formerly /u/squirrelrampage on Reddit

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I know this is a hard pill to swallow for most people, but our conscious thoughts are not necessarily “ourselves”, even though they often get framed as such. We are the whole, the uncountable unconscious small machinations, as well as the big thoughts.

    As somebody else mentioned: Reacting first and thinking about it later was most often advantageous for our ancestors. “Flee from the lion first and think about that was necessary later.”

    But that does not mean that the process of arriving at the point of “Flee from the lion” isn’t individual and very much “ours”. It’s just the fastest part of our brain taking the lead and everything else following.

































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

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

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