Quote from: John MorrowAnd you, the guy quoting songs, doesn't?

Wow, you scored 0 for reading comprehension on this one, didn't you? Did you get the part about me not actually supporting communism. I'm trying to explain to you that my issue with you is not that you're anti-communism, but that your half-assed ill-informed anti-communism actually makes it much harder to effectively argue against communism to the people that matter. You're belting out a spiel that "preaches to the choir", and is based mostly on (mostly american) misperceptions of what communism consisted of.

QuoteIs there brutal exploitation of the Third World by American and multinational corporations?  Of course there is.  Does America's success depend on it?  Of course not.  Should that sort of exploitation be stopped?  Absolutely.  

The day it stops is the day that the United States' standard of living plunges dramatically.

QuoteYou seem to think I don't understand why people are angry.  Of course I do.

Nope, I really think you don't. You probably think you do, but I think you lack the real-world experience to really process what its like.

QuoteMaybe they make descent freedom fighters (thought given the Spanish Civil War, even that's not a given) but can they actually run a country without running it into the ground?

Certainly not using the model of communism that has been tried on the national level so far. Allende's model presented an alternative to that, but now we'll never know if it would have been successful or not, since the Americans blew it to pieces and murdered the only democratically-elected communist leader of the 1970s.

But again, I'm not a communist; my position is that any system that sacrifices either property rights or individual liberties is ultimately doomed to failure.

QuoteYes, and as soon as they get into power and start confiscating the wealth of the "parasites who get rich off their work", what happens?  And doesn't that sound more than a little like the vision the Nazis were selling the German people if you make the villains Jews instead of multinational corporations?

With the notable exception that not all Jews (in fact, not the vast majority of them) were wealthy parasites living off the blood and sweat of other human beings; whereas ALL the multinational corporations pretty much are exactly that. The truth of their statement is what makes communism much more ultimately appealing than Nazism; you can argue against communism on the level of their proposed solutions, but you can't argue with their diagnosis. Whereas Hitler's diagnosis was a lie and a fantasy.

QuoteAnd in order to understand my hatred of Communism, you have to try to imagine what it was like for two Chinese parents to trade children so they could have something to eat, to be a Ukrainian farmer given a choice between risking being shot for stealing food and starving without it, or a Cambodian facing execution because they wore glasses.  Need I go on?  Do you think that people cross barbed wire and risk their lives in leaky boats to escape Communist countries because they think they have a future there?  

I don't think you really understand any of those things either. My family lost its considerable fortune to the communists in Poland, and I'm not talking about a plot of land and a pig here. So please don't go preaching to me about the evils of marxist-leninist totalitarianism.

From what I read of what you write, it seems to me that what you hate is a mustache-twirling villain thought up in 1950s propaganda films, not the real architects of terror that was the USSR or Maoism.

Quote...says the Canadian living a nice upper-Middle Class lifestyle in Latin America.

...who, like anyone in the middle class and up in latinamerica,  has to deal with the constant grinding guilt of being faced with inexorable poverty.  Viglietti sings about that too, he says "How can I eat, knowing that my brother goes hungry? How can I drink, knowing that my brother is thirsty? Yet still, I eat and drink, because I must".

QuoteDo you think there aren't dirty beggars in the United States?  

I've lived in various places in the United States.  Trust me, what you think of as "poverty" is nothing like what I'm talking about here.

QuoteAll I can say to your example is that if you think the 6 year-old little girl really needs that peso to feed her family, I'd like to know why you don't give it to her, even if she's the 20th kid to ask you that day.

That's a difficult question, again based on not having lived it. Come down here for a year, and then you can answer it yourself after the 200th, or the 2000th or the 20000th child has asked you for money.

QuoteIf you can't, then, no, I don't know that Communism is an ideology that ultimately leads to a better solution.

Again, 0 for reading comprehension. Go back and read what I wrote again, and you'll see that I was saying that the "ideology (I) know leads to a better solution" is in fact liberal democracy.

RPGPundit

Quote from: jhkimHowever, in the 1920s there was a very different split.  There were no established communist regimes or history of horrific abuses.

As GMSkarka pointed out,t he pulps extend into the 30s and WW2, by which point there were certainly some horrific abuses.  In fact, Stalin was for Hitler before he was against him.

Quote from: jhkimSimilarly, I don't think that having East Asian heroes means that you are ignoring all prejudices and faults of East Asians.

No, that wasn't my complaint.  My complaint was that the example of a brother and sister as heirs to a family legacy seems to be ignoring the sexism that would make such a situation quite unlikely or at least unusual and in need of an explanation.

Quote from: jhkimPersonally, I pictured someone who was attractive and also muscular.  cf. my friend Lee's excellent send-up of comic illustrations.

Which woman are you talking about?  I'm asking about "ultra-musclewoman".  

Quote from: jhkimBut more generally, I note that there have been two contradictory reactions against New Horizons.  On the one hand, some people complained that it would be an alternate history which isn't true to the historical reality and thus the true pulps of the times.  On the other hand, other people complained that it isn't sufficiently escapist and thus isn't true to the spirit of the pulps.

I think it's possible to be sufficiently escapist and capture the spirit of the pulps while acknowledging the problems of the period so long as it's done with a light touch, not a heavy hand.  Again, I offer the episode "Legends" from the Justice League animates series as a possible way to pull that off, though that may be too light for a lot of people.  But anything heavier and I do think you'll start spoiling the escapism for people.

Call it a road sign.

Now we're posting full-page commentary about politics with all of FUCKALL gameable content. Take it to Tangency, or have the decency to stat up a character summing up the salient points of your argument.

(Pundit, I did enjoy the rant nonetheless.)

Quote from: DevPNow we're posting full-page commentary about politics with all of FUCKALL gameable content. Take it to Tangency, or have the decency to stat up a character summing up the salient points of your argument.

(Pundit, I did enjoy the rant nonetheless.)

DevP speaks truth, my character, El Blanco Amado, will beat you if you speak further without gaming content.

On a pulp vibe, GMS said something interesting upthread about BB setting Adventure! in the 1920s to avoid nazis.  What are the time limits of pulp?  Obviously the 1930s is the classic period, but the 20s does seem fair game to me and IIRC Fu Manchu is even earlier, some of the ERB stuff I think is set in the 1910s.

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!

Call it a road sign.

I'm sorry, but your road sign has a penis and therefore offends me and underestmates the role of women in caped mystery heroes.

I guess for me this whole rigamarole comes down to this:
Look at the Doc's icon of Pulp heroism, do you really need a whole book to envision this person as a woman or black person? Do you need a whole chapter to explore a different motivation?

Maybe it's simplistic of me, but I don't.

Pulp is broad brush, if you need a chapter of motivation you're trying too hard.

The essence of pulp is a strong right hook and a villain menacing an American girl.

It is, fundamentally, not that right on a genre.

Quote from: RPGPunditI'm trying to explain to you that my issue with you is not that you're anti-communism, but that your half-assed ill-informed anti-communism actually makes it much harder to effectively argue against communism to the people that matter.

I'm not arguing to "the people who matter" here, though, am I?

Quote from: RPGPunditThe day it stops is the day that the United States' standard of living plunges dramatically

That depends on how you want to define exploitation and what you are talking about stopping.  Do I think my standard of living depends on a multinational corporation buying the rights to rainwater in Bolivia?  No.

Quote from: RPGPunditNope, I really think you don't. You probably think you do, but I think you lack the real-world experience to really process what its like.

Not at all.  Knowing what people are willing to do when they are starving and hopeless does a pretty good job of illustrating what it's like.

While I haven't experienced it personally, my father went into China after WW2 but before the Communists took over to pull American troops away from the Russian border (yes, they were there).  He described boats coming up alongside of his ship to take the garbage away so they could auction it off to starving people on the shore as food.  And he used that to illustrate why people chose to support the Communists, constrasting that with how Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife lived.

Yeah, I get it.  Really.

Quote from: RPGPunditCertainly not using the model of communism that has been tried on the national level so far. Allende's model presented an alternative to that, but now we'll never know if it would have been successful or not, since the Americans blew it to pieces and murdered the only democratically-elected communist leader of the 1970s.

I think you are over-romanticizing Allende and how different he was going to be.  What percentage of the vote did he get, by the way?

Quote from: RPGPunditBut again, I'm not a communist; my position is that any system that sacrifices either property rights or individual liberties is ultimately doomed to failure.

So you are arguing what, exactly?  That we should let people try communism and discover that it doesn't work on their own?  

Quote from: RPGPunditWith the notable exception that not all Jews (in fact, not the vast majority of them) were wealthy parasites living off the blood and sweat of other human beings; whereas ALL the multinational corporations pretty much are exactly that.

You should take a closer look at the claims commonly made against "middleman minorities" around the world, not just Jews, and why they've often been accused of being "wealthy parasites living off the blood and sweat of other human beings" and compare and contrast them to your characterization of multinational corporations.  It has to do with a failure to understand and appreciate how and why such groups make money simply by moving goods and money around without actually making anything.  While such a role seems "parasitic", attempts to replace them with something else inevitably fail.

Quote from: RPGPunditThe truth of their statement is what makes communism much more ultimately appealing than Nazism; you can argue against communism on the level of their proposed solutions, but you can't argue with their diagnosis. Whereas Hitler's diagnosis was a lie and a fantasy.

Yeah, actually you can argue with their diagnosis, though not in a 2 minute sound bite.  And lets bear in mind that Marx's idea that revolution was inevitable failed to materialize leading to the idea of vanguards and revolutionaries and shifting the target from exploited industrial workers to easier to manipulate peasants.  

Quote from: RPGPunditFrom what I read of what you write, it seems to me that what you hate is a mustache-twirling villain thought up in 1950s propaganda films, not the real architects of terror that was the USSR or Maoism.

And what makes you think that?

Quote from: RPGPundit...who, like anyone in the middle class and up in latinamerica,  has to deal with the constant grinding guilt of being faced with inexorable poverty.  Viglietti sings about that too, he says "How can I eat, knowing that my brother goes hungry? How can I drink, knowing that my brother is thirsty? Yet still, I eat and drink, because I must".

Must you smoke your pipe and travel to Canada?  Must you have a maid?

Quote from: RPGPunditI've lived in various places in the United States.  Trust me, what you think of as "poverty" is nothing like what I'm talking about here.

And how do you know what I think of a "poverty"?

Quote from: RPGPunditThat's a difficult question, again based on not having lived it. Come down here for a year, and then you can answer it yourself after the 200th, or the 2000th or the 20000th child has asked you for money.

I'm asking you for your answer.

Quote from: RPGPunditAgain, 0 for reading comprehension. Go back and read what I wrote again, and you'll see that I was saying that the "ideology (I) know leads to a better solution" is in fact liberal democracy.

Guilty as charged on that account.

Guys, can we discuss without making assumptions about the other's experiences?  We really can't tell online.

For example, I actually have gone without food, on many occasions, as a child.  You can't tell that by my normal posting, we can't tell what experiences John or Pundit have had, and frankly it's all off-topic anyway.

Communism was fucked up, understanding it does not make it work, I understand entirely why people adopt it (apart from anything else I was a radical communist many years ago), but that still don't make it work.

Hell, I understand why people join the Moonies, they're still wrong.

Tie it to gaming, tell me about "Red John and his Hammers of Justice" or fuck off to Off Topic where I shall be delighted to join you (probably on John's side as it happens, but Pundit is more than capable of holding his own).

Quote from: BalbinusDevP speaks truth, my character, El Blanco Amado, will beat you if you speak further without gaming content.

On a pulp vibe, GMS said something interesting upthread about BB setting Adventure! in the 1920s to avoid nazis.  What are the time limits of pulp?  Obviously the 1930s is the classic period, but the 20s does seem fair game to me and IIRC Fu Manchu is even earlier, some of the ERB stuff I think is set in the 1910s.

Well, the Gear Krieg RPG showed that Nazi bashing in WWII could be fun, especially when they're on the receiving end of a Tesla coil.

Even so, and not knowing the first thing about the genre, I could imagine that setting pulp games before the 30s, or 1939 anyway, is that history really did get unignorably serious as the decade progressed, and that a massively mechanized, mass-army war is poison for pulp heroism. Same goes for WWI. Pulp Verdun? No thx.

Quote from: BalbinusTie it to gaming, tell me about "Red John and his Hammers of Justice" or fuck off to Off Topic where I shall be delighted to join you (probably on John's side as it happens, but Pundit is more than capable of holding his own).

I personally tend to think that any discussion of how people think and the world works is tied to gaming, but I can see where it might bother others and would be happy to follow the thread to Off Topic if that's where RPGPundit wants to take it, since the ball is in his court.

The greatest positive effect that arguments over a genre's value in their game is that the group really knows what they want. Say if my group really wanted my pulp to be like this (and I do):


Than we'll do it, it's our game and we'll mess with it any way I want. Now we should be honest about its lack of emulation of genre, but at least in the end we get what want. In that respect, I understand why some folks are digging the new book. It's about what would be cool for them.

Quote from: jgantsSee, this is where I get confused.  If the natives are hulking and ape-like, then that's OK to say.  But if they are also black, then it's not OK to say because that's a stereotype?

My own sense is that ape-like is best reserved for non-humans who are, indeed, ape-like and pick another word to describe humans.  

As for why it's a particularly touchy stereotype, please see this article and note that it's talking about events from 2006, not 1926.

Quote from: jgantsCan they still be black if it's just unsaid?  Or do I need a different type of native for adventures in Africa?

If they are natives in Africa, do you have to describe them as black?

Quote from: jgantsSo, in my pulp game it would be A-OK to have hulking, ape-like brute natives in the jungles of the Amazon, but not in the Congo?  Savages in the mountains of Borneo are cool, but not in Tanzania?

See my comments above.  Isn't "hulking brute" sufficient?

Quote from: jgantsI admit, I have a hard time taking political correctness stuff seriously.  I grew up poor and white, but I wouldn't complain about the use of the "killer redneck inbred family" in a horror game.

When you can find an example of white people being treated like the black athlete in the article I provided a link to, above, maybe we'll find a good comparative term.

I personally wish people would stop using the word 'redneck'. The reason that rednecks have red necks is that they do agricultural work for a living, out in the sun. There's no shame in that.

Quote from: John MorrowMy own sense is that ape-like is best reserved for non-humans who are, indeed, ape-like and pick another word to describe humans.

Perhaps.  But you are the one who said that using "big, hulking, apelike brutes" was fine until you add "black" into the equation.

My point is that I find the idea that you can use the phrase to describe everyone else except blacks is both silly and arguably more racist.

If you just want to remove the word  "apelike" from the description of any person (because of the subtext of minorities being regarded as subhuman) then fine.  I assume "big, hulking, black brutes" is acceptible then?

Quote from: John MorrowAs for why it's a particularly touchy stereotype, please see this article and note that it's talking about events from 2006, not 1926.

I am aware that racism and ignorance (as well as bizarre sports fanaticism) still exist.

Quote from: John MorrowIf they are natives in Africa, do you have to describe them as black?

I agree that its redundant and doesn't need to be explicitly said.  On the other hand, I don't think that by including it a phrase magically becomes racist.

Quote from: John MorrowSee my comments above.  Isn't "hulking brute" sufficient?

Like I said, that's fine with me.  But I think some people are going to be offended as long as you include any kind of "natives" in your pulp game, regardless of the words you use to describe them.

Quote from: John MorrowWhen you can find an example of white people being treated like the black athlete in the article I provided a link to, above, maybe we'll find a good comparative term.

My point wasn't to compare the relative levels of racism faced by different groups.

I was just saying that I, personally, wouldn't be offended by portrayals of people that aren't me, even if we share a racial link.  

For example, a roaring 20's game that included drunkard, corrupt Irish cops isn't going to upset me even though I am Irish.  If it mentioned their tempers being as red as their hair, it still wouldn't offend me - even though I have red hair.  

I just don't connect to that stuff at all.  It just doesn't offend me on a personal level.