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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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I’ve read a detailed account of this a long time ago. Recalling from memory, originally this Watson woman briefly described the elevator incident in passing during a presentation she was delivering at another atheist event which was posted online, and another woman in this atheist subculture decided to argue against her accusations in a blog post, which in turn generated a cascading feminist backlash, which in turn elicited the Dear Muslima letter you mentioned. It was this latter event that drew mainstream media attention to this whole trainwreck.

This actually isn’t that self-evident in retrospect; in fact, I’ve seen the observation on the SSC subreddit once that it’s actually difficult to pinpoint the one decisive event which propelled the Gamergate scandal to mainstream exposure. Was it one of the blog posts? One of the youtube response videos? A tweet? It’s difficult to tell, especially because most of the first-hand sources related to Gamergate have been purged from the internet.

Anyway, this is all in the past by now. I think the most important facet of Elevatorgate is that everyone involved ended up escalating the scandal instead of trying to calm it down. First of all, it was Richard Dawkins who did the most to fan the flames instead of making all those involved cool down. I think it’s fair to hold this against him.

This actually isn’t that self-evident in retrospect; in fact, I’ve seen the observation on the SSC subreddit once that it’s actually difficult to pinpoint the one decisive event which propelled the Gamergate scandal to mainstream exposure. Was it one of the blog posts? One of the youtube response videos? A tweet? It’s difficult to tell, especially because most of the first-hand sources related to Gamergate have been purged from the internet.

... that's probably truish, but I'd give better-than-even odds that, had 4chan not banned the post, it would have gotten little more than a few sages and some 'not your personal army' posts (possibly 'i ain't reading all that sorry/happy' meme?). There's a hole-shaped gap in the narrative because the actual contention is about a thing that never got visibility, rather than the stuff that did.

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