Messages

Some bad news: Trump supporters have started vandalizing Florida manatees!

I guess some people don't know the difference between a braid and a beard.  More likely, though, he's like my son, reading the first few letters and guessing the word... it gives some odd questions/sentences once in a while. 

Who's Blondbeard? 

You don't know him? - Great guy!

No really, my appologies (it's not even like you have the most difficult name here...I mean, how hard is it to write Braidedbeard, really?). I could blame dyslexia, the auto-correct, that at I was thinking of pirates lately, or the fact that I was tired. But in reality I was just typing lazily. Let's just pretend I edited the post, and call it fake news...

Who's Blondbeard? 

Speaking of US colleges, there's that whole system with the electoral college. From what I've read, Hillary actually got 3 million more votes from the total population, but Trump won the vote in more different US states,
which just goes to show how antiquated and out of touch most of their political system is. Land doesn't vote, people do.

Except if you look at the history and purpose of the electoral college, you'll find that it's doing pretty much exactly what it was designed to do, and a major reason for it being there is, again, the fact that the US is basically 50 countries. The size and scope, along with the varied interests between different states, pretty much necessitates a system like the electoral college to at least try and keep a few densely populated states controlling all of the more sparsely controlled ones.

It's an argument I've heard before and not a particularly good one to boot. How's it fairer that, instead of risking populated states having more say than the sparser ones, somebody in Wyoming gets to have a vote that's worth more than that of someone in California?

And that's not even mentioning its ties to slavery...

Speaking of US colleges, there's that whole system with the electoral college. From what I've read, Hillary actually got 3 million more votes from the total population, but Trump won the vote in more different US states,
which just goes to show how antiquated and out of touch most of their political system is. Land doesn't vote, people do.

What "Equality of Opportunity not Equality of Outcome" means is "Against racism. Against doing literally anything to tackle racism." This is, unfortunately, fairly a standard right-wing belief. Not something that makes you a Nazi apologist. See: I can tell the difference.

True, plenty run of the mill libertarians and people with the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality say the same thing, but just because it's not nazism doesn't mean it's not stupid. You can't pretend centuries of oppression hasn't had any long-term consequences
and it'll just go away just because the most egregious laws upholding the oppression have been abolished, it's like expecting a cancer patient who's been wasting away for years to get up and play football straight after ten minutes of chemotherapy.

WHAM, if you can take all this time arguing in this thread, you really should take the time to watch the speech by Kimberly Jones I posted a couple of posts back, it's like 5 minutes long but she really explains it all.

WHAM, you can't blame things on youthful naivité when you wrote the stuff people are complaining about earlier this day.

It's all right, Ali. We can keep up the status quo, where one side act like children angrily calling people names, while the other side keep a cool head and act like adults.
Keep calm and carry on.

I remain unimpressed by the fact that you can adopt a lofty, disinterested tone. Being calm and polite isn't the same thing as being rational.

We ought to have an emotional reaction towards racism, inequality, mass murder. It's not irrational to feel passionately about politics. If you can look at the holocaust and keep a "cool head" - I deeply mistrust you.

My thoughts exactly, it's easy to stay calm when you've no horse in the race, but if you're a minority or a woman, any group that's faced a long history of very real oppression because of something you were born into,
it's immensely hard to stay polite towards people defending an ideology that treats you as a subhuman.

Also, rational and passionate need not be exclusive, just watch this speech:

And the comic you posted is, as it turns out, from an alt-right artist, with other strips that are transphobic, racist, and express Holocaust denial (and with its official forum a Neo-Nazi fan community that was banned from Reddit). Which again, is not permitted here.

The creator of the comic, or parts of their fanbase, can hold whatever views they want. I see no reason for that to detract from the art itself, or the all-too-real message it portrays.

But what of art that clearly reflects the political views of the artist, such as the one you posted?

Also, I may have brought up a personal example from my family history, but far more people than just my family lived through WW2, and you have no way of knowing whether any of the people reading this forum had relatives who survived the holocaust,
and that alone is a strong reason not to use nazi imagery lightly in my book, not to mention any potential neo-nazis seeing it, not knowing you're doing it ironically, and decide nazis should be welcome here.

I've given up on so many other forums because nazism, sexism, racism, and homophobia run rampant without consequences, and it's exactly the modding and rules of the AGS forums that let me express myself without fear of harassment from a dozen anonymous trolls.

Thank you kindly! Most intriguing - it shall be an interesting read. Happy to see it available free of charge. I seem to remember hearing of her in connexion to Ordeal, but she seems a most fascinating writer, with an intriguing perspective.

I complain so much about the internet, but I cannot argue that it makes sourcing books ever so much simpler.

Glad to be of help, I hope you have an interesting read!

Again, these symbols have real power because there's still neo-nazis and fascists out there who have hurt and killed real people. People in the 1930s kept treating Hitler as a populist clown and kept making excuses as he annexed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia, and look where it got them.

Sorry if this comes across as too emotional, but my own grandmother lived in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation and saw people she knew disappear forever into concentration camps, and I've been in the same room as people who've survived the holocaust and had nightmares from the stories they've told me. This isn't ancient history and dressing or posing as a nazi isn't funny for people who've seen the horrors.

To be "horrified" of an old symbol of a dead ideology is, to me, a sign of weakness of the mind and spirit. It's a fear of ghosts.

It's an insult to the victims of Nazi genocide to suggest that people who are horrified by the SS logo are weak in mind and spirit. Unlike the swastika, it has no meaning beyond Nazism. "Weak and mind and spirit" is authoritarian bullshit - I see no reason that weakness should be despised.

Anyone who draws a parallel between BLM protesters and the far-right extremists who just stormed the Capitol is either a fascist sympathiser or an idiot. Out of respect for Snarky's request, I'm being as civil as I can towards WHAM: I don't think he's an idiot.

My thoughts exactly, the reason nazis started using such symbols in the first place was so they could organize and rally together to commit real physical violence.

And even if I were to play along with the notion that the swastika is used in other contexts than nazism, WHAM stated outright that he only changed his avatar to look like a nazi:

Hey, if I get called a nazi and fascist by people who don't know the difference, then I might as well look the part, right?

Hey, if I get called a nazi and fascist by people who don't know the difference, then I might as well look the part, right?

A comedian once said; "It doesn't matter if you f*ck goats ironically, you're still a goatf*ucker".

A big reason fascism and neo-nazism got so big in the first place is because of vile nazis posting nazi memes as a joke,
and people who don't know any better reposting such memes and symbols ironically/for shock value, making fascists seem more
numerous and popular than they are and just emboldening them further.

Plus don't you think an avatar with SS runes would be pretty horrifying to forum users who haven't followed the context of this discussion?

It's as ridiculous to draw an equivalence between BLM protesters and MAGA nutbars as it is to imply that Trump's populism meant that he had the support of the majority of Americans. He never did.

True, whenever people try to draw an equivalence between people killing others, and the people protesting the killings, I'm reminded of that classic Monty Pyhon quote:

I know I've posted it in the forums before, but it keeps being relevant, doesn't it?

Yes, please tone it down, Khris, and focus on arguments not persons. We've been over that particular ground many times before, anyway.

(It's awkward for me to play a double role of mod and participant in discussions like this. We should get a dedicated mod for this forum.)

The polarization and name-calling in US politics are awful, but the worst part of it is how their bipartisan politics and the mentality of their "debates" keep bleeding over to discussions outside the US.

As a Swede and a History buff, I can't say I would be surprised if the USA ceased to be a superpower in this century, with the numbers of wars they've fought and foreign interventions they've kinda been burning the candle in both ends and there's been hardly any focus on sustainability or longevity. Few empires have lasted more than a couple of centuries, and those that did focused strongly on building a strong infrastructure and cohesive governmental body, whereas, as some rando on the internet said, USA isn't even a full country, it's 50 tiny countries in a trenchcoat.

Okay so far I have a 1 or 2 player game with up to a thousand fish, which if you swim close enough to them they will join your shoal and swim with you,  The core mechanics are more or less there, I need to add sharks and stuff.  The fish themselves are placeholder (despite being very small, they'll still look better when I create some proper sprites!)

I'm reminded of the Swedish folklore on the Giant oarfish, which is called Herring-King in Swedish exactly because people thought they had the ability to make schools of fish follow them, like an army following a king.  There's no chance you'd feature one of them in the game?

Never got to the building stage of my entry idea, but I thought I'd at least share the new sprites I drew for the protagonists:

Spoiler

[close]

[here]

Now, I shall see about Andrea Dworkin. She seems quite intriguing, and I can never have enough books to read!

Well, there's a free PDF of the full book here.

I giggled at seeing a quote of Dolly Parton saying:

Nobody cries alone in my presence!

If we're talking about the Odyssey, I don't remember ever being asked to read it in full in school, and personally, I don't see why it should be either. There are several million books in existence,
and I personally think there are lots of books that can spark more interesting discussions than a work whose biggest influence on western society was giving filmmakers some ideas on what monsters to put in their blockbusters.

But even if you disagree and think the Odyssey is one of the greatest books ever, from my experience, our teachers were so pressed for time we could barely fit one book into a school year,
so that would just mean excluding another work if they were to choose the entirety of the Odyssey as part of the curriculum. I for one think Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin is one of
the most eye-opening books I've ever read and I'd wish everyone would read it, but I'm not going to say it's censorship because it isn't part of every school curriculum.

"Ban" (or "deny children access to literature") seems a pretty extreme term for something that appears to be more accurately described as "exclude from the curriculum" — or, at most, "remove from the school library."

And we may agree or disagree with the arguments for and against specific books, but school reading lists have always been shaped by moral, political and didactic agendas and views about what is appropriate for children of a particular age. A hundred years ago there's no way they would give schoolchildren a book to read with the word "fuck" in it (of course, a hundred years ago it was almost impossible to have such a book printed in the first place), and it's similarly reasonable to decide today, for example, that we won't use any book with the N-word in class. Because we are influenced by what we read, children in particular.

That said, I do think schools should teach texts that reflect worldviews that differ from mainstream modern thought, both because you otherwise throw out a lot of great and culturally significant literature, and because it is important to show that people did think differently in the past, including that some prejudices were commonly accepted. And I definitely don't think you should exclude works that are in themselves unobjectionable simply because the author may have written or said other things we would find offensive. (So, for example, even if you decide against teaching The Merchant of Venice, that doesn't mean Shakespeare should be excluded from the curriculum altogether; nor should you throw out all books by Roald Dahl.)

Also, while I don't trust the WSJ to provide an unbiased summary of events, I definitely have misgivings about "cancel culture" when it goes after people who aren't "in the game" (pundits, political activists, etc.) with full force, including online harassment and threats to their careers, to punish stray comments.

I think that summons up my problem with these kinds of discussions perfectly.
It reminds me of Jim Sterling's video on editing versus censorship: