Quote from: Shasarak on July 20, 2021, 07:10:14 PM

Quote from: Pat on July 20, 2021, 06:58:48 PM

Quote from: Jaeger on July 20, 2021, 06:38:05 PM
Dialectic does not win arguments with normies; Rhetoric does.

Fortunately, this is an obscure halal game board. There's no chance a key battle in the cultural war will be waged among these bits, so there's nothing to win, and therefore absolutely no reason to engage in win-at-any-cost tactics. We might as well have civil and rational discussions, instead.

Yeah, thats us: civil and rational.

It's not them, either...

Quote from: Pat on July 20, 2021, 06:58:48 PM
...
Fortunately, this is an obscure halal game board. There's no chance a key battle in the cultural war will be waged among these bits, so there's nothing to win, and therefore absolutely no reason to engage in win-at-any-cost tactics. We might as well have civil and rational discussions, instead.

No problem here.

IMHO it also depends on the poster. For instance I generally don't descend into outright mockery or the use of profanity when debating someone.

And most of the posters here are pretty good about things if you say "I didn't consider that..."

A few are annoying pendants, and some have serious reading comprehension issues. But mostly this is a decent group.

I think that the disconnect between us in the case of the PV video is mainly this:

Quote from: Pat on July 20, 2021, 06:58:48 PM
...That's why I think the PV video is very weak, because it starts by presenting correct information as outrageous. ...So unless you look at the full picture, you're just cherry picking details to support a narrative. ..."

Now I totally get your underlying reasoning. And objectively speaking, you are 100% right.

But IMHO, for the normie world none of that nuance matters. In fact it is actually detrimental to your side to even acknowledge that it is there let alone actually talk about it.

PV is doing what they have to do to deliver the rhetorical kill shot.

And in the wider world of SJW's vs. everyone else; those are the tactics that you need to employ if you are going to win normie hearts and minds.

Quote from: BronzeDragon on July 20, 2021, 07:10:51 PM
...
This assumes things will get better.

I have no such confidence.

Depends on what and individual imagines to be "better" as well.

Within the next 30 years there will be either total a SJW victory and subjection of their enemies. Or...

A BIG backlash is going to result.

Shit is gonna get ugly. There will be no "let bygones be bygones" when the dust settles. More like: "Lets make the rubble bounce!"

We are in the mist of a cultural battle of two opposing and irreconcilable social paradigms.

Things are not going to settle back on the (by today's standards) centrist 1990's quasi-egalitarian American social mores and values.

American and Western society as a whole has given Marxist ideas and counter culture a lot of slack post WW2. Which has allowed the ideas and movements leading up to modern SJW's Maoists to push their agendas with very little effective pushback.

If the SJW's are defeated; that leash is getting jerked back like a motherfucker.

And the further along the SJW Maoists get with their agenda before they are made low; the bigger the backlash will be.

That is why Creepy Joe Biden becoming the Not-president is actually a bad thing for people who identify as political centrists. Or who lean left, but hate the SJW's.

Trump was the good cop.

Quote from: RPGPundit on July 20, 2021, 07:45:12 PM

Quote from: Pat on July 20, 2021, 05:54:27 PM
The studies do support a lot of the claims made in the video within the first half of the Project Veritas video. Studies of babies reacting to skin color and other social cues goes back decades, it's not really controversial, and it's not Critical Race Theory. Tribalism and defining in and out groups is fundamental to human social organizations, and that's literally among the first things kids pick up.

How the CRT Race Grifters present it is totally disingenuous. As I stated in my video.

Quote
That's why I think the PV video is very weak, because it starts by presenting correct information as outrageous.

Their conclusions, that "sixth month old white babies are racists" (and that non-white toddlers are not and cannot be racist) are absolutely outrageous.

Those are the conclusions being drawn by the whistleblower, not in the snippets of the training that are shown in the first half of the PV video. Which is why I think the PV video is weak -- it's not supporting its conclusions for the first half, and the second half doesn't dive deep enough. I'd like to see more of the damning material, and less of someone drawing conclusions based on material we haven't seen.

Quote from: RPGPundit on July 20, 2021, 07:48:42 PM
The key battle is happening now and is being waged EVERYWHERE at the same time. The hordes of fucking barbarians that are the SJWs have come from inside the Polis itself and are now going house-to-house trying to burn it ALL to the fucking ground and leave nothing but salted earth in its wake. It's a battle in a defining war for the future of civilization itself, and if the SJWs win we will all be plunged back into a new dark age of savagery.

Every single measure to stop this needs to be on the table, because the death tolls if they win will give the Black Death a run for its money.

It won't be won by waging a bloody thread by thread war on the RPGSite.

I do believe you're correct in general.

My only issue is I don't see the levers of power available to stem the tide. They all seem to be being pulled in the same direction, just that some people are trying to pull back on some of them, mostly unsuccessfully I might add.

It's fine to talk of a backlash, but what are the levers this backlash is pulling on? What is the real effect of a few parents raging at their local school board, when the board usually goes on steamrolling their agenda anyway? I know there have been a few victories here and there, but they mostly have taken place in conservative strongholds and minor counties.

My fear is that the US is speeding headlong into an actual Civil War. Except this one won't be fought along a frontline near the Mason-Dixon line, it will be fought between houses in the same neighborhood, in the parking lots of high schools, between different floors of apartment complexes and all along the country.

As Pundit said, this is an all-out fight. Nobody is gonna take second place, just as in many other revolutions worldwide. The tensions are increasing, becoming more and more palpable to regular people, and the shameful display of the authorities last year regarding riots and such is a sign that more of that is to come.

RPGs are simply another battleground in this "pre-war" series of skirmishes. One side pushes in, the other side gives, and gives some more...until there's no more ground to give.

Once the arguments are exhausted and people have spent their verbal ammunition, real ammo is sure to follow.

Watching as an outsider gives me a mixed sense of fascination and fear, because I know once the ball starts rolling in the US, it will eventually start rolling everywhere else in the Western world, which means I'm both metaphorically and realistically next.

Quote from: BronzeDragon on July 20, 2021, 08:26:45 PM
I do believe you're correct in general.

My only issue is I don't see the levers of power available to stem the tide. They all seem to be being pulled in the same direction, just that some people are trying to pull back on some of them, mostly unsuccessfully I might add.

I think the war is lost. When the kids have been converted, you've lost the future. Or at least the next generation.

Which is why I think talking rationally has value. Think of neoliberalism -- before the 70s, the whole world leaned heavily (democratic) socialist. The few free market types were relegated to the fringes, and had no power. But then stagflation happened. Both inflation and unemployment rose at the same time, making people miserable, and the keynesians had no answer. So the public began looking for someone with a solution. That's when the Mont Pelerin Society stepped in. They had been outcasts nobody paid attention to, but suddenly it was their ideas laying the foundation for the next half a century. The reason this happened was because they had been working on the intellectual framework, building a base of thinkers and theory, and all that was ready when the crisis happened.

The modern leftists used a similar approach. They laid the intellectual framework, and then waited for the time for it to emerge. This goes back further than the origins of Critical Race Theory, or Critical Theory in general, or even postmodernism, though those were all steps along the way. It can be traced back to the Frankfort School, who called this approach the Long March through the Institutions. They worked not really in the shadows, but in the fringes of public discourse, focusing not on the levers or power or immediate victories, but on the long process of building an intellectual tradition and developing a critical mass of supportive scholars and scholarship, and focusing more on theory and education than practical, short term results.

So even if the current war is lost, there is a path forward. And it's not screeching or salting the earth. It's building a framework, and waiting for the opportunity. That's why this fuss parents are making about CRT in schools and toy manufacturers like Hasbro, even if I think their solutions are off base, are at least targeting the right things. Retaking control over how children are taught is fundamental.

Quote from: Pat on July 20, 2021, 05:54:27 PM
The studies do support a lot of the claims made in the video within the first half of the Project Veritas video. Studies of babies reacting to skin color and other social cues goes back decades, it's not really controversial, and it's not Critical Race Theory. Tribalism and defining in and out groups is fundamental to human social organizations, and that's literally among the first things kids pick up.

I think this is critical to overcoming wokeness. I say wokeness is a 1-2 punch. A cloak and dagger. And its only real power is having set up the cloak for over 100 years. The daggers have only started to come out over the last 10 or so.

There are so many assumptions that make up that cloak that put people on the backfoot even on this forum, stuff like:

Diversity is a virtue and not a nuetral trait.
You can't descriminate, and discrimination is always a negative trait.
Validating emotions is always positive.
Victims are always blameless.
People can ultimately be 100% rational.
Politeness is always a virtue.
Brashness is always a vice.
Science is magic and not a whole bunch of people with different opinions.
People are always societal results and have no control over themselves.

The daggers are: None of the above matters we just want power over you. Power because I don't trust you with autonomy, Power for my self validation, or power for powers sake.

As long as people believe in the cloak, they will be spending time ineptly flailing against its non-logic while the daggers of control are thrust apon them.

Quote from: rgalex on July 20, 2021, 03:28:56 PM
And about an hour after I sent the video of the whistleblower to Breitbart, they have an article up about it.  Hope that helps get the word out a little bit more.

Bravo!!!

Someone rational will try to investigate.  That someone might appear to be an ally.  When that fails, their madness will make them turn on themselves and their targets will the very children they claim to be educating and protecting.  Well, that is after they drink their own kind of "Kool Aid".  I wonder who the SJW's Jim Jones will be? 

Maybe it won't go down in such a dramatic way.  My point is, they have a higher chance of being self-destructive than organizing their own victory. 

The fact that their agenda is openly targeting children with lead them to creating their own downfall.

Quote from: Prairie Dragon on July 21, 2021, 03:38:54 AMMy point is, they have a higher chance of being self-destructive than organizing their own victory.

This is another point on which I think we're not on solid footing.

Groups that seem unstable, sometimes downright self-devouring can, and often historically did, rise to the top and crush their opposition. The communists in Russia from 1917-21 are the clearest example of this.

From the outside, it seems these groups are always on the verge of collapse because of their internal inconsistencies and general low character of their members. Make no mistake though, that is no guarantee that the outcome will be the hoped-for collapse.

The poor russian people, and all the others that were eventually enveloped by the Soviet Union, had to wait for almost 80 years to see the fall of the regime.

They only self-destruct after ruining everything else.

Quote from: rgalex on July 20, 2021, 03:28:56 PM
And about an hour after I sent the video of the whistleblower to Breitbart, they have an article up about it.  Hope that helps get the word out a little bit more.

Honestly, I don't consider Breitbart and the like so much different from woke outlets. Like Stanley Kubrick said of the political parties in "A Clockwork Orange", superficially they are opposite, factually they are the same thing.

"A man who engaged in non-violent protest at the Capitol was given eight months prison, while hundreds of BLM cases have been dropped." Just write "A man who engaged in non-violent protest during a BLM event was given eight months prison, while hundreds of Capitol protest cases have been dropped." and you will have a woke screamsheet. But that's the "new America" for us who are watching from the sidelines.

Anyway, my belief that wokeism in popular culture will not survive much longer comes from a single consequence: loss of money. Star Wars got woke and turned a 4+ billion dollars investment by Disney into money down the drain. Terminator got woke and, God wills, it definitely killed the franchise. The new Charlie's Angels got woke and it was a bloodbath.

Black Widow got so woke that they even tried to rewrite the past. "Natasha Romanoff was hypersexualised in the earlier movies! It was time for her character to have a proper treatment!" ---> Black Widow was never "hypersexualised": she was an astoundingly intelligent and competent spy who used sex to run circles around male characters. Her first scene in "The Avengers" showed exactly this and it was one of the best in the movie. Anyway, the new "Black Widow" rode on the hype during the first week but totally collapsed in the second, so, there you are.

Disney is slowing realising that kick ass stories in "The Mandalorian" with a kick ass Luke Skywalker (instead of presenting him a wino) restarted the sales of toys and merchandise. That's a sliver in the pop culture panorama (and it is funny to talk about Star Wars as a "sliver") but it shows a way out of the hole - even if it will took years.

Talking of Disney, they are so riding the "diversity, inclusiveness, equality" approach that they are boasting about how they will now embrace... uhm... what they have always embraced - because they already had Jasmine, Pocahontas, Esmeralda, Mulan... so, what the difference will be?

[For the curious: a latino Little Mermaid - because the depths of the sea require extra melanin - and a black Snow White.]

True: seeing the Tolkien Society devolving into a megaphone for decerebrate wokeness is scary. https://www.tolkiensociety.org/events/tolkien-society-summer-seminar/

Interestingly enough, however, they announced that the seminaries would have been broadcasted on Zoom. They weren't. Nor, as I write, they put the events on their YouTube page - as they promised would do. The reason, IMHO, is that the average, run-of-the-mill, Tolkien fan would just obliterate "papers" like "The Problematic Perimeters of Elrond Half-elven and Ronald English-Catholic" or the absolutely stunning "Something Mighty Queer: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien" which gives us this mighty gem:

"My project draws from intersectional feminist and postmodern queer theories as well as recent Tolkien scholarship to examine how Tolkien's depictions of characters, relationships, and ways of loving and existing destabilize contemporary cishetero amatonormative structures. While I offer a queer reading, I do not focus on eroticism or romance; rather, I look at how various characters, relationships, and races complicate essentialist understandings of gender and cisheteronormativity."

Let's put aside the fact that I read the above three times and still I don't know about what it is about... Is someone still wondering why the Tolkien Society neither did stream this nor put this on YouTube?

A final hint that they actually don't know what they are doing. The director of the live Snow White, Marc Webb, actually tackled the key question: "How can a character named for the color of her skin be played by a black actress?" with the following statement:

"Rachel's extraordinary vocal abilities are just the beginning of her gifts. Her strength, intelligence and optimism will become an integral part of rediscovering the joy in this classic Disney fairytale."

Notice how he doesn't answer the question. Even more worrying (for them) is how simple this answer could have been: "In our retelling of the story, Snow White gets her name from the fact that the day she was born was unusually snowy." There you go: problem solved. Not everyone will like it, but you solve a narrative knot with a narrative idea - which should be your job, not mine.

So, IMHO, we will have at least three high-profile failures: The live "The Little Mermaid", the live "Snow White" and LotR on Amazon. I don't see a way out of this. Once the haemorrhage of money will reach the critical level, it will be the beancounters the ones who lead the pushback, and it will be mighty.

Quote from: Reckall on July 21, 2021, 08:24:38 AM
A final hint that they actually don't know what they are doing. The director of the live Snow White, Marc Webb, actually tackled the key question: "How can a character named for the color of her skin be played by a black actress?" with the following statement:

"Rachel's extraordinary vocal abilities are just the beginning of her gifts. Her strength, intelligence and optimism will become an integral part of rediscovering the joy in this classic Disney fairytale."

Notice how he doesn't answer the question. Even more worrying (for them) is how simple this answer could have been: "In our retelling of the story, Snow White gets her name from the fact that the day she was born was unusually snowy." There you go: problem solved. Not everyone will like it, but you solve a narrative knot with a narrative idea - which should be your job, not mine.

Comparing the two answers shows how different Webb's worldview is from yours. The director is responding to the question by focusing on the actress's talents, and superlatively praising her. Since he's defending her qualifications, he's clearly assuming what's being questioned is her capabilities. But that's not what the question asks, in a literal reading. it's mostly focused on Snow White, the character. The only references to the actress is the two words at the end: "black actress". How is that an attack on her ability? "Actress" can't be interpreted that way, so we're left with "black". He is assuming that referring to her as black is an implicit attack on her ability. While he's trying to defend her, the underlying assumption that she needs to be defended in the first place is infantilizing.

Your answer, by contrast, focuses entirely on the in-setting justification. You're not imputing anything about her talents or her race, you're just addressing the question as written, specifically how to reconcile the apparent conflict between the physical color of actress's skin and the adjective in the character's name, within the setting. To you, "black" is just a color not a whole package of implicit assumptions.

It really highlights how seeing everything through the lens of "everyone is racist" twists even the most straightforward of questions, and is patronizing toward the people it's purporting to defend. The last half of the Project Veritas video shows the same mindset, in the jargon and shibboleths used by Hasbro's trainers.

Quote from: Reckall on July 21, 2021, 08:24:38 AM

Quote from: rgalex on July 20, 2021, 03:28:56 PM
And about an hour after I sent the video of the whistleblower to Breitbart, they have an article up about it.  Hope that helps get the word out a little bit more.

Honestly, I don't consider Breitbart and the like so much different from woke outlets. Like Stanley Kubrick said of the political parties in "A Clockwork Orange", superficially they are opposite, factually they are the same thing.

I used to read it multiple times a day but thankfully red-pilled myself.  It's all outrage click-bait and there's other ways to consume content from Dellingpole, Bokhari, and the other worthwhile creators there without exposing myself to the right wing version of the REEEEEE woman.

Quote from: Pat on July 20, 2021, 08:14:32 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on July 20, 2021, 07:48:42 PM
The key battle is happening now and is being waged EVERYWHERE at the same time. The hordes of fucking barbarians that are the SJWs have come from inside the Polis itself and are now going house-to-house trying to burn it ALL to the fucking ground and leave nothing but salted earth in its wake. It's a battle in a defining war for the future of civilization itself, and if the SJWs win we will all be plunged back into a new dark age of savagery.

Every single measure to stop this needs to be on the table, because the death tolls if they win will give the Black Death a run for its money.

It won't be won by waging a bloody thread by thread war on the RPGSite.

It will only be won by waging a post by post war against SJW entryism LITERALLY EVERYWHERE.

This is a civil war, and I get that it feels inconvenient for some of you that my fighting back against people who want to destroy the hobby you love, and LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE you love (your country, your economic freedom, your job, your education, your art, your religion and your children), is getting in the way of you feeling relaxed while painting your elf miniatures, but for those of us who care about the future of human civilization it's a little more important to us to be trying to stop your fat asses from ending up in the death camp or the killing fields, and to stop your children from being ideologically and/or literally taken by these psychopaths and brainwashed into being terrorists for the destruction of the human species.

And if you're really tired by all this and just want it to stop, then I'm not the one you need to be dealing with. If YOU stood up to these Communist Totalitarian psychopaths like I do, they'd be finished in a day. On the other hand, if you got me to stop, you would end up in a gulag, dumbass.