I am surprised that this actually bothers anyone. That's what great about today, we can all just pick something at random and decide that we've been victimized.  As for me, I am conflicted I'm cool with the use of "she" and I also like cheesecake artwork.

Quote from: walkerp;222885I just want to quote Ned the Lonely Donkey here from page 1.  Just a quick message from The Real World to those of you living in your basements, fuming at the PC agenda.

I'm arguing with you to help enlighten you so you have an easier time once you get out from mommy's house and into the big bad real world, not because I feel the need to win the argument.  This argument has already been won long before we started talking about it.  When you do get a job or something where you have to write instruction manuals or internal memos or whatever, I recommend you avoid making these anti-PC arguments.  Just for your own sake.

Hopefully, I'll get my plan in place before that and none of you will have to worry about it.  Barring that, I show you my goodwill by sharing this helpful info with you.

Good luck out there!

Where's that 'roll-eyes' smiley when you need it?!? Dammit.

Quote from: wulfgar;222887Again.  This is simply not true.

N'Longa is a black African who practices tribal magic.  N'Longa is one of Howard's heroes.

There are many others.  As I said before, check out the Outremer stories or the Afghan tales.  

Off the top of my head I can't think of too many female heroes in the stories.  However, instead of the assumptions of his time, I'd argue this is largely because Howards writings- while fantastic and bizarre- were grounded in history.  He wrote about warriors, and throughout all of human history the vast majority of warriors have been male.

Was N'Longa the old dude with the magic staff that he gives to the puritan?  Because if so, he definitely was not a hero.  He's not a villain, but he is in no way represented as being a hero.

Solomon Kane is the hero of those stories, I don't recall any secondary heroes off the top of my head.

Female heroes sure, but I don't think anyone's arguing that one here, as you say he wrote about warriors and they tend to be male historically.  Also, his readership were largely male, they wanted the hero to get the girl in slightly spicy (but not too much so unless it was a spicy tale) fashion and that would be difficult if the hero was a girl too.

Quote from: Ned the Lonely Donkey;222754Hm, well, I've been working in professional/business/govt publishing for twenty years and avoiding or moderating pronouns in this way has been SOP since the 80s. If anything, RPGs were slow to catch on.

Ned

I'd missed this until Walker mentioned it.  Ned, who I know, really does work in the publishing biz.  I think his post rather closes the debate, such as it is.

Well, the he/she debate, the debate about Howard is much more interesting.

Quote from: wulfgar;222844Yet disturbingly, many today who claim to be the successors of Dr. King want to judge people by the color of their skin and not the content of their character.  How else would you describe affirmative action systems that select less qualified applicants because of their skin tone?

Quote from: Martin Luther KingWhenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic...

A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.

The phrase 'affirmative action' wasn't in use when he was alive, but it does seem like he favoured the principle.

Quote from: Balbinus;222883I have absolutely no idea what that means.

In this case, it references the fact that you strongly implied one thing (only old people stuck in begone eras would think 'X'), and then backed/sidestepped away claiming "but of course..." when called on it.

In short, rather than retracting the (or appologizing for a badly worded )statement you claimed you were correct all along.

QuoteWas N'Longa the old dude with the magic staff that he gives to the puritan? Because if so, he definitely was not a hero. He's not a villain, but he is in no way represented as being a hero.

Yeah, that's him.  He fights evil and saves the day a few times.  That counts as hero in my book.

I hate you guys for starting this thread after I went to sleep.  Jerks.

I don't mind feminists that much, as long as I don't have to listen to them.  But feminists and fantasy have a long and sordid history that tends to get my hackles up.  Feminists basically killed the sword and sorcery genre.  Sword and sorcery was dominated by male fantasy, and the feminists called it sexist and degrading to women, and protested at sci-fi conventions and bookstores.  

By the early 80's, it was hard for the big names in S&S to get work, because publishers didn't want to be associated with writers who wrote sexist tripe that demeans women.  Nevermind that few of these writers actually did that, and that the feminist critics rarely actually read any of the works they complained about.  In the minds of most feminists, John Norman's Gor series is typical sword & sorcery, rather than an extreme fringe of the genre rarely referenced in the genre mainstream (which is sad in many ways, since once you get past the sex, Gor is one of the coolest planets to come out of sword vs planet fiction).

At any rate, this spilled over into gaming.  Hardly any women played role-playing games in the early 80's, but pretty much ALL of the ones who did were obnoxious feminists.  This is a trend that has held true for several decades now.  Feminists are way over-represented in gaming compared to the general population.

Sadly, the sort of feminist you see in gaming these days is usually an undereducated idiot who knows as little about feminism as she does about gaming.  They are not people genuinely concerned with making thinsg better, they are people who feel entitled to complain about everything and to have things exactly the way they want.  They are whiners[/i].

Here's a sample from Astrid's parlor, which is crawling with these kinds of idiots:

Quote from: Shadowheart Maiden at WOTC's Astrid's ParlorHaving had the chance to look through the new books, most of them seem to use gender-neutral language. And by most, I mean probably 99.9% of them. As such, this hardly seems worth mentioning, but it bugged me, because it was one of the first places that I looked. The Warlord's first listed "paragon path" is "Battle Captain". Here is the description:

"You become the epitome of the combat leader in action, an inspiring battle captain who easily flows from issuing commands to engaging the enemy and back again as conditions on the battlefield warrant. As a leader who fights as well as he leads, you have earned the loyalty and respect of your allies, and together you have been forged into a cohesive combat team."

"He" in an example really doesn't bother me at all. I can easily believe that "he" is referring to somebody else, and that "I" (my character) can have similar abilities without being "him." Common sense, right? But "he," used in the same sentence as "you," in reference to the same person, does bother me a little. It's not a huge deal. It's just that I went straight for the warlord because I wanted to see the new class, and it just happened to be the only place in the entire book that used the word "he" by itself. The rest is all "your character/he or she" or more commonly "you." Overall, I'd say it's a positive thing, but this one example bugged me, unlike the purely third-person male examples from 3.x.

Look at that.  This was an OP, she started a thread to discuss gender-inclusive language in book because -- ohnoes! -- she found one single example of a writer not contorting his writing to their ideology, so that's clearly worth complaining about.

My point is that you cannot please these people.  They also hate cleavage, chainmail bikinis, sexy sorceress, and pretty much all the other tropes of fantasy adventure aimed at guys.  They drove Clyde Caldwell out of the business, despite the fact that he's one of the most popular artists TSR ever had.  They basically hate what D&D is rooted in, and demand it be changed.  They want D&D to be Blue Rose.  The idea that maybe we should let D&D be D&D, and let Blue Rose be Blue Rose offends them.  They truly believe that D&D has a mandate to be a force for social change.  They really believe that D&D is some sort of powerful social force, and that by eliminating all traces of sexism from the game, the larger culture will begin to respond  by being less sexist.

Which brings me to another point.  They've managed to complain about the art in every single edition, and the newest crop of these psuedofeminist entitlement queens loves to make the claim that the art in previous editions was far more sexist than in the current editions.  It's been shown in Astrid's Parlor on several occassions (mostly by me and few other grognards who actually remember Basic D&D) that most of these women who complain have never actually seen the earlier editions.

I remember one of them describing what the "perfect" art in D&D would look like.  She was describing the art in Red Box D&D.  Which was done by Larry Elmore, another artist they love to bash.

They are generally as or even more ignorant of sword & sorcery fiction than they are of game history.  They basically hate everything the game has traditionally been about.

They drive me crazy, simply because they're ignorant, uninformed, pushy and arrogant, moralizing bullies who seek to change things simply to change them.  There's no evidence at all that listening to them increases sales to women, or that these sort of whiners actually represent most or many women, yet TSR and WOTC both have decided to give their opinions weight.

It's sad.

Quote from: gleichman;222879That quote is unconnected with Race, which was the subject of the thread. As individuals, one can have opinions from either the right or left on individual subjects.

As for being Color-blind, he would be rejected by today's Left and the Black Movement he was such an important part of.

He was also apparently in favour of affirmative action (see my quotes above) - and it does sound like he's talking about government programs that would be bigger than existing ones. So if anything he'd be more left-wing on that issue than most of his contemporary admirers, rather than more right-wing.

Quote from: Age of Fable;222893The phrase 'affirmative action' wasn't in use when he was alive, but it does seem like he favoured the principle.

Oh you are so flipping dishonest here. It took but seconds to find the quote you made and you combined two different ones from different times and places in order to make it look like "affirmative action'.


The webpage you falsely used (removing individual sourcing for each paragraph) was here: http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/mlk3.html

While that page makes its best case for King supporting "affirmative action", I see nothing of the kind there. I see only a desire to be offered that which was offered to others. Loans, land grants, training.

One would have to be as dishonest as you've proven yourself to be in order to read more than that into it.

Quote from: Jackalope;222897Feminists basically killed the sword and sorcery genre...

Hardly any women played role-playing games in the early 80's, but pretty much ALL of the ones who did were obnoxious feminists...

Sadly, the sort of feminist you see in gaming these days is usually an undereducated idiot who knows as little about feminism as she does about gaming.

And not only are they under-educated, obnoxious idiots, not only do they know nothing about gaming, not only did they destroy sword and sorcery - worst of all, they have the insane idea THAT WOMEN AREN'T WELCOME IN GAMING!

Quote from: gleichman;222894In this case, it references the fact that you strongly implied one thing (only old people stuck in begone eras would think 'X'), and then backed/sidestepped away claiming "but of course..." when called on it.

In short, rather than retracting the (or appologizing for a badly worded )statement you claimed you were correct all along.

I didn't say only old people stuck in bygone eras would think x.  I said "the only people I ever seem to find railing against it are those with broader issues about living in a more egalitarian world. Similarly, if someone calls something PC you can usually be pretty sure that they've got some issues with how society has changed over the last century and a bit."  

Nothing there about age at all.  Given I refer to the last century and a bit did you really think I was criticising the views of post-centenarians?

Over the past century we've seen the role of women hugely improved over that of a century before, some people find that threatening.  Equally, over the past century and a bit we've seen the unquestioned dominance of the white male questioned, some people find that threatening.  Some people definitely have issues with living in a more egalitarian world.

I didn't say old people though, that would be bizarre, the people who argued this stuff in the 60s are old people now in the main after all.  Most of the people I see with real issues are in their 20s to 40s, and struggling to succeed in a world which isn't as set up to give them the undeserved head start their lack of talent demands.  

To be perfectly blunt, I think most people who rail loudly against political correctness (using that specific phrase) are unhappy that they can't have what they want without having to work for it, and I have limited sympathy for them.  That or they just resent others enjoying what they already have.

Quote from: wulfgar;222895Yeah, that's him.  He fights evil and saves the day a few times.  That counts as hero in my book.

Maybe start another thread, I don't think he is portrayed as a hero but I don't think it's an issue about race, and to be honest I'm not enjoying this thread and I think it would get lost here.

Youch, yer on fire Balb! (Re. post 102)

Ned

The "I'm older than you" argument's getting a real workout today, along with the, "you disagree with me, so you must be young and/or living with your parents" argument. It's strange, since both arguments are so incredibly illogical; you'd think people would avoid such clear logical fallacies.