Category: Cyberculture

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Well that's a first. A gaming community that actively opposes objectifying women

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The TF2 community shows more maturity than expected.

I came upon this thread on /r/gaming where someone thought that if more females played TF2, the class models would look like this:

Female models for TF2 that have been objectified with large bewbs and showing as much skin as possible.

Cringeworthy, I know.

So anyway, I went into the thread, expecting the usual privileged circlejerk that I would have to fight over to point out that the above art is extremely objectifying to womenm but I was pleasantly surprised when not only the top comment, but the majority of comments already made the same point.

I don’t if this says something about the TF2 community, or about reddit’s TF2 community but this is honestly the first time I’ve seen this happen. It’s usually the other way around, where I get downvoted to oblivion when pointing out that perhaps having all females dressed provocatively is just a tad sexist.

As weird as it seems, I think it has to do with the fact that the game didn’t have any official female models from Valve which would have been very likely to be dressed in skimpy outfits, simply because the original concept artist might not have given it a two second thought (anymore than they gave a thought to the idea that hey, maybe some of the characters should have been female). And from then on, it would have been an upward struggle to change the set perception where exposed cleavage, midriff and thighs should not the norm for females.

Now, that all the models are originally perceived as fully clothed, the expectations are different, leading in fact to fans creating empowered females when they try to create such models. Examples ((Unfortunately I don’t have direct link to the sources)) :

Lets hope that if Valve ever considers finally repressenting the other half of the human race in the game, they’ll go with such a design.

 

"The Rape" of Mr. Smith

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The Shit Reddit Says….

I found this little gem via reddit, when someone was trying to equate being the situation of being robbed to being raped.

Quoted here in verbatim

“Mr. Smith, you were held up at gunpoint on the corner of 16th & Locust?”
“Yes.”
“Did you struggle with the robber?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He was armed.”
“Then you made a conscious decision to comply with his demands rather than
to resist?”
“Yes.”
“Did you scream? Cry out?”
“No. I was afraid.”
“I see. Have you ever been held up before?”
“No.”
“Have you ever given money away?”
“Yes, of course –”
“And did you do so willingly?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Well, let’s put it like this, Mr. Smith. You’ve given away money in the
past — in fact, you have quite a reputation for philanthropy. How can
we be sure that you weren’t _contriving_ to have your money taken away
from you by force?”
“Listen, if I wanted –”
“Never mind. What time did this holdup take place, Mr. Smith?”
“About 11 p.m.”
“You were out on the streets at 11 p.m.? Doing what?”
“Just walking.”
“Just walking? You know that it’s dangerous being out on the street that
late at night. Weren’t you aware that you could have been held up?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“What were you wearing at the time, Mr. Smith?”
“Let’s see. A suit. Yes, a suit.”
“An _expensive_ suit?”
“Well — yes.”
“In other words, Mr. Smith, you were walking around the streets late at
night in a suit that practically _advertised_ the fact that you might be
a good target for some easy money, isn’t that so? I mean, if we didn’t
know better, Mr. Smith, we might even think you were _asking_ for this to
happen, mightn’t we?”
“Look, can’t we talk about the past history of the guy who _did_ this to
me?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Smith. I don’t think you would want to violate his
rights, now, would you?”

Bonus link: See here how funny reddit’s /r/gaming finds pedo rape, and what happens when I call them out on it.

A Gamer's Stockholm Syndrome

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Sony is being targetted yet again, and the community of /r/gaming falls over each other to prove who’s the biggest tool.

So, over at /r/gaming, reddit gamers have got their panties up in a bunch once they heard the news that a pseudonymous hacking group is planning to assault Sony once more.Apparently gamers are none too happy that someone is assaulting their preferred corporation and they are under the impression that any downtime as a result of those hacks, will be solely the fault of those dirty hackers. Some have even taken it one step further, laying the blame for any potential erosion of internet freedoms (as a result of corporate lobbying and media fearmongering) on the hackers as well.

The whole discussion is littered with playstation gamers who are outraged, OUTRAGED, that they may have to suffer more downtime on their precious online gaming as a result of a possible new breach of Sony systems. The amount of corporate suckup-ery is disgusting.

However, any possible downtimes or erosion of civil rights is not the hacker’s fault.

One has to consider, who brought down PSN the last time. It wasn’t the ones who cracked themselves into the system and it wasn’t a denial of service attack. If was Sony itself who did it, as a reaction to their system becoming compromised. I doubt that the original crackers were politically motivated anyway but even if they were and finding user data was an unexpected freebie, the reaction of Sony was the fault of nobody but Sony. Had they encrypted their data, they wouldn’t have to take down PSN for everyone. It was a gross failing on their part of their lax security practices.

It was also Son’s fault because they explicitly poked the hornet’s nest. Nobody forced Sony to take away the otherOS which made the hacking community actively interested in hacking the PS3. Nobody forced Sony to start legally assaulting the hacking community. Nobody forced Sony to participate in political lobbying to erode internet freedoms. And while the previous crack might not have been a result of any of those, but rather an fortunate exploit for monetary reasons, the latest attempts seem to be pure retaliation meant to cause harm and lulz.

Basically, the hacking community seems to be sending Sony, and anyone else watching a message. “If you fuck with us, we’ll fuck your right back”. They don’t seem very aware of this, but it does look to me as a form of solidarity in the internet age. Remember that all this was caused by Sony going after a few individuals who cracked their system for their own benefit, causing no harm to Sony whatsoever.

Finally we need to remember that the reason Playstation users are being inconvenienced by downtime of PSN is again Sony’s fault. PSN is a walled garden if you remember. That means it’s centrally controlled and managed by Sony and alas, such are the faults of walled gardens. Had Sony allowed an open ecosystem, where PS3 machines could connect to the internet directly and used one of the many available means to play games online there as pioneered by PC gaming, then the downtime of PSN would have been unlikely to affect a lot of people. Had they allowed dedicated servers or direct connections, people would still be able to enjoy their games online. But centralization means that there’s a single and large point of failure. If you don’t want this to happen again, tell Sony to open their walled garden.

But of course the PS3 fanboys won’t do that because they’re incapable of thinking outside the box. In fact, I guarantee they’ll make excuses on why such a walled garden is not only reasonable for someone like Sony, but that it’s in fact better this way. It will be like someone defending the AOL network.

All that said, I’m not exactly agreeing with the direct action of those crackers. I’m not sure how effective they will be in the long run. At best, they might achieve that corporations might think twice from going after individual hackers and they might let more hacks to their system slide and perhaps be more open in their dealings in the future. But this actions has a chance to cause political backlash as well. The reaction of /r/gaming is typical in fact.

Could there have been a better way? I’m not sure and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, but I can’t blame the hacking community from retaliating against an oppressive entity like a multinational corporation with a rich history of questionable actions, which put them in their target sights.

However to blame the kneejerk reactions of the one with a history of abuse, on the ones retaliating to them is very much akin to a Stockholm syndrome. It’s like a kidnap victim blaming their family for not procuring the demands fast enough and empathizing with their kidnapper who as a result had to cut one of their fingers.

Related articles

How did /r/anarchists started becoming interested in Anarchism?

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Anarchists on reddit explain how they reached their political position.

Anarchists on march 3/14 (LOC)
Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

I thought I’d point out a discussion going on in /r/anarchism where various subscribers explain what made them turn to this political theory. We’ve done one of these before, but it’s always interesting to see new stories.

This time we have more people who got radicalized by state violence.

Mayniac182:

I’ve said this quite a bit recently, but: police brutality. It was seeing students get beaten at the London protests that made me question the role of police, as well as realising how much money is spent protecting politicians who are no different than the ordinary person.

A lot of other expressed something similar to my coming out story, in that they were always ideologically anarchists but didn’t know it until they discovered the theory.

Nebula42:

It’s a bit complex but when I was younger my best friends were people of color but something bothered me. Their parents worked much harder than mine and longer yet they were poorer. It struck me as not equal and unfair so I sorta developed a rudimentary socialist idea from early on. Obviously I was a kid so it wasn’t anything impressive. I was pretty much a social democrat (although I labeled myself a liberal at the time). Around 2007 I became increasingly aware of how oppressive the government can be and sorta had a 2 month flirtation with Ron Paul until I realized that the ideology is tyrannical in it’s own sense. I wanted something that was anti government and anti capitalist to fit in with my views of inequality. Someone told me I was an anarchist around 2009ish and decided to explore it more. Read the philosophers..etc and pretty much had the same ideas that I developed on my own except a lot more refined. So here I am today!

And then others were affected by culture

Nondualbliss:

I’d say it was a combination of exposure to punk rock and academia. As a teenager, I was into Bad Religion and Propagandhi. I gravitated into more underground punk stuff that leaned quite left. Then majored in Sociology and learned about inequality on a global scale and read a lot of Marxist theory. Then a band I liked – Stanford Prison Experiment – included a 30 minute lecture by Noam Chomsky at the end of one of their albums, which lead me to his writings. For the past 15 years now, I’ve been reading up on Anarchist thought.

Apropos Chomsky; there’s quite a lot of people who were converted by Chomsky in there as well. Just shows how effective a popular anti-authoritarian/anti-imperialist face can be, even if they otherwise espouse some very contentious positions.

The Smurfette Principle and Sexism in PvPonline

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As the feminist frequency brilliantly explains the smurfetter principle, Scott Kurtz apparently decides to remind us how sexist he is.

She says it much better than I could really.

And since I’m on the subject of feminism, can someone explain to me what is going on with all these old school webcomics starting to show more and more sexism? I was going through my PvPonline backlog of the last week and I came upon these two “gems”

Men who are afraid of scary movies are like women while screaming in fear is stereotypical of a married female in “hysterics”

“Women are competitive and catty and generally unkind to each other” (Said by the only main female character – i.e. the “smurfette” of PvPonline)

What the fuck is this shit people?

Quote of the Day: Men's Rights "Activists"

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man boobz exposes the truth about MRAs.

Quoth David Futrelle

At its heart, men’s rights activism doesn’t really seem to be about activism at all. What the movement has turned into is a strange parody of “victim feminism,” an endless search for proof that men (despite earning more than women, heading up the overwhelming majority of companies and governments in the world, getting all the best movie roles, never having to wear heels, and so on and so on and so on) are in fact second-class citizens.

A brilliant piece on a group of people who have recently become a significantly annoying experience online. It doesn’t help matters that their members all too often intersect with right libertarians and Randroids and White Rights Activists (you can imagine what the latter are about)

Unfortunately MRA, much like libertarians are far too numerous online and can easily focus their attention into succesful entryist attempts. MRA entryism is the primary reason why most feminists have abandoned /r/feminism in reddit and have instead migrated to /r/feminisms which has a far more strict moderation policy allowing for deeper feminist discussion without endlessly devolving into What About Teh Mens! arguments.

PS: man boobz has become an instant favourite of mine. If only he would move out of Blogger’s crappy platform…

Don't diss Che or vile Maoists may get upset.

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The Angry Marxists are a group of ex-self-proclaimed-anarchists who turned Marxist-Leninist almost immediately after they were repelled from an anarchist space.

Broadsnark has recently written an excellent article on Che Guevara, and like clockwork, the vile Maoist “uber radicals” are striking back because Che was “one of the most successful and inspiring revolutionaries of the last century”. All that Mel did was to “twist the language of anti-colonialism to write up an a-historical and factually incorrect hit-piece”.

By Kropotkin’s beard, it’s like reading the Barefoot Bum all over again.

I am so glad that /r/anarchism resisted the sectarianism of their particularly toxic brand of “anarchism”. Their blatant authoritarianism and rhetoric of violence was warning enough and as soon as they were repelled, they turned into “Angry Marxists”. It’s a bit funny really, I’ve been following their blog since it started out of something like a morbid fascination to see just how rabid they can become. For example:

Lemme make something clear: we like firing squads. We are down with internment camps. We think working class and oppressed people have every right to shoot their class enemies in the neck and leave them in a ditch.

Given how they have labeled almost everyone who disagrees with them as a “class oppressor” this should send shivers down your spine if they ever come even close to grabbing any sort of revolutionary power. It would be the Kronstadt Massacre all over again ((inb4 the Angry Marxists come here to tell me how it was all individualist anarchists and thus deserved to be killed)).

I also find it quite fascinating of just how quick self-proclaimed anarchists who used to agitate quite a lot in an anarchist space for a very specific moderation policy (take a guess what it would look like), would almost overnight become completely anti-anarchist, and even espouse the same old tired strawmen against anarchism. This only reinforces my concerns that this group was part of yet another entryist attempt from Marxist-Leninists. And when it failed due to its inherent authoritarianism being anathema to an anarchist community, the masks fell off and those who were just masquerading assumed their actual beliefs and displayed proudly their ignorance of what Anarchism actually is.

This is only too humorous given just how often everyone else was dismissed as “Anarchyists” because we recoiled in horror at their violent rhetoric and suggested tactics.

Look at all the wonderful victim blaming (Also: MRAs disgust me)

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Ah Reddit, how expectedly misogynistic of you…

So, a woman get raped and the judge gives us this brilliant quote

Queen’s Bench Justice Robert Dewar called Rhodes a “clumsy Don Juan” who may have misunderstood what the victim wanted when he forced intercourse along a darkened highway outside Thompson in 2006.

I don’t think a simple “WTF” can even express my reaction at this. But anyway, I’m not here to talk about that. People who read this blog probably know already that “Blind Justice” is notoriously privileged.

However I do want to point out the Shit Reddit Said when this story was posted around.

From /r/women:

Am I the only one thinking that “Hey, Maybe if she would’ve taken responsbility for her actions, by saying ‘no’ and leaving this would have never happened” ?

Yes, because yes first “No” when he tried to kiss her didn’t count and anytime a woman is alone with a male, is an obvious consent to sex. What is this? Saudi Arabia?

First she says no, then she returns his kisses. She’s dressed like a whore and drunk. Flirts with him, leads him on, continues to go into the woods with him for some skinny dipping, then gives in. Maybe the next day she regrets her drunken actions, and doesn’t want to be associated with this dope, and cries rape to save face with her friends/family.

Poor guy, he was led on by her whory flirting. FALSE RAPE ACCUSATION!

Terrible ruling. However, what was this woman thinking? There is a big difference between blame and using responsibility- and while I’m not suggesting she is at fault (blame), I have to seriously question her sense of personal responsibility for getting drunk and driving into the woods with strangers. Unfortunately, she learned the hard way that a man’s hormones aren’t something to fuck with.

Men can’t control themselves you know? That’s why the best method to avoid rape is for women to wear burkas and stay next to a male eunuch at all times. What was that woman thinking? Everyone knows that single women are consenting to sex. I tried to educate this particular rape apologist but I just couldn’t take more than 2 replies.

I’m starting to think there is an automated response for some women in a rape situation, and it doesn’t involve a lot of struggling. After all, if the woman would be fighting tooth and nail and screaming bloody murder, most guys would actually stop.[…]

But in most of the world this is not the case anymore. So I ask you, an obvious Feminist, shouldn’t we educate women to do more in this kinds of situations? To yell, at least, if not fight?

Because if women don’t struggle, it’s an implicit consent. Nevermind that some might be too terrified, stressed or shocked or just shamed to react violently. No, we, as males should educate all those foolish women on the best way to prevent rape.

Unfortunately I also did the mistake of trying to argue with this fool, but something tells me I didn’t get through:

I’d rather prevent rape by any practical means, whether it fits a feminist agenda or not. Plus, if a woman would tell women to fight and scream in a rape attempt, would you still find it offensive?

Moving on to /r/2x, perhaps there will be less disgusting shit there:

I don’t know about this case since I wasn’t there, but guys are dumb and sometimes don’t catch signals that are sent. I have also known girls who cried rape when it really wasn’t.

You can’t honestly expect guys to control themselves ((Hey, isn’t it a common trope to call males as “logical” and females as “emotional”? I wonder what happened to this concept here. Hmmm….)) , plus don’t forget how common false rape accusations are!

There are other shitty sentiments expressed in there but they’re usually spread out within Walls of Text so I wouldn’t do them justice.

In /r/canada:

The judge here doesn’t seem to be saying “She was dressed slutty, so she was asking for it” but rather that given the circumstances (they had been partying, the guys were invited to go skinny dipping, he had kissed her and she reciprocated etc.) the man may have reasonably thought he had consent.

If she said no, resisted physically, was passed out etc., then by all means, send the guy to jail. But isn’t it possible that at the time things were a little more ambiguous?

Because what the man thinks is enough of course. Any time you reasonably think that the woman might have implicitly consented, go for it! If she doesn’t resist physically, you know she wants it.

I had a girlfriend break up with me, come back to my apartment to have sex with me and then proceeded to tell me that she would call the police and claim rape.

To this day, I didn’t understand why.

Crazy-ass bitch.

Wait wat?

And the best piece of blatant misogyny

I see nothing wrong with this. Let it be a lesson to the girl… The next time you dress like a slut, get drunk with a stranger, and then suggest that you go off alone, into the woods to go skinny dipping, odds are the guy is going to assume he is getting laid.

Fortunately the poster was downvoted to -10, but still. Still…

And finally, my favourite, the comment on the /r/mensrights repost:

Heavy make-up . . . no bra . . . high heels and tube tops??!! WTF? Did he pick up some drag queens?

What is this, I don’t even.

She kissed him back, she went in the woods with him, it sounds like she skinny dipped with him, it sounds like she accepted his advances and the judge wasn’t convinced that she said no.

In fact, it sounds like she never said no. It just sounds like he misunderstood her body language and was non-threatening. It sounds more like regret than anything.

This comment is of course not surprising coming from the Goddamn Batman of the MRAs, but it is archetypical of the lot.

Um, they wandered into the woods? Who the hell follows a stranger into the woods?!

Not sure if the alleged victim was actually raped, but she was pretty clearly an idiot.

And idiots clearly deserve to be raped…

The point is “Innocent until proven guilty.” What differentiates this particular allegation from another case, where the man was honest-to-god innocent, but due to extenuating circumstances the woman falsely accused him?

You can bet your ass that in a thread about women being raped, any present MRA will bring up the awful epidemic of False Rape Accusations. Like fucking clockwork!

This is yet another shining example of how the Men’s Rights movement attracts the worst kind of males (much like the White Rights movements attracts the worst kind of White skinned people).

That’s all folks. Your weekly dose of misanthropy has been delivered. Enjoy!

Privilege Denying Dude is down once more

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Fuck Yeah, Privilege Denying Dude, is down 🙁

It seems like the PDD is generating quite an amount of hate, enough to be pulled from Tumblr not once, but twice. Or at least this is what I assume is the reason behind the second incarnation of PDD being at status “Not Found” at the moment.

I’m going to give Tumblr the benefit of doubt here and not immediately jump on the accusation bandwagon, although given their previous willingness to hastily accept a half-arsed copyright claim, I don’t hold much hope. I only hope that if the site was indeed taken down by tumblr, the next PDD site learns from all this use something they can control more.

Privilege…so thick…can't breathe…

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Oh Privilege Denying Dude, you so funny!

Just look at this goddamn shit of a thread. The whole thing just reeks of unchecked privilege and rampart douchebaggery. I think this PDD I just cooked up summarizes it nicely.

Picture: Background: 8 piece pie style color split with red and teal alternating. Foreground: White guy with glasses and light shadow wearing a sweat shirt over a button down and short black hair. Has a smug, arrogant facial expression and crossed arms. Top text: “Using "tranny" as an insult doesn't mean that you're "transphobic"” Bottom text: “I don't hate them. I just don't care about their feelings”

Even a large number of transgendered people pointing out how wrong and hurtful he is to transgendered people was not enough to make this PDD rethink his perspective.

I think this brilliant post explains things best (h/t FuchsiaGauge)