MagickMoonshot Career Ending Tweet

[Accessing]

I was debating discussing this here on the platform but decided that as we cover everything about Halo and around our community that ultimately like PILEZ or SHYWAY it should be covered. Like most things I cover, I will try to set a non-bias tone and really want thoughtful conversation. 

This is a thread on MagickMoonshot’s career ending tweet or post. 

It is the reason for a brief 24 hours most influential caricatures made a statement “Halo is for everyone” including myself though a day late because I simply was not on Twitter at the time. 

Few things to note and really the TLDR; 

• She has lost all sponsorships and partners 
• Her contracts were terminated, effectively she was fired from jobs casting and being a community manager
• It is highly unlikely she will find success or opportunity again in the Halo community

 

MagickMoonshot was a Halo caster and production staff to LVT productions part of LVT ventures and LVT himself (LouisVTitan) content creator and tournament organizer. She was a regular face to the operations around Halo and for the most part the female identity and representation. She would regularly play with other influencers and have the sweet perks of working in Halo with collectibles like the Hawthorne John-117 UNSC chair or other valuables you might find in the background of her streams. 

She was also a community manager for Status Quo. Reportedly this is was just a trial but its to everyone else’s understanding this was a permanent position with a disenfranchised organization. An entire separate thread can be made on where Status Quo is, financial reporting and its public position carrying on after this incident. 

Magick is considered a leader and as a leader held to that standard of being a role model. 

Her tweets reception was that it is transphobic, using scripture from the Christian book of Genesis 5:1-2 to alienate and isolate her tournaments to females as defined by the Bible she was looking to usher out and divide her own community from trans woman. Her tweet was something you would consider a misstep or poor choice of words reflecting her own personal preferences between women and trans women but she doubled down, offering a second explanation to no apology or clarification in her pursuit.

 

As the Internet dog piles her she found support with radical right and Christian gamers that saw the Bible “under attack” over Twitter. There is a psychological story to follow but with little details it is not something I can explore and share with confidence. 

What doesn’t make any sense

• Why was she not inclusive? 
  In Halo there are so few competitors already it doesn’t make any sense to do a female-only tournaments excluding trans women. Some will argue that it does not make any sense to do female-only tournaments entirely, but I believe its generally agreed that showcasing talent and creating the space for woman to compete helps the community welcome both players and advertisers. 
• Why did she not apologize?
  She was given a window of opportunity to apologize or backpedal however chose to double down in a 4 part tweet days later. From what we can all review she was overwhelmed by the responses and became defensive, for most -reacting and offering a statement to the Quartering (a known offensive social media identity) was enough to sign her off and “cancel” her.
• Why did no other female leaders support her? 
  This is an interesting question I read from others and noticed; No one has had a problem with trans women in Halo tournaments and this is probably the first time it ever even crossed peoples mind, I believe that there really is no problem so nothing for others to say other than supporting inclusivity in our community. Others suggest that creators around Halo may not have felt safe to be vocal about it seeing the resistance to Magick Moonshot. 

With all of this I leave this thread open for conversation, most of anything good has been said already but its okay to say it again here. While I don’t touch on the subject too much think of inclusivity as you respond, staff would hate to find out you are transphobic and where we allow people to agree to disagree do be objective as possible to not offend others. This site and forum is for everyone. 

[CLASSIFIED]

You know we are in dark times when people are being cancelled for being christian and believing that a female is someone born with female parts not anyone who says they can be one.

[Accessing]

On 9/18/2023 at 7:57 AM, CLASSIFIED said:

You know we are in dark times when people are being cancelled for being christian and believing that a female is someone born with female parts not anyone who says they can be one.

I think there is an amalgamation of arguments all just in this response that really span the entirety of the incident that happened to Magick. 

You bring up a sentiment that’s shared with a few over Twitter that if Halo is for everyone, why could she just not pursue her own tournaments held inside her beliefs. This after all was going to be something she organizes under her own Discord server outside of any sponsor or partners and employers. Unfortunately I don’t know if we can explore an answer to this without a party agreeing to disagree or worse. It’s a general understanding though that Christian’s are not the problem, neither are Trans women. The problem was the miscommunication and assertion of religious texts where not everyone is part of the same religion to enforce a rule. It would be like if we banned a word on the forum citing that it was against Japanese Shintoism, Buddhism beliefs. It would be a ridiculous conjecture, in our hypothetical case its just a word but for Magick it was Trans women. 

It’s safe to say Christians are not being persecuted or cancelled, She is being cancelled and is using Christianity to find haven and justification for her error in communication. 

For the most part though as it applies to Halo you could surely agree that it doesn’t matter what gender players are that should enjoy and have access to the same resources all players do in Halo. That Halo is for everyone? 

[CLASSIFIED]

I don't think she was using Christianity as a haven, I think she was using Christianity because she knew it was right and it is. It isn't really about if everyone believes it or not it is about what is right. I think what she said was wrong in no way, shape, or form. She wasn't just saying "Oh these Trans people need to go to hell!" she was simply saying it wasn't right. Now I personally would have added that they could be saved and accepted by Jesus still but the heat of the moment can make you forget those things. Lastly yes Christians get persecuted and cancelled everyday. Though it may not be popular in places around you and me, Christians get tortured and killed all the time. Also a Christian just got cancelled in the very event. Now I hope I am not coming off rude I just want people to see this from the right perspective and see that no matter who you are you can be saved by Jesus, as long as you give your life to him.

[Accessing]

I think she does so unintentionally, it is not clarified here but she found a safe space to build courage in her thought process, a confirmational bias part of cognitive bias. Cognitive bias is already a large and expanding topic for studies but I will try to tie it into this conversation to support my thoughts here. I am very curious if we can also get her to comment and clarify on what exactly was her message and what she really meant. Where she might agree with you, by now it should be clear not everything is so black and white; What is crystal clear is the idea that we all want to enjoy Halo with everyone, that it shouldn’t matter what you believe, look or do. 

Cognitive bias is a systematic thought process caused by the tendency of the human brain to simplify information processing through a filter of personal experience and preferences. The filtering process is a coping mechanism that enables the brain to prioritize and process large amounts of information quickly. While the mechanism is effective, its limitations can cause errors in thought.     

Essentially, cognitive biases help humans find mental shortcuts to assist in the navigation of daily life, but may often cause irrational interpretations and judgments.

Cognitive biases often stem from problems related to memory, attention and other mental mistakes. I think its laziness, arrogance or just ignorance but all of the former have a better connotation since no one likes to be associated with any of those words. They're often unconscious decision-making processes that make it easy for individuals to be affected without intentionally realizing it. The filtering process and coping mechanism used to process large amounts of information quickly is called heuristics.

Types of cognitive bias

A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive psychology, social psychology and behavioral economics. They include the following: 

• Actor-observer bias. The tendency for an individual to credit their own situation to external causes while ascribing other people's behaviors to internal causes.
• Anchoring bias. The tendency for the brain to rely too much on the first information it received when making decisions.
• Attentional bias. The tendency for an individual to pay attention to a single object or idea while deviating from others.
• Availability bias. The tendency for the brain to conclude that a known instance is more representative of the whole than is actually the case.
• Availability heuristic. The tendency to use information that comes to the mind quickly when making decisions based on the future.
• Bandwagon effect. The tendency for the brain to conclude that something must be desirable because other people desire it.
• Bias blind spot. The tendency for the brain to recognize another's bias but not its own.
• Clustering illusion. The tendency for the brain to want to see a pattern in what is actually a random sequence of numbers or events.
• Confirmation bias. The tendency for the brain to value new information that supports existing ideas.
• The Dunning-Kruger effect. The tendency for an individual with limited knowledge or competence in a given field to overestimate their own skills in that field.
• False consensus effect. The tendency for an individual to overestimate how much other people agree with them.
• Framing effect. The tendency for the brain to arrive at different conclusions when reviewing the same information, depending on how the information is presented.
• Functional fixedness. The tendency to see objects as only being used in one specific way.
• Group think. The tendency for the brain to place value on consensus. 
• Halo effect. The tendency for a person's impression in one area to influence an opinion in another area.
• Hindsight bias. The tendency to interpret past events as more predictable than they actually were.
• Misinformation effect. The tendency for information that appears after an event to interfere with the memory of an original event.
• Negativity bias. The tendency for the brain to subconsciously place more significance on negative events than positive ones.
• Proximity bias. Proximity bias is the subconscious tendency to give preferential treatment to people that are physically close. A physical worker being considered for a raise before a remote worker because they are in the immediate vicinity of their superior is an example of proximity bias.
• Recency bias. The tendency for the brain to subconsciously place more value on the last information it received about a topic.
• Self-serving bias. The tendency for an individual to blame external forces when bad events happen but give themselves credit when good events happen.
• Sunk cost effect. Also called the sunk cost fallacy, this is the tendency for the brain to continue investing in something that clearly isn't working in order to avoid failure.
• Survivorship bias. The tendency for the brain to focus on positive outcomes in favor of negative ones. A related phenomenon is the ostrich effect, in which people metaphorically bury their heads in the sand to avoid bad news.

Signs and effects of bias

Because cognitive bias is often an unconscious process, it's easier for an individual to recognize a bias in someone other than themself. However, some ways to recognize bias include the following: 

• if an individual attributes a success to themselves, while attributing other's successes to luck;
• if an individual assumes they have more knowledge than they actually have on a topic;
• if an individual insists on blaming outside factors instead of themself;
• if an individual is only paying attention to what confirms their opinions; and
• if an individual assumes everyone shares their own opinions.

Individuals should try their best to stay away from these signs, as they all affect -- at a base rate -- how that person interprets the world around them. Even if an individual is objective, logical and can accurately evaluate their surroundings, they still should be wary of adapting any new unconscious cognitive biases.

Now, this ended up not being short at all but this is why I like forums and prefer it over Discord or Twitter. Unfortunately Unyshek or anyone from Halo simply cannot just break down to explain this at every given moment to moderate, make suggestion or find fair judgement in people. As a matter of fact Magick’s fall was in a matter of hours because the Twitter algorithm had shown her post to people the algorithm thinks would react. The knee jerk reaction is transphobia, the later analysis is cognitive bias. That same knee jerk reaction is what Twitter feeds off, the dog piling made her fallback to those that would support her ideology. Her fallback was with others that support bigotry. That ended her career as it was the “double down” on transphobia.

Twitter itself is also part of the problem encouraging hate because its impressionable but that is an entirely different topic for another thread. 

I type all of this not to say that cognitive bias and confirmational bias through religion isn’t transphobic. Religion is a deeper topic than cognitive bias, its an active conversation that is hard to argue because it spans centuries and new discoveries are still being made about all religions of the world. The interpretation of scripture changes by the person and as it relates to Magick it reinforced her own belief that it is understood as unacceptable, even in her own private discord and despite already hosting female tournaments with trans women before because of her position. Interjecting it in her message turned everyone against her also against the scripture she used. Not everyone is perfect, so we see some biases from those that also persecute her in comments and messages but what everyone agrees on is that no one should stop anyone else from playing Halo. 

Players that can enjoy Halo should be able to without discrimination. Could you agree that Halo is for everyone? In essence that’s what part of this thread is. 

 

 

[CLASSIFIED]

I do agree Halo is not a closed community but I also feel people shouldn't be getting cancelled or hated on for standing up for their faith. If people just listened to what each side had to say then maybe they could make a more informed desicion.

[Enda Goodwin]

Great conversation, need to have more challenging topics. This stuff would have been deleted on the old Halowaypoint though, don't know if you want to deviate too far from that but good on you for keeping it relative you two. There is honestly better places to debate whats right and wrong and I'm glad to come here and see a civil discussion in all aspects around her downfall. 

I actually know her from a friend of a friend and heard about this, checked the website and BLAM! the topic is right there to both catch up and see all sides from it. I hope that she does defend herself but gives explanation because I don't really think she is like that. Some great points here too, I really like and am curious about the idea that no one really stood up with her including the rest of the female pro league organization or the general influencers that are woman.  

[Accessing]

On 9/19/2023 at 11:25 AM, Enda Goodwin said:

This stuff would have been deleted on the old Halowaypoint though, don't know if you want to deviate too far from that but good on you for keeping it relative you two. There is honestly better places to debate whats right and wrong and I'm glad to come here and see a civil discussion in all aspects around her downfall. 

Yeah I recognize this and know that discussing the topic alone can be grounds for dismissal from 343 Industries or other advertising partners because it simply does not mean anything for money and brands. The conversations are typically looked at as ad nausem with little merit to any which side its being discussed but I think the ethos of a forum is to break down these complex problems and discuss them, agree with what we can and disagree where ever it matters. Ultimately this needs to be a place to study and challenge intellect and that is also part of the moniker as a ONI intelligence themed website.