Aram Zucker-Scharff

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“No imagined future paradise is worth terror in the here and now. […]

“The furious, crowdsourced prosecution of perceived feminist “corruption” violently conflicts with any anti-harassment ethic. GamerGate, more than most such movements, is morally unmusical: they have rules with no moral framework, they call for ethics without finding ways of instilling a sense of ethics in their followers. It becomes hollow rhetoric that ultimately bows before the terrible logic of revolutionary thinking: ethics are for paradise, in the here and now we must fight til our final breath with everything we have, no matter the wreckage we may leave behind us.

If you sincerely believe that the cyber mob is the ideal jury to fight corruption, and you marshal a perilous stack of indictments against dozens of writers, organisations, websites, and developers that charges them all with a conspiracy to destroy gaming, then harassment-as-praxis is inevitable. […]

the demand that everybody display in public his innermost motivation… transforms all actors into hypocrites; the moment the display of motives begins, hypocrisy begins to poison all human relations […]

When I and others questioned the ethics and objectivity of an operation whose chief exponent promised that academics like myself would “fear us even in their sleep” and pledged to target only “feminists,” […] we were simply told by gentler voices in the movement that we had nothing to fear if we had done no wrong. They are unable to understand that their ability to discern right from wrong is what is at issue here. […]

They are now all but criminalising the very notion that writers should be paid for their work, suggesting this is a conflict of interest in its own right. […]

On the doorway to paradise appeared the words: Agendas Are Unethical.

Thus we were all made to walk through.”

”

– Gamergate and the Licence to Inflict Suffering.

“

“No imagined future paradise is worth terror in the here and now. […]

“The furious, crowdsourced prosecution of perceived feminist “corruption” violently conflicts with any anti-harassment ethic. GamerGate, more than most such movements, is morally unmusical: they have rules with no moral framework, they call for ethics without finding ways of instilling a sense of ethics in their followers. It becomes hollow rhetoric that ultimately bows before the terrible logic of revolutionary thinking: ethics are for paradise, in the here and now we must fight til our final breath with everything we have, no matter the wreckage we may leave behind us.

If you sincerely believe that the cyber mob is the ideal jury to fight corruption, and you marshal a perilous stack of indictments against dozens of writers, organisations, websites, and developers that charges them all with a conspiracy to destroy gaming, then harassment-as-praxis is inevitable. […]

the demand that everybody display in public his innermost motivation… transforms all actors into hypocrites; the moment the display of motives begins, hypocrisy begins to poison all human relations […]

When I and others questioned the ethics and objectivity of an operation whose chief exponent promised that academics like myself would “fear us even in their sleep” and pledged to target only “feminists,” […] we were simply told by gentler voices in the movement that we had nothing to fear if we had done no wrong. They are unable to understand that their ability to discern right from wrong is what is at issue here. […]

They are now all but criminalising the very notion that writers should be paid for their work, suggesting this is a conflict of interest in its own right. […]

On the doorway to paradise appeared the words: Agendas Are Unethical.

Thus we were all made to walk through.”

”

– Gamergate and the Licence to Inflict Suffering.

“

“The sheer increase in the media’s — and by extension, the country’s — attention span when Ebola made its way across the Atlantic is staggering. According to a Pew Research Center poll, it outranked protests in Hong Kong, the Secret Service’s troubles and airstrikes against ISIS by the U.S. as the story Americans focused on the most. Thirty-six percent reported that they paid “very close” attention to the story, up from 25% in mid-August. By comparison, it also eclipsed other outbreak-related stories, including mad cow disease in Europe, MERS in the Middle East and swine flu in Mexico and the U.S.

“Us” versus “them.” For Carrilho, the nature of the Western media hysteria over Ebola underscores a more pernicious trend in how the West views the rest of the world. More than any other event in recent memory, the Ebola epidemic has brought to light America’s lingering and simmering fear of “the other.” The media circus is doing more than perpetuating the idea that America may become victim to a deadly epidemic — they’re implying the country’s very purity is at risk. “

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– One Powerful Illustration Shows Exactly What’s Wrong With How the West Talks About Ebola.

Why bother with #gamergate?:

jonstonechannel2:

Then there’s the third thing: the grim fascination with how language is weaponised and used to obstruct, rather than facilitate, understanding, how every tool that has been effective in making social media a progressive force is repurposed as a method of obfuscation and provocation. […] and it gives a disturbingly sharp insight into the limitations of reason when dealing with a collective mania.”