Early Access: UC Merced Talk!

The Great Heathen King

Well, they either think you are a freelancer or a camgirl. God knows my parents think that when I tell them I work on the internett...

Ian Danskin

No, that's still coming.

Homebrew Futures

Good video, as usual. Is this the omnibus ARPB video you had talked about earlier or will that come later?

PaladinOfCats

I checked other videos. His voice intonation is about the same as usual; the mic is just more saturated, probably because this is a live Zoom talk.

You sound angry. You never sound argy. What is different?

Shisa Sensation

By the way, if you're still struggling with health issues, I hope you recover soon. I miss your gaming-infused rants on how fucked our world can be.

Shisa Sensation

I like how this put a nice little bow and pretty wrapping paper on your Alt-Right Playbook. I now know more about hashtag GamerGate than I already need to. It's like junk food, you know. It's heaven on the lips but terrible on the hips, but change "lips" with the limbic system and "hips" with the prefrontal cortex.

Ian Danskin

Hi Drew. I have a massive list of sources I compiled while GamerGate was happening, from which I drew all my conclusions, not vice versa. By "digging up sources" I mean I need to go through my documents and select the relevant ones for this video, because I wasn't diligent about notating which I was relying on. All due respect, but I'm a little insulted?

Hey, I found your comment about spending time to dig up sources slightly concerning. It seems to indicate that you came to some conclusions, made a video about your conclusions, and only later went to find sources that agree with your conclusions. I'm sure you are aware that sources can be found to support pretty much any pre-conceived notions, IMO this is part of the way that conspiracy theories and the alt-right propagate. Any chance you could provide some assurance that this isn't whats happening here?

Veelk

Hi Ian (Edit: if you saw an earlier version of this, I didn't mean to misname you with a joke you said you were tired of, I just got off 2 days of double shifts and I was tired and made a mistake, sorry) You mentioned NeoGAF in this video and you didn't say anything inaccurate about it, but it's worth noting that NeoGAF is no longer the kind of place that would shut down these campaigns of harassment. The creator of the site was accused of sexually assaulting a woman by walking into the shower naked without her permission. The short version is that he started banning people mentioning this, but the community revolted and basically started posting several threads about it to the point he had to shut it down. Eventually, the community decided to leave the site and migrate to a new one, which is now ResetEra. And specifically, this was an event caused by the progressive minded element of NeoGAF, so when that community left, the changes the creator made to the site were to lean far harder into right. Now, it's a site where you can freely objectify women, post alt-right memes, articles and material, misgendering people, etc. I just went on the front page of the OffTopic subforum and there are examples of this on the first or second page alone. It's up to you to decide how you want to handle it and if you want to make any changes to the video, but I imagine that you don't want to give the impression that NeoGAF is a progressive forum when that's what it used to be but is no longer, so I just wanted to make sure you knew.

Its a great summary of everything GamerGate! And yeah...it is a bummer -- but through all of these videos (and resources) of you I've gotten a far better understanding of how all this works -- I'd have loved to know that back when Gamer Gate was active as I had some friends who fell for the ethics in game journalism bit.

Crissa Kentavr

The idea that military force isn't okay even to face off against someone else's military force being used against civilians is a bit further than I guess most people are willing to go.

The Packbats

Really good talk - looking forward to sharing it with people I know. This is a tangent, but the point about atheists makes me think of something I've noticed recently: the New Atheism movement kicked off specifically right after 9/11 with a book by specifically anti-Muslim anti-Arab shitbag Sam Harris. I haven't read his shitty book recently, but there's a real possibility that most or all (I don't know much about Daniel Dennett's politics) of the public figures of the New Atheism movement <em>got their platforms</em> by supporting bigotry against the people the US Republican Party wanted to drop bombs on. (And the US Democratic Party mostly was willing to go along with dropping bombs on, because this country fucking sucks.)

I remember hearing about GamerGate as a teenager who didn't yet know much about games journalism, alt-right culture, hell, not even politics in general. I saw a lot of hate surrounding Anita Sarkeesian at the time, and thinking that there must have been a reason for it, I just kinda silently agreed with it and moved on. It wasn't until I began watching your videos that I started to realize the toxic reality of that kind of culture, and I'm very happy that I've become better at noticing and getting out of it. So thank you, genuinely! Your work is super appreciated.

Raymond Price

You kinda covered this with "I Hate Mondays" + "The Card Says Moops", but one of the things that drives me up the wall WRT dealing with conservatives is the way they will refuse to take responsibility for harm caused by the things they support, *until they can blame somebody else*. Family separation is good and it's their own fault for trying to illegally claim refugee status, but also it's Obama's fault. The Klan and Nazis are just conservatives having their free speech suppressed by that mean ANTEEFA, but also the Klan was founded by Democrats and it stands for National *Socialist*. Capitalism is the best economic system for lifting people out of poverty, and if it doesn't lift you out it's because you're just lazy. It's so frustrating because, as you say, they do realize that this is bad, but are just trying to evade any responsibility for it without concern for the facts.

Sid

I'm 60% of the way through and the loss bit was actually hilarious and well done.

Rob Chauncey

That’s a fantastic analysis, Ian. Bummer or not, you’re doing very important work in a clear and measured way.