From time to time the gender issue comes up on gaming blogs, usually fueled by booth babes or female avatars wearing string bikini "full plate armor". The posts are usually trolled with insane amount of sexist comments. If you are dumb enough to participate on any non-moderated forum or chat, you shall expect sexist, racist, anti-semitic, homophobic and similar crap. Various feminist, anti-racists and similar organizations call to arms against the rampart sexism, racism and similar activity with little effect. It seems the "internet culture" is beyond repair.
I think the reason of failure is that the starting point is wrong. The troll leaving sexist, racist, homophobic message is not sexist, racist or homophobic. Neither he is a troll. He is an idiot and a loser.
In Hungary, you can't see a political post without comments about "Galician trespassers". It's a codeword for jews. The phenomenon is the favorite starting point for anti-racists to cry racism in the major media. They have funny charts counting how many idiots commented about "Galician trespassers". I have a much more effective solution to the problem: I ask the commenter where Galicia is and when the "trespassers" arrived to Hungary. I've yet to get a single correct answer. They usually say
To be racist, sexist, homophobic, one must have some kind of philosophy. One that is based on ideas, misinterpreted, generalized or simply false facts, but still, a set of ideas that are not logically conflicting with each other. To be such person, you have to be a thinker, even if a bad one.
The ones we encounter aren't thinkers at all. They just picked up some code phrases "jews control the world economy", "women want to take our jobs", "muslims are terrorists". They have no idea what they say or why they say it. They just do because they need some group to look down.
You can't convince them that they are wrong, since they aren't convinced that that they are right. The words they say have no importance to them, they don't believe in the genetic inferiority of women or blacks or jews. The words they say are just tools to say what they mean: "someone sucks even harder than me". They can't say "X sucks harder than me" since it could be disproved. But a distant and large group like women or jews perfectly serve the purpose.
The feminist or anti-racist trying to silence these statements has no hope to win as they are battling with code-words ignoring the meaning. To silence them, you must answer to what they mean and not to what they say. The proper answer to "women are good for nothing but sex" is not "no they are equal people". The proper answer is "you are good for nothing". I managed to silence several "racists" simply by asking how the jews removed them from their jobs. They soon disappeared after the questions got into the direction where they had to answer "I don't have profession as I did not finish school". Those who were dumb enough to answer became laughing stock after revealing their lack of qualifications to get any decent job.
This also answers why games themselves are generally more accepting than unstructured social spaces: if a player rants about anything, someone will surely dig up his stats for a good laugh. So in a game he would naturally get the right answer (you suck n00b) from other players, without them even thinking about the importance of their answer. His reason for posting that sexist/racist rant was to belittle others to look better but got belittling responses, so he stopped.
The short version is: any competitive environment where a loser can be belittled (or even better, pwned) naturally weeds out the "someone suck more than me" posts that usually look like sexism (women suck more than me) or racism (blacks/jews suck more than me).
PS: I'm obviously not thinking that there are no real sexists or racists. However they don't comment idiotic nonsense, they write thought-provoking posts that need serious thinking to counter. They are thinkers who are wrong, not morons.
The blog has been updated with table of contents, see it next to the goblin face!
Wednesday morning report: 60.0B (1 PLEX ahead, 1.6B spent on LCT, 0.1+0.3 on Rorqual)
I think the reason of failure is that the starting point is wrong. The troll leaving sexist, racist, homophobic message is not sexist, racist or homophobic. Neither he is a troll. He is an idiot and a loser.
In Hungary, you can't see a political post without comments about "Galician trespassers". It's a codeword for jews. The phenomenon is the favorite starting point for anti-racists to cry racism in the major media. They have funny charts counting how many idiots commented about "Galician trespassers". I have a much more effective solution to the problem: I ask the commenter where Galicia is and when the "trespassers" arrived to Hungary. I've yet to get a single correct answer. They usually say
- east of Romania (that's Moldavia) after the first World War
- North-Italy or north of Italy (that's Dalmatia) when Mussolini got into power
- Spain with any random year number (these guys just hit Google but unfortunately the first answer isn't the one they should look for. Same for Wikipedia, the correct answer is at the "Galicia (Eastern Europe)" link)
To be racist, sexist, homophobic, one must have some kind of philosophy. One that is based on ideas, misinterpreted, generalized or simply false facts, but still, a set of ideas that are not logically conflicting with each other. To be such person, you have to be a thinker, even if a bad one.
The ones we encounter aren't thinkers at all. They just picked up some code phrases "jews control the world economy", "women want to take our jobs", "muslims are terrorists". They have no idea what they say or why they say it. They just do because they need some group to look down.
You can't convince them that they are wrong, since they aren't convinced that that they are right. The words they say have no importance to them, they don't believe in the genetic inferiority of women or blacks or jews. The words they say are just tools to say what they mean: "someone sucks even harder than me". They can't say "X sucks harder than me" since it could be disproved. But a distant and large group like women or jews perfectly serve the purpose.
The feminist or anti-racist trying to silence these statements has no hope to win as they are battling with code-words ignoring the meaning. To silence them, you must answer to what they mean and not to what they say. The proper answer to "women are good for nothing but sex" is not "no they are equal people". The proper answer is "you are good for nothing". I managed to silence several "racists" simply by asking how the jews removed them from their jobs. They soon disappeared after the questions got into the direction where they had to answer "I don't have profession as I did not finish school". Those who were dumb enough to answer became laughing stock after revealing their lack of qualifications to get any decent job.
This also answers why games themselves are generally more accepting than unstructured social spaces: if a player rants about anything, someone will surely dig up his stats for a good laugh. So in a game he would naturally get the right answer (you suck n00b) from other players, without them even thinking about the importance of their answer. His reason for posting that sexist/racist rant was to belittle others to look better but got belittling responses, so he stopped.
The short version is: any competitive environment where a loser can be belittled (or even better, pwned) naturally weeds out the "someone suck more than me" posts that usually look like sexism (women suck more than me) or racism (blacks/jews suck more than me).
PS: I'm obviously not thinking that there are no real sexists or racists. However they don't comment idiotic nonsense, they write thought-provoking posts that need serious thinking to counter. They are thinkers who are wrong, not morons.
The blog has been updated with table of contents, see it next to the goblin face!
Wednesday morning report: 60.0B (1 PLEX ahead, 1.6B spent on LCT, 0.1+0.3 on Rorqual)
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