Zoë Quinn accuses Night in the Woods developer Alec Holowka of abuse

I know that, but what Hassat said was "probably got abused falsely just for getting press", not "had previously been a victim of abuse". That's an important distinction, and it couples with their use of calling him a 'mental patient'.

Funnily enough I was actually discussing that tweet you linked at length with someone on the first page of this thread a few hours ago.

There's no clear indication that said abuse was caused by Zoe, or unrelated previous cases in his life, or refering to the hatemob.
I was refering to "accuse" but in my sleepriddled (it was 3AM when I learned this) wrote the wrong word. Sorry.

Ah, no worries. I've made plenty of mistakes when making posts at late hours.
I think there was also a slight language barrier aspect too, because usually 'mental patient' refers to more severe issues or disorders that mean a person can't properly function without an assistant or a care-home of some kind. Though when english is not your primary language that can be a very subtle difference in wording (I took a peek at your steam profile, because your english is strong enough that I can't tell just by looking at it).

I like the general philosophy of "believe victims," in the sense that the best reaction to these situations is to offer support to the people coming forward, but never to harass anyone on either side, including the accused. That way, even if an accusation turns out not to be true, you're letting other victims know that they'll be supported if they come forward, without potentially hurting someone falsely accused.

(Which I think is generally unlikely, given the statistics and how much victims have to lose when coming forward about rape. But even in the case of a true accusation, piling onto someone to harass them wouldn't help. Two wrongs don't make a right.)

Anyways, you sound pretty exhausted. It's easy to get sucked up into drama like this, but it's important to remember that it doesn't affect you personally and you can step away at any time if it's making you feel crummy. I hope your gaming session helped. Take care of yourself. <3

I thought it was because of Jeremy Soule being accused of rape by Nathalie Lawhead and Aeralie Brighton. I've never played Skyrim, so that didn't shake me quite as much, but I follow Lawhead's work and I was sad to hear she'd been through something like that. (I hadn't heard of Brighton before, but apparently she's worked on Minecraft and Ori.)

Do you have a source on the doxxing / bullying thing? I googled 'Helldump' and only learned it used to be a subforum on Something Awful. Being part of a place with a bad reputation and engaging in the worst of its reputation are pretty different (see also : 4chan, etc).

It's not much of a guess, it's the only possibilty. She had a lot of popular moments where the media claimed her as a good person that fight against the injustice in which she could have easily said what happened to her multiple times. But she didn't. Maybe she was uncomfortable, or like some abuse victim she was scared of talking about it...except that it's not plausible knowing what she did in the past.
I am stating it as a fact because the other dev already apologized a long time ago, and there was no reason to say all this stuff in a public site like twitter. It was clear what she wanted, if what she said was true and I am mistaken about her intentions, that would mean she would just have gone to the police, or made things clear to her group of friends. But no, she did it on Twitter. You know why.

I didn't say she deleted her twitter because she wouldn't be sued if she did, but she did it because she feared being sued and wanted to avoid as much people telling her what person she is. I said "as soon as she heard that she could be sued for instigation to suicide she deleted her twitter " because her plan backfired, you read too much into it to find a wrong statement in my discussion. Also there could be more evidence in there that would go against her, but I don't really know since I don't follow her on twitter, and this is just a baseless claim, only this part only tho.
Also I know she won't be sued, that would be pointless too because the child who scream wolf usually doesn't usually get punished in this modern society, and her sister and group of friends are pretty much feminist so...she will be not be punished like the kickstarter money she took, the lie claims she did, and all the other horrible stuff she did, she knows how to avoid backlash.

I know how blacklist works, and I tell you it was not because of giveaways, but only for spite. If they checked my account they would know I'm not into winning games and this site in general for a long time, but whops they didn't, they only saw my opinion.
Also that whole last statement that may be correct in theory, but in practice we have to take a stand on important matters. Empowering accidental falsehoods is something that was done the whole gamergate scandals because everyone started covering for Zoe Quinn and she didn't get what she deserved, even on 4chan she got covered. if you want to prove me I "could be on the wrong side of justice", then prove it with facts, and not with general stuff you can use in every other situation to cover someone's ass.

While blacklists aren't important per se, they show how much there are many people that go against common sense just to defend their ideals, so it's very sad to see this many blacklists flying. I even got blacklisted from Uroboros that defended blacklisters with "eh they could do it for stopping you to enter their giveaways only and not because of the discussion" but I don't even enter giveaways anymore since I just use this site for checking free games and he knows it. So yeah, there are a lot of hypocrites here that would say anything to defend anyone even if it goes against what they do, just to prove a point.
But you know what's important? Spreading the truth, showing what true colors a person has, because if you don't speak up in times like this, more people will just believe that everything that Zoe does is right and will do it themselves when they have the occasion, or defend her with buts and if making her get away with it. If you get 10 person to hate you for what you say, and 1 person to think "hey...he may be right" then you're already doing something good.
Of course if you convince someone of something bad then it's the other way around, but on the topic Zoe it's hard to go wrong.

Well, people who support Zoe Quinn tends to support cancel culture also. Blacklists are a huge part of their authoritarian ideology.

That is not how abuse, abusers or victims work. Being abused, or hell, even being raped, does not immediately default in people going to the police, no matter how rational and obvious that may seem. The weird thing about trauma is that it can effect your judgement by introducing a severe emotional response. and if you are already not a very confident person, doubts can very easily win out. Even if the person who abused you doesn't have status that will cause extra scrutiny (eg : "Does this person stand to gain something by accusing this person?"), there is the immediate questions of how much you can prove. The police have to go on evidence, and unless you literally stand up and walk straight to the cops within a short period after a rape, the evidence is frequently inconclusive. In the case of Zoe, how do you prove that someone is financially manipulating you to remain at a property that they can't just deflect with reasonable doubt? How do you convince someone that the sexual contact within a relationship was non-consentual, or that you are only in the 'relationship' by name only, because you are afraid to challenge the other person on it (either physically, or due to the trapped situation you find yourself in?). It's similar to what I said about Alec, as much as I wanted to hear his side of the story I had previously said that I couldn't imagine what he would say that could be convincing to anyone who had pre-established opinions. Any version of "I didn't do it" would fall flat, and the only real counter with weight is "Zoe is a liar", or perhaps the more patronising version which is "Zoe has the wrong idea / misinterpreted it" which may have the opposite effect of pulling him even more surely into the crosshairs.

The abuse paradigm is nasty in that everything a victim can say, so too can an abuser. While a victim may be genuinely trapped in a situation due to financial / social manipulation, an abuser can also claim the same things to project guilt upon an innocent parter who did no such thing. As I mentioned before, hard evidence is an unreliable metric as it places a massive burden upon whoever the actual victim is, as anything cited without a reliable array of witnesses or extensive live recordings can be waved off fairly easily. Hell, as a child I got to watch the dissolving of my parents relationship in which my mother was largely the abuser, but my father gradually became a 'volatile' participant after extended emotional/mental abuse. The mechanics of these such things, particularly where it is not a pure victim/abuser role, where there may have been some give and take or even if the roles reversed after one snaps, gets so muddied that even where one party may have an honest case for going to the police, it is not even remotely that simple. I've read articles of people trying to go to the police, and how it was severely mishandled (and how they swore that if they ever got raped again, they wouldn't even try the police).

And yes, while there are obvious repercussions for revealing (or fabricating, depending on your stance) what Zoe did, that is not necessarily her goal. It is entirely possible to want to talk about something you buried, without caring about how much it may hurt the other party, whether it is considered a bonus or a side-effect. And intent is a massive part of this, IMO. Yes, her remark about not wanting Alec to be attacked could easily have been a simple ass-covering token gesture. People in such situations make them all the time. I am well aware of that. Your assumption that I am simply so naive as to have believed it without scrutiny shows just how easily an opinion can form a convenient narrative. My point is that what can be attributed to hostility can just as easily be attributed towards a volatile person being hamfisted. If you survived a shitty situation like that, you may not necessarily wish harm, but you wouldn't give too much of a shit about whether they were effected or not. Even if you did wish direct harm, if the founding event occured as described then such bitterness is not out of the question. We can draw all the narrative conclusions we want to, but the fact of the matter is that we don't know Zoe, and assuming malice is the easy option. We can acknowledge trends in honesty, we can be mindful of character witnesses, we can factor in what they stand to gain, but nothing is conclusive. I said before, even 'bad' people can become victims, and even 'good' people can be doing things behind closed doors. Patterns can be compelling, but we cannot pretend they alone are conclusive.

I have my own opinion on the matter, but I'm doing my best to suspend it in a weird kind of stasis because at the end of the day, we only have assumption, and there are already very loud and active hatemobs in action. Where matters of volatile people with histories of bad relationships are concerned, conventional logic on the course of actions doesn't always apply. Just as every fucker keeps chanting "if it was real she would have gone to the police", but people with actual experience with abuse know how that is far from an iron-clad rule. If you operate from the assumption that everyone acts in a grounded, rational way befitting a high-functioning person with solid self-esteem, then you are overlooking the simple variable that not everyone is at that level. Scarred histories cause a lot of behaviours and attitudes that do not make sense to those who haven't walked a mile in those shoes. I feel that's a very important thing to keep in the forefront of our minds before being swept into it. Each voice, no matter how muted, lends momentum. Perhaps that is just my own opinion, but I see the velocity of things and am loathe to risk adding to anything.

Am I just committing my own logical sin and in the presence due to the shadow of the hate-mobs? Am I leaning too heavily towards 'agnostic poverty'?

The language barrier seems to be cropping up again, so I'm going to underline it just for clarification :
You said Zoe "started" GamerGate. Being the target of a hatemob does not mean you 'started' the hatemob, or even that you did anything worthy of the mob response. If my memory serves me right, the only thing Zoe did was cheat on someone. While that's definitely a shitty act, it doesn't justify total strangers gathering in the hundreds to specifically target them and then continue to escalate, and it certainly didn't justify the length of time their actions continued to occur. While some slices of GamerGate then tried to move on to criticism of gaming journalism, its constituents kept returning to that subject over an extended period.

Criticism? Fair game. Projections of 'sleeping around for review scores'? A stretch, but whatever. We're external to the situation and we only had her wronged partner / ex as narrator to that effect. Harassment? No. Just no.

Yes, she did sit on the info for a long time, but she stated that she brought it up after reading about someone else abusing their position of authority within the gaming industry. Deciding to not to speak up out of some sense of respect for an old issue or whatever, that's entirely optional but not at all required. If Alec did what she said, then she is free to come forward with it whenever she wants to. Yes, this does once again hinge directly on the veracity of her claims, but the simple fact she chose to speak out at all doesn't make her words untrue. It only meant that she didn't care about the backlash it would cause. Yes, the goal could have been to sabotage his career or smear his reputation or cause harassment, but that's purely down to guesses and projection. Victims are not responsible for the wellbeing of their aggressors, whether present OR past. Unless someone is suggesting she deliberately timed her reveal to coincide with a particularly bad time in Alec's life in a genuine attempt to hurt him, it doesn't seem what you're saying has merit. It's a completely different matter if what she said was exaggerated or outright false though, but we shouldn't default to 'guilty' as a default assumption.

Interesting. I stand corrected then.

I don't think you'll find anything redemptive in how Zoe has acted publicly. People might argue she is hurting the movement she's supposed to represent more than she's helping it. I'm not sure if Zoe's or Alec's failings need to be publicly scrutinized as it has at this point. Clearly, there's a failing in how these things were handled. I don't believe that Zoe deserved the hate she was getting at the height of gg (on the opposite side of the fence, I will also argue the same for Alec - the only person/s he owe an explanation / apology to is the people he abused and whatever communities he was part of), but part of me also thinks that any support she received might have empowered her in a way that no one intended. Maybe it's also the way we handle celebrity in general that's the issue here. The public discussion around this as a whole needs a lot more nuance and understanding

(I'll respond to your response on me when I get on my PC. Tablet isnt great for big posts)
On this one though: Agreed.
It's odd people want the full story, they GET the full story then they cry he's terrible for bringing out the full story. Like, seriously? Mindless hatemobs all around on all sides, it's terrible. I hate this world. So much confirmation bias all around, rational thinking thrown out the window.
I, for one, am happy to hear this side, and will wait a few days on other news that may e changes it, read NitW on my wishlist.
Still don't believe a word of Zoe's story though.

The story Zoe told was full on physical though. Rape, kidnapping, the fingers thing.
There may have been others that "spoke", but just to Scott, nothing public. These people made no accusations, just Zoe. So we have to go with her 'story' as to the charges. Only till this story came out we got other things mentioned, which do not seem to collaborate with the initial accusation made.
But having this many parties all with their own stories does make it hard to discuss. I see a lot of it on the Steam forums where people talk about Scott's experience and Zoe's accusations criss-cross in one topic and then the responses get tangled, it all gets a mess and in the end you just got people shouting at each other about entirely different things than they were even talking about. Fortunately that does not seem to have happened here so far, as far as I can tell.

I agree with your assessement about "finding a better way of talking about these kind of situations, addressing them, and holding the people who committed the abuse accountable" which we might have gotten if Scott's story came first, but with Zoe's first it instead turned into this twisted game of 'true or false' with all sides being angry at each other and having no conversation. And in the end, nobody learns nothing.

Also, once again, agreed with the last part. I haven't even heard anything at all about the 3rd accusation done that day, and Nathalie definitely got the worst possible "support" ever for her case with this.

The quote is
"When it came to women, it turns out he often wanted something in return from them, perhaps more than they would or could give him. It was a cowardly way of approaching relationships. Childish. Abusive. And when he didn’t get what he wanted, he dropped them and their game dev dreams by the wayside on his way to find someone else."
I see how it can be read the way you say it but myself I am not fully convinced relationships in this sentence is actually meaning romantical or sexual relationships, more akin to working relationships. Maybe I misread it or misinterpretate it too, that can be a thing. Especially seeing how this is how all the other working relationships worked as well and 'something' is pretty vague. But yeah, perhaps done intentionally to make it seem less offensive.

I think the "feel responsible" was something Scott said he did on a personal level due to his own past wounds, and not something specifically in effect for others. But yes, you're right on the lashing and threats. There's that.
But from Scott's words, as I read them here, the biggest attack on his psyche was the abandonment and left to fend for themselves on working on the game. Which is also Alec's fault aswell, hence basing my words mostly on that since others might not be so receptive to threats but everyone would suffer from a loss of work and income over a project that'll never come to fruition.

unfounded

That depends on what actually happened. Even where there is exaggeration or character assassination in play, there can be a founding degree of truth. It does repaint the picture with severe doubt and can erase some of the claims she made, however in hostile relationships it's not unusual for people to deliberately project a sense of normalcy to mask what's actually happening (re: the controlling stuff). Consider : In past generations, a beaten spouse would have a story handy for how they acquired substantial bruising, and may even spread the story ahead of people actually witnessing the damage to make their cover more believable (mentioning it over the phone to someone even if you may not be seeing them soon, just in case, etc). Now in the digital information age with its frequent social media usage, I wonder what kind of patterns migrated over to the new format.

Don't get me wrong, as I said before, Quinn is a volatile person so pinches of salt need to be kept on standby, but I'm loathe to discard everything so quickly. The nature of the subject and our position as observers means everything we go on is tenuous at best, and controlling-type abusers (mindful or otherwise) are adept at stacking things to look a certain way. And yes, I do realise that also applies to Zoe. That's more the point. Though thankfully I had more luck discussing this stuff in this forum than I did trying to talk down the people launching at Zoe/Alec on twitter, heh. That was real ugly.

Just as Alec was known to be a volatile person, his sister confirmed it was because he was abused in the past, and fell prey to the whole "the abused becomes the abuser" pattern, but he was fighting it and trying to be mindful. Those he has hurt (or perhaps just scared) have every right to be angry / worried / disgusted, but it doesn't erase the origin of his patterned actions, and why empathy should have been shown. It seems it was even one of the deciding parts of why people he messed with in the past never made a big deal, because they either believed that wasnt the 'real' Alec, or they believed he was genuinely fighting it. It makes me wonder about whether Zoe has a similar (genuine) event in her past that drives her to feel she has to exaggerate. As a total guess on my part, I can imagine a genuine fully-fledged abuse/control scenario in her past that she tried to report / talk about but was instead labelled a fake, and so learned to lean heavily into anything she raises against others to make them 'stick' and not just be weaponised against her. Again, total guesswork on my part, but trying to see into the holding pattern. Like with Alec, it doesn't excuse what she did / does, but as with certain volatile people, mindfulness of their (potential) background goes a long way into seeing through the shenanigans and finding a way forwards. I have no doubt that had Alec not taken his life, his own holding pattern would have extended on, also. With Alec though, a major component of his issues was paranoia, or the feeling that his thoughts/feelings were mocked or ignored (hence why he manifested in anger / moodiness / manipulative behaviour), and the situation with the social media hatemob was essentially his greatest fear / paranoid nightmare manifesting in reality. I wonder if the severe saturation of negativity / hate that GamerGate did towards Zoe just fed her volatility via her past triggers, and caused her to become more destructive. I don't know. A lot of things taken on their own and without some hypothesis don't add up in a satisfactory way. It really could just be a summary case of "Zoe bad" but it's extremely rare that a person is just a bad apple without due influences to 'mutate' them.

As for the involuntary manslaughter? Eh. I really don't know about that. It assumes too much.
Plus it also comes with the premise of echoing criminality upon those who harassed Alec, which is unreasonable. If not in the scale of work to draw all said people in, then in determining if suicide is a reliable conclusion to angry barking on social media. Then again, law could use to adjust itself better to the digital information age, but who would make such policy? Most lawmakers are notoriously out of touch with such things and would be grasping futilely at something they barely know the outline of.

there was one. the accusation against Aziz Ansari.
Of course, all the a**holes latch on to that one accusation as being representative of the whole, rather than the exception

wow, you seem to come from a place of deep hatred and vigilante fantasies

The study you cited occurred in 2010, long before the #metoo trend as well as the general trend of making allegations on social media instead of or well ahead of going to the police.

Making an allegation on social media gets around the problems of having your claim investigated by professionals and running the risk of being found guilty of filing a false police report or worse. Meanwhile, making allegations on social media often garners a person more attention, support, and they gain the sense of being part of a movement larger than themselves (something important to many humans).

Additionally, the sense of "us vs them" across many categories, including women vs men, has only grown stronger in the last 10 years.

There's every reason to suspect that social media claims of the last couple years are likely to have a larger percentage of false claims than reports to the police.

Belief that "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't exist in the court of public opinion necessitates the simultaneous belief that either:

1) public accusations should be considered true and should be acted upon until and unless they are proven false; or

2) public accusations should be initially considered neither true nor false, and should not be acted upon until or unless a sufficient amount of hard-to-falsify evidence (e.g. signed receipts, recorded video, archived social media content) is put forth, such that the accusation can be safely considered proven or disproven.

Very few #metoo allegations are false, and yet every single one has thousands of men who come out of the woodwork, "Probably false! But what about his reputation?" etc.

Going on that sentence (which might be an example of the Prosecutor's fallacy, I'm not entirely certain), it seems like you lie in the #1 camp. While well-intentioned, the problem with the "listen and believe" line of thinking is that, in most cases, it's the accusation itself that does the most damage to the accused. As such, no matter many or few false #metoo allegations occur, those falsely-accused still suffer damage.

And even in the cases where falsely-accused are shown to be innocent, the damage done to them is rarely reversible. If their reputation was destroyed, it doesn't just repair itself instantly. If they were fired, they don't get their jobs handed back to them. If relationships with colleagues, close friends, and/or family were broken, those bonds don't just reform as if nothing happened (if they even reform at all).

Yeah... I mean with all the fake ones; Spacey, Depp, Projared, Alec, I probably forget a ton... I'm totally the a-hole if I take all these accusations with a grain of salt.
Now which were true?