Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="sunshadow21" data-source="post: 6878445" data-attributes="member: 6667193">You are wrong. I am not trying to redirect the conversation; I am trying to flesh it out beyond the piece that was originally discussed. I have no illusions of grandeur that the things I or others have pointed out are big enough to outweigh your points, but that does not make them irrelevant. You cannot simply dismiss them without consequences any more than I can simply dismiss the author of the original article because she chose to use a particularly inflammatory language. You may think my concerns are overstated, but they will come up in the real world, and their impact will be what you make of them. If you don't have a better response than "Your opinion doesn't matter right now, suck it up and endure the pain, silly man" (which is what most of the arguments on this thread have boiled down to), you're going to have a lot bigger problem on your hands than you were expecting or were prepared to deal with. If you actually take your own advice and learn how to listen and be respectful of the opinions on the other side, you will find that you have a lot more allies than you currently seem to believe. If you actually give the majority of people a reason to be helpful rather than simply threatening them because they dare to not automatically agree with you, a lot of currently quiet support will materialize and speak up. Yes, there will still be idiots, and yes, most people still aren't going to be all that interested in shouldering the problems of the entire world just because you told them they should, but if you temper your expectations of what qualifies as being offensive by making it clear that you are indeed giving those people room to breath in the language you use, the actions you take, and the tone you use, a lot more people will be willing to at least listen and not get defensive the second you approach them. If you stop expecting people to fully commit to your cause 100% without question or fail all the time, you will find that there are a lot of little things these people are already doing that are just as effective (and sometimes more so) as anything I've seen suggested in this thread thus far. Simply put, anger and raw force alone will not win you allies or solve the very real problems we face.And yet, here we are, many, many pages into the discussion because neither of those statements have been proven true. You cannot separate the gaming community from the rest of the world that neatly, and this thread is ample proof of that. While I don't really care for some of the hyperbole being used to discount the original point of the thread, there are valid points that have been brought in from other aspects of how these issues are playing out elsewhere that are relevent to what we as a gaming community can expect in terms of what needs to be done to define and solve the problem effectively. Most of those points have been summarily dismissed solely on the grounds of "But that has nothing to do with us in the gaming community," and a great opportunity for your side to practice what you preach and listen for a bit has been lost. You may have already determined in your head that the problem and solution have been adequately defined as far as the immediate concerns of the gaming community are concerned, but I, and many have others, have not reached the same level of comfort with the conclusions that have been presented. As far I am concerned nothing mentioned by either side in the article or this thread is anything more than a solid start to the conversation and that anyone who believes they know enough to be able to dismiss the other side as outdated opinion is ultimately going to find themeselves proven wrong when they find out they don't actually know more than anybody in the conversation. At this point, there is still simply too many definitions that have yet to be adequately defined, and too many potential actions and consequences still to be explored for anyone to be able to much more than make educated guesses regarding the "proper" way for this to play out.</blockquote>

Verification