I will recognize and acknowledge something else - I'm glad (though surprised) that people feel insulted when being shown to follow patterns.
There wasn't really very much going on "behind the scenes" here. I've read the article about how people (declaratively hate but) are attracted to outrage and are bored with (though voice approval of) reason. Then I've read the comments here and noticed a post basically saying "lol tl;dr :D". Lo and behold - instant empirical evidence to back up the claims from the article. I've responded in a way that highlighted this. I expected the person quoted to become curious, read the article, notice the pattern, rejoice. For some reason - this did not occur.
If you could elaborate on your point, I would appreciate the feedback.

After giving it a bit of thought, the answer is (as it mostly happens to be with broad and vague questions) "it depends". I adore reading, for example, Lovecraft. I like to play different games to experience variety, to have a taste of everything. This is the reason I might play this whole "Hatred" thing (if it doesn't turn out to be a disappointing mess). I haven't really seem a title like that before...
When it comes to interactions with people, things get a bit more complicated. In general, I think, if a person is TOO different, communication and understanding become impossible. If a person is too similar (doesn't really happen in reality!), I guess the conversations would get boring... Personally, I don't really like too much variety. I prefer people similar to me. I also vastly prefer the company of women over men... go figure ;P. The thing is - I'm already QUITE different from other people. I can find common ground in things, but even then my personality and way of thinking and expressing myself tend to surprise others.

He never said that the people arguing are stupid. His claim was merely that sensationalism breeds conflict and radical views. People affected are merely guilty of failing to notice how they are following a treacherous path of hatred and unnecessary division...

I'm so glad that I got a chance to agree with you xD!
Yes! Absolutely! Sometimes one side is either outright right or (a LOT more likely) nearer the truth than the other.
See this comic strip.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's ignore the message of peace and continue bickering about vidya like there's no tomorrow ^^.
It's the prisoner's dilemma. When it comes to arguing over the Internet, if one side chooses the full-on pacifist route of shutting up and refusing to fuel the conflict further, the other side is given free reign to abuse them with impunity. It's like spawn-camping an AFKer.

No Kasper, but being one of the resident radicals I didn't expect you to get the whole point. :)

A denunciation of sensationalism is neutral in regards to choosing sides. You are perceiving an assertion of moral equivalency on the underlying positions, when the equivalency is only being stated for the tactics employed.

Of course, to me it's very obvious how you consider a few power differentials (economical mostly) as justifying some tactics to be used by the underprivileged side, which you don't think are valid to the privileged side. Hence, when you conflate a call to stop being radical, with a call for you to surrender, that's only a reflection that you know at some level your positions are not as strong, universal, objective, as you would prefer. And instead of listening to the other side and granting them the validity the do have, you are happy to continue to radicalize, via the tactics you find more effective.

As example, I find your rhetoric about negros, jews, witches to be much more sensationalist than one sentence following thousands of words, which actually gives a perfectly valid example of how trenches are formed over the most surprising topics. Not to mention your assumption of the writer's ignorance...

Radicalism is not a bad thing, it just means that something is not under control. That is often necessary. For example: The antifascist resistance were radicals.

Whose control? That's the question. I completely agree that reluctance to trust one's fellow humans with power, and willingness to accept sometimes tragic consequences is implicit in, let's call it, neutrality.

That said, and I've said this earlier, there are actions that justify responses in kind. Tit for tat.

Fascism per se, as political practice, is still very much alive, as government control of the economy, as well police states, abound even today. Whether that in itself requires radical reactions, depends very much on specific circumstances.

Will you two be quiet! I'm sharpening my axe.

Were you being unintentionally hostile? You may not know that it is aggressive to use someone, a stranger, as an example, announcing, "Ladies and gentlemen: ...the average reader..." Despite your best intentions the fallout of blithely judging a person will precede and supersede your highest expectations.

That's all it comes down to. Are you really glad that a person feels insulted when you insult them?


Thank you for sharing a bit about your interests. Despite our differences we are each fundamentally human, are we not? We can acknowledge this underlying foundation when we attempt to communicate, even when sharing differing ideas. Even when beset with strange new styles of writing or thinking we can thusly maintain civility and remain open. In this way we can help each other to recognize the essence of an idea or a person without dismissively tl;dr-ing either. :)

That sounds like a contradiction in terms. It's like asking whether someone was oblivious to being in pain. As long as hostility is taken to be understood as an intentional state, it follows that nobody can intend to be hostile without knowing it. Was I misunderstood as being hostile? If so - why on earth?

First of all - I was correct in pointing out that that comment illustrated the point of the article. I was telling the truth. That aside - is "average" an insult now? I honestly wasn't too deliberate in wording there, because it seemed irrelevant to me. What mattered was pointing out that the theory applies, that we have evidence of it working at our hands. We have a person who acted the way the text has predicted. What is the proper way of putting this into words? More importantly - do you think I should've simply pretended this was not the case? I think there is a difference between pointing out facts and mudslinging.

I didn't insult anyone here. What I'm glad about is related to a personal set of metaphysical convictions, to be honest. I believe that the physical world doesn't constitute a closed causal loop; I'm an indeterminist. If people get mad at being "explained away" as links in the chain of causes and effects, it suggests to me that they maintain a belief in free will. If it angers people, it suggests that they care. This does nothing to prove my position right, mind you. Nothing really can, since we have no real way of testing causality per se...

Just as a footnote - I don't believe we can recognize the essence of a PERSON. Not until they're dead. A person is a process, not an artifact. People aren't this-and-that, they choose so-and-so... It makes labels silly constructs of our language that ossify our evolving understanding into static stances.

Hum... missed the leitmotiv (or "the read thread") in the original text - meaning what the poster actually wanted to say.

My impression was drawing parallels between things that I do not think quite run in the parallel lines, at least outside the US reference frame.

Radicalism to me is butchering school children in a terror attack for example, contemporarily - but so surely was drowning of anababtists (Christian radial reformist movement that rejected infant baptism) in the river Rhein in Basel by fellow reformists.

This is the cruelty and prejudice of the human heart since forever, only that we learn of it immediately across the world, and such acts can be executed with greater lethality due to technological advancement. For sure, lesser, better news and incidents do not make it above the news threshold, unless local.

Source criticality, which I would guess the poster was calling for - not sure if it is more rare as a principle these days than before - but for sure more difficult as tangible day-to-day virtue to execute, with the ease of publishing stuff online, and anonymity that internet affords.

Hmmm... I guess your definition of a radical is heavily informed by the French Revolution? I admit I also think of Jacobins when I think of radicals, yet my sense here was broader. Consider my title choice... Radicalism in media is both political activist bias AND sensationalism, in politics it's power above all and divide and conquer tactics, in ourselves it's black n white thinking and resistance to change. That's not all, but it covers my basics... and connects to what I linked yes? The writer I linked I see as mostly describing a phenomena, and not mostly related to being critical of sources, rather those examples of lack of criticality (I'd say rather objectivity, or even rationality) are shown as symptom of this inherent radicalism (he does not use this word).

I guess you mean as opposite to yourself, who isn't a radical? I kind of liked your OP better - it had this far more constructive "acknowledge the radicalism in yerself" approach:

"Radicalism is not some Moloch, it's us doing individual decisions, like throwing pebbles in a pond.
Please all; more reflection, less reflex, more empathy, less anger, more tolerance, less arrogance."

But sure, I have lots of radical reactions - anger, arrogance, Hatred. And nobody here has seen the worst of me, because I mostly are able to recognize the garbage in my head and stay the fuck off the keyboard.

I think the important thing is your foundation: If your beliefs are progressive, it will be hard for you to develope radical ideas, since they will clash will your basic world view. If you believe in pacifism, you will have a harder time justify violence. If you believe in equality of the sexes ("feminism") you will have a hard time justifying any bias against men/women. If you believe in a hippie-like "all the world as one" idea, you will have a harder time defining specific countries as the axes of evil.

I don't believe in debating with people who has what I personally consider a radical foundation. It is a waste of time - our foundation is different, and we will never find common ground. It just seem like an hollow act where you act like you have something in common, while being being fully aware that you don't.

Also, I don't believe in debate with people who are dishonest. I tried it numerous times, and it just turns into some tactical game where you try to make them expose their real viewpoints. For instance, its rather obvious that the "Zoe Quinn scandal" has nothing to do with gaming journalism, and everything to do with how her and her price winning Depression Quest is seen as a symbol of a larger change in the gaming scene that some Gamers consider a threat.
And I have nothing against discussing the essense of that - if current high-brow trends and the potential dissolvement of the concept of "Gamers" might have some negative consequences. But I'll never get them to admit that this is the core, so why bother?

That said, refusing debate with certain people results in the debate becomming more polarized and aggressive. And that's a problem.

How many times, in how many threads are you going to repeat yourself. You are correct, no point debating with the dishonest like you who feel its necessary to wrongly characterize people and their opinions. All because you can't make them say what you are trying to make them say in order to make them look bad and make your opinion better.

The truth is there are quite a few people genuinely concerned with the issue of how close gaming journalism is to certain developers, how these developers seem to get exclusive positive coverage from their journalist friends in the industry. How some games get 100% or 5 star reviews solely because the game has a "social conscience" and just happened to be developed by a former roommate. How some of these people's activist agendas are influencing the articles appearing in gaming magazines calling the typical gamer a misogynist neckbeard living in one's parent's basement. Maybe the reason you can never get people to admit what you want them to admit, is they are genuine in their concerns. Ever think about that?

Sorry that I brought the GamerGate debate into this thread. I should have used another example. It was more to explain some the reasoning behind my take on that subject, since some folks here consider it "radical".

You know what? I had a post here. A long one. As I thought about it for a while, its content wasn't exactly tough to conjure with only a moment's thought. I'll just leave you with a few quotes and you fill the blanks yourselves.

Sigh, I miss the 90s - when 'radical' and 'extreme' were words associated with the X-Games and Pepsi Max ads and Fun-Da-Mental were a multi-ethnic electro hip hop fusion group
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun-Da-Mental

where as today a 'radical, extreme fundamentalist' is something far less cool, groovy and progressive!

You're looking back at the 90's with rose colored glasses. The 90's were also the decade of the Oklahoma City Bombing, The LA Riots, and the 1993 world trade center bombing. Terrorism, racism, and violence are nothing new.