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Upper middle class white guys with lovely opinions justifying their lovely opinions because they can't stand being wrong.
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Jul 1, 2015 17:41
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Race Realists posted:Im trying my level best to try and see this issue from alternative perspectives Wealthy Christian white men ran the world for, you know, a few centuries. The whole world. All of it. That's going away and now wealthy Christian white men are getting cranky that they have to give everybody else stupid things like "rights" and "enough money to not starve to death."
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Jul 1, 2015 17:58
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Mister Adequate posted:A lot of these morons realize that eugenics is a thing we could do with humans - there's no reason we couldn't, scientifically speaking - they just don't put two and two together to figure out why doing it would be a really loving terrible idea. The thing with eugenics is that the idea was to use selective breeding or genetic manipulation or whatever on ourselves to improve our gene pool. It would benefit the human race for sure if certain genetic diseases would vanish from our gene pool. Whether we like it or not our collective genetic code has some lovely stuff in it and it would improve us overall as a race if we could do things like give incentives to people with desirable traits to have more children. The reason eugenics becomes a massive problem is that you get people arguing crap like "my race has all of the desirable traits and everybody else sucks." When you start combining eugenics and racism (which was really where almost all of the theories of eugenics ended up being applied) you get awful, awful poo poo like arguing that certain types of people should be forcefully sterilized against their will, certain races should be discouraged from breeding/exterminated outright, and people of my race should be paid to make as many babies as possible to outnumber all the other people because they suck and we don't. Yes, in theory it would be useful to try to improve our gene pool. In practice it leads to nasty, nasty things.
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Jul 2, 2015 05:29
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MrNemo posted:I'd say in the US there's a very different attitude towards the 50's so it couldn't really be said to be just because it was the period immediately preceding the sexual revolution, the beginning of 2nd wave feminism, etc. The US enjoyed a decade of almost unparalleled economic success, I'm think Rome post First or Second Punic war when the Republic was at it's height and the money/grain was rolling in. Not even hardcore anti-feminists in the UK pine for the 50's because Britain was a smoking ruin that was still enjoying rationing on certain foods for the early part of the decade and they slowly saw the remains of Empire slip away. A lot of it isn't even pining for the 1950's as they were but rather for a fantasy version of the 50's. When you see portrayals of the 50's it's always lily white suburbia. Every man has a smartly pressed suit that fits perfectly and he wears it to a job that pays real well. He has a lovely wife that is slightly younger than him, three children, and a perfect dog. They have all the modern appliances and the woman is just so happy her life is perfect that she'll have a perfectly crafted meal ready for the family at exactly 5 p.m. every day. America was prosperous and the problems it was having were hidden. The issue was that the problems were, you know, hidden. The 1950's led to the 60's. The 40's were also defined by WW2. This is another reason Americans pined for the 50's. The decades prior and after were nasty. poo poo Got Real. More importantly in the 1950's things were mostly quiet and stable and we got to ride on the wave of good feels after winning WW2 and telling ourselves we won Korea. Then the 1960's were dominated by Vietnam and a metric fuckload of turmoil at home. The buried problems suddenly burst into the spotlight while those that were wishing for the quiet of the 1950's didn't care if that meant shoving black people back in the box and forgetting they exist. Feminism was a threat to the idea that everybody knew their place. Men worked, women took care of the home, and that's the way it was done. The view was of course that this most certainly didn't cause problems and led to a society that functioned perfectly well. Which is why the phrase "gilded age" exists. The 1950's sucked for a gently caress load of Americans. Black veterans had to come back home to a nation that was still politically disenfranchising them. Women who went to school were expected to major in Husband Finding. A woman in medical school was expected to marry a doctor and drop out. Racial segregation was a massive problem with legal backing. America had massive issues brewing but they were covered up and hidden to many; the veneer of quiet and stability was a massive loving lie. Nobody wants the actual 1950's. They only want some faerie tale version of them that never existed and never will.
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Jul 22, 2015 07:51
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Alien Arcana posted:I thought "gilded age" referred to the early 20th century, like before WWI. Is there more than one gilded age or is that one called something different? "Gilded age" applies to more than one period of U.S. history, really. I think the main one is the 19th century which is another era ancaps, lolbertarians, and conservatives seem to pine for but the phrase really works well for any time considered America's golden age.
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Jul 22, 2015 22:33
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7c Nickel posted:Most of the stuff I've heard about the Dark Ages from actual historians was pretty consistent that they were called "Dark" because of a lack of reliable sources to fill in the history, not because overall knowledge was diminished. Part of that also goes to the "dark ages" being a period of relatively stagnant technology. A lot of people assume that stagnant technology means stagnant culture and no art at all which is just flat out not true. Yeah not much development or education was going on and most people were illiterate subsistence farmers but assuming that nothing at all happened anywhere is ridiculous. Medieval periods were also generally not quite as awful as people seem to like portraying them. Mostly poo poo was pretty quiet. If there wasn't a war or a plague going on people really just farmed, drank, and hosed. Which was, you know, most of the time.
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Jul 30, 2015 22:01
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Captain_Maclaine posted:The medieval period was hardly lacking for warfare. Hell, the church had to intervene with the Peace and Truce of God just to keep the knightly class from constantly tear-assing around France wrecking poo poo up. A lot of the warfare at the time was also "set up camp around a castle, hope they starve before we do."
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Jul 30, 2015 23:37
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I like how it goes down below ancient Egypt as if we became literal cavemen during the medieval period. As if any sort of technology just vanished during that period. Yeah totally, we forgot how to use iron and wrote in hieroglyphs again, right? Let's just totally ignore that metalworking and masonry got progressively (but slowly) better during those several centuries. As did seafaring. Let's also just assume that people dressed exactly the same for like 800 years and nobody painted anything or made a statue anywhere.
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Jul 31, 2015 18:06
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Peel posted:I wonder what they think Asia was up to during that period. Inventing gunpowder but failing to use it correctly. loving fireworks. Pfah.
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Jul 31, 2015 19:35
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I think my favorite part is the "moral authority" they claim the left has over the right. Yeah, how awful that somebody is preventing you from murdering Those People whenever you want and treating them like inferiors useful only for cheap labor.
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Aug 1, 2015 14:39
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ocrumsprug posted:Out of curiosity, what happened in May 2009 that caused our two thousand year regression to the 50's? Obama I assume. Or rather Obama's presidency was just starting. Either he is a Muslim and will personally begin the millenia of darkness or he didn't do enough to stop Muslims from spreading.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:59
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Mel Mudkiper posted:What weirds me out about these kinds of people is that most destructive racist beliefs I can at least attribute to the comfort and incuriousity of the average American. They don't really think hard about this stuff and chose the most personally affirming position which is usually "gently caress the minorities" Some people are only happy when they have an enemy to fight. The other side of it has to do with something that Goebbels said (at least I think it was him) during the Nuremberg trials. I forget the exact quote and can't be assed to look it up but the short of it was basically that if you want to influence somebody else the easiest way is to tell them that they're being attacked. One of the best things to do if you want to take control over something political is to convince people you're protecting them from those people. It's an ancient tradition, really. Sometimes it is in fact true that you're being attacked but it isn't always. In this case it's playing Islam like this gigantic monolith of terror that wants to end America, specifically, for reasons.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:17
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massive spider posted:Wouldnt the very notion of a "global jewish conspiracy" kind of imply a race that had its poo poo together? I've not heard any white supremacists attack jews on the notion of straight IQ, its usually implying they're self serving and morally degenerate and such. I'd be interested to know if it was ever the case in 1930s nazi propaganda though. The enemy is both so unnervingly clever and brilliant that we can't put any plot, no matter how complex, past them and so incredibly incompetent that we'll defeat them any day.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:43
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computer parts posted:Are there actual examples of them being portrayed as stupid though? In the case of Jews? No, but I've seen them portrayed as so blinded by greed that they'll screw each other over in a heartbeat or so nasty and selfish that they sabotage each other. In "Jews secretly control the world" scenarios they seem to have a knack for ruining each others' plans. The view seems to be that they're in control of the world but fail to do anything with that.
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Aug 5, 2015 00:43
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Jack Gladney posted:Are there still truthers? What do they get mad about now that Obama's almost done? Hillary.
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Aug 5, 2015 16:19
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Dapper_Swindler posted:Borgesesque? pretty much, Rorschach is an interesting somewhat tragic character but if you take him at face value and want that to be your role model. you may have issues. Then again i liked hosed up characters too (like tywin lannister, stannis barrathion, the galactic empire, the impirum of man other weird nerdy poo poo.) but then again i dont view them as role models to use for life choices. One of the issues is that good guys are boring. This is why antiheroes have become increasingly popular. First off the world doesn't run on the stark black and white morality that comic book logic likes to portray. Second off "well I always do the right thing because it's the right thing to do!" isn't very dynamic. It's why bad guys rant and good guys say "dear bad guy: I will stop you! Also, shut up." Archetypical heroes basically all have the same personality. You can just do more with villains and antiheroes.
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Dec 28, 2015 11:48
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Maoist Pussy posted:Fascism is one of the key spices in any political system. It will always be part of what we do, since leanings toward fascism and collectivism and libertarianism and all the different ways people want to order their lives are in each of us. We will always have something inside of us that demands better behavior from ourselves, our peers and our countrymen. Well, no fascism isn't really a core part of every political system. While a certain amount of control is a part of a system (no you people should not be out murdering each other and we're going to punish you if you try to do that) fascism is ultimately dividing the world into us and not us and all the political power belongs to us. The justifications vary of course but you ultimately end up with that. Us is in no way accountable to not us. This is why the first step of fascism is always to find some reason for us to be the better category. This is also why fascism wasn't exactly the newest ideology and why Mussolini liked the idea of reclaiming ancient Roman prestige for a new Italy. See, fascism automatically disenfranchises people. Actually it's extremely aggressive about it. This is why fascism sucks and why right wing politics are awful. It's always about enfranchising us and disenfranchising them. More democratic systems are about giving everybody a say. While you do end up with a ruling class of a sort they're beholden to the interests of those that elect them as they can be voted out at any time. Fascism takes that away or at the very least severely restricts who can do the electing. While there is a certain amount of control that the system exerts on the people the idea behind democracy is that it's for the common good. The idea behind more tolerant, democratic system is more along the lines of "OK, here are the rules: don't steal from each other, don't murder each other, don't trample on each others' rights. Beyond that you can do basically whatever you want within reason. Got it?" In theory democratic systems have "majority rules with minority rights." Fascist systems have "I have power, you don't, gently caress you. What I say goes." Which is incidentally why you have so much right wing thought tied up in some of these ideas these days. It's why you have upper middle class white guys making arguments that they're the smart, enlightened ones that should get to make the decisions for everybody else, who are all dumb and bad. It sounds like fascism because, well, it is. It's all about disenfranchising them while we put us in charge. This goes against democracy because if those people are going to have to play by the rules of the system then they should have a say in how the system functions in the first place. If you disenfranchise entire groups of people things...tend to not go well for them. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Dec 29, 2015 |
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Dec 29, 2015 02:54
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Maoist Pussy posted:Well, no. Fascism is the binding together of individuals into a greater polity, which is any political system other than purely anarchist ones. Liberal systems, communitarian systems, and systems typically called fascist in the modern sense simply have different emphases on what the polity should accomplish for the individual. All three are valid. So what you're saying is that "let's agree to not murder each other" is fascism.
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Dec 29, 2015 03:31
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Cingulate posted:What about the political system literally called fascism? Is fascism a part of fascism? Oh hey that's a really stupid typo. I meant "every" system. Gotta fix that. Sentences come and sentences go but typos accumulate.
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Dec 29, 2015 03:37
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Kemper Boyd posted:Late to the party, but does anyone have any sort of thought about what made this whole MRA/crazy conservative/cuckosphere thing emerge initially? It's always been there it's just more visible. One of the reasons you ended up with MRAs as they stand now is because you have a lot of fat white guys without much to do all day looking for somebody to blame. Growing up they were promised the world - they'd go to college, get a job, snag a hot wife, and be the rulers of the world. Now they see people that aren't white guys from privileged backgrounds in places of wealth, prestige, and importance and are thinking "that should be me." Part of it is because of the financial meltdown too. You have a lot of people that got screwed over and it's been hammering upper middle class white folks as well. Of course some of them are looking for somebody to blame but go after the wrong targets. Things are bad for a lot of people. It doesn't help that upper middle class white guys probably are under a lot of pressure to be wealthy and important but have no opportunity to do so. That gets twisted into the belief that all of the opportunity is being taken and forcibly given to people who don't deserve it. It jives well with American conservative thought because American conservatism has a pretty strong history of being racist and sexist.
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Dec 30, 2015 00:10
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OwlFancier posted:Is it really a strawman if you're showing footage of the actual human people saying it? No then it's taking things out of context and using it to smear people.
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Jan 3, 2016 00:51
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OwlFancier posted:I admit the whole "fading glory" type of worldview is really weird to me because I associate it most strongly with Tolkien who did an absolutely peerless job with it. I dunno if Tolkien was particularly racist or not, it's easy to read it into his books, but at the same time there's so much other depth to the work that it isn't a focal point really. Also I think he does a much better job of saying "yes everything is always going to poo poo but it's still important to do what you can" which is something I can't help but feel a lot of the turbonerds who buy into this DE nonesense seem to be missing. Tolkien wasn't a racist. I mean we're all a little bit racist but he wasn't a person writing from the standpoint of "white people good, everybody else bad" and using that to influence his works. He was, however, a traditionalist and a very devout Catholic. He wasn't a jerk but he was definitely not a fan of progress. More of a stodgy old man that had to be pulled into the future grudgingly. His writing actually started from the fact that he was ultimately a linguist. The basic idea was "poo poo changes and languages change with it." His point wasn't necessarily that one race or another was better. The idea of the ages and transitioning toward the Age of Man was that humans were really boring and mundane but didn't have any real tie to magic. Magic in the world was a dying thing. The elves were very magical and basically hosed because as magic faded so did they. If anything it was more a criticism of clinging to strongly to the past. The entire problem surrounding Sauron and The One Ring came about because the elves wanted to, you know, keep existing so they made a monkey's paw wish. The dwarves, of course, were just ruined by their own avarice. Compare that to, say, Lovecraft who was overtly racist. It's kind of hard to read racism into Tolkien, I think. Granted DE dorks could probably read feminism into it as the magic and that it will fade and the Age of Men will come but that's kind of a stretch.
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Jan 8, 2016 05:56
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OwlFancier posted:I was more thinking in the rather simple sense that the world is very clearly divided into different races and most of the people except the humans are broadly defined by their race. And also the bad guys are the Inscrutible Easterners who live in the desert. Also the elves are magical perfect pretty white guys. Actually if you read it humans are defined by their race too. The biggest difference between humans and everybody else is that humans adapt a lot better. Adaptability and resourcefulness set humans apart from the other races. Humans in the story represent a changing world. Humans are getting with the times but nobody else is. There also isn't much that says humans are the best, either. Humans are corruptible, greedy jerks in the books. Some of them rise above it but really the only consistently "good" race is the hobbits and that's because they're a bunch of fat guys that don't want to do much other than farm and eat.
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Jan 8, 2016 07:29
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BobHoward posted:It's been an awful long time since I reread LOTR, but IIRC there's plenty of "swarthier Men = more evil/fallen" stuff. And then there's orcs. They're subhuman creatures, crude degraded versions of Men (or was it Elves? I forget) created by a Devil-like figure. The very worst of the Orcs possess the darkest skin. Despite being foul and corrupted, Orcs are threateningly superior in many ways: fiendishly strong, animalistic, avaricious, fast-breeding menaces to all that is good. They lust after and resent the status of higher races. The only solution to the Orc problem which any good guy contemplates is indiscriminate slaughter. Peace talks, negotiations? Impossible.. Our Heroes cheerily wade in Orc blood, competing to rack up the highest possible body count without ever expressing any guilt or remorse, because why would they??? Orcs are vermin and deserve their fate. One of the issues with writing the kind of story that Tolkien wrote is you need villains but you need villains that aren't sympathetic. It's also a fantasy world so it doesn't necessarily need to ape the real world. So how do you create villainous villains that you can't negotiate with? Create something like orcs. That's a long, long trope of not just fantasy but fiction in general. "These things are mean and nasty and you can only fight them." It doesn't necessarily mean the writer is racist. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. edit: Now that I think about it I realize why DE likes these stories so much; they clearly delineate the world into "good things" and "bad things." Humans, elves, hobbits, and dwarves are good. Orcs are bad. That's the way of things. What these guys want to do is separate the real world into that clear delineation as well. Which is unfortunate as reality is...a lot more complicated. Fictional worlds are simpler because it makes for good storytelling. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 20:42
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Lady Naga posted:The catpeople are very much supposed to be Roma (they're nomadic peoples who are also dirty, shifty thieves and they speak funny). They're also the settings worst drug addicts and considered a slave race.
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Jan 9, 2016 22:45
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Crowsbeak posted:Why the hell are we talking about TES? The series has been around for basically ever and the internet just loves modding horrible things into it. It's kind of tied to Reddit madness and DE pretty strongly. Plus like was said it has some things that are pretty obviously racist in origin.
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Jan 10, 2016 03:52
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Ddraig posted:Tbh I've always had problems with D&D's "race" system mainly because of poo poo like this. It's become the de facto system for virtually all RPGs and it's lazy, hackish and has the potential to be incredibly offensive. The issue though is that sometimes that reflects real-world racism. Big, hairy things with dark skin that are strong and dumb has...some rather nasty real world connotations. At least if you have something like green orcs you can be like "they're just kind of human-shaped but pretty different from us" and base their traits on their environment or the meddling of some god then it's like "OK no big deal." It gets kind of touchy sometimes and isn't always directly inspired by real world racism. Then there is FATAL which literally has a magic item that makes you very good with money but gives you a huge nose.
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Jan 10, 2016 05:35
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rudatron posted:It would probably help if fantasy and fantasy games had a lot more sentient races than just 'humanoids of different physiques/colors'. Where are the hipster-cuttlefish? Though that may not solve the problem, because it brings up another issue - fantasy worlds of any kind (including sci-fi) embed current social stereotypes and ideology within them, and kind of inescapably so. Both because that's easier to make, but also because that makes it kind of more compelling; if fiction cannot connect with the audience, they'll just ignore it. Another thing about storytelling is that a story where everybody just gets along and nothing ever goes wrong is boring. You kind of need conflict and struggle to make a story compelling. Of course one thing you can do (this is why Drizzt is so popular as a character) is totally subvert everything. Like OK, so Drow are evil as hell and they turned black. What if there was a good Drow who became an amazing hero? Then you start exploring things like societal pressure; there are social reasons the Drow are dicks aside from the fantasy world reasons. Granted another side of it is you hear things like "dark people are stained by the sins of their ancestors." Sometimes a fantasy world is just "OK that isn't just a myth it literally happened. How different does that make things?" Another issue is how do you make a sentient race appear strange to the reader without making the reader automatically assume they're inferior? Just because something is different doesn't necessarily mean it's bad but that's where xenophobia often comes from. The view is that if those people weren't so awful they'd be more enlightened. All societies eventually progress to the way we act and we are the best.
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Jan 10, 2016 07:09
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Crowsbeak posted:Drow besides being rather racist, also never made sense to me. If the had spent millennia underground shouldn't they be pale as gently caress? Know sunlight would mean they would probably not have melanin wouldn't it? So they would look like Elric. (Interestingly I would argue the first Dark Elves in literature are the Melniboneans from Elric, and Elric would fit the description to a tee). Technically yes they should have lost their color but then it's a fantasy world so it doesn't necessarily follow the same rules. I don't think it's ever explained why Drow are black other than "dark" being used as a common descriptor for the nasty races. Granted that also goes into old folklore that has roots in fear of the night. Trolls, monsters, elves, etc. that live in dark places and are dark so they're hard to see at night are a very common trope in folklore and literature in general. Doesn't have much to do with racism, in that case; it probably has to do with predators hunting humans in the dark before fancy things like electrical lights got invented and the fact that humans as well tend to be lovely to each other more when nobody can see what's going on. So it turned into "be careful when you're in a place you can't see anything because something might try to hurt you." Sometimes it's racism. Sometimes it's just camouflage. In the case of D&D creatures stuff that lives underground can generally see in the dark so they aren't prone to putting lights up. It's a good survival mechanism on their part to be dark because then they can see you but you can't see them.
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Jan 10, 2016 08:07
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Crowsbeak posted:I thought Moorcock himself admitted that Law/chaos was largely from Poul Andersson? There is nothing new under the sun.
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Jan 10, 2016 23:55
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fspades posted:Darth Walrus answered this quite well, but I'd like to stress the distinction here between "tradition-as-imagined" and "tradition-as-it-exists." Fascists are big proponents of the former, but the tradition they glorify goes back to a distant and irretrievable past. In a sense, all conservatism necessarily has elements of this, but genuine conservatives usually have no problems in pointing out to living practices and institutions as a rallying point to defend and extend further. But fascists feel alienated from the modern society and believe they are robbed of their glorious past by it. "The tradition" they defend is already a dead one that must be revived by modern means. As such, even elements of living tradition become suspect of corruption, simply because they managed to survive in a culture of decadence that must be destroyed completely. The thing about fascism overall, and totalitarianism in general, is that they play up fantasy versions of Our Glorious Past. You see this in right wing political thought basically everywhere and what they're after is the power. Nothing more, nothing less. "We were powerful once; let's be powerful again" is the overall battle cry. So they find somebody and something to blame. That is The Great Enemy and we must fight it. This is what inspires people to fight and kill; without that brutal totalitarianism of any stripe can't exist. You see the pattern over and over again in fascist, fundamentalist, and totalitarian movements and it's always the same. Mussolini had Rome. Islamic fundamentalists have the days when the Islamic world was much wealthier and stronger. But they're cherry picking the good parts. Rome was huge and powerful but also not exactly stable. Rebellions and infighting were constant. Islam has never once been a singular, unified nation. The fundamental nugget is "our ideas are right and all other ideas are wrong. We will prove this by making other ideas cease to exist." Then they look for justification and find it in all of the ways the world is not perfect. There will always be some other Great Enemy to fight and that's the excuse for taking power and keeping it. The reality is that the people in charge just want to run things for their own benefit.
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Jan 11, 2016 01:29
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Cingulate posted:I don't think this really captures Nazism. And if you leave fascism and move to other totalitarianisms, even less so (Stalinism etc). In the case of the Nazis a lot of it was "things were great before the Jews ruined everything." I get that it's more complex than that in reality but reading about it that's one of the most common things I've seen. "We were awesome; now let's be awesome again." Granted at the time in Europe Futurism was taking place as well which wanted to discard the past for a better future but nationalism in general was where a lot of it came from. "We are good; you are bad. You must be destroyed."
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Jan 11, 2016 01:47
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BaurusJA posted:I'm pretty sure the "lets be awesome again" and recovery of past stuff is why Heidegger intitially bought into the movement. A lot of Heidegger's writing, even during the second formulation of Sein und Zeit, had a lot of the "recovery, return" narrative going on in it. So the seeds of these thoughts were there in Heidegger's mind even in the 20s. I mean, I think he eventually figured out that the social control and totalitarian approach wasn't what he wanted and became disillusioned with the movement, but I don't think he ever quite got over hoping Germany could return to a slower time, a more thoughtful time... without the Jews. A lot of that goes back to their theories on race too and how the Aryan race got ruined in the first place. They argued that, as people went further north, their skin got lighter and they got more clever to deal with the harsher climate. They viewed Germanic and Nordic people as the best poo poo ever because they were the lightest and thus the most clever. There was a time when they didn't mix with other races, didn't get influenced by outside ideas, and were huge, awesome badasses that could tame any terrain you threw at them. Once again it was pining for this lost past where Aryans didn't have influence from outsiders in any way, shape, or form. This is where the idea of fighting for "Liebensraum" came from and why extermination started happening; anybody that wasn't pure Aryan was wrong and bad. They were subhuman filth that had to be removed. The idea was to not only return to a past where Aryans had no outside influences ruining them but to create a future where only that past existed but once again it was an inaccurate past they were going after. Yes the light-skinned people of that region of the world were tough by necessity but they weren't some incredible supermen that could accomplish literally anything. They just adapted their ways to their surroundings because that's just what humans do.
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Jan 11, 2016 02:07
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BaurusJA posted:And, more specifically, they were only adapted and hardy in comparison to their direct ecological environment. Drop them in tropical Africa and the disease gradient change would have wiped them out right quick. In fact, the farther a society moves from tropical regions and the more a group of people move to the edge of temperate climates the higher survival rates go. So actually, they have the argument backwards slightly. But regardless whether people can survive harsh winters or vicious tropical areas doesn't mean anything about how virtuous and powerful said group of people are, like you said, it just says that they were good at surviving their immediate ecological conditions and nothing more. Plus a lot of that happens through gradual migration and adapting survival techniques slowly. The world isn't some place where the terrain has magical lines where one side is X and the other is Y. It transitions so once one area had too many people they just moved a bit over, changed their ways a little, and then repeated the cycle later. So these forest-dwelling folks overpopulate their forest, some of them move to a slightly colder one, change their habits a bit, and so forth. Next thing you know you have people living in the arctic circle eating whales.
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Jan 11, 2016 02:31
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BaurusJA posted:Oh for sure I was just saying what I said in refutation of the "The Inherent Hardiness-Superiority of the Aryans" which Nazis widely claimed. I was more saying Aryans or people who live in northern Europe aren't superior or have it any harder or easier than any other human group just based on where they live. Of course, I'm rough sketching though. Yeah that was kind of the point I was making too. People from X region are superior to everybody else at thriving in X region but that's about as far as it goes. Especially when you look at what "harsh region" means. Deserts are pretty drat harsh too but you didn't hear them arguing that Arabs were just as good as Aryans for thriving in the desert.
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Jan 11, 2016 02:49
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Dapper_Swindler posted:is that made out of whale/seal bone goggles, thats awesome. Inuit culture is so amazing. Yup. The snow glare gets nasty in those parts so they invented something that functions basically like sunglasses. Keeps them from going blind. Human ingenuity at its finest.
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Jan 11, 2016 05:04
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Fox Ironic posted:On a side note, I think a lot of the reason White Supremacy/HBD/Dark Enlightenment stuff is gaining steam is because it's becoming harder for more "traditionally" minded people to find positive, pro-social identity in "opressor identity sets." A lot of these people see no way to reconcile being White/Male in a way that doesn't alienate others, thus they find company with reactionaries (and/or kill people). Whether this is real or imagined, I don't know if I can say, but I feel it's also the reason mass shootings are becoming more common. It also doesn't help that the identity of white dudes is frequently "be really angry, own every gun."
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Jan 14, 2016 03:11
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OwlFancier posted:I would probably be extremely racist if I lived in a pen and paper RPG setting. Yeah to be honest I'd only be a race realist if there were, in fact, actual major differences on that level but even then it'd be hard to justify telling an individual orc that he wasn't allowed to study math because orcs are, on average, less intelligent than other races. But see that doesn't mean an individual orc is necessarily stupid. Though his race's average intelligence is 8 the -2 means that the natural maximum is still 16 which is still pretty drat smart even by the standards of other races. From a purely mechanical standpoint, anyway; even then it's tough to say "orcs can never be smart" when their average is less smart. Even if a stereotype has some truth to it you can't use it to predict how a specific individual will act. Granted in my own D&D world I made one of the most powerful wizards alive a troll so what do I know.
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Jan 14, 2016 10:30
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Cingulate posted:Ok but the trick is not: what is the morally justifiable response to living in such-and-such world? The trick is, in what world do you think one ought to be a "race realist"? Only in a world where every member of one race has a certain trait and another does not. If you had a world where, say, one race was completely unintelligent beyond words with two syllables and very basic math then I could see being a "race realist" about them because then the reality is that that race isn't bright at all and can't accomplish much intellectually. It would have to be pretty drastic, though. I'm talking an entire race of people that would all be mentally retarded by human standards.
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Jan 14, 2016 14:22
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Cingulate posted:Okay. From this exercise, have we learned anything about "Race Realists"? Nothing, really. Race realists are idiots grasping for any excuse to justify their racism. That isn't news. The differences between races on Earth aren't that huge. The biggest difference is what horrifying genetic diseases a specific ethnicity is prone to. We all have them so it isn't like you can argue inferiority on that one either.
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Jan 14, 2016 16:32
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