#lightcoffeephobia

If you didn't pick up from the title, this is another post about GamerGate. The normal disclaimers apply: if you disagree with what I say, you are free to talk to me about it. My contact info is in the sidebar. Every time I make this offer, I get a bunch of emails and Skype messages agreeing with me and thanking me for what I said, and then like one or two people on Twitter talking about how wrong I am. I want them to know that I'll still hear them out, and if it seems like I'm holding onto an opinion you disagree with it's because literally nobody is countering it. 

Anyway, this time I'm particularly interested in people's thoughts, because I want to write about something a little different. A friend was talking with me about my last blog post, and she began to bring up parallels between it and GamerGate - including a few I didn't actually think of. It made me think of it in a slightly different light, and I'd like to propose a potential alternate interpretation to why this thing called "GamerGate" exists.

Throughout its life, GamerGate has been claiming it is about ethics in gaming journalism - and, I think a lot of people associated with it do believe that. However, I have a theory that its core goals and actions are better described as a focus on something else: individual accountability.

Think back to the very beginning, when this whole thing started. You had a game developer who had sex with a games journalist. People discovered this, and (wrongly) thought that the journalist had written a positive review of her game because of it.

Right there, any creator with a lick of common sense could have ended this whole issue with the simple words "I had sex with people in the industry, but I made sure it was nobody who would review my work or otherwise help me get ahead". Just like that, she would have taken accountability for the actions while emphasizing that they were harmless, and no one would care. 

Instead, you saw something different: rather than addressing this as though it were an attack on the developer specifically, she (and the journalists she was apparently associated with) addressed it as an attack on female developers as a group. People who had legitimate concerns about favors in journalism were publicly dismissed as being against female developers. Gaming media pushed the narrative that the attack had nothing to do with the developer's actions, and everything to do with the groups she identified as a part of. To proto-Gamergate, though, it wasn't about the group - it was about the individual, and no one seemed to see that.

You see this pattern continue into GamerGate's more recent behavior. In almost all of their actions, GamerGate tends to target individuals in the game industry. They'll send in a whole bunch of complaints about a particular writer who said something discriminatory, or try to persuade advertisers to pull from the specific news publication that employs that writer. Rather than targeting a group, GamerGate tends to very, very specifically go after people they interpret as doing something wrong. 

And honestly, most of the people GamerGate attacks are being pretty horrible. Like, I think the latest one is some writer who said that GamerGate was proof that nerds needed to be bullied into submission. GamerGate retaliated by getting some advertisers to pull from the website that employs him, as well as donating a bunch of money to anti-bullying charities to make a statement. It's largely a targeted call-out campaign, which is something I actually think is pretty awesome if executed with the right amount of skepticism.

In response, though, you see GamerGate's targets try to make it about groups. They'll claim that GamerGate is attacking journalists, or attacking independent developers. They'll push a narrative that the attacks are purely based off group membership - that nobody in these groups is safe - and thus everyone in them should stand against GamerGate. Even the opponents who try to engage GamerGate diplomatically do it in a very removed and group-oriented way, asking what specific changes GG would like to see to their policies, all while refusing to talk about individuals. Anyone who tries to draw attention to them is a harasser. 

You see the same thing when GamerGate's opponents characterize GamerGate. They're an angry mob, or a bunch of straight white cisgender men who are upset that their industry has diversity. Any individual voices or diversity inside GamerGate gets erased in favor of characterizing them as a homogeneous group. 

Portraying a group as homogeneous means you can characterize them by any single member. If someone who claims association with GamerGate sends a developer a death threat, it's not from an individual, it's from GamerGate. GamerGate's members, for their part, usually make an effort to track these harassers down and hold them personally accountable for their wrongdoing, but meanwhile their opposition holds up the harassment as proof that GamerGate is an unsalvageable cause full of harassment and everyone involved should abandon it. Interestingly, TotalBiscuit wrote an excellent essay on how publicizing death threats only encourages copycats, logic by which GamerGate's opposition is causing more death threats to happen with their response. You don't see them taking any personal accountability for that - it's just GamerGate's fault for sending the death threats to begin with. Anything to avoid acknowledging individuals.

I've even noticed this trend of anti-individuality in my own experiences. I've written things about GamerGate before and had its opponents immediately dismiss me on the basis that I've "drank the kool-aid" and been manipulated into supporting a bad cause that harms game developers and minorities.

But like... that's me! That's me you're defending, on both counts. Can we talk about how GamerGate really does benefit the sort of business tactics I use? Or how my emphasis on word-of-mouth popularity and positive audience regard means I'll be even more powerful if the journalism scene utterly crumbles? Heck, can we talk about how consumer-focused tactics like mine actually remove entry barriers, and how increasing their comparative power would probably bolster the number of women and minorities in the industry? I don't want to be dismissed as part of a group - want to be acknowledged as an individual who has actual experiences and motivations that drive my actions. 

That's actually another thing I really like about GamerGate, and which also plays into the theorized emphasis on individuality. GamerGate's opposition is mostly straight, white, cisgender men who claim they are bravely protecting innocent minorities from, apparently, GamerGate's straight, white, cisgender men. GamerGate, on the other hand, tends to actually push their minority voices to the forefront. Maybe it's just a response to the accusations of homogeneity, but any time a woman or minority speaks out in GamerGate's defense there is an effort to really get her side heard and draw attention to it. They want to actually get the minorities themselves in positions where they can visibly speak, rather than just consigning them to an offhand mention as "my gay friend". I've met more female, non-white, and LGBTQIA gaming writers and Youtubers through GamerGate than I have through at least four years of seeing gaming news sites talk about the importance of diversity in the industry. There are enough minority voices in one place that erasure has become a joke, with things like TallBlackNerd changing his Twitter name to "Cis White Gamer". It's hard to express how oddly meaningful that is.

And this all seems to tie back to that one core idea: individual accountability. GamerGate tends to push for things to be viewed in terms of people, whereas their opponents tend to push for things to be viewed in terms of groups, stereotypes and labels. Maybe this is intentionally malicious and they're trying to cover up active wrongdoing, or maybe they just naturally think in a very privileged and discriminatory way. Whatever the case, just imagine how much smoother things would go if the industry at large shared GamerGate's dedication to individual accountability:

I guess what I'm really getting at in all of this is that I'm not sure GamerGate is doing itself a service by saying that it's about "ethics in journalism". At its core, I think the central idea is really about people in the game industry being held individually accountable for wrongdoing. That's not an issue of ethics - it's an issue of letting people defend themselves without dragging a group into it. If an employee of yours did something so bad that people are able to present evidence that gets advertisers to stop supporting you, then you need to treat that employee as a liability. And beyond that, you need to thank the people who called him out for doing you a service. 

Is the theory accurate? Would such an angle better summarize GamerGate's motives and give it a stronger arguing point? I don't know. I'm one person, and most of what I focus on is my own goals and ideals. I do think it is an interesting idea to consider, though - and puts a better emphasis on what I find generally agreeable about GamerGate as a whole.

I'm not following GamerGate as closely as I used to, but I am still interested. Analyzing its advocates and opposition is beginning to give me those same feelings I get when playing an Elder Scrolls game or reading a story. I like the ideas, but beneath it there is a brooding realization: I could do it better. 

A week or so ago, I made a post about how words can mean different things to different people, and the importance of learning what definition the user intended. While it's on my mind, I want to make a quick followup illustrating how this can be used offensively.

Imagine you have six shapes. The Yellow Star is objectively good. Everyshape loves the Yellow Star. Meanwhile, the Red Square is pretty much the worst shape ever. Everyshape hates the Red Square. 

Here's the interesting part: depending how you categorize things, you can justify any of the shapes in the center as being good or bad.

Like, let's say you hate Blue Square. She skipped out on your birthday party or something. Rather than saying Red Square is bad (something everyone would agree with), you can make the generalization that squares are bad, using Red Square as proof. Now, Blue Square looks bad too.

Or, let's say Yellow Triangle is in a bind. He killed his roommate, and the police are getting nosier than he'd like. He can make himself look good, though, with a generalized statement: yellow shapes are good, and Yellow Star is proof of this. This is actually the tactic I wrote about in an essay called Defensive Generalization.

You can even make more complicated generalizations based on the exact people you are trying to discredit. Let's say you have a problem with both Blue Star and Blue Square. You simply say that shapes with symmetry based off an even number are bad, and point to Red Square as evidence of this. You can even do a two-step: let's say Red Pentagon and Blue Square get along great and call themselves the "Top-Row-Of-Shapes Club". If you want to break that club up, you can warn Red Pentagon that even-number-symmetry-shapes are bad (see: Red Square) and that her association with Blue Square could be harmful. And just like that, their relationships are yours to control.

Despite the prevalence of this tactic, seeing through it as a listener is relatively easy: you just need to pay attention to who is categorizing things for you. Blue Square is going to deny having any association with Red Square. People who want to attack Blue Square, though, will take every angle possible to associate them. They're both squares, they both have even symmetry, they both have one facial feature, they're both on the right side of the image, whatever. If you question who is grouping things together for you, ulterior motives can become more obvious.

Countering it from the target's perspective, however, is more difficult. As easy as it is, most people won't question who is categorizing things for them. Blue Square either has to deny her associations with Red Square, or come up with a whole bunch of groupings that associate her with Yellow Star, who we all know is good. It's a stressful position and, ultimately, favors whoever has the most people listening. If someone gets shot, it's the loudest voices that will decide whether he was a student or a thug. 

As listeners, though, we have the most power to counter this. We can be aware that harmful manipulators will use this tactic, and by extension skeptical of people who try to sort things into categories for us. Ultimately, your goal is to look past manipulative categorization and judge parties by their actions, not their grouping. Anyone who tries to keep you from doing this is usually an enemy. 

I write a lot of posts here about anonymity.

One one level, it's because I just really enjoy the concepts and ramifications anonymity - which by extension makes me one of the disconcertingly small number of creators who can maintain a positive relationship with 4chan and the other Anon Cultures. On another level, though, it's a professional interest: anonymity is very important to anyone who deals with crowds, public opinion, and data gathering. Statistically speaking, the responses people give when others are watching and judging them tend to be very different than the responses people give under the veil of anonymity. 

However, the other thing I like to talk about on this blog is social manipulation. In all my discussions of anonymity, there's still one topic I haven't really touched on very much: how do you control anonymous people?

Anonymity as a data gathering tool is well and fine, but one of the big fears people have of 4chan and similar cultures is their seemingly uncontrollable, chaotic nature. With 4chan in particular, popular culture knows them largely by their external actions - 4chan raids, 4chan harassment, 4chan hacktivists, etc. Content creators especially seem pretty clueless when it comes to actually exhibiting control over anonymous figures - which is strange because, like I've said before, it's not complicated. It's really kind of confusing how people can be so bad at it.

So, in this post I'm going to more or less just talk about how to control anons. To understand the techniques, though, we have to get into a bit of psychology and history.

Put on your psychologist scarves, kids. We're gonna talk about brains.

Crime and Punishment

Before I get into the thick of this, the first thing you have to understand is the difference between reinforcement and punishment.

The concept is pretty simple. The idea behind reinforcement is that someone receives a reward for behaving in a certain way, which encourages them to behave that way more frequently. It can be a positive reinforcement (giving them something they want, like a cupcake) or a negative reinforcement (taking away something they dislike, like an annoying singer), but in both cases it leaves them better off than they were. 

Punishment is the opposite. Someone faces consequences for behaving a certain way, and this discourages them from doing it again. Like with reinforcement, punishment can be either positive (someone sings annoyingly until you leave) or negative (they take away your cupcake). The common trend is simply that it leaves you worse off than you were before. You fear the punishment happening to you, and this causes you to act a certain way.

Our culture has a very large emphasis on punishment. On some level, this is an institutionalized thing we recognize and accept - we know and approve of the fact that people get charged money for driving recklessly, or will be locked away from people if they physically harm someone else. There are a lot of other types of punishment that are used to control behavior, though, which we tend to overlook.

For instance: social ostracization. We have very strict and complicated rules governing everything from eye contact to the appropriate progression of discussion topics. If someone violates these rules, it's not a crime, but we still try to make them get hurt a little. For things like inappropriate conversation progression or eye contact, they'll be accused of obsession with a topic, or their sexuality will be called into question in a way that makes them uncomfortable. In more serious cases of someone violating norms in a way we disapprove of, we will inflict viral misinformation against them - this is where you see stuff like slander and decontextualized quotes used to harm someone's reputation or career. At this point, you're usually not trying to discourage that person's behavior - you're trying to make an example out of them, and show others the cost of violating your beliefs of how people should act. 

Rape is another punishment that is pretty widely accepted in our culture. If you go to prison, for example, it's taken for granted that you're going to get raped. People don't complain about this a lot, probably because they recognize that prison on its own looks like a pretty good deal for a lot of people - it's a warm place to sleep and three state-funded meals a day. The fear of rape is regarded as one of the things that makes prison an effective punishment. You also see this fear of rape used in politics - any time a conservative politician uses the classic "it was her fault for dressing that way" line, he's establishing rape as a de-facto punishment someone incurs for violating what he sees as an appropriate dress code. It's effectively an attempt to weaponize rape as punishment.

Even death is a pretty common punishment in our culture. Like, even outside arguments of capital punishment, we are taught that you simply don't walk certain places at night, or reach into your pockets in the wrong way, or make any sudden movements when a cop pulls you over, or things like that. We recognize that, yes, if you do these things then you're probably going to die. Like rape, it's also something that's been politicized in the past - if you've ever read the beautifully dated "Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle", the comic's whole premise is that if you're gay you will die. It's not used as a statement of "we should do something about HIV", but instead as a political statement that you really shouldn't be gay. In general, our culture is pretty okay with death as long as the person was doing something we disapprove of.

And like... sometimes, I just like to think about how fucked up and dangerous our entire culture would seem to an alien visitor. 

Anyway, the point here is that our culture is utterly terrifying. Outside of the written rules, we have a complex web of social standards and personal beliefs that are enforced through vigilante justice. Good and bad are irrelevant - you just can't piss off the wrong people, or they'll come and get you. However, there's always been one defense to this: anonymity.

One of the earlier forms of this was confessionals in the Catholic church. People who committed a mortal sin would confidentially tell it to a clergyman who offered them ways to seek absolution without the clergyman judging or hating them. Later on, you also saw the concept of anonymous crime tipping emerge - letting people report a crime in a way that the criminals could not trace it back to them. In both cases, anonymity was being used as a way to encourage positive behavior by inhibiting problematic people who would enforce punishments on it. The tipper or confessor could still be rewarded with the positive feelings of making amends for their wrongdoing or inhibiting a crime, but they were less likely to be punished for it. 

In some ways, this had a dark side: it's where we got things like the magazine-clipping ransom letter. In other ways, it got romanticized: we saw fiction stories of superheroes concealing their identity so that criminals could not attack them or their families at home. In all cases, though, anonymity came about as a defense against punishment. 

With the advent of the internet, it became easier than ever to conceal your identity. You might be a lowly fry cook by day, but by night you were just a name on a forum like everyone else. At school you might get beat up for being a nerd, but at home you were a Level 50 Paladin in your MMO guild. Nobody could hurt you for what you were or did while wearing a mask.

On top of this, people discovered that they could have their identity completely concealed to the point of not even having a persistent online name, and it would still be psychologically rewarding to interact with people. Under complete anonymity, people could act and take chances without even the fear that their beloved Level 50 Paladin would be punished for it in their stead. 

In a hostile and punishment-driven world where you could have all your career aspirations permanently destroyed by holding a conversation topic for a sentence too long, people realized that they could be invincible. They just needed to put on a mask.

Fighting Faceless

As long as there is punishment, there will be anonymity. The very act of punishment gives people two options: they can meet the punisher's demands, or they can learn to defend against it. Anonymity represents the latter: people weakening the effectiveness of punishment. For better or for worse, an anonymous individual can act without personally suffering negative consequences.  

This, I think, is where most people falter in their attempts to fight anons. Anonymity is a defense against punishment. They are still susceptible to everything else. 

For a lot of people, this can be a kind of disconcerting experience as they realize exactly how much they rely on threats and coercion to control others. Sometimes, this is a very big sign you are doing something wrong - if you rely on bullying or slander to control others, you will have a very hard time controlling an anon culture. Other times, it's a bit more innocuous - if you rely on institutional laws like DMCA, the inability to punish people in an anon culture who violate it can be frustrating. 

External punishments still affect them. You can threaten to hurt someone an anon cares about, or destroy something they love - all the standard villain tactics that work against masked superheroes also carry over here pretty well. Of course, this is also a really stupid thing to do, since it provides them with positive reinforcement in the form of moral justification. 

This highlights an important point, though: moral justification does affect them. Feeling like they made a positive difference affects them. Heck, any kind of positivity or reward affect them.

Like I mentioned above, anonymity is a defense against punishment, and everything that isn't punishment is fair game. You can reinforce positive behavior, evoke feelings of righteousness, reward them with things they want, and even influence them with empathy and camaraderie. You can control them or stop them or anything like that, and it's really not that hard. Most people outside of me wouldn't even call this "manipulation". It's kindness. They're incredibly susceptible to it. 

The Big Twist

So, you know all that stuff I just wrote about controlling anons? It also works on normal people. In fact, it works better than coercion.

Like I mentioned earlier, we often don't recognize the degree to which we rely on fear and punishment as a culture. We're accustomed to it, and those of us lucky enough to be born with social aptitude can navigate these complex interpersonal relationships with relative comfort. Someone's reactions and strategies in their first encounter with an anon culture can be a telling indicator of how much said person relies on punishment - or even the ways in which they rely on punishment. It can be a humbling experience, having a branch of manipulation tactics suddenly cut off from you, but you become more powerful because of it.

Anonymity and similar defenses against punishment are an ingrained part of our culture that will not be going away any time soon, and your success these days will largely depend on your ability to adapt to them. Services like Steam, for example, are viable in the modern age because they try to combat the unpunishable forces of piracy by providing better service than the pirates can. They rely on reinforcement rather than punishment, and it works. Meanwhile, companies that try to enforce punishments slowly dry up and die. 

And not only is it economically non-viable, but a reliance on coercion can be dangerous and self-deceptive. As I said at the very beginning, the opinions people present around others differ from the opinions they present under the veil of anonymity, and their actual habits are better reflected by the latter. Someone might share your political beliefs when they see how you treat people who disagree with you, for example, but you have no idea what that person is doing when they enter a voting booth and gain their anonymity. If they are siding with you out of fear, you can bet they're secretly fighting you when consequences are removed. Thanks to the very existence of anonymity, all coercion does is obscure your knowledge of who's on your side and who isn't. When the masks are on, the rules are different.

I think that's what makes anon cultures so interesting to me. For all their depravedness and hostility, they largely represent a place in which punishment is less effective. The cultural differences that emerge from that are neat - not entirely positive, nor entirely negative, but certainly different. I think the world would benefit from more people learning the techniques to effectively control anons, because they carry over into about everything. People in an anon culture are no different from normal people, other than being more resistant to the cheapest of manipulation strategies. 

That's not to say I think anonymity creates the end-all perfect culture or anything like that, but it's definitely an interesting step that is worth learning from. In particular it's important to know how to respond to it, since elements and effects of of anonymity are only becoming more prevalent as time goes on. 

Anonymity and the idea of consequence-free social interaction might be be scary, but as long as you understand how it works, it's relatively harmless and there's nothing to be afraid of. If nothing else, it's simpler and safer than the world you're living in now.

I am pretty easy to get in touch with. Like, on the side of my blog, you will notice there are three different messengers and an email address. You can contact me using those, and I will reply to it. You can ask me questions and I'll answer them, you can criticize my choices and I will hear you out, and you can even ask me to read your obscure fanfics and I will at least get as far as putting them on my iPod and forgetting about them (sorry Quin. I really am planning to get to them someday).

As far as I know, this isn't a particularly weird thing. Like, most authors and creators I've known are fairly accessible. I've sent people compliments before when I liked their work and usually gotten a "thank you", and I've even sent criticisms when I found something uncomfortable and usually got a prompt and interested reply stating that they hadn't thought of it that way. I think the only time I haven't gotten a reply was when I sent Tracy Butler a image comparing Mordecai to an anatomical diagram and proving that he does have stumpy little arms, though I suspect I was one of dozens of readers to do this. 

After I started doing Prequel, though - and began acquiring something akin to popularity - I began to notice an interesting shift in how people contacted me directly. Compliments remained pretty unchanged, but criticism became something no longer given to me directly. 

On a functional level, this is kind of neat. Like, artists talk about how they need criticism to improve, and by all accounts being able to look at the internet and see hundreds of people talking about your work is a straight upgrade over showing people your pictures and asking "what do you think?". However, it also leads to this interesting shift where criticism - and your responses to it - become something of a spectacle. You're a public figure (perhaps even celebrity?) and your actions are something people will dig into as deep as your work. 

My first inclination when dealing with thing like this is usually to seek motive. Unless they are simply unaware how their approach compares to others, the public critic's motivation is probably not to institute actual change. Like I mentioned up above, most creators I have known were incredibly receptive to listening to criticism or learning about new angles when contacted privately about it, and I don't think I'm particularly different in that regard. By all accounts if someone is more popular than you then you would have the overall biggest impact on the world by affecting their views as efficiently as possible. The optimal offensive strategy, I would argue, is to deliver criticism privately. 

This overlooks an important element, though: the optimal defensive strategy. When you're contacting a well-known figure, they do have social power and there is this risk that they will use that against you - you know, put you up for ridicule or call you out for something publicly, or even just outright ignore you with the knowledge that you are too small to carry an impact on your own. As a defense against this, we make things public. We deliver criticism on a stage in which others will see if we are mistreated or ignored, and we do this knowing it will likely hinder the effectiveness of our message. We trade offensive power that would make our campaign more likely to actually work in favor of defensive power that will protect us from having things turned around on us. We are put in a Prisoner's Dilemma-type situation where a fear of betrayal makes both sides worse off. 

While it's easily explained from a game theory standpoint, the bigger question is how to circumvent it and make everyone better off. My part in this is that I try to emphasize that you can contact me without negative social ramifications, as well as trying to support the idea that this is a useful belief others should emulate. The challenge, of course, is convincing others that there is nothing to fear; that they can use the pure offense strategy without concern for their own emotional or physical safety. You want to convince critics that they can confront you personally without fearing it will be turned against them.

It's interesting because the more I think about it, the more it's equally difficult from my position. Like, there are always people out there saying things about me that make me want to contact them and ask "dude, where did you even hear that?", but my experience with it is that contacting a critic in such a way usually ends with the conversation online, and usually edited somehow. This practice is probably not large-scale or spreadable enough that I should actually care about it, but when your career path depends on renown it is easy to find slander concerning. Back when I wrote that post Weaponizing Fear, the core question behind it was whether rumors were actually something a creator should worry about, and as best as I can tell the answer was "probably not". In a way, I guess that means I have something of a moral obligation to try and confront critics privately and bring down the general wall of communication fear that exists there, but it's still an uncomfortable idea because you know it's going to backfire a little at the very least. It's a question of how much risk you are willing to take for the sake of a better and more informed tomorrow. Someday, I'll suck it up and start contacting people more, shyness and ramifications be damned, but I can see why a lot of creators choose to remain quiet and removed. There is a very real fear that you will get hurt.

The moral, I guess, is the same one that comes from most of the posts here: get people to talk. Whether you agree with them or not, you are more powerful if you can get others to speak freely and without fear. The more people you speak to and the more angles you get, the more informed (and, probably, weird) you will be, and if you put people in a position where they are afraid to speak to you, you only hurt yourself. 

I should probably reiterate that post's point since it comes up a lot: punishing someone for saying something does not change what they believe. It only changes what they express around you. It creates the illusion that you are changing people's opinions when in actuality you are just invalidating your measurement tool. It's like losing weight by covering up the last digit on your scale. 

If you actually want people's beliefs to change, don't do this. You'll only make it harder for people who actually want to create change to get accurate data. 

Sometimes I read debates on Tumblr and see people get pretty viciously attacked for expressing their opinion. This makes me sad, since I'm a firm believer that anyone should be able to express their opinion without facing retribution for it - even if that opinion is something completely terrible that I disagree with.

My reasons for advocating this are admittedly pretty selfish: it's already a pain in the ass to get people to express their actual opinions, and I don't like seeing it made any more difficult. As someone with an interest in marketing, debate, and other people-centric activities, I need to know people's opinions - the opinions they actually have, not just what they are intimidated into saying.

The classic example of this is people saying they like dark, sophisticated coffee when responding to surveys, while their actual buying habits tend to lean toward lighter brews. You see similar patterns everywhere, though. The link eludes me right now, but I recall there was some recent study showing that people express more homophobic views when completely certain the information is being submitted anonymously. That's not a good thing - it means people are expressing an opinion out of fear of punishment rather than actually believing it. Once they're away from the public eye, they're still going to buy their light coffee - it'll just be that much harder to actually address the issue. 

And really, when it comes to any sort of disagreement, addressing the issue is the whole point. You can show respect to someone and their beliefs while still vehemently disagreeing with them. I mean, my background is in psychology. I have a friend who thinks the floor is poisonous and they will die if they touch it with their hands. I disagree with them about floor toxicity, but I know if I try to make them feel bad about it then they're just going to close up about it entirely. I want them to be open about this issue, because I'm hoping someday I can convince them that their perceptions do not match reality. I'm sure anyone here can show the same level of respect toward homophobes, racists, or whatever. 

I've said things to this effect to people before and gotten replies like "you can't solve problems by being nice". I should clarify that I'm not advocating the idea that people should be nice and passive and eventually problems will go away. I am advocating the idea of being a manipulative bastard. I am advocating luring people into a sense of security wherein they openly put their most vulnerable thoughts and feelings forward for your perusal and modification. This is traditionally called "being nice and understanding", and it's how you control people. Or help them, if you're into that sort of thing.