Who are you to say what others can joke about?

Large amorphous groups like gamergate (and yes, feminist groups and organizations as well) all have a few crackpots making threats. I am sure a few will be found, but that does not alter the legitimacy of the arguments made. I wouldn't be so quick to believe what three letter agencies put out either, especially since they are beholden to political bodies with interests in specific outcomes for the sake of image.

..and yet here you are, posting anyway. Thing is, the tempest entered the teapot from outside. Games are just one of the newer fronts on a much larger, ongoing cultural conflict.

I can understand you want the conflict to just go away, but that doesn't mean both sides are without argument and are just assholes.

You forgot to add #ThinkOfTheWomen to your little hashtag list. At least then your posts wouldn't leak your obvious opinion on the issue you claim not to care about.

leftists blame the insurance companies and rightists blame the government. Who to believe, who to believe.. Meanwhile, we all get fucked by a government that caters to the rich.

We have skyrocketing costs everywhere due to inflation from excess federal borrowing and increasing tax that has flattened economic growth. I'm talking about what the healthcare act did on its own. The fact is, my coverage was quite reasonable for the cost until the new system took effect.

Like you, I was speaking anecdotally. The likely reason you've haven't seen any raise in costs is that you and your buddies are insured by your employers. Eventually your future paychecks will feel the hikes, but those of us who have our own plans saw them almost immediately when the new rules took effect. We got notices in the mail that the old plans are to expire by the end of this year. The new ones are 2x the price with almost half the benefits. While I cannot offer proof (and I never claimed to), the correlation between that event and obamacare is pretty damned high. After all, the additional costs for the new rules you mentioned have to be made up somewhere.

I would use some critical thinking and not just depend on 'argument-from-authority' driven 'fact check' sites. They are magnets for corruption. I am not implying that factcheck.org is wrong, but you shouldn't take them at face value either.

Yeah great, until those trusted with the collected output of the citizens become too legally disconnected from them. Then it becomes easier and easier to build a plutocracy that justifies using that resource for other agendas. The USA has this problem already, but the EU is also a prime example, esp with the layers of immunity between the average european citizen and one of these EU unelected committees. The well-meaning leftist reaction to this is to grow the size of the state to regulate the rich, but what ends up happening is that the rich use the expanded powers against the rights of the citizens who lobbied for the expansion. People are starting to wake up to this and are forming parties like UKIP.

ALL democratic systems require a population that isn't too willing to have it shoved up their asses, but unfortunately, the current cultural trend is towards accepting this as the new normal. It's what you're calling 'solidarity.' I'd rather let them have their million dollar villas than have their million dollar villas AND use an expanded state to enslave me financially at my own expense.

That doesn't mean we should quit resisting the trend towards total state ownership.

Your argumentation would work better if it wasn't based on ad hominems.

They weren't. A few women were criticized for their low quality argumentation and/or poor ethics and behavior, however.

There's a big difference to a general attack on women because of their sex and criticisms towards specific women for their actions, which the anti-gamergate side refuses to acknowledge. The former may or may not be misogyny (depends on the motive for the generalization), the latter certainly is not. The rest of it boils down to long term corruption in the media, from supposedly game focused, gawker-owned rags spending too much time on 'social justice' and attacking their readerbase, to the obvious bias in the mainstream media coverage (not that the mainstream media has ever really gotten gaming). Whenever a group becomes this large and amorphous, there are bound to be a few crackpots in the mix (and the feminists are quick to trot this excuse out when one of their group gets a little too blatantly misandric for the good of the their image) who say stupid shit. These comments really shouldn't be taken seriously, but today's media loves to drum up the fear angle by implying that those crackpots make up the majority position and people fall for it. Law enforcement loves it because it gives them justification to demand larger budgets and more unchecked power.

stumblr! = dancing + social(ist) justice!

I'm sure you were referring to the boatloads of white knights defending said groups, dogmatically, out of desire to feel like the heroes they are not, regardless of the evidence presented.

Nope. It's all about the popularity contest such personalities never grow out of.

It couldn't possibly be because they were dissatisfied with the existing situation.

So you say. I find it interesting that most from europe think that americans shouldn't have opinions about places they've never been to or lived in while they drone on about an america they learned about from the leftist propaganda in their own countries. Here in the states, washington DC has managed to concentrate a majority of the wealth. The top 10 richest areas in the country reside there. Since it doesn't have to answer to the market, it can be as lazy, inept, greedy, and bureaucratic as it wants since there's nothing for it to compete with. Obamacare has already made a mockery of itself and foreshadows the future failure of healthcare in the country.

That doesn't sound like a free market to me. Are you sure? Are you including the subsidies in your calculations? Can you opt out of paying for services you don't need? When I am talking about cost, I am not just talking about currency. I am also talking quality and timeliness of service. If the free market results in higher prices then that's because the government was holding them low, which was probably hurting quality of service. The NHS in the UK is a good example. Human nature is universal, so you can't tell me that your own politicians are all honorable upstanding people who never use the state monopoly to their advantage at taxpayer expense.

In the states, health insurance skyrocketed after obamacare forced insurance companies to carry high risk people as well as the 'rights' demanded by special interest 'social justice' groups that the rest of us must now pay for. My own doubled, and that's with lower quality coverage.. For me to get the equivalent coverage it would cost at least 2.5x the price it was last year. This is what happens when a bunch of government bureaucrats insert themselves for a cut in a system that already suffers from too much bureaucracy.

I agree, the right is full of lying bastards too, but what I don't get is why you're willing to overlook all the same shit from the left. Your appeal to popularity is not an argument either. As a general rule, I note the direction the hoards of lemmings the left creates are running and walk quietly and thoughtfully in the opposite direction. It has served me quite well.