OK I really shouldn’t be posting about Gamergate at all, let alone in The Year of Our Lord 2016, but today’s Discourse fully clarified for me a thing that I feel strongly about

And that is that when I think of bad shit from my own past, and imagine people arguing about it, I wouldn’t actually want defenders who talk like Zoe Quinn’s defenders tend to

It doesn’t matter if they’re absolutely correct in taking my side (which of course I think they would be).  I don’t want people defending me in terms like

“oh Rob was unequivocally The Victim here, [the other person in the situation] wasn’t a victim IN ANY WAY, that claim has been DEBUNKED and only HORRIBLE WORTHLESS PEOPLE believe it now”

Because I would want to know that people on my side really wanted to stand by me and weren’t just mouthing the right words because they didn’t want to be perceived as horrible garbage.  Because people who say stuff like the above strike me as more interested in feeling like righteous zealots than in the truth, and if someone will be a zealot for me, they’ll be a zealot against me the moment prevailing standards of “righteousness” flip around.

The kinds of reactions I’ve actually gotten, in practice, are more along the lines of “I’m more inclined to believe your story than theirs, given all the information I know, although of course it’s always hard for outsiders to tell in personal disputes like this” – and thank God for that.  I welcome these even-handed “milquetoast” pro-nuance types, because they really seem to care about the truth, and the truth, I believe, is on my side.  I do not welcome zealots.

“But the zealots are right, so that makes it all okay!”  Nope.  Even if I were the one most personally invested in the situation, I still wouldn’t want zealots, and if I can’t judge that, who can?

(Admittedly I have never been in any dispute that went viral and lead to widespread harassment, but I don’t think that would change things for me.  If there were a raging internet war that might have real-world consequences for me, the last thing I would want was zealots throwing more fuel on the fire.)