problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
That's one of my favourite artists and is certainly suitable for children. After the RDJ album, I recommend showing them the accompanying EP, Come To Daddy, and the title track's music video.
Seconding Since I Left You by The Avalanches. That album is definitely a classic and is full of fantastic stuff. Check out the title track, Electricity and ETOH for a sampling of what the album has to offer. It has a bit of a sound collage feel (being a plunderphonics album) and it might be a bit more crunchy and loose than you want, perhaps, but the album really offers a seamless experience.
There's also another Australian band called Parcels which would probably be a good fit for you - not only do their tracks do have the "fun, bright, easy to follow" and "danceable" quality you mention, they make music in the same vein as Daft Punk (french house). Here is an early EP of theirs, titled Hideout, and here is their first album, also titled Parcels.
Currently listening to the Charley Crockett album you posted and am liking some of this, especially Clown. If you like folk, I'd recommend you have a listen to Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, which is a masterpiece of songwriting and one of the more depressing albums I've listened to.
I've been listening to a lot of electronic music recently. For a link to some of it, I posted a list of the electronic albums I've been enjoying not too long ago, and have been updating it as I go along for future reference in these music threads (at the time of this post, it stands at 35 entries). It is basically the antithesis of the music you've posted. I’ve bolded the albums that I think might confuse and/or outright annoy people, which makes up 20 of the 35 albums (and some of which are among my favourite albums of all time, with Exai in particular being my favourite album of any genre). You can take the bolding either as a warning or a challenge.
I'm reading Neven Sesardić's Making Sense Of Heritability (in conjunction with many other papers and blog posts). It's a book that addresses the arguments of anti-hereditarians who claim that heritability is not a good estimate of genetic contribution to variance in a trait because of interactions, gene-environment correlations and so on. Sesardić is incredibly critical of anti-hereditarians, and very good at pointing out the flaws in their reasoning. I'm currently at the part where he explains how the equal environments assumption is tested.
His writing is quite accessible for a newcomer to behaviour genetics, and the book is quite thorough in its scope. I actually think this is a book people who are in any way interested in the topic should read, if they haven't already.
problem_redditor
1mo ago
I spent my Easter falling down the rabbit hole of behaviour genetics and HBD after discovering Shaun's video purporting to debunk The Bell Curve.
Fuck.
On that topic, Emil Kirkegaard has a post about sex differences in rationality. It speaks about a test called the Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) which seeks to measure tendency towards rational thinking, with a higher total CART score implying higher performance on the test.
A 2016 book by Keith Stanovich found on the topic of sex differences: "[I]t can be seen that the total score on the entire CART full form was higher for males than for females in both samples and the mean difference corresponded to a moderate effect size of 0.52 and 0.65, respectively. ... Moving down the table, we see displayed the sex differences for each of the twenty subtests within each of the two samples. In thirty-eight of the forty comparisons the males outperformed the females, although this difference was not always statistically significant. There was one statistically significant comparison where females outperformed males: the Temporal Discounting subtest for the Lab sample (convergent with Dittrich & Leipold, 2014; Silverman, 2003a, 2003b). The differences favoring males were particularly sizable for certain subtests: the Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning subtest, the Reflection versus Intuition subtest, the Practical Numeracy subtest, and the Financial Literacy and Economic Knowledge subtest. The bottom of the table shows the sex differences on the four thinking dispositions for each of the two samples. On two of the four thinking dispositions scales—the Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale and the Deliberative Thinking scale—males tended to outperform females."
There is also a possibility to indirectly measure sex differences in rationality by checking who believes irrational things, but "it is important to sample widely in beliefs without trying to select ones that men or women are more apt to believe". Kirkegaard draws attention to a 2014 study that does such a thing. This study instructed participants to select on a five-point scale how much they agreed or disagreed with a claim, and "scores were recoded such that a higher score reflected a greater rejection of the epistemically unwarranted belief". The unsupported beliefs were grouped into the categories "paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscience". In all of them, men scored higher than women, suggesting greater male rejection of unsupported beliefs in every category.
In other words, if one sex was more likely to distort reality in line with their biases, I would expect it to be women.
Let's nuance the picture a bit. According to this article: "[I]n 2016 and 2020, CES data shows that the top two income quintiles (i.e., 80%–100% and 60%–80%) preferred the Democrat (i.e., Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden) over the Republican (i.e., Donald Trump) more than the twentieth through sixtieth percentiles did". Support for the Democratic Party by income is currently a U-shape where people in both the lowest and highest income quintiles are the strongest Democrat supporters - in fact, in 2016 and 2020 it seems that those in the highest income quintile have been a bit more pro-Democrat than those in the lowest. There's also the fact that in ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Biden outpaced Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million. In the rest of the country the two were knotted closely together.
The parties are switching bases, and I don't think this represents a shift in the beliefs of the upper class, rather I think this represents a shift in the parties and their policies. Over the years, the two parties have slowly converged when it comes to economic policy, and the ideological battleground has shifted to the social. Democrats have been adopting the brand of radical progressivism that has long had purchase with the upper class whereas their economic policy has slowly drifted moderate, and this serves the interests of their newly elite voter base.
I too only learned to play rote what other people wrote in my music education, and this was something I found to be utterly mind-numbing (in my case, I played piano). But when I was 15 or 16 I picked up how to use a digital audio workstation and started making electronic music, a hobby which I now think I'm pretty good at.
In my experience, formally learning music theory isn't that essential. Don't get me wrong, a grasp of theory helps, but it's not absolutely necessary for composition and most people who are intent listeners do intuitively pick up some sense of theory while listening to music (and you pick up even more when trying to make things).
As with anything else, getting good at making music mainly involves slowly gaining experience through trial and error and spending thousands upon thousands of hours on it. I'm fairly certain that a good amount of the artists you like aren't thinking about it in terms of formal theory, they're making things and keeping what sounds good to them, discarding what doesn't, and learning along the way.
I see the key part of that quote as "one way or the other."
If reparations are owed "one way or the other", that's still arguing in favour of reparations in some form regardless of whether the colonised benefited or not.
Regardless, it does seem to be that the argument that reparations are unjustified because "the colonized benefited from colonization" does not really address the argument that colonization was an inherent wrong
Sure, but as already noted my original comment wasn't really meant to address that argument, since even if it is true, arguing that colonisation was an inherent wrong doesn't in and of itself justify guilt let alone reparations because often the people responsible are dead. To adapt the hypothetical a little bit, if my grandfather kidnapped your grandfather and enslaved him but taught him to read, and so after he escaped he became richer than he would've been had he not been kidnapped, this could be argued to be a moral wrong. Nevertheless, I think it would be unfair for you in the present day to claim grievance and demand that I take responsibility for the actions of my grandfather because he committed a moral wrong. In the case of colonisation, it's even worse because a whole nation of people is implicated regardless of whether they even have any ties to those at fault. It's the worst form of guilt by (involuntary) association.
As a pedantic note - this hypothetical ignores that it's also the case that colonisation improved health and living standards while the colonisation was happening and in some cases had legitimacy via the support of locals, whereas in this hypothetical the slavery probably resulted in a loss in life quality and improvements came only after it ended, but it demonstrates the point that even if you make that concession it doesn't change much.
(an argument, BTW, which which I completely disagree: As far as I am concerned, it is an argument manufactured (or adopted, since it is really a Western idea) by local elites and foisted upon the hoi polloi; it is essentially, "Your oppression by outsiders is immoral! It is we who should be oppressing you!")
Yes, I agree completely. Local elites do also tend to like blaming the West for the state of things, instead of placing the blame where it belongs (since said elites and officials are often in fact responsible for the myriad issues in their communities and countries). I think this is an aspect of the public discourse that actually hurts people in these countries, instead of helping them, and the culture of guilt in the West really only helps foster and intensify it.
My comment was specifically created to address the arguments of people demanding reparations. I appropriately scoped my point for making the claims I did in my original comment: "This is not necessarily a case in favour of colonialism and colonial policy, but if someone wants to claim that whites should feel some sort of endless historical guilt for the plight of third-world countries today and subject themselves to a system of racial reparations, they’ve got another thing coming." As a result, any supposed "counter" to my original point which is not related to the discussion of reparations is attacking a point which I did not make. I would also add that I do not necessarily believe colonisation was moral, but I also do not believe responsibility for colonisation is inherited, and thus the hypothetical still fails. The way people argue for intergenerational guilt is to claim that the effects of colonisation still persist, but if negative effects attributable to colonisation aren't demonstrated, that argument isn't an effective counter.
Furthermore, I would also dispute your characterisation of the reply to me. The argument that was being forwarded by my interlocutor was that reparations should, in fact, be paid. To quote: "One can easily make the case that reparations are owed one way or another for the original act of victimization." The user's other comment in this thread is also pretty clearly forwarding a case for it.
EDIT: added more
If someone kidnapped you and turned you into a slave for 10 years but while enslaved you spent more time than before reading books and so after you escaped you became richer than you had been before I kidnapped you, it would not invalidate the argument that the person who kidnapped you owes you something.
Firstly, your hypothetical isn't exactly analogous to the situation under discussion, since in your hypothetical it is not the act of victimisation that directly caused the richness of the slave, whereas when it comes to colonialism it was what the colonisers did which ended up improving health and living standards (and it did so while the colonisation was happening, which is yet another dissimilarity to your hypothetical).
Secondly, in line with your stated moral principles, I hope you are in favour of Arabs compensating the Assyrians and approx 50 other ethnic groups for the 7th century Muslim conquest of the Levant. Or hey, as mentioned, the Norman Conquest of 1066. According to this article people with Norman surnames today are overrepresented at Oxbridge and elite occupations like medicine, law and politics. Reparations sure seem to be in order.
Alternatively, we could let bygones be bygones, instead of demarcating a special class of victims and making grievance inheritable. But that's just what my preference regarding public policy is, as a person who grew up in a post-colonial country themselves.
Yes. It is relevant, however, in the context of demanding reparations and other forms of coercive political action as remedy. Without proving that colonisation is the reason for the poor state of any given population of people it's about as pertinent to anyone's present plight as the Norman Conquest.
Another interesting piece of information that people don't particularly like to acknowledge is that colonisation might actually have benefited the colonised countries' economies and resulted in improved health and general wellbeing when compared with the counterfactual situation.
For example, countries like Kenya benefited from the establishment of a cash economy, the modernisation of infrastructure, and the spread of Western medicine. There’s a study which used height data as a proxy for nutrition and health to investigate how well Kenyans did under colonial rule. It notes that “however bad colonial policies and devastating short-term crises were, the net outcome of colonial times was a significant progress in nutrition and health.” Other numbers quoted in that article show improvements in the health infrastructure as well as a steep decline in infant mortality during the colonial period.
This article, in trying to explain the end of colonialism, speaks of a population explosion that occurred pretty much everywhere in the colonised world, and notes that while sometimes this was a result of immigration, in most colonies it was a result of population growth. "[P]opulation increase during the colonial period presumably was not an exogenous event, but rather a result of changes produced by colonialism itself —specifically, increased employment opportunities and decreased mortality due to the introduction of European technologies." The author suggests the increased population resulted in more subversive activity and extralegal appropriation of profits which might explain decolonisation.
Interestingly, it was not during colonialism, but during independence that the situations of many of the colonised countries became how it is today. This World Bank report notes "Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess. Many countries have lost professionals with valuable skills to more prosperous neighbors or to the developed world because of poor motivational practices, poor governance, internal conflicts, and civil wars. Guinea presents the most classic example of this decline. At independence, Guinea had a highly motivated public service, with clear rules on recruitment, promotion, and appointments to senior positions. Public sector infrastructure - roads, telephones, and so on-were adequate and well functioning. All these have broken down today."
And once the "colonisers" left, African politics became quite the corrupted hellhole. "[O]nce the political imperative of independence was achieved, the tools of nation building became a double-edged sword, increasingly coming to serve the ends of patronage in the struggle to retain and consolidate power. In this struggle, economic logic was the loser, resulting in factories located miles from critical inputs, paved roads extending into useless bush, while areas of high agricultural output were left unexploited for lack of transport. The heavy and often corrupted and corrupting hand of the centralized autocratic political system reached into all branches of the public service, controlling public administration, the judiciary, the private sector, and civil society."
Even the worst example of colonial exploitation, the Congo, had a better deal under colonisation then it does now. The Congo Free State under Leopold II was pretty bad, yes. On the other hand, the Belgian Congo was... okay, relatively speaking. Infrastructure was built, and living standards improved to a degree that would not be seen there at any point after. I think Moldbug makes a convincing case for it here, and it's notable that some Congolese after independence expressed a wistfulness for the days of colonialism. This Time article details such a perspective from a Congolese man.
"We should just give it all back to the whites," the riverboat captain says. "Even if you go 1,000 kilometers down this river, you won't see a single sign of development. When the whites left, we didn't just stay where we were. We went backwards."
“The river is the artery of Congo’s economy,” he says. “When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations — cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 3,000 people, 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned.” Using a French expression literally translated as “on the ground,” he adds: “Everything is par terre.”
This is not necessarily a case in favour of colonialism and colonial policy, but if someone wants to claim that whites should feel some sort of endless historical guilt for the plight of third-world countries today and subject themselves to a system of racial reparations, they’ve got another thing coming.
I agree that whether Gjoni posted to 4chan or not isn't particularly central. However, the 4chan thing is a very small portion of what I wrote - the post of mine is broken up into 4 parts. Part 1 is an introductory section which exists mostly just to demonstrate the sheer carnival of trivial-but-damning errors that Danskin makes, errors that shouldn't exist when you're speaking authoritatively on the subject for a university. The meat (and the primary point of making this post) is part 3 and 4, which demonstrates that Grayson and Quinn had a glaring conflict of interest that went completely undisclosed when he was reporting about her.
With regards to your other question about whether GamerGate was my first time, yes, it was my introduction to the culture war, and admittedly it has a special place for that reason alone. I still think, however, that it's important not to let your culture war opponents define the historical narrative in the way they want, even on seemingly small things like GamerGate. Ceding ground to them like this gives them the ability to smear you later on and justify increasingly censorious behaviour towards those who oppose them, and at this point I'm adopting an approach of not giving an inch where I don't think it's warranted.
Finally, GamerGate is not in any way my main focus and it is also not something I'm going to be writing about often. This thread is probably the last top-level thing I'm going to be writing on it for quite a while.
... and the response I always saw was along the lines of "there's plenty of ethics problems in video game journalism; somehow all the ones you come up with involve women and totally not organizing internet mobs against them on purpose".
This is just repeating the previous claim, with the focus now moved from "harassment" to "not necessarily doing the harassment yourself but purposefully inciting harassment by drawing undue attention", a claim that's much more difficult to falsify because it requires information into one's intention and other relevant details that often don't exist.
As to the "somehow all the ones you come up with involve women", that ignores the centrality of Nathan Grayson to the whole "Quinnspiracy" drama, and furthermore there were plenty of ethical breaches identified by GamerGate with a female reporter/male dev, or those which did not involve women at all.
A few examples from the Deepfreeze site (a source which takes a pro-GamerGate perspective):
"Perhaps, though, Grayson’s most blantant impropriety is the overwhelming coverage given to his friend, sound designer Robin Arnott. Author of Oculus Rift game Soundself, Arnott received an abnormal amount of coverage from Grayson. Grayson plugged him six times in three months, with the bulk of the coverage for Soundself coming from Kotaku."
"Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Philippa Warr, who wrote three articles about Sunset without disclosing her friendship with Alexander, has also written three disclosure-less articles about her friend, indie developer Terry Cavanagh — the same Cavanagh that also received coverage from Jenn Frank, who didn't disclose she provided the game's voice acting."
https://deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=unfair
The Quinn story blew up because it was the spark that lit the powder keg, and because there was a salacious story (The Zoe Post) behind it, which meant it had legs.
With any self-organized group, there's always the question of who the True Scotsmen are. The pro-GamerGate side wants to focus as narrowly as possible while the anti-GamerGate side wants to cast a wide net and talk about all of the fallout.
Sure. But No True Scotsman only applies if and when the people doing the thing you want to exclude actually identify as being part of your group. If there is no proof that the severe, criminal harassment was in fact done by people involved in GamerGate, it's much harder to pin these things on them. Furthermore, only focusing on the harassment and blatantly ignoring the members of GamerGate who actively policed and discouraged harassment is indeed its own form of No True Scotsman.
EDIT: a word
Gamergate always seemed like a lot of the two sides talking past each other
Sure, I think we would disagree on which side is doing most of the "talking past".
The counter to "there's lot of ethics problems in videogame journalism" was never "no there aren't", it was "duh, everyone knows that; no one takes videogame journalism seriously. Why are you harassing women about it?".
This sane-washes the anti-GamerGate stance. The general anti-GamerGate stance, exemplified by Danskin, was not "well, there are ethics problems, but harassing people is a step too far", it was the stronger claim that "You people are misogynists who are just using ethics as a cover for your misogyny". Often, it does in fact veer very close to claiming that there was nothing to complain about ethically, as evidenced by Danskin's dismissal of the idea that there was an ethical conflict of interest in the Quinn/Grayson case.
As to why people got harassed, it's because it's the internet, and everybody who's even remotely controversial gets harassment. The mistake of anti-GamerGaters is to characterise basically the entirety of the harassment as being ascribable to GamerGate, when there were a large number of third parties that existed to stir shit. It, furthermore, also ignores that GamerGaters also received harassment and threats during that whole kerfuffle, and ignores their actual attempts to stop harassment. Cathy Young expounds on that argument here:
There was certainly some appalling harassment toward Quinn, Sarkeesian (who canceled a university lecture in October 2014 due to an email threatening a massacre), feminist game developer Brianna Wu (who received a death threat mentioning her home address after she mocked and trolled GamerGate), and some other people, not all of them women. Web developer and GamerGate opponent Israel Galvez was targeted by a fake 911 call that resulted in a visit from a SWAT team, a scary tactic known as “swatting.” But several caveats are in order:
(1) None of the criminal or severe harassment was ever tied to anyone known to be involved in GamerGate.
The FBI spent months investigating GamerGate-related harassment; as documents show, it ended up only issuing warnings to one man who admitted sending an email threat as a “joke” and to another who had made harassing phone calls to a woman with whom he had argued in a chat room. Neither was a known GamerGater. And, while the FBI found evidence that some of the harassment around GamerGate originated on 8chan, a site known as a GamerGate hub, some of it was linked to the forums on Something Awful, frequented by anti-GamerGate, anti-8chan posters.
When GamerGaters blamed the harassment on outside trolls, it looked like an excuse or a far-fetched conspiracy theory. But Kerzner, a neutral GamerGate observer, agrees that “there was a sizable number of third-party trolls that caused the vast majority of the really bad stuff.” There was at least one fairly well-documented instance in which the swatting of a GamerGate critic was traced — according to The Verge, hardly a GamerGate-friendly publication — to a troll from an 8chan board dedicated to “general anti-social mayhem,” where “users joked about Gamergate supporters ‘taking the fall’ for the attack.” A November 2015 post by a notorious troll known as “Wild Goose” also appears to confirm the existence of a troll nest that went after “SJWs” and “gaters” alike.
(2) While the harassment related to GamerGate was quite real, there was also a drastic failure of journalistic skepticism in reporting it.
Of course, questioning people’s reports of being victimized by harassment and threats is something that should never be done lightly. But honoring that principle shouldn’t preclude basic fact-checking.
For instance, in late 2014 and early 2015, there were scary reports of a GamerGate “psychopath” named Jace Connors who had made a series of videos threatening Wu; one of them featured knives, another a man in a skull mask. The most bizarre one showed Connors ranting dementedly against Wu after crashing his car, supposedly on his way to her house.
In February 2015, the videos were revealed to be a satirical prank; “Jace Connors” was actually sketch comedian Jan Rankowski while the man in the skull mask was one of his sidekicks, and the purpose of the videos was to troll and mock GamerGate. Yet more than two months after this disclosure, the skull mask video was still described as an instance of horrific GamerGate harassment in a Boston Magazine article.
More oddly still, Wu’s own New York Times op-ed last month asserts that GamerGaters “shot videos wearing skull masks” and displaying knives they threatened to use against her. When I reached out to Wu for comment, she initially replied that she received “many” such videos and that only GamerGaters themselves had ever claimed they were satirical — even though Wu herself was quoted commenting on the hoax in a February 2015 article in Verge. In a subsequent email, Wu reiterated that she was sent other videos matching the description during that time; however, none are mentioned on her Twitter timeline. (The closest is a screenshot of a tweet with a photo of what looks like a boy wearing a skull mask and holding a toy gun, and with a threat to kill Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu.) It seems likely that the reference in the op-ed is to the debunked “Jace Connors” incident.
(3) At least some of the portrayal of GamerGate as a harassment campaign had to do with speech that, while arguably unpleasant, was not threatening.
This speech ranged from polite but persistent unwanted attempts at debate (nicknamed “sea-lioning,” from a 2014 web comic) to video blogs criticizing someone’s work.
(4) GamerGaters themselves were targets of serious harassment, a fact hardly ever acknowledged in the mainstream media (with a few exceptions such as David Auerbach, then at Slate.)
A number of GamerGate supporters were doxxed (i.e., had home addresses and other private information posted online) and reported threats. In 2015, two offline GamerGate events I attended — a meetup in Washington, DC and a panel examining the pro-GamerGate side of the controversy at a Society of Professional Journalists conference in Miami — were disrupted by bomb threats that forced evacuation of the building. This received virtually no coverage.
Given that GamerGaters were defined as the “bad guys” in social justice discourse, many supposedly right-thinking people felt free to engage in startlingly hateful invective toward anyone involved. In November 2014, Geordie Tait, a Bay-area writer for the gaming website Star City Games, posted a series of tweets literally calling for a Holocaust of GamerGaters; when criticized for trivializing the Holocaust, he responded by saying that the Holocaust was “not as bad as what women have suffered.”
Even people who were not GamerGaters but were seen as too GamerGate-friendly (or even too neutral) were sometimes targeted. YouTuber John Bain, a popular video game critic known under the nickname “Total Biscuit,” who strongly condemned harassment but also took the view that GamerGaters had some valid concerns, said that he was inundated with abusive messages while undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer, including messages wishing for his painful death. (Some GamerGate critics also vilified Bain after he succumbed to cancer last year.) Kerzner was a victim of false rumors intended to undermine her career — rumors that chat transcripts disclosed in 2016 seemed to confirm came from anti-GamerGate activists.
(5) Many GamerGaters not only denounced harassment toward their opponents but actively tried to curb it.
Early on, some members launched a “#GamerGate harassment patrol.” In October 2014, Kotaku reporter Jason Schreier, a strong GamerGate critic, acknowledged on Twitter that GamerGaters were rallying to report a troll who was doxxing journalists. In a Kotaku article a month later, Schreier credited GamerGaters with tracking down a man responsible for a string of threats to Sarkeesian (though he still suggested that the climate created by GamerGate had probably egged the perpetrator on).
problem_redditor
2mo ago
I'm aware of how it looks. That being said, Danskin's UC Merced talk is from 2021, so if the woke are still talking about it, I see no reason why they shouldn't continue to be countered and called out on their misstatements. Furthermore, I am aware of several occasions where users on TheMotte have stated that they'd like to know more about GamerGate from a non-mainstream source to get an alternative opinion, and I thought this video would be a good jumping-off point to get into the topic.
4/4
22 March 2014: Grayson publishes an article in RockPaperShotgun called "A Game And A Chat: The End Of GDC Spectacularmathon". In it, Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest is featured again.
Some quotes:
"Part one’s guests include Papers Please creator Lucas Pope, Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn, and Boon Hill dev Matt Ritter. Part two, meanwhile, brings in such luminaries and champion toe fighters as Gone Home writerly brain man Steve Gaynor, Kotaku features editor Kirk Hamilton, resident Vlambeer madman JW Nijman, Action Henk‘s Kitty Calis, and RPS god heroes Cara Ellison and Hayden Dingman."
"Among many other things, we talked everyone’s favorite GDC moments, diversity in the gaming industry, the virtual reality fuuuuuuuture’s growing pains, my Lost Levels talk, and what happens after you release a game like Papers Please or Depression Quest."
So again, Quinn and Depression Quest are highlighted alongside far larger games like Papers Please. Just like all the others, this isn't incriminating on its own, but it does form part of a larger pattern. No conflict of interest is reported.
23 March 2014: Quinn openly admits she hangs with Grayson on Twitter.
Quinn: @tha_rami I'm headed over to butter to hang with @Vahn16
25 March 2014: Quinn and Grayson speak again on Twitter and send "solidarity" to each other. Quinn is calling Grayson "friend" and they are confirmed to be emailing each other.
Quinn: Realizing the degrees to which working on my art and career has destroyed like 95% of my personal life.
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel I am sending solidarity from my lonely bedroom work perch. I will be here until 5AM or so, I'm thinking
Quinn: @Vahn16 solidarity from the skies, friend. Also answer your damn email
https://archive.md/mmArt#selection-1387.0-1393.63
30 March 2014: Zoe Quinn speaks with Leigh Alexander on Twitter about going to Vegas with Nathan Grayson for a planned collaboration, the DAY BEFORE Grayson wrote an article about her.
Quinn: @leighalexander good thing I'm launching a gonzo games zine this week I guess
Alexander: @ZoeQuinnzel omg no way i wanna know about this
Quinn: @leighalexander it involves me and @notquitefrodo and @Carachan1 and @Vahn16 all going to vegas.
31 March 2014: Grayson writes an article in Kotaku featuring Quinn, and it's his most incriminating yet. The article is called "The Indie Game Reality TV Show That Went To Hell". This happens only three days before they go to Vegas (where they have sex). The topic of the article is about the failed GAME_JAM which Zoe Quinn was involved in. He paints Quinn as the "good guy" in the drama that ensued and at the very end, he posts about Quinn's desire to start her own game jam.
"And while the experience was trying for all involved, it was also rife with important lessons. Quinn summed it up:"
""There was this amazing thing that happened after the production was over. Without any organization or prompting, we acquired and shared some refreshments around, set up some multiplayer games, invited production staff to just come be people and play with us, and had a spontaneous pop up party more or less. It was the first time I had started to feel like myself at all since landing in LA. I started to remember what life felt like off-set again, and it reminded me of what I love about game jams and the indie community in general. It felt like such a complete contrast to the 24 hours that preceded it, and a thought clicked into my head.""
""I want to run a game jam. I'd love to have the LPers do what they're so often so brilliant at and bridge the gap between the games and the audience, and do it super low-tech, low-budget, documentary style. Capture the inspiration, the hard work, the 3am delirium and the dumb jokes that come with it. Show people how we all band together and support each other through the deadline. That's what I want to show the world about game jams. That's the ambassador I'd rather be.""
This is incriminating because at least less than a month later, in April 2014, Quinn went on to solicit donations for her own game jam, called Rebel Jam, despite having no start date and no determined location. Clicking on the "donate" button goes to what looks like a personal Paypal account. Even more importantly, Rebel Jam never actually ended up happening. I'm going to be charitable and assume that Quinn couldn't get enough funding, but there's also the more unpleasant possibility that I don't think I have to mention.
Either way, it doesn't matter because this looks pretty bad regardless of the point of Rebel Jam. Grayson and Quinn's exchanges definitively seem to imply that they are close, and him creating publicity for her projects definitely violates any code of journalistic integrity.
Again, no conflict of interest is disclosed.
2 April 2014: Quinn states that the Vegas trip is the next day.
Molinari: @legobutts @ZoeQuinnzel Did I hear someone's coming to Vegas? :o
Quinn: @OneMrBean @legobutts Yeah! I'm going there tomorrow for a few days with @Vahn16 and @notquitefrodo
2/3 April 2014: Grayson and Quinn go to Vegas and even tweet at each other during the car ride.
Grayson: I've lost track of the number of hours we've been on the road (1? 2?!?). I've eaten both my bags of mini-Reese's. Morale dwindling
Quinn: @Vahn16 what the hell you already ate all that?
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel MY FOOT IS ON YOUR CHAIR WE WILL USE HUMAN SPEECH DAMMIT
Quinn: @Vahn16 I don't sound like a human right now tho also you just tweeted me telling me we were gonna talk instead of tweeting you boob
https://twitter.com/UnburntWitch/status/451535398980706304
3 April 2014: Grayson posts a vine while in Vegas which features Quinn.
Grayson: The most Las Vegas thing I've ever seen in Las Vegas
Here is the vine in question. You can see what looks like Quinn's hair in the bottom right when you play the video. It's easily distinguishable because of just how oddly coloured it is.
At some point during the Vegas trip, they start having sex. This is corroborated by Gjoni's logs in The Zoe Post, and it is backed up by Grayson's admission in the Totilo article where he states that they started a romantic relationship in early April.
5 April 2014: The end of the Vegas trip. Grayson and Quinn act all mushy on Twitter talking about how they'll "miss each other's faces", and a mutual doesn't seem very surprised to see this lovey dovey behaviour.
Quinn: @Vahn16 yep definitely miss yer face already
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame
Quinn: @Vahn16 <3 <3 <3
Harper: @ZoeQuinnzel @Vahn16 Guys, gross. At least invite me next time so I get to be all lovey too. sourface, bitterface
Quinn: @NikaHarper @Vahn16 fuck yes you are invited as HECK
https://archive.is/t56H4#selection-4233.1-4233.73
So let's recap what we have here. Grayson and Quinn seem to have been good friends whose relationship strengthened overtime (just going off their Twitter exchanges alone), and throughout the time they knew each other Grayson wrote not one, not two, not three, but four articles featuring Zoe Quinn all of which brought attention to her future or current projects in some way. The fourth of these articles is the most blatant, undeniable and egregious, and in it Grayson unashamedly shills for Quinn's upcoming game jam project that she solicits donations for (and which never actually ends up happening). And that article is set only a few days before they have sex in Vegas.
As a journalist, if you have a conflict of interest you have to recuse yourself or disclose the conflict of interest, and Grayson did neither. Grayson's excuse was that since they supposedly didn't have sex until a few days after the GAME_JAM article was published, they weren't in a "relationship" at the time, so it's apparently fine that they were at the very least friends before then and were doing a lot of stuff that indicated their blatant personal conflict of interest. But as this redditor notes: "personal conflicts of interest are not limited to people you are having sex with, and putting the sex a few days after the article doesn't really make it notably more ethical".
Funnily enough, Totilo himself stated back in August 2014 on Twitter that "reporters who are in any way close to people they might report on should recuse themselves". Wonder where that principle went.
https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/501817475097702402
Anyway, I hope you've noticed just how different the reality is from the portrayal in Danskin's talk to UC Merced, where he makes sure to completely brush over anything at all that might imply that there was a breach of journalistic ethics. The treatment of Gamergate by the mainstream has been an attempt at historical revisionism par excellence, where any indication of unethical behaviour has been stripped out of the record and replaced with some narrative where no one ever had any justification to be angry and Quinn was only ever a Poor Oppressed Victim being unjustly attacked by a virulently misogynist mob. It is an example of where if you repeat a falsehood enough, people will accept it as truth.
3/4
Okay, now we get to the main star of the show, which is this claim by Danskin:
In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.
This is not technically false, but it's a half-truth that's so egregiously misleading that it might as well be a lie. He is trying to imply that there was no journalistic ethical breach, whereas I would say the evidence definitively points to repeated and sustained ethical breaches.
The Totilo article that supposedly exonerates Grayson and Quinn states:
"On March 31, Nathan published the only Kotaku article he's written involving Zoe Quinn. It was about Game Jam, a failed reality show that Zoe and other developers were upset about being on. At the time, Nathan and Zoe were professional acquaintances. He quoted blog posts written by Zoe and others involved in the show. Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favorable review."
https://archive.is/8KjOG#selection-2701.170-2701.197
Again, nothing in this is strictly false, but this is not an honest or accurate depiction of what was going on. Furthermore it's necessary to note that Totilo was, as Danskin states, "editor-in-chief at Kotaku". This is basically "Kotaku investigated Kotaku and cleared Kotaku".
In order to understand what this leaves out, we need to look at the record of discussion between Grayson and Quinn. Mind, I am leaving a lot of discussion between Grayson and Quinn out because there is so much of it and a lot of it is just rehashing ground already covered. There is a lot to go through, and a lot of it is pretty incriminating.
23 Jun 2012: The earliest evidence of interaction between Grayson and Quinn I can find. Grayson posts on Twitter after a chat with Zoe Quinn.
Grayson: So, after a fantastic chat with @ZoeQuinnzel, I find out she's leaving the city tonight. GOOD JOB, SAN FRANCISCO. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY.
26 Jun 2012: Grayson responds to a tweet of Quinn's.
Quinn: Another loathsome rainbow. @ Charlton Service Plaza (Westbound) http://instagr.am/p/MWslkWErqC/
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Loathsome Rainbow would make an amazing addition to Lucky Charms cereal. Please make that happen once you're rich and famous.
29 Jun 2012: Quinn and Grayson friend each other on Tribes.
Quinn: @Vahn16 This is the best idea and I think I must join you because all I am doing for fun is getting in to games as art arguments on OkCupid
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel YES. I will totally friend you and stuff on Tribes. What's your username thing?
12 Aug 2012: Grayson wishes Quinn a happy birthday on Twitter:
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Happy birthday! Well, what's left of it, anyway <.< >.>
Quinn: @Vahn16 I'm 3 hours ahead so it just started
5 Sep 2012: Grayson posts an article on RockPaperShotgun called "Green For Greenlight: Valve Now Charging $100 Fee" and namedrops Quinn in it a good couple of times, quoting her a bunch and making sure to include her accomplishments and upcoming games in the article. No conflict of interest is reported.
Some choice quotes:
"“$100 is a lot for me right now, because I’ve released all of my games [thus far] for free, and I’m supporting myself on freelance work and contracts till I get my first ‘real’ game done,” said Dames Making Games founder and It’s Not Okay, Cupid developer Zoe Quinn. “That’s eating for a month.”"
"Steam’s still not as open as, say, Desura – nor, in all likelihood, will it ever be. That’s not the point. Is it fair to charge $100 for that? The jury’s still out. But, for better or worse, developers shouldn’t go in expecting something entirely different. ... “It really just seems like an error in communication,” Quinn added. “Which, again, is one of the reasons I didn’t make a page for It’s Not Okay, Cupid yet. It’s clearly not Steam quality at this point [in development]. And if I don’t have a gameplay demo or video that shows that it should be up there, I don’t know why I’d put it on Greenlight.”"
This seems fairly innocuous for now. It is not an isolated incident, however, it ends up being part of a much larger pattern.
13 Nov 2012: On Twitter, Grayson offers to help Quinn with a game of hers she wants to develop. They also have another exchange where he calls her game It's Not Okay, Cupid (abbreviated as INOC) Game Of The Year (albeit a bit jokingly).
Quinn: Gonna make a game about social anxiety where you master moves like "lean against wall", "pretend to check phone", "avoid eye contact"
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel I will totally volunteer to be a consultant on those things. I consider myself something of an expert.
Quinn: @Vahn16 low five!
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Although actually, I've always wanted there to be a game where people actually, like, react if you just awkwardly stare at them
Quinn: @Vahn16 that happens in INOC, swear to god
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Gasp! GOTY.
27 Jan 2013: More friendly communication between Quinn and Grayson.
Quinn: I am gonna start a place that sells 60's themed sandwiches and call it "Psychadeli".
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Never stop saying things.
28 Jan 2013: Grayson on Twitter promotes an "awesome guide on making games" written by Quinn. As established, these two are already seemingly friendly with each other.
Grayson: Speaking of making games, @ZoeQuinnzel wrote this awesome guide that I fully plan on using in the future.
Quinn: @Vahn16 d'awww
14 Feb 2013: Quinn's game Depression Quest is released on MobyGames. Nathan Grayson's name is in the special thanks section among others (Nathan will later claim he had no idea about this).
"Special thanks for their amazing support during a really difficult time. This game would have been dead in the water months ago without you all."
22 Nov 2013: Quinn tells Grayson "ilu", he favourites her tweet.
Quinn: @Vahn16 nathan ilu
25 Nov 2013: Quinn tells Nathan on Twitter she really wants to buy him a beer.
Quinn: @Vahn16 dude. I really wanna buy you a beer ASAP
12 Dec 2013: Another indicator of closeness between Grayson and Quinn on Twitter.
Grayson: In other news, I've become a "listen to @ZoeQuinnzel because she's saying important shit" Twitter bot. So yeah. Bleep motherfucking bloop
8 Jan 2014: Grayson posts an article on RockPaperShotgun called "Admission Quest: Valve Greenlights 50 More Games". The article, while only really being about Valve greenlighting more games, is for some reason named after Quinn's game Depression Quest, and he specifically gives a shoutout to "powerful Twine darling Depression Quest" as being one of the standouts of the bunch. It's easy to dismiss these things as arbitrary without prior context. It's not so easy when you see the communications that Grayson and Quinn have before this article.
As a little bit more evidence in favour of Grayson's probable partiality here, the article's tags are: "depression quest, Steam, Steam Greenlight, Treasure Adventure World, Valve." So the only two games that are highlighted in the tags are Treasure Adventure World, and, surprise, Depression Quest.
Again, please note how friendly public communications seem to be between Grayson and Quinn at this point, to the extent that Quinn posts "nathan ilu" on Twitter. No conflict of interest is disclosed.
9 Jan 2014: A day after the publishing of the Admission Quest article, Grayson tells Quinn on Twitter that if she quits, he will "burn down the gaming industry".
Quinn: No wonder Phil quit. Is that gonna be me in a few years?
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel I hope not. If it is, I will burn down the gaming industry.
30 Jan 2014: Quinn tells Grayson and another person on Twitter that she misses them, and tells Grayson that she "owes him a bazillion hugs".
Grayson: Suffice it to say, @haydencd and I did really dumb stuff in a videogame today
Quinn: @Vahn16 @haydencd miss you two
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel @haydencd GDC is nearly upon us. Then there will be dumb shenanigans galore. Also karaoke. For real this time
Quinn: @Vahn16 @haydencd fuck yessssssssssssssss I owe you like a bazillion hugs anyway
16 Feb 2014: More friendly communication between Grayson and Quinn.
Quinn: The Stanley Parable LARP: a British dude just follows you around cattily narrating what you do into your ear
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel Can we spend all of GDC doing that? It will be terrible for my interviews, but I don't care
21 March 2014: Grayson lets slip that he knows Quinn's middle name in a tweet which Quinn favourites.
Grayson: I'm the third person ever to guess @ZoeQuinnzel's middle name!
2/4
Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.
I have taken a look at the #burgersandfries IRC logs, and here's what a lot of the quotes from Gjoni look like. You can decide for yourself how fair Danskin's characterisation of Gjoni is.
https://archive.md/Ler4O#selection-9.65374-9.210
Eron_G: The sexual harassment thing on twitter is really killing the causes. I request that if you're on twitter, you continue voicing your support for the causes. And feel free to keep pointing out Zoe on hypocrisy. But basically call out anyone that is saying things openly antagonistic on grounds that accomplish nothing. You want to become the levelheaded side of the debate.
When asked the question "What would make you reveal the stuff you're censoring? Is it because you're afraid of legal action or because you're trying to protect people/yourself?" he answers:
Eron_G: The stuff I've censored has been censored to protect Zoe from undue harassment.
When asked the question of if he had any regrets regarding The Zoe Post, he answers:
Eron_G: I wish the harassment thing would die down
When asked a question about Quinn's past experiences with imageboards, he reveals this answer which again seems to confirm that the reason why he dropped the Zoe Post on SomethingAwful was specifically because they liked her.
Eron_G: She was a regular on Something Awful. And they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way. Which is why I chose Something Awful as one of the two boards to drop this one.
When asked the question "Thank you for taking the time to sit with us today. My queston is, taking into account everything that has happened, is game journalism changing because of it? Do you see journalists being more careful because of the Zoe incident?" he repeats his anti-harassment stance:
Eron_G: I don't think journalists are just going to drop their friendships because of this. And for now I think the out of left field attack has caused everyone to band together even more closely. Which is again, why the harrassment needs to die down and become more reasoned debate. One of the links in the blogpost has a good indiestatik article on the issue from a year ago
When asked the question: "Thanks for being with us here today Eron. In case this whole debacle is not properly dealt with in the near future, or if the Quinn side wins and yourself and gamers as a whole are seen in a bad light, would you speak out publicly even so?"
Eron_G: I'm still trying to think about how that would go down. I would recommend avoiding a situation where you are seen in a bad light, by shouting down people who spread pointless harassment. Legitimate concerns will listened to if you organize properly. But the smell of people's genitalia is not a legitimate concern.
When asked the question: "Do you /v/ has missed the mark in targeting Zoe rather than the journalists who published work that had a conflict of interest?"
Eron_G: I think /v/ has targeted both. They aren't a hivemind. But, I think they're targetting Zoe the wrong way. And they are focusing too much on sex in the journalism thing. Sex is a tiny ass part of the problem at most.
In response to the question: "Have you talked with IA via skype? Or through some other means? Why not appear on one of his videos to tell people to calm down on the harassment?"
Eron_G: That might be a good idea. I was thinking it would be cool to see the community come together to simultaneously get people to move the discussion in a more positive direction and deter random harassment though. It just seems -- better.
Eron_G: But if IA reaches out to me I might consider a video. So long as we discuss some terms first.
In response to the question: "I've been an indie game developer for a few years now, and while I haven't been particularily involved in the social side of things or with "popular" indie devs like Phill Fish and Zoe Quinn and the like, the things that you revealed to the general public worry me. We both know that Zoe and Phill alike are very popular and fairly well known in certain areas of the online community do carry some weight regardless of their actions in the past so do you believe that your actions and the resulting actions of them both could spell bad news for the indie dev industry, at least in the way of holding a negative connontation? It's popular talk that Zoe Quinns doxing was all fake/staged, do you believe that Phill Fish's is as well?"
Eron_G: I don't think Phil Fish's doxx was faked by Phil Fish. It might have been a real doxx, or it might have been someone using the opportunity to divert suspicion for financially motivated hack.
Eron_G: I I think that the more people harass devs, the worse it's going to get. Like, without anything getting better. It will just discourage people from making games.
In response to "Why are Quinn and her supporters trying to paint all of this as "harassment" even though there's a mountain of evidence saying otherwise?"
Eron_G: Because there's mountains of people calling her "cunt" and "slut" and proliferating nudes of her.
Eron_G: I mean, there's probably a bunch of that right now if you search "zoe quinn" or "thequinnspiracy" on twitter
Personally, I am willing to take what I see in these logs at face value and conclude that Gjoni is advising them that the conversation should be focused on ethics, has explicitly stated he has censored things to prevent Quinn being harassed, and repeatedly states that he doesn't want harassment of Quinn (or anyone else). I'll grant that Gjoni does state in these IRC logs that the initial point of making The Zoe Post was to warn people that Quinn was not a nice person (because of the infidelity and emotional abuse she subjected him to) but I am unaware of any statements where he advocates using the ethics discussion as a front to destroy her.
Furthermore, many of the conversations in burgersandfries and many of the questions people asked Gjoni in that chat log are in fact specifically about the broader topic of ethics in games journalism and do not immediately concern Zoe, which indicates they care about ethics in and of itself.
In response to: "You said that you've gotten accounts from indie devs on how broken the scene is. Can you share any of those, or all they private?"
Eron_G: They are all private and tenuous. And the annoying thing is a lot of them are through other people. Who I do have reason to trust. But it means I have to get those people to try to convince them. Because they won't talk to me directly. They explicitly stated that their reason is fear for their careers.
In response to: "In your opinion, how could the every-day gamer rally around to dismantle the stranglehold that the video game 'press' has in order to create a more honest and transparent industry?"
Eron_G: Demand they rethink their standards of journalistic integrity in light of not only the ways that coverage might become biased, but in light of the effects that those standards can have on the industry they are covering.
In response to: "Thanks for taking my earlier question. Do you think indies themselves could be rallied to lash out against corruption in journalism via panels at gaming conventions, or is this "suicide?" Would you be willing to speak on a panel about this topic?"
Eron_G: hmmm. . .
Eron_G: I hadn't considered the possibility of getting indies themselves to do it.
Eron_G: actually
Eron_G: that gives me a number of things to think on
In response to: "Are there any usernames you think we should check out? Or any websites that might be off the radar but important to the corruption discussion and we wouldn't be expected to find, I.E. old forums used by the corruption clique in the past?"
Eron_G: No. But I do know there are secret invite only forums for devs who have been sufficiently successful.
While the chats are very long (it's thousands and thousands of posts) and you can probably find some objectionable statements in there, it's my perception that that kind of behaviour is certainly not common enough to dismiss #burgersandfries as some kind of coordinated attempt to hide harassment of Zoe Quinn behind a veil of ethics.
Part 1/4
Recently, someone sent me a video about GamerGate made by BreadTuber Ian Danskin in 2021. The video in question is his talk to UC Merced about "digital radicalism" using GamerGate as a case study. Here is the link to the video and here is the link to the transcript of the video, posted on his Tumblr.
It's truly shocking how many errors and misrepresentations there are in it. There are so many I can't and won't cover them all, but I do want to highlight the most notable ones.
Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.
Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.
I'm genuinely not sure where he's getting the idea that Gjoni posted to 4chan. Not even his supposedly "too comprehensive" RationalWiki source detailing the timeline of GamerGate states that Gjoni posted it on 4chan - it just states "Eron Gjoni publishes "The Zoe Post" on Wordpress, accusing Zoe Quinn of infidelity. This time the post is shared to 4chan's boards /b/, /v/, /pol/, and /r9k/." One of his other sources claims Gjoni attempted to sic 4chan on Quinn, but this claim is not cited.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Gamergate
According to The Zoe Post, here Gjoni’s side of it:
“If you take my recommendation to opt against the TL;DR — yes, this is written almost entirely in shitty metaphors and bitter snark. It’s a post about an ex, and the tone reflects its intention as the starting post for forum threads entitled Cringe-Worthy Break Up Stories on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, because I figured it would be best to announce on friendly communities in innocuous ways. Penny Arcade and Something Awful deleted those threads, so now this blog stands alone. I will not take it down, because I know the information is important, even if what I have omitted means you never might."
"And no, I never posted this to 4chan.”
https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
There is, however, another page on RationalWiki which states that "After he got banned from Penny Arcade and Something Awful, he shared with 4chan's /r9k/ and /pol/ who then decided to call her a "whore" and a "cunt".[1][2] How non-misogynist."
https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Gamergate_claims&diff=1587662&oldid=1587661
RationalWiki posts two sources to "prove" that Eron Gjoni shared with 4chan's /r9k/ and /pol/. However, none of their sources prove at all that Eron Gjoni shared it - others rehosted what was removed from other places as posted by Gjoni, but he himself did not provably rehost on the chans himself.
The tone of these chans is very 4chan, meaning it's not amazing. However, I found no evidence suggesting Gjoni sanctioned or approved of either.
I'd also add that Gjoni has stated repeatedly that the reason why he posted them on Penny Arcade and Something Awful was because they had positive views of Zoe, not because they had a history of harassing her.
"I chose the Penny Arcade forum because all mentions of Zoe there have been positive. I chose the Something Awful forum because Zoe used to visit there a lot before making DQ, and they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way."
"She was a regular on Something Awful. And they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way. Which is why I chose Something Awful as one of the two boards to drop this one."
https://web.archive.org/web/20141204063637/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BxRecBCIAAEIcOG.png
Then, Danskin goes on to make this bombshell of a claim:
What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.
Now, his source for this is the Boston Magazine hit-piece on Gjoni, entitled "Game of Fear". Here is the link (to an archive page, since I would rather not give clicks):
https://web.archive.org/web/20221008092349/https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/28/gamergate/
Reading it is incredibly funny, actually. There's not a single piece of evidence presented in the article in favour of these claims (because they're based on interviews), and the tone reeks of exaggeration and editorialising. But I'd think if you're going to try to use Gjoni's own statements to impugn Gjoni, I'd think looking at Gjoni's actual statements would be a better source for that instead of accounts of his statements that are filtered through a lens of journalistic bias.
Here's Gjoni's two-part commentary on the Boston Magazine article, entitled "What The Hell Is Journalism Even". As far as I can tell, it is still unfinished to this date, but what exists seems to demonstrate a clear pattern of falsehood and misrepresentation in the Boston Magazine article.
https://antinegationism.tumblr.com/post/117661182576/what-the-hell-is-journalism-even-part-1
https://antinegationism.tumblr.com/post/117729753311/what-is-journalism-even-part-2-zachary-jasons
Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest.
Incorrect. This is a really big error. Here's what Gjoni actually says the "typo" is in his edit to the Zoe Post:
"There was a typo up for a while that made it seem like Zoe and I were on break between March and June. This has apparently led some people to infer that her infidelity with Nathan Grayson began in early March. I want to clarify that I have no reason to believe or evidence to imply she was sleeping with him prior to late March or early April (though I believe they’d been friends for a while before that). This typo has since been corrected to make it clear we were on break between May and June. To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature."
https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
So as you can see here, Gjoni was not correcting a section in the Zoe Post which stated that she slept with Nathan Grayson for a good review of Depression Quest. He was correcting a typo which made it seem like they were on break between March and June instead of May and June.
In fact, he literally couldn't have retracted the statement that she slept with Nathan Grayson for a good review of Depression Quest because not a single sentence in The Zoe Post ever states that in the first place. Even when you go back to the earliest archive.org snapshot of the Zoe Post (all the way back in 16 Aug 2014), no such claim is made.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140816104303/https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
The only mention of Depression Quest he made is contained within his later edit identifying the typo, and the purpose of him mentioning it was to caution people to be careful when making claims about the conflict of interest.
Even Nathan Grayson himself admitted that Gjoni did not state in his post that Quinn traded sex for reviews.
Given the centrality of The Zoe Post to the whole thing, this mistake is incredibly damning. It establishes that Danskin hasn't even read the Zoe Post. You would think that someone speaking at UC Merced about the Quinnspiracy and Gamergate would have at least read one of the Quinnspiracy's central documents, but this seems to imply that he's simply obtained his information from predictably slanted secondary sources.
Here's a link to Part 2 of this post, in case it gets buried under the replies.
What music has TheMotte been enjoying lately?
For my part, here is a list of albums I've been frequenting (listed in alphabetical order, not by preference). It's not exhaustive and I've restricted my pick to an album per artist, to prevent myself from filling it up with all the same people.
EDIT: added more
Agreed, I don't believe the charitable interpretation is warranted at all and the Voice's powers will in reality almost certainly be expanded far beyond the immediately apparent scope of the wording.
I do think it's useful to have arguments against both the motte and bailey, because it's very easy for defenders of the policy to rely on the ambiguity of the proposed amendment to argue "It clearly just pertains to cases where the matter specifically concerns Indigenous people". I consider any such idea to be based on a wilful and motivated ignorance, given the sheer pervasiveness of "indigenising" public policy here in Australia, but having an argument against that interpretation of the Voice's scope shows that the proposal is inherently objectionable on such a fundamental level that even if you interpret its provisions in the most unobjectionable manner possible, there are still glaring issues to be found.
I'm reading the Monash University article, and it's incredible just how terrible a lot of the argumentation is:
Myth 4
It will give First Nations peoples special rights.
The Constitutional Expert Group comprising nine experts (including former High Court judge Kenneth Hayne) and chaired by the Commonwealth Attorney-General has advised that a First Nations Voice will not give First Nations peoples special rights. All Australians have the right to make representations to Parliament, which is guaranteed by the constitutional Implied Freedom of Political Communication. The First Nations Voice is simply a permanent one.
This is puzzling, to say the least. Advocating for a piece of legislation, then arguing that the proposed piece of legislation "will not give First Nations peoples any special rights" and won't grant them the ability to do anything regular Australians already couldn't is incredibly strange and contradictory. Stating that it creates no special preference for the Indigenous is basically stating that the amendment is useless, and if so, then why advocate for it? Clearly "permanency" is a special right granted to Indigenous people here (and also there's the fact that the Voice will be explicitly and specifically enshrined in the Constitution on the basis that Indigenous people have a special status as the "first peoples", which at the very least gives the Voice's representations a de facto legitimacy that those made by other Australians will not).
Then there's this:
Myth 9
It offends the notion of equality that underpins the Constitution and our democracy.
Our Constitution does not protect equality, and actively allows for racially discriminatory laws by virtue of s 51 (xxvi) (the race power).
Oh, thank God.
Further, the race power has only ever been used to make laws for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, laws that are not required to be beneficial laws.
So we actively permit racial discrimination, and that law has only ever been used to benefit one ethnic group over others. I somehow do not feel comforted by this fact.
Amending the Constitution to provide First Nations peoples with a Voice to Parliament does not offend notions of equality; rather, it is acknowledging the finding of the High Court in Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) that “Their dispossession underwrote the development of the nation”.
"Amending the Constitution to provide First Nations peoples with a Voice to Parliament does not offend notions of equality; rather, it just gives an implied special status to them based on a permanent ethnic claim over land."
It's really hard not to be flippant here because of just how slippery and condescending all the argumentation is. If you're going to support something, at the very least fully stand behind the principles that underly your preferred policies, instead of constantly hedging and denying any of the more contentious implications of these policy decisions in order to make your positions seem more agreeable than they really are.
I'm aware, I'm just being facetious - rather, I'm pointing out that there are a lot of Aphex Twin tracks which are probably not suitable for small children (something which I assume the contents of the links I provided would immediately make clear).
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