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Comment by MrDom | Hacker News Reader

especially in the company of the people who usually inhabit this website.

It gets easier to understand when you realize most of us were bullied as kids. It becomes a natural instinct to herd together and protect our own. It's less because some of those people have media connections and more because those media connections happen to be people they consider friends and loved ones. At that point, emotional bias takes over.

Or, to put it another way, if somebody told you your mother was a murderer, would you believe him, no matter what evidence he presented? Even if he had a video of the event, it would be easier for you to believe that the tape had been doctored than for you to believe this person you loved could do something so terrible. At least it would be for me.

I'm not excusing it, mind you, just explaining it.

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Thank you MrDom, I partially agree with you, some antiGGers that are in full force here at HN really don't want to hear the truth and gang up against those who challenge the damsel-in-distress that the likes of Sarkeesian (who's a front for Jonathan Mcintosh), Chelsea Van Valkenburg (who currently calls herself Zoe Quinn) and that odious John Walker Flynt guy (who calls himself Brianna Wu right now) dish out. As you have seen very clearly, nobody has been able to provide a shred of evidence in defence of Sarkeesian (Mcintosh), Van Valkenburg and Flynt. And they knew that they have been unable to do so.

Given how central HN is to Silicon Valley, I suspect that at least some of the participants in this discussion are more than innocent (if naive) bystanders and actively sabotage any investigation into the licentious relationship between games companies and game journalists: whenever anyone dares to mention that something untoward has been going on, they automatiaclly and habitually scream: misogyny, harrassment, bullying. And it works well on the mainstream level: the damsel-in-distress trope sells really well with normal guys. But it doesn't work with everyone, like myself ... leading to angry downvoting.

I'm sympathetic to GG, but that name stuff is too close to dox for my taste.

I actually had to look up what doxxing is! I realized I had never gotten a proper definition. Doxxing refers to the practice of investigating and revealing a target subject’s personally identifiable information, such as home address, workplace information and credit card numbers, without consent.

I suppose you could argue that exposing frauds is a form of doxxing, but so could whistleblowing. I think there is a line to be drawn[0], but their names? How do you talk about the key players in a scandal if you can't use their names?

[0]: That guy who took a picture of Zoe's work place and posted it on twitter was over the line, for example. Then again, Zoe posted Mike Cernovich's address on twitter and encouraged her followers to swat him.

I think it's not worth talking about them at all - IMO the journalist reaction to the scandal is most interesting. There's still no disclaimer on Nathan Grayson's articles and guys like Devin are playing 'See No Evil'.

But when we must talk about them, we can use their public names and get along fine. Getting their former identities doesn't help people who want to clean up journalism, it just helps dig up background dirt.

In what sense is using people's real names problematic? When I'm calling the US president Barak Obama I'm doxxing him? Maybe it's a generational thing: when I was a child we still had this thing called telephone book, where you could look up every adults address and phone number.

All this shows the ridiculousness of the charges the Van Valkenburg and Flyns of this world are making, then the gullibility of their followers.

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