Are the people who hate tlou2 enough to constantly harass actors and reviewers not the exact same fucking bag of dicks that perpetrated gamer gate?

The Venn diagram of tlou2 hate spammers, incels, gamergaters and musk/peterson fans seems to be to be a circle

A generation of young men who won’t ever listen to a woman, yet who feel owed women, whose bigotry was given permission and power by Hitchens and Dawkins and South Park, who idolise science in the abstract but reject real science as propaganda...

Ultra hard right conservative bigots who think they’re apolitical “sceptics”, watching penn and teller or prager u as their fact checking, anti trans and most especially violently anti women - who need to “return to their natural role” of being fuck property and no more

There’s something really fucking ironic about all the “atheist sceptics” being picked up by Peterson and other evangelical Christians and converted into the most obnoxious charicature of a fundamentalist Christian bigot

Dawkins and Hitchens laid out the framework for a cult. They taught kids that’s being closed minded and bigoted is actually rationality and anyone who disagrees with them is just stupid and a shull

Then gamer gate came and told them women and sexually desirable men were conspiring against them, turning them into early stage fascists

Then Shapiro and Peterson and that little British turd who worked for Alex Jones come along and sell them an extremely old fashioned kind of religious conservatism but they call it radical because if you espouse the stupid thing in public people will call you an idiot

So like all types of fundamentalist cult, it developed an entirely false persecution complex whereby if people criticised your ideas, they were out to get you and you were being oppressed

Thanks South Park for doubling down on that

Most of the followers of these movements were kids when it started. Gamer gate was adult men mobilising child armies

Now a lot of these men have grown into full blown full size adults but the cult programming they receive is just as powerful as any church or newspaper is with other adults

And - like all conservative cults - it is broadly reinforced by the mainstream because of the lingering values of the past and lowest common denominator capitalism. So it feeds into this idea that eg women “should” be sexy and sexually available and submissive

Anything which goes in the face of that is sjw propaganda

Not just in media either - the odd butch or unattractive woman, a trans person who isn’t there to be vilified, races not playing to stereotypes etc - the existence of these things _in the world_ is now some kind of conspiracy against... what?

At least Christians can (in bad faith and against logic) claim that their opinion is gods opinion. It’s entirely bullshit but it’s an answer

Wtf do these neo atheists have? They threw god out right at the start. They said they worshipped science and facts and history. But science and facts and history don’t support any of their bigotry

So then science and facts and history have to keep being altered

Reality isn’t what researchers work towards, it’s what was printed on the video game box art in 1989

In the exact same way the daily mail will begin each article with a reasonable idea (like “we all believe in fairness...”) and then twist all evidence and logic to make an entirely unsound but emotive argument, so have these young men been twisted

I’m not excusing them - we’ve all been exposed to these sources of media and -as Peterson often says in his bland entry point truism - we all have to take responsibility for ourselves

If you were sucked into gamer gate when you were 12, then you should probably have a long hard think over many years but kids are ultimately naive. If you’re still on this bs as an adult, you need to have a very long hard think about your motivations

Go back to the start - what was the supposed benefit of neo atheism: to avoid cult mentalities, to avoid being misled by powerful people for their gain, to avoid letting bigotry and power mould and distort your perception of reality

So now as you dismiss reality - down to the existence of buff women ffs - think back to those early motivations. Is this what you wanted? To be frantically defending a false picture or reality sold to you by people who profited from that?

For society more widely, this remains a very serious danger - these are the same people who ended up with tiki torches for trump. Yet outside of twitter, no one talks about this huge group of dangerous, radical unhinged men. We need to join the dots and stop this radicalisation

Society has left this as a case by case problem for individual women. Twitter itself has left this as a case by case problem for individual women. This cannot be allowed to continue. Steps must be taken

First off, harassment and threats must end on social media. I’m not saying that if people say a politician is a twat they should be banned, obviously. I’m talking about harassment sent to the person: threats, abuse, general intimidation

“But how can it be stopped?” Well how do we stop it irl? We don’t have a perfect system but we try and that reduces the overall volume

Accounts should be blocked and banned far more readily and regularly. Yes people can make new ones, but it’s an obstacle

But just minimising the damage on twitter isn’t going to be enough. The first step must be to protect the victims from further abuse, but even if they’re off the internet those people will exist

Now I’m not entirely sure how you deal with adults with extreme views and terrorist behaviours but i would imagine the sorts of things we do to mitigate any other kinds of extremism (not that I approve of all of them, but this shouldn’t be an exception)

In the exact same way that if we’re going to call fundamentalist Muslims or Irish nationalists “terrorists” then we should call white supremacists terrorists and these violent misogynists should get exactly the same classing. They participate in coordinated campaigns of terror

They should be no platformed in every space, their attempts to coordinate harassment should be targetted and they should be criminalised exactly as they would be if they were harassing people irl - which they almost certainly are

The warnings about the rise of nationalism and fascism were there for a decade or more and we didn’t do anything about them, and now those people control a lot of govts or have govts living in fear of them bending to their will

We have the same situation again with a younger generation of violently misogynistic men. We cannot leave it to feminism - predominantly the voluntary labour of the women most harmed by these men - to stop this. First of all because these men point blank refuse to listen to women

“Acceptable” men must fight this more vigorously, and must continuously examine themselves because _every single one of us_ carries misogyny as a result of growing up surrounded by it

Ultimately I don’t know tho, I don’t have the answers and I’m not trying to provide answers in this thread really