GamerGate is Now An Actual Hate Group

The GamerGate “movement” has continued unabated since I first covered it here last month. Since then they’ve spread their vitriolic nonsense to other women in game development and even women geek culture celebrities who have dared to suggest that perhaps the game industry should recognize women as an important part of their audience. They’ve also expanded, with no trace of visible irony, to threatening people who claim that they threaten people. In the process they’ve become not only literally but officially a hate group. And despite all this, they still hide behind a claim that their real concern is “ethics in gaming journalism”, a concept that’s been a joke since Nintendo Power first hit the newsstands in 1988. And while it’s tempting to ignore them, to not “feed the trolls”, silence is complicity.

Remembering Susan Truitt

On Oct. 11, 2014, the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism and The Free Press held a celebration of the life of Susan Truitt. This is an edited version of remarks made then by Peter Peckarsky.

 

Susan Truitt and I were co-counsel in the Ohio Supreme Court contests of the 2004 elections of both a President and a Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court.

Susan Truitt was a force of nature, a very intelligent sparkplug with an outstanding spirit and a truly outspoken attitude. Mincing words was something Susan left to others.

She was also an extraordinarily devoted mother of three wonderful children who meant everything to her, an accomplished competitive equestrienne, a golfer, and a lawyer whose legal ethics were certified as beyond reproach in an opinion by the same Chief Justice she tried to remove from office.

Election Proposals Were the Hot Topic at Debate on City Charter Issues

Columbus City Charter Issues 6, 7 and 8 were the subjects at an Oct. 6 debate sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Metropolitan Columbus. But the matters in dispute at the public event, held at the Whetstone Branch Library, involved only Issue 7. If approved by the voters on Nov. 4, Issue 7 would change Columbus’ procedures for citizen-initiated ordinances, referendums, charter amendments and recall elections. .

Michael Curtin, retired from The Dispatch after 38 years and now a state representative for District 17 in the Ohio House of Representatives, was pitted against Jonathan Beard, president and CEO of the Columbus Compact Corporation. Beard is also chair of the Columbus Coalition for Responsive Government, which in recent years has made several tries to place initiatives about city issues on the Columbus ballot.

NSA and FBI make a 'Bullrun' to resurrect vulnerable encryption

Edward Snowden was not cleared for the details of this program. He revealed it's existence nonetheless. The program is called BULLRUN and it appears to have been going on for a very long time. Snowden's 2013 revelation of it in the New York Times does not appear to have slowed it down. In fact, it appears that the NSA and FBI have retreated to a more comfortable controversy from the Clinton Era, complete with technology from the time period. Remember the Clipper Chip? Like Vanilla Ice, it endlessly returns from the 1990s, growing worse each time. However, the Director of the FBI never suggested the American public should be forced to listen to “Ice, Ice Baby” over and over again.

Nostalgia for the secret programs of the 1990s apparently is not confined to X-Files re-runs. During the Clinton Administration, the NSA was greatly concerned that the average person or company might soon be able to have government grade encryption not easily breakable by them. The SKIPJACK algorithm, codenamed and commonly known as CLIPPER for audio and CAPSTONE for data, was their solution. The method, and it's patent, were classified as secret but not top-secret, until 1998.

ONE MY LAI A MONTH

“When somebody asks, ‘Why do you do it to a gook, why do you do this to people?’ your answer is, ‘So what, they’re just gooks, they’re not people. It doesn’t make any difference what you do to them; they’re not human.’

“And this thing is built into you,” Cpl. John Geymann testified almost 44 years ago at the Winter Soldier Investigation, held in Detroit, which was sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “It’s thrust into your head from the moment you wake up in boot camp to the moment you wake up when you’re a civilian.”

The cornerstone of war is dehumanization. This was the lesson of Nam, from Operation Ranch Hand (the dumping of 18 million gallons of herbicides, including Agent Orange, on the jungles of Vietnam) to My Lai to the use of napalm to the bombing of Cambodia. And the Winter Soldier Investigation began making the dehumanization process a matter of public knowledge.

Reflections on the destruction of Vets Memorial this Veteran’s Day

“This Veteran's Day, Columbus taxpayers might want to reflect on the desecration of Vets Memorial and the rip-off of the government money designated for local veterans' well-being,” said combat veteran John Dreska.


If you're counting, here's the latest round of funny numbers that are killing Veterans Memorial. In one of the most fiscally irresponsible decisions in Franklin County history, the Commissioners will now spend nearly $10 million to demolish the structure and prepare the site for a new building. They are also giving away 12 acres to developers. Also, they've pledged a subsidy to cover operating deficits for any new facility built on the site.

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