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Comment by ChrisClark | Hacker News Reader

What the fuck is wrong with these GamerGate idiots? Is it a mental illness or something?

You see behaviour you dislike and don't understand and you can say either "they are unpleasant people" or "they are unpleasant people and they have a mental illness".

Probability tells us the first is more probable.

This is the conjunction fallacy, and you need to address it because stigmatising people with mental illness causes those people harm, and doesn't help address the actual problem (which is that some people are arseholes).

>>which is that some people are arseholes

A lot of people who are assholes aren't actually assholes, but suffer from a mental disorder such as asperger's syndrome. By lumping all of them under the offensive label "asshole" I'd posit that you are the one stigmatizing them.

Regardless, I think the question we need to ask ourselves is this: what is it about the gamer community, and specifically the "GamerGate" sub-community, that attracts such people? And what can we do about it?

> A lot of people who are assholes aren't actually assholes, but suffer from a mental disorder such as asperger's syndrome.

You have nothing to support your claim that many assholes have asperger's; nor the converse that many people with asperger's are assholes.

I used to volunteer for an organization that helped people with mental disabilities. One of the primary symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome is a demonstrated lack of empathy for other people, which makes social interactions very difficult.

This is one common reason why someone with Asperger's can come across as an asshole: they are literally incapable of understanding how their behavior will hurt other people's feelings. For example, 15-year-old suffering from Asperger's can come to you and say, "that shirt makes you look really fat" and in their mind they're just making an innocent, normal statement that they think is helpful (i.e. you should wear something else tomorrow), but from your perspective they're being a total dick.

So when you come across an asshole, you should ask yourself: are they willingly hurting other people's feelings (i.e. intentional disregard) or are they totally unaware? After having worked with people with mental disorders, I tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

I don't have any hard evidence that the GamerGate community has a disproportional number of people with Asperger's (or similar disorders) compared to the rest of the population, but it does seem to have a disproportionate number of people who come across as total assholes. That's how I connected the dots.

As someone who has been diagnosed with aspergers syndrome before:

The problem with this line of thought is that it's quite possible for us to atomize and quantify the causes of assholery. That doesn't make the people involved any less jerky.

For any human flaw we can probably put the person in question under a microscope and diagnose the exact causes, but the behavior is still hurtful and offensive. I guess the point of your comment is that the people doing the hurting might be innocent in the mens rea sense, but I think that's a fairly high bar of charity towards people who use tactics like SWATing and obviously enjoy the pain of their victims.

Moreover if improvement is possible, you won't get it by not holding people accountable for the things they say and do.

All boobacks are red.

Are all red things boobacks?

You see assholes, and you say they are probably people with Asperger's, even though of the two statements:

"this person is an asshole" and

"this person is an asshole, and also has Asperger's"

the first is more likely.

It's nice that you give people the benefit of the doubt. It's not nice that you slur people with Asperger's by saying that assholes are likely to be people with Asperger's.

EDIT: Specifically, there are many people with Asperger's who are appalled by the hateful idiots in GamerGate or the worst bits of 4chan, and who really dislike being associated with them.

I'm not saying that assholes are "probably" people with Asperger's, or that assholes are "likely" to be people with Asperger's.

I'm just saying that, before we lash out at people we perceive as assholes, we should ask ourselves whether they are willfully being assholes, or simply can't help it.

edit: apparently this is a controversial statement. Consider this: our justice system distinguishes between criminals who commit crimes willfully, and those who do so due to a mental illness. The two are treated differently. I'm saying we need to do the same in our social interactions.

I understand how you were just trying to make a point, but it just doesn't make any sense.

You say that "people who are assholes, aren't assholes". Well... are they or aren't they?

Then you say that they may be suffering from Asperger's and that the commenter above is lumping them together.

The issue with this argument is that the commenter above took problem with the other commenter about saying these perceived assholes have a mental illness, and how that negatively impacts those who actually have a mental illness. Your argument (metaphor?) is that by saying someone is an asshole is lumping those with Asperger's in, when Asperger's wasn't even mentioned.

Regardless of how your metaphor didn't actually make any sense, you then go on to say that "GamerGate" sub-community (what does that honestly even really mean???) attracts 'such people', implying that GamerGate is full of people with Asperger's. Then imply that something needs to 'be done about it'.

What is wrong with people with Asperger's? Why are you picking on them?

Read my response above. I'm not "picking on" anyone.

Diagnosing your opponents with mental disorders is precisely what Stalin did.

Test

Additionally, what's wrong with FreeBSD? I'd like to hear their take on this.

Because while I'm generally highly sceptic of this "everyone needs a CoC now!", the alleged reaction by Core goes much much further and is simply astonishing.

Maybe someone needs to explain to them that freedom of association includes freedom not to associate. "His harassment was outside our mailing list" is not a good reason to decline any action.

I love FreeBSD! I have a GitHub record to show that! :3 It's my sweet little darling angel. But it's sick. :<

We need routes to ensure safety and respect for everyone. If someone makes others feel endangered, it is not unreasonable for there to be immediate recourse and resolution. That's what a Code of Conduct is all about.

My problem with Codes of Conduct is mostly how to write them.

The Swing dancing scene had a big scandal this year, and everywhere CoCs are popping up.

But do you really need to write down that an adult (quite old, in that case) dance teacher is not allowed to sleep with just-teenage dance students? Or that racist remarks are not welcome?

No, so you adopt very broad language. Usually something like "harassing", "making uncomfortable" etc.

If your community needs those two sentences to police such behaviour, you've got a much bigger problem.

I simply don't believe that you can convince anybody to take action because some very broadly written CoC authorizes them to do so. They either see that the behaviour is a problem, and are willing to act, or they will just start to debate whether the CoC's specific wording is really covering the behaviour in question.

Then again, I have zero practical experience with policing a community.

Damn! Missed midnight. :-)

I mean, we do, evidently, have a much bigger problem in the open-source community. It would be nice if we didn't, but there's no easy way around it.

So there are really two options: one, hope the community stops existing or stops having influence (unlikely), or two, accept that, yes, we do need to spell out every little detail about behavior as if people don't know appropriate behavior on their own.

Nobody advocating detailed codes of conduct particularly likes the fact that they are necessary. But how you feel about the situation that led up to them doesn't really affect whether they are in fact necessary.

There is no community, just a mob, if there are no shared values WRT behavior. On the other side there is no justice system if the system is defined based on one persons feelings while ignoring the survival or existence or basic human rights of the other participants. Two sides of the same coin of lack of a community. You can't just sweep up a mob, an almost randomly selected jury, call it a community, and assume it'll work like an actual community. You'll just get anarchy, some will provide intimidation, some will provide legalistic supremacist totalitarianism, most will watch the drama from the sidelines and shake their heads and hope neither side rises to power.

So your answer is not to have enforceable routes for women to be safe and respected because nobody can write specifically enough?

I run an organization (hypatia.software [Hypatia Software Organization]) where the Code of Conduct is enforced and it is effective.

No, my answer is to have a community where you ban those people without discussing the semantics of some sentence.

In the end, it's probably equivalent to your answer. Because when the people in your organization feel someone is harassing people and you decide to kick him out, you're probably simply describing his behaviour and referencing your CoC, but not doing some detailed analysis how and why he did so.

Yeah, it's just that it is sad that it is practically required to be spelled out. But even bigger yet, is that we have to find ways to enforce it and its purpose.

As somebody who has experience moderating groups without explicit rules - the result of this in a group of more than a dozen people is inevitably that some of them will feel that (a) the banning is unfair, no matter how egregious the behaviour, and (b) there should be a set of written rules for the leaders/moderators to follow, so that people understand clearly what is expected of them. You really can't win.

Personally, I tend to steer on the side of a broadly defined CoC backed up with a very clear dispute resolution policy (there's plenty of examples of both of these - Debian has a pretty decent set for large projects). In a functioning community, reaching for this should only be required very rarely, so they shouldn't affect anyone most of the time - and they quite obviously don't in the case of open-source projects, or we'd hear about actual cases where people have been kicked out of projects for very little a lot more than we do.

Can you give some references to problems that existed in your organization before the CoC, and to what extent the CoC procedures have demonstrably helped?

>If someone makes others feel endangered

That's a bit stretching it basic threat, management is to judge each threat agent by the level of intent and the ability to act on that intent for the most part the usually aholes don't pose any actual threat. I also don't understand why some one being an ahole for a specific reason is worse than some one being an ahole just for sake of being an ahole, we all had our nemeses over the years people that you just don't click with that do everything in their power to get to you - outplay them, ignore them or move on.

If there was a priest who was homosexual, and involved himself with gay-pride rallies on his own time, would you say it is acceptable for the church to excommunicate him since he had "freedom not to associate" with the group?

If don't feel that disallowing personal thinking is good for society.

I also feel that it is possible for people to agree on some topics while disagree on others. Guilt by association should not be the measure we use to judge people. I'd say it is very unlikely that the person who "attacked" Harper also supports the "legalize rape" comment from RooshV.

In my opinion, attempting to draw a connection between RooshV's legalize rape comment and the person the article is about is a slanderous tactic to automatically make him "the enemy" with no evidence. This seems evident when you notice there is no source for any of the tweets made to Harper. This is contrasted with the readily available links provided to support deplorable comments made by RooshV.

Harper makes statements like "He started enlisting the support of his neo-nazi friends." which are obviously being used to create an us/them dichotomy for the reader. "I'm not a horrible racist like the Nazi's, that means I must hate this person who must be a Nazi." the readers would think to themselves.

I have no doubt that some of the content in this article is correct. I am just taken aback by the lack of sources provided, the attempts to slander the "opposition" and the wording of the piece. Being well read on the past of Harper, I would say that the claims have merit, but were blown entirely out of proportion.

I'll happily, and publicly, eat my own words if someone can source proof for her claims. I have no objection to recanting any of this.

> the lack of sources provided

Sources are: emails between myself, core, and the FreeBSD Foundation. I'm not providing those. A phone call with the FreeBSD Foundation, which I did not record and will not provide.

I could mention the names of the people I spoke with in FreeBSD, but why? I could provide the tweets of the guy I spoke about, but to what end?

I'm not going to name names. People can find a way to dig it all up if they really want to, but I don't want this to turn into a "this person is terrible" type thing. It's not about him, and I don't want a mob going after him or any individuals inside FreeBSD. That wouldn't be right, and it would detract from the point in writing about this at all.

Instead, I hope people talk about the issues of harassment and legal shadiness regarding trademark claims.

> I could provide the tweets of the guy I spoke about, but to what end?

To provide credit to your claims, otherwise what you are doing is defamatory.

>Sources are: emails between myself, core, and the FreeBSD Foundation. I'm not providing those. A phone call with the FreeBSD Foundation, which I did not record and will not provide.

Sadly, none of that is verifiable from an outsider perspective.

>Instead, I hope people talk about the issues of harassment and legal shadiness regarding trademark claims.

This is the only thing I can claim to have an educated opinion on. Any entity who owns a trademark has the rights to ask you to stop representing their likeness. By using "freebsd" in your name and actively participating in politics surrounding the open source/FreeBSD community, you are representing their likeness and in this case you are not protected by fair use.

For example, I can't make a twitter called TacoBellGuy and post about food related politics. If Taco Bell got upset with me, I'd have to change my name. Very clear cut.

I've consulted a lawyer. You are incorrect.

Randi's accusation about actual gamergate participation in her recent freebsd ordeal consists entirely of:

"GamerGate hopped onto all of this."

No claims of gamergate people actually doing anything, just hopping.

It's a natural alliance between people who want to cause a reaction and people who react to anything.

It was pretty much inevitable that these two groups would become the Middle East of the Internet.

What does this have to do with GamerGate? This is a feminist talking about an MRA, neither of those things are GamerGate...

I feel like you have conflated the issues a bit maybe?

She has, like a lot of women, been harassed by GamerGate. They actually sent a police SWAT team to break down her door (which they didn't).

http://blog.randi.io/2015/04/03/swated/

She's been viciously attacked in Breitbart, a far right-wing site that championed GamerGate's hounding of women in tech.

She also created a useful tool to block GamerGate hate attacks on Twitter. It's the sort of thing a lot of women could use.

http://europe.newsweek.com/one-womans-new-tool-stop-gamergat...

Basically, any women in tech who can be targeted will be targeted by Gamergate because that's what they do. GamerGate is basically a rentamob of misogynistic thugs. It's toxic.

(Whether it's just misogynistic thugs exploiting the GamerGate label doesn't really matter. To all intents are purposes, they are GamerGate now.)

There was quite a good BuzzFeed story on the larger picture of what's going on.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/in-2015-the-dark-for...

"She's been viciously attacked in Breitbart, a far right-wing site that championed GamerGate's hounding of women in tech."

How about you give links to these "vicious attacks" so people can actually look at them and make up their own opinions, it's not like they contain any proof that anyone is a serial harasser:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/06/29/harping-o...

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/07/23/freebsd-c...

I went back and counted, there are 6 mentions of GamerGate (not including the tag) and all of them are anecdotal references by FreeBSDGirl. In fact, the primary article in question (the guy that wants to legalize rape) doesn't mention GamerGate at all, or even remotely allude to it.

P.S. Thanks for the downvote rather than a reply. It really shows your willingness to talk about issues and not just jump to conclusions...

The guy that wants to legalize rape and the person the article is mainly about are not the same person.

Maybe I need to read a bit better. I don't deny that they are different people, but I guess I thought the linked article was more important than just a side comment.

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