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I'm a boardgamer and have to sit on my hands every time this comes up in /r/boardgames or boardgamegeek, because there is basically no tolerance allowed for any dissent. JK Rowling is a transphobic genocidal Jew-hating racist fascist and buying HP content is the equivalent of donating money to fund concentration camps.
I wish that was hyperbole. I wish I was exaggerating. That is literally what they think, and any pushback will get you banned fairly quickly.
It is pretty well-contained on Boardgamegeek. I avoid the political boards, and find less politics on the rest of the 'Geek than I do almost anywhere else. I recently read the CGE-bashing threads on Rainbow Gaming because they stopped doing guided tours of the Bedlam mental hospital 100 years ago, but the mods are good at keeping the board gaming forum and the mental hospital separate.
The culture that is Boardgamegeek needs to keep politics out of the main boards because there are a lot of conservative-leaning groups in board gaming - you have the grognards, a lot of Zoomer barstool conservatives, and the Mormons (The LDS Church encourage board gaming as a morally healthy way of keeping kids off screens). At the very least you need to grognards and the People of Hair Colour on the same forum in order to be the go-to place to advertise the big miniatures-based Kickstarters.
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If I wish for any supper power, being able to make the nightmares of too wind up people true is up there in the list with immortality
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Wait where did the Jew hating come from?
Aside from the goblins there was also an effort last year to label her a "Holocaust denier" for denying that the Nazis specifically targeted transgender people. "Holocaust denial" and "Nazi apologia" are anti-semitic, so she's anti-semitic. Here is an article from the time arguing the pro-Rowling side.
I think this segment is worth highlighting. It illustrates Rowling's point (Nazis were targetting LGB, not T) in a very darkly comedic way.
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People claim that goblins in Harry Potter are an anti-Semitic caricature. Personally, I believe that if one looks at a fantasy race of bankers and their first thought is "they're Jews", that says more about them than it does about the author.
Heck, I've seen people claim that the (decidedly non-mercantile) goblins in Goblin Slayer are an intentional anti-Semitic caricature; on the grounds that (paraphrasing from memory) 'goblins are always, and have always been, nothing but an anti-Semitic caricature — that's why they're depicted with long noses.' (Still not quite as ridiculous a take as the 20-something who complained about "anti-Semitic microaggressions" in a Mel Brooks movie.)
Is that more or less ridiculous a take than the people who complained that Blazing Saddles was racist?
I'd say only slightly more. The people who complain about Blazing Saddles are generally the sort who can't grasp the use/mention distinction, and also often the sort to argue that certain very bad things should not be depicted in fiction even to condemn them, like the nerd forum (I can't remember which one) that was considering banning any and all mention or discussion of Chainsaw Man, because it depictsMakima's grooming of Denji , even if it also shows it as quite clearly a bad thing.
Meanwhile, the person complaining about the "Druish Princess" joke in Spaceballs also thought Brooks's Yiddish accent as Yogurt was Italian, because it's one of those "white ethnic" accents you hear in NYC, right? And "Brooks" isn't the most Jewish-sounding surname, is it? So expecting her to know he's Jewish — and thus the joke is "classic Jewish self-deprecating humor" instead of an "antisemitic microaggression" — is totally unreasonable, and you know what the only kind of non-Jew who bothers to learn and remember who is or isn't Jewish is….
(Now ask me about the "naked Orientalist racism" in Batman comics…)
You can't just tease me like that. Go on...
Well, this one was from a different young twenty-something steeped in Tumblr leftism, ready to pounce on the slightest "racism" in ways that displayed their serious ignorance.
But they were quite vehement that the people at DC (specifically Julius Schwartz, Dennis O'Neil, and Neal Adams; not that they knew that) were engaged in deliberate racist messaging when they (back in 1971; again, not that they knew that) created an "Eastern" villain (Middle Eastern with some East Asian ancestry, I believe) to threaten the "Western" — and "implicitly white" — Gotham City like some kind of "racial ghoul"… and then named him exactly that. Oh, sure, they deliberately misspelled it to look pseudo-Arabic, but c'mon, "Ra's al Ghul"? It couldn't be any clearer what they really meant.
This one isn't inherently silly. Sure, pointing to the name is stupid, but Ra's al Ghul is clearly a Fu Manchu imitation complete with daughter. And the fact that he was created by people with a good record dealing with other races doesn't mean they can't be wrong when it involves Asians.
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Everyone knows (I say jokingly) that it's actually that JK Rowling expressed a bit of subtlety and restraint by not outright referring to them as gnomes instead.
I have seen people claim it's because the illustrations (which she approved) look like stereotypes of anti-Jewish propaganda (due largely to the noses), but I haven't done the comparisons myself.
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The goblins are allegedly Jewish caricatures. A lot of the bits of evidence that are brought up - like a Star of David on the floor of Gringotts - are either coincidences or issues caused by the adaptation (the location they were filming in had them already).
On the other hand, they do run the banks, hounded at least one person in canon over debts and do have a different understanding of property (anything wrought by goblins is seen as only leased for the lifetime of the wizard who bought it which...you can see how that could lead to misunderstandings) that leads to at least one goblin betraying the team for treasure.
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There are people that believe that the goblins in the world of Harry Potter are a (racist) reference to Jews.
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Supposedly the goblins who run Gringotts bank are reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes. Your mileage may vary, I don't really see it.
Even if the accusation was well-founded, I imagine the Venn diagram of "people calling for JK Rowling's death" and "people enthusiastically celebrating the massacre of unarmed Israelis on October 7th" would show a great deal of overlap. Very few trans activists accusing JK Rowling of antisemitism actually care about antisemitism qua antisemitism: they just hate her because of her gender-critical opinions and are trying to tar her with as many other brushes as are available. See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.
(As an aside, there is at least one character who is canonically Jewish, a heroic Ravenclaw.)
Hiberno-phobia? I can only remember one Irish character, and I don't remember them being portrayed particularly badly (apart from being bad at quidditch).
Séamus Finnegan. I recently heard someone arguing in earnest that his name is a "reverse spoonerism" for Sinn Féin (I'm sorry, what?), and the running gag in the first book/movie of him accidentally causing small explosions is meant to make the reader think of the IRA.
I'm an Irish man who grew up when the Harry Potter books were all the rage. My friends and family literally queued up to buy them on publication day and devoured them over the course of a weekend. I don't recall ever hearing an Irish person contemporaneously suggesting that Séamus was a negative stereotype.
I actually really like that theory. It's so obscure as to be pretty clearly false but would be a hoot to advocates for at dinner parties.
Well, the names of Harry's mentors are references to esoteric alchemical processes, so it's not the craziest fan theory I've ever heard.
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I mean, the HP world is pretty quaintly simple in a '50s-cartoon way, and in fact everything non-British (the French (of course), the Bulgarians, ...) in it is presented as the sort of droll stereotype you would expect from old monolingual British people who have never really left the country except perhaps to go and be drunken pests on Tenerife or the like. This does not really register as malicious, as much as it is just ignorant and provincial. I find myself drawn to the charitable(?) explanation that many of the activists themselves are rather ignorant and provincial, and quite self-conscious about it in the modern instagrammable world of jetsetting global citizen cultural trivia mongery, and it's well known that humans are particularly cruel towards displays of identity markers in others that they are desperate to shake off themselves (hence all the older children hating on childish things, Indians hating on "pajeets", people in a hierarchy hating on people one step down in the hierarchy).
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Yeah, I love playing board games but I hate (and have completely disconnected myself from) the board gaming community. I got sick and tired of political fights constantly being started over games, proclamations that something was evil for various reasons (racist, etc) and just general priggishness. It seeps into the games some too, though it is lower intensity and thus more tolerable (for example, Dominion 2e going out of its way to change all cards from saying "he" to "he/she", or Wingspan removing reference to a bird named after Hitler). Like @WhiningCoil, I'm pretty annoyed that a bunch of self righteous jerks have trampled all over my fun hobby because they refuse to just let it be fun, it has to be a political enterprise.
Which bird is that?
Sorry, it wasn't Hitler. When I went digging I found that my memory got that mixed up, but they did rename various birds which were named after humans: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3182394/american-birds-to-be-renamed
In that thread, the president of the game's publisher says "I wouldn't call this... a matter of erasing the past--the past isn't changing. Rather, it's using the information we have in the present to not celebrate or honor those who committed atrocious acts in the past and to simply not be derogatory to certain cultures". So, pretty explicitly letting politics drive game design, even with the fig leaf of "we're just keeping pace with the names used by official ornithological groups".
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To apply some boardgaming lingo, here, this strikes me as a good example of how the American culture wars are being waged asymmetrically. (As is so often the case, Scott Alexander noticed years ago.) Although I don't actually know of any, I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not. BoardGameGeek and NexusMods are the two hobby sites that I know technically "ban" politics, but apply that ban selectively in exactly the way "Conservative Versus Neutral" implies. Reddit has a site-wide rule against calls for violence and often bans accounts for using certain right-coded no-no words, but I don't think a day goes by that I don't see at least one comment calling for the literal extermination of Trump voters, conservatives, etc. Is that nut-picking? Maybe! But if so, there are an awful lot of nuts to pick, and no one in my outgroup suggesting they chill. (And probably some of those posters are AI/actual Chinese psyops, but still.)
Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this, though it has perhaps limited some of the more egregious examples in the federal bureaucracy, higher education, and corporate world. The "alt right" inverts left wing identitarianism and adopts some of its methods, but they don't noticeably control a bunch of putatively "neutral" spaces. Politics moves in cycles, and eventually the Republicans will be the minority party again. If Sweeney and CGE is what we get when Republicans have control of the federal government, what can we expect when that changes? I do not think "a cooling off of the culture wars" is on the Democratic agenda!
That's partly a consequence of the people who make up the groups. Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people. If you started a club for gun enthusiasts, I doubt progressives are going to invade the space and push out the people who refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. And your gun club is probably going to have the occasional comment about Democrats that would start a fight should any Democrat be around to hear it.
But there tends to be a certain creeping nature to it. You're making a wargame forum and someone wants to show off their mechs in pride colors. You either ban it or leave it. Then if you ban it you're a political space but according to the left not a political space if you allow it. If you allow it someone is going to give a negative response that probably leads to an argument. The next time someone shows off their mechs and adds "trans rights are human rights" and we repeat.
To my understanding the Battletech forum rejected pride mechs. And one of the novel authors made some gay characters and that got rejected. Eventually Reddit intervened to replace the mods and the left quite literally took over the space.
No one can without trampling on the First Amendment. And they certainly aren't going to choose to stop being angry that Trump managed to win again.
I think that answer only kicks the can down the road. I agree that we naïvely expect young, bookish people to lean left rather than right - but why is that the case?
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Well put. The bias in "neutral" spaces is something I've unsuccessfully argued with the common redditor and open leftists about for years at this point. Trying to focus in on this issue by having your average left-of-center person acknowledge it in these discussions is virtually impossible. The most condensed and easily deliverable version of this argument that I've come across is to present to people the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. If they're the average dug-in redditor, they'll either claim the site itself is biased and unreliable or they'll pivot and say something like, "Left leaning views are just more inline with reality," and the discussion/argument is essentially over at that point. It's the same tactics over and over. They'll either grasp at something to discredit the source or demand you endlessly provide additional sources to corroborate it, or they'll implicitly admit to the bias and justify why it is this way, all while never actually admitting that it is.
It's like the scale of it is so large and ubiquitous that it's nearly impossible to recognize for some people, and for others it's The Celebration Parallax: That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is.
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Post TDS content on say, a hunting forum or a boating forum.
What's TDS?
Trump derangement syndrome
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Trump Derangement Syndrome.
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