Agemegos

Re: Beanstalks are becoming real . . .

Re: Doulocracy: how's it work?

Re: The cranky thread Forgetting to drink.

Re: The cranky thread There's only one thing worse than drinking to forget.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? I would expect that the first step would be to perform an in vitro fertilisation using a gorilla ovum and human semen and vice-versa, and to allow the zygotes to develop into eight-cell embryos before destroying them. Only if that seemed promising would anyone try allowing the hybrids to develop to term. And when they did the choice of host-mother would be tricky. Really you'd think that a human womb would be a better choice than a gorilla one, to avoid likely obstetric difficulties. So expect gorilla sperm to be put into some sort of political prisoner or member of a hated ethic minority, before human sperm is put into a female gorilla. And by the way, chimpanzees or bonobos would seem like a better choice than gorillas. You may be interested inthe SF novel Orphans of Creation, by Roger MacBride Allen. This has as its premise the discovery of an unsuccessful attempt inthe Antebellum South of the US to use Australopithecines as a morally-acceptable substitute for human slaves.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Indeed. I would never doubt it. But when I read through Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and take stock of the things and people who have influenced me, I become acutely aware that many of my heroes, the people on whom I attempt to model my behaviour, are fictional characters. I suspect that the role of the taste for fiction that exists in the human psyche is to enable us to adopt and transmit cultural norms through story-telling.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Good question, and very apposite. Sometimes it may be because those atrocities are not relevant to the point at hand. For example, if I had asserted that Australians never commit atrocities, then it would be a relevant counter-argument to point out some of teh atrocious things some Australians have done to aborigines. Whether aborigines had or had not ever committed atrocities themselves would not be relevant in that case. But far more often I think that this tendency you note is the result of the interaction of four pernicious fallacies. First, the fallacy of attributing credit or blame for the actions of any members of a group to all the members of that whole group. Second, the fallacy of considering that people are either wholly good or wholly evil, instead of recognising that most people, including most who are really pretty admirable on the whole, do some bad things. Third, the Manichaean fallacy that Good and Evil are two sides that are engaged in a war with each other. And fourth, the fallacy of confounding facts with value-judgements. I think the fallacious reasoning in this case goes as follows: "If any American indians or African blacks had ever committed atrocities then those whole races would be evil. Fighting against evil people is good, so the US would have been fighting the Good Fight in the Indian Wars. However, my whole point is that the US was committing an atrocity in the Indian Wars. The American indian atrocities therefore contradict my conclusion, and so they must be false. Or at least I ought to suppress them." I am glad that you challenged this fallacious and racist reasoning, because I fear that the reason methods that people rehearse in arguments about history on teh INterNet they go on to apply in making political (eg. voting) decisions.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Halfelves and half-orcs are infertile, are they? That'll be news to Elrond and Elros. Neither do I. And that is why I am careful not to rehearse judging any people as being evil because of their birth, even in fiction.

Re: Doulocracy: how's it work?

Re: Do characteristics break the Hero way of doing things?

Re: Is anyone gaming the Iraq war? I'm not doing the war itself, but the last HERO System thing I ran before I came up here (ie. in February 2003) was a little campaign in which the PCs were secret agents of the Catholic Church (in a special organisation reporting to the Cardinal Prefect de Propaganda Fide). In the climax of the campaign they had to go into Saudi Arabia undercover to intercept an attempt by some seriously misguided 'Christian' fanatics who had a stolen atomic warhead and were trying to blow up Mecca during the Hajj in an act of vengeance for the WTC attack. So the campaign was topical, but not actually in Iraq nor during the war. The best fun I had in the campaign was the scene in the equivalent of Q Branch in which all the techy secret gadgets were not spy stuff but things to allow the PCs to practice their religion (and fulfil their obligations: one PC was a priest and obliged to say Mass every day) in secret. Rather than smugglings guns and bombs the we James Bond does they were equipped to smuggle communion wafers and wiine, consecrated vessels, chrism, etc. The look on the players' faces when 'Q' demonstrated their secret equipment was priceless.

Re: Space: 1889, HERO-style! I played in an Space:1889 game that we ported over to reliable HERO System rules after we discovered problems with S1889's one-lung representation and resolution systems. It worked fine, and HERO is generic enough and S1889 normal enough that it hardly took any work.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept?

Re: Is Hebrew similar to German Nice citation! 85% is a lot of similarity. But 10% vocabulary is significantly less than the content of French in English. And I guess the grammar is basically German: is that right? So Yiddish should have four points of similarity with German and perhaps one with Hebrew?

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? No I don't. I argue that rehearsing the act of making moral judgements on the basis of race may reduce out resistance to making moral judgements on the basis of race. No actual, living, breathing casualties are actually evacuated in a disaster drill either. We still learn from the drill. No actual enemies are out-manoeuvres ina field exercise: we still learn from the exercise. Psychological studies that detect racist attitudes in people's subconscious behaviour (by the time it takes them to make decisions and the time it takes them to recognise words) indicate that in populations studied (Californian and Arizonan undergraduates for the most part) the majority harbour racist attitudes. Of course most of them are able to suppress these when dealing with them in tasks occupying central attention, but they tend to leak through in tasks deal with peripherally. And income studies and employment studies and studiesof jury verdicts and sentencing and even the identifications of eyewitnesses all indicate that members of racial groups connected with negative stereotypes all suffer from significant disadvantages in normal life because of tacit racist attitudes. It may be hard for you to imagine (not having any racist attitudes yourself), but the majority of people in modern western societies seem actually to be afflicted with subconscious racist prejudices. For example, I have them myself. You confidently assert that even if the effect I fear is shown to exist the vast majority of people are in no danger of reinforcing their racist prejudices by rehearsing in RPGs acting on such prejudices. That seems unjustified. I concede your point that rehearsal may not produce the psychological changes I apprehend. But I cannot agree that the majority (vast or otherwise) stand in no danger of forming subconsicious racist attitudes: they already have them. You will search my posts in vin for any insistence that anyone must. Besides which your use of 'miniscule' and 'infinitesimally' assume what you are trying to prove. I'm sorry to have made you so sad. But perhaps reality out where most of us live is different from reality in your neck of the woods. Racist attitudes (subconscious and otherwise) are rather common out here. Even the majority of well-brought-up and decent middle-class people have been shown to harbour them, even those people who strive to act justly. Rehearsing decision-making techniques in fictional contexts has been shown to reinforce the use of those techniques in real life: an entire training industry is built on the fact. Or indeed several. It is admittedly a speculation that racist decision-making is generalisable, ie. that rehearsing making judgements against one race reinforces the habit of making decisions on the basis of race in general. But we're still a long way from hallucination.

G'day Perusing my new copy of FREd, I noticed that Hebrew has been granted an extra placement on the languages table giving it four points of similarity with German and Yiddish. That is, HERO rule now make Hebrew as like unto German as Norwegian is to Sweden and as Spanish is to Catalan. Is that reasonable? I know that Yiddish is very like German, and that Yiddish and Hebrew are both spoken by Jewish populations. But isn't Hebrew in its structure and most of its vocabulary still a member of the Semitic family of languages, possessing no discernible connection with Indo-European languages such as German? Regards, Brett Evill

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Fair enough. Judging people by their race is not the only thing that you rehearsed in gaming, and the net effect may well be positive. Perhaps there is no effect. Perhaps you have resisted an effect. Perhaps you are more tolerant and accepting than you would have been if you hadn't gamed, but less so than if you had played games without irremediably evil races in them. It is not possible to tell from a sample of one, even if your self-knowledge were perfectly reliable. You will note that neither Cyst 13 nor I has advocated giving up RPGs, nor have we given up playing ourselves. You may conclude that we do not think that RP gaming is itself a dangerous activity. In short, I agree that RP (especially the less superficial adventures, and most especially in gaming groups with diverse backgrounds) is on balance wholesome, even beneficial. That doesn't exclude the possibility that some games are not as good as others.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept?

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Fair enough. But I'm not blaming other people for my problems (which are minimal anyway). Nor am I encouraging others to do so. I am encouraging people to take command of their destinies by taking command of the habits they cultivate.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Sorry, but I'm working from paper sources and personal experience. Indeed. CBT achieves remarkable relief of (say) depression by retraining inappropriate habits of thought. This is done deliberately, and by the informed effort of the patient. There is nothing subliminal or involuntary about it. On the other hand, the aetiology of straighforward depression (not bipolar disorder) seems to consist entirely of dwelling on inappropriate thoughts: it is a mental habit formed by rehearsal. And yet no-one sets out to become depressed. It seems clear that mental habits can form character even without an intention to personal change. From my personal experience something similar seems to be true of anger, and some psychologists seem (according to their writings) to agree. There is, however, no well-conducted study of the treatment of anger with CBT, at least that I know of. If it is reasonably foreseeable that what you write will lead to people killing themselves (or others) who would not otherwise have done so, then I urge you to think carefully before deciding to publish. Where to draw the line? I can only leave that to your own conscience. The charges made years ago included an assertion that D&D games actually consist of satanic worship, and that players whose characters reach third level are taught to cast real-life magic spells. They were driven by malice and paranoid delusion. The possible dangers that I am discussing are admittedly speculative. But my apprehensions are informed by an actual knowledge of what goes on in a role-playing game and some empirical findings from cognitive psychology, not on a belief in magic. Also, I am not hostile towards role-playing games, and only urge that we should hold the content of our games to the same standard that we hold our other activities.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept?

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept?

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Easy. Heavyweight title bouts are real, and therefore people can't distinguish between them a reality. But experiments have shown that even children can tell fiction from reality. So obviously violence and hateful attitudes lauded in fiction are harmless. [That's ironic, godammit!]

Re: My 'Star Hero' arrived Unfortunately not. But thanks anyway.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? So do I, and so I think does Cyst13. But that isn't inconsistent with pointing out possible dangers to others, is it? Everyone has to make their own judgements, but must they necessarily gather their own information, and refrain from sharing insights? I think it is an interesting reflection of our times that so many of us interpret any argument that something that happens is or might be bad, and every argument that something that isn't happing would or might be good, as an attempt to expand the scope of government intervention. I guess that experience of the last thirty-five years or so would give people that impression.