That's an absolutely ridiculous assertion.Tilly said:
If you're standing next to someone, and that someone says something ludicrous or inflammatory and credits it (wrongly) to an ideology you are informed about, by all means correct them. If someone on the other side of the fucking world says or does something in the name of a shared ideology, do you have a "responsibility" to police that person? Even if you've never seen or heard of them, will never meet or cross paths in any way, and have absolutely no way of even being aware of their existence? If you fail to police that person and prevent them from saying and doing the things they already said and did, has your "movement" failed? Even if what they said and did had nothing to do with it, but they claimed membership anyway, either out of malice or ignorance? Are people now free to attack you and consider you indistinguishable from that person because you unwittingly "harbored" them? Am I sufficiently elucidating the problems with the stance you've assumed? Yes, no?
Despite the fact I think GamerGate is DIFFUSE, and FORMLESS, and counts an ABSURDLY LARGE PERCENTAGE of career trolls, "culture warriors", outrage addicts and angry young men with a corncob up their ass about feminism among its membership (fucking things up royally for all the "ethics in journalism" people), I do not consider it the "responsibility" of GamerGaters to "police" those people or shut them up. It's completely impossible. They would instantaneously fail.
When you make that argument, you're manufacturing a reason to argue PAST the person facing you. You want to fight the aggregate that exists in your imagination...all the worst case scenarios, misleading vividness, and straw men you've carefully crafted for the purpose of knocking down. If the person you're arguing with isn't demonstrating any of those qualities, simply assign them as a result of their participation in a group. After all, they didn't POLICE the group, so they must secretly applaud those characteristics.
"Oh but that's what radical do, why is okay when THEY do it?"
Yep, it's what RADICALS and FUNDAMENTALISTS and proponents of biased, fuzzy thinking all over the world do, regardless of ideological stripe. You won't be able to police THAT, either, although lord knows I've tried. I've told some of the resident fundamentalists that they were being fundamentalists, and the response was "Nope our brand of fundamentalism is noble".