So, over at PZ’s bastion of idiocy, he pointed out that he had run afoul of the scourge of the internet. A neck-deep bog of misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and every other label he and his crew can think to pile on those who do not toe the party line. Skipping right over the part where disliking something is a phobia, you may be asking yourself what this perfidious den of evil was… Normally, I would hesitate to even type the words, but for your own safety, I must tell you: online gaming.

Yeah, I know. His first mistake was to think that playing WoW makes him a fucking gamer and gives him any acquaintance with the actual world of gamers. May as well call himself a gamer because he plays Angry Birds and Farmville. So, super-nerd that I am, neck deep in nerd pastimes of all sorts, I make the insane decision to wade into that shitstorm and try to explain to them the difference between bigotry and trolling. For some reason, anyone who calls someone a fag as an insult clearly thinks of homosexuality as wrong, despite the fact that in the same sentence, they carefully explain how often they fuck your father. Must be one of those self-hating fags, I guess. Somehow, the idea that a person would use whatever words get a reaction regardless of what they actually are is so alien to them that they cannot even understand what I’m saying. Somehow, by explaining to them what they are dealing with, I have also become a misogynist, bigot, etc.

They cannot grasp that in the world of gaming, “bitch” is gender neutral. “Bitch captured the flag!” tells you nothing about the sex or gender of the person that did it. Of course, rather than admit that they were beaten on that point, they twisted the argument to pretend that by using the word “bitch” as an insult, I was somehow a men’s rights activist. Never you mind that it was actually someone else’s example initially. That person, being one of the True Believers, was immune from such accusations… but what do you expect from people who are so hardwired into tribalism that they thing if you half-agree with someone on one thing, then you are allies and guilty by association, and that if you actually agree of three or four, you must the closest of compatriots and BFFs.

Interestingly, that’s not really the meat of my post here, though. Everyone knows what that festering den is like. Read on for the actual point: Read the rest of this entry »