This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is, to be frank, an insane comparison. Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism. There is no physical reality that connects the playing of a game with racism the same way physical reality connects shooting a gun at someone with murder. Many people believe that the contents of a modded game can exacerbate racism, but this is by no means a well-supported view, and is certainly a far less consensus view than "shooting someone with a gun has a high likelihood of kill them," and the leap from "I personally think this mod could exacerbate racism" to "therefore, this modder, even if possibly subconsciously, had racist motivations in creating this mod" is unjustified.
Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision. This would remain just as strong even if, say, you modded Doom to change all demons to cis white men and the player character to an amalgamation of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The only conclusion we could draw is that you wanted to make a Doom mod with these properties, and any sort of speculation about your personal beliefs about the politics surrounding people like Kendi, DiAngelo, and cis white men would be just that, speculation, and you would be responsible for exactly none of the speculation that many people could (and would likely) speculate about your principles and beliefs that motivated you to create such a mod.
And, needless to say, in neither your example nor mine, would you actually be being racist, since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.
Why did someone make or install this mod? It clearly didn't come into existence because particles randomly happened to generate the mod. If the reason was one we would call racist, then yes, we can reasonably infer that someone at the very least made something racist that may indicate their own racial prejudice. Sure, we can't prove racism totally. But I think it is entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced that the creator is racist.
You either believe in an overly strict chain of causality and inference, or you are trying to establish a principled stance that you don't actually uphold in real life.
Okay, but we're asking if the person holds racist views, not whether they were racist to anybody.
You jump from "why" to "it's entirely reasonable to be at least somewhat more convinced [of a conclusion]." I disagree with this. I think the entirely reasonable thing is to say "We don't know," and being convinced, somewhat or otherwise, of the creator's racism or other beliefs sans external independent evidence, is unreasonable. Yes, if the reason the creator made the mod were one that we would call racist, then it's entirely reasonable to say that the creator is a racist racist who racistly created a racist mod in order to spread his racism. That's a big if, one that can't really be checked by observers only from looking at the mod.
??? I don't see what's overly strict about this chain of causality, and I don't see on what basis you get to claim that I don't uphold this in real life. To me, it appears like you're doing here to me the same thing that I'm accusing you of doing with this mod theoretical to the modder, which is projecting your own biases onto the situation and asserting that someone else must be (somewhat more likely to be) acting in a certain way because of how your projected biases relate to their observed behavior. To me, it feels like an overly restrictive and closed view of the diversity and idiosyncracies of humanity to believe that one can just simply conclude from "He changed all the black heroes to white heroes" or "He changed all the demonic enemies to cis white people, to be murdered by the POC champion protagonist" that "He did this out of his sociopolitical beliefs that are in accordance with the direct, straight-up pattern-matching against this mod (i.e. that if I modify a work of fiction to more glorify white/black characters at the expense of black/white characters, that implies I hold some sort of belief or bias in favor white/black people and against black/white people IRL)."
What kind of "No True Racist" principle are you trying to set up here? Apparently, no one is allowed to conclude that a person is more likely to be racist if they download a mod that makes the only black person in a game white even though there's no world-building reason against his presence.
Saying "racist" five times in that sentence really made your point stronger.
By all means, propose alternatives for why this person is making this mod. I can think of only one other.
I made it clear that context matters in my various responses in this thread. I don't think there's anything racist in the creation or use of that one BG3 mod that makes characters fit the established lore on appearances better. But you don't get that justification for something like Stardew Valley because the "lore" reasoning doesn't apply.
Correct, because that would be leaping to conclusions. Your expression of incredulity that someone won't leap to the same conclusions you will doesn't make that leap any less of a leap.
First of all, I don't need to propose alternatives, because the conclusion that they're doing it out of racist motivations isn't some "default" or "safe" conclusion that we can just draw. But just off the top of my head, the first obvious reason is to troll the types of people who would get their panties in a wad over things like this. Those people might contend that the trolling is racist, but of course that's by no means a commonly accepted meaning of "racism" - in fact, it's a highly contentious one. This took me all of 5 seconds to think of. Which, again, is not at all necessary; it's the leap from "he changed some colors of fictional characters in a video game" to "he has racist motivations" that needs the justification. It took me another 15 seconds to think of the explanation that the modder finds the stylized representation of the character in the game to look better with a certain color scheme over another color scheme. Both of these could be motivated by racism, of course, because literally every action, innocuous or not, could be motivated by racism. But leaping to the conclusion that they are requires actual additional, specific justification.
You make it clear that you can say that context matters while also insisting that you get to determine the context based on your own personal idiosyncratic views on the matter. But the reality is that we aren't mind readers with very little insight into the internal and unique thinking process of other people. There's no limit of the number of completely innocuous, non-racist reasons why someone could have changed the only black character to white in a way that is irrelevant to the lore, even if you or I couldn't think of any of them (which isn't the case, since I can think of some of them, but that's besides the point).
Seems like we now need to actually delve into mod in question. Thankfully, someone has done a total writeup here. It cites the following evidence.
There's also very little evidence to therefore suggest the mod was a troll or that it was to better fit the aesthetics of the game. These people were not artists either, they just straight up used a white person's portrait with some pallet-swapping to make the black person white.
We're getting to a point now where people aren't even allowed to voice a goddamn opinion without access to the Record Of Objective Reality buried in the universe's documentation.
Yes, I determined the context. I am allowed to state what that context is and why I think that is. If you find it unconvincing, so be it, but it's telling that you don't afford me enough charity to not claim I'm trying to decide everyone's opinion.
So why don't I see you in every thread about progressives reminding everybody that they don't know why progressives do what they do beyond an individual level?
It may surprise you to learn this, but the entire study of ideology and beliefs works as well as it does because people aren't nearly as unique as you're painting them as. The way particular neurons fire in a person's brain is largely overkill in terms of what you need to know to understand their motivations and make fairly good predictions about them.
So when you tell me that there's no limit as to why a person may want to make a black person white in Stardew Valley, your next step, if you were intellectually honest, would be to start assigning probabilities to each of those reasons. Do that, and I suspect you're going to quickly get into very small numbers after 5.
This is additional information that one had to look up about the modder - the point of contention here is on whether "your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are," and these go beyond the modder's very deliberate modding choices. If you want to say that this specific modder was likely racist because of the various lines of evidence that we can see from that modder's behavior, I would agree with you 100%. That's not what what I'm arguing about. And talking about "context" doesn't actually add anything to this, because "context" isn't the issue; the modding choices didn't tell us anything about whether the modder was racist, with or without the additional details that added context - it was those additional details that told us whether the modder was racist.
I mean, fair enough if it's "so be it." Your statements seemed pretty definitive, that you found absurd my belief that a modder's deliberate modding choices can't be used to pass non-trivial judgment on the modder's thinking, but if you just agree to disagree, that's fine as it is.
Well, one reason is that when people are talking about "progressives," they're usually talking about a set of people who voluntarily signed up for a particular sociopolitical cause. There are loose boundaries, blurry lines, edge cases, and controversy of course, and I'm against psychoanalyzing in almost all cases, but I'm of the opinion that someone's publicly stated sociopolitical positions do provide information about their sociopolitical positions in a way that someone's published entertainment products doesn't. It's certainly true that people here leap very far to conclusions that are entirely unjustified, based on projecting their own insecurities and bitterness onto these "progressives," and I would say that's just as unjustified as claiming that modding a video game to change a character's race is indicative of the modder's racism. It's just that such lines tend to be just one-off low-effort swipes rather than substantive points about how we can divine people's inner sociopolitical beliefs based on their behavior in other realms such as art. The low-effort swipes are bad and lower the standard of discourse here, but I'm not a moderator.
I also personally find it hard to argue against such psychoanalysis of progressives when they perfectly match the mentality that I myself lived through as a progressive. Of course, I can argue just as well as anyone that, just because I happen to be an existence-proof of the reality of the mentality of the progressives that someone is bitching about here, that doesn't mean that any other progressive than me has that mentality. It's that when I see someone who clearly understands my own thinking so well despite never having met me, much less been within my mind, it gives me pause and makes me want to listen rather than argue. I don't experience this when it comes to people accused of being racist due to their creation of entertainment products, since I find the claimed mindset quite foreign.
And this step, if one is intellectually honest, is to admit that we can't assign meaningfully accurate probabilities to these reasons that aren't just dominated by our own biases. If we had some sort of empirical evidence to rely on that shows some relation between "make a black person white in Stardew Valley" (or more generically "make [X] person [Y] in [ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCT]") and "racism in the creator" (obviously can't be mind reading, but racist is as racist does, and so this can be detected through other actions), we could perhaps discuss these probabilities with some very large error bars. Unfortunately, the very mechanism by which we can collect this sort of evidence has largely discredited itself in this realm, and so we're mostly left grasping for straws.
Yes, because we were getting to the point that I had to actually bring that stuff up.
You are correct, however, that we are speaking on a separate argument, one about whether there is any coherent meaning to be found in one's modding choices.
????????
What do you think context even means if not the details for why something is or is not racist?
There are a great many people who adopt their views through osmosis. For example, streamer Hasan claims that he is a socialist, but watch his streams and you'll realize how fundamentally unserious he is about making socialism happen. According to you, I am supposed to take his words seriously instead of considering anything about revealed beliefs/preferences.
If you think that your mentality may have just been your own, then the next step would be to ask how many progressives shared your mentality. That's the relevant question, not whether you personally experienced what is being described.
What a black-pilled take, to forgo the opportunity to ever exercise your mind and produce accurate statistics/percentages because you would be biased!
I don't believe you. I don't believe for a moment that you don't trust the percentages your mind constructs in a great deal of other instances. This is a perfect example of an isolate demand for rigor.
I think there is no more value to be gained from continuing this discussion. So we shall, as you say, agree to disagree.
I'm impressed by the balls you have to repeatedly put false words in my mouth and to project your own insecurities onto me and then end with an "agree to disagree." It's legit admirable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If I wake up each morning, retreat to the privacy of my closet, and spend ten minutes meditating on how awful black people are and how much I hate them, would that actually be being racist, given that there's no black people there to be racist to? Is racism necessarily interpersonal, requiring some form of direct interaction/exchange?
This is an interesting definitional question. I would say No to both questions, though it's almost a Yes for the latter one. Racism is necessarily interpersonal, but it doesn't require some form of direct interaction/exchange. But it does need to play out in some form of interaction/exchange, even if theoretical or intended. If I go to a bunch of other Korean-Americans like myself and tell them to go out and shoot up a bunch of Slavs because Slavs deserve to be shot or whatever, I'm not directly being interacting with Slavs to be racist towards them, but I'm clearly setting up a chain of events meant to create a direct interaction between members of different races to act in racist ways towards each other.
If you spend 10 minutes meditating on how much you hate black people, but then that meditation doesn't affect how you treat black people or how you tell others to treat black people during the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of the day, then I don't see how it could possibly be racist.
More options
Context Copy link
If the answer is yes (which my reading of current race relations suggests is true for some people, if not 07mk) a further question - say it's 300 years in the future and 95% of humanity has been wiped out by covid-9001 - including all black people - and I retreat to my closet every morning to meditate on how awful black people were, is that racist?
Not a joke question potential yes responders, I am genuinely interested in the answer.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link