

    One of most popular argument goes something like this “Only rich capitalists engaged in homosexuality and transsexualism because of degenerate bourgeois ennui. True Workers™ are never homosexual and transsexual. Therefore any homosexual and transsexual must be a member of the bourgeois class and cannot be a True Worker™.” (Which is just circular logic.)

    There are other arguments in the vein of “China (or another socialist country of choice) is queerphobic, China is socialist, therefore socialism must be queerphobic.” (Which fails to acknowledge that other socialist countries like for example the GDR were remarkably progressive in comparison to its capitalist neighbors.)

    Then there are other circular arguments like “Capitalist societies are rotten to the core. There is more queer visibility today. Queerness is proof of capitalist rot.”

    Appeals to queerphobia of the past like “The Soviet Union criminalized queerness. The Soviet Union is the socialist ideal, therefore we should do like them.”

    Or there are appeals to the authority of some queerphobic socialist writer of the past. As well as riffs on the argument from the screenshot which boil down to “Individualism is bourgeois capitalism. Queerness is an individual choice. It cannot be allowed under socialism where collectivism reigns supreme.”


  • The official reason for me getting fired were budget cuts, but I knew that the new department head actually wanted to hand my responsibilities to a buddy of theirs they had brought on board. Despite being there longer at the department than the new head and their buddy, as well as excellent performance reviews I had no chance to keep that job.


  • Yeah, you can put horses on any pasture and they will happily graze on whatever weed grows there. Gryphons (just one example of a popular fantasy mount) should be carnivorous. So how many cows do you need to feed that thing before it will fly someone safely across the countryside, without deciding that this someone looks awfully tasty?

    Big flying mounts should be horribly expensive to maintain. Only the most wealthy nobles and wizards who can literally conjure money should be able to pay for them.

    Personally I always have to suspend a lot of my disbelief whenever dragon mounts are being mentioned in fantasy books and there is absolutely no explanations how these creatures are being fed. Usually the topic is quietly sidelined or simply dismissed with “something something magic”.