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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.
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 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'.
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.
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