PC GAMER SAYS THEY CHOSE TO IGNORE CORRUPTION #GAMERGATE UNCOVERED

According to an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit that included the staff of PC Gamer, they revealed their true intentions on where they stood on corruption, illegal activity happening within the gaming industry and #GamerGate back when it first popped up: they actively chose to ignore it.

Responding to a question about some of the legitimate concerns and issues raised through the GamerGate hashtag regarding ethics in journalism, and why PC Gamer never addressed those issues, PC Gamer’s deputy editor, Phil Savage,unabashedly admits…

“As far as I remember, the only time we addressed Gamergate’s concerns directly was in specific reference to the ethics stuff they once touted as their purpose. We didn’t publish an op ed about the dangers of authoritative statements of sexism. Nor, however, did we publish an op ed extolling the virtues of authoritative statements of sexism. We tried to hold course and do our thing, because, honestly, we decided that, whatever that group’s points, they weren’t worth the oxygen based on their treatment of ourselves, our peers, an whatever developer had crossed them that week.”

People asked them about the actual corruption that largely went unreported by a lot of media outlets, some of which included things like Allistair Pinsof’s blacklisting at the hands of the GameJournoPros, to 40,000 people being hackedand a journalist covering it up so he wouldn’t disrupt his relationship with an EA employee (which to their credit, Kotaku did cover), to various gaming websitescaught violating Federal Trade Commission regulations, to various gaming websites misreporting the facts to damage the image of a video game publisher, to Zoe Quinn admitting in the Crash Override Network leaks that she actively worked with some developers to purposefully sabotage the Polaris Game Jam, to the former IGF chairman caught in multiple scandals (some of which were potentially illegal), to loads of other issues. Thus, leaving gamers to question why none of these were covered or at least acknowledged in any way by PC Gamer?
According to Phil Savage, it was because they don’t report on games journalism, just games…

“Actually, it’s not just this one side of the issue we, where possible, tried not to write about. It was the whole issue in its entirety. As I say in the other reply to my last comment, we’re a games site, not a games journalism site. We cover the former, not the latter.”

Except, that’s not entirely true. PC Gamer had an entire editorial centered around the meme “PC Master Race”, in which they said that the gaming community needed to move away from the meme due to its political connotations to racism. The article had nothing to do with a specific game, but about the culture surrounding the meme. The article was titled “Let’s stop calling ourselves the “PC Master Race”.
Another user also pointed out that #GamerGate was mentioned in another article by PC Gamer called “The PC Gaming Lows Of The Year”, in which editor Chris Thurstun spends an entire segment talking to the “gators” about… #GamerGate. None of the corruption issues mentioned above were brought up by Thurstun, and just like how he evaded and defended the corruption carried out by theGameJournoPros, Thurstun conveniently sidesteps any mention about the wrongdoings of game journalists in the article itself.
In fact, PC Gamer’s own executive editor Tyler Wilde was involved in exchanging sex for positive coverage, dating a Ubisoft employee and writing about Ubisoft’s games without disclosing his ties to the publisher. PC Gamer was part of the corruption.


The scandal was exposed barely two weeks after PC Gamer wrote their piece about #GamerGate, prompting Tyler Wilde and the PC Gamer staff to issue an apology on January 16th, 2015, acknowledging the lack of disclosure and their lack of ethics surrounding the matter.
PC Gamer only issued the apology because they were caught, not because they valued ethics in journalism, otherwise they would have disclosed the ties back when they were discussing #GamerGate and not because #GamerGate brought the gavel of ethics down hard upon them in the court room of social media.
So why hasn’t PC Gamer changed their stance after one of their own literally got caught with his pants down in the stall of corruption? Well, because according to Phil Savage #GamerGate is still about harassment…

“Gamergate as an entity was (and still is) pretty quick to harass anyone who disagreed with it, many of whom were women. That doesn’t make individual Gamergaters misogynistic, necessarily, and it definitely doesn’t make gamers misogynistic.”

I’m sure Savage can provide evidence for his claims, right? All of the facts say otherwise in regards to #GamerGate being a harassment campaign, but surely Savage should be able to back up one of his claims since everything else he mentioned about #GamerGate was either untrue or misrepresented.
Also, Savage seems to be ignoring that out of the 250 or so journalists in theDeep Freeze database, just over 30 are actually female. Out of the total 250 entries corralled by the diggers of #GamerGate, 17 of those journalists have five or more violations in the database, and they only make up for 7% of the total database. Out of those 17 journalists, only six of them are females, which means that the top most corrupt female journalists in the database only make up for 2.4% of the total journalist entries on Deep Freeze.
According to those stats, Deep Freeze doesn’t have a very diverse selection of corrupt female game journalists. I’m curious how Savage can equipoise those figures to mean that more corrupt male journalists on Deep Freeze means more women get harassed?
Unlike other sites we actually do encourage giving voices to both sides of the issue, though. Hence, the right of reply is always open for PC Gamer.
(Main image courtesy of Yahlantykan)

Based Black Girls For Trump

Just a Deplorable White Female Voting For Trump!

Girlfriend voted Hillary. She admitted defeat and wore the shirt.

Stomp Our Flag We'll Stomp Your Ass

Trump won't pursue charges against Clinton

President-elect Donald Trump won’t subject Hillary Clinton to a criminal inquiry — instead, he’ll help her heal, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.

“I think when the president-elect who’s also the head of your party … tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members,” Kellyanne Conway told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who first reported that the president-elect would not pursue his campaign pledge to “lock up” Clinton, his Democratic opponent.

“Look, I think, he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them,” Conway, who is now on the Trump transition team, said in her interview.

She continued: “I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy, but if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that’s a good thing.”

At the second presidential debate in October, Trump sounded a much harsher tone.

“If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception,” he vowed.

Here’s a breakdown of the scandal that Hillary needs help healing from:

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This Doctor Wants to Treat Your Crippling Fear of Death With Uncut Ecstasy - Researchers are quietly testing MDMA's potential to be a legal prescription drug.

Surrounded by redwoods and Buddhist prayer flags, Phil Wolfson greets me outside his clinic at the top of a mountain in Marin County, California. (I've agreed not to reveal any identifiable details for security reasons.) Wolfson, a 71-year-old psychiatrist with a trim puff of white hair, is barefoot. He requests that I accede to "an element of hippiedom" before I enter: "Shoes off, please."

Today is the first in a series of meetings designed to cut through the red tape that comes with doing legal research on illegal drugs. Wolfson is launching a new study to see if pure ecstasy, also known as MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine), can ease severe anxiety in people suffering from life-threatening illnesses.

Inside the clinic, nine of his colleagues—therapists, scientists, and other researchers—sit at a table combing through paperwork. The work is banal—"All these consent forms, where is it all going to be stored?"—but the side conversations keep things animated: A group of clandestine Russian chemists are creating "insane drugs"; an Iranian cleric has issued a fatwa supporting the use of the hallucinogen ayahuasca; a guy in the Santa Fe Buddhist community was ostracized for supporting psychedelic drugs.

The topic of how MDMA can be administered comes up, and the word "intravitreal" is uttered.

"What's that?" asks Wolfson, with a voice that sounds like a cigarette is ashing in his lungs.

"Through the eye."

"What?" Wolfson says, dismayed. "I've never seen anyone do that! We're not doing that."

"But you could do it that way."

"We're not talking about your weird scuzzy drug taking," Wolfson says.

The current study, Wolfson explains, "is an attempt to show by very kosher and scientific means that MDMA is safe and efficacious." He throws his hands up: "But we already know that. This is minor league."

The current study, Wolfson explains, "is an attempt to show by very kosher and scientific means that MDMA is safe and efficacious. But we already know that."

Wolfson first encountered MDMA in the early '80s, when it was still legal and available through psychedelic devotees who were struck by the enhanced feelings of intimacy and closeness brought on by the "empathogen." In particular, Wolfson was taken with its "sultry, velvet, electric energy." The logical next step was to try MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in his practice.

But this "flourishing" period of MDMA's clinical use ended quickly. Against the suggestion of an administrative law judge, in 1985 the Drug Enforcement Agency declared ecstasy a Schedule I drug—a substance considered to have no recognized medicinal value and a high potential for abuse—even though Wolfson and his colleagues had been using it medicinally. "In 1985 when there was legality, there were tens of thousands of doses used. If you go to '86 and beyond, it was tens of millions. Then it becomes dirty, underground; there's contamination and casualties," Wolfson laments. "The war on drugs creates havoc and it creates interest and it creates a money scene."

Wolfson is now affiliated with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), an organization dedicated to "a world where psychedelics and marijuana are safely and legally available for beneficial uses, and where research is governed by rigorous scientific evaluation of their risks and benefits." He is leading a stage of research that he hopes will help facilitate the return of legal MDMA prescriptions.

Thirty years have passed since Wolfson last prescribed MDMA in a medical setting. MAPS

When combined with psychotherapy, Wolfson says, pure ecstasy is "revolutionary medicine" that can obliterate the restrictions of the traditional 50-minute psychotherapy session. To start, MDMA can balloon therapy sessions to five hours or longer. Unlike antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds, which may be consumed indefinitely, MDMA is only administered a few times over the course of several months. But the breakthroughs inspired by the drug persist, Wolfson says, suggesting that it has the potential to permanently alter a patient's perspective on the crises they seek to overcome. In 2010, MAPS completed the first pilot study of MDMA-treated psychotherapy for people with PTSD, including veterans. More than 80 percent of the patients no longer qualified as having PTSD after just two sessions, and that was sustained for nearly four years, until the study stopped tracking them. Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, notes, "So far there have been over 1,100 subjects who've received MDMA in legal studies, and there have been no serious adverse effects."

Wolfson says MDMA was a crucial part his own healing when his son came down with leukemia and suddenly died at age 17 after a failed bone marrow transplant. Wolfson credits the drug with helping him and his wife through the crushing loss. "In the warm afterglow of an MDMA session," Wolfson wrote in a paper published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs in 1986, "new possibilities for love, relationships, and self-appreciation emerge."

A gong rings in the clinic, signaling a break from the hours of paper pushing, and the researchers gather on the sun-dappled patio outside. "What do we do if someone tests for something illicit?" one of Wolfson's co-therapists wonders about their research subjects. "I mean, what if they really love their crack? Or they're doing ayahuasca regularly?"

"Deception is worthy of exclusion," says Wolfson. Plus, the study wouldn't really have an effect on "sophisticated users," that is, people who trip regularly likely wouldn't experience MDMA sessions with the same profundity as those with fewer drug experiences.

Seven months after this planning session, Wolfson's study is now in full swing. It has enrolled six subjects, including several women with "a history of violence and rape, abuse as a child," Wolfson says. They're going through the treatment specifically to deal with the fear that comes from brushing up against death. It's still early, but their fears appear to be receding. "People are having breakthroughs, working through the trauma and coming to a new appreciation for their lives," Wolfson says.

It will be 2020 at the earliest before MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can be approvedby the Food and Drug Administration. The MAPS team will still have to go through another much larger study. All for a drug, Wolfson says with exasperation, "which is very safe, that's been used by more people than almost any other drug. And yet we can't get there." A moment of reflection passes, and he continues, "Why is this a really good thing to do? Because the cat's been out of the bag for a long time. People have understood the benefits of MDMA. It's not like it's a big mystery. A lot of people can benefit from this."