1) the core claims of Gamergate have now been shown to be overblown at best

The initial claim turned out not to be a simple quid pro quo. The person who gave the favorable mention of Depression Quest turned out to have been mentioned in the credits for the game, however. He gave a mention to a game he was involved in the development of. This is certainly less headline-grabbing than sex-for-coverage, but I don't think it's any better. Either way it's a tempest-in-a-teapot at that point... but the more people started looking, the more rot they found.

It's clear at this point that there's a group of "gaming journalists" who give favorable reviews to their friends and political allies while giving unfavorable reviews to others on the same bases. And who are contemptuous of gamers, though that's not in itself unethical.

there is no public evidence that any of the claims of harassment or threat at question were fabricated, only speculation

There's little public evidence on either side about threats and harassment. The most well-investigated threat (to Anita Sarkeesian) seems to have been from someone in Brazil who she already knew about and has been threatening her since long before GamerGate got going.

A lot of the so-called harassment is just people responding publicly to statements made publicly. That's not harassment. Dot-mentioning someone on twitter is not "harassment". Making a response video to someone else's video is not "harassment".

Do you really find it hard to believe that these death threats are genuine?

As with harassment, a lot of these so-called death threats don't even fit the form. They count things like "I hope you die" or "Go kill yourself" as death threats, when they're clearly not. Some of these death threats were actually threats and actually happened, but "someone sent me a death threat therefore my opponents are wrong and evil" still doesn't hold together.

"Femenist agenda?"

Are you dense or do you not understand gaming isn't a zero-sum game? You can have a billion more ladies making games and that doesn't mean games like Hatred or Call of Duty are going anywhere.

No one objects to women making games. But who was it who ran a successful campaign to get GTA V pulled from Target Australia because, specifically, of misogyny?

EVERYONE outside your echo chamber ONLY sees harassment and hate coming from people using that name. The name "GamerGate" is synonymous with a hate movement.

GamerGate isn't an echo chamber. GamerGaters do in fact question each others positions and claims. And sometimes find them wanting, as in the case of a pro-GG person who claimed he was physically assaulted and forced out of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend because of his pro-GG stance.

It's not surprising GG has a bad reputation; when you fight the press you can't expect anything but bad press.

No, see, you can STOP F*#^%& USING THE NAME "GamerGate". It is poison. It kills your point. The name was coined as part of the initial hate attacks on Zoe Quinn.

Except that it wasn't coined as part of that particular bit of chan drama. It came up a month later -- coincidentally, just as the "gamers are dead" articles came out.

You don't need basic computer education early. You need basic math education early. You need people to learn the basics of arithmetic early enough that you can move on to other things later, but still before high school -- other things including Boolean logic and alternate number bases as well as algebra, geometry, trignometry, and the usual.

The point of an AP course, in particular, is to get college credit for work done earlier. What college is going to give credit for a course like this? Maybe towards some sort of "Sociology of Computing" degree?

Did they perhaps have OTHER illegal evidence that they couldn't bring to a judge to get a warrant, like a tip from the NSA perhaps?

Computer Science *already has* a massive gender divide. Taking the nerds who are making the topic hostile to women and forcing them into close proximity to the few remaining women is a recipe for a completely gender-based educational program.

If you're going to be anti-nerd, you're going to lose out on most of your best students. It's not mere accident that CS and nerds go together.

And of course as a nerd myself, if you're anti-nerd and consider nerds to be a problem, I'm against your programs; you're just another nerd-despising member of the mainstream, dressing your hatred up in progressive ideology.

I don't know, perhaps you should ask the GP poster, who posited that somehow, anybody showing enthusiasm is being "shut down by the professor" who is "cruelly rebuking them" by telling them "Let's talk about this item of common interest together after class, rather than distracting everybody in the class with topics that aren't relevant to the class."

Which actually seems like a pretty nice way of putting it, if you ask me.

Not "anybody showing enthusiasm" Specifically "guys" showing enthusiasm. Nobody but you (assuming you're the same AC) said anything about Hadoop or Erlang or any other irrelevant subject during a lecture about C; the language of the course was Python in any case.

And what the enthusiastic guys were told was "You're so passionate about the material and you're so well prepared. I'd love to continue our conversations but let's just do it one on one." This was a _stock_ answer, so obviously not a sincere invitation but rather merely a politely-phrased rebuke.

You are absolutely correct. African Americans are the ones who chose to separate from American culture. When the US Constitution was written, African Americans volunteered to be slaves and quite vociferously demanded that they were only as 2/3rds of a person.

Can always tell a knee-jerker on this issue, because they've heard of the 3/5ths compromise but they don't know which side was which. Bonus points for getting the number wrong though.

But people who follow your line of reasoning will be almost entirely those who would have acted that way anyway.

Game theorists?

If one group is going to define things as "us vs. them" and make the categories immutable, members of the other group have to play along or be at a disadvantage.

Do I unreasonably stereotype you? Then perhaps you should consider whether you do that same thing to others.

Hmm... let me consider that...... considered. No, you're just an ass.

It seems to me that if we are truly one nation of Americans, we as a nation have a collective responsibility to ensure that nobody gets left behind.

Does not follow. There's always going to be winners and losers, even if there are no racial, ethnic, or gender schisms dividing them.

If we are one nation, then the onus is upon every one of us to do all we can to help undermine the barriers that keep a group of Americans, simply through accident of birth, from achieving social parity.

Unfortunately there's a prisoners dilemma here. If one subgroup chooses not to identify with the nation but only with themselves against another subgroup, they gain an advantage. The other subgroup can neutralize this disadvantage only by reacting in kind.

So, given that white men (or more specifically cis-white-hetero-males, though for the purposes of CS Asian males are included as well) are the target of various "social justice" initiatives, and in fact are now suffering for it (note the gender disparity in college admissions), it makes sense for white men to NOT be concerned with boosting the groups who have labeled them the enemy.

Then what's a better term for "people descended from people who were natives of North and South America in AD 1491, who had their land forcibly taken from them in European invasions from 1600 through 1900?"

Losers?

Because that is all that matters right? 'Merica. And really only the East Coast of 'Merica.

Because that was the claim of various alarmist predictions about anthropogenic climate change made after Katrina. If they've made predictions about Asia, I hadn't heard them.

(For those keeping score, since 2005, the year of Katrina, the number of major hurricanes hitting the US mainland stands at zero. No doubt it will go up again at some point, and anthropogenic climate change will be blamed).

It's been a while since a cat 3 made landfall on a US shore, hasn't it?

As the old joke goes, "Shhh.... that's the climate census. They think they're alone here".