GBS

[TekLazar]

I'm having one of those days where I've been super productive but haven't actually gotten anything I needed to get done accomplished.

Yeah that's been me these past few days as well, cracking away at MTG and trying to figure out how the heck to mod Dwarf Fortress without it crashing, but homework and social relationships have been "eh".
I think it is always good to be mindfully aware of these activities, and while I quite enjoy MTG and DF and getting close to 100%ing Enter the Gungeon, I always have to keep in mind how they are affecting my other more important activities, and even more important, how they are affecting my mental and physical health. I always have to give myself grace though; I have had a rough and tough life, but I don't want to live in that life forever.

Not even sure if that's exactly what you're talking about but keep at it. I've found that despite my expectations, most of the time people are rooting for you.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

https://twitter.com/zbeg/status/1269962379925708801

Oooooof! This does not make WotC look good.

 

[Chris Taylor]

https://twitter.com/zbeg/status/1269962379925708801

Oooooof! This does not make WotC look good.

Shit man. Echoed. I've heard a lot of things back and forth about WotC being a bad place to work and being very VERY anti envelope (Jeff Hoogland speaks about this a lot), but there's a ton here I didn't know (Well duh they're trying to keep it hidden)

Uh, if anyone liked slay the spire and hasn't heard of it yet, Monster Train is really good! They even give you a discount purchasing it on steam if you have slay the spire, because they're transparent with their inspirations.

 

[Dom Harvey]

Jeff Hoogland speaks a lot, that's for sure

 

[safra]

more like.....uh. haha. more like. NotC. haha.

 

[sigh]

isn't it crazy how high quality color printers are these days?

Really interesting that a piece of paper and a basic land have the same thickness as a double-sleeved card...

 

[Erik Twice]

Shit man. Echoed. I've heard a lot of things back and forth about WotC being a bad place to work and being very VERY anti envelope (Jeff Hoogland speaks about this a lot), but there's a ton here I didn't know (Well duh they're trying to keep it hidden)

More than trying to keep it hidden, what works is provinding people an incentive to give it a pass or ignore it or look the other way.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Noah is undoubtedly a scumbag, Nielsen is a little more tenuous. I don't think it's just something as simple as different political beliefs, some of the stuff that she was retweeting was abhorrent:

Spoiler

Spoiler

I just think there's a HUGE chasm between someone who is supporting conservative values (which I have no problem with) and retweeting pro white supremacy and real ignorant shit regarding protests (which can fuck right off) from a while back. It's just a horrible look, I can see why WoTC cut ties with her. You can't try to present yourselves as an inclusive game open to everyone and then keep deploying work from someone in stark contrast to your proposed ideals. I think they gave her a grace period to see what was actually up after stuff creeped up a while back and then just found out more unsavory stuff before calling it off. It didn't help that she topped it off by sending art a year back, personally, to some loony bin conspiracy YouTube channel that loves regurgitating bullshit and spreading misinformation. She may not have been outright stating that she was in favor of everything ignorant she was retweeting, but most of us weren't born yesterday. There's no subtlety here. Reading between the lines makes it pretty obvious where she is on the political spectrum.

People who bask in extreme ignorance harmful to others should absolutely be called out for it, especially those that proactively support denying the rights of others. She either believes and agrees with (and by extension promotes) anti-semitic, racist, and transphobic stuff based off what she's following and retweeting (there's more stuff, I'm just not gonna dig it up again).

It's a shame, but being a great artist doesn't give her a pass in supporting extremely ignorant bullshit without potential consequences. I'm not about to throw away the cards and prints that I have of her art, but I'm absolutely not buying anything going forward if I can avoid it.

Taking the discussion out of CBS into GBS, I'm genuinly curious what is so super offensive about these four visible tweets. I mean, I'm rolling my eyes pretty hard at three of the four (I think the "statues are attacking us back" is just funny, but maybe I'm missing a hidden layer here?), but is the world so black and white today that a liberal person isn't allowed to appreciate a conservative's work of art while politely disagreeing with their political views at the same time?

 

[sigh]

polite disagreement works when you are talking about what flavor of ice cream you like. It works less well with ideologies focused on extermination of certain cultures.

The first tweet alone is fairly explicitly racist at the very least, not to mention quite Nazi/white supremacist, even if unintentionally.

Even most "tame" conservative views (in America at least) are exceedingly dangerous and shouldn't be accepted "politely". Reduction in food assistance programs, for example, could literally kill people. It's not like a fluffy little opinion. A good metric of privilege is the realization that these policies and stances don't/won't affect you. There are some people for which it's life and death, or at least disruptive to their pursuit of a happy life. And that's before we get into the "obvious" stuff like white nationalism.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

It's weird for me as a Dutch person (an undeniably privileged one at that). Political differences really are more benign here, I feel.

Re: the first tweet. What makes it explicitly racist? The comparison between the white power movement (which is undeniably racist and despicable) and the black power movement (which is about equality and addressing legit societal problems (afaik)) as if they were two sides of the same divide is baffling, but the tweet doesn't support fascism. It calls for society to #healthedivide. Yes it's using the wrong imagery, and yes it completely misses the point that you can't heal the divide unless you address the problems the black power movement marches for, but, underneath it all it's still not a call to arms, a call to oppress or eradicate minorities, it's a cry for harmony. This is the complete picture:



It has a white person shaking a black person's hand as the final panel. I just don't see the racism part here.

Now obviously gifting your art to a dubious right-wing nut job show is a different thing altogether...

 

[dbs]

Re: the first tweet. What makes it explicitly racist? The comparison between the white power movement (which is undeniably racist and despicable) and the black power movement (which is about equality and addressing legit societal problems (afaik)) as if they were two sides of the same divide is baffling, but the tweet doesn't support fascism. It calls for society to #healthedivide. Yes it's using the wrong imagery, and yes it completely misses the point that you can't heal the divide unless you address the problems the black power movement marches for, but, underneath it all it's still not a call to arms, a call to oppress or eradicate minorities, it's a cry for harmony.

I wasn't going to comment, but Onder, the picture shows on the one hand, BLM members protesting over police indiscriminately executing black people, and on the other hand literal Nazis. It suggests these two positions are exactly the same. I.e. that "police should not be able to kill black people with impunity" and "non-Aryans should be exterminated" are equivalent positions.

But it's not just that, the "harmony" position explicitly suggests in this case that BLM members should not be protesting the death of George Floyd. That black americans should, I guess, just quietly accept police violence for the sake of avoiding division. It's a call to maintain the status quo where in the status quo a police officer can murder a black person without consequences.

 

[sigh]

equating the Black Power fist and the Nazi salute is the racist-or-worse part. They are not equivalent at all.

Edit: dbs beat me to it and with a much more thorough input

 

[shamizy]

Onder, it would be as you said if that were the intention of that post, but that's not what's being portrayed. Like dbs mentioned, equating the two movements is what's being done to legitimize one side and present them as two halves of one coin when that could not be further from the truth.

The core of the Black Power movement in the US was to re-establish the rights for colored people everywhere and provide a platform from which they could grow due to a lack of opportunities available. Their efforts inspired the core of the Civil Rights movement whose lasting effects have helped all people of color in the long term going forward. Without their efforts, the immigration booms of the decades following would not have happened and America would have been drastically different. The primary objective of Black Power is to bridge the equality gap between white people and people of color in the US. The only people who were afraid of the Black Power movement were those who stood to lose something from it succeeding.

White Power, on the other hand, is a purely white supremacist movement looking to assert racial superiority and keep others down. They are polar opposites in terms of goals; you couldn't find two platforms more at odds with each other. Equating the two is disingenuous at best and recklessly ignorant at worst, but this has been a common tactic used by parts of the media in the last few decades since the removal of the Fairness Doctrine in the late 80s. It's what has allowed media platforms to be established that can push their own narratives and has had dreadful consequences for the American public as a whole.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I wasn't going to comment, but Onder, the picture shows on the one hand, BLM members protesting over police indiscriminately executing black people, and on the other hand literal Nazis. It suggests these two positions are exactly the same. I.e. that "police should not be able to kill black people with impunity" and "non-Aryans should be exterminated" are equivalent positions.

But it's not just that, the "harmony" position explicitly suggests in this case that BLM members should not be protesting the death of George Floyd. That black americans should, I guess, just quietly accept police violence for the sake of avoiding division. It's a call to maintain the status quo where in the status quo a police officer can murder a black person without consequences.

Thanks for the thoughtful response dbs. I agree that using these images next to each other as if they were of the same cloth is problematic, and suggesting that nonblacks should be afraid of the black power movement is equally problematic, but merely shouting "RACIST" at a misguided tweet like this isn't really helpful, I think? Clearly, by the third picture, this tweet is not meant to be racist. In fact, this tweet attempts to broadcast an, as far as I can tell, honest message of inclusivity. An "if we just could work together, no one would have to be afraid of the other". That is why I asked. Any racism in this tweet is nothing of the overt, white power, fascist kind. Rather it shows how ingrained into white culture (in this case American, but this is a problem beyond US borders as well) systemic racism has become.

I think it's become hard to hold an honest discussion about politics (and racism) between people on either side of the political divide, in the US especially, and that makes pointing out what's wrong with tweets like this harder than it should be. There are a lot of entrenched people on both political sides, who have no interest in an honest discussion or a compromise, and this is translating itself to fringe groups getting more clout in the political landscape. Radicalization to either side is problematic (though right extremists scare me a lot more than left extremists) for a stable government and a people's faith in their government. I think it's very dangerous that there are now politicians capitalizing on and purposefully widening this dichotomy...

I'm rambling a bit, I'm afraid, but I think branding the people behind problematic tweets like this, and especially the people who like tweets like this, as unrepentant racists is problematic itself. Then again, not pointing out what is problematic in a tweet like this is problematic as well.

In short, why can't people just not be assholes

 

[sigh]

problem is the racism doesn't have to be intentional to be explicit and therefore harmful and dangerous. The image creator could have the best intentions in the world. Systemic, overt, subtle, etc. it's still racism. And once it's out there, it can be used by people with overtly bad intentions.

 

[Chris Taylor]

In short, why can't people just not be assholes

Amen brother. And yeah if that was the only questionable action on Neilson's part, sure you could maybe see the other side here.

 

[dbs]

Clearly, by the third picture, this tweet is not meant to be racist. In fact, this tweet attempts to broadcast an, as far as I can tell, honest message of inclusivity. An "if we just could work together, no one would have to be afraid of the other".

Again, the explicit message of the top-right image and the bottom image together is: "black people should not protest police violence." Are you saying that this is a racially- and politically-neutral position that isn't in conflict with the movement for black lives?

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Again, the explicit message of the top-right image and the bottom image together is: "black people should not protest police violence." Are you saying that this is a racially- and politically-neutral position that isn't in conflict with the movement for black lives?

No, that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that this tweet doesn't read like the intent was to put that explicit message there. You are taking two of the three images and attributing a wilfully nefarious and subtle racism to the composition that likely isn't there. Rather, this tweet, to me, reads like an ignorant attempt to get people of different color together, instead of against each other. A noble goal, but by unwittingly wicked means. Now, for this tweet's message to succeed, you have to have the conceit that the BLM movement is against white people. It is not! Comparing the white power movement and the black power movement with each other is a false equivalency. For one, there are numerous white people protesting alongside people of color, so the whole idea that a black power movement is by black people only, or that it should scare people who aren't black, is ignorant. But, what I'm seeing around me is that the public debate is getting more black and white. There is no room for shades of gray anymore, no room for the benefit of the doubt. Rather than reading this as a misguided attempt at fraternisation, it is labelled as racist. Nobody (in their right mind) likes being accused of racism, it's a word with very negative connotations. A human's first instinct at being accused of something so negative that they don't identify with, from their own misguided point of view they are trying to spread a message going against racism after all, is to withdraw from the vitriol and hide in their own bubble. I would hope that a person willing to propagate the idea of people of all colors working together, would be open to an honest discussion about why putting the white power movement and the black power movement side by side is problematic. I'm fairly certain shouting "RACIST!" at them is going to achieve the opposite. I mean, I've seen the sentiment around me: "everything is racist nowadays". Why, yes, systemic racism is a thing that exists! But also, calling everything racist without room for nuance is something a lot of people are having a hard time to come to terms with. I actually believe the public discourse would be better served with different names or terms for different shades of racism. Not because I want to downplay certain kinds of racism, but because I think it would help in discussing problems in society without a bunch of people playing their "BUT I'M NOT A RACIST" card as a reflex.

Anyway, I'm tired (for real, it's late here). This is an interesting topic with a lot of nuances, a lot of which I probably don't get as a white, European male. I'm trying though.

Edit: I run the risk of looking ignorant myself, typing all of this, but if I don't ask and discuss, I will certainly remain so.

 

[safra]

No, that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that this tweet doesn't read like the intent was to put that explicit message there.

This is because propagandists on the right are very good at hiding their most overt symbology from people who aren't fluent in US media analysis. This image has several 'dogwhistles' that are extremely clear and comprehensible to both nazis and anti-fascists, while maintaining the plausible deniability for people like yourself who are not media-fluent in nazi symbology. It's like how an actual 'dog whistle' is audible to dogs, because they can hear higher pitches, and not audible to humans; the racism is hidden inside views that appear egalitarian or to be drawing equivalencies between two things, and racists can see it loud and clear.

There is no such thing as a legitimate movement in favour of 'white power'. In modern history, white people have clearly had almost all of the power to begin with (think of Europe's imperial powers, America's racial 'caste' system, settler-colonists in the Americas at the time of first contact). "Black Power" is a plea for black people to be allowed to be powerful, to have access to the systems and trappings of power. "White Power" is an inherently violent movement to prevent non-white people from having that same access.

I hope this is helpful. I don't want to go off on a spiel at you because you sound like you are just trying to ask legitimate questions. If you'd like me to elaborate on any of these points, just ask.
yrs,
saf

 

[Chris Taylor]

I think we get your intent, even bleery eyed as you are.
It's a complicated topic, and I like giving people the benefit of the doubt as well, especially if they are people who's art I like.

 

[Dom Harvey]

Terese Nielsen likes a lot of woo-ey 'all we need is love' stuff and it's easy to view this in that context. Unlike most people like that, she's also all-in on Trump and believes a lot of conspiracy theories that are either explicitly alt-right or at least promoted by people in that space. If you want to promote some 'racial divisions are promoted by the powerful to stop people realizing their shared interests' message, it's not hard to find examples that don't frame white nationalists and BLM protesters as two sides of the same coin

It's true that talking about racism as a feature of people rather than behaviour is typically counter-productive. That said, once someone's behaviour is consistently racist over time, that informs how you view other behaviour that might be ambiguous. TN crossed that line long ago and has lost the benefit of the doubt

 

[Onderzeeboot]

This is because propagandists on the right are very good at hiding their most overt symbology from people who aren't fluent in US media analysis. This image has several 'dogwhistles' that are extremely clear and comprehensible to both nazis and anti-fascists, while maintaining the plausible deniability for people like yourself who are not media-fluent in nazi symbology. It's like how an actual 'dog whistle' is audible to dogs, because they can hear higher pitches, and not audible to humans; the racism is hidden inside views that appear egalitarian or to be drawing equivalencies between two things, and racists can see it loud and clear.

That's disturbing and depressing at the same time. I wonder how many Americans are unaware, blissfully upvoting what they think is a conservative egalitarian message, or spreading it (it's not unlikely that this twitterer copied this image from somewhere else) It's depressing how polarized the political debate in the US has become. As an outsider it's awkward seeing people defend Trump over Biden (or Clinton) because as a republican he can surely not be worse than a democrat, right? And every time I see that I'm like, "have you actually looked at what Trump has done, not only as a president, but as a business man before?" And meanwhile most Republican politicians don't have the guts to draw a line and say "this is not what we stand for".

There is no such thing as a legitimate movement in favour of 'white power'. In modern history, white people have clearly had almost all of the power to begin with (think of Europe's imperial powers, America's racial 'caste' system, settler-colonists in the Americas at the time of first contact). "Black Power" is a plea for black people to be allowed to be powerful, to have access to the systems and trappings of power. "White Power" is an inherently violent movement to prevent non-white people from having that same access.

I'm in full agreement here. There was and is no doubt in my mind that the BLM movement is very legit, and that the White Power movement is hateful and disgusting.

I hope this is helpful. I don't want to go off on a spiel at you because you sound like you are just trying to ask legitimate questions. If you'd like me to elaborate on any of these points, just ask.
yrs,
saf

Thanks Safra (and everybody else). I think stuff like this is important to discuss, and I'm grateful for your input. I see people around me acting as if this is mainly an American thing, and while the wounds slavery and segregation inflicted on society are more pronounced, I think, in the US than in most European countries, including the Netherlands, we (Europeans) should really stop acting as if we don't have the same problems you do. (Systemic) racism is a problem in the Netherlands as well, and the sooner we stop pointing fingers at how bad the situation in the US is, the sooner we can stop making up excuses to fix our own problems.

 

[safra]

(Systemic) racism is a problem in the Netherlands as well, and the sooner we stop pointing fingers at how bad the situation in the US is, the sooner we can stop making up excuses to fix our own problems.

I was born and grew up in Indonesia so yeah no kidding

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I was born and grew up in Indonesia so yeah no kidding

Oh shit. I'm sorry The Indonesian Indepence War is one of the darkest chapter in Dutch history, if not the darkest

 

[Chris Taylor]

I think the phrase is: "If you aren't ashamed of your country you aren't looking hard enough"