Quote from: John Morrow;426256The solution is to teach evolution as the mainstream scientific explanation for things and acknowledge that it's a theory that does not necessarily invalidate the religious beliefs of students and their parents.  In other words, "This is what we are teaching you and you will be tested on, but you don't have to believe it."

I wonder if that would settle the bickering.

QuoteThe problem is that generalizing like that is doing the same thing that racists do when they assume that all black people are criminals.  You can't possibly know if the plight of an individual white person was more privileged than those of individual minorities.

You're right of course, it's a vast generalization... but as a generalization (going only by 'race') it's supported by statistics... showing who had access to money and power during those years... and inversely gives some explanation of why, statistically, it might appear that non-whites were more likely to be 'criminals'.

Quotethis totally ignores that what people now think of as one "white" culture wasn't, and sometimes still isn't.  Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans were all heavily discriminated against as immigrants.

Again, I agree... it's a generalization that paves over the exceptions. But didn't a fair number of people from those ethnic groups change their names so they could 'pass' as plain old white folks? Not really an option for folks with visible clues they were from 'somewhere else'.
I know my family's name went through a few alterations before it became 'Smith'.

QuoteOr do you, knowing almost nothing about my father and a hypothetical black person, really believe that you can justly determine who is more "privileged" and use that judgement to take away from one person and give to the other?

I never claimed to 'know' anything... just stating what my perceptions of certain current political groups are... and why they seem so scared and tribalistic. I never mentioned 'reparations' or quotas or anything else.

Quote from: Simlasa;426265I wonder if that would settle the bickering.

There is always going to be bickering at the extremes.  What it would end (and what such compromises should try to end) is the conflict driving the middle to the extremes by denying them the excluded middle argument.

Quote from: Simlasa;426265You're right of course, it's a vast generalization... but as a generalization (going only by 'race') it's supported by statistics... showing who had access to money and power during those years... and inversely gives some explanation of why, statistically, it might appear that non-whites were more likely to be 'criminals'.

Crime is not necessarily linked to poverty.  Please note that I'm not denying that there were decades of institutional racism or that racism still exists.  I simply don't think the cause and effect relationships are what many people claim they are.

Quote from: Simlasa;426265Again, I agree... it's a generalization that paves over the exceptions. But didn't a fair number of people from those ethnic groups change their names so they could 'pass' as plain old white folks? Not really an option for folks with visible clues they were from 'somewhere else'.
I know my family's name went through a few alterations before it became 'Smith'.

You can still tell one ethnicity from another through hair and skin color, family names that weren't changed, and religion.  Remember, much of the hostility in the past was directed at Catholics and the Catholic Church, to the point it was still an issue when John F. Kennedy ran for President.  What changed, more than anything else, was how people perceive ethnicity and religion.  The way people view the Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans as well as Catholics today is not the same as they were viewed a hundred years ago.  

Quote from: Simlasa;426265I never claimed to 'know' anything... just stating what my perceptions of certain current political groups are... and why they seem so scared and tribalistic. I never mentioned 'reparations' or quotas or anything else.

Well, you faulted them for feeling persecuted despite having "privilege".  Just because a bunch of people in the ivory towers of academia declare them as "privileged" does not mean that they perceive themselves that way nor does it mean that they actually lived a life of "privilege", nor is that what most are looking to preserve.  I think you'd have a hard time finding many white people these days who have any problem with a qualified black candidate getting a job over a less qualified white candidate or even an equally qualified white candidate if an anti-white bias is not the deciding factor.  They aren't trying to preserve "privilege".  What they are trying to avoid is having someone hundreds or thousands of miles away from them judging them and telling them how to live their lives.  Stripped of all the political assumptions about sinister motives, that's a pretty easy thing to understand.

Quote from: danbuter;426207See? This is why politics should be outlawed on this site! Everyone has their ideas, and not a single one has been changed, nor will be. It just creates an atmosphere where people will really start to dislike each other.

i.e. This thread is Tangency in microcosm. It just needs someone to come up with gay rights and kittens to finish it off.

Actually I think you've got it exactly backwards - I think politics or whathaveyou should be totally open for debate here (so long as it is at least marginally RPG-related I suppose) exactly because you CAN'T have this discussion at the Other Site without the velvety Hand of Mod coming down on your head - especially if you disagree with the prevailing Social Norms of Said Site.

We're adults here - we can disagree, and have meaningful and useful debate while we do so. IMO, of course. I doubt (or at least hope) that any disagreements would lead to any kind of enmity between folks here. Again, being able to hash it out *should* actually help avoid problems like that - nobody will be cut off at the knees by the mods, and the disagreement can run its course and eventually peter out instead of festering over time.

That's actually a problem with modern society, in my opinion - too many people are able to silence true debate and discussion with loaded words and appeals to authority instead of, you know, talking.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;425660revising history is racist now?

Often, yes.  Like, for example, if you say "the Confederacy were just joshing about all that slavery stuff! That wasn't what really mattered to them at all, and at the first real opportunity they'd do a full 180 and become such an inclusive culture that black men could become army officers!".

That's racist revisionist history.

RPGPundit

Quote from: danbuter;425662And the Civil War was not about slavery, though politicians used slavery as a platform to promote it.

For the purposes of this thread, that's a half-truth.  Saying "the civil war was not about slavery" might be only just very technically true, but its a far cry from meaning that the Confederates didn't care about slavery. They did, an awful lot.

And both are light years away from the idea that the confederacy wasn't racist. The north was racist too, the south was just slightly more racist.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Omnifray;425692Hang on, there's an incongruity here.

What is it...

Hmmm....

Pundit GIVES A SHIT about people being OFFENDED by something!?

Well, if I wanted to be really auto-critical, I'd say its for three reasons:

1. I'm impressed by how they managed to end up on the wrong side of pissing so many people off, while flustered by the stupidity of how most of it was unintentional.

2. As an historian, I'm fucking appalled by their alt-history and just how stupidly they go about it in an effort to make a wild-west setting fit to modern-day political/cultural sensitivity.

3. I find it hilarious that these guys go out of their way to whitewash culture to the point where women can be sheriffs, black men can be respected leaders of society, the south isn't racist, and neither is the north and people mostly even like and listen to the indians, but in a pique of utter frivolity they decide that the Freemasons are an entirely Evil secret cult that serves Satan and plots to take over the world.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;426338...... black men can be respected leaders of society,..................

RPGPundit

On this one detail, Pundit you may be partially wrong.

There were several towns in the Old West where black mean held the officee of Sherriff and even Maytor and had the respect of most of the town.

Only reason I know or rtemember this is because of a play that was in Cinncinnati at the Playhouse in the Park 10 years ago and in the play's program was the notes from the playwright that he had researched that particular fight.

Apparently many black men ran away or traveled west instead of North, some changed their names and started new lives and had a better life out west. Also some black men were veterans of the Civil War - so had some experience and earned respect because of that fact and had a second career or life in the westrern states.


- Ed C.

Quote from: Benoist;425755Now imagine an alternate future in which the Confederacy endured, twenty/thirty years after the war. Does anyone seriously think that the Confederacy would have abandoned slavery without a major blacklash/reason to do so in the first place?

I don't know how that's explained in Deadlands, but if the only reason to do so was for the sake of the readership, it sounds kinda lame, to be honest. Like gamers aren't adult enough to deal with alternate history in believable terms, you know.

In Deadlands, pres. Davies abolishes slavery in 1865 to win the support of france and britain and to get blacks into the army.  As of the 1880s the civil war is still being fought.

Now some people might say "well that doesn't sound so unhistoric", but there's two important things to consider:
1. In OUR timeline, the CSA could have done that and would have won the immediate support of the European powers, they would have won the war in all likelihood. But they DIDN'T do that, precisely because of how much slavery mattered to them.

2. In the Deadlands books, its not just the historical facts but the overall tone that is absurd; the game is set up such that you can play a black, chinese, native, hispanic or female character and have absolutely no social disadvantage (aside from a few lone npc that might have the "prejudiced" trait or whatever) to your background.  Its a game that suggests that the wild west could suddenly have late-1990s cultural values for no truly good reason.

RPGPundit

It was in no way universal though. You cannot make the statement Pinacle has about the multicultralism of the west without being shouted at. Not only by historians but by civil rights groups.

The concept of a female sherriff would have made the average varmit piss himself laughing.

Quote from: Omnifray;425778It's funny, systems which are inherently full of prejudice and tension sometimes DO manage a peaceful transition without war or conquest.

The best example is possibly how women got the vote in England through peaceful protest of the suffragettes etc.

Women got the vote more because of WWI than because of the suffragettes.  

RPGPundit

The Suffuragists were peaceful. They included an ancestor of mine.

The Suffuragettes were terrorists plain and simple. They blew up mailboxes and litter bins, flattened Churchill's House (while he was away thank God) and in a Dublin theatre very nearly invented the suicide bomber.

Neither had much effect on Women's rights. As Pundit said that was the war.

Quote from: The Butcher;426105This one I didn't know about.

Care to elaborate?

This is the "Back east" sourcebooks.  Basically they portray freemasonry as a satanic conspiracy of mustache-twirling evil led by the chief satanist Albert Pike who I think they had eating babies for breakfast or something.  It was like the fuckers were copypasting from the Opus Dei playbook.

RPGPundit

I do not have Deadlands, nor am I particularly interested in zombie cowboys. But, I do have a few observations.

Regarding the "root cause" of the Civil War, this thread actually points out a major reason which is often overlooked.  One side said it was about slavery while the other said it was about states' rights. The disagreement between those two viewpoints was the major cause of the war,  but not the only one.

On Deadlands itself, IIRC, it has the war continuing for a decade or two longer, more or less. There is absolutely no way that the scale of battles like Chancellorsville, Antietam, or Gettysburg could have continued.

And further, even in a scaled-down war, the Native Americans like the Commanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux, would have resisted a peaceful co-existence with Anglos.  They had seen by then what the eventual outcome would have been.

I also view it as highly likely that the "civilized tribes" in Oklahoma would have seceded from the Union themselves, either singly or as a group.

Finally, in the Far West, there was more racism directed at Asians and Hispanics than at blacks. There was, of course, plenty of racism to go around.

But he big question is, does any of this belong in a game?  As always that question boils down to what the players want. It's their choice.

The whole Deadlands thing just strikes me as so fucking stupid.

I'd love to play some Brisco County Jr., but not this shit.

Quote from: Cranewings;426948I'd love to play some Brisco County Jr., but not this shit.

That's actually pretty much what our Deadlands games end up being like... one of the PCs is even named 'Brisco' (though the character isn't at all similar). I guess that's not so bad... I was just under the impression there'd be more 'horror'... but there ain't.