Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc.

Why isn't that a thing in South Africa, though? Aren't Black Males stereotyped to be these well-endowed, muscle-bound, slightly dim epitomes of virility?

Speaking of which, I just remembered, the whole plot of Arabian Nights is kicked up by king Shahryar's wife screwing his black slave in his absence. Upon the betrayal he went psycho and started his routine of marrying and bedding every virgin in the country, only to behead her the next morning, as a confused revenge of womankind, and so that he'd never be betrayed again.

I wonder if that's among the many bits that the French translator made up.

edited 28th Jul '16 1:02:09 PM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

...If it were that, I think South Africa would have the full-on race issue you guys commonally attach to the word, jano? Apartheid... remember that?

For some reason, your Jim Crow propaganda pushed the word in that direction. But, although the concept certainly was around in South Africa (upfront and in your face), the word didn't get shoehorned into just meaning "interracial sex behind a husband's back". It still just means "sex behind the husband's back".

No. Depends. Certain tribes have that stereotype more than others... *cough*amaZulu*cough* (from the amaXhosa perspective: Zulus can't swindle for toffee, they have to take by force, poor things ). But, not all Blacks. :/

edited 28th Jul '16 1:12:44 PM by Euodiachloris

Which concept and which word? I'm getting confused, jano.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

"Cuckold" or "to be cuckolded", nè?

edited 28th Jul '16 1:08:29 PM by Euodiachloris

Ah, OK, the arrows confused me.

Oh, it's one of those "we may look all the same to you foreigners, but we see each other as completely different and having far less in common than you think" sort of situations...

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Yup. And, depending on which clan or tribe your nanny came from... different White folks, different stereotyping...

(Euodiachloris, I am a Swiss citizen currently on holiday in Italy. Nothing to do with the US)

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

They view people as either ressources or obstacles. I have to say, they sound an awful lot like sociopaths.

Sounds like Nietzche wannabes.

Key word being wannabes.

Mixed feelings about the stereotypes:

edited 28th Jul '16 2:10:56 PM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

That is an insult to Nietzsche.

Inter arma enim silent leges

You know, on the topic of the alt-right and (US/UK style) libertarians and people associated with that general inclination, I wouldn't necessarily say the concerns raised about the social justice community aren't entirely invalid; the sort of hypocritical "social justice warriors" they complain about do exist even if they're fairly uncommon, and some such people do indeed have fairly significant followings in certain places.

Now, claiming that most or even a significant plurality of the social justice community is composed of would be tyrants is a gross and absurd exaggeration, but that being said, there are a number of worrying behaviors and phenomena that have arisen in the social justice sphere as of late. Now, to the best of my understanding, the vast majority of these issues at this time arise mostly from intellectual laziness as opposed to any actual malice.

However, as the social justice cause is expected to become increasingly mainstream going into the future, it's important that people remain wary for the (further) growth of proto-authoritarian sentiments in the base, however well meaning and harmless it may seem.

I don't know about fairly uncommon, they actually are even if a minority. It's just that their concerns with social justice often turn out to be entirely self-serving and so transparently the result of unrelated fandom things like Ship-to-Ship Combat that they may as well not even get a second look. "Social Justice Warriors" may as well be broken into two camps at this point.

There's some overlap in the people but the kinds of behavior exemplified by "if you don't ship my OTP, share my headcanon, or draw/write more of the characters I want, doing the things I want, or the way I want, then you're a racist/homophobe/pro-abuse/transphobe/ableist", "this work is hateful because it chose to pair one of its characters with a different person than the one I wanted", or "my celebrity husbando is a pure unproblematic fave while this celebrity I don't like because I think they're ugly is a real-life Ron the Death Eater" are an entirely different flavor from the stuff college campus activists and the Progressive Unicorn Brigade engage in.

It's not even intellectual laziness or malice at this point but appropriation of genuine social justice concepts for selfish reasons. It's just a bunch of stupid noise and schoolyard bullying, from people who should know better and sometimes do but don't care because they like feeling powerful.

edited 1st Aug '16 1:32:00 AM by AlleyOop

There is something to be said about how people have this unrealistic expectation that any movement be spotless. I don't think think that's ever been the case with anything, and it certainly isn't the case with the social justice movement.

It mostly comes down to how much you know about or sympathize with its aims and the people in it, like anything else. A person who doesn't fully grasp or is not particularly concerned with fighting social injustice because it isn't relevant to them is not going to be very forgiving of a well-meaning but ultimately insensitive and maybe even flat out wrong person, and is ultimately quite likely to latch onto examples of bad apples to justify their apathy or contempt for their group (like the Steven Universe debacle a while back), while ignoring everyone else who isn't like that or just not bothering to see if there's actual validity behind that person's stance or ideas. It's very, very easy to filter out anybody whose ideas you don't care for or want to avoid on the internet, for better or worse.

Not to say that self-policing and an awareness of how to properly present your points in a way people outside of your movement will understand and be more willing to accept aren't important for social activism, but past a certain point, people will just latch onto whatever validates their preconceptions, and there's nothing that can be done about that.

edited 31st Jul '16 1:35:32 PM by wehrmacht

It's less an expectation of spotlessness, and more a concern about a demagogue eventually exploiting the more radical elements of the community using social justice rhetoric reduced to its lowest common denominator. In regards to the potential for tyranny, the substance and agenda of a movement matter less than the degree to which critical thinking is employed by its participants; without sufficient safeguards against such eventualities, that's not outside of the realm of possibility.

edited 31st Jul '16 2:15:46 PM by CaptainCapsase

Sure but the unicorn brigade have shown no indication that they're going to escape the two main areas where they exist, the Internet and student's unions, the second one is very odd as well, they should be spreading outside of university student oust by graduating but they're not, almost as if the same process that gets them to graduate gives them enough critical thinking skills to leave the unicorn brigade.

Also I'd like to add to the appropriation point, it's not only crazy fandom people but also racists and sexists, if you look you can see that a part of the unicorn brigade aren't interested in social justice at all, they're interested in hate (either at a specific group or simply a chance to hate on someone) and are trying to use social justice as a way to be hatful legitimately.

It may actually be similar to how you get some idiots joining militaries so as to "shoot the towel heads", you'll get people joining the social justice movement so as to "tell all men to go die and that I want to cut their balls off".

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Well, if incidents like the primary school teacher guilt tripping children starts happening more often the we will know if their crap is leaking out of the academic circles and reality. Not to mention the cases where some HR manager lost her job because she admitted in a social media post she doesn't hire men for the company.

Besides I don't think it is the college teaching critical skills to those people who is holding them back, I've met my share of seniors who were just as dense when they got into college and remained dense as they left. So far from what I've seen from both US and even Brazil, most of those snow flake activists are so invested in their activism they end up forgetting the subjects they are studding have tests they need to pass.

No really, a Student Union here wanted to demand their college to recognize the hours spent on protests as academic hours and I think I've seen similar demands roaming around in the US or something similar about students failing classes because they are spending most of their time on student strikes or protests instead of studying or attending the classes.

Inter arma enim silent leges

Georgian city Republicans send cops door to door to suppress the black vote

But why don't black people like cops or the GOP????

edited 2nd Aug '16 3:33:33 AM by NoName999

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has managed to get itself in trouble again, this time over an "Aug Lives Matter" placard in a piece of concept art for the game.

I think I'll include my post in the game's thread here as well:

While I don't think Eidos Montreal genuinely had malice with the use of the slogan, it still shows how important context is. Like the "mechanical apartheid" term, it's extremely difficult to convey what sort of situation ingame would lead to such a call as depicted in the art without including a whole lot of context. Which a piece of concept art on its own decidedly lacks. Sure, we have some idea due to watching every trailer and every bit of gameplay that's been released so far, but your average social media user might not. Your newspaper or magazine reader might not. Your TV or movie viewer might not. That lack of context can result in it backfiring big time.

And then there's the whole issue of appropriating the name of a movement that has been extremely successful in highlighting the racial inequalities that exist in America today. That movement has successfully smoked out a lot of bigots who are willing to go to any length to rationalise police brutality against minorities, perpetuate governmental policies and societal beliefs that ensure structural discrimination against minorities, and run what is effectively the real world version of Picus News (remember, Picus isn't just a TV network and news site, it runs forums for all kinds of interests too, video gaming included) to convince them of the truthfulness of their cause and fool the credulous into joining their cause. Remember that the bigots' online presence was first marked by a movement convinced that games that touched upon real world issues were infringing on their "freedom of speech" and "indoctrinating" the young with their "warped" ideologies, instead of providing them with a hefty dose of gore and titillation. The fact that many of the bigots would be apologists for apartheid as well is not coincidental. Not only does the use of the name raise the issue of sensitivity, that's also painting a huge crosshair on their backs if the bigots find that the game's opinion on its in-universe social issues is not one of their liking.

I recall a comment by Hideo Kojima noting that if he botched the treatment of the themes he intended to include in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, his career would be finished. I get the feeling that this is especially the case for Eidos Montreal now.

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

Did he botch them, though?

Deus Ex Revolution was very social-justice and anti-bigotry about how it presented the hypothetical future social tensions due to the advent of augmentation, drawing very explicitly from the language and implications of issues such as racism, LGBT rights, ableism, and others yet.

This confuses some critics, who would rather it were an allegory for one thing. I would posit that the one thing in question is bigotry and privilege, approached through multiple facets. It also doesn't need to be an allegory for anything, instead simply using present tools to approach a hypothetical future problem that might actually occur in the mid-term future, just as the very best kind of Speculative Fiction does.

Deus Ex was a masterpiece of its time. Deus Ex Human Revolution was a beautiful, tasteful, elegant tour the force (with a couple of bugs ). I trust the creators to keep doing an excellent job.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Honestly I don't see why overreact over that, plenty of shows, comedians and commentators use current issues in their works.

At least it is being recognized instead of denied.

Inter arma enim silent leges

From player feedback, he didn't.

The backlash was, as I mentioned, from it managing to get released with minimal context because someone clearly hadn't learned from the "mechanical apartheid" debacle, resulting in a furore about what boils down to using someone else's brand without permission. And, uh, a large part of the vocal internet deciding that BLM was a "kill all honkie cops" movement and deciding that the same must apply here, or that SJWs have "cucked" Eidos Montreal.

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

I think that horse is getting beat so bad it's already dead and doesn't know it.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

At this point we should stop giving two craps to whatever comes out of Twitter, nothing productive is coming out of there an there are people there who live for the outrage.

Outside of voicing their dislike of using the term "aug lives matter" in a game that deals directly with the issue of discrimination I don't really get what they want. To force studios using modern issues for inspiration and analogues for social movement in their works?

The Apartheid one as a bit stupid, it isn't like the South African Apartheid still going around and other themes like the holocaust, genocide and fascism have been used in countless games and works to represent a message.

They are beating a dead horse hard enough to bring it back to life and beat it to death again.

Inter arma enim silent leges

Really? Can you give me an example of Apartheid-themed game?

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.