I thought I was reading an apology letter from one ignorant... or rather, from one unthinking person-in-the-public-sphere-who-is-very-sorry to another unthinking person-in-the-public sphere-who-is-very-sorry, and I was sort of touched because it reminded me of that one time in middle school when I thought it would be sooooo funny to be ironic about Columbine (and got rightfully suspended for it). But after clicking the link to Max Read's article I realized that this is actually an article about Gamergate. This is a fake apology for making an ironic tweet with the foregone conclusion that anyone that participates in Gamergate is a bad person, and leaves no room for talking about the original subject matter at all.

I believe this is a leaf node in a directed graph of self-legitimizing Gawker articles ultimately designed to rebrand the "Zoe Quinn Five Guys" incident as "Gamergate" and shift the focus off of Zoe Quinn and her colleagues and onto "gamers", whoever the hell they are. And that's fine by me, Gawker, Zoe, Sam, Max, Anita, Phil Fish and the rest of them should be allowed to say anything they like.

So if you'll indulge my off-topic wanderings, I want to talk about the original subject matter, because it still bothers me after all these months: why did moderators across a bunch of sites actively participate in censoring the Five Guys story in its early days? Do Zoe and Gawker have a bunch of ties to these moderators? Should I be worried about a secret, incestuous network of journalists and moderators that no longer just post stories in their favor, but actively suppress stories that cast them in a negative light? Who curates the conversations I participate in?

Sam Biddle and his colleagues at Gawker do not have my sympathy. I saw the banning and post deletion as it happened, and I'm mad about it. Maybe he should apologize for that instead.

This pamphlet seems way over my head.

Let's see if I can summarize this correctly: I have no choice but to be a cubicle-bound wage slave, and no choice but to only love others as part of a couple, and no choice but to go to a supermarket instead of growing my own food, and no choice but to elect one of two bad politicians...

what's "putting life in common?" There seem to be a lot of phrases and code words here that I'm not parsing fully.

I guess what I've always been looking for from the Occupy movement is the idea of what they want the world to look like, and I've been having trouble imagining it. This article helps a little, but I'm still not seeing it.

They didn't have shit. If they did, they would have released something instead of bragging about it and making themselves a target.

So in problem number 8, you're proposing that anyone who has an account on reddit.com condones CP? There are a lot of people who didn't even know about it until SRS and Gawker started pointing it out, myself included.

Wait a sec, 52 days ago? You weren't around for when SRS's project panda started up and succeeded in cleansing reddit in the name of the glorious BRD...

Reminds me of the Anita Sarkeesian harassment incidents. It seems like these days the easiest way to piss off a bunch of guys on the internet is to tell them that somewhere a woman disapproves of them.

EDIT: upon further reflection, I realized that the message these guys must be hearing is "you aren't allowed to court women", the implication of this being that they'll never get laid, find a girlfriend, marry, or otherwise get to enjoy the company of women. Given that message, I understand the angry responses, but that's not the message she's saying.

Or maybe these guys are just sick of "american women." I hear that a lot from various guys, that "they're extremely picky and that it's hard to make traction with them." I don't know how true that is, I need more data to figure this thing out.

Couldn't this be construed as threatening to assassinate the president?

There's something all four men (the Secure Father, the Purse, the Handyman and the Personal Assistant) have in common: they are all slaves, defined by what they can do for this woman, and not by who they are or what they enjoy doing.

Why did I read this.