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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Well, Wizards of the Coast is making Aragorn Black.

This doesn't even make sense storyline wise. What with Aragorn being descended from the kings of Numenor, it's not as if he could be from some distant land. I suppose there is still the possibility that all the Numenoreans are black, but, Arwen's white in the same picture, and she, being the daughter of Elrond, is closely related to the line of the Numenorean kings.

It's clearly for the sake of diversity, but couldn't they just do things in their own intellectual property instead of messing with what belongs to others? There'd be no harm in making up a ton of new Magic characters who just happen to be black, instead of changing already beloved characters from who they are.

But at least, could they have gone with someone who it would not mess with the backstory, like Gandalf, who has no national origin? I suppose that would make the moniker of "The White" a little ironic, but that's still better than the current state, to me, at least.

This significantly decreased the chance that I get cards from that set. I play, (but I don't spend very much on it), but if this is supposed to appeal to a fanbase, whether to get them to start playing, or get them to spend more, it would probably be wise not to alienate them. Why not put your diversity where it won't hurt your bottom line?

Rings of Power had some questionable things racewise (and a whole lot more unquestionably bad things in other domains), but at least it wasn't doing this.

WotC hates white people.. They aren't even being subtle about it.

“This is not the face of the hobby anymore,” Brink said, “and I think there’s been mistakes made in years past where people assumed that D&D players were all, you know, white dudes in a basement. Which has been a faulty assumption for a lot of years and gets more and more false every day. And so in my viewpoint, guys like me can’t leave soon enough.”

"I'm never writing another white main character and that's on period"

"White men. I mean, really. Where to begin."

"I remind myself of this every time doubt or imposter syndrome begins to creep in. I'll be damned if I sit there waffling while some mediocre white dude who thinks he's the shit swoops in and steals the opportunity. Take the chance. Do the thing."

"When did mohawks become the hair style of choice for white trash kids?"

Imagine if any other group of people was the subject of these tweets.

The Dungeons & Dragons Movie Intentionally Emasculates Its Leading Men

While speaking with Variety, Daley and Goldstein discussed how Michelle Rodriguez's Holga the Barbarian and Sophia Lillis' Doric the Druid tend to engage in the frontlines of battle compared to their male party members. "That was not an attempt at wokeness on our part," Goldstein said. Daley elaborated, saying, "Swear to God, it wasn't. We liked that Holga is the bruiser that does the dirty work for Edgin, and he doesn't like to get his hands dirty. We also love emasculating leading men."

WotC has a full blown culture of hating white men, and wanting to see them miserable. They must be denied anything they enjoy, and all the things they used to enjoy must be ruined. They love watching white men suffering and miserable. They literally could not be any more clear about this.

Stop giving money to people who hate you. They aren't even hiding it anymore.

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You know how sometimes some Robin DiAngelo type will ignorantly claim "White people have no culture"? When in reality, they are just totally oblivious, in all the worst ways, to the absolute cornucopia of white culture around them? That all the books written by white people are white culture? And all the movies. And all the music. And all the games. And all the architecture. If it was made by a white person, with whatever magic sauce every person's unique cultural heritage brings to the table, then it's white culture. But to a subset of people, this simply does not exist. How they can not see it is beyond me. But lately I notice people cognitively mutilated in ways Orwell wouldn't have thought up in his wildest dreams. So it is what it is.

Or worse, they view the existence of white culture, or anything at all that white men can enjoy and see themselves represented in and valorized in, as innately harmful to everyone else. And it must be destroyed. I'm sorry, I mean "fixed".

This hypothetical ur-racist is the exact sort of person utterly incapable of perceiving wokeness. It's just normal to them. "Being a decent person". No amount of pointing out their hatreds will make a remote impact on them. It's only wrong to hate people, and white men aren't people. They demonstrate how they've dehumanized white men every time they open their mouth. It's compulsive.

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I still wonder incredulously about how this happened. How an ideology swept seemingly everybody and nobody noticed, and anyone who believes it refuses even to name it, to recognize it is a concrete set of views that can be evaluated, and affirmed or rejected.

Like arjin_ferman wrote, we noticed, and there were plenty of fairly high profile fights around it. Possibly the most famous of which is the affair of reproductibly viable worker ants, aka Gamergate, which still gets referenced to this day 9 years later to be blamed for the rise of Trump and the alt-right and fascism and whatnot.

But in terms of how "wokism" became the force it is today, being so ubiquitous and invisible as to be water to a fish by many people (one could also make the analogy to white privilege to white people if one wants to be meta about it), I think one significant factor is the education system being infused with this stuff, and infused for several generations. It's fairly well known that much/all of the academic basis of what we call "wokism" started at least 50 years ago. The famous and influential paper White Privilage: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack was published in 1989, and from what I understand, this wasn't breaking particularly new ground in the "field."

In that half a century plus of this ideology being developed and taught, teachers have been taught to teach this stuff to kids, who in turn have grown up to be teachers who teach more of this stuff to kids. When you're taught only this as the only correct ideology as a kid, then as a teacher you're simply going to be unable to teach the next generation of kids to consider anything else as possibly correct. This process is leaky and imperfect, but at some point it reached critical mass. It also has some very strong defense mechanisms; it hijacks the common youthful impulse to rebel by always positioning itself as the ideology of the weak underdog against the powerful man, and it also has its own explicitly anti-rational/anti-empirical methods of epistemology that places barriers in people's ability even to study other ideologies, much less adopt them.

I think there are other extrinsic forces at play that helped it along as well, such as the fact that this time period was very closely after the US civil rights movement which is generally agreed upon as having been righteous and heroic, but which inevitably left fewer battles to win for people who wanted to follow their heroes. If you're a progressive, you have to progress beyond the prior generations' progressive victories, in order to find any meaning as a progressive. Thus compelling people to create new and improved versions of racial justice, leading to things like denigrating colorblindness in favor of explicit racial profiling. I also think the well known echo chamber effect in social media in the past 15 years played a factor on all sides, but with "wokeness" in particular, the aforementioned anti-rational thinking made its effect even stronger (I would guess similar things happened in traditional religious circles and other conspiracy theory circles, though I would also guess that the former group there wasn't as influenced by social media just due to not using it as much).

All this (and more, I'm sure), and we're seeing the results play out. It was clear to me as early as 2015 that we were seeing a new religion in action, one whose great innovation, in this unusually secular era, was convincing its adherents that it wasn't a faith-based religion at all. I think this is somewhat analogous to Christians (and likely followers of other religions, though Christians are the only ones I've personally encountered) who say that Christianity isn't a religion, unlike those other things like Judaism, Buddhism, or even atheism.

How an ideology swept seemingly everybody and nobody noticed , and anyone who believes it refuses even to name

Of course they noticed, there were several massive ideological fights about it. People tried warning against it, and organized to oppose it.

This is one of the things that opened me to conspiracism. You wouldn't get so many people pretending nothing happened, if this was just a new ideology becoming popular.

The noted reluctance of social justice advocates to name themselves (and here's a new article from de Boer on the subject, even!) does remind me a little of something like the Mortal Name from Unsong, or how, in Warhammer Fantasy, actually saying the name of any of the Chaos Gods as a Chaos worshipper can get you turned into a mutant, but I suspect the real reason why is something more complex: to admit the boundaries of the group or category you belong to may actually be to surrender the ability to set those boundaries yourself.

Granted, social justice advocates more tend to position themselves as being in the moral spotlight, but I think there is a similar phenomenon here, where they can't let themselves be pigeonholed as being a distinct subset of the left wing. After all, if they organized into their own political party, they'd have to actually fight in elections and such--too risky, perhaps.

I mean, SJ names itself all the time. It's just that the words it uses are words which already mean other things - "moral", "decent", "compassionate", "sane".

I think they've grasped something that even Blair missed; if you don't even have a word for "Ingsoc" separate from the word for "good", it becomes impossible to even utter the crudest of blasphemies "Ingsoc is ungood" in a comprehensible fashion. All you can say is the meaningless "Good is ungood". Yudkowsky, though, did not miss it:

I don't think you could twist them far enough around to believe that eating babies was not a babyeating thing.