More reports...
> user reports:
> 1: I don't actually have any problem with this I'm just reporting it to be funny, haha wacky report
> 1: It's targeted harassment at someone else
This is almost found abstract poetry at this point, but in all seriousness we had our fun but please stop this
I got an email from a far-left blogger with a similar story, which
got me thinking about socialists in particular. Imagine you’re writing a
socialist blog - as is 100% your right in a democratic society. Aren’t
employers going to freak out as soon as they Google your name, expecting
you to start a union or agitate for higher wages or seize the means of
production or something? This is a totally different problem from the
cancel culture stories I usually hear about…
That this is a new thought for him tells you everything you need to
know.
It's super depressing how many of the culture war grifters have fallen for the grift themselves. Scott might have more of a pretense to intellectual status than many culture warriors, but it's glaringly obvious how little of the world outside the grift that is the culture war is actually visible to him.
Oh wow yeah, he completely misses the point. After listing half a dozen people who did/nearly lose their jobs he blames it on...
>Getting all these emails made me realize that, whatever the merits of my own case, maybe by accident, I was fighting for something important here. Who am I? I'm nobody, I'm a science blogger with some bad opinions. But these people - the trans people, the union organizers, the police whistleblowers, the sexy cyborgs - **the New York Times** isn't worthy to wipe the dirt off their feet. How dare they assert the right to ruin these people's lives for a couple of extra bucks.
> As for the Times' mistakes: I think they just didn't expect me to care about anonymity as much as I did. In fact, most of my supporters, and most of the savvy people giving me advice, didn't expect me to care as much as I did.
what could have possibly lead them all to think that
The bizarre fucking thing is that he obviously never cared that much about anonymity, at least in terms of practical solutions
You could find his name online with the barest of Google Fu that he never really bothered to deal with, beyond complaining about it on his blog
He’s the epitome of the toddler trying to have his cake and eat it
Years ago, I actually messaged him when I found out that he still maintained that website about that archipelago roleplaying game or whatever and it had his official name on it. He replied that he basically didn't care that it's up there. Srsly, this guy was never honest about “doxxing” stuff. So annoying.
Socialism is when NYT doxxes people. And the more it doxxes people, the socialister it is. And when it doxxes a real lot of people, then it's **COMMUNISM**.
Yadda yadda yadda. I just want an update to “You Are Still Crying
Wolf” in light of Jan. 6th. I want to bask in its glow of ‘well, they
were just some kooks who are a minority and not really racist’ ugh just
give it to us I know it’s coming.
I want an acknowledgement that Scott's description, in that post, of the comment
> When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
from Trump's campaign launch speech as "anti-illegal-immigrant" is a fabrication on the part of Scott.
In that *entire* speech, Trump doesn't mention illegal immigrants or illegal immigration once. The text of the speech is very clearly referring to Mexican immigrants generally.
The smirking attempt to describe this as a "non-racist" statement is obnoxious, as is the entire post. But this transparently made-up falsehood really grates on me for some reason.
even though as I remember it they managed to take a complaint about a
video game review and mishandle it so badly that they literally got
condemned by the UN General Assembly
You misspelled women there Scott, they had a complaint about
women.
Scott talking about gamergate (the OG motte/bailey, the complaint was that the game was mentioned at all (which is hard for a lot of indie games) but it then was invalidated by the GG people not going after the journalists, but going after [any] woman (some of whom were journalists) [related to gaming]), making references to portal ... erugh.
Ready Player Scott...
Also, I played that game after it got Streisanded into the stratosphere, and God it hit me hard. Depression Quest is genuinely a really good piece of creative writing, and I say that as somebody who hasn’t really had much interest in video games for about 12 years since I was 15 - I’m this specific about the date because I remember the specific moment I lost my interest. I was really fascinated for a while with the details of the GG story and always ended up surprised - well not surprised as such - by how little the KiA lot cared about parsing out those details in their weird campaign against Quinn and everything else.
I played it as well and didn't care much for it, but then again I don't really like the IF style games much so that didn't help, nor that I like games for the escapism, nor the realistic depictions of depression. So it def 'wasn't for me', so I don't have strong opinions on it.
(Which brings me into roundabout into what made it all so much a hate campaign, there was a lot of 'no strong opinions' converted into 'absolute hate and death threats', there is nothing that warranted this gg attack, and it was just a campaign of misogyny combined with a witchhunt, using 'ethics' as a cover (The fact that GG didn't declare victory and disband after their stated ethics problems were dealt with (hell even RPS relented) also was a big red flag)).
E: erugh, imdoing gg again. Feel free to delete/ban etc, all this shit.
I think it’s possible not to care for the game if it isn’t your thing, but it was a surprisingly good representation of depression in a medium that hasn’t generally leant itself well to that, is all I’ll say.
I know, that is part of why I didn't like it that much, that is what I kinda ment with the gaming for escapism part. I would love a game about ostriches putting their heads in the sand I guess. ;)
It's a statement made to show how much of a fuck up it was. It's a greater contrast between "video game review complaint" and "condemned by UN" than if he were to say complaint about women. It's a pretty obvious heavy condemnation of GamerGate.
God damn, if this is the kind of discourse that gets upvoted here, this basic inability to understand contrast in writing, then I feel pretty confident in saying that this community is just as completely fucking mindless as the denizens of /r/TheMotte.
I think you should doubt your ability to review Scott's writing harder
Edit: use the power of imagination to view this as a snarky reply to animegirl staunch doubtful defender of the siskind
Also imagine how fat my fingers are
Read Scott's full paragraph again. He frames GamerGate as a "complaint about video game reviews" with such bad PR it led to "condemnation by the UN".
That's like framing the MAGA movement as a "complaint about the US federal government" with such bad PR that it led to "arrests over the Capitol building attack".
Disavowing Gamergate or MAGA just because "bad PR" looks bad to people with the political leanings prevalent in this sub, hence the upvotes.
I already explained this. The relevant characteristic is that someone is contacting him for PR repping GanerGate. The issue he has with this person is that he doubts their qualifications on the basis of GamerGate being a massive PR failure. By using the initial example of "video game review" instead of "complaint about women", it shows a greater contrast in terms of how badly GG flubbed PR, as it's a much bigger fall from game reviews to UN condemnation than it would be about sexism. It's a more relevant condemnation of the specific skill that the person emailing him claims to represent, rather than a moral tirade against what the movement actually stood for.
I understand your argument. The problem is that your argument is really fucking stupid.
> it shows a greater contrast in terms of how badly GG flubbed PR, as it's a much bigger fall from game reviews to UN condemnation than it would be about sexism
But that's exactly the problem. It's a misframing. GamerGate came to the UN's attention because it was a sexist harasssment campaign, not because of bad PR. "complaints about video games" vs "UN condemnation" does make for a stronger contrast, but it's also misleading, because it erases the causation chain. And framing sexism as being merely "bad PR" is bad, and extremely sneerable.
It's not misframing. The frame in this specific paragraph is the competence of this person on PR who offered with the larger frame being Scott's experiences after shutting down his site, not the actual moral worth and effectiveness of GamerGate. You do realize this article is not about GamerGate, right?
The competence of this person on PR is irrelevant because of the nature of GamerGate. See the Jeffrey Dahmer example. The person could well be a PR god. Scott's assessement is wrong because he doesn't understand Gamergate, or is on GG's side, or doesn't want to take sides to turn off part of his audience.
>The competence of this person on PR is irrelevant because of the nature of GamerGate
The nature of GamerGate is not the discussion of the article and the Jeffrey Dahmer example would still work, as I said. If someone said "I got contacted by a nazi who offered to do PR, but they were premising the Nazi regime as a PR success and I remember their complaints about the state of their country being so mishandled that it lead to them being condemned by international courts" my diagnosed autism is apparently at a lesser level than yours that I can understand the cheekiness and the point of that statement being "I don't think this Nazi is worth listening to." I'm sorry that that you can't understand basic points being made and can't handle references to reviled movements/people in an offhand way.
> even though as I remember it they managed to take a complaint about a video game review and mishandle it so badly that they literally got condemned by the UN General Assembly. But it's the thought that counts, and I am humbled by their support.
Yeah, this is totally a tongue-in-cheek jab at GamerGate and a deep understanding of how it was a misguided movement, and not merely "mishandled"(his word). I guess his humility at their support is also sarcastic?
You must be the greatest conoisseur of sarcastic writing to see under all these layers of feigned ignorance.
Hey, it's you who started having a seizure over a comment getting upvoted, and calling the community "mindless". I'm just trying to make you understand, since the lack of understanding seemed to cause you such distress.
Also, please don't use autism as an insult.
We basically disagree on whether the text is tongue-in-cheek or not. The Nazi example doesn't clear anything up, since that could also be tongue-in-cheek or ignorant.
Also, there is an important difference between "misguided" and "mishandled": "the Holocaust was misguided" vs. "We should get rid of Jews but the Nazis really mishandled it."
"Misguided" is irrelevant to the PR point that was being made. "Mishandled" means that on the specific point of PR, GamerGate was not good. Not only are the denizens of this subreddit condemning someone on a comment that may have been tongue-in-cheek, but they're condemning them on a statement that is still factually correct. GamerGate was a movement that did not have good PR. Which is the relevant portion of the paragraph, because he was given PR advice from someone who was repping GamerGate. Saying "GamerGate was a misguided, misogynistic movement" is true, but in regards to the email he received, it's not relevant to the point that was being made.
> condemning someone on a comment that may have been tongue-in-cheek
So now you're not so sure anymore if he's tongue-in-cheek?
A different author might have written "GamerGate was a misguided, misogynistic movement, which is why PR advice couldn't help them.", but Scott didn't. That's why Scott gets posted on SneerClub and other authors don't.
Even if he were tongue-in-cheek, he did a shit job expressing it in text. And you're doing a shit job convincing people otherwise. That's what the sneering is about.
>So now we're not so sure anymore if he's tongue-in-cheek?
No, it's tongue in cheek. I'm saying that, from your perspective, you're condemning someone on unsure details *and even if we were to take the case that it is not tongue and cheek, y'all are still acting moronic because he's still correct lmao.
>GamerGate was a misguided, misogynistic movement, which is why PR advice couldn't help them
But there are plenty of misguided or downright immoral movements with good PR. The morality of a movement doesn't mean that they automatically have PR corresponding to that morality. Saying that the movement is bad PR is a more direct condemnation of the PR ability of the person repping it.
>That's why Scott gets posted on SneerClub and other authors don't.
Or maybe it's just because he's said some things that either pissed you off or were wrong in the past, and the denizens here think that's a free ticket to assume bad faith as the default position. Sneerclub is just another circlejerk, friend.
> The morality of a movement doesn't mean that they automatically have PR corresponding to that morality.
Which is exactly why you need to look at the morality and not the PR.
> Saying that the movement is bad PR is a more direct condemnation of the PR ability of the person repping it.
No, since the movement could have bad PR because the movement did bad stuff, not because of the PR ability of the person repping it. Putting it on the person repping it means that you implicitly believe the movement was salvageable with good PR ability.
> Which is exactly why you need to look at the morality and not the PR.
You would, if the topic was discussing the morality of the movement, which it's not. It's talking about a PR guy emailing Scott using GamerGate as his basis for his PR. PR is the subject, not the morality and effectiveness of GamerGate.
God damn, what kind of brainworms do you have to think this was a good point that makes sense within the context of this article?
>No, since the movement could have bad PR because the movement did bad stuff
They could, but plenty of immoral companies have good PR that genuinely do bad, if not immoral stuff, especially given how capitalism pretty much relies on exploitation and slave labor. PR is specifically used to cover for that immoral behavior a significant chunk of the time.
>Putting it on the person repping it means that you implicitly believe the movement was salvageable with good PR ability.
It means that the person is fucking stupid for using GamerGate as their basis for supporting why Scott should follow their advice, when GamerGate is a PR disaster. It has nothing to do with the salvageability of a movement nor the morality of the movement, just the contact's usage of that movement to sell their own PR points. You're tilting at windmills here.
> It means that the person is fucking stupid for using GamerGate as their basis for supporting why Scott should follow their advice
But then that doesn't follow. Because their PR advice might actually be useful when applied in the defense of a blogger who's getting doxxed, instead of an army of mysoginists. It still stands that Scott's not judging things correctly because it seems he doesn't understand GamerGate.
> Because their PR advice might actually be useful when applied in the defense of a blogger who's getting doxxed, instead of an army of mysoginists
You're correct on this statement, but it doesn't address my argument. The dude chose to sell his own PR advice based on the success of a movement that had AWFUL PR. Scott pointed out that he chose to sell his own advice on the basis of this PR disaster of a movement. This is a pretty straightforward condemnation the PR guy's ability to read the room (which is VERY IMPORTANT FOR PR). It's really not that hard, friend. I'm sorry you're having difficulty understanding these basic concepts.
You have no argument. You're just trying to impose your extremely charitable interpretation of Scott's words on everyone else. Without Scott actually clarifying his position we cannot know for sure, and from the sounds of it, he doesn't know much about GG, so it's a pretty good bet he's ignorant, as he has been other times on feminist issues.
Also, work on your temper dude. You're a shit debater. This is a bad look for the left. The level of vitriol you spew for such minor things as text interpretations is Chernobyl-levels of toxic.
Here's another way to put it:
The lawyer of Jeffrey Dahmer contacts you to give you PR advice.
The sneerable rationalist response:
"No thanks. You're AKSHUALLY not good at PR since you managed to escalate a person's mental health issue into a life sentence."
The unsneerable normal person response:
"UMM, WHAT? Jeffrey Dahmer is a murderer. That's why he went to jail. What does PR have to do with this? Please, leave me alone."
By another way to put it, did you mean to say "a completely fucking stupid way to put it?"
It's just a throwaway line in an essay about a completely different topic. You're also ignoring the greater contrast in writing, which doesn't apply to your example. And guess what, I would accept that AKSHUALLLY response if it were there because that would be fucking hilarious and I wouldn't get so upset about it because I would understand the gist of the comment would be "This reviled person is not good for PR" in a throwaway paragraph on an entirely different topic. I know Jeffrey Dahmer is bad, I know GamerGate is bad, are you so mindless that you need Scott to hold your hand and explain that to you as well?
No, I don't want him to hold my hand, I just point out the bad analogies and misappropriation of events, which, by the way, are a staple of his writing. A complaint about video games turning into a UN condemnation is a testament to the sexism in the video game industry, not to whatever Scott wants to make it out to be.
>It's a statement made to show how much of a fuck up it was.
You understand you're doing the same thing, right? The question at hand isn't the *degree* to which GG failed.
"Fuck up," much as "mishandled" suggests the issue was a lack of competence. That's a weird way to describe a group of people actively harassing journalists, sending death and rape threats, etc. There's a question of intent -- particularly *malice* \-- here that you're both burying.
No, there's no burying. Calling someone incompetent is still a massive condemnation of their character. This is just pedantry at it's finest, crying that a small section of an essay on an entirely different topic decided to use a more direct condemnation of the relevant characteristics (PR guy repping GamerGate is probably not good PR) instead of an irrelevant moral tirade.
Wow, this community really is filled with idiots.
> This is just pedantry at it's finest, crying that a small section of an essay on an entirely different topic decided to use a more direct condemnation of the relevant characteristics (PR guy repping GamerGate is probably not good PR) instead of an irrelevant moral tirade.
Interesting. What would you call multiple tirades against a single snarky sentence? Just asking for a friend.
The difference is that I'm having fun but I'm also correct. Which you must know, after all, you couldn't address the argument (you cut it out of your post) and like many of the retarded right wingers I argue against, you try to fallaciously appeal to hypocrisy to make up for this.
Fuck, it feels good being smart.
You seem very confused. I'd recommend re-reading the thread, but I'm not actually sure you can read. This is starting to seem like I'm failing a Turing Test.
> Calling someone incompetent is still a massive condemnation of their character.
Rationalists who come to SneerClub to get their jollies on the whipping post are the worst song, played on the ugliest guitar.
> Wow, this community really is filled with idiots.
Ha, but you also post here so you are part of this community, so you called yoruself stupid, checkmate anime avatar!
I am very intelligent.
Nah, the natal form of the “movement” (before it picked up the Adam Baldwin-coined nickname) really was a complaint about how video game journalism sucks quite badly. (People shitting on Kotaku in particular for being a sleazy clickbait rag with lax professional/ethical standards was commonplace and not considered a politically partisan opinion prior to 2014.) Seeing as it came from 4chan, it got co-opted by right-wing culture warriors very very quickly.
I thought the dunk on GG was pretty funny.
Everyone is reacting like this because it's pretty clear that the actual gamergate people were only pretending to care about the criticisms of games journalism as a pretext for their smear and harassment campaigns. That they grabbed those complaints as fig leaves, as political cover.
And while you think we're slamming your observation that there was a real body of criticism, what we're actually here to slam is the idea that gamergate ever meaningfully engaged with any of that body of criticism. Which makes any observations you make about that body of criticism appear to be examples of the exact same deception where you pretend that gamergate isn't totally non sequiter from the legitimate critique.
It didn’t meaningfully engage with anything, ultimately, because it failed that test when it was co-opted very early on. That isn’t to say there was nothing it *could* have meaningfully engaged with (for at least as “meaningful” as the topic of video games journalism and/or culture war narratives can be). I really don’t see how people are reading “there was a kernel of valid critique in the initial controversy that spawned Gamergate” and understanding “Gamergate was a coherent, valid and well-intentioned movement”.
Also let’s be honest, people are reacting this way because A) I said that SSC Guy’s joke about Gamergate was funny whereas good r/sneerclub posters are supposed to be morally outraged by everything he’s ever said, lest they be outed as members of the SSC Tribe, and B) I said there was a little tiny kernel of validity behind the dumb bullshit that instigated Gamergate and that means I must be a member of the Gamergate Tribe, which is even more hated and feared than SSC.
As someone who was active on 4chan and several left-leaning game forums at the time this took off, I can tell you it is not. I’m guessing what you know about it is based on secondhand “explainers”.
hon, the whole brouhaha started with eron fucking gjoni posting multi-page misogynistic screed and siccing people after zöe quinn. the game journalism thing was always a pretension applied post hoc to help legitimize the harassment campaign.
The anger about game journalists and Kotaku predated (by a good long while) the specific drama that sparked off the “movement”. Separated from its lurid backstory, the Quinn/Grayson thing was in fact an example of unprofessional/unethical journalism, albeit not as massive an example as a lot of the people who turned it into a rallying cry thought.
sure, but only when you also separate this from the fact that it did not happen at all. i'm fucking amazed that you still feel the need for crude revisionism in 2021, almost seven years after gjoni unleashed the incels.
You're having trouble answering those questions because you've realized that you either have to disavow MeToo, or disavow Zoe Quinn and the narrative surrounding her.
after long deliberations i decided to answer your questions in the adequate manner, giving them just as much thought as they require.
get into the sea. do not come back.
What is your opinion on the MeToo movement? As a follow on question, what would you think had the press rallied around Weinstein and accused the people coming out against him as misandrist harassers?
EDIT
No takers? Come on, don't be shy :3
[This vid might be relevant to your interests](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7kNWTnW154)
(Don't confuse 'people don't want to have this stupid debate again' with 'my side is right').
That people sometimes fabricate false claims, and people sometimes make true claims. And that gamergate is mostly the first, and me too mostly the second.
BTW, I'm well aware that you don't actually know what those claims are. You, as a feminist, made a blanket decision to dismiss a series of abuse claims by a man against a woman and did the whole DARVO thing. This is why Zoe Quinn and feminist ideology cannot be separated from corrupt journalism.
Journalism as a whole, and gaming journalism especially, has a long history of uncritically repeating abuse claims against men by women with no fact checking involved. Yet when a man makes an abuse claim against a woman, then suddenly everyone has to stop and run damage control for her.
Never mind the fact that many of the people involved were proven to have personal, professional and financial connections to the woman in question. You and everyone else got a stick up your vaginas because a man dared to speak out against a woman, and that couldn't be allowed to stand. You people really are so basic.
i think that you can go fuck yourself, then eat a bag of slugs and then fuck off in the general direction of places where sad tossers who create sockpuppet accounts in order to sealion around any gamergate mention.
you absolute turnip.
It's the other way around, buddy. The misogyny is what triggered them, the journalism stance was the socially-acceptable cover for the ensuing whining. Then came the people who say the quiet part out loud and the rest was history. If you believe otherwise you were played by the subtle ones.
Not really? People in the same game discussion boards had been complaining about shitty game journalism for ages before GG. Many were misogynist reactionaries too, but the two groups were a Venn diagram, not a flat circle.
Well then, if they had been discussing this for ages, why did this all blow up at that precise moment for this precise event? I mean there must have been a *trigger* of some kind... Nobody will ever know, though.
For a dude who frequents 4chan, you sure don't seem to understand much about their psyops.
I haven’t frequented it since Gamergate and Trump ran rampant over the site, actually. But I will say it’s not a singular hivemind (and was even less so before those events plus The Fappening turned it into a beacon for the internet’s worst and dimmest).
Anyway, the Quinn/Grayson story specifically sparked the fire because it simultaneously triggered people with axes to grind about games journalism, misogynist reactionaries, and trolls (a.k.a. agendaless e-drama bloodhounds). Those three groups overlap, but were clearly distinct - just like the userbases of /v/ and /pol/ - before the right-wing opportunists who became ideological architects of the “movement” started to successfully consolidate them and point them in a more coherently political direction.
Well, I agree actually, and that's my point: the latter two groups played the first one as useful idiots/"politically correct" cover for their own shittiness. As you said, the usual alt-right tactics of appropriating a discussion space and hijacking for their own goals. And it worked, but thankfully history isn't gonna look favorably on the whole thing. So no, the things didn't flare up because of the journalism thing, that was just the embers the misogynists fanned to start the fire.
Same thing happened with the MAGA idiots, really. They were frustrated but not directed, then some asshole with further intentions "subtly" directed them and the Capitol was assaulted as a result. But the inciting asshole can still (try to) claim he didn't *explicitly* tell them it wasn't because of himself. See, it's insidious, it has proven dangerous, and we need to call it the fuck out.
That’s *my* point: it was hijacked, and very early on. There were in fact some people who genuinely were just mad about the state of video game journalism, but the movement quickly outpaced them and the right-wing ideologues who jumped on board (starting from /pol/ and eventually expanding to the likes of Adam Baldwin and Milo Yiannopoulos) did a great job of not only using them as cover but converting them to a hardline political cause. The people who continued to wear the mantle while insisting it was “actually about ethics in games journalism”, etc. by the time it was actually known as “Gamergate” were a combination of bad faith psyop types and the useful idiots, SSC-esque tone-deaf morons too autistic to read between the lines. Hence the joke about this group of people sucking phenomenally at PR is on point.
Cool, cool, we agree, then. So why are you defending them? As much as games journalism might suck, it's not a hill remotely worth dying on. Both the games industry and the journalism industry as a whole have been shit for over a decade now. It is known. It won't improve. It's not worth rubbing shoulders with fascists to make a point. The reasonable people should have bailed out super early.
I really don’t see how I’m defending them at all. We all agree that Gamergate was a horrible shitshow. Even Scott Whatsisname agrees. All I was trying to say is that the *initial* momentum of the movement was not *entirely* about misogyny or proto-Trumpism. The reasonable people *did* bail out super early, for exactly the reasons you just explained.
I mean, it's 2021 and you're still parroting the "it's about ethics in games journalism" line. First: nobody cares, and as we both agree, it's covering up toxic behavior.
I feel like you think I am somehow defending people who use the Gamergate mantle or speak positively about the movement as a whole in 2021. I’m really, genuinely curious to know what I wrote that gave this impression.
> Nah, the natal form of the “movement” (before it picked up the Adam Baldwin-coined nickname) really was a complaint about how video game journalism sucks quite badly.
Why the fuck did you even bring it up? It's an insignificant detail at this point, but somehow you decided someone was wrong on the internet and took the time to say that. Nobody cares about the valorous journalism-defending gamers who got played. It's like trying to save banana peels from a dumpster fire.
The post I was responding to alleged that a joke disparaging Gamergate was an inaccurate characterization of Gamergate because the sole defining characteristic of Gamergate was misogyny. I did not think the joke was inaccurate, because there were in fact people who genuinely wanted to criticize games journalism and failed spectacularly by letting themselves and their ridiculous movement get co-opted by the misogynistic far right.
That someone is engaging on the subreddit for specifically mocking the guy who coined the term motte and baily doesn't know what motte and baily is? Yes, that's very hard to believe.
> As someone who was active on 4chan and several left-leaning game forums at the time this took off
... and voted for Obama *both times*...
Ahem. As someone who wasn't born yesterday, I know that "video game journalism" has been a payola-infested trash heap for years, no, *decades* before 4chan reactionaries decided to target Zoe Quinn for the crime of being a woman who has sex. You're not fooling anybody by repeating "but but but it really *is* about ethics in video game journalism!!" for the umpteenth time.
Here's my hot take - video game journalism is fine, and in fact, it's much, much better today than it was in the 90's and early 2000's - ironically, the period
Virtually all video game review sites have a wall between journalism and editorial, as is hilarious like when IGN was plastered in Alien : Isolation ads the same time it was giving the game a '5' and the person whom the only real evidence of being told 'to change a games score' by editorial has repeatedly said the reason that happened isn't because of some paid off elitist circle of reviewers, but rather, new ownership who didn't understand how the site was run.
The actual reality is most "paid off reviews" are in reality "reviews you disagree with."
btw, if you want to know about my voting history, you should DM me. It’s not the kind of thing I typically bring up publicly to win arguments about video gaming subculture dramas on Reddit.
I’ll be curious to know whether mods think “ironically” hounding someone for information on their real-life voting behavior is appropriate for this sub. I don’t mind being downvoted and disagreed with if people don’t like what I said, but imo personalized baiting and harassment are pretty over the line.
> I’ll be curious to know whether mods think “ironically” hounding someone for information on their real-life voting behavior is appropriate for this sub
We're obviously not going to censure someone for making a *Get Out* reference. Don't ask stupid questions.
So how many different bait posts am I allowed to make posing the same glib pop culture reference to the same person before it’s considered an issue? It’ll be useful to know just how obnoxious I’m allowed to be if I ever want to get a rise out of someone instead of engaging them.
If someone is being obnoxious, then you can just stop replying to them. Reddit's got lots of annoying people. It's good to know when to quit sometimes.
Very well, we shall continue after my ban runs out.
Personally I think the mods are just as curious about your voting habits as I really am.
E: wait WAIT, that 'targeted harassment' remark, was about me harassing you? And not about the regular sneerclub subjects? Ow god...
HAHAHa, im dying here, haahha, a couple of joking bad faith questions about voting questions (after I pointed out the 'you voted for obama twice' thing is prob a reference to a certain type of liberal bullshit, bullshit liberals are themselves oblivious to even when it is pointed out). 'help help im being harassed' are you for fucking real?
E2: also as subtext is apparently hard, I dont care about the voting records at all.
Whether you choose to believe it or not, I actually am making an effort to engage in good faith on this sub because I think the people here are generally really intelligent and thoughtful and I’m interested to learn their perspectives, regardless of whether I end up agreeing with them. It should be pretty obvious that I’m generally more sympathetic to most views expressed here than on places like The Motte, because I’m spending my time here and not there. I don’t have a problem with people telling me if they think I’m wrong or my take on a controversial topic is ass-backwards, but I don’t appreciate being subject to mocking innuendos about my character or intentions (e.g. likening me to a fictional homicidal racist) from people who don’t know me at all.
Also yeah, I’m not sure how repeatedly hounding someone with “joking bad faith questions” on an obviously inappropriate topic for others’ amusement doesn’t qualify as petty harassment.
'im engaging in good faith'
But still no voting record. Curious. ;).
E: stupid repeated joke aside, I hope they now get that they are giving off weird vibes, with the 'unnamed leftwing forums' and defending the start of GG takes.
Sorry but you come here and go: 'well actually, there was a basis of truth in gamergate' 'how do you do my fellow leftists' (the 'I was in leftwing forums') thing, you have a weird hate for kotaku, which you translate into 'see gamergate was right on some things' (like that in any way justified the attacks on Zoe (As she isn't a journalist), it all is just a fucking weird take, even if gaming journalism generally sucks. Zoe is still being harrased about bullshit accusations to this day, iirc some idiots accused her of murder or something). Aka, redoing the whole gg debate again in 2021. This isn't really in good faith and will not go over well. (GG wasn't hijacked, some bad faith actors just pretended that it wasn't about harassment as a shield to get some respectability, to get centrists/contrarians to defend them, as plausible deniability, and as a recruitment tool). (E: In fact, it was hijacked, the harassment actions of ... that dude (forgot his name sorry) and his blogpost was hijacked by bad actors like Bannon (who became rich(er) due to selling WoW gold) into some sort of 'gaming journalism sucks' culture war, they just attached all the GG bullshit to the general gamer discontent which was already there. And this is also why people say trumpism and GG is related). You are just doing a totalbiscuit 'actuallhyy it is the journalists fault women get harassed in gaming because their reporting doesn't gel 100% with my experience of GG'.
And I didnt post that link to compare you directly to a horror movie character, I linked that to show you are sharing behavior to the actor not knowing what they were doing was giving off red flags, as I tried to explain above. It was about the liberal bullshit behavior, not the 'murderous racist' thing. (I had trouble at first figuring out wtf you were going on about with your 'fictional racist' remark). That your takeaway for my link to the 'actor didn't get it' thing, and me asking 'would you vote for him a third time' is 'you called me a murderer' is such a bad faith take, it puts a lot of doubt on your whole 'trust me im in good faith' stick. For the record, I didn't vote for Obama at all, and I have never voted in any American presidential election ;).
And I don't see how you can't take being asked a question twice, and still going 'actually, GG had some truth in it, as this was basically a distributed harassment campaign where a lot of the harassment came from people 'just asking zoe some questions'.
All this lack of self-awareness and pretending like you are in the right and the victim (see also [your bad summary](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/l29o2g/scott_alexander_is_back/gkedr7o/) of what is going on in this thread) doesn't make you look good. Also you say you don't mind people saying you are wrong, but the whole thread is a clear counterexample of that. (after dgerard told you you were wrong (dgerard also was on SA at the time all this shit went down iirc, I think the kids nowadays would call him OG)).
It also doesn't help that all the people jumping to your defense are GG'ers themselves. Nor does your utter lack of humor about the whole thing.
Also in regards to downvoting, for what it is worth I haven't downvoted you.
E: errgh, I don't like writing out long stories here, as I do it too much and it wastes to much time.
lol, I mentioned I was in left-leaning game forums at the time (NeoGAF, Selectbutton.net and others, if you’re dying to fact-check me) to emphasize that people who don’t like Kotaku, etc. are not exclusively aligned with the Trumpist right, incels or whatever. I mentioned it because I directly observed this to be the case, not to stake my partisan bona fides which I have no need to do. (They still aren’t, btw, but Gamergate definitely helped usher in a new era of binary culture war-fueled gatekeeping re: who is “really” in what camp.)
I never justified harassment or said anything flattering about Gamergate at all. Harassment was a wildly inappropriate response to a *potentially* legitimate concern, and that concern quickly became a Trojan horse for a bunch of other crap. By the time it was a “movement” with a name coined by a right-wing crank, it was already too late - the people who stuck on past that point were either bad faith actors *or* simply tone-deaf, context-blind morons who refused to see what they were associating themselves with.
If you’d like to try and prove that I’m a secret GGer or Trumpist and not just someone with a contrary opinion, I think you’ll have a hard time finding evidence of that. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I didn’t “come here” just to post in this thread; I’ve been reading and posting on this sub for months, and never been at the epicenter of any drama before because none of my other posts have been all that controversial lol
Sorry I responded to your bad faith response to a bad faith reading of my posts with insufficiently good faith? I think I tried. I did at least get you to say what you actually mean in words instead of just cryptically mocking me and assuming the joke was self-evident, so that’s good enough for me.
It isn't just that you are having a contrary opinion, your opinion is counterfactual.
There was no legit complaint, (iirc the dude who wrote the zoepost admitted this, the timelines don't even match [unless we downgrade the complaint to 'they knew each other before the game was referenced']), and it wasn't posted on 4chan at all. But SA. (where it was promptly deleted, also FYI, dgerard is a goon (as in SA user, not the insult)).
All the other forums etc was already part of the crazy gg witchhunt. And yes, gamers got tricked, they let their dislike of gaming journalism overrule their sense. But it didn't quickly became a trojan horse. It was one all along.
And sorry about the whole 'just come here to defend gg' thing then, I had no idea, I can't recall names well at the best of times, and I hardly have kept up with this place lately. I just came here to point out the 'enlightened liberal' feeling.
E: I give up.
I’d been under the impression that the journalist named in the original post had been the one who covered the game, but apparently that isn’t true (it was someone else at the same publication). That’s the only relevant factual issue. The fact that a bunch of people who initially participated in/commented on the drama were more concerned about the Kotaku/game journalism angle than the personal vendetta against Zoe Quinn is true. I know that because I saw the threads about it in the very first couple of weeks, and the months and months of prior threads expressing grievances against the state of games journalism as exemplified by Kotaku. Most of those people either bailed out as the bad tactics and bad faith of the “movement” became obvious, or shifted their attention to more abstract culture war arguments (some of which I’m sympathetic to, but none of which were exemplified by the towering intellects of Gamergate).
A lot of people who’d previously found themselves in the position of criticizing Kotaku or game journalism found those formerly apolitical opinions suddenly cast as evidence of Gamergate allegiance and put in the awkward position of saying, “Yeah, those people are technically right that game journalism sucks, but what they’re doing about it is inappropriate and stupid.” I know because I was one of them.
So anyway, characterizing Gamergate as a complaint about game journalism that spiraled monumentally out of control (however dubiously relevant the inciting incident actually was, and however many bad faith actors were in on it from the beginning) is not really inaccurate at all. “Gamergate are the exact opposite of PR geniuses” is a funny dunk. That is pretty much all I was originally trying to say. Not “Gamergate good”, not “harassment is excusable”, not anything remotely like that.
Nah, that’s an oversimplification. There were two related but distinct phenomena that had been building up in gaming subculture for some time and converged around what would become Gamergate: people complaining about gaming journalism for being the aforementioned trash heap, and people complaining about a specific trend of certain websites publishing Jezebel-style culture war editorials angled for maximum drama (e.g. “privilege checklists”, docking review points off of *Mario Kart* for not representing black people). Critical threads about these topics on gaming forums were commonplace for years before Gamergate, and Kotaku was one of the biggest targets. There was also a third category of angry reactionaries who believed Anita Sarkeesian was leading a conspiracy to drain the precious manhood out of their beloved games.
As tabloidy and immature as the Zoe Quinn/Nathan Grayson story was, not every person who initially reacted to it or viewed it as a catalyst to demand more accountability from gaming publications fell into *all* of the above categories. There was a quasi-legitimate grievance at the heart of it, insofar as a journalist for a major publication providing positive coverage for an indie game (a field in which people’s careers live or die off of word of mouth and good coverage) without disclosing his conflict of interest regarding the game’s developer is a valid example of unprofessional, ethically dubious journalism.
Early on in the unfolding drama, there were regular instances of people urging others to focus their criticisms on the journalists rather than the developers. But 4chan being 4chan, the “Zoe Quinn is a feminist whore” narrative quickly won out as the “movement” veered into a broad culture war using weaponized troll tactics, and more committed far-right ideologues who didn’t give a shit about video games saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radicalize socially awkward, politically apathetic young men. It’s only once things reached that point that anybody outside the inner circle of gaming subculture heard about it to begin with, and by then the narrative and counter-narratives were formed.
...But there was no review of *Depression Quest* at all, so your entire framing falls apart. What positive coverage? Where? Provide the internet archive link of the original shady post that supposedly existed
My recollection is that Kotaku put up a preview feature hyping the game written by Grayson. It isn’t the catastrophic ethical breach that GG made it out to be, just an example of their casual unprofessionalism that emerged at a time when the relationships between developers and press were under scrutiny (and also happened to excite the drama hounds, misogynists and reactionaries).
...no, not even that. Just find the internet archive link, if it is internet history it must be on the Internet Archive, I couldn’t find one.
[Closest I found was this article. Look at the author. How do you spell “Grayson”?](https://kotaku.com/4-video-games-that-help-you-understand-and-deal-with-yo-473476131)
Huh, guess I’d misremembered or been misinformed about how direct the link between Grayson and Kotaku’s coverage was(n’t). So yeah, I guess that story was exaggerated in light of the existing paranoia about unprofessional relationships between journalists and devs, which goes to show what a crappy job the whole “movement” did of managing its alleged priorities.
A quick google search of "Kotaku depression quest" leads to this post on KiA, which highlights the coverage given by Nathan Grayson regarding the game: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/38xk11/does_anyone_have_the_link_to_nathan_graysons/crynyku/ Even if the archive-links are down (ironic), they are easily searchable by full title.
What you said here is both well-explained and correct and you're still downvoted to -7. I upvoted this but I'm not sure how much help that is, I just want you to know that not everyone here disagrees with you.
But iterated games sometimes require a strategy that deviates from
apparent first-level rationality, where you let yourself consider
lose-lose options in order to influence an opponent’s behavior.
Ah yes, the deliciously rationalist habit of making decisions out of
emotion, reflex or personal subjective principles(like all people do),
but convincing oneself post-factum that one is, in fact, a superrational
god acting upon the world with game theoretic perfection.
I for one welcome Scott Siskind back to the light of day. May we
sneer him for many a year!
It's also pseudoscientific garbage anyway. Scott Siskind wrote a [sequence on game theory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QxZs5Za4qXBegXCgu/introduction-to-game-theory-sequence-guide) under the nickname Yvain: it was atrociously bad. Flush with misused terminology, incorrect understanding of concepts, miscalculations all around. The guy doesn't understand maths and doesn't understand game theory. It'd be clear to anyone who has worked through a Martin Osborne textbook.
In fact, this is the classic trope in rationality community: to understand something you must read something superficially, and preferably from a tertiary text already associated with the rationality community—after all, academia is broken and scientists aren't Bayesian enough, so why bother with primary sources? Then fill in the rest of your comprehension with guesswork and filling the blanks.
I stopped counting how many times Julia Galef, Duncan Sabien, Scott Siskind, and lesser known rationalists constantly misused Prisoner's Dilemma, as if it's an empirical fact and not a mathematical construction. The pinnacle of this fast and loose pseudo-mathematics was [this goofy-ass fool](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/toonalfrink)—who, BTW, was barred from EA Global for sexual harassment—who once told me in response to my criticism of misuse of game theory that I reject human nature or something.
> I reject human nature
That is actually a very common thought ending cliche, it is often used to argue against communism and socialism etc. If only there was a community that made you aware of those things. Guess it is just human nature for those things to be impossible to exist.
You can't convince people you're smart by *reading* stuff, you gotta *write* stuff for that.
I used to work in the autonomous driving ecosystem, and this reminds me of all the people who were like
"oh yeah, that raises lots of very deep and interesting question!"
me: "yeah, I mean, obviously liability for accidents will be a legal minefie...."
them: "Have you heard about the trolley problem?"
me: *facepalm*
I mean he refers to “iterated games” and just...leaves it there, as /u/4YearsBeforeWeRest quotes
But as far as I can work out what he actually has in mind is just a straight-up prisoner’s dilemma, the problem being all he does is link to a Wikipedia page without explanation. Maybe he thinks that’s an iterated game - which it is not, unless you mathematically construct it as one - or maybe he’s just confused or being lazy: we can’t know because he’s such a terrible fucking writer.
Cards on the table: I’ve been a big sceptic of how you can apply game theory since long before I found out about Siskind and the LessWrong shtick. But characteristically even though I’m not a maths guy I *checked* and did various dives into the history which left me even more sceptical about how I see it used in this sort of case. To me the most interesting insight is that you will without much difficulty find serious theorists arguing that the classic prisoner’s dilemma example over-stated - mostly because counter-intuitive thought experiments are more exciting than actually knowing anything.
In fact - I don’t have a source to hand right now - I remember reading more than one article/paper by such theorists which argued that game theory is not just useless in these cases, but that its use in those cases is basically a pathology: a paranoiac diversion on the part of people who get really into prisoner’s dilemma thinking. It doesn’t seem to be beyond the realm of reason to attribute such a pathology to Siskind.
But we’ll probably never know about Siskind because as I noted above he’s such a terrible writer it is never clear what he’s really thinking.
> I remember reading more than one article/paper by such theorists which argued that game theory is not just useless in these cases, but that its use in those cases is basically a pathology
This is in accordance with a sneer that I've been meaning to make for a while, but saving for the right time: People who try to shoehorn in game theory and see prisoner's dilemmas everywhere ironically put themselves in losing positions game theory-wise by being insufferable to listen to.
It's particularly annoying to see them try to analyze human behavior with simple, shallow models.
The best example from Scott is [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/XsMTxdQ6fprAQMoKi/p/gFMH3Cqw4XxwL69iy) where he basically tries to shoehorn the iterated prisoner's dilemma in many real-life situations, pointing to the moral hazard of allowing people to defect under extraordinary circumstances. What he misses is that these situations don't fit nicely into Prisoner's dilemmas, people's responses are not binary(cooperate or defect), that defecting with a good excuse and proof to back it up is not equivalent to simple defecting, and that humans can choose whether to take part in a game or not, and restructure their games to be more fair and acommodating to the people involved.
Okay yeah it totally makes sense Scott Siskind would make a
substack.
Rather poor taste to compare Scott Siskind’s own situation to that of
Mohammed Bouazizi though.
AFAIK, the ‘big reveal’ of any expose—insofar as there was going to
be one—wasn’t going to be about Scott Siskind, but rather the dangerous
strain of pseudointellectual idiots that suckled on Scott Siskind’s teat
over the past decade.
He literally presents him trying to weaponise half a million people into harassing some journalist as a whoopsie and journalists defaulting to publishing his name because of some policy document somewhere as a tyrannical régime of oppression.
Are you sure/do you have a source on the Scott interview actually happening?
Based on the text in this linked article, it seems that Scott asked for anonymity as a condition of having an interview, so the interview didn't happen.
Sorry, it looks like I remembered wrong. According to [the Washington Free Beacon](https://freebeacon.com/media/well-known-blogger-shuts-down-site-for-fear-of-nyt-doxxing/) (which of course he granted an email interview)
> "He never got around to asking me questions because I started with asking if the article would include my real name and we didn't get past our argument on that subject," Alexander told the Free Beacon by email.
However that interview does confirm his first expectation was that the SJW thought-police had finally come to cancel him:
> Alexander's public views are broadly liberal with some libertarian influence, but his controversial arguments have attracted the ill will of what Aaronson called "social media mobs who despised Scott and wanted to end his blog because of political disagreements"—part of what made Alexander wary of the article.
> But when Metz reached out, Alexander says, he wanted to discuss not these controversies, but the community SSC had built, in a largely positive way.
> The apparent density and the length of his exposition resembles on the surface good writing but underneath that it lacks the depth of genuinely good writing because Siskind can’t read
His writing has the aesthetics and trappings of "good" writing, in the same way that rationalists often mime the aesthetics of real research and sound arguments.
> Siskind can’t read
This ×100. It's simply bizarre how he can read Singer on Marx, or Herman&Chomsky's *Manufacturing Consent*, and take away stuff that simply isn't there!
And didn't it happened once that he reviewed a book, and then the author showed up in the comments to correct some misunderstandings, and Scott admitted that he actually didn't read the book?
Rationalists dont have to read per se, only one has to read the book, then he writes an unbiased book report (rationalist superpower) and then the rest can absorb this book knowledge from the report.
And that is how you read 10 books per day.
Cliffs notes are obviously written by The Cathedral, and cannot be relied upon, only Those Gifted By Rationality, can write proper notes ;).
(I'm joking, but every time some weird 'self help group but for people who hate' create a book club they never seem to go back to stuff like Cliffs notes).
The thing that’s really weird is that he went into Marx from *Singer*
Like OK, you decided to do a blogpost about Marxism because you read the *Very Short Introduction* by Singer
You do you man, but I would’ve thought of something maybe taking myself a bit more seriously than that.
Yep, basically my thoughts on the matter too. His prose is technically fine, and he's able to pull a laugh out of me every now and then- but, yeah, fundamentally, his writing is shallow and ego driven.
Scott isn't actually bad-but-fun. He's just bad. He's offering ego-affirmation for former gifted kids who crave external validation. I say this as a former gifted kid who craves external validation as well- that's how he and the Rationalists almost pulled me into their bullshit. The average person who stumbles across his blog is generally bored out of their mind, by his sheer verbosity if nothing else. (Not average in the intelligence sense, average in the lacking the weird former gifted kid hangups. One of my best friends, who is absolutely brilliant but lacks said hangups, considered Scott just some weird pedantic nerd.)
And oh, do I hate his habit of regularly including ultra-obscure words to force you to click a link and learn about it. He never tries to explain those words, never offers his own definition, he just forces you to research them just to prove how smart he is. That's godawful writing. It serves to boost his own ego, and it's a cheap damn rhetorical trick for trying to make readers respect you.
I straddle the line on this because I’m one of those former gifted kids but I also immediately had your friend’s response on encountering Siskind, although to be fair I was primed for it because I encountered the whole LessWrong universe via its being mocked on /r/badphilosophy before /r/SneerClub was born.
Maybe there’s a nearby possible world where I encounter the Yudkowsky Expanded Universe and get sucked in, but I think most possible versions of me are cynical enough to have a nose for bullshit even with the habit of seeking validation.
I’m guilty enough myself of referencing obscure words or using hifalutin rhetoric but I’ve been called out on it enough times by now by people whom I respect that I try to define my terms as much as possible - it just occurred to me that it’s interesting Siskind and I both have backgrounds as philosophy students, but learned very different lessons about prose style: I was (rightly) pressured to tone my bullshit down hard while he went in a very different direction.
I definitely wasn't primed for it- I bought into Siskind's bullshit for a while. I don't entirely regret it- he introduced me to Seeing Like a State, which remains one of my most important books, but it was really Yudkowsky that turned me against the Rationalists. The instant I got to his "solving physics in favor of multiple worlds through non-empirical means" chapter I was fucking out of there.
I'm not naturally super cynical, so I had to train a healthy dose of skepticism into my brain the hard way. Lots of false starts and general awkwardness along the way.
And good on those people in your lives! It really does make a difference who we surround ourselves with.
I was somewhat put off Seeing Like A State by skimming Scott's take on it, then I went and looked myself and ended up quoting a chunk in *Libra Shrugged* - where I'm basically running a pitch for anarchism in a book on centrist market liberalism
Scott did an honestly pretty bad job of discussing a lot of Seeing Like A State- not surprising, his book reports (not reviews, lol) tend to be pretty shoddy in general. Like the time he wrote about a book on philanthropy without reading it first, got called out on it (by the author), then read it, and just doubled down on his original complaint. Ugh.
Is it really for gifted kids? (Not being catty: serious question.)
The whole scene (re: "habit of regularly including ultra-obscure words to force you to click a link and learn about it", et al.; but there are other relevant habits, like the habit of being sciencey-sounding and calling oneself scientific as replacements for actually appealing to any positive findings of science or following rigorous methods in one's own analysis) has always struck me as so pretentious... so transparently pretentious, so centrally occupied with constantly signaling its transparent pretentiousness... that it's always struck me as more for people *who desperately want to think of themselves as* gifted.
I suppose that's the "crav[ing] external validation" bit you mention, except that it seems like if someone's actually bright in any relevant sense, this is exactly the kind of "cheap damn rhetorical trick" that ought to be immediately seen through.
I think there's pretty big overlap between 'gifted kids' and 'kids who desperately want to think of themselves as gifted'
When i got assigned that label as a kid it felt awful, the combination of raised expectations, being singled out & still constantly failing, essentially flip flopping between feeling scammed and feeling like i should obviously be able to do this bc im 'gifted' so surely it's all my fault
I can see why it would be a lot more appealing to fall for the lie that everyone else is wrong and just fails to appreciate your genius rather than having to accept that a shitty label did in fact ruin part of your childhood and you will forever be worse off for it
(im sure this doesnt happen to everyone who gets deemed 'gifted' but it's a far too common story)
The first trick to grasping the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom, is realizing that being intelligent doesn't correlate at all with being wise in the general population. Normal people fall for stupidity, smart people fall for *complicated* stupidity.
I'm having trouble understanding what the main claim is you make against Scott and his writing. Is it that he does not have good/deep insights in his writing and his style distracts or hides his lack of deep insights?
Hi, I usually don't comment when there appears to be animosity but this seems like a very focused comment so I'm curious. Just going line by line:
> He can’t be succinct when he should be;
I know his prose is long but I don't overwhelmingly get this feeling from it. I'm guessing "should be" is the operative phrase here and it seems to me that, when he makes a point, he makes it pretty directly.
> he disguises banal observations with again, unnecessary, metaphors of his own invention (a metaphor in non-fiction prose shouldn’t have the role of making the author look more insightful, it should reveal an insight to the reader);
Going to be honest, I'm not sure how you can tell a metaphor is intended to make the author more insightful. If anything, I feel like both purposes-of-a-metaphor you stated coalesce.
> he mixes a tone of detached objectivity with a subtext of self-righteous indignation;
I agree that sometimes his posts have a degree of indignation that seems a little misplaced. The untitled post about nerds and women comes to mind, as does some of the newer posts wrt the Times. Most of his posts, though, have a very casual feel to them; he writes like someone might talk. I'm curious where you're picking up the "self-righteous" bit from.
> he refuses to work with people on their own terms unless they broadly agree with him already but as per the previous points hides that fact under a thin veneer of prose style;
I actually agree with this one. He has a tendency to reference someone else's terms, then add a snarky tagline that demeans it without directly confronting it. Kind of bush league.
> just as a writer he gives the impression of being in conflict between total self-involvement and a desperate almost Freudian desire to seem worldly.
First off, I'm not sure where the conflict between those motives are. If anything, I think they would reinforce each other. Wouldn't someone obsessed with how they come off be self-involved? And focusing on the second point in particular, I'm struggling to imagine how some who has a "desire to appear worldly" would write. My best guess is that he/she/they would drop lots of references to stuff, which I guess Scott does a lot. Is it that? Some elaboration would be lovely if you could provide it.
>lots of bad writers have fans, success, and influence because they’re fun, which massages the shallow or abhorrent content for the ego of the reader...it just means they’re susceptible to the desire to think they’re smart for getting the surface insight.
Which is fine on a personal level, but it’s also a problem that in broader society critical thinking exists to solve.
I agree with this. Not a phenomenon that is exclusive to Scott, but that obviously doesn't excuse it.
> In terms of Siskind specifically, the bad writing is expressed in a talent for undermining the public sphere and making everything about his ego.
Again, I'm not sure what you mean by this, especially "undermining the public sphere." A generalized example might be helpful (like inflammatory rhetoric).
> That isn’t immediately obvious because his ego is working with that of the reader.
Also curious what you mean by this. My best guess is that it means readers will feel smarter for having read his work...but isn't that basically the case for all nonfiction writing? More specifically, it seems clear that Scott tries to write in a way that provides insight, and his readers follow him there. Again, I don't see how this differentiates Scott's writing from other writing. Maybe you don't agree with the insights, or maybe the reader base intoxicates itself somewhat on said insights (which I sort of agree with), but these seem like separate issues.
> It’s bad writing because it’s simultaneously self-deceiving and deceives the reader with its shallowly elegant prose.
Do you think that Scott is being deceived by his own writing? I understand the position that he is deluded (though I wouldn't agree) but how does the writing deceive him?
I ask this in part because I'm thinking about doing some writing (not publicly, just to organize some thoughts) and the one thing I have chased and been unable to possess is a somewhat casual, informal tone. I thought Scott was a pretty good example but seeing his style of prose ruffle feathers makes me wonder what I'm missing.
If you managed to get through all that then I appreciate you.
I wrote a longish reply about writing, the major takeaways of which are: state your thesis at the top, not at the bottom, and don’t dress up your ideas with stupid fucking extended metaphors - unless you’re writing poetry
Unfortunately my device crashed and I lost all of it
Fortunately I could find this link where you will find me pointing out a number of the issues with Siskind’s thinking and writing
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/8vswlt/you_are_still_crying_wolf_has_been_updated/
Hey, I just wanted to thank you for actually taking the time to write a thorough response and direct me to a comprehensive answer. I don't fully agree with you but I think I understand your position now. It's easy to snipe on the internet and I appreciate that you took me on in good faith.
I live in London atm and like a lot of people haven’t got a job right now (God I fucking hate London) which is under Tier 4 lockdown due to The Plague: I don’t have much to do other than write, but I appreciate your appreciation.
Scott Alexander can't even read things properly, as has been discussed here many times before, e.g.:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/gc27k5/author_reacts_to_ssc_book_review/fpbulfv/
To be a good writer you have to be good at editing (finding your own mistakes or making yourself clearer). Scott doesn't seem capable of this.
Got a (honest) question on the first point in that link since I don't know anything about Marx. If the essence *is* (as in 'the essence is nothing *but*) the
ensemble of the social relations and we see social relations as changeable (is this correct in Marx' view?), wouldn't the conclusion of seeing essence as completely malleable be correct?
I'm not sure what "completely malleable" could even mean here. What does "completely malleable" mean to you in regards to "human nature"? As far as I can tell "completely malleable" is a nonsense combination of words that Scott Alexander made up; it has nothing to do with Marx.
edit: You can read the text in its original context if that helps you?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
Who do you consider to be a good writer?
If I am understanding it correctly, by your standards, every genre fiction author is a bad writer.
This is my first time reading Scott (read it first on Hackernews, thought it made sense, then noticed that hey, isn't this the guy /r/sneerclub always shits on), and while I will agree that he is meandering, takes a long time to come to his point- he is also fairly entertaining and interesting.
>Nothing in there said anything like “spaceships and dragons bad”
Except thats exactly what hes saying.
>That doesn’t mean the reader who becomes a fan is stupid, it just means they’re susceptible to the desire to think they’re smart for getting the surface insight
Yeah sure, you're not stupid for liking fantasy, you're just not very smart. Gee thanks for letting me know about that.
> This goes back to the point about the pheasant shoot: lots of bad writers have fans, success, and influence because they’re fun, which massages the shallow or abhorrent content for the ego of the reader - Aaron Sorkin does a similar thing. That doesn’t mean the reader who becomes a fan is stupid, it just means they’re susceptible to the desire to think they’re smart for getting the surface insight.
What exactly is this saying?
Also why is Aaron Sorkin bad (didn't know who he was until you mentioned him, social network was a good movie tho).
I’m saying that Scott Alexander/Siskind doesn’t think before he types, and comparing that to a pheasant shoot. A pheasant shoot, if you don’t know, is a rather grisly business whereby primarily upper-class twits use wide-bore shotguns fired more or less randomly into the air at a flock of “driven” pheasants^1 on land kept by a gamekeeper. Fun, sure, but not a sport requiring a great deal of skill or forethought.
So I’m drawing a comparison between that sport and the much more difficult and skilled task of sniping a target at a distance.^2 The metaphor, then, is attempting to explain how a writer can be both fun and engaging, but actually just draws you in without giving you a good reason for it. Siskind/Alexander uses words which have a surface elegance which disguises the shallowness of his thought - you can see the rest of my post in the light of this explainer for more detail.
Sorkin does the same thing: on The West Wing he buries his shitty politics under a constant hail of words words words words words.^3 The Social Network is probably the least bad thing I can think of that he’s done, even though it has its own problems - and the endless expository dialogue which is his signature grates at me more and more every time I see it, which has over the years been semi-frequently because it always seems to be on the movie channels which are basically the only TV I watch these days. To be honest I’m just a sucker for anything that bags on tech entrepreneurs so I’ve watched it more times than is reasonable.
1. Pheasants are themselves particularly witless animals.
2. Full disclosure: I’ve only handled an actual gun (paintballing aside) a handful of times at a range, and I’ve never personally been on a pheasant shoot, although I know people who have.
3. And I would again point out that I’m not shitting on genre fiction writers at all here, and ask where the fuck you got that idea. Many genre fiction writers *explicitly avoid* doing this.
> The Social Network is probably the least bad thing I can think of that he’s done, even though it has its own problems
The Social Network would be the one movie where Aaron Sorkin's writing actually works, because it's in character for Mark Zuckerberg to talk like that. It's about a former gifted kid who can't fit in, is probably on the autism spectrum, and is sort of toying with a *rationalist* view of the world.
Oh shit you’re absolutely right. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. It’s basically what makes Sorkin’s writing compelling *to Sorkin*.
He can’t write stuff outside his own head (which is fine, just don’t pretend you’re doing it), so Zuckerberg and his ilk are his ideal subject. Which further also makes me think about how he sets up Justin Timberlake’s version of Sean Parker: remember how galled and embarrassed he is when he gets caught with drugs? I just realised that that’s Sorkin writing up his own coke bust.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, it just calls back to that thing that The West Thing guys always call back to, which is that Sorkin can’t write in somebody else’s voice besides his own. Which is fine, Samuel Beckett couldn’t do that either and acknowledged it. But that’s what makes *The Social Network* Sorkin’s least bad thing: he’s writing these deeply involved self-inserts which *work* only because he’s writing *him*.
I believe his most recent venture is about the Chicago Seven, but these days my only contact with Sorkin is via The West Wing Thing where they shit on him for being a bad writer and worse person. I did watch The West Wing and one (disastrous) episode of Studio 60 over a decade ago now because a friend was super into the former - which I never understood because I thought it was the masturbatory shite that it is; fortunately she’s gone very not-West-Wing since. Anyway, apparently he went into this Chicago Seven without *knowing fucking anything, which he admits* about one of the key events in American Democratic politics of his own lifetime, which is hilarious.
The best bits of The West Wing, in my humble opinion, are in the British sketch show Dead Ringers, by the way.
Elizabeth Sandifer had an excellent take recently on [The West Wing as liberal science fiction.](http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/we-will-reach-the-promised-land-liberal-science-fiction-at-the-fall-of-democracy/)
Well as for genre fiction, I’m a huge fan of Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillaine, Philip K. Dick, Len Deighton, Iain M. Banks etc.*
I don’t think any of those guys do the stuff I criticise Siskind for, indeed all of the guys I specifically referenced are famous for their concision.
Secondarily, I just disagree that he’s interesting, although to a certain audience he’s entertaining: fine, but it’s not for me and I think it’s pernicious for the reasons given above.
*I don’t really do fantasy but I get the appeal
Ima be honest, 1/2 or 3/4 of those people you listed I would not consider genre fiction, in the same way Shakespeare/dickens wrote for the masses (which is what I really meant by genre fiction) but their works are by and large considered literary master pieces today.
More importantly, by shitting on fun
> lots of bad writers have fans, success, and influence because they’re fun, which massages the shallow or abhorrent content for the ego of the reader
your looking down upon what the vast majority of humans do and create. Its a very elitist, aristocratic tone.
Your definition of genre fiction is... well, wrong. The listed authors write science fiction, spy thrillers, and detective novels, all of which fit absolutely into the category of genre fiction. Whether or not they're written for the masses is absolutely immaterial to them being genre fiction. Genre fiction is, to my mind, a shitty label, but one with a pretty clear definition. Is it horror, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, or a spy-thriller? It's genre fiction. Is it brilliant and thought provoking? Then the literati will attempt to "uplift" it out of genre and claim it's literature. It's a whole stupid literary lifecycle.
Source: I'm literally a genre fiction author. And I take that as a point of pride, and if in the (highly unlikely) instance literatis decided to "uplift" me out of genre fiction, I'd fight them off with a stick. (Again, super unlikely.)
And, as for shitting on fun: uhhhh nah, there actually are a fuckton of bad writers who are just fun out there. u/noactuallyitspoptart is spot on tjere. Hell, I've been accused of that myself often enough. (Especially by homophobes. So many one star reviews complaining about having gay characters in my books.) And many of the bad-but-fun authors out there actually do promote godawful, abhorrent, shallow nonsense- casual racism, sexism, queerphobia, regressive politics, Randian Objectivism, advocacy for torture, outright fascism, etc. Many of us bad-but-fun authors do, at least, try our best to avoid being abhorrent or shallow- but that doesn't make those others go away.
If it's fun, is the writing really bad?
Unless the fun is in how bad it is i guess
I feel like calling any piece of art (whether it be writing or smth else) bad but enjoyable gives the claim a sense of objectivity that it really doesn't deserve
I mean, Yu-Gi-Oh is fun as hell to watch, but no one's going to call it an exemplar of good television. Artistic quality is definitely no measure of enjoyment much of the time.
And there are definitely works whose entertainment value come purely from how bad they are, like Troll 2 or Plan 9 From Outer Space.
I don’t mind that as such. Lots of good writers ramble - I ramble, good writer or not. What I mind is the way that rambling in his specific case undermines the reader and tries to make them feel small for not being smart enough to get his basically shallow ideas.
I don't think long or even rambly writing is necessarily bad. But Siskind uses his longwinded style to obfuscate, which is bad. And often the point he's obfuscating is some odious thing.
Even when there's a point, his fiction is three to six times as long as it should be, and his nonfiction is ten times as long as it should be.
It's not like every sentence is a finely tuned delight either.
This man must be antimatter to editors.
I'm sure I've rambled about this before, but I'm now thinking about how the fuck you'd edit this guy. How would you cut the word count to a tenth, without revealing that there isn't actually a "there" there?
And: just imagine Scott being told he has 1200 words to do his thing.
3-6? Imo you're overly generous toward his fiction.
At least he needn't concern himself with "killing his darlings." Not when the 1st draft is D.O.A.
> This man must be antimatter to editors
Who are not evidence in anything of his I've read. But, hey, it's just another blog, right?
I get annoyed with myself because I have a bad intellectual habit of getting more annoyed with someone being shallow than being odious or evil: odious/evil you can just dismiss, but being shallow is just infuriating to me. Himmler was at least *really* batshit, whereas Hitler was just a mediocrity at the right time. I’ll never tire of telling the story of when I got beaten up by white nationalists/fascists in Estonia; where the guys in question beat me up after my then-girlfriend threw her drink in one of their faces after his calling her the wrong racial epithet, and she was furious with me - after I took a beating on her behalf - that I was mostly annoyed, albeit laughing, that he got it wrong.
It think's fair to be more annoyed by shallowness or tediousness or whatever than being evil or odious. If the main thing irking us were evil we'd be on a subreddit dedicated to Pompeo or whomever, not Yudkowsky and Siskind.
I kind of agree, but I would push back a bit.
When I was living in Kosovo recently - hopefully again soon - my Canadian flatmate (wonderful guy, I would never cast aspersions), who like me is 27 years old, astonished me one day by expressing surprise and fascination when I mentioned that our apartment building neighbourhood was a bombsite from within our own lifetime. When you face the people you mutually respect and care about and they display that level of ignorance about their own immediate environment it’s worth thinking about how you can be more annoyed by that ignorance than by the thousands of dead that he’s ignorant of.
In that case it’s just illustrative of the privilege this guy has to live in Pristina without knowing why there’s a famous monument to Bill Klinton in the city centre. Bear in mind, this guy has a Kosovar girlfriend who lived through the Kosovo War as a toddler. So the reason I try to check myself in the way described above is that I’m horribly aware of the fact that being annoyed in an intellectual way, rather than an ethical way, about these matters expresses the privilege I have not to know: which is one reason I’m motivated *to know* in contrast to some of the privileged people I’ve known.
> But Siskind uses his longwinded style to obfuscate, which is bad.
Especially as he fashions himself to be a science writer.
Reading (and re-reading) works you'd like your work to emulate, along with a dog-eared copy of Strunk & White at hand, would, I think, improve his writing. But first he'd need to concede it needs to be improved.
What isn’t wrong with it?
Good writing, generally, makes it simply, obviously clear what you mean. Scott’s meaning is almost always obfuscated. When this is by design, it’s bad enough. But it’s frequently obfuscated simply because he goes on long tangential metaphors that bear little relationship to his point, if he can be bothered to settle on one at all. This is obfuscation by laziness or self-importance, which is somehow even worse.
I’ll speak to his fictional work Unsong. The character of Dylan Alvarez, who initially seems interesting turns out to be a lame straw man parody of what Scott thinks of white leftists. For someone so eager to “steel-man” right wing views, it is telling that he would ruin what might have otherwise been one of his more interesting characters because he can’t actually genuinely imagine a privileged person wanting to tear down the system. Aaron as a character is boring. The less related characters are to Aaron the more interesting they are.
Some of his short stories are fun on their own, but then he uses metaphors or examples from them in his nonfiction blogging in a way that isn’t good.
Yikes. One minute he’s clarifying what actually happened and
apologizing for what he should have done differently in his interactions
with the reporter, and I’m starting to think he’s a decent guy who got
swept up in something blown way out of proportion; the next minute he’s
literally comparing himself to the martyr who started the Arab Spring
(and condescendingly explaining what that was for people who actively
avoid following the news). And all the while he starts from the
presumption that everyone already knows it’s obviously “doxxing”
(“kicking you in the balls”) to say an online persona’s real name… in a
newspaper’s [blog’s] profile about his rise to fame, for which he
initially agreed to an interview - I mean I could see some arguments for
that point of view in the abstract but it’s not a foregone conclusion,
and certainly not as clearly mean-spirited and awful as what that word
(and “kicking me in the balls”) usually means, e.g. what his apparent
supporters did to Zoë Quinn.
I used to think Scott Whatever was a mostly nice guy who got sucked
into a bad crowd, but he’s working really hard to convince me he’s a
petulant narcissistic asshat. I think this Substack thing is gonna work
out for him just fine.
Don’t forget the comparison to police officers
> I wonder whether maybe if police officers were allowed to write anonymously about what was going on without getting doxxed by newspapers, people wouldn't have to be so surprised every time something happens involving the police being bad.
Not to mention the cop-doxxing that tends to make the news is for cops who used excessive force against protesters or other unarmed people. And I daresay cops sign on for risks of personal exposure and danger when they put on the badge, sort of like when someone voluntarily gives an interview to the most famous newspaper['s blog] in the country, except, you know, more.
> **If** cops could speak with no consequences
Maybe this is my bias speaking, but I have a hard time seeing an American who spends as much time on the Internet as Siskind missing all the cop Facebook groups that get exposed going mask off. Or is he saying that those opinions should be broadcasted to *more* people with *more* protections for the violent racists?
I got the feeling Scott was talking about the good cops blogging (and exposong the corruption in the system), and then not getting fired, and not just the racists.
But... that is my interpretation (the blog he talked about was semicritical of the changes going on with the police as far as i can tell) and not actual text, which is another example of his writing kinda sucking, and allowing the reader to fill in the blanks.
To be perfectly honest I only skimmed the post and didn't see that he had provided a link to a research paper along with this statement. It of course doesn't actually explain his statement, but handwaving in the direction of someone who is actually informed is something of an improvement over his modus operandi.
Maybe if people like Scott read the writings (non-anonymous writings even!) of people of color who have to interact with the police, maybe *they* wouldn't have to be so surprised every time something happens involving the police being bad.
I got an email from Balaji Srinivasan, a man whose
anti-corporate-media crusade straddles a previously unrecognized border
between endearing and terrifying. He had some very creative suggestions
for how to deal with journalists. I’m not sure any of them were
especially actionable, at least not while the Geneva Convention remains
in effect. But it was still a good learning experience. In particular, I
learned never to make an enemy of Balaji Srinivasan. I am humbled by his
support.
important to keep in mind: [Balaji Srinivasan's key achievement in life is setting $125 million of other people's money on fire](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/08/08/balaji-srinivasans-plan-to-save-journalism/). This makes him an investment genius, you understand.
I got an email from a far-left blogger with a similar story, which
got me thinking about socialists in particular. Imagine you’re writing a
socialist blog - as is 100% your right in a democratic society. Aren’t
employers going to freak out as soon as they Google your name, expecting
you to start a union or agitate for higher wages or seize the means of
production or something? This is a totally different problem from the
cancel culture stories I usually hear about, but just as serious. How
are you supposed to write about communism in a world where any newspaper
can just figure out your real name, expose you, and lock you out of most
normal jobs?
So close to seeing the real problem, but still insisting on cancel
culture
I feel like this problem and "cancel culture" are different terms for similar bad things: being fired because your employer doesn't like what you did in your free time, because they think it means you will threaten their business in some way. If it's because you're a socialist, it's because they think you might unionize the workplace. If it's because you said something transphobic, it's because they think they'll get bad press or people will boycott them. Even though socialism is good and transphobia is bad, it's still a very similar phenomenon.
I still don't agree with most of the people who complain about "cancel culture" but the part people describe where some random person loses their job because a big enough group of Twitter users complained about it is an actual bad thing. It makes normal people (and i mean liberals, conservatives, PoC, white people, etc) afraid to talk about anything political in public spaces.
i found it hilarious recently when a libertarian i know (of the sort who not only does the reading, he's actually read his Adam Smith) cycled back to the solution: employment rights!
Apparently if you have a blog about your field, that can make it
harder to get or keep a job in academia
This text has a link as if there might be a study about the
connection between blogging “about your field” and your job security in
academia. The link is instead to a tweet that mentions some
anecdotes of right-wing people who only think they might lose
their jobs if their right-wing views become public
knowledge.
You would think that struggling to find and keep employment with
firms that seem to hate blogs, and getting targeted by a
profit-motivated click-maximizing company, would make scott a little
more sympathetic toward anticapitalists and marxists. You’d think
Apparently this is the first time he's thought about it:
> I got an email from a far-left blogger with a similar story, which got me thinking about socialists in particular. Imagine you're writing a socialist blog - as is 100% your right in a democratic society. Aren't employers going to freak out as soon as they Google your name, expecting you to start a union or agitate for higher wages or seize the means of production or something? This is a totally different problem from the cancel culture stories I usually hear about, but just as serious. How are you supposed to write about communism in a world where any newspaper can just figure out your real name, expose you, and lock you out of most normal jobs?
You mean leftists can be cancelled too? What a shocking surprise!
Ok, so I just found this subreddit and I’m a bit confused.
I’ve never thought about rationality being *bad* in any way, but people do justify their emotions using rationality, perhaps more than I thought. Point is, I see this subreddit’s value.
Anyway, I found Scott a month or so ago and loved the few blog posts I read. I’m not obsessed with it or anything, but I definitely enjoyed reading them. I noticed a post about Scott on this sub painting him in a negative light, so I searched the sub and found you guys really dislike him.
Best I could figure why you don’t like him is because he is right-leaning, has some posts that alt-righters like, he is overly verbose and uses complex language when simple could do, he has some fans of questionable political orientations, he plays the victim, etc. I’m now questioning if his blog is really that good. Either you guys are “crying wolf” (ha) and reading into things too much, or he really is all the things you say he is. I’m wondering what in particular don’t you like about Scott or his blog, and are the differences mainly political, or do you dislike him for other reasons?
Thanks.
He quit his job for the blog, wow that is rough, and also a
commitment to blogging. (And considering the current climate both a
gamble to take, and also putting a lot of trust into that you will have
enough fans to make ends meet, shit im sneering from the wrong side)
Why is he humbled by the support of so many bad people? (And why
doesn’t he reflect on that? But at least Scott apologizes, so good going
there. (Now if only he would apply his ‘no touchy testicles’ logic to
things he casually dismisses (like BLM))).
His socialist story also makes it clear he is so much inside a not
leftwing bubble. This union stuff is pretty basic stuff.
And of course after admitting he did something wrong he goes straight
back into wipping people up for the holy war. I’m sure your readers are
going to care a lot for the ‘strong liberals’ (why don’t you question
the fact that they say strong liberals, and don’t mention
socialists/communists/etc). Source : the cato institute. Ah, right.
He wants to go back to the old internet where you could ‘You could
troll people, you could Goatse or Rickroll them, but doxxing was beyond
the pale’. Well Scott, Welcome to sneerclub. (This is also doing a full
180 from your own stated goals on your own projects. So good for you for
having standards).
Anyway, I do wish him good luck in providing healthcare for 4x less
cost. That is a good project. (And him not allowing blog readers at
least reduces the risk of it turning into scientologylite).
E: via the otherdiscussions tab, where this is also being talked
about, of course themotte, but also a two gamergate discussion boards
(which … still exist, how retro) and a board for ancaps, samharris and
stupidpol. Eugh.
Bonuspoints for the gater with excellent reading comprehension who
posted: ‘Looking at “other discussions”, he’s got a surprisingly large
gushing fanboy following. In particular in /r/SneerClub.’
>This union stuff is pretty basic stuff
The first fucking thing an organizer taught me when I started organizing a union was to make sure the boss doesn't know you're organizing a union until it's too late for them to stop you. Both because they'll crush your organizing outright and because they'll retaliate against you. He can't know anybody even tangentially connected to the Left if he's never thought about this.
There was no review at all!!!!!! Like this is basic, there was no review, the whole foundation of that silly movement is utterly, totally fake.
Doesn’t matter if the developer and the journalist had sex, she gained nothing from it at all!
Apart from a loser ex ruining her life by igniting utter untruthful ugliness that is still around and still influences the views of people like you, of course
“hEr pR tEAm”
indie developer doesn’t have that money you pathetic nolife dork
Turns out the movement that shaped your psyche is fake as fuck and is just misogyny. Log off.
Huh. No mention of his blog and spinoff subreddits serving as a venue
for laundering “HBD” into mainstream respectability. Weird. Maybe he
didn’t want to add any more to his word count.
My G-d he is so self important. Most normal people don’t know or care
who he is. He’s also got a huge persecution complex. “Everyone was
obsessed with me! Doxxing me! Those evil journalists!”
Scott called McInnes a fascist, which is great. But I 100% guarantee
that all the fascist Scott stans will think, “oh, he doesn’t mean
me”, or worse yet, “that’s just Scott doing the Kolmogorov
thing, of course he actually understands that McInnes is cool and
good.”
I got an email from a very angry man who believed I personally wrote
the entirety of Slate.com. He told me I was a hypocrite for wanting
privacy even though Slate.com had apparently published some
privacy-violating stories. I tried to correct him, but it seemed like
his email client only accepted replies from people on his contact list.
I think this might be what the Catholics call “invincible ignorance”.
But, uh, I’m sure if we got a chance to sort it out I would have been
humbled by his support.
and the whole planning-to-write-a-flattering-puff-piece-about-Scott-until-he-drew-so-much-attention-to-it-that-critics-forced-them-to-finally-consider-reporting-another-angle thing
A minor sneer but you don’t have to say “Slovak-language” radio about
the radio in Slovakia. It’s the default and it’s not as if it would be
unsurprising to hear about an American blogger on English-language media
in Europe.
I think Scott's right to specify the language there.
If it were just "grandmother in Slovakia heard a story about me on the radio", I think a lot of people really would assume that it might be English-language radio. The possibility would at least cross my mind. Specifying the language clarifies a potential misunderstanding that could genuinely occur that, if it did occur, would undermine his point (about the reach of the story, as being reported in foreign languages suggests broader reach).
For whomever reported this post: it is not doxxing nor harassment to link to a post where the author publicly states his name.
That this is a new thought for him tells you everything you need to know.
*Scott Siskind
He uses his legal name in this post, so we can quit this farce of pretending his pseudonym is separate from his legal identity.
Yadda yadda yadda. I just want an update to “You Are Still Crying Wolf” in light of Jan. 6th. I want to bask in its glow of ‘well, they were just some kooks who are a minority and not really racist’ ugh just give it to us I know it’s coming.
You misspelled women there Scott, they had a complaint about women.
Scratch the science and I think there’s a point to agree here.
Ah yes, the deliciously rationalist habit of making decisions out of emotion, reflex or personal subjective principles(like all people do), but convincing oneself post-factum that one is, in fact, a superrational god acting upon the world with game theoretic perfection.
I for one welcome Scott Siskind back to the light of day. May we sneer him for many a year!
Okay yeah it totally makes sense Scott Siskind would make a substack.
Rather poor taste to compare Scott Siskind’s own situation to that of Mohammed Bouazizi though.
AFAIK, the ‘big reveal’ of any expose—insofar as there was going to be one—wasn’t going to be about Scott Siskind, but rather the dangerous strain of pseudointellectual idiots that suckled on Scott Siskind’s teat over the past decade.
Anyway, let the Scott Siskind grift begin.
I just want to note that this is a classic Scott post:
Paints himself as the victim
Creates a vast overarching narrative that is more fiction than reality
Scott is the classic example of a writer who is so good at his craft that he can’t distinguish his narrative from reality.
did he really structure the entire post around the cake song from portal?
did he?
Yikes. One minute he’s clarifying what actually happened and apologizing for what he should have done differently in his interactions with the reporter, and I’m starting to think he’s a decent guy who got swept up in something blown way out of proportion; the next minute he’s literally comparing himself to the martyr who started the Arab Spring (and condescendingly explaining what that was for people who actively avoid following the news). And all the while he starts from the presumption that everyone already knows it’s obviously “doxxing” (“kicking you in the balls”) to say an online persona’s real name… in a newspaper’s [blog’s] profile about his rise to fame, for which he initially agreed to an interview - I mean I could see some arguments for that point of view in the abstract but it’s not a foregone conclusion, and certainly not as clearly mean-spirited and awful as what that word (and “kicking me in the balls”) usually means, e.g. what his apparent supporters did to Zoë Quinn.
I used to think Scott Whatever was a mostly nice guy who got sucked into a bad crowd, but he’s working really hard to convince me he’s a petulant narcissistic asshat. I think this Substack thing is gonna work out for him just fine.
uh
So close to seeing the real problem, but still insisting on cancel culture
ugh you fucks made me learn his real name
This text has a link as if there might be a study about the connection between blogging “about your field” and your job security in academia. The link is instead to a tweet that mentions some anecdotes of right-wing people who only think they might lose their jobs if their right-wing views become public knowledge.
You would think that struggling to find and keep employment with firms that seem to hate blogs, and getting targeted by a profit-motivated click-maximizing company, would make scott a little more sympathetic toward anticapitalists and marxists. You’d think
He quit his job for the blog, wow that is rough, and also a commitment to blogging. (And considering the current climate both a gamble to take, and also putting a lot of trust into that you will have enough fans to make ends meet, shit im sneering from the wrong side)
Why is he humbled by the support of so many bad people? (And why doesn’t he reflect on that? But at least Scott apologizes, so good going there. (Now if only he would apply his ‘no touchy testicles’ logic to things he casually dismisses (like BLM))).
His socialist story also makes it clear he is so much inside a not leftwing bubble. This union stuff is pretty basic stuff.
And of course after admitting he did something wrong he goes straight back into wipping people up for the holy war. I’m sure your readers are going to care a lot for the ‘strong liberals’ (why don’t you question the fact that they say strong liberals, and don’t mention socialists/communists/etc). Source : the cato institute. Ah, right.
He wants to go back to the old internet where you could ‘You could troll people, you could Goatse or Rickroll them, but doxxing was beyond the pale’. Well Scott, Welcome to sneerclub. (This is also doing a full 180 from your own stated goals on your own projects. So good for you for having standards).
Anyway, I do wish him good luck in providing healthcare for 4x less cost. That is a good project. (And him not allowing blog readers at least reduces the risk of it turning into scientologylite).
E: via the otherdiscussions tab, where this is also being talked about, of course themotte, but also a two gamergate discussion boards (which … still exist, how retro) and a board for ancaps, samharris and stupidpol. Eugh.
Bonuspoints for the gater with excellent reading comprehension who posted: ‘Looking at “other discussions”, he’s got a surprisingly large gushing fanboy following. In particular in /r/SneerClub.’
Why do people concede that the shady review that supposedly started GamerGate actually existed?
That review never existed!! There was no Depression Quest review on Kotaku at all, GamerGate was always unvarnished misogyny!
Oh my God he actually charges 00/year for a subscription. What is the supposed benefits that he’s offering for that?
Huh. No mention of his blog and spinoff subreddits serving as a venue for laundering “HBD” into mainstream respectability. Weird. Maybe he didn’t want to add any more to his word count.
Well, thanks, now you’ve ruined Jonathan Coulton for me.
My G-d he is so self important. Most normal people don’t know or care who he is. He’s also got a huge persecution complex. “Everyone was obsessed with me! Doxxing me! Those evil journalists!”
Scott called McInnes a fascist, which is great. But I 100% guarantee that all the fascist Scott stans will think, “oh, he doesn’t mean me”, or worse yet, “that’s just Scott doing the Kolmogorov thing, of course he actually understands that McInnes is cool and good.”
genuine lol
It’s like being crushed by a boring avalanche
never not relevant
NYT DID NOTHING WRONG
A minor sneer but you don’t have to say “Slovak-language” radio about the radio in Slovakia. It’s the default and it’s not as if it would be unsurprising to hear about an American blogger on English-language media in Europe.
Just came here to read all you losers’ whining about someone who is better than all of you in just about every dimension.
I was not disappointed.