The civil thread about racism and fantasy worlds.

[subtledoctor]

Nah, there’s no such thing as race (edit - IRL)... it is a faux-taxonomical fiction, created (recently!) and used to support garbage pseudoscience that justified horrific economic and military policies. Et cetera et cetera, yadda yadda. 

That doesn’t fucking matter. Racism is real, and certain kinds of imagery has been used cruelly to demean people in the name of racism. Standing behind the use of such imagery even after people alert you to its objectionable nature, is super shitty. 

Edited March 2, 2022 by subtledoctor

[temnix]

Nothing is objectively offensive. It's all in the mind, of course. Once I was banned from RPG.net for inventing Zurich gnomes - the name might have been different. I made up a Monstrous Manual-style sheet for them, with Ecology, Society/Habitat and so on. They were greedy, small, crooked, tailcoat-wearing, leaned on diamond-studded canes and controlled most of the world's wealth. They lived on the highest peaks, where they hid their treasure, under the protection of hulking security brutes. And some moderator thought this was a caricature of Jews. Nothing could have been farther from my mind. If anything, the man from Monopoly and any number of Russian Civil War drawings of evil moneybags came together there. It was a parody of capitalists, of course, but not of Jews, although it is true that powerful Jewish clans have controlled much of the world's finance until a few decades ago. But in that moderator's mind this image was absolutely linked to Jewishness. This was the remarkable part. HE was much more anti-Semitic, by the passive inertia of his imagination, than I ever was. But could I explain this? Of course not.

And to the Imp: you know, you're much smarter than a lot of your posts make a case for. If you would put some floodgates on that stream of consciousness, you could be taken seriously more often.

[jastey]

There is a joke that goes like this: a psychologist shows a patient some random pictures (the ones with just color blots on them) and asks what he's seeing. "A naked woman." Next picture: "A woman ready for sex." It goes on like this. After the session, the psychologist diagnoses a sex addiction. Replies the patient: "*I* would be sex addicted? And who showed all the dirty pictures to me?!"

And just because my intentions could be misinterpreted: I am not referring to the original reason for this thread. Although a picture of a chimpansee in clothes for me actually shows a chimpansee in clothes, I do respect that it's a discriminating picture because such pictures were misused in the past to humiliate people.

[Thacobell]

Its been awhile, I wonder what's going on at G3.

[InThePineways]

@subtledoctor

So, let me get this straight... It wasn't a racist caricature, but it resembled something that might appear to be a racist caricature. My God, get a grip.

This tendency for people to act offended on someone else's behalf is not virtue, it's bourgeoisie theater for the sake of showing in-group loyalty. Your mindless and overzealous adherence to the common narrative even at its most vulgar tells me that 200 years ago you would have been the biggest bible-thumping racist. Not to mention your own overtly racist comment about being "white as the driven snow", whereas if i said someone/something was "black as pitch", you would have had an aneurysm. Ask me how I know you're a boomer.

Fiction should have no restrictions - aside from current events and nauseating politics, imagination needs freedom. Should De Sade's 1000 Days of Sodom be restricted because it depicts sexual violence? No. Because it's not real. Fiction allows people to explore ideas without enacting them, and to restrict it is to put chains on the human mind.

Edited May 25, 2022 by InThePineways

[InThePineways]

Since I'm likely to be banned anyway, I might as well address another comment... I realize this isn't the place for this discussion, but at the same time, people like @subtledoctor need to be refuted.

On 3/1/2022 at 3:04 PM, subtledoctor said:

Nah, there’s no such thing as race (edit - IRL)... it is a faux-taxonomical fiction, created (recently!) and used to support garbage pseudoscience that justified horrific economic and military policies. Et cetera et cetera, yadda yadda. 

That doesn’t fucking matter. Racism is real, and certain kinds of imagery has been used cruelly to demean people in the name of racism. Standing behind the use of such imagery even after people alert you to its objectionable nature, is super shitty. 

This topic is hotly debated. However, there have been developments more (recently!) than 1978, the year of the study by Richard Lewontin which claims race doesn't exist. Subtledoctor subscribes to an outdated and debunked racial theory.

The 2003 paper by Anthony William Fairbank Edwards which debunks Lewontin and coins the term Lewontin's Fallacy: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12879450/

Here is the full paper on Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.se/10.1002/bies.10315

The "explain like I'm five" version:

In a genetic sequence, the location of a gene in respect to other genes affects genetic expression. In this way, genes are like letters in a sentence. Look at these two recipes:

1) Take 3 cups of milk, add 2 tablespoons of chocolate powder, and stir.

2) Take 3 cups of silk, add 2 tablespoons of chocolate powder, and stir.

Recipe 1 gives you chocolate milk. Recipe 2 gives you chocolate silk. The recipes were almost the same, but had very different outcomes. Genes work in a similar way. Two people might have 99% the same genes, but depending on the specific sequence their genetic expression can be very different.

If you google "lewontin's fallacy", the first things you'll see are articles and papers claiming Edwards was wrong. Every one of them fail to adequately refute Edwards. There are other facets to this debate, but from what I know on the subject,  it appears that ethnicity is real and absolutely has scientific validity.

Edited May 25, 2022 by InThePineways

[CamDawg]

1 minute ago, InThePineways said:

Since I'm likely to be banned anyway

You're not. Outside of spambots we've never had to ban anyone, delete any posts, or any of the traditional moderation you see elsewhere.

G3 moderation policy can be colloquially described as letting idiots dig their own holes so that other users can decide how seriously to take someone. If you feel that attacking other users and ranting reflects well on you, don't worry, we'll make sure those posts are preserved so that others can see them. The community here is pretty good at ignoring the attention whores, or pointing and laughing at the hot/bad takes, generally leaving the forums pretty drama-free punctuated with small bursts of outside idiocy from time to time. It's why we have a couple of regular posters here who have been banned everywhere else, and why the "IT'S SO UNJUST THAT I GOT BANNED AT [some other site]" post is a G3 tradition. Granted, it's a terrible tradition and I wish people would stop doing it, but tradition nonetheless.

On a personal note, I'd like to take a moment to thank @Thacobell for reviving this thread after two-and-a-half months.

[InThePineways]

@CamDawg Okay, thanks. I'm just as emotion-driven and irrational as subtledoctor, hence why i felt compelled to talk race theory on a teen rated videogame modding website. This topic stirs resentment in me like you wouldn't believe.

[InKal]

Poor Jarno don't deserve to be smeared like that.

Take some stupiid joke or something, blow it out of proportion and accuse Jarno of racism just because you don't like him so much. Call him "shitty" and name this fucking thread "civil". JA PIERDOLE........

 

[The_Baffled_King]

God help me. Not only am I posting in a thread entitled "The civil thread about racism and fantasy worlds", but I am also going to defend subtledoctor.

As for why, well, if I'm going to invest any time posting here about matters not directly related to Baldur's Gate, then I guess I shouldn't duck the most important of debates. Secondly - and this is directed at InThePineways - on the basis of your posts in temnix's topic here, I suspect you're doing yourself a disservice in this thread.

1 hour ago, InThePineways said:

This tendency for people to act offended on someone else's behalf is not virtue, it's bourgeoisie theater for the sake of showing in-group loyalty.

I completely agree that this has become a massive problem in the modern world, driven to a large extent by social media. The noble goal of making people accountable for harmful and offensive behaviour has been hijacked and has degenerated, at times, into an avalanche of hatred. So alienating are these witch hunts - as you so accurately describe them - to those who are not part of the in-group that they are self-evidently counterproductive for the very cause that the mob claims to champion. Moreover, the level of cruelty displayed by many members of the mob to their target reveals the hollowness in their claims to be virtuous defenders of justice, and the amount of damage done to individual targets is often staggeringly disproportionate to whatever it was their target may have done wrong.

However... that doesn't mean that everyone who takes offence at something relating to a characteristic that they don't possess is indulging in theatre. If they are themselves literally offended, that is not an inherently illegitimate reaction; equally, if they speak up on the basis of offence that may be caused to others, that can be a wholly virtuous act, even if it does happen to align with the mores of the in-group to which they belong. Also, I'd be surprised if subtledoctor's skin colour is known to you beyond a doubt.

16 minutes ago, InThePineways said:

There are other facets to this debate, but from what I know on the subject, ethnicity is real absolutely has scientific validity. Claims to the contrary seem to be mostly politically motivated hand wringing.

I don't know whether your analysis of the science is correct. I'm not going to read it to find out, but that's only because I'm not going to express a view on the matter. I will say only that, in principle, I agree that ignoring facts and science because it is inconvenient is bad whoever does it. Certainly, liberals who do so should take a good look in the mirror the next time they mock creationists for the departure of the latter from scientific principles (I am an atheist, and very socially liberal).

1 hour ago, InThePineways said:

Fiction allows people to explore ideas without enacting them, and to restrict it is to put chains on the most sacred function of the human mind.

I suspect that you don't fully stand behind your words. If I was to say that Bob down the road from me was animating a cartoon film featuring sex scenes between an adult and a child of 10 then, fiction or no fiction, I'm guessing you wouldn't support its dissemination. And what if exploration of ideas of that nature through fiction can be a pathway leading to the enactment of said ideas (it's my tentative understanding that this is true)? The difficulty, perhaps, is that people who are morally upright and sufficiently strong of mind to be relatively unaffected by certain material can sometimes overlook its potential for harm when in the possession of people very different to them.

On 3/1/2022 at 11:04 PM, subtledoctor said:

Racism is real, and certain kinds of imagery has been used cruelly to demean people in the name of racism. Standing behind the use of such imagery even after people alert you to its objectionable nature, is super shitty. Standing behind the use of such imagery even after people alert you to its objectionable nature, is super shitty.

With all that out of the way, I largely agree with the above. I fail to see how any benefit of posting the image, or keeping the image, outweighs its drawbacks. The fact is that the preservation of what is important for society requires a delicate balancing act between competing interests - even the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights must sometimes be weighed against each other.

InThePineways, the reason I began my post by highlighting the areas in which I agree with you is because I think you have elevated subtledoctor into the avatar of a trend that you disagree with, then taken aim at that avatar, rather than at his post (that doesn't mean I think you have to agree with him, or with me).

[Graion Dilach]

3 hours ago, CamDawg said:

It's why we have a couple of regular posters here who have been banned everywhere else, and why the "IT'S SO UNJUST THAT I GOT BANNED AT [some other site]" post is a G3 tradition. Granted, it's a terrible tradition and I wish people would stop doing it, but tradition nonetheless.

I knew I should've opened a thread to whine about Roxanne booting me from BSW back then...

I don't want to express my opinion on the current topic because my views disagree on crucial aspects of both of the simplified sides and I'm tired of expressing/defending what I think.

[CamDawg]

52 minutes ago, The_Baffled_King said:

Not only am I posting

You really don't have to.

53 minutes ago, The_Baffled_King said:

I guess I shouldn't duck

No, honestly, duck away. I cannot emphasize how in favor I am of ducking--and not just you, but I cannot strongly encourage everyone enough to duck this thread. Let me provide a visual aid for the best outcome of this thread going forward:

Let's turn this thread into something useful, and everyone can post duck pictures instead.

While I'm here, though, I am going to reiterate an incredibly, strongly held opinion of mine:

3 hours ago, CamDawg said:

On a personal note, I'd like to take a moment to thank @Thacobell for reviving this thread after two-and-a-half months.

[Bartimaeus]

We will now commence the Airing of Grievances.

[InThePineways]

I already had a strongly worded outburst, so I might as well conclude. (sorry CamDawg, bless your patience)

1 hour ago, The_Baffled_King said:

I suspect that you don't fully stand behind your words. ... And what if exploration of ideas of that nature through fiction can be a pathway leading to the enactment of said ideas (it's my tentative understanding that this is true)?

This is the line of reasoning that compelled mothers in the 80s to call for DnD to be banned. Generally, putting a taboo on an idea just makes it more attractive. I do stand behind my words, despite my opinion that the West is losing ground in the world which I was blathering about in another thread. I know ideas were much more restricted in the past, which is one of the countless ways life in general was worse than it is now. I don't think it's something we should go back to.

 

1 hour ago, The_Baffled_King said:

I think you have elevated subtledoctor into the avatar of a trend that you disagree with, then taken aim at that avatar, rather than at his post (that doesn't mean I think you have to agree with him, or with me).

You're right, and it was a bit hypocritical considering what I was upset about. My apologies to the forum.

 

[subtledoctor]

Oh my gosh, what happened here?? A lot, it seems. Well, since I was tagged multiple times, let me just clear up a few points: 

• As The_Baffled_king noted, I did not actually represent a number of positions that InThePineways ascribed to me and then disagreed with. 
• I was not offended on anyone else’s behalf.
• I never claimed fiction should have limits.
• I am not a boomer. 
• My mention that Jarno’s country has relatively little racial diversity was not “overtly racist.” (It’s mostly white, and they get a lot of snow!) There is nothing wrong with a place lacking racial diversity! But people from such places are unlikely to fully grasp all of the race-related issues that some other countries might have grappled with. 
• That’s not a knock on Jarno; why would someone fully grasp issues faced by different people in a faraway place? I don’t think Jarno is racist; the point of informing him that his meme was super cringey was to let him know it could be construed as racist, because I believe he is not racist. 
• I agree with temnix (!!) that Jarno is probably smarter than his posts sometimes make him appear. 
• I also think The_Baffled_King is smarter than he may be given credit for (including by yours truly). 
• While Edwards may make good points contra Lewontin as a matter of genetic science (I am surely no judge), neither does he affirmatively establish a scientific basis for “race” as we commonly use the term. I was not commenting on any issue of genetics, but rather opining that a scientific basis for race has never been affirmatively established. Nor could it be, with any validity. That’s the way I see it, but we don’t need to debate it because nobody is going to be convinced and I am fully aware other people see it differently. They’re just wrong, and that’s okay. 

ThacoBell, -1 for necroing this thread. But +1 for having the most intelligent response to it. 

Edited June 2, 2022 by subtledoctor