Days After GamerGate Figure Zoe Quinn Accuses Former Boyfriend of Vague Sexual Abuse, and Days After He's Fired from His Job and Ostracized from His Industry, Man Kills Himself

"#CancelCulture" goes to where it always wanted to go: to "cancelling" people's actual lives.

Now, no one's truly responsible for another person's decision to commit suicide.

But... what did you think would happen here, Zoe? You dated the guy. You knew he was mentally unwell and had battled depression and mood disorders his whole life.

The game that made this guy's reputation was "Night in the Woods," which was about... a main character with deep mental health issues.

Being mentally unwell was kind of his brand.

What did you imagine he would do after you turned the industry from which he derived his livelihood and purpose against him?

This story is from Russia Today -- sorry to link them, but for reasons that are pretty obvious, the leftist American media refuses to cover this story.

The unraveling of Alec Holowka’'slife in the days after facing unproven accusations should remind us why, at some point, civilized society turned away from mob rule and embraced due process.

Not only is your social media feed becoming a live broadcast of an execution of the lost and the vulnerable, but the people handed the axe and hood may be no saner than the ones they are beheading.

Let's leave for the moment --and we will return here-- whether the claims against Holowka are likely to be true, any other circumstantial evidence, or the credibility of his accuser Zoe Quinn, one of the most high-profile activists on the internet.

Instead, let's chart the fatal sequence that perfectly shows how NOT to handle any sexual abuse allegations, including entirely plausible ones.

From cult hero to dead in five days

August 26: Zoe Quinn, the feminist game developer whose conduct had sparked Gamergate, the five-year ideological war between online communities, accuses Holowka, the indie co-author of cult hit Night in the Woods, of mistreatment, via a lengthy Twitter post.

Quinn somewhat insidiously blurs the line between routine poor relationship behavior and bona fide criminal acts, between literal descriptions and metaphors. Although Quinn has since deleted her post and her entire Twitter account, the full text has been preserved.

The gist is that Quinn, already "vulnerable" after another assault in Toronto, was bought a one-way ticket to Winnipeg after "flirting" with Holowka, and began a relationship with him.

In the month that she stayed, he had "physically confined" her to his apartment, "slowly isolated" her from other people in her life, and "degraded" her while they were alone, while "acting normal" in public.

Note the resort to very vague accusations which are meant to be read in a variety of ways, while hyping up the emotive, non-factual language.

Does "physically confined" mean that he kidnapped her? That's what she seems to want you to take away from this -- but she admits later he "acted normal" in public, suggesting that this wasn't an actual kidnapping, but that she merely felt "confined."

The word "isolated" is similar -- was she imprisoned, or did he just discourage her from going out to meet other people? The latter is a sign of a jealous and controlling nature -- but being a bad boyfriend is not the same as false imprisonment.

The language used -- deliberately, I would say; calculatedly -- puts the idea of actual physical kidnapping in the minds of the hysterics of the SJW movement while not quite committing her to that claim.

Now we get to actual specific factual allegations of bad behavior -- though some of this sounds absurd:

Holowka would "throw things" and "jam his fingers inside me and walk me around the house by them when I told him it hurt" as well as telling her that the earlier assault was her own fault during "mean and violent" sex.

Zoe Quinn is not a small girl. He weight fluctuates, and she gets pretty heavy at times.

I don't know what this "walk[ed] me around the house" means. It can't be fully literal. And it could be a single incident of a guy doing something he thought would be taken as either sexy or silly, but which was taken badly.

The language again is vague.

By the way, part of the reason for doubting the "confined" and "isolated" language is that she also whines that the pair agreed that she would buy her ticket to Toronto, but that he would by her ticket back to wherever she lived. She complains he did not buy her that return ticket.

So is she just saying that her "isolation" and "confinement" was over a ticket the guy wouldn't pay for, and which couldn't cost more than $250 or $300?

She got a friend to pay for the flight back. "Confinement" over!

After her friend paid for a flight back to Toronto, she broke up with Holowka by email, at which point he "lashed out" and complained to other developers in the community that she was a "b***h," thus "ruining" her career in the Canadian games industry.

Oh, he trash-talked her to people.

Good thing Zoe Quinn is so firm on the principle that one must not spread vicious stories about people, to ruin their reputations and make them unemployable!

Now, if Quinn feels that she was the victim of sexual assault or other forms of abuse recognized under existing law, she would have done well to go to the police. She alleged in her posts that other people had confirmed her stories ("That's Alec, what can you do," she was apparently told) so surely within the current climate and with her prominence she and other victims would have been listened to.

For someone whose stock-in-trade is the claim of misogyny, and who has graphically detailed other similar instances from her life, it is somewhat unfortunate that Quinn was apparently too "scared" in this particular case to even mention it for "the best part of a decade" since it allegedly occurred.

If, however, Quinn thinks this was insufficient to go to the cops about, what purpose does her airing on Twitter of these vague grievances serve?

Quinn has received tens of thousands of retweets and likes, and positive media coverage, but, she has headlined entire conferences on cyber bullying and complained of dozens of death threats -- she would have known that those voices would be turned against the accused. In fact, she mentions that Holowka had already said he’d kill himself over her behavior during their relationship and that "Alec is likely not well and I always believe in rehabilitation over punishment." Does disgracing a troubled person in front of millions constitute "rehabilitation over punishment"? Was Twitter ten years after the fact the most productive way?

August 28: The colleagues with whom Holowka developed his last hit game "cut ties" with him and cancel his current project after some "agonizing consideration."

A lengthy Reddit post from his Night in the Woods coworkers emphasizes that the team is "heartbroken" but sheds little specific light. "Enough of the allegations are extremely plausible," writes Scott Benson, adding that "the things that Alec did during the bad times were worse than we knew."

Note that this, too, is written to suggest that he heard of similar behavior -- even though his words make clear that he had not heard of similar behavior. "The things Alec did during the bad times were worse than we knew" -- so this guy did not know about these "worse" things until Zoe Quinn spazzed it out all over Twitter.

On what basis, then, does he claim these are "extremely plausible"? Apparently only on Alec's not-similar but still erratic past history, and the Gold Standard word of Zoe Quinn.

"We aren't trying to prove a point or appease a mob or show we're great," he reassures, adding that he is "depressed."

Yes you were. Zoe Quinn, for some reason, has been made some kind of High Empress of Twitter and Deplatforming and when she says someone needs to be #Cancelled, all cowards and soybois will snap to.

Thus, we are none the wiser as to whether they have verified the accusations. Nor if they are aware if their actions will contribute to him being viewed as guilty.

But they have washed their hands of him.

August 31: Alec Holowka commits suicide.

"Alec was a victim of abuse and he also spent a lifetime battling mood and personality disorders," writes his sister Eileen Mary, but "became a new person... working towards rehabilitation and a better life."

In her words, Alec "wished the best for Zoe."

Read the rest of the article -- It proposes a "Call for Sanity," suggesting rules (social rules, prudential rules) about how to responsibly make charges on Twitter, or better yet, not make them on Twitter and instead turn to dispassionate authorities to offer a ruling before setting the mob on someone.

I wasn't going to post on this for several reasons.

First, I'm not sure it's fair to lay someone's suicide at the feet of someone else, even if, as in this case, it sure looks like Zoe Quinn and this Scott Benson knew of this guy's shaky psychiatric history.

Is it fair to blame someone for someone's suicide? Usually not. How about if they know, or should have known, the person had suicidal thoughts and decided to trigger that suicidal ideation anyway?

It's a gray area. But gray areas are not good areas to play in.

Second, Zoe Quinn really is the High Empress of SJW Punishnment Battalions and I'm quite sure that anyone discussing this will be doxxed in short order, as was the case during GamerGate.

The White Knights and Tumbrinas are very protective of their Damaged Queen.

But I decided to post this after listening to Ethan Van Sciver describe how he himself considered the Suicide Option after being subject to mass attacks by the SJWs, and how friends of him, similarly targeted, often confess to have shared in the same thoughts of suicide being a possible solution.

Van Sciver was attacked because he was an open Republican and Trump supporter -- SJWs dug up an artist's sketchbook he did a few years ago, called "My Struggle" -- a wink at "Mein Kampf" -- because the character featured on the cover, which he himself had reinvented, was Sinestro -- which Van Sciver had rescued from the "too childish and silly" pile to make a dangerous and compelling villain. He turned Sinestro into Space Hitler -- thus the "My Struggle" joke.

By the way: Space Hitler was not the hero of Van Sciver's Green Lantern books. He was the villain. He did not hold Space Hitler up as someone to emulate, but someone to defeat.

The SJWs ignored that a follow-up book, "MANIFESTO," had a cover suggesting it was full-on Soviet propaganda. Obviously, being a normie Republican, he was not a fan of Soviet economics or Soviet propaganda, but the SJWs just pretended this book didn't exist in order to make the claim that he was a Secret Nazi seem more plausible.

And so he was hounded out of DC comics, where he had worked for years as a top-of-the-foodchain apex artist.

He starts talking about his own thoughts about killing himself here. And the confessions of those similarly targeted.

He talks about it for about six minutes. Definitely worth your time.

I'd like to start asking all the #Cancel Culture activists: What do you think is going to happen when you isolate someone and turn the whole world against them, and make them unemployable?

What is your goal, if not to drive them either to suicide or two steps away from suicide?

Stop pretending "you had no idea."

You had every idea. This was your main idea.

Oh by the way: Of course Marvel comics just hired Zoe Quinn to write some SJW book for them.

She has no real experience in comics, or really, in any creative endeavor at all. She fundraised for a game she never finished, and she came to "fame," of a sort, for "Depression Quest," a non-game which pretended to be a game, which was really just a Choose Your Own Adventure text about depression and, as it turns out, suicidal thoughts.

Her only previous experience in comics came when DC Comics' super-SJW editor of the Vertigo line hired her, for no apparent reason other than her SJW Twitter cache, to write a nonsensical Grrl Power Fantasy title. That title was cancelled for low sales and did not, I think, result in a completed story.

But of course, based on that track record, Marvel Comics had to scoop this Hot Property up.

Gravedancers Union: Dataracer rounded up some tweets from Zoe Quinn's fans, celebrating her taking of the Ultimate Scalp.

Driving a Man to Suicide Achievement -- Unlocked.

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:13 PM

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