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Notes -
Representation in the Last of Us
Because this show is highly popular and ongoing, I’m just going to coat everything in spoiler tags.
If I had to steel man the idea of making all villains white, it would go something like this:
Before the vast majority of Western history, minorities, especially blacks Hispanics and to some degree Asians have been caricatured. When mass media first came about this was accelerated to an unprecedented degree.
After decades and decades of this harmful depiction, negative stereotypes have been baked in. In order to reverse the already baked in trends, we will need at least a few decades of vilifying white people. Then maybe we could have equal representation and declare that the war against whites is over.
To be clear I don’t exactly advocate for this position, but I do think it has a sort of insidious logic around balancing the scales so to speak. And I would agree that minorities still deal with more racism than white people when it comes to day to day interactions, in America. Institutional bias is a different animal, and conflating the two muddies the water in my opinion.
The logic may even be persuasive if humans as a unit lived 400 years. But new humans grow up to have 100% diametrical values to their parents, largely as a product of media consumption. And so HBO forcing these new associations onto the youth is not a correction to the bad, it’s just a bad which happens to target a different cohort IMO.
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This never makes sense to me. Who is weighing the cosmic scales? Who is omniscient enough to know the true baseline for each group, how far away from that baseline each group is, and how much each interaction will nudge toward the baseline? This is of course rhetorical because no one (or group of ones) can possibly do this. So maybe…just don’t do evil hoping it comes out good?
The answer is of course a resounding chorus of:
"I am!"
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Mmm, I used to. But now I'm just out for basic vengeance. Sorry. I get that this makes me the problem, but I just don't think I care. I don't have it in me to take all this demonisation of me on the chin and forgive and forget.
There's a simple reality-check available for this. Try living for a month without power/water utilities or spending any money. Then assess which is stronger: your desire for revenge, or your fondness for modern amenities. The demonization sucks, but revenge, iterated sufficiently, plausibly results in you drinking your own piss.
I think that's probably an exaggeration of what would happen if my country suddenly stopped being diverse via magic. I'm frankly unclear how my life is improved in any way by it being so in the first place, though I am assured day and night that it is.
Are you somewhere other than America? And what do you define as "diverse"?
You should want the vengeance pendulum to stop because it can, at least potentially, destroy absolutely everything you know and love. There are routes from where we are now to complete social collapse and very large heaps of skulls. Those routes are, I think, less improbable than most people seem to appreciate. If we go down them, and you do not get the fuck out, your quality of life will trend downward very significantly.
The water still runs and the banks still process withdrawels. It can get a lot worse from here.
The UK. Diverse I would say is having an immigrant population over 5% -- most of whom should be highly paid, skilled workers.
It already is. What I want is to stop it for all time by winning a total victory.
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Did you finally chill out? I seem to remember you being on the other side of that debate, describing the present situation as intolerable, and the outcome unavoidable.
The present situation is intolerable, and the outcome is inevitable based on the current trajectory. This is because too many people on both sides want revenge are going to keep pushing until they get it. They ought not to do this, and they should be told as much when possible, despite the obvious fact that they're going to do it anyway; doing so maximizes the slim probability that some out-of-context event defuses the situation before society throws a rod.
I'm actively trying to chill out, yes. Most days I do pretty good at it. Attempting to facilitate the breakdown of our existing society, through word or deed, remains a profoundly seductive idea, but I couldn't find a convincing argument for why doing so isn't evil. More to the point here, the seductive power of revenge fantasies is largely derived from one's blindness to how that revenge actually plays out. No revolutionary thinks The Glorious Victory is going to result in everyone they know and love dying, or in a century of poverty and ruin, or in widespread plague and cannibalism, even though those are likely outcomes, historically speaking. I don't actually think such outcomes are necessarily deal-breakers for revolution; sometimes the fight really is worth the following decades of misery. But when you reach for that sword, you should have a clear view of what you're actually signing us all up for.
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There is some daylight between 'I am still upset about X' and 'I have experienced near maximal punishment'.
The scenario I described is a plausible outcome for our side winning, not "near maximal punishment". Allowing one's actions to be motivated by spite and revenge makes such outcomes more likely, at the margin.
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Where, exactly? In my neck of the woods, it is considered acceptable to say "white people are [negative thing]" and completely unacceptable to do the same with any other race. White people are discriminated against academically and in employment; if you understand what "equal opportunity employment" means, you are reminded of the fact that you'll be discriminated against every time you apply for employment as a white person. To believe that you're more likely to deal with racism in day-to-day interactions as a minority, I would have to put a huge amount of emphasis on microaggressions, perhaps to the point of treating things like this as a personal affront.
I don't buy the idea of microaggressions, but I do think the idea points toward something real. Namely that the racism minorities experience is a sort of silent or unconscious 'looking over,' without realizing it you may tune out concerns or people from cultures not your own. I've caught myself doing it enough, as a white person.
Now I do think the whole racism card is massively overplayed in our society, and that outright blatant racism towards white people is both egregious and shockingly accepted. That's a problem. However, white people by and large still have quite a few cultural advantages, and even the most woke liberals I know tend to mostly associate with other white people in their personal lives. That's definitely an advantage.
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Much of the Bible Belt and Gulf Coast. In my neck of the woods it's more acceptable to call someone the N word than support BLM, Confederate flags are less controversial than LGBT rainbow flags, etc. TheMotte seems to heavily oversample blue state right wingers and not have many people from rural red states dominated by borderers and evangelicals.
I lived in a Bible Belt town in Alabama for a little while (military), the people there are just very conservative, that's all.
If you did a poll and found 5% of white Southerners think it's acceptable to use the N-word and 3% support BLM I might find that believable, but that venn diagram would not be particularly representative.
Also FWIW I honestly probably encountered as many pride flags on the gulf coast as Confederate flags I even saw a few houses who flew both.
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