Chaos: "Bro, it isn't my interpretation. Words have meanings. Again, I don't know why you give this huge leeway to Sarkeesian when literally any other person on Earth would not get so much charity as to just redefine words on a whim, and then to have you put on a performance to justify the use of them."
Do you even read my posts? I called bullshit on this assumption of yours. Sarkeesian explained herself. EXPLICITLY. There is no room for "But that's not how this word is MEANT to be used!". If you can find an example of me contradicting this logic in another argument, I'm all ears.
Chaos: "Let's use hodj's argument about Christianity and the holocaust that will never fucking end, because why not? Did he say "Christianity encouraged the holocaust?" Because if he did, that would be wrong. Did he say "Organized religious institutions encouraged the holocaust?" Again, would probably not be correct. I think you would be hard pressed to find evidence that the Catholic Church outright offered an incentive for the Nazis to burn Jews. Because, as you well know, encouragement is a specific word that requires the offer of reward or other enticement to action."
You're making 2 mistakes here:
- You're conflating the "encourage" argument with the "causes misogyny" argument. The Holocaust example was related to the latter.
- You just keep repeating typical uses of "encourage", as though any of that contradicts Sarkeesian's EXPLICIT explanation what she was talking about. I get it: it doesn't matter to you how she explains herself, whereas to me that matters tremendously. If she made her point clear, it is literally completely irrelevant whether or not you think she used the wrong word to do so. When I took you through what Sarkeesian said line by line, it was to establish that her point was clear and unambiguous. If that doesn't count for anything to you, then I guess we're done on that point. We're just going around in circles otherwise.
Chaos: "Did Christianity cause the holocaust? No, because Christianity is a nebulous concept with a different meaning to everyone who even knows what the word is."
What? No. Christianity didn't "cause" the holocaust because there is no direct cause-and-effect line between Christianity (the organization, the belief system, whatever) and the Holocaust.
Chaos: "Did Christian institutions "cause" the holocaust? Yes, unequivocally, the Catholic Church gave support and encouragement to the Nazis that allowed the holocaust to happen."
What? No. Christian institutions didn't "cause" the Holocaust because ALLOWING DOESN'T MEAN CAUSING. Words have meanings, Chaos. There is no direct cause-and-effect line between Christian institutions and the Holocaust.
Chaos: "If I were to say "the catholic church contributed to the holocaust" the difference between those two statements is really meaningless."
How often did you have to repeat that to yourself before you convinced yourself it wasn't nonsense? CONTRIBUTING TO something is not CAUSING SOMETHING. ALLOWING something is not CAUSING something. WORDS HAVE MEANINGS. Unless you've got some explicit context or an explicit explanation that would lead us to interpret these words unconventionally, you're STRONGLY contradicting yourself here.
Chaos: "Nothing has a sole cause, my morning shit has multiple causes and influences. We, as learned peoples of the internets, can probably just all agree on this right now. So when I say "GTA caused misogyny among the youth of America" you can be pretty sure I don't mean "GTA is the sole cause of misogyny in America".
Jesus, really? So now, just like your "there's no such thing as implicit encouragement" statement, you're going to look me in the eye with a straight face and say "There's no such thing as 'X causes Y' because, implicitly, we always know there's more going on than X". No, dude. Just... No. Mushrooms cause me to fart. Humidity causes me to sweat. Traffic causes me to stress out. There IS a direct cause-and-effect line between X and Y in these cases. "GTA causes misogyny" is a gross oversimplification of an issue that can't and shouldn't be reduced to provocative sound bites. In fact, fuck it: If you're allowed to say that encouragement can ONLY be explicit, then I'm going to go ahead and say that "X causes Y" can ONLY be used for simple, direct cause-and-effect relationships. If you can find me examples that prove otherwise, I'm all ears. Otherwise, you're full of shit right now.
Chaos: "But if I say "GTA encourages misogyny in America", you can similarly divine that I mean GTA has created an environment that entices or rewards misogynistic behavior. You, as a studied video game historian, know that is not the case." You know that actions against women in these games, specifically the helpless background sex workers, are specifically discouraged. So since you know this, if I were to say "GTA encourages violence against women and/or misogyny" you would call me dishonest."
You're conflating 2 arguments again, AND you're not making it clear whether you're talking about in-game behavior or RL attitudes. I've said everything I have to say about your problem with "encourage", so I won't retread. But if you said "Sexualized, vulnerable female NPCs appearing in numerous popular, modern games contribute to an atmosphere where misogynistic attitudes are more likely to develop, here's a study that suggests this to be the case", then no, I wouldn't call you dishonest. Why do you need to come up with inapplicable hypotheticals when we have Sark's actual stance?
