SPECIAL NOTE: Brianna Wu is running for Congress in Massachusetts. We’re looking forward to having the first ever Fannish Caucus created for Congress. Brianna is looking for support from progressive democrats (and anyone else with half a brain). Here’s her bumper sticker linking to her campaign site. Amazing Stories editorial department fully endorses her campaign.
SOCIAL
TSA Now Wants A Record of What Books You Are Readng (Remember when the feds tried that with the libraries?)
The President Wants To Know How You Have Voted*
ENTERTAINMENT
Improbable Botany’s crowdfunder is still going strong. Read an intro to the project and an interview with one of the authors.
Valerian Coming on Strong (Looks like pulp space opera hack work…)
INDUSTRY
Sarkesian and Mob Harassment (via File 770)
Real disasters of biblical proportion
New Release: The Longest Day (Ark Royal X)
SCIENCE
In the year of 17, in the days when lands were many
Space Corps! (Anyone named Tom Corbett, Rocky Jones or Captain Video are shoo-ins!)
According to the President, No one had any idea how big infinity was….
*SHORT EDITORIAL COMMENT: Every time we read this request, all we can picture are people being rounded up based on voting record and party affiliation. There are cattlecars in the background.
For a more objective view of Sargon vs. Sarkesian, check out this link from Tim Pool
EDIT: link removed because the yapper suggests that what was done at the convention panel was a normal and customary attempt at holding “a conversation”.
link removed for the reasons stated above
Citation please. All Sargon did was sit at a panel. Pretty sure that ain’t a crime. If anything, Polygon is the one peddling lies to support an ideological narrative
You’ve already referred to one good source. Further, the link to that source is already provided in the news item.
Here is Vidcon’s public statement on the subject: The entire statement can be found here: https://medium.com/@VidCon/vidcon-debrief-e6bb4e187a28
Who’s Harassing Whom?
VidCon has a tagline, it’s “For people who love online video.” But, of course, in addition to celebrating, this event has also always been about confronting difficult issues our community faces. It is openly known that women on the internet are subject to far greater amounts (and intensity) of harassment and abuse than men. This is a pattern and it’s pervasive. Running this event, we have to be aware when a creator has potentially dangerous harassers or stalkers, and our list for our female creators is a whole lot longer than the list for male creators.
That’s just one reason why we had a panel called “Women Online” featuring women who had received a variety of kinds of abuse, from repeated sexual advances to stalking to years of targeted harassment.
There is a fairly prominent genre of social/political commentary on the internet that focuses on specific individuals as a path to attack ideas and build outrage. These creators do not violate harassment policies, but the result is often that the vitriol of their followers ends up focused not on ideas, but on people (usually women.)
Many people in these communities end up believing the righteous thing to do is threaten, harass, and dox the thinkers they’re arguing with. Whether or not this is an intentional strategy to cultivate harassment or an awful side-effect, the result is some of the worst discourse and most intense harassment on the internet.
This year, we had a contingent of attendees (some who paid, some who snuck in with fake passes) who had been either perpetrators of this harassment, or had, for years, watched as the outrage they cultivated resulted in followers doxxing, harassing, intimidating, and even threatening the lives of the creators on these panels.
It is difficult to imagine that this group of people (who are aware that their channels have been base-camps for years of harassment of some of our panelists) did not realize that their arriving early to fill up the three front rows of a panel was going to be intimidating. In any case, it looked like intentional intimidation to most people in attendance, and the panelists were understandably on edge throughout the discussion.
During the panel, a panelist called out one of the audience members for being someone who has made her life very difficult, and wished she didn’t have to give him attention because he was a “garbage human.” Look, we don’t want our panelists to insult our audience members, even when we completely understand that the comment exists in a much broader (and pretty messed up) context. Even when people have said hateful things that everyone in our office disagrees with, we have a policy, and it exists not just to protect people at the show, but to protect our ability to have these conversations.
Our founder, Hank Green, talked with our panelist and said two things:
He told her that her comment had violated our policy, but that he understood that there was a broader context (which to be clear, we were blissfully ignorant of until this weekend, and remain inexpert in.)
He apologized to her for not having been more aware of and active in understanding the situation before the event, which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for.
We agreed that she would go forward and continue on as a panelist on a later panel.