drmanhattan16
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User ID: 640
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
What arguments? You've given vague statements about acceptable reasons and unacceptable reasons, with a single example and a rather poor explanation of principle.
Nonsense. I rejected your assertion that one's modding choices would never reflect one's own politics, or just important beliefs. You didn't explain to me in the least whether any kind of positive gay representation is okay in a children's cartoon to you.
You've danced around what you think of the rampant race/gender/sexuality bending in modern media such that I'm not really sure where you stand on it, but you seem to not care about diversity bending, assuming it's for "good reasons", and against white washing assuming it's for "bad reasons".
I explicitly said I supported all manner of race-bending, even making people white if necessary. Keep fighting the SJWs in your mind if you want, but don't pretend I'm taking part in your shadowboxing.
It all just seems like it's working backwards to give one group charity, and withhold it from another. I only see an object level double standard, because you believe you have some familiarity with the feeling and motivations of the people doing it. But all you have as your own biased guesses.
I could literally copy-paste this exact response every time you or someone else complains about a white character being made black.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Okay, but how do we know that Twitter was the primary problem?
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Right-wing boycotts have taken off since twitter became neutral.
What's the proof of that?
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Yes, yes, I know that you and many others think that progressives are acting bad faith. Unless you think that I'm doing the same, which my history and my responses in this very thread clearly doesn't support, then you should address my actual arguments.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism.
Why did someone make or install this mod? It clearly didn't come into existence because particles randomly happened to generate the mod. If the reason was one we would call racist, then yes, we can reasonably infer that someone at the very least made something racist that may indicate their own racial prejudice. Sure, we can't prove racism totally. But I think it is entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced that the creator is racist.
Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision.
You either believe in an overly strict chain of causality and inference, or you are trying to establish a principled stance that you don't actually uphold in real life.
since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.
Okay, but we're asking if the person holds racist views, not whether they were racist to anybody.
My context boils down to why and where someone is doing something. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with, for example, adapting the Hindu story of how Ram and Hanuman worked to defeat Ravana and his kingdom in Lanka for a non-Hindu audience. Spreading the story while retaining the messaging isn't inherently offensive. I don't share the idea that anything capitalism touches is tainted.
If someone made a Universal Character Customizer mod that allowed for an all-white Stardew Valley, I don't see any racism in either creation or downloading. If someone makes a mod explicitly for making the only black people white in that game, I'm going to conclude that either someone is trying to facilitate the creation of an all-white rural town that exists in reality, doesn't like the art for those black characters but can't make better art in the same "race", or they're being racist.
As I said, I'll be charitable to whatever reason someone gives me if they play with an all-white town. I ultimately don't give a fuck if the reason is straight up racism - it's your game, your experience, and no one has the right to tell you how you should be allowed to play it. But I'm not going to pretend there's no coherence to criticism of the mods themselves.
Edit: to address your edit, I think that race-bending is not inherently bad. So saying its widespread means nothing to me. I am more interested in why it may be happening, as that is where judgment can be passed.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former.
Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"
Seriously, what kind of argument even is this? How far do you take this idea that the only thing you can infer from what mods a person downloads is that they downloaded it? By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.
Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.
So great to hear you agree with me!
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
I just said context matters. Why are you trying to get me to say that it doesn't?
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices.
The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.
if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information.
Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
I mean, I think I made my case clear.
No, I don't think you have. In particular, it is unclear to me which of the following you would agree with.
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Any depiction of people in a way I don't like is not acceptable.
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Some depictions of people in a way I don't like is not acceptable.
People appeal to 2 quite a bit, but they never quite shake the impression that they actually agree with 1. In particular, when you cite all those kids' cartoons and say that they're just all too gay, you suggest to me that you actually have a problem with gay representation, period.
Full disclosure, I haven't watched those episodes of those shows. Maybe they're just actively trying to make political activists out of your kids. If so, I'll fully agree with you that those shows are not necessarily appropriate for children. But if they're just showing gay people existing like straight people, then yeah, I'm starting to think you at best just aren't differentiating as you say you do.
And having found myself facing an abundance of media which very plainly hates me, I'm extra sensitive to the slightest hint of it anymore.
I see people say that all time. What media are you referring to? Because even in 2023, there is plenty of media that doesn't only demonize straight cis white people.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
if I were in your centre left shoes I would be concerned that there was some confusion and that maybe I was expected to answer for the DIE crowd.
Not really. I expect anyone reading my post to get to the part that says I don't have a problem with mods that don't flatter DEI.
Ultimately, I do not have a problem with someone wanting to discuss why the DEI messaging in media is offputting to them. I am sympathetic to the idea and think that creators of all sizes can do better with this. IF you want to say that the anti-men message in a piece of media makes you feel unwelcome, I'm totally onboard with that. But I often find that people don't cleanly cut away at what they find okay or don't, even when they have the tools to make this clear.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Because only God himself could alter reality to the point that I wouldn't be capable of wondering why people do what they do, and that guy hasn't been seen in a while.
Sure, we can certainly discuss what it says and how we would go about proving it and so on and so forth. What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.
Edit: to more directly address your point, I do not believe that people's modding preferences are so obviously segregated from the rest of their views. In the context of Stardew Valley, I'll afford any person who wants it charity when they say they downloaded a mod that only made the only black person white because they didn't like his art or whatever, but I'll conclude that this person is more likely to be a racist than not.
Anecdotal evidence: there are several mods for Darkest Dungeon that are lewd. I don't believe that people who use them, including me, are misogynists, but I do think people using them aren't opposed to all objectification of people.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.
It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are. I explicitly use mods that many others find discomforting or crude because I don't ultimately care. But I wouldn't turn it back around and ask "Why are these people criticizing me????" The criticisms are coherent, I just reject them in the end.
Stardew Valley has had mods that turn the sole canonically black character and his half-black, half-white daughter totally white. I very much doubt this is because people thought he didn't fit in organically, he explicitly has an outsider background (comes from the city to the town). It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.
I say this as someone who agrees with your position on such mods. I truly don't give a fuck about someone making everyone in a game white or removing LGBT flags from a game, and I think mods that allow you to do those things are ultimately fine, just as mods that do the opposite are equally fine. But I'm not going to pretend the criticisms are invalid - I just don't share the values of those critics.
And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.
By all means, I'll march alongside you when you want to complain about "pale, male, stale" is a thing. But I'm going to look at you quizzically if you also want to defend the idea that games shouldn't even try to be inclusive to people who aren't like you.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
So, this is to say that the Battle of Midway was the epitome of that meme about US military strategy, quote about "if we don't know what we're doing, neither will the enemy!" included?
No, not at all. The US knew what it was doing at the strategic and operational level, but it failed at the tactical level. The reason for this was inexperience, America just didn't have the experience the Japanese did with carrier flight operations and especially combined carrier strike launches. They had some, it wasn't like the US was completely clueless as to how carriers operated. But Kido Butai had many, many years of experience over their counterparts, including constant working of the men and machines in the six months prior to Midway.
Remember, neither side thought that carriers were the primary means of delivering power that we think of them as today. They saw battleships and the "big gun" as the capability around which many other things followed.
This goes even further, though, in that US blunders actually directly contributed to their victory. Is this just proof that war is too chaotic to be predictable, and that there are no rules, or is there something else here?
The success of the blunders is only a thing because of the luck at 10:20 A.M. Had only Yorktown's planes found their target, it would have been a 3 vs. 3, but the US carriers would have a big chunk of planes and pilots missing. Not an easy fight to win, and they may have just cut their losses right there.
I was not able to find any discussion of a hypothetical scenario in which all US strikes were perfectly coordinated at the carrier level i.e dive-bombers and torpedo planes working in concert, all escorted by fighters. But I would hazard a guess and say the Japanese would not have had so much success before 10:20 A.M.
I guess I'm trying to say that you should never rely on your poor military performance to somehow be exactly what you need to have luck roll in your favor.
I liked this series, I'd love to read more history formatted like this, albeit as singular posts and not necessarily parceled out like this.
Part of the problem with that is that I'd either have to zoom out much more, or you'd get one mega-post that people would just get tired of reading.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Thanks!
Yeah, it's somewhat sad that Fuchida felt the need to lie. Kido Butai's performance was objectively world-class, but that alone wouldn't have been very validating to the strategic leadership in Combined Fleet.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Glad you, Nwallins, and all the others enjoyed it!
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Is single-issue posting really such a problem?
Yes, very much so. Humans treat "How many times they've seen a thing happen" as equivalent to "How big a problem is this thing". Our minds, left unchecked, will make this conclusion for us, but we have a name for it - the Chinese Robber Fallacy. Or, if you want a less politically salient example, YouTube's algorithm rewards daily uploads instead of high-quality uploads. While new content has its value, this results in people posting low-quality garbage that is often directed at kids at a higher volume.
It's not SS that is inherently the problem. It's everyone who posts frequently about the same things, because the world is big enough that you could make two or three threads discussing the same basic idea ("progressives do X", "conservatives do Y", etc.) without actually having anything of value to say, but driving the point about some connections in the world into people's minds.
There is an argument to be had that we need people to scrupulously report on every instance of something happening so we can pull from a bigger body of facts to establish a narrative or trend. Organizations like the ADL or NRA for anti-Semitism and gun control respectively do need to constantly be informing their readers about the latest things to happen. But out of respect for avoiding the Chinese Robber Fallacy, no one, not even SS, should be posting "here's 15 things about this topic in the last month", but instead talk about it at a much lower rate and build on a narrative with trend analysis and whatnot.
Basically, we don't need 10 top-level comments about something Disney might do. We need one that goes through each of those events with contextualization.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
One could argue that it is superstitious, but I defy you to claim that it is more superstitious than "structural racism" and "trans women are women" or "wreckers and kulaks are sabotaging our production quotas" or "dialectical Marxism is the inevitable outcome of the laws of history" or "free will does not exist" or any of the other dominant shibboleths that inevitably emerge from Rationalist Materialism.
Christianity posits the existence of a God, a being of very particular description, history, and the progenitor of a whole host of moral facts. This is a claim of much higher power than to argue the existence of sabotaging kulaks or whatever. That people can believe in God or the proposed kulaks with the same fervor is a mark of human irrationality, not evidence that both claims are equally superstitious.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Would the use of the report function go up if the net vote was always hidden?
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Absolutely not. The BLR lets people engage in the worst impulses the culture warrior within creates. It is not helpful to anyone to constantly engage with "Boo Outgroup" articles.
If the choice is between ignorant boredom and culture-warring engagement, I will very much advocate for the ignorant boredom side.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
letting the holocaust deniers and white nationalists through is useful, because they have no chance of convincing anyone--but if you let through an ordinary conservative, they might actually convince people.
Why are you discounting the impact of holocaust deniers and white nationalists on convincing people? It doesn't even need to be total, one tactic that people on the mainstream Holocaust "side" is JAQing off. That is, asking questions that don't come from a place of desire to learn, but to simply sow doubt.
Moreover, how many people are even familiar with the Holocaust and the evidence behind it to the point that they could refute the deniers, even to themselves? Every time I see a post by SecureSignals about Jews and the Holocaust, I have to admit I have no way of refuting the points being made, because I don't know enough. I'm not swayed, ultimately, but I don't find it inconceivable that someone may come here and think that SS makes a good enough point to cast doubt on the entirety of the mainstream narrative.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
It's very difficult to make out which side you are talking about in some passages.
Please indicate which passages you are referring to.
Also, no submission statement.
Quoting the rules on the sidebar:
"If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images)."
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
I'd argue that people just don't care enough to express their creativity in corporate communications. Once you have a phrase that people understand, no one is going to bust their heads in coming up with a better one. Doesn't seem like a case of people being robots as much as it is people being lazy. Or perhaps those two are really the same.
What kind of "No True Racist" principle are you trying to set up here? Apparently, no one is allowed to conclude that a person is more likely to be racist if they download a mod that makes the only black person in a game white even though there's no world-building reason against his presence.
Saying "racist" five times in that sentence really made your point stronger.
By all means, propose alternatives for why this person is making this mod. I can think of only one other.
I made it clear that context matters in my various responses in this thread. I don't think there's anything racist in the creation or use of that one BG3 mod that makes characters fit the established lore on appearances better. But you don't get that justification for something like Stardew Valley because the "lore" reasoning doesn't apply.
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