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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Once again I'm torn, because I kind of agree with both of you. The biggest problem I have with woke propaganda is the reasoning behind it. If you* are the kind of person who thinks that representation is important, that children who grow up seeing blacks only portrayed as villains will be demoralised or think they can't be heroic, that they can't identify with Luke Skywalker because of the colour of his skin, and that only hateful race obsessed cunts would target a race and paint them as evil - well I can only really assume one thing when you lump every fair skinned ethnicity in together and then consistently paint them as evil. You already said that's how you think. Same with men and women.

I am happy to include others, and I think it's totally fucked to interfere with how someone else wants to mod his game even if it's in a way I find disgusting - I am a hajnalbrain cooperatebot after all - but as far as I am concerned the DIE crowd and the neo nazi crowd are two sides of the same coin. Except there's a shitload more of the DIE crowd.

I don't think that's hyperbole. Keep in mind that back when it was black people copping it it was generally out of ignorance at worst - vanishingly few actual racists have held positions of power in the media in the past few decades. Most people were just trying to tell their story the way they'd pictured it while writing, and in a white majority country that's going to consist mostly of white people. But the DIE people are actively malicious. They want to put racists and sexists and homophobes in their place, and the rest of us better cheer them on or they'll come for us next. Fuck that and the horse it rode in on.

*I am sure you will understand I'm using the royal you here, but reading it back I see the way I wrote it is ambiguous, and while you've made your position on the topic quite clear, if I were in your centre left shoes I would be concerned that there was some confusion and that maybe I was expected to answer for the DIE crowd. But I am also not in the mood to rewrite this post, because I can't find a way to sit comfortably in this chair, so I am including this disclaimer instead.

if I were in your centre left shoes I would be concerned that there was some confusion and that maybe I was expected to answer for the DIE crowd.

Not really. I expect anyone reading my post to get to the part that says I don't have a problem with mods that don't flatter DEI.

Ultimately, I do not have a problem with someone wanting to discuss why the DEI messaging in media is offputting to them. I am sympathetic to the idea and think that creators of all sizes can do better with this. IF you want to say that the anti-men message in a piece of media makes you feel unwelcome, I'm totally onboard with that. But I often find that people don't cleanly cut away at what they find okay or don't, even when they have the tools to make this clear.

Yeah that's fair. The disclaimer was more for Quincy than for you - for a hypothetical centre left me who got it in the queue and thought it was a passive aggressive end run around the be kind rule. Especially since the last sentence is a statement directed at the royal you, which I should have fixed regardless of my discomfort.