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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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The mod creator appeared earnest in recommending other mods that whitewashed black characters.

The comments on the mod itself by defenders were of the "woke double standards" type, which genuinely angers some anti-woke types.

This is additional information that one had to look up about the modder - the point of contention here is on whether "your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are," and these go beyond the modder's very deliberate modding choices. If you want to say that this specific modder was likely racist because of the various lines of evidence that we can see from that modder's behavior, I would agree with you 100%. That's not what what I'm arguing about. And talking about "context" doesn't actually add anything to this, because "context" isn't the issue; the modding choices didn't tell us anything about whether the modder was racist, with or without the additional details that added context - it was those additional details that told us whether the modder was racist.

Yes, I determined the context. I am allowed to state what that context is and why I think that is. If you find it unconvincing, so be it, but it's telling that you don't afford me enough charity to not claim I'm trying to decide everyone's opinion.

I mean, fair enough if it's "so be it." Your statements seemed pretty definitive, that you found absurd my belief that a modder's deliberate modding choices can't be used to pass non-trivial judgment on the modder's thinking, but if you just agree to disagree, that's fine as it is.

So why don't I see you in every thread about progressives reminding everybody that they don't know why progressives do what they do beyond an individual level?

Well, one reason is that when people are talking about "progressives," they're usually talking about a set of people who voluntarily signed up for a particular sociopolitical cause. There are loose boundaries, blurry lines, edge cases, and controversy of course, and I'm against psychoanalyzing in almost all cases, but I'm of the opinion that someone's publicly stated sociopolitical positions do provide information about their sociopolitical positions in a way that someone's published entertainment products doesn't. It's certainly true that people here leap very far to conclusions that are entirely unjustified, based on projecting their own insecurities and bitterness onto these "progressives," and I would say that's just as unjustified as claiming that modding a video game to change a character's race is indicative of the modder's racism. It's just that such lines tend to be just one-off low-effort swipes rather than substantive points about how we can divine people's inner sociopolitical beliefs based on their behavior in other realms such as art. The low-effort swipes are bad and lower the standard of discourse here, but I'm not a moderator.

I also personally find it hard to argue against such psychoanalysis of progressives when they perfectly match the mentality that I myself lived through as a progressive. Of course, I can argue just as well as anyone that, just because I happen to be an existence-proof of the reality of the mentality of the progressives that someone is bitching about here, that doesn't mean that any other progressive than me has that mentality. It's that when I see someone who clearly understands my own thinking so well despite never having met me, much less been within my mind, it gives me pause and makes me want to listen rather than argue. I don't experience this when it comes to people accused of being racist due to their creation of entertainment products, since I find the claimed mindset quite foreign.

So when you tell me that there's no limit as to why a person may want to make a black person white in Stardew Valley, your next step, if you were intellectually honest, would be to start assigning probabilities to each of those reasons. Do that, and I suspect you're going to quickly get into very small numbers after 5.

And this step, if one is intellectually honest, is to admit that we can't assign meaningfully accurate probabilities to these reasons that aren't just dominated by our own biases. If we had some sort of empirical evidence to rely on that shows some relation between "make a black person white in Stardew Valley" (or more generically "make [X] person [Y] in [ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCT]") and "racism in the creator" (obviously can't be mind reading, but racist is as racist does, and so this can be detected through other actions), we could perhaps discuss these probabilities with some very large error bars. Unfortunately, the very mechanism by which we can collect this sort of evidence has largely discredited itself in this realm, and so we're mostly left grasping for straws.

This is additional information that one had to look up about the modder...

Yes, because we were getting to the point that I had to actually bring that stuff up.

You are correct, however, that we are speaking on a separate argument, one about whether there is any coherent meaning to be found in one's modding choices.

And talking about "context" doesn't actually add anything to this, because "context" isn't the issue; the modding choices didn't tell us anything about whether the modder was racist, with or without the additional details that added context - it was those additional details that told us whether the modder was racist.

????????

What do you think context even means if not the details for why something is or is not racist?

Well, one reason is that when people are talking about "progressives," they're usually talking about a set of people who voluntarily signed up for a particular sociopolitical cause.

There are a great many people who adopt their views through osmosis. For example, streamer Hasan claims that he is a socialist, but watch his streams and you'll realize how fundamentally unserious he is about making socialism happen. According to you, I am supposed to take his words seriously instead of considering anything about revealed beliefs/preferences.

I also personally find it hard to argue against such psychoanalysis of progressives when they perfectly match the mentality that I myself lived through as a progressive...It's that when I see someone who clearly understands my own thinking so well despite never having met me, much less been within my mind, it gives me pause and makes me want to listen rather than argue.

If you think that your mentality may have just been your own, then the next step would be to ask how many progressives shared your mentality. That's the relevant question, not whether you personally experienced what is being described.

And this step, if one is intellectually honest, is to admit that we can't assign meaningfully accurate probabilities to these reasons that aren't just dominated by our own biases.

What a black-pilled take, to forgo the opportunity to ever exercise your mind and produce accurate statistics/percentages because you would be biased!

I don't believe you. I don't believe for a moment that you don't trust the percentages your mind constructs in a great deal of other instances. This is a perfect example of an isolate demand for rigor.

I think there is no more value to be gained from continuing this discussion. So we shall, as you say, agree to disagree.

I think there is no more value to be gained from continuing this discussion. So we shall, as you say, agree to disagree.

I'm impressed by the balls you have to repeatedly put false words in my mouth and to project your own insecurities onto me and then end with an "agree to disagree." It's legit admirable.

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