So here's the thing that's gonna blow your mind: I don't have to agree with FemFreq to think that the GamerGate swarm's behavior toward them is fucking unacceptably horrid and that it's because they think there's room for video games that don't cater to young white males. Though the people involved would be called "friends of friends", I only very rarely agree with the second-order conclusions that FemFreq makes and I think their politics in particular around violence in media are profoundly weird and wrong. I have no beef with Mortal Kombat, and I own MKX. I've met Zoe Quinn probably half a dozen times and I don't really care for her schtick or even the games she makes (though I'll give her credit for Crash Override, I think that's a good idea). I think Brianna Wu is kind of personally odious and is being as vocal and visible as she is to help raise her own profile. I think Shanley Kane is kind of a bully who wants people to feel bad at least as much as she wants things to change.

But all of that--yes, literally (who), all of that--is secondary to this: on the big, important things, they're right. American culture is profoundly racist and sexist and video game culture is worse than average. Games are built largely to pander--not even just your average "catering"--to young white males, and even as a young(-ish) white male that kind of sucks. This is something we should talk about. This is a real thing.

What isn't a real thing is the straight-up fiction told by Eron Gjoni that led directly to destroying a woman's life. What isn't a real thing is the catastrophic misreading of a couple of articles about the sublimation of "gamer culture" (what a joke) into the mainstream. "'Gamer' is meaningless because everybody plays games" turned into, in the minds of some very scared and very small people, "fuck gamers they're dead." The request for more representation in games permuted somehow into "no representation for people like us", even though there's literally (who) no way on God's green earth that video game publishers would not still and forever cater to that population. "Some people who like games and make games hang out with and know some people who like games and write about games" turned into ethics in games journalism, while, all along and completely unmentioned, IGN et al, with their million-dollar ad spends (not necessarily corrupting, but a sort of bias that none of the GamerGate talking heads mention), and the straight-up YouTube payola schemes (you know, actual corruption) have gone unmentioned, almost certainly because they aren't "anti-GG".

So even setting aside the bad behavior that overwhelmingly comes from one side of the aisle, we are starting at a position of fundamental reasonableness versus fundamental unreasonableness.

Some of the people involved are people I would characterize as extremists, others to a large degree just bad actors. And if the criticisms actually were "FemFreq makes stuff up for attention," I'd probably honestly be partly in agreement. But it's not, it's really not. In the heart of hearts of the people doing this shit, it's that women and minorities are elbowing their way to the table and the specter of loss of relative privilege is scary so we'd better fight back and the only way we know how to fight back is to try to make them give up by making it not worth the damage to their lives.

The fact of the matter is this: you lose when you start trying to hurt people. You just do. That, in the rhetoric you don't actually care about, there's a point to be considered actually and truly stops mattering when you are attempting, as a group, to hurt people in a concrete and tangible manner. A GamerGater being socially shunned for his retrograde bullshit is not the same as a normal person being forced from her--invariably her--home because of death threats toward her and her family. This is not the False Equivalency Zone, and you will find no takers here.