Quote from: Brad;1065333Except that excerpt is significantly preoccupied with sex, to the point that there's a long explanation as to why it's "not a big deal". If it's NOT a big deal, why are SJWs obsessed with the matter?

It's a pendulum.

The Judeo-Christian Patriarchy has been obsessed with sex since the dawn of time. Who can marry who, who gets to have sex, when, how...  It's an effective control mechanism. It was the built in nicotine of human physiology. People get horny. You control when they can scratch that itch, you can control them.

So, it only makes sense that the rebelion to that culture would also focus on sex. Except it's sexual freedom OR sexual indifference. If sex isn't important, you can't control people with sex.

As long as people get horny, you are going to be able to have sex as a taboo or a fetish. In some ways, people lose control when they get aroused. People have and continue to do stupid shit for sex. It has power over us.

Some people are hoping they can convince the world it no longer has power. And they will fail. Just like the JCP is slowly losing it's grasp/authority so too will the CTRL-leftists.

In the end people long to be free. Free from authority, free from guilt, free from judgment. That Pendulum is gonna keep swinging back and forth until we all agree to stop fucking with each other or trying to tell each other what to do.

Quote from: trechriron;1065339It's a pendulum.

The Judeo-Christian Patriarchy has been obsessed with sex since the dawn of time. Who can marry who, who gets to have sex, when, how...  It's an effective control mechanism. It was the built in nicotine of human physiology. People get horny. You control when they can scratch that itch, you can control them.

So, it only makes sense that the rebelion to that culture would also focus on sex. Except it's sexual freedom OR sexual indifference. If sex isn't important, you can't control people with sex.

As long as people get horny, you are going to be able to have sex as a taboo or a fetish. In some ways, people lose control when they get aroused. People have and continue to do stupid shit for sex. It has power over us.

Some people are hoping they can convince the world it no longer has power. And they will fail. Just like the JCP is slowly losing it's grasp/authority so too will the CTRL-leftists.

In the end people long to be free. Free from authority, free from guilt, free from judgment. That Pendulum is gonna keep swinging back and forth until we all agree to stop fucking with each other or trying to tell each other what to do.

Well, that's somewhat condescending.

Quote from: Brad;1065286What..? Is that true? I thought it was just a FUDGE derivative.

Fudge was the base system yes, but the story game aspects and economy were heavily influenced by the Good/Bad Stuff from Amber, the story game lineage is clear.

Quote from: trechriron;1065339It's a pendulum.

Or, regardless where the pendulum is, there's a strain of Lysenkoism convinced that they can create the New *-Man.

Quote from: trechriron;1065339It's a pendulum. The Judeo-Christian Patriarchy has been obsessed with sex since the dawn of time.

Before I possibly miss the point and waste time and effort on a diatribe, can I just ask: how far into the cheek should the tongue be assumed to be pushed, here?  I'm oversensitive on certain topics.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1064596So if you can have fighting and wounding and dismemberment and killing in your rpgs, then you can have people going mad. And we don't need a lecture on sensitive treatment of mental illness in an rpg any more than we need a lecture on sensitive treatment of someone having their head cut off with an axe.

Now I want to see someone try to do a sensitive treatment of someone having their head cut off with an axe.  Oh, it won't work, but the effort should be worth a few laughs.

Re the excerpt from Sarah Newton's new game--it is a little preachy, but stripped of the rhetoric (and there isn't a lot of that) the underlying ideas seem fine to me: (1) it's the far future so Judeo-Christian morality is not a factor and (2) the society doesn't care about a person's sex or gender. The first makes sense, though it ultimately probably doesn't have a huge amount to do with distinctions in gender roles, etc. The second is just pretty standard for a lot of games today, for good reason--at least a fair amount of the player base wants all careers/classes/whatever open to all characters regardless of their sex.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1065348Before I possibly miss the point and waste time and effort on a diatribe, can I just ask: how far into the cheek should the tongue be assumed to be pushed, here?  I'm oversensitive on certain topics.

  Reads to me like the standard libertarian/free-love/Freudian variant of the Enlightenment/Rousseau 'noble savage' myth--mankind was free and innocent at first, but became oppressed and repressed by the evil forces of Civilization/Christianity/Patriarchy/SJWism/Whatever the Anti-Libertarian Demon of the Week is.

Quote from: Fritzef;1065474Re the excerpt from Sarah Newton's new game--it is a little preachy, but stripped of the rhetoric (and there isn't a lot of that) the underlying ideas seem fine to me: (1) it's the far future so Judeo-Christian morality is not a factor and (2) the society doesn't care about a person's sex or gender. The first makes sense, though it ultimately probably doesn't have a huge amount to do with distinctions in gender roles, etc. The second is just pretty standard for a lot of games today, for good reason--at least a fair amount of the player base wants all careers/classes/whatever open to all characters regardless of their sex.

The only reason we have distinct races is because of A) geographic isolation, or B) taboos against miscegenation. It's  unlikely either will be factors in the far future. So in the far future humans will no longer have races.

When I pointed this out on a SF/F fiction board discussion about diversity and representation in the science fiction genre, it was not well received. Progressive identarians are so obsessed with notions of race and representation that they can't even imagine moving past it. I'd love for a tabletop game publisher to depict a future human society where there are no distinguishable races, just to freak out both the far left and far right.

Quote from: Haffrung;1065478The only reason we have distinct races is because of A) geographic isolation, or B) taboos against miscegenation. It's  unlikely either will be factors in the far future. So in the far future humans will no longer have races.

When I pointed this out on a SF/F fiction board discussion about diversity and representation in the science fiction genre, it was not well received. Progressive identarians are so obsessed with notions of race and representation that they can't even imagine moving past it. I'd love for a tabletop game publisher to depict a future human society where there are no distinguishable races, just to freak out both the far left and far right.

IIRC this was Larry Niven's take on Earth's population in the Known Space series. There was still some racial differentiation on the colony worlds because they had been settled by small populations and isolated for a time, before FTL travel. I'd certainly be fine with the idea of no racial differentiation among humans.

I can't remember if Sarah Newton's Chronicles of Future Earth setting has different races of humans, or not. I own the old version, for BRP, and I might be interested in the new one if it weren't for FATE, a system I'm not keen on.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1065476Reads to me like the standard libertarian/free-love/Freudian variant of the Enlightenment/Rousseau 'noble savage' myth--mankind was free and innocent at first, but became oppressed and repressed by the evil forces of Civilization/Christianity/Patriarchy/SJWism/Whatever the Anti-Libertarian Demon of the Week is.

That was mostly how I read it too, I just wasn't sure how much of that (if any) Trechriron was actually advocating.  I figured I'd rather look obtuse for asking about the point than for reacting to the wrong one.

(This is one of the reasons I dislike satire as an art form -- I find it hard enough to thematically interpret writing without the satirist's deliberate ambiguity about what's meant seriously and what isn't.)

Quote from: Haffrung;1065478The only reason we have distinct races is because of A) geographic isolation, or B) taboos against miscegenation. It's  unlikely either will be factors in the far future. So in the far future humans will no longer have races.

Or there'll be different "races". The Expanse presents this well: after a couple of centuries in low gravity, the Belters are tall, thin, with large heads and knobbly joints, and have their own dialect incomprehensible to "Inners". There's a Martian who has an Indian appearance but talks with a Texan drawl; the part of Mars he's from had a mix of settlers from both areas, who didn't separate into ghettoes, but faced with the common enemy of the brutal Martian environment, and stuck together in domes, worked together and mixed, now they're "Martian." But to the Belters, Mars, Earth, same-same. "Inners."

Across the world there are many races who conquered and mixed with others and who are now forgotten, with few if any of their cultural traditions continuing, and when one race moved to a new place, it became a different race. Is there anyone in the world now who identifies as an Angle, a Saxon, or a Jute, except as an affectation for historical reproduction purposes? But they mixed with the Danish and Norman invaders to make "the English."

The SJW, like the CJW, both being fundamentally American phenomena, fails to understand that different countries have different conceptions of "race". This was well-illustrated in the movie Tears of the Sun, where a US SF team is debating whether to save one bunch of locals from being butchered by the others. Apart from the whole "white man saves innocent darkies from other savage darkies" colonial theme, the discussion had the guys expressing different opinions, but the African-American one said, "these are my people." Now, was he a migrant, or son of migrants to the US? It was mentioned. So had he traced his family tree back to 1678 to find out which particular group of Africans he'd come from? It seems unlikely. Thus, most likely he was not descended from any of the groups involved, but if he was, he was as likely to be descended from the butchers as from the victims. But this black man's character written by a white man had him identifying with the victims. Why? Because that is part of "race" identity in the US: being a victim. To Americans, there are no Hutu or Tutsi or whatever, there are only blacks and whites. To the African, identity has far more subtleties.

Likewise Indians, Chinese and so on.

I would expect that even if humanity reaches the stars, we see similar things. New races will emerge, influenced by their environment and their roots. The reality of "race" and anthropology are far more complex than either Social Justice Warrior or Conservative Justice Warrior understand, because both have their roots in American culture, which is essentially Manichean, with Good vs Evil, black vs white, etc, and no sensible middle ground where things are acknowledged as being mixed up and confused, and thus more interesting, but much harder to make moral judgements about.

Anyway. If humanity reaches the stars, we'll get more races. And thinking about the sorts of things which might happen is the point of science fiction.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1065513That was mostly how I read it too, I just wasn't sure how much of that (if any) Trechriron was actually advocating.  I figured I'd rather look obtuse for asking about the point than for reacting to the wrong one.

(This is one of the reasons I dislike satire as an art form -- I find it hard enough to thematically interpret writing without the satirist's deliberate ambiguity about what's meant seriously and what isn't.)

Satire and sarcasm are hard to pick out on the internet.  There's no position too crazy for a person to sincerely hold.

Quote from: ThatChrisGuy;1065518Satire and sarcasm are hard to pick out on the internet.  There's no position too crazy for a person to sincerely hold.

True. And these days a misinterpretation either way -- taking a joking remark seriously or assuming a serious remark was a joke -- has the potential to cause so much tsuris that it's almost not worth saying anything at all.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm a little too emotionally thin-skinned for certain environments anyway. Which is one reason I tend to sympathize with people who appear to have the same problem, regardless of politics. But anything that helps me fake my ongoing imposture of maturity is gladly welcomed. )

Quote from: Haffrung;1065478The only reason we have distinct races is because of A) geographic isolation, or B) taboos against miscegenation. It's  unlikely either will be factors in the far future. So in the far future humans will no longer have races.

H. Beam Piper did sort of the opposite. He thought that people in the future would still have races, but because of miscegenation, there would be no relationship between names/culture and race.  So he would have things like a huge red headed Viking guy have a Japanese name