Victimatus virtus non est

Caribbean immigrant to UK / Long posts tagged #long or #long post / Officially mentally unwell // Please don't hostile ping me into any arguments, or hostile ping others to see my posts.

[beardedmrbean]

[mascula-sappho]

what a lot of people say is anti-arab racism: borders existing, being correctly labeled a colonial culture, being told Arabs are not the ancient Canaanites + ancient Mesopotamians + ancient Egyptians all at the same time, being asked to speak a language other than Arabic, Jews + Kurds + Persians existing in proximity to an Arab or doing anything such as singing or talking or dancing, wondering where all that gold came from, being called out on cultural appropriation of head wrap styles from Jews and rugs from Persians and henna styles from Somalis (among many others these are just examples), having to be around religions other than Islam.

what Persians, Jews, Kurds, Druze, etc. agree is racism: not being allowed to speak native language, culture erased, land stolen, children murdered, thousands jailed, hijabs mandatory, murdered for resisting or practicing culture or religion, historical artifacts and temples built over or destroyed or disappeared, religion stolen, people claiming to be the "true" inheritors of your culture while killing your people, etc.

anyway all West Asians who are not Arab and will never be Arab, I love you, I love you, I love you. Never give up.

[loulooser]

Can’t wait to not sleep at all on September 11th

[spinostarz]

i know ur from the uk(?) but reading this as an american is really really funny

[loulooser]

why 😭 it’s about twenty one pilots???? Their new album is out sep 12th????

[jarsjam]

THERE'S TWENTY ONE THIS TIME???

[thydungeongal]

I have posted before about how sometimes well-meaning attempts at running D&D without some of the more unfortunate dynamics can often backfire but in a way where most people don't even register it backfiring. Because when you take the step of "oh D&D's various 'evil humanoids' don't just exist in a vacuum and given the renfaire colonialism on display it's kind of impossible not to read them as somewhat racialized" many people will then go "okay but we still need some people who player characters should be allowed to kill guilt-free, so let's replace 'orcs' with 'bandits' because killing bad criminal people is perfectly ideologically neutral." At that point it's like "okay so your characters are no longer the racist kill squad, now they're just the Tough on Crime Vigilantes."

But I feel I should make clear that D&D the game itself is not exactly at fault here: like, okay, it is sort of at fault in the sense that it is a game of fantasy killing people with swords and magic. And it is easier for people to accept the killing with people with swords and magic part when they can imagine that their characters are at least to a degree justified. That is sort of just built into the game (and the game has built into its lore varying levels of making the fantasy of killing certain types of guy justifiable).

But D&D is not at fault for making people go "okay so it's bad when you kill orcs simply because they're orcs. It's better when you kill people who are bandits, who are a class of evil criminals where killing them is actually wholesome and sensible." Like, yeah, most people probably don't think about it that deeply, but the reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.

And the ideology is basically "it is bad to be racist but it's good to be a tough on crime vigilante."

[krongbly]

I don't disagree with this post but I do think there's an important element being left out here which is that 9 times out of 10 players are engaging in combat primarily as a form of self defense. Most of the time it's less of "we can kill these people because they're criminals and that makes it ideologically neutral" and more "these NPCs are trying to kill us and the most effective way to stop them right now is to reduce their hit points to 0 which, if they fail their death saves, means they will die."

I think "vigilantes tough on crime" is actually kind of a bad descriptor for how most parties operate. This definitely varies wildly from table to table but I think for the *average* table there's honestly a solid chance that either your players are friends with at least one criminal NPC or even that they themselves are criminals. There's even an entire class who's fantasy is "criminal."

[thydungeongal]

I don't think the self defense point actually holds true in a meaningful sense.

In older editions of D&D, which were much clearer on the expected gameplay being "go into the dungeon and steal the stuff," there wasn't really this layer there. The rules for combat were generally quite harsh on player characters so combat was certainly something they didn't want to get into too casually, but ultimately the player characters were just going into the dang monsters' house and stealing their stuff. The monsters were arguably the ones acting in self-defense (but they're evil so who cares).

But in the WotC editions the self-defense justification is still fraught because modern D&D especially is an action game. It's a game where characters mostly have access to various methods of visiting violence upon their environs and where the gameplay itself rewards them for violence, because combat is the main source of experience as written in all WotC editions of the game and characters primarily grow in combat effectiveness.

The self-defense angle I feel is not supported by the game's rules itself, but is more of a narrative contrivance introduced by groups to make their characters feel more heroic.

My friend @tenleaguesbeneath once described it as, and I am paraphrasing, "characters hunting things for sport but the things attack them first so they can claim self-defense." Characters want to get into fights (because that's where the rewards are), characters primarily grow in terms of being able to get into cooler fights, but because getting into fights on purpose isn't heroic there's an angle of "those goblins started it" to make the characters feel more heroic.

I don't think this is a bad thing per se. It is one way to make the power fantasy of D&D feel less like the characters are violent thugs and more like heroes. But like it is basically a group of mercenaries going into a warzone, they can't really say "well we didn't really expect to have to kill anyone on our mission, but sadly, circumstances conspired against us." Fighting is what the game wants them to do and I don't think anyone is wrong for wanting to portray the player characters as engaging in self-defense, but it's only self-defense through a very crooked lens imo.

[lumpout]

Linking this to the modern "revenge porn" action movies like John Wick and Nobody.

The self defense/revenge motivation is a fig leaf for indulging in gleeful violence. While modern DnD fictionally positions the party as the righteous castle-doctrine empowered heroes; we should at the very least be critical of why it is doing that. It's functionally identical to the fantasy of "what would I do if a bunch of terrorists/bank robbers burst into the room?" Just because there's an in-universe reason as to why you get have to murder all those people in flashy and fun ways does not mean that it isn't what you (the player) sat down at the table to do.

[jambeast]

And the key thing to remember is that violence is awesome (in fiction) and we don't have to justify it to anyone.

[brazenautomaton]

Yeah this post is horseshit and the ideology behind it is soul poison. If you demand a Maoist struggle session for your D&D campaign for its ideological implications then 387.44 million miles of wafer-thin circuits is not enough to express the extent to which you need to go fuck yourself. The assumptions and demands you make are based in a concept of human experience that only exists to serve your politics. This is not how human beings engage with art, this is not how human beings engage with stories, this is not how human beings engage with games. You are suffering under this monstrous worldview and you are monstrous in attempting to inflict it on others.

You are not revealing a secret pro-vigilantism argument, you unfathomably vast stumblefuck. You are revealing that you have conditioned other people to be afraid of speaking up against you and they're unable to fight your openly malevolent bad-faith attacks, so when you threaten them with Unpersoning for some game mechanic or setting detail you don't understand, instead of standing up for themselves and telling you to fuck off they shuffle to the closest equivalent of it that they think won't get them yelled at.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

ever wandered around in an open world video game and noticed there are no children? no elderly people? no fat people? no one using a wheelchair? no one with a guide dog? this is supposed to feel like a living world and there's so much of life that's just not there

[dragon-in-a-fez]

lots of people in the notes being like "open world games don't have kids/wheelchair users because if they did the players could kill them!" and I am unrolling my papyrus scroll with my curated reading list on the topic of "oppressed groups being imagined as symbols of innocence and vulnerability that must not be harmed in public instead of acknowledged as real people who are often suffering abuse in private, and why that is bad"

[dragon-in-a-fez]

like yeah I'm aware that our culture would go collectively apeshit over kid NPCs being shot up in GTA. I'm also aware that that very same culture is broadly fine with parents beating their actual real life kids, and that most people, even most people who would never hit their own kids, think other real life kids getting hit is not their business to be enraged about. so maybe like. there's something weird going on there.

[switch-up-snowfox]

what culture broadly are you thinking of???

[cookingwithroxy]

Honestly, this is a position so stupid that I'm stuck thinking about the whole 'Do you ever think about how, in open world games, you only ever see 30 models of NPC's?' or 'Do you ever think about how, in an open world game, there will be more combat npc's than non-combat NPC's?'

The statement 'Considering the limited processing power available to computers, games prefer to place npc's the player is likely to interact with in the world, rather than ones they are less likely to interact with' would be all that one would ever need. And while you can couple that with 'People responded exceptionally badly to people making fun of/assaulting a Suffragette in RDR2' and extrapolate a limitation on being willing to put said NPC's in games, all you really have to do in this specific conversation is point out that child abuse is a startlingly rare event (at 7.7% per 100000 each year in the US) and realize that this is not so much a conversation about NPC's at all and more of a 'OP wants to have an argument and is looking for a proxy to justify whatever yelling they wish to do'.

[carlosmarcosapproved]

[yokelfelonking]

No. No, I wasn't. The people who told me that communism was bad also told me that segregation was bad.

Also I am capable of coming to my own conclusions about these things regardless of who told me about them and I have determined that communism is an absolute dogshit ideology.

[brazenautomaton]

"It's not my fault that all you have to do to 'spread anti-communist propaganda' is open a history book and read what's inside."

Also what the fuck does Videl have to do with this.

[uncle-beanbag-mojave]

[beaked-whales-in-exile]

Oldest commie trick in the book, using race whataboutism to sow doubt about America. These fuckers will use any end to destabilize a country.

[simon-newman]

"What does Videl have to do with this?"

Well, she is the daughter of Satan...

[eric-coldfire]

They're pretending Communists didn't segregate.

[goth-queen]

[the-based-brit]

@cookingwithroxy @mama-germany

[cookingwithroxy]

Makes me think about spending time back at the family farm!

[doomtribble73]

[maimonideznuts]

When the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened, the Polish resistance didn't join or assist, they waited for uprising to be crushed and the ghetto to be "liquidated" because their ideal Poland didn't have Jews. When the Warsaw Uprising happened, the Soviets waited for the uprising to be crushed by the Nazis because they had no room for any organised Polish national identity in their Communist utopia.

When the concentration camps were liberated (which to be absolutely clear was a side effect of a European war, nobody on any continent waged war to end the holocaust except for Jewish Partizans), and survivors attempted to return home they were met with pogroms because the neighbours who enthusiastically sold them out to the Nazis and packed them into cattle cars didn't expect to see any of them back and were hostile to the reality.

Antisemitic violence faded through the establishment by holocaust survivors of Jewish advocacy organisations and concerted efforts lobbying politicians and having legal protections passed by elected representatives.

-

So maybe support the organisations that were established by your radical forebears that made these legal changes happen... And don't trust a link that suggests that not voting in preference for accelerationist violence is a real strategy.

Civil Rights Organizations

^ for the Americans.

[eris-and-lokis-love-child]

How did the supreme courts justices get in that got rid of the interment camps?

They were appointed by elected officials who were voted in.

What could have ended slavery? Voting. What could have prevented the holocaust? Voting. However, demagogues that liked to convince people not to vote kind of both kept slavery ongoing, as well as the holocaust.

Why did the south revolt? Because a voted in president made them think they would lose their slaves.

OP's arguments are bad and they should feel bad.

[cookingwithroxy]

Internment of Japanese Americans - Wikipedia

Japanese American Incarceration Camp Protests

Read descriptions of protests that occurred inside Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II.

Also, OP is actually actively lying about the connection between 'riots' and the closing of the interment camps.

Indeed, it was actually ENTIRELY UNRELATED CIVIL LEGAL PROCEDURES that lead to the end of the camps. And it does not go without saying that the OTHER related case?

Actually determined the camps were LEGAL, and that the US government had the right to just exclude people from any region they wanted for any reason they felt necessary... they just couldn't contain them afterwards. Granted, everyone there is hates the Korematsu decision, but it's still a thing.

So yeah OP and their source are not telling the truth.

[doomtribble73]

[maimonideznuts]

When the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened, the Polish resistance didn't join or assist, they waited for uprising to be crushed and the ghetto to be "liquidated" because their ideal Poland didn't have Jews. When the Warsaw Uprising happened, the Soviets waited for the uprising to be crushed by the Nazis because they had no room for any organised Polish national identity in their Communist utopia.

When the concentration camps were liberated (which to be absolutely clear was a side effect of a European war, nobody on any continent waged war to end the holocaust except for Jewish Partizans), and survivors attempted to return home they were met with pogroms because the neighbours who enthusiastically sold them out to the Nazis and packed them into cattle cars didn't expect to see any of them back and were hostile to the reality.

Antisemitic violence faded through the establishment by holocaust survivors of Jewish advocacy organisations and concerted efforts lobbying politicians and having legal protections passed by elected representatives.

-

So maybe support the organisations that were established by your radical forebears that made these legal changes happen... And don't trust a link that suggests that not voting in preference for accelerationist violence is a real strategy.

Civil Rights Organizations

^ for the Americans.

[eris-and-lokis-love-child]

How did the supreme courts justices get in that got rid of the interment camps?

They were appointed by elected officials who were voted in.

What could have ended slavery? Voting. What could have prevented the holocaust? Voting. However, demagogues that liked to convince people not to vote kind of both kept slavery ongoing, as well as the holocaust.

Why did the south revolt? Because a voted in president made them think they would lose their slaves.

OP's arguments are bad and they should feel bad.

[beardedmrbean]

What were the people doing the rebellion and war in favor of for this one?

Who started this war and was it a offensive or a defensive war that wound up ending the Holocaust?

Probably shouldn't have to say how constitutional amendments happen, but just in case, it's voting, and needs a overwhelming majority.

Happened with the 13th Amendment to the constitution too. (that's the one that ended slavery for those who don't know)

[mornington-the-crescent]

OP just wants an excuse to burn shit down.

[coffee-n-kush]

[not-this-crude-matter]

[criticalthinkingisalostskill]

[potatoes83]

I don't watch a lot of TV these days, but when it was raining all day as we chilled in the camper, Whose Line Is It Anyway on a local over the air station didn't go amiss.

These fucking race baiting shysters are still advertising asking people for money. I couldn't believe it, an honest to God SPLC commercial. After all of these inescapable revelations about what lying shifty dirtbags they are, they're still going on about how it's their job to stop hate, so give today...

You can't make this shit up. 🥔

[beardedmrbean]

One of the women at the congressional hearing sounded like she was saying there were people donating to the programs knowing what they were doing, which feels odd to me.

Might have been trying to avoid accusations of defrauding their donors by saying some of them knew their money was being used to fund the klan.

[generallemarc]

I'll believe that claim and stop laughing at her when she provides solid evidence for it and not a second before. This wasn't something that was being advertised, and given how the SPLC does advertise itself there is no way in hell that the people giving it money expected it to be used to fund the KKK, nor any possible scenario where a reasonable person could have or should have anticipated this. This is awful, heinous, and very well could be majorly illegal, but seeing this made me realize something that got lost in the shuffle: while it may not fit the formal definition, the SPLC defrauded pretty much every last person, business or other entity that gave them money. They were told their money would be used to promote anti-racism activism, and instead it was used to fund organizations described by the people they gave their money to as being racist. Financial law isn't my forte, but if that's not fraud then it's damn sure some other crime.

[outraged-honk]

Seeing so many Americans wanting their country to be destroyed. "Watch it burn" as one post said.

So you'd rather have no rights? You'd rather have no say in government? You'd rather have absolute chaos, widespread death?

Your privilage is showing.

If you hate the USA so much, leave. Same with other western countries right now.

Hating your country, sure, I feel we have at one point. However, wanting it destroyed is another story. Not only does it show extreme first world privilege, it also shows that the propaganda from terrorist regimes has burrowed deep into your common sense.

Being from a country that I can be free in, that I can associate with who I want, I don't have to worry about bombs, women can wear whatever, I like having democratic rights like freedom of speech, and to voice my opinions.

But you forget that what you have in the western world, all those rights and freedoms, they are not as common elsewhere in the world. Every country has a different system and protects their laws and citizens differently, while it says about 160 countries have this right, the same amount is said to violate human rights at the same time.

Be careful what you wish for because it might just come true.

Sources:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-freedom-of-speech

https://worldostats.com/country-stats/human-rights-index-by-country/

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

i don't like that 'metal' here means like, iron maiden. dimmu borgir is taylor swift to me

[barryogg]

"Why do people consider Iron Maiden emblematic of metal here"

[clonerightsagenda]

Literary criticism terms I use on this blog despite making them up myself, much to the chagrin of anyone who does not have my back catalog memorized:

are we the baddies: SFF subgenre focused on agents of an imperial power realizing that and grappling with what to do next, in contrast to stories focusing on the scrappy rebels resisting said imperial power

I could fix him (the empire): SFF subgenre where the colonized subject being nice and/or sexy enough Ends Colonialism, frequently tied to the John President of Racism problem

librarian bait: books centered on the transformative life-changing power of books and libraries, cousin to books focused on the transformative life-changing power of storytelling and narrative in general

college brochure fiction: stories where the protagonist has an artfully arranged group of diverse friends who are as flat as paper and whose cultural backgrounds never come up meaningfully

the Dave Strider: character the fandom fixates on to the detriment of everything else, until the weight of that attention warps fanon and sometimes even canon around them. almost always male. it's happening to Gurathin from Murderbot right now

[clonerightsagenda]

#OP tell us more about the John President of Racism problem!

It hails from an immortal tumblr post by penultimate-step, except not immortal apparently because I get 'not found' when I try to go back to the original. So here's the text:

It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.

[barryogg]

[alan713ch]

"The mexica didn't sacrifice people that was a lie the Spanish invented"

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I HATE THE DECOLONIZER MOVEMENT SO MUCH

[alan713ch]

WE FUCKING KNOW IT HAPPENED! WE CAN SEE IT IN THE GLYPHS IN THE RUINS AND IN THE SURVIVING CODEX AND EVEN IN THE STORIES TOLD ACROSS MULTIPLE TRIBES!!!

The historical argument whether it was a sacrifice or an offering - whether they killed captive people or people offered themselves for the sacrifice is an ongoing debate, but for crying out loud, WE KNOW IT IS TRUE

Fucking decolonizer movement. Fucking idiots.

[alan713ch]

GAH I'm still angry

This is why I have never liked the decolonizer movement, at least not how it's been presented in Mexico - it tries to blackwash the Spaniards more than they already were.

Mexico sits in a weird spot in the Spanish Invasion narrative becaue Hernan Cortes saw what Columbus did and said "ew, no?" and mostly succeeded at not wanting to kill people! Also, like, literally EVERYBODY HATED THE MEXICA because they were FUCKING HORRIBLE PEOPLE! It is known that Cortes would've failed had it not been for Malintzin successfully negotiating an alliance with the Tlaxcalteca. But we also know that had Cortes failed, then it would've been fucking Pedro de Alvarado and now that bastard was probably even more cruel than Columbus ever were.

And yes, there were different attitudes from the Spaniards based on who had the crown - particularly with the Bourbons there was a stronger introduction of the caste system, while before it was less strong as there was a lot of early mestizaje. And it's not like I am trying to absolve the Spaniards - indigenous people are still feeling the effects of the Conquest.

But not to bring someone down, you need to elevate someone else. People are complex, and nobody's a saint, for fuck's sake.

[thestuckylibrary]

#when we say “you don’t become an empire by being nice that applies to the aztec empire too#two things can be true: Aztecs committed human sacrifice and that’s bad#and that didn’t justify what the Spanish did to them#and the Europeans did exaggerate human sacrifice and misapply it to tribes who didn’t participate in it

[hazzardevil]

Nobody ever seems to remember that the Aztecs ruled over a variety of ethnic groups that we know sadly little about today because of their colonialism.

They won a total cultural victory by getting the descendants of their subjects to identify with the empire after it ended and whitewash its behaviour.

[shieldfoss]

I think you'll find that only capitalists can have empires actually. Other systems are just sparkling Negusa Nagast.

[barryogg]

There's an old satirical story by Sapkowski, In a Bomb Crater, in which Poland is at an irregular war with Lithuania. A subplot involves the protagonist's friend with a last name Indyk (Turkey), whose family tries to naturalize as Lithuanian citizens.

The problem: their last name would be translated to Kalakutas. The friend's father tries to sidestep this somehow, but is rebuked by the immigration office, who point out that "kutas" is only a slur in Polish (being one of the many words for dick), and if he truly considered himself Lithuanian, he would have no problem with it.

I think of this every time some pagan or decolonizer tries to 'splain away human sacrifice, be it by Vikings, Aztecs, whatever. I'm sorry, I thought you wanted to repudiate the white, western, Christian morality? Why would you have a problem with human sacrifice then? The peoples you advocate for didn't consider every human life to be dignified and worth preserving.

And they continue to do so, even today.

[demonofbabylon]

pro prison leftists are so funny to me because i'll say something like "perhaps it is inhumane to send people to knife island where they must compete in the knife games" and someone will respond, thinking they've destroyed my argument, "I get not sending drug users to knife island, but are you really proposing we don't send (whispers) ...pedophiles to knife island? what else would you have us do with them?"

[needabetternamelater]

And yet you still didn't say what you wanted to happen. They also asked about involuntary confinement of all kinds, not just 'current American prison'

[fierceawakening]

Exactly what I want to know. What SHOULD have happened with Epstein? If we shouldnt have sent him anywhere, how should we have made sure he didn’t harm anyone else, given that the previous time he wasn’t sent to knife island he continued abusing girls?

Making fun of me for asking this doesn’t get me any closer to figuring out what your answer is, Demon.

[needabetternamelater]

So congrats, @demonofbabylon, you go in my queue as yet another dodge. At this point, I'm starting to think the prison abolitonsits can't answer this because they don't actually know. We all know how prison reform works but we were asking how prison aboliton would work.

[insomnialya]

DNI if you're under 19.

[TW rape mention]

"So we'll give them freedom and it'll fix everything! Because giving freedom and no consequences to people who have committed terrible crimes will clearly benefit society, right???" /SARCASM

Yes, I think they should be separated from other criminals. But they can't be fucking free. Many of them are already free! Maybe that's why nothing changes.

[needabetternamelater]

The very existence of prisons assumes that the people aren't inherently evil, if we truly thought they were inherently evil and were incapable of change then we'd just shoot them like a rabid dog....we don't do that because we don't, as a society, think that. So this still doesnt' answer the question.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

See, it's ironic that they bring up "rape culture".

The term came from a documentary on male prison rape, and then certain feminists took it and treated it as exclusive to M on F non-prison rape.

And yet this person doesn't really seem to be concerned very much with actual prison rape, per se, which is one of the few forms of rape that society often openly condones.

As opposed to "haha that wasn't real rape", like almost any instance of adulton adult rape that isn't M on F.