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Anniversary posted:Honestly I think he's libertarian adjacent based on language use and some textual elements. Struck me as a lot of wanna-be Hot Topic anarchism to me, with a topping of not being very well-read on history. The interview was what got me to pull my pledge. Game didn't look like it had much to offer the group I would run in for. quote:Chad Walker: As a classic insufferable liberal, I feel really gross about the public discourse becoming so vile and grotesque—and inhumane—when it comes to people’s struggles. Whether it’s immigrants, or people of color getting killed by police all the time, or transgender people being denied their very existence, the rhetoric from their opposition is so vile—and it’s no longer on the fringes. The vileness is front page. Wow that Twitter thread is.... yikes. His 'audience' was apparently explicitly the groups that the backers had a problem with. As if they're going to buy in to a game ostensibly about anti-fascist cyborgs and learn from it. Dude, your elfgame is not some sort of deep propaganda piece, because the audience you think it's reaching flatly don't give a poo poo about a niche corner of a niche hobby. A political tabletop game is the last thing they're going to be up for in the first place. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 04:57
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Der Waffle Mous posted:Its one of those things where it originally referred to the weird tendency for a bunch of lovely white dudes to shout down (mostly) women and poc who had any kind of criticism of the Sanders campaign and other chair-throwing histronics, that over the course of the campaign morphed into the above assertion that all Bernie supporters were obnoxious white dudebros. I remember hearing that there's actually good chance that the majority of supposed 'bernie bro' harassment was literally Russian bots. I think the core issue with Sigmata is that it's a milquetoast centrist liberal fantasy of fighting fascists when it's become all too evidence that those people are utterly incapable of fighting fascists. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 05:20
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This guy personally embodies so very many problems with today's political landscape. On one hand he's the op-ed piece favorably profiling/platforming a neo-Nazi family (They're actually not so different!), then he's the third-way Democrat insisting on cooperation with monsters, then he's the "Calling a racist a 'racist' will only make him more racist!" enabler. And he still manages to fit a child's misunderstanding of antifa on his plate. He's like a South Park centrist trying to find his truth in the middle of a landscape that ranges all the way from fiscal conservatives (who only want to punish the poor) to alt-right white supremacists. He's agonizingly ill-informed while portraying himself as an expert on the Left. His flailing hits so many nerves that it's hard to believe he's unintentional, but even the commonplace of this ignorance is aggravating. Playing a game where "We gotta work with the Hitlers!" is on par with Tina Fey's sheetcake in terms of misguided galaxy brains. moths fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 12:01
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Nuns with Guns posted:The history of the setting is that McCarthy got elected president in 1960, started some more pointless proxy wars, was kind of bad but successfully seeded the mainstream consciousness with a fear of infiltrators toppling traditional America from within. Red-baiting Joe McCarthy, who died in 1957? Or pacifist Democratic-Farmer-Labor Eugene McCarthy? I'm so confused.
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Sep 24, 2018 14:30
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Cessna posted:Red-baiting Joe McCarthy, who died in 1957? The former.
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Sep 24, 2018 14:31
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Anniversary posted:The former. I guess getting elected President three years after your death is a Feat.
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Sep 24, 2018 14:38
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Cessna posted:I guess getting elected President three years after your death is a Feat. Nah, it's a class feature.
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Sep 24, 2018 15:04
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McCarthy would have probably overdosed well before 1960 even if he wasn't discredited. It's also a strong possibility that he was a closeted homosexual and I imagine that wouldn't be swept under the rug like JFK's philandering. He honestly could have went with Barry Goldwater but then again, Goldwater is a libertarian darling.
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Sep 24, 2018 15:19
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:He honestly could have went with Barry Goldwater but then again, Goldwater is a libertarian darling. Eisenhower's VP was Nixon. Eisenhower had a serious heart attack in 1955. Alt-history, Eisenhower dies in 1955, making Nixon president.
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Sep 24, 2018 15:27
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Cessna posted:Eisenhower's VP was Nixon. Eisenhower had a serious heart attack in 1955. Hostile V posted:In all seriousness I don't want to give too much away but y'all are shooting too drat high with your alternate timeline predictions. Hostile V said it first, said it best, and is doing a really earnest F&F of it too.
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Sep 24, 2018 15:31
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To me it just seemed like the kind of game setting where if you have the basic pitch, you can just take it and run it in whatever game you like anyway. The number of people who can do nuanced alt-history settings in the RPG industry is relatively slim because it's the kind of thing that's really enhanced by an deep understanding of history and politics. Chad Walker, on the other hand, works in IT security. Which is likely why Cryptomancer was much better received, but he has it in his head that his education and profession makes him "a foreign policy thinker by virtue of my security career and academic discipline", which, uh. Sure, if you say so. Granted, I'm not saying you have to be a Masters Degree in history to write a game where you have orcs attack 15th Century Korea, but it helps. He probably needed to consult less people with fringe political opinions and more just... historians. It turns out one is more likely to have objective views than the other! I could really dig into the flaws shown in his interviews, but ultimately it seems like he things because two groups agree some of the time that they can be made to agree all of the time. It's like the Geek Social Fallacy of politics, the notion that somehow not including people just because of their views is somehow mean or unfair. The fact is, just because you can get a Christian group to agree with you on immigration policy doesn't mean they'll be up in arms over Kavanagh. It's not necessarily more compassionate to welcome intolerance into your club, either. I'm reminded of a recent radio story I was listening to where a reporter was covering the far right, and as a result was going to white supremacist meetings and generally socializing with them, and he would go to late night diners and chat with one of the leaders regularly. They would talk about movies or D&D or whatever and just have normal conversations as he got in deeper. But months into this, his dining partner suddenly started going off about The Jews™, and he was pretty much floored with the sudden reminder that - no matter how much they had in common or how normal his "friend" seemed - they weren't on the same side.
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Sep 24, 2018 15:51
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Cessna posted:I guess getting elected President three years after your death is a Feat. The start date of the alt history timeline was 1954. Joseph McCarthy wasn't censured or otherwise called out and instead allowed to run wild. I guess we're meant to assume he was so invigorated by this that the hepatitis/alcoholism/heroin didn't get to him in time.
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Sep 24, 2018 16:42
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Of course once he's actually in power he's exactly the ineffectual leader that he was in reality.
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Sep 24, 2018 17:32
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Pfft. Blocked on Twitter for politely asking Chad Walker to clarify which parts of his rant he says he doesn't support fully. Such  .
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Sep 24, 2018 19:06
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Nuns with Guns posted:The start date of the alt history timeline was 1954. Joseph McCarthy wasn't censured or otherwise called out and instead allowed to run wild. I guess we're meant to assume he was so invigorated by this that the hepatitis/alcoholism/heroin didn't get to him in time. I just realized that his whole alt-history is based on not calling someone out.  I'd be interested in your analysis, but totally understand its probably not worth your time.
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Sep 24, 2018 19:22
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For a proponent of radical discourse this guy sure does seem to have a thin skin when it comes to criticism.
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Sep 24, 2018 21:33
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Anniversary posted:I'd be interested in your analysis, but totally understand its probably not worth your time. There's better insights I could make going on in the FATAL & Friends thread, but I was largely reacting to just reading through SIGMATA: Is Popular-Front Antifascism a Fantasy?. Part of it that puzzled me was just the notion that because two political groups may agree on one issue or at one moment in time that they can come to "break bread" - to become strange bedfellows. It's like this theory that if you find some crack of commonality, you can create unity. And a lot of his attitudes in the writing remind me of Geek Social Fallacy #1, this weird notion that if you dismiss people based on their regressive beliefs you're... the bad guy, I guess? Not just somebody trying to maintain your ethical standards or hang onto your sanity in the awful timeline we find ourselves in? It seems like a cheap way to try and claim the moral high ground even as he tunnels underneath himself. It's bizarre. There's probably something to the idea of disparate political groups joining together against a greater disaster, sure, but when one populates one's game with factions that are largely made up of people who historically have been "gently caress you, got mine!", it's a real head-scratcher. Anyway, yeah, I don't really care about SIGMATA too much save as a weird curiosity, the kind of story it's trying to tell is actually pretty old hat in RPGs. The main thing I catches my attention is the question of is "Why did he think this was a great idea?" Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 21:49
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The number of people who can do nuanced alt-history settings in the RPG industry is relatively slim because it's the kind of thing that's really enhanced by an deep understanding of history and politics. Chad Walker, on the other hand, works in IT security. Which is likely why Cryptomancer was much better received, but he has it in his head that his education and profession makes him "a foreign policy thinker by virtue of my security career and academic discipline", which, uh. Sure, if you say so. Granted, I'm not saying you have to be a Masters Degree in history to write a game where you have orcs attack 15th Century Korea, but it helps. He probably needed to consult less people with fringe political opinions and more just... historians. It turns out one is more likely to have objective views than the other! This reminds me of my favorite joke/sad reflection on reality that I like to tell when I explain why I majored in Political Science/International Relations: The best thing about Political Science is that everybody has a say in it - by merit of voting in the United States, everybody has an opportunity to voice their opinions/beliefs and contribute to the body politic. The worst thing about Political Science is that everybody has a say in it - very few people actually have an informed opinion, yet their votes carry immense weight/consequences. The very structure of the U.S. political system by the founders suggest that they were very, very cognizant of this dichotomy as well. Similarly, just because people believe they're intelligent doesn't mean they're going to be well-informed about International Relations theory/History. IT Security/Computer Science are not at all the same field as IR/History (although in the realm of cybersecurity, there is a little bit of overlap). Moreover, quite a few people believe that just because they've read a book on the topic means that they are officially qualified as an expert in that field. I can tell you that it is extremely frustrating to hear about every goddamn rear end in a top hat who read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel start expounding on the topic like they had a Ph.D. in IR/History. I imagine that this RPG setting is no less frustrating. On a related topic, it's part of why I really like King Arthur Pendragon - you can tell from the first 20 pages of the book that Greg Stafford knows his poo poo about Arthurian legends (like Chretien de Troyes' contributions to Lancelot and the overall concept of courtly love in the Medieval era) so you don't have to worry about him going completely off the rails when it comes to building the world, the systems, the rules, and how they all interact. LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 21:52
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I feel like that's hard to discern because it's very possible that you have a large knowledge of politics and international relations but disregard that in lieu of your ideology
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Sep 24, 2018 22:02
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Cessna posted:Eisenhower's VP was Nixon. Eisenhower had a serious heart attack in 1955. Goldwater was a critic of both and active during the period. He felt Eisenhower was too liberal and despised Nixon as a person. It's not a long shot at all for him to go overboard considering he opposed the civil rights movement and wanted to escalate the Cold War. Nuns with Guns posted:I guess we're meant to assume he was so invigorated by this that the hepatitis/alcoholism/heroin didn't get to him in time. Also, this. It's all poorly conceived and commits most of the sins of alt-history so it is what it is but there were better people than McCarthy for a 1960 demagogue, even starting in 1955.
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Sep 25, 2018 00:55
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Plus, Goldwater was the only presidential candidate to ever openly say that, yeah, he'd start a nuclear exchange.
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Sep 25, 2018 01:08
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Someone tell me if the Pathfinder game that releases tomorrow is a pile of poo poo or not.
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Sep 25, 2018 01:13
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Plutonis posted:Someone tell me if the Pathfinder game that releases tomorrow is a pile of poo poo or not. Signs point to yes.
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Sep 25, 2018 02:14
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Plutonis posted:I feel like that's hard to discern because it's very possible that you have a large knowledge of politics and international relations but disregard that in lieu of your ideology
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Sep 25, 2018 03:09
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Comrade Gorbash posted:It's still possible to discern between people who have done the homework but have come to different conclusions due to ideology versus people who haven't bothered to learn poo poo first. it is, but only once you know enough to not fall in to the second category. Until then, you will perceive yourself as being in the first.
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Sep 25, 2018 04:52
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LuiCypher posted:On a related topic, it's part of why I really like King Arthur Pendragon - you can tell from the first 20 pages of the book that Greg Stafford knows his poo poo about Arthurian legends (like Chretien de Troyes' contributions to Lancelot and the overall concept of courtly love in the Medieval era) so you don't have to worry about him going completely off the rails when it comes to building the world, the systems, the rules, and how they all interact. That always felt like a bit of a double edged sword; while it's not much a problem for me because I'm crazy, at least one friend has felt Pendragon has a very specific idea of how it's supposed to be played by default and different ways of doing it come off as a bit begrudging. (but not half as bad as most other games for that, really)
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Sep 25, 2018 05:07
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Plutonis posted:I feel like that's hard to discern because it's very possible that you have a large knowledge of politics and international relations but disregard that in lieu of your ideology Comrade Gorbash posted:It's still possible to discern between people who have done the homework but have come to different conclusions due to ideology versus people who haven't bothered to learn poo poo first. Impermanent posted:it is, but only once you know enough to not fall in to the second category. Until then, you will perceive yourself as being in the first. I think the real key - and this is part of what I liked about King Arthur Pendragon again - is that you have to be clearly communicate your sources and explain why you deviate. If you can't do that in good faith and willingly understand when people point out the flaws in your logic, you've got no business trying to position yourself as knowledgeable. My favorite example of this is Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Your average, run-of-the-mill free-market libertarian will crow about Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand' of the market and how government's got no business interfering with the free market. What they failed to do was actually read The Wealth of Nations - not long after talking about the 'Invisible Hand', Adam Smith goes on to talk about the need for government regulations in the market because corporations are inherently predatory. Going back to SIGMATA, it's clear that the author really only possesses conventional wisdom about political violence. In other words, they simply adhere to the idea of either 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' or 'hey, we have this one thing in common we shouldn't kill each other'. Even just a cursory study of Syria reveals the profound amount of bullshit this logic is: ISIS and other rebel groups may have the common cause of 'bring down Assad's Alawi government', but that's clearly not enough for them to even consider working together. They know that if they prevail over the Assad government, they will fight each other - ISIS will try to vanquish everyone else in order to consolidate power, and other rebel groups will try to vanquish ISIS because it's hard to have a party in a democracy whose stated agenda is 'absolute power for ourselves'.
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Sep 25, 2018 17:17
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LuiCypher posted:Going back to SIGMATA, it's clear that the author really only possesses conventional wisdom about political violence. In other words, they simply adhere to the idea of either 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' or 'hey, we have this one thing in common we shouldn't kill each other'. Even just a cursory study of Syria reveals the profound amount of bullshit this logic is: ISIS and other rebel groups may have the common cause of 'bring down Assad's Alawi government', but that's clearly not enough for them to even consider working together. They know that if they prevail over the Assad government, they will fight each other - ISIS will try to vanquish everyone else in order to consolidate power, and other rebel groups will try to vanquish ISIS because it's hard to have a party in a democracy whose stated agenda is 'absolute power for ourselves'. There's a 2+ page tangent in the books about how Assad (took actions which) created ISIL so Russia could aid him militarily and the US could avoid aiding the resistance. He claims that this is an example of "the Signal" failing.
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Sep 25, 2018 17:27
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The idea of brazenly trying to apply observations from Syria into a recent-history United States situation is just... stupid, really. Even ignoring the author's bad takeaways, little details like, say, the fact the US doesn't share borders with four to six squabbling, high-strung neighboring states means that insurgent warfare would be completely different, jesus christ.
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Sep 25, 2018 18:51
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Anniversary posted:There's a 2+ page tangent in the books about how Assad (took actions which) created ISIL so Russia could aid him militarily and the US could avoid aiding the resistance. He claims that this is an example of "the Signal" failing. I'm reading that interview that ARB linked, and my god is he an insufferable rear end in a top hat. Also, the tangent is incorrect. Not to mention: Haystack posted:The idea of brazenly trying to apply observations from Syria into a recent-history United States situation is just... stupid, really. Even ignoring the author's bad takeaways, little details like, say, the fact the US doesn't share borders with four to six squabbling, high-strung neighboring states means that insurgent warfare would be completely different, jesus christ. That this is also correct. I made this same mistake earlier too, and I think this is a really important point. LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 19:04
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So it seems that both Matt Loter and Jeremy Hambley are now banned from Gencon. I guess going scorched earth is one way to avoid a legal controversy. 
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Sep 25, 2018 20:41
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wait who are those guys
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Sep 26, 2018 00:10
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Impermanent posted:wait who are those guys Hambley is a magic the gathering youtuber who shits incessantly on Wizards and/or MTG cosplayers for being SJW now, while Loter was a guy who was apparently angry enough about said youtube nerd to ambush Hambley in a bar and punch him a few times. https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2018/08/03/gen-con-indianapolis-gaming-commentator-conservative-views-punched/896816002/ About a month later and GenCon has just elected to ban them both.
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Sep 26, 2018 00:25
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Impermanent posted:wait who are those guys A serial harasser so bad that WoTC banned him from Magic, and a dude he decided to accuse of hitting him and which literally nobody with the power to investigate as a crime seems to believe actually happened.
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Sep 26, 2018 00:31
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Liquid Communism posted:A serial harasser so bad that WoTC banned him from Magic, and a dude he decided to accuse of hitting him and which literally nobody with the power to investigate as a crime seems to believe actually happened. But hoo boy is shitlord Youtube trying to say that it did.
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Sep 26, 2018 00:36
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Has there actually been any evidence whatsoever that Loter attacked him as claimed? Because pretty much any non-CHUD news sources I've seen on the incident haven't named names, or suggested that the police were even slightly interested in the case.
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Sep 26, 2018 00:42
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The cool thing is that it doesn't actually matter whether Loter actually did it or not, because GenCon believes it's plausible enough and business are basically blind and deaf Azathoths that just want to avoid controversy in the laziest way possible, generally preferring not to bother with context and instead focusing on optics. So it's a bit like James Gunn.
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Sep 26, 2018 00:47
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Kai Tave posted:Has there actually been any evidence whatsoever that Loter attacked him as claimed? Because pretty much any non-CHUD news sources I've seen on the incident haven't named names, or suggested that the police were even slightly interested in the case. Nope, but chudlord has been crowing that it did, and Loter has disengaged from the Internet rather than fight a troll in its natural environment.
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Sep 26, 2018 01:16
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LuiCypher posted:But hoo boy is shitlord Youtube trying to say that it did. He made t-shirts with his face on them for the occasion. Which I mention only for those who don't know. (He had to add a bandaid to his face because he certainly didn't need one after the 'assault.') Oh! And he livestreamed 'an investigation' that turned up a large-sized combo meal of a nothing burger.
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Sep 26, 2018 01:23
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I guess Wizards is selling Magic boxes directly on Amazon now for way under MSRP, at ~$95/box. Stores are paying between $79-92 wholesale per box (depending on volume), and some of them are in full freakout mode.
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