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I agree, in principle. In practice, in my experience, anyone with strong views on the matter tends to seek ideological purity. I have a number of problems with Israel, which are often difficult to express without either being accused of antisemitism, or being praised by outright antisemites. I have many more problems with "Palestine" (in any of its many incarnations), which are all but impossible to express without being accused of Islamophobia, being pro-genocide, being racist, and so forth.
I agree, as a boardgamer, that boardgamers are terrible, and online boardgame forums are excellent demonstrations of Conquest's Laws. What amazes me is how the same can today be said of pretty much every hobby that was ever demographically "geeky white male." RPGs, video games, anime, comic books--but also science, engineering, philosophy, and information technology. These spaces have been absolutely overrun with people insisting "it's not just for you!" and for maybe the first decade of the new millennium, the response I usually saw was... this, basically. But post-Awokening (and with the help of "Woke Capital") a lot of old school nerds and geeks have been hounded to the edges of the space. It's weird to watch properties that weathered and survived the "moral majority" censorship of the late 20th century cave with zero resistance to the new millennium's
church ladiessensitivity readers. You could kill children in the original Fallout. Warhammer 40k was not PG-13. It used to be okay for something to not be for you.It pains me that this is such a lost thing nowadays. There's nothing wrong with things that don't appeal to everybody! In fact, I would go so far as to say that's what makes life interesting - we can each be into different things that others would find unbearable, and we are better off for it because each of us is happier than with something that tried to appeal to everyone at once. But for some reason, that's now treated like it's morally abhorrent.
Also, maybe it's just my skewed perspective but it seems like the actual rule is even worse than "we must water everything down for everyone". It seems to be only the things that nerdy men enjoy which get this treatment. Board games have to be PC, video games must remove any trace of sex appeal because that scares off women, programming must be packed full of diversity statements and codes of conduct, etc. But nobody expects the local crochet club to change to appeal to men, etc. Basically, it feels like society kicked nerds out in the 80s, we went "ok whatever we're going to do our own thing", and now 40 years later the bullies are back to kick us out of the communities we built as a refuge from them in the first place. It really grates.
The problem with this argument is if everybody was actually on your side in nerdy spaces in the first place. There were plenty of people who wanted to kick you out from the jump.
Again, I've made this analogy before, but in 1997, if among your friend group, one of the guys in your local area that is into anime, Warhammer, Doctor Who, or whatever thing you're deeply into is kind of off, occcasionally says cring things or whatever, you may put up with it, because that's the only option you have. But, this did make a current brand of nerd think they had more support than they actually did.
But, in 2024, you don't have to deal with that guy anymore, and thanks to the increased popularity of nerdy things in general, there are plenty of people with more normal views on stuff.
If the option is somebody who might know less about cool thing y you're into, but also doesn't complain there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing, a lot of people are going to side with the person who knows less because they're less annoying to be around, even if you don't care one way or another.
I'd also argue video games are part of the capitalist system, while crochet groups really aren't, even though there have been rows about crochets involving race. But yes, it turns out people who own businesses want to make more money, and they'll drop their appeal to males 18-34, if it'll help them also win over older males and women.
I think a big thing your side doesn't get is the actual reason for the desexualization of games is actually less evil SJW's, but the fact that programmers, engineers, and actual gamers are getting older, having kids, and it's far more defensible to a wife to be playing a game on the lbig living room TV with characters that look like the modern Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, or whatever the game people have determined is full of 'ugly' people, as opposed to the polygons with boobs of the late 90's.
Ironically, I would compare this to a refugee situation, where refugees sometimes put up with extremist or less than fantastic parts of their refugee community because they all have to stand together. Well, some of the refugees found a new country and they have to follow certain rules and stop saying certain things and don't find that a problem, while there's a smaller group that wants to hold on to outdated traditions because that's the way it was.
Just a quick sanity check - do you think there were absolutely no changes in the sphere of nerdy-left beliefs, and thus in what is considered cringe, between 1997 and 2024? The fault lies 100% on the guy that got kicked out?
I mean, yes, there has been social change, but the vast majority of that has been positive in my view, and in the view of the vast majority of people. It's up to those guys to determine if their deepest worry is about the gender or race of their favorite superheroes or the average bust size of the women in video games or whatever is proof that SJW's have taken over. I truly do think 'the SJW's have ruined everything' types do really overrate how much everybody in nerd culture was really on their side, as opposed to people who weren't opposed to the nerd culture of 1994, but also aren't opposed to the nerd culture of 2024.
If your deepest view is culture was great in 1995 and everything was fine, yeah, you're going to be left behind, just like if you're belief that culture was great in 1970, even in 1995, you'd be considered an out of touch old guy that's being passed by. 1995 is actually a long time ago now, when it comes to culture.
I've also made this point before - in 1994, if two nerdy (likely) white dudes are having a political argument, they probably don't have too deep a connection to many of the political arguments, even if they have different views on something. On the other hand in 2024, the left-leaning person is far more likely to have non-white people, LGBT, or other groups that are effected by conservative policies, so it's not a shock that now they have a closer relationship with those folks, they're less likely to be seen as just arguments.
Like, why do I want to be personally friendly with people who want to make the lives of my other friends worse? I'm fair about this - I don't expect somebody whose pro-life, anti-transgender rights, or super anti-immigration whatever to be my friend if they deeply care about those issues.
This flows both ways. Politics was interested in me personally in 2020 in a way that it wasn't before, and also in a way that disproportionately affected nerdy activities like board gaming. Why would I want to be friends with people who want to make the lives of myself and my other friends worse by supporting lockdowns, which were far more egregious than the average social conservative's demands not least because it also involves partially criminalizing homosexuality anyway? Well, it turns out that I don't really have a choice, because 90% of the people around me want to make my life worse, and the option to join a gaming community with a consensus that opposes lockdowns doesn't exist.
Am I'm banging my usual drum again? Yes. But there's a point: You've given no reason why board games should have gone left to protect LGBT friends who suffered from conservative policies, instead of going right to protect the LGBT friends (hello) who suffered from progressive policies. To go even further, the entire nerdy ecosystem depends on capitalism, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly to function. It also has a bit of an obsession with everything military. All things that have (for one reason or another) clustered into Conservatism. If nerdiness is going to have a political slant, why is that slant not for it's natural ally? If anyone's going to get politically purged, then why not the Communists whose political ambitions are mostly incompatible with the continued existence of these nerdy activities?
Is that a rhetorical question, or do you really not understand why a ban on homosexuality qua homosexuality is taken more personally by a leftist than a ban on homosexual sex by way of banning all assembly of non-household-members, regardless of sexuality or indeed the intent to have sex, with a purpose that doesn't stem from decrying them besides?
Yes, the actual problem with the Confederacy was that they didn't enslave enough whites, and the actual problem with Nazis is that they didn't gas enough Germans. If only they did that, they'd have been goodies. Hurrah equality!
Rights can't work from a basis of equality. Was the solution to gay marriage was actually to prohibit all marriage, and sodomy to instead criminalise all sex? No. To be even more flippant, gay people were already legally allowed to have straight marriage, and straight people were already prohibited from gay marriage.
You do realise that I am a LGBT person who was pissed off at the government de facto recriminalizing homosexuality with lockdowns? The bracketed hello might have been too subtle... Leftists are okay with certain forms of bans on homosexuality, but that's because the aesthetics of LGBT rights takes priority over actually giving us any rights, because it turns out that they in fact do want the government to care about what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom. Hence it's okay to violate our rights as long as it "doesn't stem from decrying them", whatever that's supposed to mean (though really it still is decrying us because it's about reducing humans to disease vectors on a spreadsheet in general).
And to get out from the weeds and back to the point: It's trivially incorrect that nerdy political purges are based around some sort of propensity to make the lives of their friends worse, or damage the relevant hobby. The target prioritization is totally wrong for that to be the motive. Lockdowns actively criminalized in-person Boardgaming, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering (last I checked, lockdowns killed paper Standard), Wargaming, Conventions, and all other nerdy face-to-face activities. And politically, those were supported more by the left than the right. Therefore, if you're going to use attacking friends and their ability to participate in any particular nerdy activity to justify nerdy political purges, there's your actual target. Anything else would be ad-hoc excuses to disguise an ulterior motive for purges.
I'd be way more comfortable playing with a social conservative than a mask addict, even if because of demographics this is very unlikely to actually happen. At least I could trust they'd still be interested in playing when ligma 28 rolls around, and they wouldn't be motivated to call the police on me for suggesting it.
Why do lockdowns de facto criminalize homosexuality? By that logic, shouldn't lockdowns have criminalized all sexuality, homosexual or otherwise?
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