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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   28586 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Another day, another entrant into the OpenAI drama. Emmett Shear is the new interim CEO of OpenAI.

I don't know why it was surprising to people that Sam wouldn't come back. The company was meant to be subservient to the nonprofit's goals and I'm not sure why the attempted coup from Sam's side (you know the whole effectively false reporting that Sam Altman was to become the new CEO) was apparently "shocking" that it failed.

The OpenAI board has hired Emmett Shear as CEO. He is the former CEO of Twitch.

My understanding is that Sam is in shock.

https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101

What's kinda sad about all of this is how much people were yearning for Sam Altman to be the CEO as if he isn't probably one of the worst possible candidates. Like maybe this is just a bunch of technolibertarians on Twitter or HN or something who think that the ultimate goal of humanity is how many numbers on a screen you can earn, but the amazing amount of unearned reverence towards a VC to lead the company.

In any case, here's to hoping that Laundry Buddy won't win out in the rat race for AGI, lest we live in a world optimized for maximum laundry detergent. Maybe we'll avoid that future now with Sam's departure.

Anyway, I'll leave this to munch on which I found from the HN thread.

Motte: e/acc is just techno-optimism, everyone who is against e/acc must be against building a better future and hate technology

Bailey: e/acc is about building a techno-god, we oppose any attempt to safeguard humanity by regulating AI in any form around and around and around"

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1683208767054438400

How's it going my dude?

You might want to repost this to this week's thread seeing as you posted it right as this thread went down.

Or, if you dont mind, I can just repost it for you?

ETA: Went ahead and did it.

Nobody involved in Silicon Valley AI circles has ever really suffered. We’re talking about people who largely grew up upper-middle class in the richest and one of the most peaceful societies in human history. They’re bored. This millenarian phase is completely natural, people get bored, they want ‘happenings’. In the absence of faith, it’s Machine God Now.

Theres also the fact that many e/acc people have their differences with the prevailing political zeitgeist and are either conservative (‘we’ve been losing for so long we might as well roll the dice’) or libertarian (and thus opposed to regulation by default).

My conspiracy theory: e/acc proponents know that when AI starts automating huge numbers of jobs the west is going to have a ‘socialist moment’ that makes Occupy Wall St or even 1968 look like those three Falun Gong guys outside the Chinese embassy. And they know the only way to get ahead of that is to go balls-to-the-wall ‘bring us our machine God’ ASAP.

Beautiful theory. Yeah the eschatology within the deep circles of the E/acc movement rarely gets talked about. I think boredom from tech elites is also a huge piece.

There's nothing with stakes for them to do. Geopolitics is low status now. Most other areas where there's lots of power like government, healthcare, politics etc are super slow and bureaucratized. Tech is the new hotness where ambitious bored sons of the elite class get to play with powers beyond their control.

Geopolitics is low status now.

What does this mean? Members of Congress/foreign ambassadors don’t seem low status to me.

In the circles of younger elites. Idk this is more anecdotal than anything.

Altman and Brockman to join Microsoft. Looks like Nadella decided to cut out the middleman and hire everyone who's willing to follow Altman out of OpenAI directly.

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122

Good. I can't properly express my contempt for deceleration proponents. With Sam as CEO of the new group, and with all the doomers left behind at a now-irrelevant, we're going to see a level of acceleration we've never seen before.

What I want is for OpenAI to live up to its name and release GPT5 under AGPL as a "fuck you" to Altman and Microsoft.

The source in this instance is not the models. From the AGPL:

The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. "Object code" means any non-source form of a work.

Source code would be the training data plus the source code/commands/algorithms for turning the text into a transformer model. Same thing bugs me about Facebook calling their Llama models open source. They're nothing of the sort. It'd be like me handing you a Windows 10 disk and saying since I am giving you the program, it's open source. Ridiculous. Doubly ridiculous that people accept this without noticing.

None of these companies can release the actual source, because they'll get sued to oblivion by the copyright holders.

Yes, I meant the whole training set as well. If they get sued they can all blame Sam for misleading the board.

This is about the only thing which would make me support OpenAI again but unfortunately will never happen. I don't for a second believe Altman is supportive of free (as in speech) AI in the hands of the masses, but the AI safetyists are even worse on that regard.

EA's are the most vehement opponents of actually opening AI.

Push it to the limit!

Motte: e/acc is just techno-optimism, everyone who is against e/acc must be against building a better future and hate technology

Bailey: e/acc is about building a techno-god, we oppose any attempt to safeguard humanity by regulating AI in any form around and around and around"

I'm a grumpy Luddite who hates the idea of AI regardless of whether it delivers on all it's promises, spells our doom, or fails to deliver on any of the hype either way and ends up just being another iterative improvement. It feels I somehow found myself in the middle of a battlefield as two religiously fanatic armies are about to clash and rip each other to shreds.

Can't you guys settle your differences in the Las Vegas Octagon, or something?

In the last 6 months I have thrown every menial dev work I could at chat gpt. For me there is no turning back for QoL improvements. For 20$ month you get a whole Bangalore team of juniors.

Yeah, but that's not what everybody is getting hyped up / scared to death about. Everybody's talking about how this is infinitely scalable and how this means doom / utopia.

I think that will LLM and the battery tech improvement we observe - eliminating manual labor in 20 years is real possibility. That is both doom and utopia for big parts of the world.

I still think most white collar stuff will go first, but certainly with LLMs applied to robotics it’s clear now that blue collar labor won’t be far behind.

At some point, maybe, but why waste GPUs on manual labor, when naked monkeys can dig for cobalt for a mere 2-3K calories of Uncle Klaus' Bugs?

Yeah obviously in parts of the world where labor is $1 a day it’ll take much longer. But at the same time there could be a textiles effect (where indigenous textiles industries in Africa were totally destroyed by cheap donated clothing made in Bangladesh for the West) where they can get donated machines from Bill Gates or second hand stuff that lets them eliminate labor all the same.

Labor prices are perfectly able to adapt to the current market situation, so I don't see why the developed world should be exempt. It's also not about absolute prices, but about the relative marginal costs/profits of investing resources into building a manual labor performing robot vs. putting those same resources into expanding SkyNet.

Ok, so now we're back to the thing I originally complained about: vaguely mystical predictions of a massive social revolution. Is it possible at all to talk about specifics?

Another pet peeve of mine is, if people are going to predict massive revolutions reshaping our societies, can they at least do it right? The current state of AI, and the law of comparative advantage, clearly implies replacing intellectual, not manual labor.

Yes. With enough investment - I will have a robot that will be good enough cleaning lady, housekeeper and gardener. That will be also able to do some basic house/electric maintenance stuff. I was joking couple of years ago that the Qatari definition of hard labor is the act of pointing the bangladeshi what to move and where. Also nurses and whatnot.

It will start as simple things - better roombas, tile laying and painting machines etc etc. Even the blue collar work will be augmented. Eventually we will get to good enough universal laborer.

Judging by the way other household appliances adoption was done - it will become extremely affordable in just a couple of years. In the west - I don't care about the rest of the world - it will only make migration problems sharper and worse - since the people coming are literally worthless except as organ donors or sex work. It will also deprive the developing world of chances to develop - the only thing they will have worth anything - their natural resources.

If you are on the right side of the divide it will be utopian. If you are on the wrong - dystopia.

Yes. With enough investment - I will have a robot that will be good enough cleaning lady, housekeeper and gardener.

And what is it that you will be making your income from?

Donating organs and/or sex work?

Developing and selling robots and real estate.

More comments

It would have been a pretty big blackpill if Sam and Satya had been able to strongarm the board of OpenAI — which was specifically designed not to be strongarmed — into completely reversing their decision and resigning within 48 hours. Still, it’s going to hurt seeing that big red number in my E*trade account tomorrow, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ChatGPT gets nerfed/throttled/shutdown in the coming weeks-months. I’m very interested in what Ilya Sutskever does after this. He was apparently the driving force behind Sam’s ouster. I want to know if he has a plan, if he saw something that spooked him, or if he’s just acting on vibes.

It would have been a pretty big blackpill if Sam and Satya had been able to strongarm the board of OpenAI — which was specifically designed not to be strongarmed — into completely reversing their decision and resigning within 48 hours.

About that... XD

As of a few hours ago, Ilya publicly regrets his actions: https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028

It appears he had no plan, or didn’t plan for this level of backlash and therefore effectively has no plan anymore.

yeah no kidding. as an aside to all of this, i've got to say, the media reporting on this was downright shameful.

obviously there were the initial reports about the firing which were fine, but the weird concocted narrative about how it was totally confirmed that they were going to capitulate reach a "truce" by the entire board resigning was surprising. it didn't make any sense except as a PR fluff piece.

like the media on this couldn't have been more wrong about what happened if they tried.

what's notable about this is like this isn't some gossip rag that we're talking about here, I'll read the gossip rags and the TMZs but I don't expect the reporting quality to be top notch (well, TMZ is usually at least accurate, if inconsequential). it's entertainment and I know what I'm signing up for when I read it.

but this is Bloomberg we're talking about here that got immensely suckered. people pay them lots and lots of money for this high quality info. I don't expect them to be particularly favorable to OpenAI's position here which as best as I can tell does seem to be about them not wanting to sell out, but Bloomberg was unfathomably wrong.

I think what was most irritating was that it makes about 0 sense for the board to fire a CEO then in less than 24 hours go "uh well uh whoopsie," reinstall Sam as CEO, and collectively resign for no reason. I can't believe no one bothered to go through this process when fact checking.

but this is Bloomberg we're talking about here that got immensely suckered. people pay them lots and lots of money for this high quality info.

I'm salty because I've been on the pointy end from them before, but I'll point out that Bloomberg Media also has someone paying a lot of money to formalize and present his specific viewpoint to the public.

but this is Bloomberg we're talking about here that got immensely suckered. people pay them lots and lots of money for this high quality info.

I haven't followed the story closely enough to tell whether Bloomberg got it shockingly wrong, or whether their initial reporting was plausible but just ended up wrong by a twist of fate, but if you're right, consider that a decent chunk of the reason for the media's existence is to shape the world, rather than just report on it's shape.

As a very strong rule, this is not the case for financial news Corps. WSJ and Bloomberg are paywalled and subscriber only because their reporting is considered financially worthwhile for their subscribers. They are very different than most media, which is primarily for entertainment.

WSJ kicked off the Adpocalypse, which I'd cite as the central example of shaping vs. reporting on reality.

unearned

Altman has demonstrated extreme willingness to help great number of people, this isn't about numbers on screen but about demonstrated goodwill. I've yet to learn as much about Shear.

Anyway, I'll leave this to munch on

Two can play this game. «Motte: AI safety is about safeguarding humanity. Bailey: we're building our AI god to shape the light cone to our fancy.» It's remarkable how you can't conceive of a less totalizing vision.

Altman has demonstrated extreme willingness to help great number of people, this isn't about numbers on screen but about demonstrated goodwill.

yes, loopt was very successful. he also did great work at reddit helping to drive it into the ground as well. worldcoin isn't a totally creepy and terrible thing. very great CV there.

but more to the point: he's a investor, goodwill does not at any point enter the picture and it'd be remiss to think otherwise. that's the only thing they care about, ultimately. it seems clear to me that Sam probably hoped to sell out OpenAI and fortunately their structure made it so it didn't work.

Cynicism is a cope of dysfunctional people.

whats the story behind the reddit comment?

he's on reddit's board and was the interim CEO after Ellen Pao left. he helped to bring Steve Huffman back as CEO. people complained about Ellen Pao ruining reddit by making it into a "SJW safe space" or whatever, but the truth of the matter is a lot of that happened not as the result of Ellen's tenure, but because of board pressure being applied after Ellen left.

Sam is a part of that and is probably also why reddit is basically forced into the "we must grow at all costs and justify our valuation" mode of operation and has been since even before interest rates started rising.

Accelerationism is about, if a techno-god is possible (which it isn't), building it as soon as possible so we don't waste this universe's precious time with futile meandering.

Both safetyist pearl clutchers and rent seekers like Altman are ennemies of this. Both are different levels of deluded luddites who think they can stop innovation right where they like it and more damningly that they have any right to.

The twitter e/acc types are techno-optimist normies that have little understanding of theory, which is why they think Altman is on their side because he's not trying to put them in prison for owning a GPU. They don't know that you always shoot a traitor before an enemy.

Let these events be a harbinger of a return to Open AI. And not moats for managers or VCs against our changing times.

When Progressives Defend Pedophiles: The Curious Case of Sarah Nyberg

In my previous thread about Gamergate where I challenged a speech Ian Danskin made on the topic for UC Merced, I said it would probably be the last thing I would write about the incident for a long while, and this is certainly flouting that.

But this writeup is not about the core issues of Gamergate. Rather, it's to highlight an egregious instance of misconduct from the progressive camp that is far too damning not to write about. It's definitely old news now, but sometimes this stuff needs to be dusted off so it won't languish in some archived page in the asshole of the internet where progressives would undoubtedly rather have it stay.

So who is Sarah Nyberg?

Sarah Nyberg (srhbutts on Twitter) is a trans woman who became a prominent anti-Gamergate figure through constant attacks on Gamergaters on various forums and articles. Included among the things she's participated in is repeatedly dragging 8chan through the dirt over accusations of child porn and for being an "active pedophile network".

However, just 6-10 years before her involvement in anti-GG, Nyberg herself was an open pedophile who actively defended pedophilia, posted borderline CP on the forums of FFShrine (a site she ran), and also actively lusted after her 8 year old cousin, whom she called her little girlfriend (often abbreviated to "lgf"). This hugely came out in the mainstream when a series of videos was made about her by TheLeoPirate, and culminated in an article being made on Breitbart about her... leanings.

The original "slam dunk" evidence against Nyberg came from a series of WebCite archive pages, which came directly from FFShrine. Unfortunately, they can no longer be accessed - there is a reason for this, but I'll address that later. For now, just keep in mind that the primary trove of evidence that was initially used to indict Nyberg is currently missing, but they are online in various forms, in screenshots, videos and so on. Regardless, one can start building an extremely strong case for her pedophilia - and can do so even without the benefit of these sources.

The first part involves proving that the "Sarah" on FFShrine was in fact Sarah Nyberg, and that's a trivial task, since FFShrine was outright registered under her name. In addition, here she is on her main Twitter account, openly admitting to it being her site.

GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over.

https://archive.is/2ciMR

Oops.

In addition, Sarah has had more accounts under different names. The email her site was registered under was called retrogradesnowcone.gmail. com, and you can see a user called retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums admitting they run FFShrine. And just to properly cement that retrogradesnowcone is Sarah, here is Sarah on Twitter approvingly posting a Ravishly article with her face in it with the caption "my face is out in the open", and here is a Hotornot profile called retrogradesnowcone with the very same photo of Sarah's face in it. Sarah also shares her pictures under her handle retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums here.

In short, srhbutts on Twitter, Sarah on FFShrine, and retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums are all the same person: Sarah Nyberg.

To begin, let's look at the logs on FFShrine. While the WebCite pages directly archiving the chat logs from FFShrine are not directly accessible anymore, there are images on the internet, taken from there, which are still up. One can also confirm that these WebCite archives contained in that pastebin page were directly archived from 2005 FFShrine logs when combing archive.is for archives of the WebCite pages.

Among the images of the WebCite logs floating around, there are a few which are quite incriminating. Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat". Here, Nyberg says again "Dana is my cousin that I miss very much <3" and notes she doesn't know what to tell her cousin's parents to make it not seem weird. Then states she wants to kiss her, although don't worry, she wouldn't unless her cousin wants to learn how to kiss or something. Here, Nyberg confirms that Dana is 8 years old and here, Nyberg admits Dana gives her erections.

In addition to this, a former user of FFShrine, Roph, also uploaded further leaks of FFShrine IRC chats to his own website, slyph. org. Although slyph. org is no longer working, you can download the zip files of these IRC logs once uploaded there at archive links such as this one (warning, the logs will auto-download). Things get even worse here, and here are some of the more incriminating sections of the logs:

In file 2006-12-29.035011.html, Sarah posts a bunch of links to photos on 12chan and asks "how old are they", along with one she calls "cute ^T^". The response from a user called thetruetidus is "below 10 - Sarah ???"

In file 2006-12-30.101829.html, she posts links to online organisations for "girllovers and boylovers", then again posts a bunch of links to photos. Then subsequently says this:

(18:55:54) Sarah: yea i no

(18:55:56) Sarah: there' sa nipple

(18:55:59) Sarah: alert alpott

In file 2006-12-31.015010.html, she posts yet another set of links to photos on 12chan (which, by the way, makes her denunciation of 8chan incredibly hypocritical), then says when linking one of them:

(11:18:27) Sarah: [LINK CENSORED] she looks drugged :(

The response from other users is as such:

(11:19:43) LiquidCruelty: The one where she looks drugged

(11:19:44) Sarah: LiquidCruelty

(11:19:45) LiquidCruelty: that's CP

(11:19:51) LiquidCruelty: I can see underage twat

(11:19:52) ivorynight: ya

(11:19:54) ivorynight: i see some vagin

Sarah's response is to say that "nudity isn't CP, also I can't see anything", and in response LiquidCruelty and ivorynight state "Oh bullcrap" and "well take some vitamins and try harder, I know you went over this with a magnifying glass". In another section from the same file, Sarah states she's 6 on the inside but admits "I just turned 21".

To further confirm the veracity of the logs, there was a period of time where the latest IRC chat lines from FFShrine were embedded on her video game music download site Galbadia Hotel, archive pages of which Roph posted on KotakuInAction. Let's see some of these chat logs (which are direct archives of the page, by the way):

On 2006-01-29, Sarah states "thank heaven for little girls" and expresses concern over the fact she "only sees her lgf a few times a year". When asked when she's seeing her again, she responds "at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I'd tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly !" On 2006-03-05, Roph asks her "so who is dana? =o". She responds: "dana's my lgf ^________^ - little girl friend !" It's notable how well the content of the logs embedded here match up with the ones previously mentioned, and the fact that she continuously tries to get close to Dana just to get herself off in secret without informing anyone of what's happening is frankly quite unsettling (and that's not even addressing the posted pictures of children). And just to confirm that the Roph who owned slyph. org and posted the IRC chat logs is indeed the same Roph in the FFShrine IRC chat, here's him linking to slyph. org in the Galbadia Hotel IRC chat lines.

In addition to the evidence from FFShrine and all the related sites, there's also her postings on the Venus Envy Comic forums under the handle retrogradesnowcone. In this thread in the Venus Envy Comic forums on 2006-01-14, Nyberg openly admits "for the record: yes, I am a pedophile. no, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. no, I don't-- I wouldn't ever-- have sex with children. no, I don't look at child porn." Just remember, this is someone who later in the year went on to say "nudity isn't cp" on FFShrine and decided it was perfectly acceptable to post photos of a potentially drugged kid on internet forums - photos which users went on to identify as having "underage twat".

A user named DJ Izumi, in that thread, goes on to post chat logs from elsewhere where Nyberg, again under her retrogradesnowcone handle, talks about her "lgf" and says an array of other questionable things. Such as:

Quote:

[01:20] [LINK CENSORED] > nambla ;-;;

Quote:

[01:27] that site I tried to show you? it's a site for lesbian pedophiles. jftr

Quote:

[01:57] ;-;; this is making me miss my lgf

[01:57] lgf?

[01:57] little girl friend.

Quote:

[03:08] I don't think it's right to do sexual things with a child, not because a child can't consent, but because in the context of society it can really @#%$ them up. in a more sex-positive society I don't think it'd be a problem

Quote:

[03:11] I'm attracted to (usually) about 6 to 12. been attracted to as low as 4 but that's atypical

If further evidence is still required, I'd also note that Nyberg was known as a pedophile as early as 2007, long before Gamergate was a thing. As user ItsGotSugar writes about FFShrine in October of 2007: "Another character [on FFShrine] was Sarah, an administrator who was allegedly a pedophile. (Don't ask me whether "she" was really a girll; it was hard to tell.) I think Sarah had been expressing an unhealthy fixation on children from the very beginning, and I could only hope it was all some disgusting in-joke that had gone on for too long." Similarly, in 2010, 4 years before Gamergate existed, user BasilFSM notes that "You know what the worst thing about this Sarah is? She/He's a known pedophile. That's deplorable in itself."

Furthermore, in this interview with Milo there's this accusation by an anon called "M" accusing Sarah of initiating inappropriate roleplay with her, despite knowing that she was underage, and she would say things like "mommy tickle me where it's wet". And later on in the interview M states that her claims were ignored on Twitter. Keep in mind, this is an unsubstantiated allegation, but it is an unsubstantiated allegation that aligns with what we do know about Sarah. While this alone is not something that the argument of Sarah's inappropriate behaviour can rest on, the contents of all these disparate pieces of evidence align so well with each other that it's honestly quite implausible that all of this has somehow been faked by Gamergate (a common accusation by anti-GGs looking to defend her).

Nyberg herself on Twitter and elsewhere has also made statements that often basically are tantamount to an admission that these logs are hers. Apart from the open admission by srhbutts that "GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over", there's this Twitter thread wherein she tries to defend herself with this response: "View the unedited logs. Everyone behaved in similar ways".

Eventually, Nyberg writes a medium article responding to the whole thing where she never concretely refutes the claims against her, never even claims the evidence against her has been faked, but defends herself by stating that she was "just being an edgelord". She states "Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. Since then, I’ve learned that intent isn’t magic, and a playground of the taboo isn’t particularly conducive to moral growth. That I’ve grown past the person I was back then is something I am deeply and forever thankful for." She tries to paint it as regrettable teenage edgelord behaviour (she was 21) that she's grown out of, paints the people accusing her of being a pedophile as acting in bad faith, and casts herself as a victim of Gamergate harassment.

So even Nyberg cops to these logs being hers. And it's noticeable how her response to this is the anti-GG version of The Toxic Gossip Train. Even a good portion of the comments on her medium article are incredibly disgusted with how she treats the whole thing, with one stating "I’m sorry but I don’t think you get to just wash your hands of it and claim edgelord status. From the looks of it you were pretty deep into the role. Vieweing, discussing, and distributing child porn. That’s not edgelord that’s criminal." Another states "Pedophilia is a serious accusation. The evidence against you is disturbingly accurate. Your sob story won’t help you." In the same fashion as Miss Ukelele, the point of this post is not to issue an apology, she's essentially trying to trivialise her acts, claim victimhood and scold people into shutting up about her behaviour. It is true that "teenage edgelords" claim extreme views all the time, and sometimes objectionable ones. But what Nyberg did clearly falls far beyond that.

Yet in the light of Nyberg's medium article, the progressive crowd immediately comes out celebrating her and calling her stunning and brave. Here's Leigh Alexander's reaction (yes, that Leigh Alexander) as an example:

Definitely read it.

https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625

It's amazing how over and over again the women targeted by these nobodies have the grace to make their experience useful to others

https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184

anyway remember to please respect and support women in your field always, and do not define them by these experiences others created

https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643803653082644480

Writer for Houston Press and Cracked Jeff Rouner had a particularly flabbergasting reaction, which was to send Nyberg a photo of his kid wearing her new hoodie to cheer her up. He would later go on to delete this post.

https://archive.is/B8jBZ

In contrast, other people who knew her from way back when start picking apart her article. Roph notes "Sarah is right in that ffshrine had “edgelords”. I was one, too. I visited 4chan almost daily, used the current hot memes and phrases, joked about stuff. Shared the funny, hot or shocking meme images. Many people there did. Then why does nobody give a damn about any other user in all those logs (which are absolutely genuine, don’t get me started)? Because none of us were paedophiles. An open, proud, adamant, often very defensive paedophile. Defensive of paedophilia. Often justifying it through various arguments. Attempting to normalise it."

Plasmatorture, a former mod on FFShrine, notes "The amount she talked about it and the great lengths she went to convince everyone that she was a suffering martyr for having these feelings she knew she could never act on (supposedly) made it pretty damn clear she wasn't just trolling. That's like 5+ years of playing the long con. No troll has ever had the patience for that." CoryMartin similarly notes "The members of FFShrine and other communities you and your members mixed with (crankeye, kefkastower) didn’t interpret your ongoing demonstrations and admissions of pedophilia as you being an edgelord: they took it as you being an actual pedophile. It was taken as fact, and you had no issues with people knowing it at the time. I believe I was around 14 then, and it certainly creeped me out. Either you’re incredibly inept at comedy to the point where even people who interacted with you casually on a daily basis thought you were serious, or you’re deliberately lying to cover up something about you that most people would find deeply troubling. I think the latter is far more likely."

Now, all of this would just be hearsay if we didn't have the chat logs, as well as Nyberg's own admissions that she did in fact author these logs. However, with these corroborating pieces of information, they become part of an ever-strengthening case against her. Yet despite this evidence, news articles often gave her the Zoe Quinn treatment, painting her as an Oppressed Victim which Nobody Had Any Reason To Be Angry With, such as this article by The Verge that links to Nyberg's genuinely terrible medium article as the only source on the topic and states that she was "subject to one of the biggest and nastiest organized harassment campaigns of Gamergate".

After the initial video and after Nyberg's sordid internet history came to light, anti-Gamergaters started attempting to damage control to an almost incredible degree. One instance of this was when Randi Harper posted lists of Gamergate supporters on public facebook groups. To be charitable, these people publicly associated with Gamergate, so this doesn't constitute doxxing. To be less charitable, part of her stated reasoning for engaging in this behaviour was to "take the attention away" from her pedophile friend Sarah Nyberg. Other anti-GGs, including currently prominent YouTube voices such as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, were there and openly encouraged this behaviour, with some calling it "noble" of Harper to divert attention away from Nyberg's pedophilic behaviour. All this can be found in Crash Override, the anti-GG chat group Zoe Quinn and others were using to coordinate plans.

https://archive.vn/eBVCb

[04/01/2015, 9:43:22 AM] Randi Harper: i'm talking to amib in DM.

[04/01/2015, 9:43:29 AM] Randi Harper: all of this is going to take the attention away from sarah.

[04/01/2015, 9:43:32 AM] Dan Olson: and the second biggest #GamerGate Ultras, is fully public.

[04/01/2015, 9:43:37 AM] Randi Harper: i'm going to become GG enemy #1, i'm hoping.

[04/01/2015, 9:43:41 AM] Charloppe: ty for that randi

[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] SF: That's really noble of you.

[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] Charloppe: she needs some peace right now

And:

[04/01/2015, 9:48:38 AM] Athena Hollow: <3

[04/01/2015, 9:48:57 AM] Athena Hollow: They had to fucking SCOUR FOR MONTHS to find the shit on sarah.

[04/01/2015, 9:49:03 AM] Athena Hollow: and got fucking LUCKY on that.

[04/01/2015, 9:49:13 AM] Athena Hollow: fuck them.

[04/01/2015, 9:49:26 AM] Athena Hollow: they joined a goddamn public facebook group. fucking morons.

Notice what Athena Hollow in particular says about this. There's not even a denial of what they found. She only cares that GG got "lucky" by discovering Sarah's pedophilic behaviour and she's angry they could use it as a cudgel against anti-GG in general. This is what an unprincipled tribalist looks like. Imagine being so utterly unscrupulous that you would provide ballast and cover for a pedophile to win internet points against Gamergate.

It gets worse. You know why you can no longer access any of the original WebCite caches that were used to implicate Nyberg? The reason is because of an upstanding citizen called Izzy Galvez, who was another anti-GGer who was also part of Crash Override. In a Twitter thread, he gleefully posted images of him actively working to conceal evidence of Nyberg's pedophilia from the public (archive link here). The images in question demonstrate that he sent emails to WebCite claiming the material was being used for harassment, which resulted in WebCite making the snapshots of her domain unavailable to the public.

Not only did Galvez actively try to conceal information, he also attempted to manufacture misinformation to try and paint the logs as faked. He makes a post on GamerGhazi supposedly providing screenshots that supposedly show that the logs were last edited in 2015, therefore they were were "tampered with by GG" to add pedo material. The screenshots actively redact any identifying information about the site to make it appear that these are from FFShrine, but as this source notes in reality these screenshots came from Roph's backup of the logs in slyph. org, and not actually from the FFshrine website. In other words it "only proves that Roph uploaded files in 2015, NOT that the files were edited in 2015, or that they were created in 2015".

There's plenty of other instances of progressives trying to provide cover and ballast for Nyberg, such as an article by Margaret Pless entitled "5 Reasons Why I Stand with Sarah Nyberg" (which was then fully rebutted by this medium article called "5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg"). But of course, any discussion about Gamergate isn't complete without a discussion of how RationalWiki has covered it.

RationalWiki, as you can imagine, fervently defends Nyberg, courtesy of an obsessive anti-GGer called Ryulong who frequently vandalised the Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on anything even slightly related to Gamergate, and who was even funded by GamerGhazi after he posted his GoFundMe on there and it was stickied by an admin. Because of Ryulong, RationalWiki is hosting two contradictory (and false) defences of Sarah Nyberg: "Timeline of Gamergate" claims that Nyberg was simply "expressing disgust at pedophilic roleplay" (this is completely unsupported by the link they use to back it up). "List of Gamergate claims", on the other hand, tries to state that, okay, "she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses" - a claim that, as you can see by the evidence provided so far, is based on an attempt by Nyberg to misconstrue her own behaviour. A recent (2021) attempt to correct these false claims on RationalWiki by a person called Doris V. Sutherland resulted in the edits being completely reversed by a user called TechPriest, and the argument eventually reached the talk page. Without warning, Doris was then completely banned by the RationalWiki moderators, with the only rationale being "gator sock" - despite the fact that if you read Doris's article she is clearly not in favour of Gamergate.

Doing research on this post made me want to scrub myself with sandpaper, and the fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible. Unfortunately, most of the incriminating information now resides in heterodox news sources at best, now-defunct blogs and sites that have to be reached through archive links at worst, and as a result this information has pretty much disappeared from the eyes of the public. Most "authoritative" sources and large scale collections of information are strictly policed to make sure that reporting is sufficiently congenial to the progressive viewpoint, and the only thing the public ever hears is a skewed view of the entire affair.

This is, in real time, how history gets written. Once all the dissenters disappear for good, all this stuff will be forgotten, and the only thing left will be a bunch of seemingly authoritative articles that will cause people to harbour a distorted view of how the culture war actually played out.

I remember the Nyberg story at the time, and a large part of the pushback was that some of the evidence proving that Nyberg was a paedophile was posts it had made under its previous male identity, which made it easy to shout about gamergaters "outing trans people".

Something similar happened with Aimee Challenor, except on a grander scale.

The serious point here is that "trans people deserve to have their pre-transition identities memory-holed under penalty of strong anti-discrimination laws and norms" and "people can self-identify as trans" implies that anyone can memory-hole their past. And this is particularly attractive to paedophiles and other scum.

The curious part is that there are many things Nyberg could have said and done which would have got them into trouble even with their own side. Circular firing squads are hardly uncommon among these types of communities. Is it because the accusations came from outsiders? Is it because these particular accusations are not considered as awful as others?

If the KKK attacks someone for being black, and that person also happens to be a pedophile but very few people know that and the evidence of it is currently hotly debated, a lot of people will take issue with the KKK attacking them for being black.

10 years later, anyone who feels like it can go back and curate a narrative about that and say 'hey look, they were defending a pedophile'.

/shrug. Not all victims are good people, that doesn't mean you do a full background check and wait for consensus to form before trying to protect them. Even if, yes, that will sometimes get used against you in hindsight.

If someone defends Andrew Tate while saying they don't believe him to be a sex trafficker, I give them the benefit of the doubt and say they defend a right-wing asshole and are probably suffering from motivated reasoning in evaluating him. I don't say that they defend sex traffickers.

Is it because the accusations came from outsiders? Is it because these particular accusations are not considered as awful as others?

Almost certainly the former. If these screenshots had been dug up and passed around by someone with progressive bona fides as a result of some internecine dispute, this would have gone done much differently.

A fact which often has good Bayesian foundations!

Given epistemic learned helplessness and the ability of the internet to invent narratives and fabricate 'evidence', considering the motives of the source when you hear a surprising piece of information meant to motivate you towards some action is often a good idea.

A fact which often has good Bayesian foundations!

Given epistemic learned helplessness and the ability of the internet to invent narratives and fabricate 'evidence', considering the motives of the source when you hear a surprising piece of information meant to motivate you towards some action is often a good idea.

Frankly, reflexively defending someone with the rest of your in-group simply because your out-group attacked them does not have good foundations of any sort. "Considering the motives of a source" is generally a good principle, I agree. That just as much applies to your in-group as it does to your out-group, and defending someone from critique without knowing whether that critique has basis or not is not epistemically justifiable. The motives of those making a claim are ultimately irrelevant to the truth of a claim. "Being skeptical" does not entail "knee-jerk rejection", especially in situations when the evidence is already there for you to look at.

Regarding your other comment on this, I have no doubt that at least some of the people here were ignorant in some way or other (though some, such as Galvez and Ryulong, were almost certainly being dishonest). I tend to believe, however, that this lack of knowledge was because they actively decided not to look at or consider any of the evidence although, again, it was readily available to them at the time, then formed their own opinions based almost solely on preconception. It was wilful ignorance borne out of tribal partisanship that caused them to defend this, and that definitely deserves scorn.

Frankly, reflexively defending someone with the rest of your in-group simply because your out-group attacked them does not have good foundations of any sort.

Well, I would agree that believing something is correct because people like you/on your side believe it is double-counting evidence and improper.

However, I'm not sure that generalizes to discounting attacks, which are different from neutral beliefs. People who make the most vocal and virulent attacks against a side are not ussually the ones most motivated by a dispassionate commitment to the truth alone, and their vitriolic attacks are often motivated by more-extreme-than-median beliefs about the thing they are attacking.

These are reasons to expect that an attack will be less likely to be accurate than the median belief of the defender in general. I certainly admit that the most virulent attackers on my own side are often wrong or being misleading about my opponents, in ways that often make me cringe or make me angry at them. This belief about my own side's bulldogs being unreliable transfers to my beliefs about the other side's bulldogs.

There's also something to be said about when it is sensible to believe that your own side is more likely to be correct about something from the outside view, and I think this judgement often falls with defenders rather than attackers.

For example, I think people who personally know a lot of trans people well or follow a lot of trans creators or etc. are more likely to be in favor of trans rights than people who don't, and also that this personal knowledge makes them on average better informed about the topic.

On the other hand, I think strict gun control is probably a pretty good idea that would save a lot of lives, but I also know that the people who disagree with me know way more than I do about guns and gun culture, and so I actively discount my confidence in my position there and rarely advocate about this topic (or try to give this caveat when I do so).

I think it's often true that familiarity and actual knowledge breeds defense and allegiance more often than the opposite, and this gives defenders on average an epistemic advantage form the outside view.

Of course, there's an extent to which everything I have said are just-so stories that can be pulled out to justify one's own beliefs, but conveniently forgotten when those beliefs are challenged. I could tell a different story appealing to the metaphor of an investigative journalist, claiming that most people are happy to lazily believe whatever propaganda is convenient to them at the moment, and that the most virulent attackers are ussually the ones who have bothered to do their own research and actually found the proof of the problems that need to be addressed.

On the whole, I think my initial bent towards defenders is more often true, though both definitely happen; I would be less skeptical of the investigative journalist metaphor if attacking the other side wasn't so much fun that lots and lots of people seem to spend all their time doing it without any personal expertise justifying it, swamping the signal there.

I tend to believe, however, that this lack of knowledge was because they actively decided not to look at or consider any of the evidence although, again, it was readily available to them at the time, then formed their own opinions based almost solely on preconception. It was wilful ignorance borne out of tribal partisanship that caused them to defend this, and that definitely deserves scorn.

I certainly believe that, BUT, I believe it about both sides of the issue equally.

If 99% of the people on both sides are participating in the flame war without really bothering to do the level of research needed to form truly independent opinions, then I'm not sure that the ones who coincidentally happened to be on the right side are any more virtuous than the ones on the wrong side. Perhaps if one side was consistently correct in these types of battles, and allegiance was based on observing that; but I definitely don't think that's true with regards to GG, it was a complete fiasco where both sides believed tons of wrong things at various points.

(or at least, that is my belief having lived through it, and I don't have any real desire to try to hindsight-argue about it now)

However, I'm not sure that generalizes to discounting attacks, which are different from neutral beliefs. People who make the most vocal and virulent attacks against a side are not ussually the ones most motivated by a dispassionate commitment to the truth alone, and their vitriolic attacks are often motivated by more-extreme-than-median beliefs about the thing they are attacking.

These are reasons to expect that an attack will be less likely to be accurate than the median belief of the defender in general. I certainly admit that the most virulent attackers on my own side are often wrong or being misleading about my opponents, in ways that often make me cringe or make me angry at them. This belief about my own side's bulldogs being unreliable transfers to my beliefs about the other side's bulldogs.

I think this is missing a big portion of the picture, which is noticing that when my side makes statements of neutral beliefs, they are often misconstrued by the other side as attacks. At the very least, they react strongly and sometimes harshly in a way as if they thought they were attacks. As such, when I perceive people from the other side as attacking me, my first and main concern should be how I am misconstruing their neutral statements as attacks. I should also understand that my own biases against these perceived enemies will make it almost impossible to avoid convincing myself that these are attacks so as to justify my dismissal of them on the basis that attacks are more likely to be false than mere neutral statements of fact. As such, I would require an extremely high bar of proof to be convinced that something by a perceived enemy is an attack, because if I allow myself not to have such a high bar, then I'll almost definitely fool myself into believing what's convenient for myself and my ego.

I’m at work now, so can’t respond appropriately, but one point:

If 99% of the people on both sides are participating in the flame war without really bothering to do the level of research needed to form truly independent opinions, then I'm not sure that the ones who coincidentally happened to be on the right side are any more virtuous than the ones on the wrong side. Perhaps if one side was consistently correct in these types of battles, and allegiance was based on observing that; but I definitely don't think that's true with regards to GG, it was a complete fiasco where both sides believed tons of wrong things at various points.

When making this post, I wasn’t necessarily trying to argue that GG was more virtuous (though I do believe they were) or that GG was more consistently correct (though I believe they were). Rather, the point of this post can be summed up in the following paragraph I wrote:

“[T]he fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible.”

In other words, anti-GG liked to portray themselves as having the moral and intellectual high ground, and so did the media covering it. They were the ones that made it into a social crusade and claimed they were situated on the right side of history. The mainstream view was that GG were bigoted, biased tyrants using ethics as a shield for actual hatred, and anti-GG were brave activists attempting to “expose” the truth. But when stuff like this happens, it illustrates the falsity of that predominant viewpoint and the utter hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness of those claiming the high ground.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable that if you’re claiming moral and intellectual superiority, you should be held to a higher standard and be penalised appropriately if you fail to fulfil it.

I don't think the GG side was claiming to be evil and stupid?

Almost everyone is claiming moral and intellectual superiority almost always, those are the two main reasons people claim to be on any side of any argument. I would think?

I mean, yeah, I think the heart of the GG movement was trolls trying to harass and victimize women in retaliation for entering their cultural spaces, but my impression is that everyone on the other side vehemently denies that and claims that GG was a lofty movement rooting out corruption and tearing down the lies and abuses of the SJWs.

And the same for the anti-gg side, they claim themselves to be lofty defenders of etc etc blah blah and the other side calls them sjw snowflakes cancel culture etc etc blah blah.

There was a popular media narrative that proclaimed one side the good guys, sure; but both sides were claiming to be the good guys in their own rhetoric.

Also, on another note: We applaud the old-school ACLU for protecting the rights of Nazis to hold parades because we recognize that they were fully committed to defending one specific ideal, an ideal that was incredibly important to have someone protecting, and they didn't cares who's 'side' this put them on along any other axis. We decried them more recently abandoning this purity of ideology and considering other factors in their allegiances.

There's an angle from which defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption is not different from defending a saint against false charges of corruption. If the charges are false and you are restricting your defense to those charges, someone should be there to stand up for the truth and the integrity of the system that produces and considers those charges.

Of course, anonymous internet flame wars with millions of participants are never that clean. Obviously even if 99% of anti-gg people carefully restrict their defense to the charges of 'corruption in games journalism' alone, that's still 100,000 of the stupidest 1% producing memeable screenshots defending them against the pedo charges or saying they're a great person or whatever else.

Just like there are 100,000 screenshots of the vilest 1% of the gg side making rape threats and posting pictures of women's houses and etc. etc.

Whether a side can be fairly judged by screenshots of its worst members is an eternal question in these types of debates, and a surprisingly complex one once you get into the weeds on it.

I don't think the GG side was claiming to be evil and stupid?

There is a difference between believing you are good, but arguing that you have better policies and such, versus arguing that your side deserves to own a space because your side consists of a better kind of person. The anti-GG side went all in on arguing that the GG side consisted of horrible white male neckbeards who harass people and who should be kicked out of gaming for that reason, while they themselves were inclusive lovely people.

At the point where they argued that they were better than the GG people, it seems perfectly valid to point out when prominent members are, or defend abusers, pedophiles and other horrid people.

I mean, yeah, I think the heart of the GG movement was trolls trying to harass and victimize women in retaliation for entering their cultural spaces, but my impression is that everyone on the other side vehemently denies that and claims that GG was a lofty movement rooting out corruption and tearing down the lies and abuses of the SJWs.

It's a matter of degree. My perception from being in these spaces at the time that it happened is that GG believed on the balance that they were more correct than the antis, but they were more than well aware that there was a good amount of shit-flinging happening on all sides, and often tried to actively police their own communities in order to weed out that behaviour. Like users of KotakuInAction early on creating "Gamergate harassment patrols" and even Kotaku crediting Gamergate with tracking down someone who was sending threats to Sarkeesian.

There's also the fact that none of the criminal harassment was ever tied to Gamergate. I was in KotakuInAction when the whole thing was going on, and didn't see harassment being celebrated. In addition, the Gamergate surveys basically showed GG to have strongly left wing demographics, so that's some data which should be considered when you're evaluating them.

I will say I hardly ever saw any such caution on the anti side, who seemed to be impressively secure in the belief of their superior morality to the point where they seemed to believe they were just better people who could never be on the “wrong side of history” - in part, I think, because they were offered legitimacy by the mainstream in a way GG was not. I did, however, have an anti private message me to fling racial slurs at me (so much for being against harassment). So you might forgive me if my perception of this whole thing is very different from yours.

There's an angle from which defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption is not different from defending a saint against false charges of corruption. If the charges are false and you are restricting your defense to those charges, someone should be there to stand up for the truth and the integrity of the system that produces and considers those charges.

Of course, anonymous internet flame wars with millions of participants are never that clean. Obviously even if 99% of anti-gg people carefully restrict their defense to the charges of 'corruption in games journalism' alone, that's still 100,000 of the stupidest 1% producing memeable screenshots defending them against the pedo charges or saying they're a great person or whatever else.

The case in question here is not "defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption", but defending a pedophile against verifiable charges of pedophilia. The claims that were being made against Sarah Nyberg in this case were not that she was corrupt, it was that she was a pedophile, and as another user here has already noted GamerGhazi, at the time, basically censored info on their subreddit that might suggest that she was. The defence against her pedophilia was at least widespread enough for the largest anti-GG subreddit to actively police the dissemination of information about it.

I mean, if you can find me something like the mods of KotakuInAction moderating KiA to be an active hub for harassment or something in a similar vein, I will concede the point that yes, "both sides". But I have my doubts.

That's my impression too. The important thing in this instance was not allowing the opposing team to score a point.

I think it is less that the accusations came from outsiders and more that those outsiders were just using the accusations to discredit her arguments via ad hominem.

I think it is less that the accusations came from outsiders and more that those outsiders were just using the accusations to discredit her arguments via ad hominem.

That's a pretty poor argument when the main argument by prominent anti-GG'ers was that gamers are smelly neckbeards that harass people, evidenced by cherry picked random tweets by unknowns or fabricated evidence. If they genuinely had a problem with ad hominems, then they had every opportunity to reign in that behavior from their own side, but they didn't.

Those arguments were what, again? GG is a force for evil on the internet and we all have an obligation to 'do better'?

I'm not sure exposing this person's dirty laundry qualifies as an ad hominem. Anti-GG mouthpieces made a big deal out of their moral superiority to their reactive, basement-dwelling, chuddish foes. Tearing off their robes and exposing them as mere creatures - and all the weirdness that entails - was practically a public good. But then I would think that given the level of disdain for them I carry, so take that FWIW. And if they wanted to circle the wagons for Nyberg because 'ad hominem' - to be understood as spotlighting a warped moral zealot as a problematic fraud - then double dumbass on them too.

Is there a reason you choose to use the pronoun she for a male pedophile?

Mod intervention!

It's totally fine to express disagreement with the general concept of trans. It is less fine to make statements that flat-out imply trans is a thing. Not everyone agrees they're "male", and I think this falls under the whole building consensus rule.

Presumably because there's no reason to let one's disgust with a pedophile inform as to whether they are actually trans.

My read is that joyful isn’t saying this person isn’t really “trans” but that trans people are just role playing in their chosen sex. I agree. Sarah is a male even if he calls himself a female. Just like how an 80 pound girl isn’t fat even if she starves herself because she sees herself as fat. Objective reality trumps personal identification.

I'm not entirely sure that's the reasoning behind the original comment. This site has quite a few people who seem unwilling or outright incapable of speaking about trans people without words or a tone of deep disgust. Note that joyful didn't say "Why do you use the pronoun she for a male?", but rather "why do you use the pronoun she for a male pedophile?" This should increase the likelihood of this being a disgust response in our eyes.

But even we granted that this is just about objective reality, it wouldn't have an impact on pronoun policy. There is no inconsistency between your view and the idea that one should respect the pronouns of others.

One of the ways in which sex differences are real and important is in regards to paedophilia. Male paedophilia is a much bigger problem than female paedophilia in terms of both how prevalent it is and in terms of how harmful it is. Using female pronouns for a male paedophile rhetorically downplays the seriousness of the situation.

Language comes with connotations, which are neither explicit nor objectively necessary inferences. Nonetheless spreading those connotations and that framing is the first step in winning a broader argument, which is why you get so many fights over what language to use.

Using female pronouns for a male paedophile rhetorically downplays the seriousness of the situation.

I don't agree. I think that at least nominally, pro-pronoun people would consider it serious regardless of the pedophile's sex. Obviously, there are the usual caveats (humans can think one thing and feel another, etc.).

pro-pronoun people would consider it serious regardless of the pedophile's sex

Maybe so, but when the average person hears "Sarah is a paedophile - she has openly admitted to a sexual interest in children", they make a number of reasonable assumptions:

  1. It is impossible for Sarah to penetrate a child with a sexual organ.
  2. It is impossible for Sarah to impregnate a pubescent child.
  3. It is effectively impossible for Sarah to transmit a sexually transmitted infection to a child.
  4. While Sarah will be able to physically overpower a prepubescent child or a pubescent female, she will have a much harder time physically overpowering a pubescent male.

These assumptions are true of female paedophiles. These assumptions may not be (likely are not) true of Sarah Nyberg.

Until the average person has fully internalised the idea that the pronouns a given person uses are wholly uncorrelated with their sex, affirming Nyberg's transgender identity carries with it the unavoidable side effect of downplaying the risk Nyberg poses to young children in the mind of the average listener. It's undeniably true that an adult female molesting a small girl is bound to be deeply distressing for the victim, but there's still a vast qualitative difference between that scenario and the scenario in which an adult male physically overpowers a small girl, penetrates her with his penis, infects her with an STD and possibly impregnates her.

but there's still a vast qualitative difference between that scenario and the scenario in which an adult male physically overpowers a small girl, penetrates her with his penis, infects her with an STD and possibly impregnates her.

I concur, but this sounds to me like an attempt to ensure Nyberg isn't allowed to escape the instinctive feelings associated with male pedophiles. Which is a goal you have to actually declare, otherwise I'm going to assume you don't think people's feelings should decide how pedos of either sex are treated.

More comments

There’s a principle here of never letting a liar define the terms, and never letting a bad guy have an inch of ground lest he take a mile. There’s a heavily tribal “scissor statement” embedded in attempting to describe the situation, and Joyful’s question may be a disgust response to the concept of transgenderism-as-divisive-social-lie as much as to transgenderism-as-ugly-behavior.

Having said that, I’m personally fine with the OP having described this Sarah Nyberg pedophile consistently with the child-luster’s pronouns of identification. I don’t need to know the “deadname” of the kid-unsafe transwoman or be constantly reminded of fundamental lies via the narrator’s pronoun choice. The post is all about the tribal lines and about one side protecting a dress which hides an erection for little girls; I don’t need to see a humiliation ritual of that dress being verbally ripped off in every sentence.

The reason for the choice of pronoun is obvious: That's the pronoun Sarah would want us to use. If you have a point to make, speak it plainly rather than asking stupid rhetorical questions.

Should you use the pronoun Sarah wants you to use or the pronoun for the gender you think Sarah is? If Sarah isn't in the conversation, does Sarah's preference even matter? Is there a "correct" language? Or is a word's correctness judged only on whether it facilitates a common understanding between speaker and listener? You obviously understood who all those "she"s and "her"s referred to, but would "he" and "his" have been a marginally easier read for you and other Motte readers?

I honestly don't know anymore.

If they were "he" at the time of the offense, I think that should be used. I don't think "Angelique raped six women over ten years and one of her victims described how she forced her penis into her mouth" is either clear or accurate, when Angelique was still going by "Ed" at the time.

I’d like to suggest that for historical explanations we use their pronouns at the time, then change after the transition comes in the story.

I'm not sure we've ever actually had to enforce this, but the official policy with Motte pronouns is:

  • You are always allowed to use the person in question's preferred pronoun.
  • You are always allowed to use "they", regardless of whether the person accepts that or not.
  • You are always allowed to twist yourself in knots to avoid pronouns even if it looks really silly.
  • If you're doing something historical, you can also use the person in question's officially preferred pronouns at that time in the story, but don't cleverly split hairs on this one; if you write a story about the Wachowskis, and start out by referring to them as "he", but then switch to "they" when they transition, the Eye of Sauron may look down upon thee.

The good news about these policies is that everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable, which is probably about as good as we can get.

I think this is extremely silly and enshrines into the rules the disputed premises of one side of the culture war (i.e., that pronouns refer to self-described gender and not sex). I think that's quite uncharacteristic of The Motte. Why not just let people use whatever pronouns they want to use for other people, and if there's confusion then other users can ask for clarification?

Because people tend to use these things as a way to reinforce their beliefs and make it a hostile environment for others.

I think this falls generally under the "don't be antagonistic", "don't enforce ideological conformity", and "provide evidence in proportion to how partisan your claim is" clauses.

Aside from pronouns, does this rule apply to qualifiers as well?

Should commenters be modded for referring to Hamas as terrorists instead of the self-identified 'islamic resistance movement'? Using 'incel shooter' instead of 'supreme gentleman'?

The general antagonism clause applies as it always does, as do a bunch of adjacent rules. No individual word is banned, no individual word makes you exempt from the rest of the rules.

I could write both bannable and perfectly-fine comments with any of those above phrases. If you want to come up with a more specific example, I can tell you how I'd judge it.

Some might argue that not being allowed to use the pronouns we think accurately apply to someone is enforcing ideological conformity.

As I said, "everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable". I'll take that over "one side is perfectly happy with it and the other side is not happy at all".

More comments

If you're doing something historical, you can also use the person in question's officially preferred pronouns at that time in the story, but don't cleverly split hairs on this one; if you write a story about the Wachowskis, and start out by referring to them as "he", but then switch to "they" when they transition, the Eye of Sauron may look down upon thee.

This is confusing to me. Is the issue that the Wachowski sisters do not use the pronoun "they", but they did use "he" at one point?

It's to prevent people from maliciously using "he" by slipping in a historical sentence. You can write a post about the pre-transition history of the Wachowski's and only use "he", you can write a post about their entire history and use "he" for the pre- section and "she" for the post- section, or "they" for the entire history, but you cannot write a post where you use "he" for the pre-transition part, and "they" for the post-transition part.

Yup, exactly.

(You could also use "she" for the entire history if you wanted.)

How can this be malicous? If one talks about what the directors of Matrix are up to today, mod-approved options "her" or "they" if one didn't use "he" to refer to them when they identified as men. The latter exception seems absurd.

It can be malicious if I think to myself "haha, using 'he' will trigger the trannies, so I will slip in a historical sentences to have an excuse to use 'he', and use 'they' otherwise to stay one the good side of the rules".

The rule also hits legitimate uses, but it's a compromise, that's inevitable.

More comments

This needs to go to the sidebar, I think. I wasn't aware there's an official policy.

I'm honestly trying to figure out what to do with the sidebar; right now it's kinda just overly cluttered, and I'd like to slim it down. But I'm not sure how.

I've refrained from putting this up just because it doesn't come up often and doesn't seem worth the clutter right now.

Gah! You really split the baby on that one. I think it's worse.

I have independently thought that is the best way.

Bruce Jenner won his gold medal in 1976. The identity known as Caitlyn Jenner didn't exist (at all probably, and certainly not publicly). So it's simply wrong to say Caitlyn Jenner won her gold medal in a men's Olympic event in 1976.

If people are capable of fundamentally changing their identity, then we should refer to their current identity now and their previous identity(ies) when speaking in the past tense in which the previous identity(ies) was(were) acting.

This is the way that makes sense to me. I can speak the other way out of politeness, but I can also imagine situations where that would be rude to other interested parties.

For instance, memoirist Shannon Thrace married her husband in such and such a year. The fact that he later transitioned does not change what she experienced during their relationship. She did not spend those years thinking of herself as a lesbian in a same-sex relationship. Their most intimate moments were understood at the time to be happening between a man and a woman. As far as she knew, up until the final 18 months and the divorce, she was married to a pretty gender-conforming guy. It would probably feel like gaslighting, were I to insist she had instead experienced a years-long marriage to a woman.

It would be rude to deadname Thrace’s ex and use he/him pronouns and otherwise offer painful reminders of time spent living as a man. But it also feels rude to rewrite Thrace’s most personal and foundational and intimate experiences. I don’t know a good solution to this.

How so? That’s how I’ve always referred to my trans cousin since they’ve come out. It seems the most intuitive way to speak about things to me. What’s your issue with it?

Would you use differently-gendered pronouns to refer to the same person in the same sentence?

“She sold her car for more than he bought it for, due to the pandemic supply chain disruptions.”

Sounds like utter madness to me.

My facetious proposal: respect the pronouns of well-behaved trans people, but disrespect the pronouns of those credibly accused of bad behaviour. On the theory that respecting pronouns is a thing done as a courtesy to your fellow human beings, but only extended to those who act courteously to others.

So Sam Brinton is born a He, gets to become a They by choice, but then as soon as he steals some lady's luggage he automatically reverts to a He again.

Okay. None of my beliefs about Gamergate and who was right or wrong turn on the question of whether Sarah Nyburg was a pedophile and whether particular people defended her.

Why does anybody have to be right?

That's what I don't get about the whole thing. I was trying to explain to this someone the other day, and it was like, I'm not actually defending GG here per se, unless you look at context as a a form of defense. But in reality, there was a LOT of crappiness that was coming from that anti-GG community, that IMO laid much of the cultural groundwork for modern Pop Progressive culture as I call it. Was it worse than the GG people themselves? I don't think that's a relevant question. I think the real answer is that online activism is just...well...crappy, or at least it has a tendency to be such.

How about which side was able to control the narrative enough to run defense for an open pedophile?

I understand that a lot of things were said/accusations made... So accusations made by one side against the other is suspect. But when one side says things about themselves, I think that is meaningful.

Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat".

I remember Nyberg also shared pictures of Dana with other pedophiles online.

https://archive.is/rD6TL

Conversation with #ffshrine at 2006-06-04 18:04:46 on Roph@deep13.xelium.net (irc)

(23:48:28) uranus: thx for giving my cell phone number to alpott

(23:48:33) uranus: and sarahs

(23:48:38) uranus: and giving out danas pics~

Conversation with #ffshrine at 2006-06-30 22:20:25 on Roph@deep13.xelium.net (irc)

(01:18:13) Minty: sarah, have you actually posted pics of dana before

(01:18:23) Sarah: privately, yes

(01:18:29) Sarah: and once when I was drunk I linked to her in the chat

I still don’t know what gamergate is or was, other than ‘a sufficiently massive train wreck that everyone involved on either side should be fired into the sun’, but I don’t see how it’s notable that a not-very-prominent participant is a minor attracted person.

I don't know a huge amount about GamerGate either. At least, not the start of it. We'll get to that.

The end part, the part that... well, not quite "matters", but the part that turned heads, was basically this: SJ openly declared culture war on nerdy men; the Grey Tribe ruptured fully from the Blue Tribe. I say it doesn't matter because the cracks had been growing for a while due to SJ's increasingly-censorious nature (indeed, Scott's criticism of SJ started a couple of years before GG); something was going to explode sooner or later, and it merely happened to be GG.

...all of which means there's a bit of an issue with reading up on it: since the Grey Tribe as a separate identity didn't actually exist for the most part until GG, it didn't have any narrative-producing institutions of its own, and the Red Tribe didn't care yet. So nearly all the media coverage is Blue propaganda intended to make the "pro-GG" side - the Grey side - look as bad as possible. Frankly, at the time I mostly bought it.

GamerGate is one of those cases, in hindsight, where each side had a public definition of what they thought it was about, and both of them were lying or self-deluding. This is necessarily a simplification, since neither side of GamerGate was univocal - both were unsteady coalitions and contained substantial diversity of motive - but it's one that helps make sense of it to me.

What pro-GG said GamerGate was about was ethics in game journalism. They were concerned about lack of disclosure, conflicts of interest, a journalistic field controlled by the industry it claims to report on, and to an extent (though GG was always a bit cautious and divided in expressing this) by journalists who were not culturally members of or sympathetic to their audiences.

What GamerGate was actually about, to pro-GG, was video games as a cultural scene being taken over and gatekept by cliques of progressive journalists, people alien to and contemptuous of the traditional gamer demographic, but who, by taking over journalistic institutions, arrogate to themselves the power to define who is and is not a 'gamer', and who also seize privileged access to publishers and developers and thus influence the types of games that get made. What it was really about was entryism.

What anti-GG said GamerGate was about was a harassment campaign. It was about a bunch of reactionary troglodytes who hate women and minorities lashing out to try to punish the diversification of video games, both as products and as an audience.

What GamerGate was actually about, to anti-GG, was a bunch of gross ugly people being gross and ugly in public, and worse, trying to exert control over a cultural or media sphere that anti-GG felt they were rightful custodians of. GamerGate was about a bunch of basement-dwelling virgins acting out their resentful misogyny against people who are leading the rise in diverse games. I realise this sounds very similar to what anti-GG said it was about, but I think the distinction is that the public anti-GG line was about behaviour ("they're harassing people") while the real feeling was about identity or even essential attributes ("they're gross").

In a sense, what GamerGate was about was control of 'gamer' as an identity - about who gets to decide what it means to play video games, what 'gaming' is as a subculture.

Seen in that light, I feel like the ultimate result of the controversy was probably a marginal pro-GG victory. Anti-GG got to control the narrative, to the extent that e.g. the Wikipedia article on GamerGate is pure anti-GG propaganda, but that control didn't translate into success because the traditional video game journalistic scene that anti-GG had their base in was becoming irrelevant. If I think about the movers and shakers who get to define gaming as a subculture now, it's all much more crowdsourced - it's streamers and YouTubers and content creators. If I think about the people with privileged access to gaming companies whose feedback changes the way games are made now, it's, well, it's content creators. It's not journalists. Asmongold doesn't have a journalism degree, but he has significantly greater access to Blizzard than anyone working for Kotaku.

It's not a total victory and journalism still matters - Jason Schreier, say, still has a lot of influence - but it's not got the stranglehold that I think it was felt to have in 2014.

Whether this is good or bad overall is a separate question - I think personally I prefer the streamer/content-creator-based world to the progressive journalistic clique, but frankly I dislike both of them - but insofar as it was about gaming as a scene, I think pro-GG have probably come out better than anti-GG have. Even if all the official histories favour anti-GG and will probably do so forever.

What GamerGate was actually about, to anti-GG, was a bunch of gross ugly people being gross and ugly in public, and worse, trying to exert control over a cultural or media sphere that anti-GG felt they were rightful custodians of. GamerGate was about a bunch of basement-dwelling virgins acting out their resentful misogyny against people who are leading the rise in diverse games. I realise this sounds very similar to what anti-GG said it was about, but I think the distinction is that the public anti-GG line was about behaviour ("they're harassing people") while the real feeling was about identity or even essential attributes ("they're gross").

W/o evidence, this doesn't strike me as charitable as your "What GG was actually about, to pro-GG..." explanation. Pro-GG cares about entryism, but anti-GG is just about denying people who trigger a disgust response?

All right, that’s fair. I suppose I’m not unbiased. I remember the narrative from GamerGate at the time was obsessed with expressions of contempt towards them (e.g. that Sam Biddle tweet), but it would be unfair to present that as necessarily representative.

I'll admit that I might be reading a more general progressive politics of contempt into it - the smug style and all that. But it may not be helpful of me to pattern-match GamerGate to later cultural disputes.

I realise this sounds very similar to what anti-GG said it was about, but I think the distinction is that the public anti-GG line was about behaviour ("they're harassing people") while the real feeling was about identity or even essential attributes ("they're gross").

I think there's another layer to it, where even within behaviour the Blue perspective insistently defines GG as being a "harassment campaign" despite GG doing stuff other than harassment (most obviously, awareness-raising, and IIRC also boycotts) and TTBOMK only a tiny minority of GGers actually doing things normally considered to be harassment.

Your breakdown of the motivations and rhetoric of both factions seems accurate.

I feel like the ultimate result of the controversy was probably a marginal pro-GG victory. Anti-GG got to control the narrative, to the extent that e.g. the Wikipedia article on GamerGate is pure anti-GG propaganda, but that control didn't translate into success because the traditional video game journalistic scene that anti-GG had their base in was becoming irrelevant. If I think about the movers and shakers who get to define gaming as a subculture now, it's all much more crowdsourced - it's streamers and YouTubers and content creators. If I think about the people with privileged access to gaming companies whose feedback changes the way games are made now, it's, well, it's content creators. It's not journalists.

I don't play many video games these days, but of the few recent ones I bought, Elden Ring seems celebrated in GG circles for being especially non-woke. Its character creation uses "Body Type A / Body Type B" rather than a gender option. Another celebrated non-idpol game, Hogwarts Legacy, apparently lets you play as a black male witch in the female dormitories in 19th century England, and has openly transgender NPCs.

Yes, traditional gaming journalism is a shadow of its former self, but that's just social media killing the legacy press. The culture of AAA games shifted with everything else. Calling the situation a pro-GG victory seems like telling a 1924 Russian white that he won the civil war because Lenin died.

Oh, certainly the last decade or so has been a defeat for social conservatism in video games. Actual conservatives have been consistly losing. Even in games or franchises that in my experience are particularly beloved by conservatives we can see this - BattleTech, for instance, has no gender selection for PCs, but merely lets you select 'pronouns', which can be mixed-and-matched with any body shape or facial features without limitation.

But I think it would be a bad misreading of GamerGate to see it as a social conservative response? GamerGate was never conservative.

Thus to take the case of Hogwarts Legacy - that game's success strikes me as much more compatible with the narrative that pro-GG won? The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy isn't "Hurrah for trans representation!" The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy is "boycott this transphobic filth". (Indeed that review is a perfect example of everything that drove GamerGate up the wall - a 'review' that barely touches on the game itself, which is mostly an autobiographical ramble, and which doesn't even seem to care about the question of whether the game is fun to play. At the time I remember pro-GGers citing this review as an example of what they were angry about - a review that seems more interested in passing moral judgement on a sin, in this case sexism or objectification, that it does in considering whether or not a game is fun or well-made.)

Pro-GG never cared about gay or trans characters in video games. Pro-GG was team "shut up and play video games", and was opposed to any sort of moralising. GamerGate was not anti-woke in the sense of "don't have LGBT characters in games". GamerGate was anti-woke in the sense of "stop lecturing me you puritanical douchebag".

Yeah, in the context of gaming I'd have to say anti-GG won.

In the broader political context, it's hard to say, particularly since as I said something like GG was essentially inevitable.

Another celebrated non-idpol game, Hogwarts Legacy

and has openly transgender NPCs.

I have seen plenty of complaints about the latter from people who care about IDPOL.

My gripe with it is more that it makes absolutely no sense in the Harry Potter universe, they've got polyjuice potions, presumably other means of body altering via magic too. There shouldn't be any trans people who have a visible mismatch between their expressed phenotype and what they desire to be, let alone a glaringly obvious case.

They could easily have just had a character who you don't even know is trans until you dig into their backstory and figure out they're on it

I don't think the red tribe cares about gamergate even now. "Some degenerate internet weirdos getting into it over something retarded, IDK and IDC, it's so stupid it really just demonstrates why the blue tribe shouldn't be in charge of things that they care about this enough to blow it up" is probably the median red tribe opinion when it's brought to our attention.

I mean, of course it doesn't care about GG; GG's long-past. But there've been quite a few Greys who've become Red-adjacent in the years that followed (the alt-right and alt-lite), which means this sort of fight gets more attention. Elon Musk buying Twitter and the AI debate are, of course, more important, but they're also centrally Grey-on-Blue conflicts (Grey-on-Grey-on-Blue in the latter case, since Grey has both Butlerian Jihadis and uncensored-AI-for-all types), and you do see Red media taking some sort of interest and sympathising with Grey.

Even at the time, they were pretty divided? GamerGate made conservative media for a short time in 2014, but the reaction seemed to be mostly incomprehension plus a little contempt - look at those weirdo nerds.

There were a few people who thought it might be a chance to do outreach to gamers (re: Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart), but they didn't get that far. Even post-2014, there is still the occasional, token attempt to reach out - consider something like this, arguing that games are a conservative medium and describing GamerGate as a "gamer-led consumer revolt" against "the attempted control and corruption of leftist-dominated gaming journalism sites", but it never went past a few lone voices. The traditional right, overall, just isn't really trying.

What exactly did gamergaters do that justifies "firing them into the sun?" I followed the movement pretty closely and I don't even know what you're getting at here.

Do you mean the 0.01% of people who sent death threats to Quinn/Sarkeesian/Wu and were loudly denounced by the rest of the movement? I think it's been established that there were about a dozen or so people who sent death threats and there are ~100,000 kotakuinaction subscribers. Can you name a social movement that has fewer than 0.01% of people who are psychopaths?

If you mean something else, could you please be explicit about what it is?

I mean, one side completely owned the narrative, to the point where they felt secure in defending an overt pedo.

Isn't that tactic notable?

SJW’s will defend mass murdering dictators if they can be convinced he was on their side, it’s not particularly notable that they’ll defend pedophiles.

Why use minor attracted person? First it is three words instead of pedophile. Like all woke language it is ugly. Second, it is often used to try to legitimize something we should keep highly hated.

In my humble and likely heterodox (for now) opinion, the proper terminology for what a "normie" might call a "pedophile" is "anti-agecuck" (as almost all men, because of basic biology, are inevitable sexually attracted to women under 18 not uncommonly and even pre-pubertal girls (due to humans being a K-selected species, meaning it is natural/reproductively optimal to develop romantic/sexual attachments to potential reproductive partners in anticipation of their fertility to already have a pre-existing pair bond available to enhance the nurturing of eventual offspring once fertility is achieved) and thus those who allow feminist age of "consent" mandates (which were the first major "wins" of the modern feminist movement) are inevitably cuckolded by younger, more enlightened/freer, or just more immoral men (guys who believe in the traditional narrative about the alleged irreparable harm that results from youth-adult sex but just don't care, who often tend to be non-White as conviction rates for child "molestation" show, giving this cuckoldry an interracial element), thus leaving "pedophiles" to basically exclusively oppose this (again, interracially-flavored and anti-White) cuckoldry), "non-agecuck" (for the same reasons as before), or "possessor of natural masculine sexuality" (due to there being little record of these modern feminist age-based attraction taboos in more natural, less artificially estrogenized times).

But until society has been freed from the grip of a memeplex I might deem "Judeo-feminist quasi-matriarchalism" or "talmudic-demonic-feminist quasi-matriarchalism", if I had to pick a phrase, enough to properly appreciate these terms, "pedo" is necessary for understanding. Thus "pedochad" is always an acceptable term as well.

"MAP" isn't necessarily inaccurate per se but I reject all woke newspeak right off the bat, and it is unfortunately that.

Note: As usual all of my posts are generally/almost always unironic (minus an allowance for a reasonable amount of rhetorical irony same as any other poster here might apply, but not in my fundamental perspective), good faith attempts to inject a perspective that I believe most are afraid to acknowledge into the conversation, and this one is included. (Including this disclaimer since I haven't posted here in a while and I had problems with people thinking I'm not serious even when I posted regularly.)

Edit: Copying the below for the reader's convenience, but updated:

With parentheses unfolded:

In my humble and likely heterodox (for now) opinion, the proper terminology for what a "normie" might call a "pedophile" is "anti-agecuck"

  • (as almost all men, because of basic biology, are inevitable sexually attracted to women under 18 not uncommonly and even pre-pubertal girls
    • (due to humans being a K-selected species, meaning it is natural/reproductively optimal to develop romantic/sexual attachments to potential reproductive partners in anticipation of their fertility to already have a pre-existing pair bond available to enhance the nurturing of eventual offspring once fertility is achieved)
  • and thus those who allow feminist age of "consent" mandates
    • (which were the first major "wins" of the modern feminist movement)
  • to influence their sexual/mating behavior are inevitably cuckolded by younger, more enlightened/freer, or just more immoral men
    • (guys who believe in the traditional narrative about the alleged irreparable harm that results from youth-adult sex but just don't care, who often tend to be non-White as conviction rates for child "molestation" show, giving this cuckoldry an interracial element)
  • , thus leaving "pedophiles" to basically exclusively oppose this
    • (again, interracially-flavored and anti-White)
  • cuckoldry)

, "non-agecuck"

  • (for the same reasons as before)

, or "possessor of natural masculine sexuality"

  • (due to there being little record of these modern feminist age-based attraction taboos in more natural times)

and thus those who allow feminist age of "consent" mandates (which were the first major "wins" of the modern feminist movement)

The big increases in the age of consent happen in 1885 in the UK and between 1900-1920 in the US - by 1920 the (hetrosexual) age of consent in the UK had reached its current level 16, with an attempt to raise it to 17 failing in 1917, and it was 16 or 18 in every US state except Georgia. In the UK at least, this is part of the Victorian re-moralisation movement, which was heavily driven by women but explicitly dissociated itself from the first-wave feminists, who were still something of a joke. In the US, the timing suggests it was a Progressive thing - I don't know enough about Progressive-era US politics to understand the relationship between Progressivism and first-wave feminism, but they seem to have been allies. So on net I wouldn't say that age of consent laws were feminist laws.

During the sexual revolution, there are attempts (supported by some but no means all feminists) to reduce ages of consent or to undermine enforcement. In the UK, for example, Gillick (doctors can prescribe contraceptives to girls under 16 without the parents knowledge or consent) was widely supported by feminists on harm reduction grounds. Again, age of consent laws are not feminist laws. More recently, you see third wave feminism focussing on abuse of authority (such as teachers banging students) rather than how young the girl is.

As a separate point, the only licit sex with under-16 girls in the pre-age-of-consent era was after marrying them with the father's permission. It has never been socially acceptable for a man to seduce a 14-year-old girl.

During the sexual revolution, there are attempts (supported by some but no means all feminists) to reduce ages of consent or to undermine enforcement. In the UK, for example, Gillick (doctors can prescribe contraceptives to girls under 16 without the parents knowledge or consent) was widely supported by feminists on harm reduction grounds

I don’t see how this is evidence of anyone attempting to lower the age of consent or reduce enforcement? Age of consent laws in practice have never focused on minors of similar ages having sex with each other. The focus has always been on people over the age of consent having sex with those below it (with some allowances in jurisdictions with Romeo and Juliet laws), along with the occasional case of minors with significant age gaps.

The most common situation a doctor is prescribing birth control to a girl under 16 is when she wants to have/is having sex with her boy friend who’s about the same as her.

The big increases in the age of consent happen in 1885 in the UK and between 1900-1920 in the US - by 1920 the (hetrosexual) age of consent in the UK had reached its current level 16, with an attempt to raise it to 17 failing in 1917, and it was 16 or 18 in every US state except Georgia. In the UK at least, this is part of the Victorian re-moralisation movement, which was heavily driven by women but explicitly dissociated itself from the first-wave feminists, who were still something of a joke. In the US, the timing suggests it was a Progressive thing - I don't know enough about Progressive-era US politics to understand the relationship between Progressivism and first-wave feminism, but they seem to have been allies. So on net I wouldn't say that age of consent laws were feminist laws.

Women like Helen Gardener (a suffragette and early advocate of atheism), Josephine Butler (also a suffragette and anti-coverture activist), and Frances Willard (also also a suffragette and president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, yes the one that successfully pushed alcohol prohibition (which was also a policy commonly promoted on women's welfare grounds, that male "drunkards" were a threat to women) as well), three of the biggest advocates of raising the age of consent in the 1800s in the UK and US, were absolutely feminists of the genealogy leading directly to modern feminism, even if some of them later may have felt that other feminists went "too far" (though as demonstrated in many if not most cases they did support women voting, so they wouldn't have disavowed later feminists on those grounds). (Second-wave feminists often disavow modern third-wave feminists, also feeling that they've gone "too far", because of their support of transsexuality; are these in some cases contemporaries of Andrea Dworkin not actually feminists then? Or they never were? Despite being as pro-matriarchal, anti-patriarchal, and in many cases straight up anti-man as it gets?)

So unfortunately I'm afraid your information is incomplete/incorrect. Of course there were general prudish Victorian anti-sex types (like Ellice Hopkins, who was still feminist in function but not all that explicitly, nor do I think she had much real intention of upsetting masculine authority or traditional gender roles, though she died in 1904 and might have become a suffragette eventually) mixed in (though even these were still usually women thinking they could dictate to men, which is de facto feminist), and of course because of the time period involved some of even the explicit feminists were organized according to Christian principles, but they were still feminists (that is, to be clear, many/most of them explicitly called themselves "feminist" (a term coined in the early 19th century), even again if some of them would eventually denounce other later women who also called themselves feminists. (Isn't it the inevitable end of many if not most progressives to feel that other later progressives have eventually gone "too far"? "I wanted X sure, but Y's crazy!" Were the Old Bolsheviks not real socialists or Soviet patriots in the end because they probably didn't much appreciate Stalin later purging them all?)

The fact that almost all age of consent raising advocacy of the time focused on the alleged welfare of women and girls as opposed to men/boys is proof enough of this. If biased gynosupremacy and gynocentrism isn't allowed to be considered feminist, then what is?

So yes on net modern age of consent laws are absolutely feminist in origin in that they are the product of gynocentric and gynocratic political organization and advocacy (quite often, again, by women who explicitly called themselves "feminist" at the time again even if in some cases they didn't necessarily agree with every other woman who would later identify as one). Only a modern man would even try to deny that. "Well, sure, they were women thinking they could dictate public policy to men on the grounds of alleged 'women's rights', but they weren't, like, burning bras or anything crazy!"

Even the purely "remoralization"-oriented stuff you highlight was mostly feminist in practice (even if not explicitly) as it was significantly feminized in terms of the composition of its supporters, policy aims, and rhetorical practices. Women thinking they know better than men what morality is and that they can or should dictate their emotionalized "care"-based "morality" over men's virtue-and-honor-based morality is feminist no matter what terms they couch it in and even if they pretend it's not explicitly pro-woman (even though in most cases as highlighted it was).

Were they totally feminists in a strictly modern sense? Well of course not because full modern context necessary for them to be so didn't exist. But modern feminists are even more extreme about the issue and often more supportive of higher ages of consent than ever before (as I've seen calls by some to raise it to 21, 25, etc.), so that still kind of proves the opposite of your point.

And again, a significant portion of them if not the majority of them were at least (usually not even only later but at the same time) very early suffragettes (which means most of them denouncing first-wave feminism seems unlikely, so I think you're wrong on that point) and thus I'd say that firmly qualifies them as feminists, given that the modern feminism movement still tends to claim women gaining the ability to vote as its own achievement.

During the sexual revolution, there are attempts (supported by some but no means all feminists) to reduce ages of consent or to undermine enforcement.

This is true but this was driven mostly by (often gay) men (organizations like NAMBLA, Vereniging Martijn, etc., overwhelmingly male-led organizations), not feminists.

In the UK, for example, Gillick (doctors can prescribe contraceptives to girls under 16 without the parents knowledge or consent) was widely supported by feminists on harm reduction grounds.

This has nothing to do with age of consent. You do realize that underage people can have sex with other underage people right? This is just general sexual liberalization stuff (which tends to not include stuff that men will actually benefit from, so no properly restoring men's dominion over younger girls/women in general).

More recently, you see third wave feminism focussing on abuse of authority (such as teachers banging students) rather than how young the girl is.

Yeah, no. I'm afraid this is the point where anyone who reads stuff on social media outside of this site is going to instinctively call bullshit on you. Modern feminists and woke types have become utterly obsessed with anti-"age gap" rhetoric (when it's in the man's favor), like literally getting mad at a 27 year old man for dating a 22 year old woman-tier even when there's no authority-based relationship between them. Just search "age gap" on Reddit.

As a separate point, the only licit sex with under-16 girls in the pre-age-of-consent era was after marrying them with the father's permission.

This is irrelevant. You conventionally sought the father's consent to marry women/girls of any age in those eras (outside of which sex was taboo for everyone of every age assuming a relatively modern monogamy-oriented culture), because a female was considered her father's property/ward before she became her husband's.

It has never been socially acceptable for a man to seduce a 14-year-old girl.

Again, no. Asking the father for permission to marry a girl/woman was a part of the courtship process which would have been considered (the acceptable version of) seduction back then. And you've already admitted that this was acceptable for most of human history. So it was definitely acceptable. (And that's not even getting into prostitutes, slaves, etc. where if anybody had any objections to having sex with them then it was almost certainly on the grounds of fornication/adultery/promiscuity, not their age if they were young.)

So I must regretfully say that I do consider your post basically entirely incorrect and confused about the facts in almost all areas.