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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17723 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/dungeons-and-dragons-elon-musk/684828/

In This Thread, 2D3D Wonders Why Race Concern Shit In Pop Culture Still Matters

So, Elon Musk apparently had a spergout over WOTC because WOTC apparently did a faerun land acknowledgment and apologized for racially essentializing... well, anything (or everything, I can't tell).

Per the article,

After a designer at Wizards said that the company’s priority now was responding to “progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense” at those stereotypes, and not to “the ire of the grognards”

And that made Musk tweet an implied consideration to buy out Hasbro, owner of WOTC. Perhaps he should keep away from napkins and lawyers for a few weeks, but WOTC staff and progressives have more to lose from a Musk takeover than Musks does if he accidentally commits to the sale.

My questiob is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.

I trust this forum understands the broad strokes enough to make a culture war summary unnecessary. Anything white nerds love must have more women and minorities and it must explicitly come at the expense of the white nerd favourites. Duke out details in the comments if necessary, the battle itself isn't the point.

The progressives won the previous round already. They got the victory lap of defeating racial essentialism by incorporating noble blacks, I mean orcs, in the rulebook a few years back. Vice, Kotaku, Polygon spammed articles about how this proves the rejection of white supremacy by the powers that be. Hooray for the Resistance, we are now the New Republic. Did I mix my factions? It doesn't matter, and apparently neither did the battle. Because WOTC still saw fit to dig up ancient corpses and put them on trial for heresy.

Except it is patently clear that the audience for this public shaming doesn't exist anymore. The volume of pop media culture wars has deflated in the face of victory, and perhaps Sydney Sweeney deadeyeing a millennial journo hoping for self abasement to atone for even being proximate to white advocacy is emblematic of how irrelevant this public opinion war is. You can, in fact, yeschad someone trying to make you feel guilty for not grovelling for zillenial approval.

But what exactly is the battlefield now? Racial/sexual/gender/whateverfuck representation? Moral ambiguity of 'bad' people unless the bad guy is generational trauma/white supremacy? Sinecures for adherents via "narrative consultancy"? Is the objective to win a battle or just to make noise.

Theres a destructive incentive structure here that I can't parse out fully. The unwoke are perfectly happy to sit back and be gradually edged out, as seen from the ready faggification of media starting with Will and Grace and reaching a high point (maybe) in Bridgerton where intraracial relationships are the enemy (maybe, I don't watch Shondaland slop). Or maybe the ongoing media projects where you can't have minorities be bad guys anymore - its always a white guy somewhere at the end pulling strings. Except if its Giancarlo Esposito.

Back to topic. The unwoke are silent dragged along consumers, the woke think they can accelerate the slide or celebrate the slide, suddenly reactionaries Notice and generate backlash, and the woke get smacked in. Retreating in confusion, they conclude that the issue is the message not being made clear enough, and the message is doubled down despite vocal opposition.

Rinse and repeat, but always back into defeat. Social justice went fucking nuts in 2016 because Trump descended from his golden staircase to snatch victory from Hilary Clintons anointed hands, and without the popular vote it seemed that this was merely a technical mistake, one that needed to be message disciplined to ensure the course of history is maintained. Biden won as a moderate but governed as a progressive because his brain turned to soup about a year in and the entire white house was Jill roleplaying Eleanor except without enough balls to lead a relatively competent cabinet, so the progressive staffers wrote every communique and channeled The Groups. Opposition was simply the last gasp of straight white men (and blacks and gays and women and asians and latinos and....)

Then Trump won, the illusion shattered for about a year. But now the same dead fights are being rehashed.

I don't really have a concrete point to interrogate in this culture war. My stance that any media featuring a minority front and center being likely to suck because it always means the writers room can't have room to criticize stupidity is enough for me to optimize my consumption because I'm an old moron and nostalgia for old shows from my youth gives me enough tinglies. Yet the strength of reactionary pushback to culture war attempts clearly shows that this is a conflict progressives seem intent on reigniting, and it should be clear that they not only lost the previous rounds but the upcoming battlefield is likely lost. The Dispatch sold a million copies and none of their characters were "body positive" in any way. Contrast that with Concord that literally was dead on arrival with their fat ugly minorities, making me wonder if the skirmishes being reignited are just masochists indulging in a public humiliation/victimization kink.

Hasbro is limping along by milking Magic the Gathering for everything it's worth. D&D was never all that profitable, but Critical Role helped bring a resurgence. Thing is, that's the theater kid crowd. The grognards can either accept it or fuck off. They weren't that profitable anyway.

I think that the model of the progressive mind is that minorities will appreciate the work they are doing, the median American may not notice or care but won't mind, and the right are a tiny percentage that will impotently rage (which is a bonus). I don't think they're entirely wrong about the median American not caring, but they think they can maintain quality while not just giving half the country the heckler's veto. Heck, they veto it themselves before any heckler can even get the chance. But eventually they're recycling the same safe stories and people get bored. They spent all their time on stuff they admit only a minority care about, and the normies will still eventually subconsciously feel that something is missing.

There's an interesting dynamic to this kind of thing in fantasy universes.

The original Star Trek was revolutionarily progressive in having a multiracial crew. There was a presumption of American leadership (Kirk), but it also featured a Japanese crewman twenty years after Hiroshima (Sulu), a Russian during the height of the Cold War (Chekov), and a black woman during the civil rights era. Trek unites all of humanity by creating an alternative "other," the Klingons. The displacement of the kinds of stereotypes that we used for the Other and the Enemy, the Russians/Japanese/Blacks, onto the Klingons inevitably leads those who feel othered to identify with the Klingons. So then we have to reform our views of the Klingons in TNG, and so we need the Borg to be the new absolute villain.

Same thing happened in WoW, the Orcs go from bad guys to misunderstood victims.

To be fair, TOS Trek includes some pretty clear allegory where conflicts with the Klingons and Romulans (one episode of basically submarine warfare) are also themselves allegorical for the Cold War. The movie Star Trek VI is pretty interesting to watch because it's loosely portraying the end of the Cold War that had just happened (complete with a coup attempt, but no *Swan Lake).

But the recycling of villains into friends did occur multiple times (see also the Ferenghi) and you have a pretty reasonable take on how that was done more broadly.

But the recycling of villains into friends did occur multiple times (see also the Ferenghi) and you have a pretty reasonable take on how that was done more broadly.

The implication here being that Ferengi were modeled after Jews and they work in industries of vice? Bad joke/observation aside, the culture that early Trek embodied was if you want to call it the right kind of progressivism at least for the day, if not in an objective sense. I don’t think anyone here would disagree with that.

Speaking of Star Trek, I notice that in their future they've also cured humans of religion and homosexuality.

However, in the newer series they've reintroduced homosexuality. I wonder if we're just a few years away from the new first officer [1] of the Enterprise F showing off an ingenuous device that will let him know which way on the starship to face so he can pray towards Mecca.

  1. who takes orders from a badass girlboss captain of course

Star Trek (in the more modern incarnations) tried to be "spiritual not religious". The Bajorans got to be religious, but there was always the clash (once made explicit) about "yeah we know the Prophets are in fact Sufficiently Advanced Aliens".

Chatokay, God help that character, got stuck between "I want to practice my native heritage traditions but I can't believe in them as religious because my mother knocked all that nonsense out of me" so we got the worst of both worlds there: using the trappings of (all chucked in a blender) indigenous traditions from North and South America which came off looking a bit patronising at best, but no actual "why yes I do in fact believe in the spirits" because this is the future and science rules.

in the newer series they've reintroduced homosexuality

What do you consider new Trek?

The Outcast with an "ambiguous" kiss, Rejoined with a "symbiote confusion" lesbian kiss, and The Emperor's New Cloak with a "dark mirror universe" lesbian kiss are all prime time line. More than, about, and just less than 30 years ago respectively at this point.

I haven't seen, and do not consider to be head cannon, anything after Voyager. I suppose the more recent series have explicit homosexual characters, where it's a recurring part of their character rather than incidental to an episode theme?

In TNG era they were relatively slow with their introduction, with only moderate controversy following each showing. It probably doesn't hurt that Terry Farrell as Jadzia Dax is pretty easy on the eyes.

There is a difference between the occasional queer-coded alien and just outright portraying homosexuality as if it were normal. Not a huge difference (it's pretty clear the TNG actors wanted to push the gay agenda and had to be reined in by the producers), but still a difference. It's the next step in promoting deviancy.

I'd be pretty comfortable letting kids watch TOS-era Star Trek, somewhat comfortable with letting them watch TNG-era Trek, and very uncomfortable letting them watch NuTrek.

There was also that terrible episode with Riker and the non-binary alien, which was supposed to be an After-School Lesson about gayness and tolerance, but which could also be applied to transness if one wanted.

It was done so badly, though. Riker of all people?

The better one was with Dr. Crusher and the Trill character where Crusher is in a relationship with a male Trill, he dies, the symbiont has to be placed in a new host, and that one turns out to be female. The symbiont/new host is willing to keep the relationship going, but Crusher eventually turns it down.

So far as I remember, the reasoning behind all the gay relationships being lesbian is because they could get lesbian kisses past the censors, but no way (at the time) would two guys in any kind of explicit relationship be acceptable.

I suppose the more recent series have explicit homosexual characters, where it's a recurring part of their character rather than incidental to an episode theme?

Oh, God. Disco Trek. There was a gay couple there, which in itself wasn't the worst thing. The worst thing is that one of the couple was the crazy mushroom-obsessed engineer, and once they introduced the spore drive (don't ask) I couldn't watch any of this show for the amount of wincing I was doing.

Mind you, if we are talking about Trek and homosexuality, this is the fandom that invented (or at least popularised) slash 😁

At the end of season 1 of Picard they have 7 of 9 getting romantic with that alcoholic woman. For example.

Though you draw the line at Voyager, so that's that.

an ingenuous device that will let him know which way on the starship to face so he can pray towards Mecca.

I unironically like that idea, though? How to incorporate religion into sci-fi is always a neat thing when done well. I'd also like some discussion about communion wafers/wine made via the replicator device, and any potential implications of that.

Early scifi dealt with it a lot; I'm thinking Arthur Clarke (The Star, the Nine Billion Names of God for a more comedic take that would be up the alley of our Caliph) or even Asimov with The Last Question. It probably only really stopped being a thing once scifi became a mass-market endeavour.

Regarding Catholicism, at least, you could replicate wine and unconsecrated wafers (as long as the elements were in line with the rubrics). You can't take a consecrated host and replicate that as a communion host, though. You'd need to have a priest there to perform the consecration.

For the Protestant denominations where it is an ordinance not a sacrament, replicating wine and wafers would seem to be okay. Make that grape juice and wafers, I imagine, for those with the prohibition on alcohol. I can't see much difference between replicator communion kits and these (your choice of juice and cracker or wine and round wafer! now gluten-free!).

You'd need to have a priest there to perform the consecration.

Real life naval vessels have chaplains on board so this would not be a stretch.

It's a good sci-fi idea in general. It would be a great fit in, say, Babylon 5. But I take the point to be that it's iffy at best whether it fits the Star Trek universe as established in the first few series and first ten or so movies.

Yes. Whether or not I find this stuff to be stupid cope IRL (I did amuse myself watching Muslims trying to figure out how to fast in northern regions with very short spells of sunlight) it can actually add a bit of reality to the character and world.

Utopian scifi needs to get over its religious hangup.

My question is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.

It's been, what, two years since woke "died"?

It's still omnipresent in every large financial institution, it still carries the majority of the Western population under age 40, and even the most "based" right-wingers are still tiptoeing around the most important cornerstone of Woke - racial biology (which even Nick Fuentes, the new media appointed archdemon, is unwilling to broach - he's on the side of 'Based Blacks').

Anyone talking about the death of woke is a Chinese man talking about the death of Maoism in 1965 because it suddenly went quiet. You're in for a very rude shock come 2028. Steve Bannon is right to be worried about being jailed when the Republicans lose the next election.

Look, people can privately fantasize over their weird racial utopia or idealistic society whatever have you, but it’s not going to happen without a radical (and radically violent) civilizational upheaval of modern day civil society. And nobody wants that. I hate living in a radically progressive society, but I recognize to some extent that’s the cost paid for all the other benefits that get provided to me. Society isn’t going back to some purified white ethnostate out in the American northwest somewhere. It’s just not going to happen. I could go back and live with distant relatives I still have some connection to in Scandinavia but I wouldn’t because it’s too foreign to me, even though I’m genetically indistinguishable from them. I actually ‘feel’ much more connected to my friends who are Hispanic, white, black and Asian than I would with other whites who can’t speak English or speak it with an unintelligible accent.

What are people like Nick supposed to say on this “racial biology” point? “Race” is a biologically fuzzy concept. Even population geneticists behind closed doors have admitted that you can talk about biology at the level of the gene itself without commitment to now outdated and pseudoscientific categories like comparing Nordics and Teutons and Alpines and Slavs, etc. Most genetic traits today are polygenic (i.e. single genes don’t code directly for most traits, multiple different genes contribute some proportion) and some are in fact omnigenic (at the genetic periphery, and genes only contribute very small, indirect effect sizes to a trait). What is this racial significance supposedly sitting there in the corner that nobody is talking about?

“Race” is a biologically fuzzy concept

Race being fuzzy doesn't mean DEI doesn't work. It doesn't prevent people worrying about the right representation of race in the military, in academia, in politics, in media, in jail. When I apply for a job, I am asked about my race. They don't do that for no reason. Indeed, HR will admit to discriminating against white men: https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-6-hiring-managers-have-been-told-to-stop-hiring-white-men/

Race is no more fuzzy than bullets are fuzzy. What is a bullet? Can it be made of copper, lead, ceramics? How about glass or wood? Can it be spherical or pointy or a dart-shaped flechette? Maybe it has explosives in it, maybe not. Huge diversity here!

But the key essence of a bullet is that you fire it out of a gun to hurt something. A really fine definition of bullet isn't needed to fire a gun. We don't need to nail down the exact nature of all the polygenic traits affecting a racial group to use it politically for X, Y or Z. Recognizing race is an extremely basic skill that children learn early on. Farmers made use of heredity in their animals centuries before anyone knew what genetics was.

There are no Black STEM Nobel winners, no Black Fields medallists, no impressive technical or civilizational achievements, much evidence of dysfunction wherever they go (the murdery parts of Detroit, the murdery parts of Washington DC, the murdery North of Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, South Africa, even Sudanese gangs in Melbourne). Yet there's a powerful lobby for capitalizing 'Black' and decapitalizing white, for giving blacks more privileges and status in society, which really complicates the situation when you observe that Nigeria alone has more births than Europe (Russia included).

So if we stick with the status quo of valorizing blacks while propagating stories of white racism and wrongful, evil discrimination against blacks, it seems highly likely that the Western world will be overrun with blacks who are incapable of running it but world-class in wrecking things, while also motivating them to do so by creating and incentivizing this animus. What idiot would want to live in Nigeria when they can move to Britain, Australia or America instead and get guilty white people to give them free stuff and special privileges? And only a racist is going to have the guts to actually block them, for they don't care if it's against 'international law', 'human rights', 'historical debts' and other such things.

This is in addition to the huge deadweight costs of existing DEI and black-valorization policies. So the racial significance ranges from 'gross misallocation of resources in the present and injustice' to 'looming demographic disaster'.

I don’t know if I’m being asked to defend DEI policies here or what, because I most emphatically do not, and I’m all for dismantling them. Nor do I see the relevance of your comparison to bullets. What’s in there that’s supposed to be significant about race somehow? Do people identify with phenotypic familiarity? Obviously. The science of Genetic Similarity Theory (GST) has received substantial support since its development. Does that mean there’s some ‘gene’ out there that predisposes one group to create civilizations that other groups lack? Highly doubt it except in only the most extreme and fringe examples.

Western world will be overrun with blacks who are incapable of running it but world-class in wrecking things, while also motivating them to do so by creating and incentivizing this animus

You just described Rhodesia and South Africa. Theres a fun discrepancy playing out here too: Rhodesia under a strongman shit the bed hard, South Africa seems to have collapsed into incompetent grifters stopping grift purely to spite other grifters.

No matter how much progressives cheer on blacks destroying hated wypipo institutions run by Those Other Whites, blacks will turn on each other at the power consolidation stage and often before that. Farrakhan and MLK, Zuma vs Ramaphosa, Tutsi vs Ibo, etc etc etc.

Looming demographic disaster is quite possible in aggregate, but survival can exist next to the chaos. Scott Alexander and his coterie of Aella rationalist adjacents can thrive in San Francisco isolated from the decay in Tenderloin and even if the rot spreads they just become islands floating in swamps. I visited a friend in Mumbai where his place was more opulent than estates of Indonesian tycoons, but all the windows had to be closed because it was surrounded by literal filth. Not that he would care because he would be rich eternally, probably off the backs of the peasants drowning in the filth out the back.

Everyone is dancing around the two issues that are verboten to explicate, especially in the USA: that a common overculture conflicting with libertarian sensibilities is a good thing for cost effective social organization, and that implementing said overculture onto culturally disparate populations inevitably requires sacrificing some forms of cultural identification which is impossible when cultural identification carries local power. 1950s postwar USA had a common commie enemy, a distinct life path that was socially sanctioned and available to most, and rising quality of life that could be enjoyed guiltlessly because envy was itself more transgressive than "greed".

Race is shorthand for culture, and much easier for progressives focus on race because it externalizes white blame onto immutable characteristics that therefore must be protected. Igbo and Yoruba are physically identical to outsiders but if I say that in Lagos I'd be lynched. Minnesota just had an election where the white winner Jacob Frey won by preaching unity across somali tribes and the somali contender lost because his tribes opponents refused to vote for him. Culture is what matters more, and even though race is the obvious proxy, it is imperfect enough to distract from tangible effects.

Obama was the genius that played both sides of the race angle: raised ENTIRELY white (his black father left him), dons a fro in college for black points and speaks legible jive for white curios and black hoodrats to feel equally comfortable with him. The significance of race died with him... until Michael Brown. I think Ben Shapiro is a dolt whose claim of right wing racial resurgence is only due to Obamas claim that "Brown looked like he could have been my son" is thin, but it did reflect an implicit race war rearmanent: shifting from grudging complaining to rahowa (directionally). The racialization of US politics (and all western politics are downstream of US politics like the fucking BLM shit in goddamn Berlin or Defund The Police in UK) is objectively a bad thing and any restarting of it is a fucking horrible outcome, yet the progressives insist on restarting it whenever they muster the brain cells to agree on an action befitting the progressive stack.

I see what is happening to D&D more like a Geek, MOP, sociopath thing than a CW battleground.

There is a reason why the birth of D&D 4 -- where WotC started to streamline things to make the game more newcomer-friendly -- drove fans to the fork of 3.5 called Pathfinder.

My exposure to D&D started with the Bioware game Neverwinter Nights (which was particularly notable for its easy to use level editor, which lead to thousands of authors creating adventures for it), so D&D 3 always seemed normal to me.

I later played the Baldur's Gate games which ran on 2nd edition, THAC0 and all.

--

Recently I have played BG3, and while I found a lot to like, I mostly hated what I saw of the underlying game mechanics. I get getting rid of skills -- characters mostly maxxed out a few skills in any case, but the changes to spellcasting felt deeply offensive.

Like, traditionally wizards and sorcerers would both have spell slots for different spell levels. However wizards had to assign spells to slots during rest at night, while sorcerers could just decide which spell of their (smaller) repertoire to cast. This created meaningful mechanical differences -- a wizard who had prepared for a specific encounter was more dangerous than a sorcerer who was in turn more dangerous than a wizard who had prepared for a very different task.

With D&D 5, there is no need to assign spells to slots any more. Instead, you have to decide which spells you want to be able to cast after rest, and are limited to a frankly ridiculously low number, I think on the order of a dozen or so in the BG3 endgame, where in 3.5 you could go into combat with six different L1 spells, six different L2 spells et cetera. (Of course, the level capping at 12 instead of the more traditional level 20 does not help either. What good is a necromancer who can not cast finger of death? Not that a FoD whose best outcome is mere damage is much fun, either.)

--

On the CW side, D&D races have always been more than halfway towards species, really. Sure, you have (fertile) half-elves and half-orcs, so a full speciation between these groups has technically not happened. (I do not consider thieflings to be evidence that devils and demons share the same species as humans any more than I consider Jesus or Greek heros to be evidence of God or Zeus sharing a species with humans, in either case it seems like magic is involved in the conception.)

Still, the D&D 'races' are clearly much further apart than most populations of homo sapiens sapiens are. And they used to get their mechanical differences, which ties the fluff around them to the game mechanics. Yes, that means that no halfling is ever going to be the realm's best melee fighter. That is life. They are 3 feet tall and weigh 20kg or so. Last time I checked, no elementary schoolers were beating up grown men at MMA either.

It seems pretty obvious to me that racial and sex-based bonuses exist in the real world. If a kid wants to become the worlds best long distance runner, but is a girl of European origin, then I am sorry to say that it seems very unlikely that she will ever beat the best male long distance runner from Kenya.

Of course, sex-based bonuses, while clearly present at least for physical (and social!) attributes in the real world, are totally absent in D&D. Women melee fighters are just as viable as men, and most non-evil societies are shockingly egalitarian compared to a medieval baseline. And as far as racial bonuses are concerned, the almost exponential scaling of power with the character level means that a STR-based halfling fighter will still be slaughtering creatures twice her size by the dozen eventually. So in a sense, the game mechanics of D&D were more woke and blank-slatist than reality for a long time.

--

The lack of alignment also strikes me as silly, it was always a defining characteristic of D&D. Sure, I can see how the Always Chaotic Evil trope might be Problematic, but this can be fixed without getting rid of the E-word altogether. Just say that most goblins follow evil goblin gods, problem solved. And of course, the cosmology of D&D has not suddenly changed merely because alignment is not a stat any more, it is pretty clear that the followers of Baal or Shar are evil even if you do not spell it out.

I also do not think that the alignment system lead to an overall reductionist morality, you could still have plenty of shades of grey. Or even two lawful good characters going to war with each other if loyalties and circumstances conspire to pit them against each other.

--

Personally, I think what killed D&D was WotC dumbing it down to increase mass appeal, not SJ. My understanding is that most fans of the earlier editions got off the bandwagon when 4e arrived. If among the myriad ways WotC are pimping out the rotting corpse of D&D is also apologizing for Gygax having done a racism somewhere, I can not say that I find that uniquely upsetting.

I see what is happening to D&D more like a Geek, MOP, sociopath thing than a CW battleground.

Geek, MOP, sociopath IS Culture War. It is describing how the Culture War battle is lost by the geeks by the entryist sociopaths.

I see what is happening to D&D more like a Geek, MOP, sociopath thing than a CW battleground.

There is a reason why the birth of D&D 4 -- where WotC started to streamline things to make the game more newcomer-friendly -- drove fans to the fork of 3.5 called Pathfinder.

Paizo has, among other things, removed slavery from the Pathfinder campaign setting because some SJWs found it offensive (see the edit at the bottom with Paizo's response). In case anyone was wondering why the rulers of Cheliax who worship Asmodeus (the ruler of Hell with Tyranny as one of his divine domans) have canonically abolished slavery. Whatever else is happening, culture war is as well, and not just as a cover for other motives.

On the CW side, D&D races have always been more than halfway towards species, really. Sure, you have (fertile) half-elves and half-orcs, so a full speciation between these groups has technically not happened. (I do not consider thieflings to be evidence that devils and demons share the same species as humans any more than I consider Jesus or Greek heros to be evidence of God or Zeus sharing a species with humans, in either case it seems like magic is involved in the conception.)

I think this is the wrong way to think about it. "Race" as a term for a group with a shared ancestry predates and has a broader definition than modern biological classifications. D&D used the term race and not "species" because Tolkien and other fantasy authors did, and the reason why they used it is due to writing settings that are descended from premodern myths/fairy-tales and that are meant to evoke a premodern sense of the world. Heck, in 3.x (the edition I'm most familiar with) the apes in the Monster Manual literally have claws, I'm guessing because someone made a deliberate decision to not base them on real-life apes but instead inaccurate medieval bestiaries. So there's no reason to assume D&D crossbreeding follows the rules of modern biology in the first place.

Always Chaotic Evil trope

One annoying thing about discussions of D&D racial alignments is how rarely they engage with the actual text. "Always [alignment]" was of course invented by 3rd edition and used for outsiders like demons, some undead like ghouls, and a handful of other creatures like dragons and mind-flayers. Orcs by contrast are "Often chaotic evil". Those terms were defined thusly in the Monster Manual glossary:

Always: The creature is born with the indicated alignment. The creature may have a hereditary predisposition to the alignment or come from a plane that predetermines it. It is possible or individuals to change alignment, but such individuals are either unique or rare exceptions.

Usually: The majority (more than 50%) of these creatures have the given alignment. This may be due to strong cultural influences, or it may be a legacy of the creatures' origin. For example, most elves inherited their chaotic good alignment from their creator, the deity Corellon Larethian.

Often: The creature tends towards the given alignment, either by nature or nurture, but not strongly. A plurality (40-50%) of individuals have the given alignment, but exceptions are common.

If they actually engaged with it I wonder if a lot of SJWs would actually find this more objectionable. "Skewed distributions of traits, not absolute rules" are, after all, the sorts of differences based on race or sex that people tend to believe exist in real life.

With D&D 5, there is no need to assign spells to slots any more. Instead, you have to decide which spells you want to be able to cast after rest, and are limited to a frankly ridiculously low number, I think on the order of a dozen or so in the BG3 endgame

It's based on level + int modifier, so yeah a dozen or so is about right. That said, the 5e magic changes are on the whole a breath of fresh air. Vancian magic in prior editions (my experience is with 3e, which itself was a softening of the system by including 0-level spells) is a terrible, actively un-fun system. It sucks ass to find yourself in a situation where it sure would be nice to cast (insert spell here), but you only prepared one copy and you already cast it so you're SOL.

The magic system envisioned by Jack Vance, where wizards cast world shattering spells that are so complex that you have to lay them down in your mind in advance, is very cool for a novel. It is not at all pleasant as a game mechanic, however. There are a lot of changes 5e made which are questionable but I disagree that this was one.

Vancian magic in prior editions (my experience is with 3e, which itself was a softening of the system by including 0-level spells) is a terrible, actively un-fun system. It sucks ass to find yourself in a situation where it sure would be nice to cast (insert spell here), but you only prepared one copy and you already cast it so you're SOL.

But 3e/3.5e also had more robust magic item buying/crafting rules, so it was easy to spend a little extra money to have your highly situational spells as scrolls or wands for when you need them, so you could reserve your spell slots for your more generally useful spells.

True. Though in fairness, you can craft scrolls in 5e just fine so the same would really apply to that (albeit the DMG gives almost zero guidance to the DM on how to implement magical item crafting, just hand waves a few broad guidelines). And in BG3 specifically you have scrolls coming out of your ears.

There is a reason why the birth of D&D 4 -- where WotC started to streamline things to make the game more newcomer-friendly -- drove fans to the fork of 3.5 called Pathfinder.

I'm not sure I would describe 4e's sin as being "streamlining" or "being too beginner friendly." They made the decision to use grids instead of feet, but the earliest editions used table inches. They replaced 3e's point-based skill system with a simple yes/no, but most TSR editions didn't have a general skill system by default. They threw the lore in a blender, but by the end of 4e's life the World Axis lore had basically everything from the Great Wheel, and it almost ends up being a change of emphasis and presentation more than an actual, substantial change to things.

Heck, it's a bit silly to say that 4e was the start of D&D trying to make itself newcomer friendly, when there is an entire line of Basic D&D under TSR (BX, BECMI and the Rules Cyclopedia) that all manage to be pretty easy to play and run, and are still playable to this day.

It seems pretty obvious to me that racial and sex-based bonuses exist in the real world. If a kid wants to become the worlds best long distance runner, but is a girl of European origin, then I am sorry to say that it seems very unlikely that she will ever beat the best male long distance runner from Kenya.

Of course, sex-based bonuses, while clearly present at least for physical (and social!) attributes in the real world, are totally absent in D&D. Women melee fighters are just as viable as men, and most non-evil societies are shockingly egalitarian compared to a medieval baseline. And as far as racial bonuses are concerned, the almost exponential scaling of power with the character level means that a STR-based halfling fighter will still be slaughtering creatures twice her size by the dozen eventually. So in a sense, the game mechanics of D&D were more woke and blank-slatist than reality for a long time.

I agree with you to an extent, but 1e did allow for superhuman stats for humans: 18/100 for males and 18/50 for females. A cap reminiscent of Hercules vs. Xena levels of strength.

However, my feeling is if you're going to allow for larger than life heroes with more strength than is actually humanly possible, who cares about maintaining strength differences between sexes? I'm genuinely fine with either option - either different superhuman caps for men and women, or superheroic men and women being potential equals - but I have a slight preference for the latter, since we're not even talking about real biology anymore anyways.

Heck, even Greco-Roman mythology had Camilla and the Amazons as examples of warrior women with immense strength, so it is hardly "woke" to allow for them in fantasy.

The lack of alignment also strikes me as silly, it was always a defining characteristic of D&D. Sure, I can see how the Always Chaotic Evil trope might be Problematic, but this can be fixed without getting rid of the E-word altogether. Just say that most goblins follow evil goblin gods, problem solved. And of course, the cosmology of D&D has not suddenly changed merely because alignment is not a stat any more, it is pretty clear that the followers of Baal or Shar are evil even if you do not spell it out.

I also do not think that the alignment system lead to an overall reductionist morality, you could still have plenty of shades of grey. Or even two lawful good characters going to war with each other if loyalties and circumstances conspire to pit them against each other.

The weird thing is, they haven't even gotten rid of alignment. Flip through the 5.5e Monster Manual, and you'll see that every monster statted there has an alignment. 5e and 5.5e just de-emphasized alignment (most spells and effects like "Detect Good and Evil" interact with creature types like Celestial or Fiend instead of Alignment itself), and presented things slightly differently. (Like, the 5.5e Monster Manual says up front that all of its alignments are suggestions, and you as DM can change them if you want, but has that ever not been the case? Even if, say, 1e doesn't give you explicit permission, what DM is so devoid of creativity that they couldn't conceive of the idea of a fallen Astral Deva/Angel?)

The big change is in how they emphasize and present humanoid creatures. The 5.5e Monster Manual basically defaults to making the DM do homework and apply racial traits to the NPC stat blocks for all of the humanoid races (including orcs and drow), and shunts a lot of creatures that were historically humanoids into other categories (like goblins becoming fey, and lizardfolk becoming elementals.) I don't like most of 5.5e's changes, and have continued to run 5e with my local group (with a healthy dose of OSR philosophy and sensibilities because I love that playstyle) but it is simply false to say D&D got rid of alignment.

They would 100% not put out today the version of D&D that Gygax put out in 1974. No sane business that wanted to make lots of money would. And you know exactly why. It would offend way too many customers for no good reason. Not a good business reason and not a good artistic reason, (unless you squint really hard).

So, I think this means it's not a dead battleground. Though I would go on and say it's different; this isn't the same stuff as making elves black.

Then Trump won, the illusion shattered for about a year. But now the same dead fights are being rehashed.

Just because Trump won an election doesn't mean you can ignore the racial demographcs of your potential customer base (>30% black or hispanic, 50% female) along with half of the white people stressing out about things they see as bigoted.

I'm mostly not up to date on this issue though, and found this discussion on r/KotakuInAction informative albeit a bit circle jerky.

From that link

In the 1970s, historical wargamers in America were predominantly white, middle-class men

Who would have thought that a nerdy (demographic primarily male) tabletop game (demographic primarily male) created in the US (demographic primarily white) and written in English (demographic primarily white) would be predominantly populated by white males

What a fucking mind-blowing concept

and

White men (and later men in general) were the main consumers at the time because they were ruthlessly mocked by women just for playing the game. Women thought it was lame and wanted nothing to do with it. They only became interested after it became trendy to be a nerd and after watching Critical Role.

Whites have slipped demographically but also D&D is mainstream now.

The slipping demography of white America and the not-exclusively-for-hideous-neckbeardedness of D&D anymore explains the behavior a lot better than progressive dead-battlegrounding, IMO. Though of course the woke ideological shit-tests are a part of this too.

In order for women to mock men for playing D&D, they'd have had to know what it is, and plenty of women plainly like some element or other of the concept of the game (they like roleplaying tea parties).

The main issue was that they wanted nothing to do with the men that played it.

Women who play dnd roleplay alot more than munchkin. Killing baddies is the boring part for girls, just like dialogue filler is boring for guys. The girls (including autogynephiliac men) I dm'ed for back in college were really into their female characters being put into near rape scenarios ("I remove my clothes in this prison to increase my stealth check roll!" "uh... ok...you can just stay in your enchanted leather..." "I roll for wisdom check if I remember that the enchanted leather is stealthy enough" "pass" "fuck roll again"). I know that a pbp forum had to offload all ERP because the main threads were getting clogged with sex roleplay and wasting turns for the rest of the party.

True that the girls never wanted anything to do with the guys playing. Creeps or munchkins are equally irritating. and the presence of a woman just makes that much worse. Though I have seen relatively healthy dnd groups among younger kids where girlfriends tag along just for shits and giggles, and thats honestly one of the best outcomes for an irl dnd session. Getting epic failstreaks to be funny requires good DM and good players and thats generally pretty rare.

I think it is possible to overstate this thesis. I think D&D has a Star Wars-like thing going on with it: Star Wars was a massive blockbuster, watched and enjoyed by tons of men and women. It is also the case that autistic men gravitated towards it as a long-term special interest at a much higher rate, and so they became the core of the Star Wars fandom.

D&D Red Box was a huge Christmas smash hit the year it came out. While I have no doubt that male players outnumbered female players back then, I would find it extremely plausible that tons of kids, male and female, got D&D Red Box in their Christmas stockings, tried to start a campaign and had it peter out after a few weeks or months, and that this group constituted the majority of all D&D players back then. The ones who stuck around were probably disproportionately autistic men, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if you subtracted them you would have a much more gender-balanced (though still skewing male) early audience for D&D than you might expect.

And that made Musk tweet an implied consideration to buy out Hasbro, owner of WOTC.

Forget DnD, save Magic: The Gathering please. They of the negro Aaragorn card need it more than most.

This is where the praying man meme goes. "I see what you've done for others, Lord..."

Please please please don't let Elon buy it. I don't need yet another thing I own or do to become Chud coded. Not because I think he would fuck it up, but because I'm trying to survive in a blue town here.

Apparently they also race-swapped Théoden (while retaining the Rohirric elements) which made me go "what the what?" But this was all back in 2023, I think?

If you're gonna go "Théoden is a proud Anglo-Saxon-African", then why not give him other African cultural elements? This is just "how can we squeeze some more coin out of the consumers?" and not anything more deep than that.

My questiob is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.

If you've convinced yourself that how we talk and what we consume determines reality why would you not fight over every crumb? The trigger for Basecamp offering employees who were offended at a list making fun of customer names buyouts to purge the company was an ADL pyramid that started with light mockery on the bottom and genocide on the top. If you believe this shit, then you should try to fight for every minor space no matter how dead it seems.

It's actually a great way to get otherwise politically inert people - or people who don't care to do any of the ugly tedious work of real politics - to feel like they're doing something. They can help where they are. Your hobby isn't childish or simply irrelevant to important matters, it's another way to do good.

isn't this now a genius strategy to get your company bought by elon. also, the article reminded me a lot of geeks, mops and sociopaths (https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths)

Generally I ignore WotC. I think it was some 5-10 years ago a bunch of their higher ups said something like "We need less white dudes in this hobby" and I decided not to give money or attention to people who hate me. But a buddy of mine sent me this video reviewing a book of short adventures WotC published. His conclusion is that WotC has forgotten how to design adventures. Cool dunk bro.

But it occurs to me, a few days later, what might really be happening. Because all these adventures are criticized for being too linear, too bare bones, no room for fleshing out a world or inventive problem solving. And I think, not unlike how D&D in the 00's had MMO/Video Game envy, and aspects of it's design leaned into what they thought people wanted in MMOs and other CRPGs, I think D&D in the current era has Youtube envy and is trying to lean into what they think people want when they watch Critical Roll.

Because short, on rails adventures are perfect if all you want to do is play a session about as long as a youtube play session, and act out imitations of what you saw watching other people play D&D on youtube.

I donno, it's a theory. I have no interest in exploring the current era of D&D products to confirm it, on account of them hating me and all.

Generally I ignore WotC. I think it was some 5-10 years ago a bunch of their higher ups said something like "We need less white dudes in this hobby" and I decided not to give money or attention to people who hate me. But a buddy of mine sent me this video reviewing a book of short adventures WotC published. His conclusion is that WotC has forgotten how to design adventures. Cool dunk bro.

I mean, D&D is under a Creative Commons license now, so no one needs to care about what WotC does ever again. Doesn't matter if they go woke(r) or if Elon Musk turns it into another chud hobby, the books are free for anyone to modify and change forever.

Even if you want to pay money to companies actively supporting a contemporary game, there's plenty of options across the political spectrum from relatively woke companies that still make decent products (Paizo, Kobold Press) to more right-wing or neutral companies (a fair few OSR publishers.)

D&D is under a Creative Commons license now

This is not a very informative phrasing, because there are several different Creative Commons licenses and some of them are very restrictive. More specifically, D&D is under CC BY 4.0, the Creative Commons attribution-only license, whose restrictions are minimal.

I certainly didn't expect someone to read my comment, and just start publishing D&D content without any further research, but I suppose the further clarification for those interested is nice.

I would love for D&D to be taken away from WotC and put in the hands of someone who will make some fucking content for it.

Also, this battleground isn't dead, the 5e player-base is fucking ridden with leftists that will eat up queer land acknowledgements. There legitimately is a market for their products. The biggest blow they took lately was the OGL fiasco and how it made all the big-deal podcasters (who have mostly drifted towards being Leftist or Leftist-safe if they weren't there already, to my understanding) try to swap to third-party systems.

Yes, just recently ran into another hobby drama, and learned that about half the super-mega-permaban-list was for saying a nono word on unaffiliated discords. People have been announcing the death of wokeness since... well social justice started maybe 4 years before Trump was elected, and its been 9 years since then.

This has driven a lot of the growth in the OSR scene... which is interesting because now you can watch in real time as outsiders and entryists accuse the OSR community of being full of fascists, while inside the community it's roughly divided between "I just want Old School orcs" and "We must make it clear that the OSR community is a welcoming and inclusive space."

WOTC making orcs basically humans with an odd skin tone is an unusually poor choice. Really speaks to them missing the fundamental purpose of morally unambiguous enemies in a game. I get the real point is they don't want a race of dumb savages so they have to change them into human with oddly colored skin. Like an identifiable group of real life humans drawn in fantasty style.

I don't play tabletop game any more, but if I did I'd want old orcs and racial bonuses.

WOTC making orcs basically humans with an odd skin tone is an unusually poor choice. Really speaks to them missing the fundamental purpose of morally unambiguous enemies in a game.

From a gameplay perspective, if you want a tabletop equivalent of a video game beat-em-up title, it makes sense that you want a race of always chaotic evil antagonist who exist in endless supply and can be mowed down with no moral compunctions. It's the same reason we have zombies, or Nazis. But, from a worldbuilding/roleplaying perspective, that seems both pretty boring and also kinda unrealistic? Not unrealistic in the sense that you cannot build a world where it doesn't make sense; with enough effort, I'm sure you can. Unrealistic in the sense that it doesn't map to anything in the real world.

I get the real point is they don't want a race of dumb savages so they have to change them into human with oddly colored skin. Like an identifiable group of real life humans drawn in fantasty style.

If they are going to turn a monster race into fantasy Mexicans, then I prefer goblins. They are much cuter.

WOTC making orcs basically humans with an odd skin tone is an unusually poor choice. Really speaks to them missing the fundamental purpose of morally unambiguous enemies in a game. I get the real point is they don't want a race of dumb savages so they have to change them into human with oddly colored skin. Like an identifiable group of real life humans drawn in fantasty style.

I think the strange thing to me is the weird double think involved. 5.5e turned humanoids into homework monsters by making the DM have to manually apply racial traits to the NPC statblocks, and reclassified a few humanoids as other creature types, but it still has bioessentialist "evil" races all the same. Even if the front of the Monster Manual clarifies that alignment can be changed by the DM, it is really hard to imagine, say, Mind Flayers ever having a good relationship to humanoids, given their diet.

And 5.5e still has monsters that are practically only ever going to be used in a "horde of unambiguous evil" way, like undead and fiends. Like, sure, it might be fun to have an antihero vampire or a risen fiend under certain circumstances, but most DMs are not going to put much thought into it, and just start breaking out the undead or fiendish hordes.

What's weird about it? It is as you said: Mind Flayers are an acceptable "evil" race because they are literally an obligate predator of humanoids. Traits that aren't present in real humans are an acceptable factor to base "evilness" upon. Aside from small clusters of the kind of people who hate Frieren for writing demons as evil anyway.

Best orcs are Project Long Stairs orcs. Wattsian P-Zombies that breed explosively and instantly learn and integrate any tactical behavior they observe.

OSR?

Old School Renaissance/Revival. Basically, D&D going "back to its roots" (generally 1st or 2nd edition AD&D, depending on who you ask, but sometimes Basic or even Chainmail). There are a host of Old School "retroclones" which are all variations on the old "6 stats, class/level, d20" fantasy game, but the aesthetic is generally to appeal to 70s and 80s kids disenchanted with everything post-TSR and all the newer games. Unsurprisingly, there is a large overlap between OSR fans and gamers sick of "woke D&D," though it's by no means an entirely right-wing or anti-woke movement.

Old School Renaissance/Revival (generally, clones/imitations/enhancements of the first two editions of Dungeons & Dragons)

Yeah, I'm at the front lines of it. Every few months, we get a scare where a leftist theater kid or a straight woman who keeps talking about Queerness turns up and calls things problematic or harumphs at someone's accent.

Why do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds? For the same reason that Jehovah's witnesses keep knocking on doors. It's the nature of religion. Keep doing what is "good", so that you yourself remain "good".

A lot of people seem to think of a religion as something that addresses big spiritual questions like death and meaning. But I would argue that the defining feature of a religion is a monopoly on morality, just as the defining feature of a government is a monopoly on violence. And because of this societal confusion about what constitutes a religion, the "woke" religion has been able to fly under the radar without calling itself what it actually is.

When you look at it this way, it makes a lot more sense. When you believe in the absolute morality of what you are doing, the odds don't matter. The pay doesn't matter. Nothing matters besides doing what is "right". It doesn't take too many of this kind of true believer to tip the scales on an issue, since they are willing to push the cause forward at great personal cost (friendships, jobs, family, etc).

I think historically this is probably why most states were unwilling to tolerate other religious systems anywhere near the levers of power. The monopolies of violence and morality are most stable when they walk hand in hand. But here we are, buried under centuries of enlightenment thinking, unable to see something so obvious that a peasant from the middle ages would have likely scoffed in disbelief before shuffling away to thresh more wheat. So why do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds? Short answer - John Fucking Locke.

But I would argue that the defining feature of a religion is a monopoly on morality, just as the defining feature of a government is a monopoly on violence.

This is the most satisfying definition I think I've ever heard for religion. Most have trouble with the fact that there exist "religions" like (some of) Taoism and Confucianism that don't rely on the existence of divine deities per se.

Not all religions have a commitment to the supernatural in this sense. Theravada Buddhism has always remained a classic “atheistic religion.” You can split hairs further if you want to just call it a moral philosophy, worldview, philosophy of life, etc., but as a religion it’s still suitable.

Morality is still the major game religions play, and only because we’re never going to recover the original trappings of a pious life, circa, say 300 B.C. The demoniac theory of possession is gone for all time and has been taken over by neuroscience.

Religion today is full of items we no longer pick off the shelf of our holy books. We walk with what is relevant or want to be true in the present day and then claim that’s what the religion is and has always been.

I'm not even sure it holds for the pre-Christian world? The philosophers at the time criticized the traditional depictions of gods as immoral and you could go to a philosophy school or learn something like Stoicism parallel to your existing religion and not replacing it. Religions did have moral content (the first commandment being to be good to your god so they'll be good to you) but they don't seem to have been totalizing.

The inordinate focus on morality in all dimensions seems to be a particularly Judeo-Christian thing.

How many societies allowed open condemnation of the gods by philosophers? Ancient Greece, maybe. But even there, if you pushed too far, you ended up drinking hemlock.

Epicurus got away with it. So ancient Greece yes.

I guess it's not all that surprising though if you've never encountered a religion like that. It's the quintessential black swan fallacy. If every religion you've seen has a deity, you'll assume that it's an essential feature, not a useful adaptation.

Except it is patently clear that the audience for this public shaming doesn't exist anymore.

It never needed an audience. It's always been a relatively small number of people doing it--these people just have a lot of power. It doesn't matter that, for instance, Disney refuses to make white men a big part of its audience most of the time. So they lose some money, they don't care. They aren't going to go out of business or get fired because of it.

Also, bear in mind that woke media can get popular. The audience is probably race blind and sex blind in the way that used to be considered good and now marks you as a fascist. They don't actually object to the media being woke at all unless it's very over the top (lectures about how straight men are evil, 100% female cast, etc.)--it's just that if the writers put a high priority on woke, they probably put a low priority on everything else such as good writing, so the odds are against woke things getting an audience. But it can still happen (Baldur's Gate 3 for instance).

They don't actually object to the media being woke at all unless it's very over the top (lectures about how straight men are evil, 100% female cast, etc.)

I'd argue that's the difference between "woke" and "progressive/raceblind" media. Like, if you have a new superhero that you're going to launch, and you decide that it'll be a Latina woman and most of the story is going to revolve around a hispanic community in Texas - that's not a problem at all. I may not be interested in it, but I'm not going to say it's necessarily bad. If you're going to take a superhero who was "pale, male, and stale", and make them into a Latinx girlboss who don't need no man - then you've just made a garbage piece of media.

Baldur's Gate 3 is actually a great example of something I'd say isn't actually "woke" - it's just progressive. I'm going to compare it to the recently developed "Siege of Dragonspear" expansion for Baldur's Gate 1&2 - if you aren't familiar, one of the major characters in Siege of Dragonspear has a fairly big arc where it is revealed that they are transgendered, and it's considered to be a big deal that they're living their gender expression and they're so brave for doing so. However, if anyone here has played Baldur's Gate 1 - you'll recall that one of the first items you get in the game (literally in the third explorable area) is a belt of gender changing. In a world where there exists a magic item common enough that a random ogre can have one - being trans just doesn't make any sense. By comparison, Baldur's Gate 3 has progressiveness "in the water" so to speak - characters are gay, multicultural, etc. But from my recollection, it doesn't have any major plot points that rely on progressive shibboleths to make sense - there's no "ACAB" making it so you can never trust the guards, there's no situation where the only competent person is a female POC who is being shouted down by the bumbling men, and there's no plot point that relies on realizing all orcs are actually noble and that the orc opposing you must be a mind controlled victim.

My questiob is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.

First, I doubt they'd believe that anything can ever be permanently lost to their enemy — after all, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." It's a pattern in progressive historiography where prior failed attempts at pushing some cause are lauded as prefiguring the later successful ones. Second, I must once again quote Mrs. Britten's English Zone:

Early literature written by Puritans in America often appeared as first person narratives in the form of journals and diaries. Early American colonists wrote their accounts of immigration, settling in America, and day-to-day life in journals to pass their stories down. Many Puritans also wrote letters to send back to Europe to family and friends they left behind. Very little fiction appeared during this period; Puritans valued realistic writing with an emphasis on religious themes.

…

Even the letters they wrote to friends and family in Europe performed more of a purpose than simply communicating about their lives and keeping in touch. Puritans' religious beliefs affected their lives on all levels, and their writing illustrated their religion's values, such as the importance of the church and the influence of God in their lives. Writing often became instructive, teaching Christian values. The Puritans did not believe that literature was for entertainment; therefore, they frowned upon "entertainment" genres such as drama (plays) and fiction novels.

How do you demonstrate that you are one of the Elect, if you aren't promoting Virtue, fighting wickedness, and serving Christ DEI in everything you do?

serving Christ DEI in everything you do?

I don't think it was intentional, but the fact that it is spelled the same as "of God" in Latin from a group of that seems overall against overt Christianity is funny to me in a very deep way. "In this house we believe in DEI. Agnus Dei to be specific." Imagine if conservatives started requiring stated support for "Graciousness, Openness, and Dialog" for red state faculty positions.

The sometimes-mentioned alternate "JEDI" also has some religious overtones.

If Scott read this, he'd be kicking himself that he didn't think to include it in Unsong.

None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.

Because the proponents are Calvinists who swapped gods and kept the Calvinism.

One of the pet theories I have is pure economics. It is a public knowledge that women make 85% of purchases and they account for 80% of consumer spending. We also have predictions about "sheconomy" by Morgan & Stanley that 45% of women will be single and childless by 2030. By the way sheconomy is an interesting choice of a word for what is named as “male lonelines epidemic” on the other side of the gender coin, but that is besides the point.

Now what is more important is what is left unsaid. Yes, women used to make most purchasing decisions - because they went shopping using their husband's credit card. If 45% of women will be single by 2030, it by virtue of mathematics also means, that there will be similar number of single men in charge of their own spending, men who are increasingly moving to the right compared to women. This means that in totality the purchasing power of male population is probably going to increase significantly, and that pandering solely to increasingly progressive women by companies and advertisers may no longer be the winning strategy as Gillette or Anheuser-Busch learned the hard way. We may see some more surprises in upcoming years solely due to economic factors outside of any culture aspects.

One of the pet theories I have is pure economics. It is a public knowledge that women make 85% of purchases and they account for 80% of consumer spending.

No, this is just a layer of the justification onion, it's not really a reason for woke media. You can see the justification fail with things like the Gillette me-too ad, female Ghostbusters and other properties that didn't appeal to women either, pushing all the trans stuff in, etc.

Nothing woke BECAME popular, popular things became infiltrated and then woke and then shitty. Tumblr clapbacks are mistaken for dollar spend. No population of genderqueer women rushed to play Dragon Age 2 because they finally felt representation with Taash, women play hotter characters in MOBAs of all stripes, women were the ones that used the armor set change thing more than male players and women used it explicitly to make off meta but attractive outfits visible on their characters.

Look if you want to see what pop culture women spend money on that men don't its not girlboss Rey or Junker Queen fatsuits, its romantasy billionaire bedroom bestiality or instagram experience photoshoots. In China women spend hundreds on Imperial Banquet cosplay dining experiences where they are dressed as noble consorts to be served hand on foot by nubile waitresses in delicate filigree.

Women applaud inclusive options for a theoretical other woman that wants to be catered to, but they aren't going to spend money at the Lesbian Collective Art Fair themselves. At the much maligned dashcon 2014 there was much clowning on the genderqueer performative identity panels, but what the girls attending were REALLY fired up on was the discussions on superwholock slash. Woke shit is just signalling, actual consumption is marginal at best.

Sometimes I wonder if "the powers that be" have arrived at the conclusion that letting 20-40 year old women run up insane amounts of credit card debt, that they then pay the minimums on until they die on welfare, raises the GDP more than the alternatives.

At a certain point, the credit card debt is just made up money. When you pay the minimums, you pay so many multiples of what you actually borrowed it's a joke. If you default after paying back 3x the money you borrowed over 20 years, yeah, there is some opportunity cost for the banks that lent you the money, but nobody lost money in absolute terms. And hyper consuming childless 20-40 year olds probably raise the GDP a lot!

That the well dries up eventually... well... there's a new sucker born every minute. And if there aren't enough the US... well... you know my shtick already.

I don’t deny that TPTB have policy levers to Goodhart metrics like nominal GDP—for instance the classic Keynesian “pay workers to dig ditches and then fill them up again”—but this particular one doesn’t seem especially plausible, unless the government bails out the creditors, in which case the situation you are describing is just stimulus checks with extra steps.

On some level, it must be the case that the expected present value of credit card payments (adjusted for default risk) is positive, or else credit card companies wouldn’t be able to raise money (relevant xkcd)

Now, it’s entirely possible that everyone is wrong about these expected value calculations and in fact the rate of default is (or will be) so high that the credit issuers will lose money—in other words, that we are in a consumer credit bubble. If you really think so, then post stock portfolio or gtfo. Less snarkily, what’s your explanation for why, of the big bubbles of late 20th and 21st century history, none of them were primarily about consumer credit card debt?

I saw a peak behind the curtain when a buddy of mine negotiated with his credit card to forgive his debt.

It turns out, when the CC company forgives your debt, they get to write it off, and it gets put on you as income. So, to give you an idea of how it worked out for my buddy. He lived his best life in his 20's, struggled to pay off his credit cards, got it negotiated, and had probably low 6 to mid 5 figures "forgiven". A sum of money which after 10 years of struggling with the debt, and generally making payments, probably bore no relationship to the amount he actually borrowed. He was then hit with a tax bill on that "income" so high he had to sell his jeep and cash out his 401k to pay it off.

I can only imagine how phenomenal this is for the companies bottom line, and all their shareholders. They get to generate virtually unlimited tax write offs. Every bullshit fee they ever stick you with is win/win for them. Either you pay it, or they write it off in which case you pay the government ~25% of it.

So, in a way, the tax code is the government bailing out the creditors. They get to make up an outrageous almost nonsensical amount of money you owe, forgive it, and then push the tax burden onto you adding insult to injury.

>Lend $100,000
>Know chud can't pay it back
>I have a plan though
>Forgive the debt
>He won't know what hit him
>Write it off and get a reduction in tax liability of $21,000
>All it cost me was $100,000
>What morons, heh

Doesn't work that way. The credit card company can only write off the amount they paid, and any interest they recognized but didn't actually receive. The debtor, on the other hand, has to report all principal, interest, and fees as income. The IRS is the only winner.

nobody lost money in absolute terms

I'd argue that the person paying the minimums did.

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