How dare they! Threatening to destroy Milo’s hair is just like the Taliban!
masterninja @masterninja
They called in 10 fucking bomb threats on #SPJairplay…10! The fucking desperation to uphold the narrative about #gamergateDaddy Warpig @Daddy_Warpig
They are EVACUATING THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
Police not treating it like a hoax.
#SPJAirplay #GamerGate
UPDATE: Milo provides the comments he intended to give before the bomb threat:
I just came off stage at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Airplay conference in Miami, Florida where we were discussing the failure of the press to report on #GamerGate fairly. Multiple bomb threats were called in to stop this event about ethics in journalism from proceeding.
Here are my prepared remarks, only some of which I managed to get to on stage…. Gamers have no social capital. In fact it’s worse than that: everyone hates them. The Right hates gamers because it blames games for real-world violence. The Left now hates them because progressives have come to accuse video games, bizarrely, of somehow being able to make people sexist.
What makes this scandal on the one hand a great story but on the other genuinely tragic and upsetting is that it represents not a culture clash but a kind of geek civil war. The people on either side of this debate are remarkably similar, and closer to one another than either group is to the rest of us.
That’s why it hurt GamerGate and anti-GamerGate to see their favourite celebrities start to pick sides. This was a family argument that became public and then escalated out of control.
But it was a family argument created by bad journalism. Bad journalism didn’t just report on GamerGate in all the shoddy and unacceptable ways you’ve already heard about. Gaming journalism started the whole schism in the first place, by insulting and ridiculing readers and handing its moral compass over to highly questionable people with axes to grind and wacky activist politics designed to divide.
Then it drove a wedge down the middle of its own base of readers by cruelly, and in the absence of fact or justification, calling one side the most appalling names, while credulously, assiduously and reflexively supporting some of the most obviously and ostentatiously unreliable people in the history of journalistic sourcing.
Even worse, the war was precipitated by people who don’t even play, or much care about, video games. Anita Sarkeesian admits, in footage you can find online but she’ll never acknowledge, that she’s not a gamer and doesn’t particularly like video games. That story changed dramatically when she was given space in the New York Times. She suddenly remembered a whole childhood she’d previously forgotten about in which not only was she a GameBoy addict but she was also, implausibly, very much aware of how Tetris was, like, really male-oriented. Or something, who knows.
The people GamerGate calls “social justice warriors” – the feminist activists, bloggers and so on – annoy gamers in part because so few of them really give a damn about gaming. Some call themselves “developers” without having ever released anything of substance. The press doesn’t know, and doesn’t bother to find out, how credible these claims are.