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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,
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.
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.
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
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