Sudanna

I did the calendar a while ago, but in the interest of slightly less lonely now, I will also post.

Consider my interest gauged.

Meh. Never been interested in VR. Not for Tevildo's reason, just was never sure what the appeal would be. There are a lot more things preventing videogames from appearing as real places than the fact that they appear on a screen. Especially for Jeff's relatively small, budget, mechanically abstracted, turn-based games. Their appeal lies firmly elsewhere. I mean. How much time do you really wanna spend looking these guys in the face.

Goals sound like things for functional people. Don't touch the stuff.

I know what the point of it is. I agree with the general aim. That doesn't make it correct. People simply do not operate on that definition of racism. They do not use the word that way. Blank-faced insistence that they must is a lot of trouble and a lot of confusion and a lot of frustrating pedantry (and being a frustrating pedant is no way to make people listen to you. . .) for the sake of a trite dismissal where an actual answer actually exists. That's. . . not tokenism. Tokenism is when you include minorities in your group purely for the sake of appearing inclusive. Edgwyn's post is not even halfway related to what that particular paragraph of wikipedia is talking about, which is even more specific. What? That didn't happen here at all. Edgwyn said that the President(for example) is very powerful. It is generally bad for powerful people to be in some way unfair, whether their particular idiosyncrasies match general societal ones or not. Edgwyn said this to point out that individual actions do actually matter. Because, y'know, people can actually directly effect other people. What else is systemic racism but trends in individual actions, after all. Mostly, white people are shitty to black people. And, generally, they're more powerful, as power in daily life goes, and so their actions effect other people more. Rarely, however, the position is reversed, and that is also bad. Acknowledging the basic possibility of that scenario and moving on does not deligitimize anti-racism. Blithely ignoring it makes you look like an idiot.

Language control is not an argument or a reform. It's a political tool. Forgive me for considering it venal, simplistic, and unconvincing. There are actual reasons to ignore the great majority of reverse-discrimination claims, and "they don't technically count in this overly-specific definition of the word that I am using and that people do not generally use" is not one of them.

I've never been able to see the insistence on using the word racism to apply exclusively towards systemic racism as anything but a wholly pedantic grab towards rhetorical control. Deliberate ignorance of how people actually, most commonly, use it. Whether you wanna call it racism or bias, Tevildo, Kel's right; that article is not good because of it.

Is a culture not entitled to the sweat of its brow? No. It belongs to everyone.

Respect is entirely subjective.

as always, yep.

Never mind that the idea of "redskin" being chosen by Native Americans in the first place is a contentious one at best. There is no clear origin. Native Americans are recorded as using it - but the records are made by Europeans, and in European languages. "Redskin" obviously isn't part of any Native American language. It is entirely unclear if it was chosen by Native Americans or if it was just the term they used when speaking to Europeans in European languages, because it's what the Europeans used, or if it's just some artifact of using translators. That's all more or less irrelevant, though. People's feelings about language are usually not very concerned with history. Bottom line is, if someting you're doing is offensive to someone, if you care about that person's feelings, you stop. You don't argue about whether or not the offense is justified - it's a feeling, of course there's never going to be a coherent, defensible reason for it. People have and care about them all the same. Now, saying that you don't care about that other person's feelings is just as good of an option, but don't be surprised when that makes things worse.

Trajkov did nothing wrong.

They are related, but not interdependent. Cultural isolationism will not solve economic disparities, but economic equality will make cultural mixing fairer.

He sure did, and it would sure be unreasonable for that patent to still be existent and controlled by his descendants today. And, if you're me, you consider much or all of patent and copyright law to be unreasonable to begin with. A patent is, in fact, one of the options I said. It would be the one where you can't adopt practices you like. I don't know anything about the intellectual property developments you describe, but people can make all kinds of laws for things they shouldn't. You're talking about different problems here. These are not the problems of distributed cultural practices offending people or dismantling group boundaries, they're problems of economic disparity. Poor Bolivians are not hurt by Americans learning about quinoa, they're hurt by Americans having much greater economic power than them. I think applies here as well. It doesn't. The difference is that having a community requires other people to cooperate with your desires. If they want to, that's great for everyone, but if they don't want to, it's also not something you can demand. No. I do not attend or fit in at such spaces. I have been to them before, and I am grossly out of place and unwelcome. I am not a part of LGBT culture. People can be as dishonest or disrespectful as they want to be. It's fine that people sometimes want to be those things. It is not immoral to be dishonest or disrespectful when you don't hurt anyone by doing so. Hurt feelings, while often persuasive(either becasue of empathy or because people hurt your feelings for doing things they don't like), do not count for moral purposes.

lilith edited her post, so my new response will be below

It's not. Black Americans, the indistinct group, does not own or control rock and roll or twerking just for having invented them, any more than Greeks can claim a right to control the use of written vowels or the descendants of Thomas Edison can demand you stop making light bulbs and give them all the light bulbs you have right now back to them. These are ideas and practices and artifacts that naturally spread, and they neither are nor should they be demographically copywritten, and the question of who gets credit for what is an ouroborous, especially in the case of entire cultural groups in the abstract. Either people are allowed to adopt practices that they see and like, or they're not, and one of these options is stupid. Saying to anyone that they're not allowed to do something because of their culture of origin, ethnicity, religion, or upbringing is monstrous, and while the reality is that those restrictions apply in the vast majority of cases(and almost exclusively in cases of material importance) to minorities, trying to reflect the general practice of binding allowable behavior to identity back on the majority power-holders does not really help anyone. Cultural mixing happens whenever and wherever two cultures touch, and that one of those cultures is dominated and contained by the other is an adjacent artifact, not a component or superior one. Arguments over the former on the basis of a connection to the latter are a distraction at best. In my experience, it's an indication of the speakers' complete disrespect and disregard for the subject and their reasoning, to the degree that they don't even consider it worth their time to articulate why. Your family probably feels that way because the people demanding cultural segregation are far more self-righteous about very bad lines of reasoning than they have any right to be. Who the hell are you to tell me what I am and am not "allowed" to do?! And so forth. If I, in a fit of monumentally poor judgement, want to take up wearing a turban because I saw it on the television and just like the look, that doesn't hurt anybody and policing it is a bad thing to do. That I would be treated better than a middle-eastern person doing the same is a result of preexisting oppression, not of my actions - that person would be discriminated against, in the same degree, regardless, and while it's not fair that we would be treated differently, stopping me doesn't help them and hurts, well, me. "Policing" people is generally a bad thing to do, and it's only sometimes acceptable because people hurting each other is worse. Wearing clothes, eating food, listening to music, dancing, learning a language, learning a history, all of these things can involve mimicking practices from different cultures, and they do not in general materially hurt the people comprising either one. What cultural mixing does do is distribute cultural artifacts or practices, and when the origin culture is engulfed by the recipient, it can dissolve the boundaries and markings between the two, and sometimes dilute the original purpose or meaning of the artifact or practice. That can weaken group identities, obscure a shared history, and ultimately reduce the capacity for that group to function independently. People, especially oppressed people, can be very attached to their group identities and want to protect them. Sometimes for good reason. But frankly, people being allowed to do what they want to is more important than people feeling a sense of distinct community.

Horses multiply on demand.

Cultural appropriation isn't bad. Being impolite is bad.

For those curious, this Games is courtesy of the random generation tool from http://brantsteele.net/. It's good for a laugh or two.

WELP Betrayed by my own water! D: Congratulations to Excalibur! Of the 24 contestants, he has proven to be the only one capable of surviving a 24-man death arena. District 12 will get, I dunno, some fluffy turtles or something. I never watched the movies.

In cahoots, eh? We'll see how well that works for you when I drown you in all of my deadly water! Triumph never did get over how bad the feast was. That's good, though. Leaves the top two murderers of the Games to enact an epic, climactic showdown of martial might. TWO TRIBUTES REMAIN (side note: i promise that this whole thing was completely random, i didn't pick myself to survive this long or anything. )

Two groups of three, up to very different things. I run around quoting The Ultimate Warrior and flexing. There's a feast!. . .It's not much of a feast, really, with one person attending. And that one person crying. Interrupted twice by the tortured screams of the ignominously dying. Glad I didn't show up. Kill you, Triumph? That's just what you want me to do. I saw those tears. Nuh-uh. Not gonna trick me. I'm in this to win. This is probably the most fitting end for Ephesos imaginable. THREE TRIBUTES REMAIN

I don't think the posse worked out. I'm scared. I guess all those explosives are starting to surface. Inelegant, I say. EIGHT TRIBUTES REMAIN

You can generally get away with this fairly easily in Avadon or the recent Avernum remakes, with the automatic stat increases each level. In any other game. . . I kinda doubt it. Maybe intelligence for Geneforge, if you just make a bunch of essence-pumped creations.