“I’ve got more knowledge in my left testicle than you’ve got in your whole brain.”
Oh Gawds, the arrogance is over nine thousand!
The title quote from a right-libertarian redditor named “Libertarian Atheist” who fancies themselves as some kind of anarchist. They got a bit upset that I declined to include /r/agorism in the confederation of anarchist reddits and apparently tried to educate me on their personal ideology. The discussion soon after degraded, until they said this particular sentence, and I just had to bow out. What more can you say to that, that is not said by itself.
For posterity, I’m going to quote in full their latest reply. It’s that amazing.
You mistake arrogance with intelligence, knowledge, and an ability to convey ideas in an effective manner. “Arrogance” is a term dumb people with false ideas and impressions use to describe other people with better ideas. A smart man with false ideas and impressions who comes across another person with better ideas will not call that person “arrogant,” he will try to better understand what the other man is saying and be on the ready to throw out his own follies. What you laughably call a “combin[ing]” of “ideologies” is not so, it is the end result of years of study and reading, throwing out weak ideas (like “gift economy”) and championing the strongest. This is what I have been doing all my life and it does not bother me in the least that you (or anyone else, anarchist or otherwise) can’t understand. Luckily opinions are not measured by how many people “take [it] seriously” (if that were the case Christian and Muslim opinions would be the best) and a man seeking the best opinions does not care who “takes [him] seriously”, what matters is reaching as close an approximation of the truth as is humanly possible.
The funniest part is where you claim to be able to teach me anything. I’ve got more knowledge in my left testicle than you’ve got in your whole brain. You’re barely fit to teach a dog. You deign to reply to me? What a laugh! This back in forth with you is the greatest waste of my time this year so far. . . we’ve got quite a bit to go but you’re in a very high running at this point.
I just love that they also italicized the “me”, making that phrase totally sound like Invader Zim. Adorable!
Megaupload was taken down, but there’s no point in discussing how justified this was. That wasn’t the goal of the act.
I just saw this article on Torrentfreak where it reports on a recent Kim Dotcom interview, where he is dismayed that the law went against Megaupload so aggressively, even though they were co-operating so much with content owners and paid a lot of lawyers to confirm that they were within the letter of the law.
Towards achieving this protection, Dotcom told us that the company had developed relationships with 180 takedown partners – companies authorized to directly remove infringing links from Megaupload’s systems – and between them they had taken down in excess of 15 million links. Those companies included the major studios of the MPAA who, incidentally, in 7 years of the company’s existence had never tried to sue Megaupload for copyright infringement.
On the advice of Megaupload’s legal team, the company believed it had the same rights as YouTube in its case against entertainment giant Viacom. In that 2010 case U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton said service providers can not be held liable for infringement as long as they remove links upon copyright holder request – even if the provider knows that parts of their service are being used to host illicit content.
“[YouTube] won their lawsuit and I’m sitting in jail, my house is being raided, all my assets are frozen without a trial, without a hearing. This is completely insane, is what it is,” said Dotcom of his predicament.
This shows how naïve Kim Dotcom is about the causes of the aggressive raid on Megaupload. It wasn’t really that Megaupload was hosting infringing content. It wasn’t that Kim Dotcom is extravagant and an easy target. It wasn’t that the judges were misled by the content industry.
Megaupload did something that scared the bejeesus out of the dinosauric content industries. It developed a new business model and got it endorsed by popular names of contemporary content culture. It was about to show the world that ad-supported content creation is viable and in the process steal some of their best-known names.
If it succeeded (and it would have if left unattended) it would have served as the first domino to fall, urging other companies to follow suit and more artist to bail the sinking ship that is the RIAA. This clearly had to be nipped in the bud.
It is no surprise that the content industry went from calling Megaupload a “rogue site” (even though it co-operated fully with them), to strongarming the New Zealand state to take action with such ferocity that they called anti-terrorist groups to raid the house of a non-violent citizen. The immediate action and the excessive response is not random. It is in fact perfectly planned.
The point is to make an example out of Megaupload, not as a detriment to pirates, but as a warning to anyone seriously thinking of challenging the obsolete business model of the RIAA without playing by their rules. The response was there to remind everyone that the law jumps at the behest of the plutocracy and publicly snubbing your noses at them is a recipe for pain.
In fact, the similarities with The Pirate Bay takedown of 2006 are not few. Both sites were considered legal in their respective countries until the moment that they were raided without warning. Both times the response was unheard of compared to the nature of the crime. Both sites mocked the old content industries and openly agitated people to embrace the future of content creation and sharing. Both sites were not the largest available. The takedown of both sites was hailed and promoted by the content industries as a bloody warning to others.
In the case of the Pirate Bay, it quickly surfaced that state officials had been strongarmed by US diplomats to “Take immediate and definite action or else…” and they followed suit. It will not surprise me in the least to hear that New Zealand state officials had been pressured off the record by the US via economic sanctions if they did not immediately take action against Megaupload, legal precedent be damned.
The point is not really to defeat Megaupload in court – even though given the farce that was the Pirate Bay kangaroo court, it’s not unlikely – the point is first to scare all sites like Megaupload into shutting down or toning down their business, regardless of how legal it seemingly is. This is why such excessive force was used by the police, to give nightmares to site admins. Secondly and most importantly, it was to disrupt Megaupload enough so that they won’t be able to proceed with their plans to try out a new business model.
Both seem to have been successful. Already many other large uploading sites have taken measures to prevent their users from effectively sharing files or closed down altogether. Furthermore even if Megaupload wins the trial, the time it will take and the disruption it will do to them due to their frozen funds and burnt clients (those who lost their subscription money) will most likely ensure that Megaupload won’t be able to recover its former glory ((Naturally, I hope I’m wrong on this.)).
The distributed and free nature of the The Pirate Bay network/community helped them to quickly come back up and quickly resume services. As such, their takedown served actually as huge advertisement for them, and their popularity skyrocketed since then, making them one of the largest, if not the largest and most influential torrent site available, and a continuous trolling thorn in the content industry’s side.
Unlike them, Megaupload is centralized and concentrated in the hands of one leader figure, Kim Dotcom. As such, it is far easier to kill the beast by cutting off its head, which is exactly what happened in this instance. Megaupload cannot as easily be moved and brough up by allies, it cannot go rogue, and without the running accounts, it cannot function. It doesn’t matter if they are absolved in 5 years. By then it will be too late.
This is the weakness of centralized disruptive models I’m afraid and I doubt that Megaupload will recover from this, even though I’ll be pleasantly surprised if they somehow manage it. But until then, lets not delude ourselves that the takedown has anything to do with legality or proper procedure. We know it isn’t and so do they, but they do not care.
All they need to achieve is to convince everyone watching that when you go against them, the law will not protect you and even success in court will only be a phyrric victory.
Totalbiscuit makes an impassionate plea for people to boycott Mass Effect 3 but refrain from pirating it. I explain why Piracy is once again the better choice.
So the Cynical Brit addressed the issue of the Mass Effect 3 DLC and touched on the issue of Piracy and how it will affect the dynamics of the situation if people Pirate the game rather than simply abstain from playing it. As expected from what I heard him say last time, he is horribly wrong on what effects piracy of Mass Effect 3 as a form of protest is going to have.
But lets take CB’s arguments one by one and see why they are flawed.
First of all, lets address CB’s proposed tactic, which is that people who dislike the Day 1 DLC should boycott the game on launch day and instead buy it later on when it becomes cheap enough ((CB also makes some classic anti-piracy arguments, such as the idea that Piracy is unethical or that it is killing the PC Game industry. I’ve already addressed these in length in my series on Piracy, so I won’t repeat myself in this post.)) :
The idea is extremely naïve. It rests on the assumption that people not buying the game, will send a clear message to Bioware and EA that the Day 1 DLC is the problem and they’ll have to change their act to make people buy their game. Unfortunately this ignores the reality of markets and how they are notoriously bad at transmitting information back to the seller. If a boycott was actually organized and it did actually get enough people sticking to it, then EA is still unlikely to understand where the problem lies. The only information they will see is less sales than their expectations, maybe (because it may be the case that their expectations were lower in the first place). This does not tell them anything more than that. Was it because of the Day 1 DLC? Of Technical Bugs? Of Misjudging the market? Of Changed gameplay? Or of Piracy?
You can bet your sweet ass that whatever the real reason of your boycott is, Piracy will be blamedif it succeeds. It doesn’t matter how many letter you send, how many petitions you sign, how many pre-orders you cancel (well, maybe, but pre-orders are the minority of purchases); In the board of directors meeting, the managers will blame Piracy. You know why? Because it will absolve management of any fault! Managers will declare that Piracy dropped sales and that better DRM and lobbying for laws is needed to combat this disaster.
They will do this even if they have read thousands of letters announcing that it was the DLC (or bugs, or changed gameplay, or whatever else) that caused it and they will waste resources combating a boogeyman. Why? Because they won’t get fired. If a manager were to admit that they misjudged the DLC effect and take it back, they will be blamed for the “disaster”. Why take the risk, when the convenient scapegoat of piracy is available?
“Geez, our market research indicated that the sales of ME3 would see a 33% increase compared to ME2, we have done market tudies which proved that the Day 1 DLC would only turn away 10% of purchasers but bring in 20% additional revenue. By gosh golly, we don’t know what happened! Look at the stats yourselves dear investors. It must have been rampant piracy! Oh and what do I see here? Here’s a BSA report from of how piracy increased 160% this year. That is surely the cause!”
The only thing that might actually make people stand up and notice a boycott, rather than blame piracy, would be a significant cancellation of pre-orders with an accompanying note informing them of the reason for this decision. Then they might receive the info they need and fix it before it’s too late (as is what happened with BF3, which is a special situation in itself). But if they don’t, piracy is going to be blamed anyway.
This has been shown again and again. The hilarious Modern Warfare boycotts are the most recent examples, where people would boycott, but the games had increased in popularity so much, that the boycott didn’t even register in the radar. Thus people said “fuck it” and bought it anyway. Then there is the boycott of Spore due to its draconian DRM. This even spilled over in Amazon with an incredible amount of 1-star reviews and other kinds of activism. Even in the face of all this, the publisher still refused to acknowledge the real reason why sales of Spore were atrocious (Draconian DRM and bad Gameplay), but rather conveniently blamed Piracy.
The Cynical Brit is incredibly naïve in this regard. He expects that Management of big publishers is both honest and competent and will take an objective look into the situation of a successful boycott and then take the correct action in the future. But except the fact that management is much more often than not completely incompetent (eg see: Bobby Kotick running successful franchises into the ground (among other failures).), they have no incentive to be honest either.
Next, CB addresses Piracy and how “having your cake and eating it”, in other words pirating the game as a form of protest, is actually counter-productive. The argument is that the companies are then going to ignore the boycott and blame it on piracy. It thus makes more sense (according to CB’s logic) to simply abstain from playing the game and show “backbone” in one’s decision, so as to convince the companies to change their ways.
But as I argued before, companies are going to blame Piracy in case the boycott is successful (or simply the game price is below its subjective value for most consumers, thus making them ignore it). A few thousand people boycotting the game on principle and sending impassionate letters are not going to make a difference. In face, this is very likely to lead to many to break their boycott simply because they are too eager to play. This form of tactic is in itself counter-productive, because it assigns the “pain” of the boycott, to the few thousand people who are the most passionate about the game ((and let’s be realistic here, the only people who care about that stuff are the ones who care so much about the story, i.e. the hardcore fans, who are a small minority)). This is a recipe for failure, as the Modern Warfare boycotts made painfully obvious.
Piracy however can combat this. People can get their “fix” of the game and avoid rewarding the company for a substandard product at the same time. The “pain” of bad decisions is immediately transferred to the company making them, and thus it allows even more people to participate in a boycott, without having to battle with their own drive to play their favourite franchise.
In the end, pirating the game and simply abstaining from buying the game are going to have the same exact results. Piracy is going to be blamed anyway. Protesting people will “vote with their wallet”. You can still buy the game later on, when it’s price has dropped to its true value given DLC and DRM restrictions. You can still cancel your pre-order and claim that Day 1 DLC drove you to do so.
If everyone who boycotts the game pirates it instead, you’re going to have a few extra thousand downloaders in the stats. This is among millions that are going to download the game anyway because they can’t afford it or can’t purchase it through legal means. Whether you show “backbone” or not, is not going to make the slightest difference in the rhetoric the publisher is going to use whether the game is successful or not.
So do yourself a favour, if the Day 1 DLC is a deal breaker, vote with your wallet and pirate the game until the price goes down to an appropriate range. Then the only one suffering will be the one deserving it, the publisher.
The recent monumental successes of both the Double Fine and the Order of the Stick crowdfunding has also kickstarted (Beware the puns!) some heated discussions between my group of friends and myself on what the ethical thing to do is, once the project exceeded the requested amount by that much.
Regular readers (with amazing memories) might remember me writing on this issue a while ago, but the recent heated discussions prompted me to explore this issue once more and perhaps go into more depth into how this applies to non-software projects such as the Order of the Stick comic.
First of all, I should explain what my criticism is:
I believe that the only ethical thing to do, once you decide that you want your project to be funded by the public, is to make the end result public as well. The reason I find this the fair thing to do, is because by crowdfunding your project you take away the actual risk of developing a new product, and thus it makes no sense to take advantage of a system which rewards you based on the expectation that you took such a risk.
In this case, that system is copyrights and the capitalist markets. The expectation in the current world is that a creative project was started by a person or a group of people, who took a risk in creating something and then trying to make a living out of selling copies of it (I’m not going to criticise the expectations themselves ((I will only say that they are very wrong. Perhaps I will explore this in another post.)) but rather take them at face value for now.) This is where copyrights come in at their theoretical level. Copyright’s purpose is to incentivize new creative works, by giving a state-provided way for their creators to monetize them once they’ve been created. Thus someone who took a successful risk in judging what popular demand is can get fabulously compensated for it ((while those who didn’t get to starve, but that’s another issue now isn’t it?)).
But if copyrights are supposed to be the incentive for creating new works of art, then it makes no sense to provide them for crowdfunded projects, since there that incentive has already been provided by the crowd “patrons” of the project. People have already provided a monetary incentive for the creator which has also taken away all the risk.
For the creator to now take the finish project and monetize it as if they took all the risk and required the incentive of copyrights to do so, is unethical.
What would be the ethical thing to do? Try to circumvent copyrights you did not have to rely upon and release the work into the commons, once all your costs have been repaid. Release it as free software if it’s software, or release it in the creative commons with the most permissive license if it’s anything else.
But what is happening here, is that the creators have to work with such lowered expectations from their audience, that they can easily get away with what see as straightforward double dipping. The creators not only get a significant part (if not all) of their costs covered, and once the project is finished, the get to keep any and all profits from the sales of copies the product as well. They get to have their cake and eat it too.
People criticise me at this point by reminding me that the fans knew what they were getting into when they agreed to fund these projects, and that makes everything OK. I do not think that’s a good excuse. First of all, people voluntarily give their money to many causes and projects, but that does not mean that every such cause is ethical. Not only do people act irrationally in most economic decisions, but I find that the moral imperatives also change when we’re talking about these amounts.
It is one thing not to expect a project to be released for free when you’re only funding just 5% of its total cost, but here we’re talking about projects who’ve been funded 100% and possibly more. When the crowdfunding success is that big, when the mutual aid sentiments are that great from your fans, the creators have a duty to modify what they give back to the community just as much. But instead what I continuously see happening is that the extra rewards are something that will make the creators even more money!
For example, the Order of the Stick (OotS) kickstart required something like 60.000$ to work. They got 20 times this amount last time I checked. The original result of the crowdfunding would have been one book being able to be reprinted. With 20 times the amount, it’s going to be 5 books and a board game. I.e. the cost and risk of these reprints is being taken over by the community, while the author gets to keep the profits. And everyone is too far caught up in the euphoria of the project’s success to notice that they just made the author practically a millionaire overnight and in return got the opportunity to buy some new books in the future.
I’m told this is a fair deal because they agreed to the original plan.
Now I have to clarify that I have nothing against rewarding the creators of such works, especially when people like Burlew have been releasing their comic for free online for a long while (which they monetized in other ways already, but that’s beside the point). I’m very happy for the success of these projects, but I can’t avoid seeing the reality of the situation just as well.
When there is such overwhelming support for the creators to create new works, to take advantage of an artificial monopoly granted by the state via threats of violence (copyrights) as if it was a required incentive as well is an abuse of the goodwill of your fans, even if those fans are too starstruck or privileged to realise it. And I just can’t ignore this “double-dipping”.
I am cynical enough to fully expect that now that new roads have been paved by the pioneers and the indies of the creative world, the big companies will also start dipping their toes into the crowdsourcing pot. We’ll see giants like Activision offering carrots of classic and loved IPs such as Dungeon Keeper or Descent to crowdfunding, so that they can get some money upfront and only then start working on these titles, with either reduced risk, or completely risk-free. And why shouldn’t they? They will develop an IP with some money upfront and then sell it back to the people who already funded it.
And because the expectations of everyone for the rewards crowdsourcing will be for the public are so low, these companies may cynically abuse this concept, until the burn out the crowdfunding goodwill.
Alternatively, I hope that now that crowd funding is gaining momentum, we’ll see perhaps a sort of competition between projects for these funds, and eventually those projects which promise full ownership to the crowd that funds them will be seen as the better offer, while the others are ignored. This is my optimistic scenario.
When anarchists refer to their comrades as weak-willed sheep to be led around, then you know the rots has already gone deep.
It’s generally sad when I get disappointed by fellow anarchists online, but I don’t make a big deal out of it always However, sometimes, I feel a need to point out where I see a failing – when there is a salient point to be made on an issue. Such is the case with the recent interaction I had in /r/anarchism.
The story so far
/r/anarchism has until now been fairly laissez-faire in moderation, something which changed somewhat after the The Great /r/anarchism Shitstorm of 2010 when it was accepted that oppressive speech and people would be removed from the premises. However, it was commonly accepted that all other aspects of moderation, save combating outright spam, would be left to the organic moderation of the community.
One month ago, one of the newer mods in the team, wanted to start manually removing so-called reposts, by which they meant the same story published on different webpages and posted to /r/anarchism within a short amount of time from other versions of it. They asked the community for comments and the general sentiments was that they should remains hands-off about it and that was that.
Yesterday, as I was reading a post about some anarchistic rants from Eric Raymond, I noticed this mod had left a single comment saying “No platform”. I decided to check if that meant what I thought it did, and sure enough, that post had been moved by said mod to the spam filter. Alarmed, I checked the recent additions to the spam filter and found it half-full with reposts (as well as similar “No platform” removals ((The same moderator has also expressed explicit desires to remove “anarcho”-capitalists from the discussion, something which was historically tolerated in /r/anarchism for the purposes of open discussion.)) ) that this mod had started doing, pretty much since the community asked them to remain hands-off.
I kinda exploded about it on /r/metanarchism, not so much about reposts being removed, but about the mod acting unilaterally and despite the decision reached in the past. My tone led this mod to try and troll me, and in the process revealed just what an authoritarian sentiment they hold, and how little they regard the people in the community they moderate.
More specifically, when challenged on the fact that they are not only removing the agency of the community and disregarding democratic decision-making, they replied with two very telling phrases.
Sit down and shut up.
This is significant because it sets the tone of the discussion. The mod is taking the clear role of the authority figure which reinforces the fact that lately, whatever this mod has wanted has been done despite all opposition. ((For example, someone requested that I be added as a mod again, this had significant support, but this particular mod blocked it on the ground that I would prevent mods from acting too much. Obviously they meant that I would stop them from doing what they just did, which I would. The request then moved to modified consensus, which was supported by 10 people and blocked by this one mod. The last request to make the mods follow the rules of their own community, also fell flat)) So I needed to be told my place obviously, a trend which continued throughout the thread by the mod in question continuously mocking my concerns.
It became apparent to me after having to beg to edit the sidebar that people around here tend to oppose things or sit on their ass if you ask, but go along with them if you just do them.
This must be the most cynical justification of authoritarianism I’ve seen. And from a self-professed anarchist no less! This is practically saying that the mod consider their comrades weak-willed and apathetic, so they’ll give lip service to democratic processes but will go through with their plan anyway since nobody is going to stop them anyway. I noted the quote in the thread, which only elicited more mockery from the mod in question, while everyone else just twiddled their thumbs.
It is no wonder that this mod has started acting as if /r/anarchism is their personal fief.
So since then, I’ve been trying to explain to people, that it doesn’t matter how small or trivial the act of authoritarianism was. The problem is that it was a unilateral act that went against what people expressed they wanted. People kept trying to argue with me that “deleting reposts is no big deal, and why should we not do it anyway?” which is frustratingly beside the point.
It doesn’t matter if removing reposts is not a significant act. It matters that this mod cynically rams through their own preferences and anarchists just let him do it. Of course the same people then argued that since people don’t bother to show up and argue the point, then obviously removing reposts is “not a big deal” and round and round we go.
To perhaps make it more understandable why allowing some people to act this way is problematic, I wanted to tell a little story which might make an apt analogy and the point I’m making more obvious:
A story of leftovers
Imagine if you will, a large community with communal kitchens and dining areas. After each meal, the leftovers are left in a pile in the kitchen and there are also a few people in the community who use them for various purposes. Some make compost out of vegetable leftovers, while others make soups out of meat leftovers such as bones.
Now imagine also that there are a few others who really dislike seeing those leftovers hanging there for hours until the ones who wish to use them come around to collect them. After a while, they make a meeting to discuss the situation. They would like to throw them away immediately with the normal garbage. The meeting is not very large because most people don’t care about leftovers, but some who collect them and some who want to throw them away show up, as well as some who don’t feel strongly about it either way. Various arguments are made for and against, with the ones who want to throw them away mentioning that they are unseemly, smelly or unhygienic while the ones who collect them make the case that those effect are very minor and easily avoidable while there are others benefits. After some back and forth on this issue, within this small meeting, the general sentiment is that most people don’t mind the leftovers staying around until they are collected and everyone leaves it at that.
People in the community go on with their lives and nobody really thinks about the issue anymore. However one of people who was the most vocal about getting rid of the leftovers, starts going around throwing away the leftovers when they notice them anyway. They don’t throw all of them away, and they always leave a small cryptic post-it note somewhere in the kitchen area that is fairly easy to miss. The people who gather them don’t really notice it other than simply finding less leftovers around.
Eventually one finds the post-it note and starts to investigate. They go through the normal garbage and notice a large quantity of leftovers in them. Enraged, they call another meeting about it and call-out the one throwing the leftovers away: “Why did you start doing this, when we agreed to let us handle it?”. Various people from the old and new meeting arrived to see what all the fuss was about.
The answer comes back: “But leftovers are unseemly and smelly.” Some people in attendance murmur in agreement, some of the ones collecting the leftovers start explaining again why they want them, and the discussion on if the leftovers should be stored or thrown away starts again. Only this time, the framing is different. This time the ones collecting them need to provide a reason to convince people to let them do it, and they need to find enough support to peer-pressure the one doing it unilaterally to stop. They will also need to get into confrontation about it which is not worth it for something so minor. “Why are you making a big deal out of this? They’re only leftovers!” Those who didn’t want leftovers lying around don’t speak up because they got what they preferred now. And unfortunately, not many care about leftovers anyway, so most remain on the fence or don’t provide any input at all.
The real problem was ignored.
The issue here was not on whether leftovers should be collected. The issue was about one person who put their personal preferences above everyone else. The fact that most were apathetic enough about it to let them is part of the problem, not the justification! At the end of this hypothetical story, the people who were doing something harmless were alienated from their own community. Their wishes, their decision-making, their agency were diminished. In the future they will not even go to such meetings. “Why bother”?
The one who disregarded them and did their own thing anyway? Now they think their comrades are weak-willed and pushovers. And next time they try to ram their preferences though, they’ll find even less opposition as more and more people are alienated. If anyone raises concerns about previous such incidents, they’ll silence them through mockery. “Yeah, fear my hygienic authority. Imma coming for your garbage!”. Those who get their way while in the minority will go with it, because, “why not?”, while those who are against it, even when they know there’s more of them, will be the silent (perr-pressured if necessary) majority, going through with it just to avoid confrontation and belittlement.
Authoritarianism starts to creep in. Some people learn that they can manipulate their more confrontation-averse, apathetic, or facilitating comrades to their own ends and realize that disregarding the wishes of others works better. The ones whose wishes are disregarded will defer more and more from decision-making and may even internalize this behaviour. Soon enough you have an authority-leader figure and followers. And unless the authority figure does something egregious, they will only increase their unofficial influence.
Reaction
I fully expect to be further mocked for this piece. “All this though about doing something as beneficial as removing spam?”, some will disingenuously asset, once again missing the point I’m making:
Authoritarianism and hierarchy does not always assert itself in one fell-violent-swoop. These sentiments creep into even the best-intentioned communities and rot them from within. Until a point comes where people either finally wake up and a splinter occurs, with the previous authority figures retaining control of the space along with those who’ve internalized the unsaid hierarchy most, while the rest go and found a new community and vow never to succumb to the same traps…until new people join and everyone grows lax once more.
It’s easy to declare vigilance against the obvious authoritarians and entryists who are painfully obvious to everyone. It’s much more difficult to be vigilant to all the small erosions coming from trusted friends, who are getting just a bit too comfortable in being seen at the leader. The stories of anarchist communities being subverted this way and eventually imploding or dissolving are numerous. Some times there’s a happy end with the petulant authority figure being expelled (and sometimes even being found out to have been an agent provocateur), but even then, the wounds done to the community are deep. Sometimes fatal.
The reason I’m starting to call out people on these apparent trivial things is not because I’m a slave to process or “stickler to procedure” as the mod in question described me. The reason I’m doing this is because I am concerned of authoritarian tendencies. No matter how small and no matter if I personally agree with the end result. The price, the rot within, is never worth it.
Authoritarians don’t like being called on their shit, and self-professed anarchist authoritarians even less and will always attempt to divert the discussion to discussing the merits of their perspective, rather than the problems of their tactics. People avert to conflict, or convenienced by the apparent end result, or just looking for lulz will indulge them and join on the assault, ridicule and marginalization of those of us raising attention to the small violations of anarchistic principles. I’ve seen it time and again, coming from all people in positions of authority. Ridicule comes first. If this doesn’t work, then they fight you, clean or dirty. Already some people in /r/anarchism are trying to paint me as a concern troll for raising issues like this, regardless of the fact that I’ve been here active in this community longer than they have. Read the thread above to see just how absurd the accusation basis becomes later on.
But putting the idea out there that I’m concern trolling and repeating it is a rather ingenious tactic. Repeat the lie often enough and then the idea will stick…somewhere. Soon enough, calling me a concern troll will not immediately sound so absurd. “Haven’t they been called a concern troll multiple times in the last few months?” the subconscious will remark.
Oh, and did I mention that it just so happens that lately they’ve started banning concern trolls in /r/anarchism?
And to pre-empt some people, no, I am not a martyr, nor I consider myself one. I am not looking to get myself banned to make a point, nor am I trying to bring down /r/anarchism. What I am is disappointed that a community that is theoretically made of a larger concentration of anarchists than most, not only lets the small violations pass, but they mostly don’t care for a democratic decision-making process. I am dismayed that when a mod cynically refers to their comrades as weak-willed sheep to be led around and shamelessly admit that they do so, nobody bats an eyelid. I am alarmed that there is so little vigilance…
Am I giving too much thought to the going-ons of a small online community on the net, compared to the grand scheme of things? Perhaps. But I find that the “grand things” tend to mask the small ones until it’s too late.
To put it another way: When you’re battling pigs on the street daily, it’s difficult when you come home to notice or be upset about some guys throwing away your leftovers…
First of all an introduction for those not in the know:
The 7th Sea CCG is a defunct collectible card game based around naval combat in all forms. From blasting your opponent’s ship to splinters with your cannons, to boarding them and hacking them to bits. It plays around the common theme of Swashbuckling Pirates and Privateers and thus you do stuff such as send your crew on adventures and generally try to control the 5 seas the game is played in.
Deck building revolves around many things:
Selecting what faction you want to play, as there are dedicated pirates, army captains, chartered privateers and even the undead, each with their own rich history, story and gameplay tendencies.
Deciding what basic strategy you’re going to use to achieve victory: Big Cannon Attacks, Small Cannon attacks, Boardings, A bit of this and a bit of that, Controlling the Seas or some other wacky experimental build – like playing the Viking Raiders and using your Laerdom sorcerers to destroy opponent’s ships through weather catastrophes.
Deciding on the type of cards you’re going to use, as too much of one card might make you strong in your chosen tactic, but might cripple you if you’re ever trapped in a boarding.
And there’s a lot of other fine strategies in deckbuilding that emerge once you start to understand how the game works and the cards interact with each other.
The game is primarily designed for 2 players playing as opponents, but you can easily play it with more, albeit a Free-For-All is not recommended. However some of my fondest experiences with card games were when playing this game as 2 vs 2 team matches.
Now that we have the game ready, the only thing that is left is to find someone to play with. Fortunately, the new OCTGN 3 has a built-in game lobby capability, which means that whenever you go to the host/join tab, you’ll see any available game lobbies for the games you have installed, and if you host a game, anyone with the same game can see it and join. Unfortunately the 7th Sea CCG is even less active than Doomtown which means it is unlikely anyone will be hosting or looking to join a game at the same moment you are. Even worse, there’s not even a specific community for the 7th Sea CCG. There’s a Facebook group with 4 people (at this time) which you might ask in, A Facebook page with more fans, but related to all things 7th Sea, which for most people is only the RPG, and of course our own OCTGN Game fora where you may inquire if anyone if up for a game. But very likely, your best bet would be to contact me directly 😉
The 7th Sea CCG version for OCTGN is not yet as automated as Doomtown, mostly because I “power” my motivation to code this stuff depending on how much I actually play the game and thus see areas for streamlining and improvement. Given that I haven’t managed to find a single person to play with (something which I hope to change with this post), it’s no surprise that the scripting behind it is minimal. Still, I do plan to improve it as much as I can, even if I don’t play much personally. Eventually I hope to make it as streamlined to play as possible and take away much of the “carpal-tunnel” tediousness that online play introduces to card games as well as help players avoid common mistakes done while playing complex games.
If you do get to play a game with your friends and find things that annoy or could simply be improved, do contact me and I’ll work on it as soon as possible. And of course, spread the word.
I’ve spoken in length about how sexist S2 and Heroes of Newerth is, which is not surprising given how bigoted their CEO is, and other have written about how Riot games and League of Legends is not far behind in providing fan service and all the other things that implies. But I still had some hope for DotA 2,which was being developed after all by Valve, which has at least somewhat a better record at how it presents women, as seen by the absolute top male nerd fantasy: Alyx Vance. Sure, their promo images of the game characters were obviously sexist and others have raised concerns about the direction the community was taking already, but hope dies last as they say, so despite all this, and despite the fact that MOBA communities are the absolute scum of the earth, I wanted to believe that some Valve guidelines and strong moderation might improve things
It seems that the DoTA2 community is shaping to be as bad, if not worse than the S2 community and the all-powerful report function isn’t having any effect whatsoever, especially given that the moderators are actually of the same shitty opinion as the rest of their scumfuck players.
There’s really not much else to say, that the community can’t say by itself. Some choice quotes
I’m not homophobic and I call people fags all the time.
george just come out of the closet already
Because, of course, only secretly members of marginalized communities might ever be against their oppression. This argument would be so bad if it wasn’t so fucking common.
For example, I have multiple homosexual friends including one who enjoys dressing up in feminine clothing and a wig, putting on make-up, to become his alternate persona “Greere Grimes”. He has 2 or 3 friends that do this as well regularly. When we see each other at the gym and talk to each other, and he says something such as (This is a true story), “Did you see the guy at the check-in? OH MY GOD I couldn’t breathe!” and I laugh and go “Dan you’re such a fag ahahah”, he chuckles and says “Oh I know! I’m gonna go talk to him” and viola. There is no offense taken because he understands that while society attaches negativity to the word, he knows I personally do not and as well, he is in fact a faggot and is fully comfortable with it.
This is the same person who as Greere Grimes was at a bar and left early without his friends, while 3 men followed him outside and broke multiple ribs as well as giving him many bruises including a black eye. These was a hate crime and the 3 men are still at large. He was in the hospital for 4 days.
Someone who understands the hate that people can have in their hearts, and HE is comfortable with someone calling him a faggot?
[…]
I will continue to call people faggots until nobody is offended. And then I will use the word to refer to homosexuals. Because that’s what it’s already supposed to be doing.
There are no words…
I don’t get offended at asian jokes being asian myself
Nor do I get hurt by random t2s randomly throwing out racial slurs and happen to hit one
Never will be and never have been.
If I talk to my mexican friend and say something about her getting smuggled over the border she will just laugh.
If I talk to my blonde friend and tell her a really crappy dumb blonde joke she wont care.
Someone please bring out the Special Snowflake award.
This is like black people still crying about shit all the time. “Yo we can say nigger but if you white people say it that shit racist yo”
^ THIS WAS A GAME MODERATOR SPEAKING ^
Same game moderator went ahead to complain about how hard straight white mailes have it. Seriously.
Anyone who actually posts in here and tries to defend it saying that its hurtful are gay. Straight up I want your wiener in my mouth gay. Now get your ass outa the closet and stop being a white knight of the internet.
Ever get frustrated at the inane arguments against anarchism? Then this BINGO chart should come in handy.
There’s a few humorous BINGO sheets available on the internet, from the hilarious Libertarian Troll Bingo, to the sarcastic Sexism in Games BINGO. The latter one, I recently modified slightly and then run through the comments of reddit, which were discussing sexism in games, with great success. I had quite a lot of fun doing it and it also occurred to me that there is another topic where there are so many cliché criticisms that might benefit from a similar treatment.
To this end, I’ve created the “Anarchism Can’t Work lolol” Bingo, which is a humorous view into some of the most common, and usually outright absurd criticisms of anarchism that are frequently trotted out when such discussions occur. You can find it below in a simple html form, or on the side, in an image format (click on the thumbnail for larger version).
Anarchist Catalonia and Ukraine were defeated in war, so this proves Anarchism can’t work. Democratic France being defeated in WW2 doesn’t count.
Grow up and get a job!
What have the Anarchists ever achieved? The “Haymarket affair”? Never heard of it.
Who would maintain the roads and gather the garbage?
Why don’t you create your own political party and run for office?
People are too stupid and evil to voluntary work together. They need benevolent leaders to do it for them. What do you mean “who would choose the leaders”?
Who would control the huge corporations if the state didn’t exist? Today they’re perfectly regulated and kept in check by our incorruptible leaders.
You’re a Utopian. Anarchy will never work the way you idealize, unlike Capitalism and the State which work perfectly now.
The corrupt politicians in power will never allow any movement that starts to challenge the state. Ron Paul 2012!
You’re not a true anarchist unless you support the rights to private property, capitalism and wage slavery.
Human Nature (FREE SPACE)
Your ethical arguments on how humans should act in an anarchist society makes you as bad as Stalin and Pol Pot.
If you oppose Capitalism so much, then why are you still using a computer and the internet, huh? And why do you buy groceries?
Let’s say tomorrow we magically had an Anarchist society…
An anarchist society doesn’t exist right now, therefore it could never work. Why no, I do not know how old Capitalism is.
The state is required because humans don’t exercise voluntary organization. Much like shoes are required because our feet lack the callouses one would develop by not wearing shoes.
Whenever your revolutions were attempted, they ended up in brutal dictatorships after a bloody civil war. Unlike all democratic revolutions which were peaceful and never failed.
I demand to know the exact details of an anarchist society of the future. People could easily predict 20th century Capitalism during the 19th.
Humans need hierarchy. All human societies throughout history were hierarchical.
Why don’t anarchist start their own communes right now? Just buy the land from the state or capitalists and prove it works. Of course nobody will try to mess with it.
Without a state and laws to tell me how to behave, I’d go on a killing spree immediately.
Libertarian Socialism is an oxymoron.
I agree with you, but nothing can ever change, so why bother…
I don’t believe I need to point out that this Bingo chart is dripping with sarcasm 🙂
One thing you might like to note is that I’ve tried to align the chart in such a way so that the middle horizontal axis contains common arguments coming from right-libertarians and “Anarcho”-Capitalists, while the middle vertical axis contains arguments that approach a Marxist-Leninist/State Socialist criticism. This should allow an easy Bingo in case you’re arguing wish such ideologues. 🙂
Finally, in case you want to spread it around, or rework it, below I’m including two text files, one containing the bingo options in simple text format, while the other one containing the bingo chart in a way that you can paste into reddit comments.
Let me know if there is a more fitting answer that I’ve missed. A few of them are possibly not that common or absurd, so if you can think of a better replacement, let me know and I’ll update it.
Wikipedia can easily fall prety to bias when its supported by flimsy sources.
The section about teh mens on the epidemiology of domestic violence looks very much like an MRA talking point rather than a neutral POV. This is the second time I review the section and find that it is full of questionable sources and blatant editorializing. The first time I removed citations which were not only minimal (i.e. “Straus, 2005”, that was all) but sometimes just wrong. I replaced those with a [citation needed] mark, to force those adding those to backup their statements.
Today I visited again and notice that many citations have been fixed, only this time bad citations have been replaced with seemingly working ones, which at the same time are ones that are frequently brought up by MRAs as a silencing tactic. For example, the very first sentence is this:
Women’s violence towards men is a serious social problem. While much attention has been focused on domestic violence against women, researchers argue that domestic violence against men is a substantial social problem worthy of attention.
This is an editorialized title, backed up by two citations. First this, which cites Gelles and does not provide a version on can check online. However I have read that Gelles has explicitly rejected interpretations that put violence against women on the same scale as violence against men. ((Unfortunately this Feminism 101 article suffers of of severe link rot, so I couldn’t link to the original source)).
The second part of the sentence links to this page of citations, which is very much like the annoying Wall of Text tactic, which primarily used to cower and silence opponents, especially those who are not privileged enough to waste even more time refuting it. This particular “Wall of Sources” is frequently linked and cited by MRAs because it is just so damn effective in cowering their opponents. Who can deny science? However, it’s not the science that we need to deny, but the flawed framing and outright dishonest interpretations of the facts and fortunately David Futrelle of Manboobz has done exactly that.
The problem with citing a Wall of Sources, is that it can be practically used to support anything, even a rhetorical point such as “researchers argue that domestic violence against men is a substantial social problem worthy of attention.” The problem with this strategy is that it is trivial for people on the other side of the argument to respond with an even larger Wall of Sources, many thousands long, that can support the exact opposite ideological point. It then becomes simply a race of who can gather and choice-interpret or outright spin scientific studies, so that they fit their biases. And this is not how the truth is found, and especially not how Wikipedia is supposed to work.
And then there are the editorialized sources in the above Wikipedia article. If you look at the sources cited at references 33 to 37, you’ll note that they all have a short paragraph interpreting them to the audience, rather than let them stand on their own. This is not done commonly in Wikipedia (as far as I know) as it’s the paragraph being cited that is supposed to give this context. And yet, it seems here that those citations cannot stand on their own, or maybe – and this is what I really suspect – that this is yet another attempt to cower anyone challenging these assumptions, as all of those references are simply used to support the following sentence:
Other studies—typically family and domestic violence studies—show that men are more likely to inflict injuries, but also that when all acts of physical aggression or violence are considered in aggregate, women are equally violent as men,or more violent than men.
Again, another MRA talking point which goes counter to the section above it, and thus multiple (editorialized) sources are pre-emptively used to prevent it being challenged.
The whole situation, imho, stinks. And though I’ve tried to shape up the article somewhat by removing the most obvious citation bias, I am loath to really start editing it and likely end up in a citation war with the MRA watchers it’s sure to have.
Anyone more familiar with the Wikipedia bureaucracy have any idea if using such a “Wall of Sources” to support an editorialized introduction is acceptable? I get the feeling it’s not but I’m don’t really care to waste the time required to find out.
I quote an analogy which exemplifies just why piracy is disruptive to obsolete business models, but not harmful.
So my article on the ethics of piracy was posted in the /r/games subreddit and the thread pretty much exploded in arguments. I only saw it half an hour before I had to go to a Faun concert (and then straight to bed because I was working early next day), so I could only properly respond 16 hours after the fact, at which point everyone had already moved on. Still I did leave some answers in that first half-hour but I quickly found out I could barely get a word in sidewise, before being downvoted below the viewing threshold. Oh well, not unexpected I guess (albeit mildly ironic, given how anti-pirates are under the delusion that their opinions are unpopular). And it wasn’t just me, anyone who wasn’t explicitly negative toward piracy, was downvoted, even for simply stating facts.
Anyway, one of the classic problems when discussing piracy is finding an analogy that approximates the same dynamics. Anti-pirates will insist on using analogies relating to physical theft, such as shoplifting, car theft and so on, while pro-piracy people try to use analogies that simulate the zero harm caused to the current owner. It almost impossible to see eye to eye on this between these two camps, but on the aforementioned thread, someone did make an analogy that I think is compelling in pointing out how piracy disrupts business models.
Essentially, the current business model of video games is like this:
I paint a picture. It is a wonderful picture, and everyone loves it. I realize that people will pay me to see it, so I put it in a closed off room and charge people to come in and see it. This works fine for awhile, and I make a lot of money; then one day, everyone on earth develops x-ray vision. This sucks for me, because suddenly I realize that people no longer need to pay me to see my painting; they can stop by any time they like and see it.
What’s an artist to do? How can I possibly make money from my work?
What the video game industry currently does is simple; they ask the government to make it illegal to use x-ray vision on the walls to my house. Ta-da! Everyone has to pay me to see my painting again.
There is a problem though; it is essentially impossible for the government to tell who is using x-ray vision to look through my walls, and who is merely looking at my house. Thus, some people choose to simply ignore the government, and view my painting using their x-ray vision. There is nothing to physically stop them, and it doesn’t prevent others from listening to the government and paying to see it. I can say that I have lost money from those illegal peeping toms, but have I? How much? Neither I or the government know, because we have no way to tell who of the people using x-ray vision would be willing to pay to see my painting.
The problem with this system is obvious: it is reliant on an old, out-dated set of assumptions; namely, that people don’t have x-ray vision. Instead of adapting to new developments, a law was passed to simply pretend those developments don’t exist. This is where we are with digital goods and copyright laws.
Computers and the internet are truly incredible, amazing things. The ability to store and transfer incredible amounts of data near instantaneously has changed humanity as we know it. So why are we fighting it? Why do we pretend that it doesn’t exist?
The idea is not to prevent people from using the new, amazing developments we have as a society; the old model is fundamentally broken. What has to happen now is finding ways of utilizing these new developments to create even more value. Don’t ask me what that is, because if I knew, I’d be busy counting my millions.
Oh Gawds, the arrogance is over nine thousand!
