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GamerGate on NPR

Anita Sarkeesian on Melissa Harris-Perry

Zoe Quinn on Ronan Farrow

Folding Ideas on #GamerGate

Fox News would prefer you get your abortion from someone who doesn’t know anything about the procedure

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll have both a segment and an interview on the topic that won’t go away, #GamerGate. Also, Fox News is really irate that a university might teach abortion instead of just leaving it up to people to figure it out for themselves through trial and error.

Before we get into the major segment on GamerGate, I’d like to point out one of the most unintentionally hilarious aspects of it, which is that any time someone is defending it, they tend to be exhibit number one showing how rotten the whole thing is. Like this guy who called into NPR to defend it.

• Angry Gamer *

He continued on to complain about one game review site that gave a game a negative review because they thought it was sexist. So when you see GamerGaters saying that GamerGate is about “corruption in journalism,” know that they define “corruption” as allowing game reviewers to give games honest reviews. That is, of course, the opposite of corruption, but a good rule of thumb with Gamergaters is whatever they say they stand for, the opposite is true.

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I’ve been doing a lot of writing and tweeting about GamerGate, including a piece that ran last week at Rewire called “What #GamerGate and the Anti-Choice Movement Have in Common.” But I haven’t addressed it on this podcast because it never made the leap into the mainstream media spaces that I usually wait for before tackling a subject on here. But that has changed, folks. The mainstream media is paying attention and they are alarmed. Melissa Harris-Perry did her best to sum up what is going on with GamerGate, despite the fact that it is confusing by design.

• GG 1 *

The woman in question is named Zoe Quinn and the allegations were not true, but that didn’t stop GamerGate from exploding. The pretext has been that it’s some kind of protest of bad ethics in gaming journalism, but since they’ve never actually produced a single example of bad ethics, besides some sexual urban legend that isn’t true, that’s hard to buy. That, and the fact that they have also been harassing Anita Sarkeesian, an independent culture critic whose journalistic ethics are impeccable. She funded herself through Kickstarter, unlike some YouTube gaming critics who have been called out for taking payola from the industry by people that are not GamerGaters. Sarkeesian was on Harris-Perry’s show.

• GG 2 *

No matter how obvious the misogyny of GamerGate, the people in it continue to claim it’s about journalistic ethics. However, the main people who are targeted, on a list of seven that was being circulated in GamerGate circles, belie this claim. For one thing, a lot of them aren’t journalists but game developers. For another, not one of them has ever been accused of violating any of the commonly understood ethical rules of journalism. Indeed, the only thing they have in common is they are women and they are feminists. Which suggests that is what GamerGate is attacking. Zoe Quinn herself was on Ronan Farrow’s show to talk about her perspectives.

• GG 3 *

Dan Olson, the host of Folding Ideas, which is a show that uses current events and pop culture to talk about critical ideas, took on GamerGate and he had some interesting points I think are worth examining. His video is 20-minutes long, so I can’t cover it all here, so I recommend you watch it. But there’s a couple of points I pulled to get you started. He also notices what I noticed, which is that the targets of GamerGate are not picked because of some abstract notion of ethics in journalism, which GamerGaters clearly don’t care about, but because they are feminists and feminists are seen as the enemy.

• GG 4 *

There’s been a lot of mainstream focus on the most lurid part of GamerGate, which is the overt threats of violence, one of which caused Sarkeesian to cancel an engagement at Utah State after finding that the university, due to the concealed carry laws in the state, couldn’t forbid people from bringing guns to her talk. Yeah, I know. But there’s so much more going on than threats. In fact, most of the GamerGaters don’t threaten but instead just engage in dishonest, sleazy tactics that are supposed to frustrate their targets into giving up and going home. Olson talks about this, as well.

• GG 5 *

On my next segment, I’ll be talking to a woman who was targeted by GamerGate about her experiences and about her theory that GamerGate makes the most sense if you think of them as a hate group.

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Interview

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In recent years, anti-choicers have been claiming that they are concerned about the health and well-being of women getting abortions and, even though they don’t agree with abortion, they claim, they want it to be safe. This is obviously a paper-thin pretext that exists for no other reason but to come up with medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinics in order to shut them down. But still, it’s funny to see how, as soon as the topic switches away from shutting down clinics toward some other aspect of abortion, the purported concern for women’s safety is dropped like a hot potato. Take, for instance Bill O’Reilly’s outrage over a new online course offered by the University of California San Francisco on abortion care. Now, if you actually care about women’s health, you’d applaud them for this, because it means that people who are interested in doing abortions are going to learn more before training and be safer and more skilled. But that’s not the angle Bill O’Reilly took.

• Abortion 1 *

Try to imagine this kind of umbrage taken over any other medical course on any other medical topic. They’re offering a course on cancer, but being pro-biology zealots, they refuse to include counter-theories about how cancer can be cured with homeopathy! They’re offering a course on vaccinations, but being pro-vaccination zealots, they refuse to let Jenny McCarthy share her anti-vaccination views. They’re offering a course on infectious diseases, but being germ theory zealots, they’re excluding the view that disease is caused by sin. And so on.

The segment was like watching a transmission from another world where people cannot believe that a doctor would think that there’s any reason to think there’s any educational interest in a medical procedure that one in three women will get.

• Abortion 2 *

Or perhaps she correctly realizes there’s no reason to talk to people who are saying one moment that they are worried that abortion isn’t safe and therefore needs to be regulated out the wazoo but then the next minute are freaking out at the very possibility that anyone might learn something that makes abortion safer. Such people have outed themselves as unserious people. The fact is this segment clearly suggests that O’Reilly, his staff, and the crisis pregnancy center people they interview want abortion to be unsafe. Why else are they so terrified of the idea that someone might actually learn something that makes abortion safer? Why on earth would you talk to people who are so hostile, so paranoid, and make no pains to hide that they hope that women lose access to safe medical care and have to resort to using coathangers instead?

• Abortion 3 *

I’m trying to imagine how you’d have this “balance” or “both sides.” Like one doctor gets up and talks about some of the tools or medications you can use to help a patient seeking abortion and then what? Give someone five minutes to talk about how women who want abortions are dirty sluts who need to be forced to give birth to teach them a lesson? That’s not what I’d call “education.” There’s just nothing informative that anti-choicers have to add to this discussion. They’re just against sex. We’ve heard that opinion, and there’s no reason it needs to be included in an educational course. No more than we need to hear the opinions of people who oppose psychiatric care in a course teaching about the various techniques of psychiatric care.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Fox News really, really hates young, single women edition. Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was a former assistant district attorney, suggested that young women are too stupid to sit on juries.

• Juries *

Of course, young men, being male, are born oh so wise, right? My guess is the prejudice against young women isn’t really about how they’re supposedly so stupid but because they tend to be more liberal and open-minded, they are probably more open to defense arguments and don’t roll into the court room ready to throw the book at the defendant, as more conservative types, who are more likely to be older or male, would be. Considering how out of control our prison industrial complex is, I think that should be treated like a good thing.