Recently there has been a petition circling the Internet, especially on Gamergate friendly forums, to have Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian arrested under grounds that they have technically committed an act of betrayal by appealing to the UN to censor the Internet. This petition cites the Logan act of 1790, a law that was passed well over two hundred years ago. There have already been thousands of signers as of this writing, including Quinn herself.
Let me get a few things out of the way: petitions seldom work, by my experience. I've yet to see a petition actually achieve what it has set out to do, and I've signed hundreds of them. Second of all, this petition is giving ammo to the enemies of Gamergate. By calling upon the government to arrest these two ladies, based on a centuries old law, we're being no better than these two ladies who call upon big government to censor their critics and silence them.
Make no mistake, what they have done, and what they are calling for, is beyond describing how horrid it is. Sarkeesian and Quinn want to make it a crime to dissent against THEIR feminism, the feminism that makes women victims instead of strong fighters. These two women, who have both been proven to be frauds and charlatans, went to the United Nations, played themselves as little victims, and begged for Big Brother to come to the world and instill his censorship on anyone who dares raise their voice against them. Meanwhile, we have child brides in Yemen, acid attacks against women in India, and in Saudi Arabia it's still perfectly legal to stone a woman to death if she cheats on her husband. If you want REAL misogyny, don't look for it on Twitter, look for it everywhere a woman is legally declared to be worth less than a man.
So yeah, it's easy to see why it'd be delicious to see these two women be given a slice of humble pie. The Schadenfreude would be extremely satisfying, should Quinn and Sarkeesian be arrested. But they shouldn't be arrested, because their "crime", when all is said and done, amounts to little more than making a speech to a congregation of politicians and representatives.
Literally, all they did was go up to the UN and beg for censorship, which the UN has all the right to tell them "no, now fuck off." Quinn and Sarkeesian have been rightly ridiculed by every thinking man and woman on Earth who have wasted their time reading their proposal. Further, the UN has proven itself to be, frankly, useless when the world needed it most. They couldn't stop the Yugoslav wars, the genocide of Rwanda, the Somali civil war, the Syrian civil war, and all the female genital mutilation in Africa, among hundreds of other issues in the world from the UN's inception to today. To expect them to actually censor Twitter and Youtube is, at best, a joke.
The petition to arrest these two, however, is no better than their petition to the UN to censor the Internet, if not on intent, then in spirit. It liberally interprets the Logan Act in order to get two women arrested. Just because it's the law, it doesn't make it right.
By invoking the Logan Act, we are, subtly or not, stating that we are scared of Quinn, Sarkeesian, and their ilk. This petition WRONGLY shows the world that their message is dangerous to us, and that it needs to be silenced. To quote Tyrion Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire "When you cut off a man's tongue, you don't prove him a liar, you prove you're afraid of what he has to say."
Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian are, when it comes down to it, guilty of little more than being idiots. When it comes to idiots, the best thing to do against them is to let them speak. When idiots speak, only other idiots listen; everyone else just points and laughs.
