Jun. 3rd, 2015

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Editor’s Note: Some wags (no pun intended) have claimed that our normal Sad Puppy reviewer of books, Mr. John Z. Upjohn, is not actually representative of the diverse opinions, tastes, and political ideologies of the Sad Puppies as a whole. Some have even suggested that he is little more than a ridiculous, over the top caricature. So in the interest of fairness, I have brought in another Sad Puppy for today’s review, to give this webpage generally and the SPRB feature in particular a more balanced perspective.


 

poky little puppy

THE POKY LITTLE PUPPY

Reviewed by Special Guest Reviewer James May

We are already aware you are blind to your own activism. You support a bizarre race-gender cult obsessed with patriarchy. It is anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western and even anti-Anglophone it is so steeped in racial hate, misandry and heterophobia. I regard it as nothing more than a hate movement, and that’s using your own paper-thin standards. How you get around that is by claiming the “marginalized” are never racists, sexists, misandrists, etc. I reject that.

Here’s the dividing line and the crucial issue: I don’t care what you do. I don’t care about any of your initiatives. What I care about is it is never expressed without dehumanizing men and whites as racist, women-hating, homophobes who have conspired and continue to conspire to keep everyone but the straight white male out of SFF. That is a lie we have proved with facts over and over again. The history of SFF as portrayed by SJWs is a hoax. It has never been any more exclusionary than Field & Stream.

We have also proved with facts over and over again that SJWs do exactly what they claim we do: namely advocate for and discriminate against people based on their race and sex.

You claim you are against Vox Day and John Wright but in fact you were throwing us under the bus in swaths of no less than 100 million people before you ever heard of them. You are a protected and privileged class of goofball feminists who will never pie-chart a military cemetery as long as you live because intersectional gender feminists are liars.

The idea we as an entire sex and racial group oppose women, gays and non-whites entering any arena whatsoever is laughable. Pretending we are all conservatives is Bigotry 101: paint an ethnic or sexual group as an ideology. Boom! Done. Let the Anita Sarkeesian “critiques” begin. We are aware of what your so-called “allies” have to do to escape the shame of being straight white men and so escape their “ideology” by showing their bona fides. We are aware of how quickly you turned on “ally” GRRM. Crime? Oops! He reverted to a straight white male and forgot to only torture men in his books. Concern for the in-group while ignoring the out-group is just more classic bigotry. Either you’re against violence or you’re not.

And notice how I myself have gone out of my way to show you are not liberals or Marxists and nor do I light up entire demographic groups. Although your cult laughingly pretends to represent all women, gays and non-whites – with radical feminist shit-titles like “Women Destroy SF” – you don’t. Gays are not the problem – gays who are bigoted supremacists are. Women are not a problem – female bigots are. Non-whites are not a problem – non-white racists are. If you claim to be human, then claim those human failings, since it is so self-evidently true of your cult. Whites are not a problem – white supremacists are. And that is a principle any race or sex can embrace. Wake up to that. My pushing back against this cult is no more pushing back against women, gays and non-whites than pushing back against the KKK makes me anti-white.

SJWs continually use random demographic spikes as if they are Jim Crow – but only if they benefit you. Otherwise random demographic spikes are fine as long as they aren’t straight white men. Boxing, Arab film, Samba, the NBA – no prob.

Say this over and over again: demography is not ideology.

Say this too: group defamation is always wrong – ALWAYS.

Stop lying and pretending you critique anything but our race and sex. No matter what we say, no matter the facts, you move the goalposts so straight white men remain in the crosshairs. Go look at Nebula Awards Weekend. It is a disgrace. Literature? LOL

I am not interested in your stupid con game or your hateful brand of feminism which pretends to be the successor to equal rights feminism, a thing I do support.

We cannot even converse until we agree on rules that work for all, not just some. This is called a “principle.” We have rightly portrayed your cult as one which rejects principle in favor of identity.

I reject everything your cult stands for.

3.5/5

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

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You know this, because the article he just wrote for Vox.com (no relation to Vox Day, for those playing along without a program) opens by saying so.

He is afraid because there’s a different “vibe” in academia now. He’s afraid because now a man’s career can be ruined merely because he spent the entire career making academia a hostile, toxic place for women (or as he prosaically refers to it, “being creepy at conferences”). He’s afraid that claims of racial or gender insensitivity might be taken seriously in a way that, before this changed vibe, an obviously spurious complaint about reverse-racism was pointedly not.

And the thing is, I don’t know.

I really don’t.

Specifics aside, I think he’s on to something about the problem of treating students as consumers and then adopting a “customer is always right” approach to teaching. This is a knife that cuts across ideological divides, as Professor Shannon Gibley was reprimanded in 2009 for making white students uncomfortable when teaching the truth about structural racism and imperialism.

There’s something there. I’m not the best person to engage with what’s there, as I’m not an academic. But I’ve seen enough and heard enough to know that there’s something there.

I don’t think the problem here is necessarily with the students, or with liberals, so much as it is with the commodification/consumerization of education as a whole. When college makes itself into a big business and positions its degrees as product, the student-as-consumer model seems like a necessary end result. It’s probably not quite that cut-and-dried, though, and this could be a fascinating discussion to have.

The thing is, Edward Schlosser doesn’t seem to be having that conversation. Rather than asking what’s been changing over time in the environment in which he’s working, he’s looking outward. He’s blaming “call out culture” and “a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice”.

And he has examples.

In an article whose subject is, I remind you, “my students scare me”, he chooses to highlight a couple of tweets by blogger @bad_dominicana, Zahira Kelly, talking about bias in science.

Note that Zahira Kelly is not one of his students. Zahira Kelly is not one of his colleagues. Zahira Kelly has bother-all to do with him or his. What Zahira Kelly is to him is a convenient target of opportunity, a person who can be used as both a scapegoat and a lightning rod.

I have the feeling that Schlosser knows none of his students would actually be that scary to the Vox.com reading audience. I’m sure he knows that it’s hard to sell his fear describing them in the abstract. But what is scary to his audience? But an outspoken AfroLatina blogger, a self-described “Bad Dominicana” speaking her unvarnished thoughts in Tweet form?

He wants to talk about nuance and complexity over simplicity, but he selects two tweets from a series of larger thoughts and then extrapolates from them… well, let me do what he did and screenshot what I’m talking about. (Apologies to the Facebook readers, click over for the crosspost):

zahira

Kelly is not one of his undergrads, but let’s stop and marvel at the condescending manner with which he acts as though she is, as he praises her intelligence and voice while blowing past her point to work what she said into what he was saying, in more or less exactly the same way he describes dealing with off-track interjections into his class.

Except she didn’t interject. He went looking for her saying something, and then even though it’s not germane to his topic, he roped her into his article, held her up for the world as an oh-so-frightening example of why everybody else should be as scared as he is.

And except she’s not saying what he claims she is. If she were calling for us to reject science, why would she say that most (quotation marks hers) “scientific thought” isn’t that scientific? If the point was science is bad, she wouldn’t be arguing that anything isn’t science. She would have no reason to make that distinction.

And look at the phenomenal leap he makes from her calling out “white patriarchal bias” to saying she throws things out “just because it’s associated with white males”.

Maybe I have a low tolerance for or high sensitivity towards this particular leap because of how often it comes up in dealing with Sad Puppies, but really. Someone who claims he just wants to go back to a time when nuance and complexity and reason were allowed to rule over short-sighted oversimplifications and us-vs-them identity arguments should not be mistaking a conversation about bias for one about demographics. That’s inexcusable.

But at the risk of giving him an “AHA!” moment in support of his supposition that feels have superseded reals, I have to say that the fact that he’s wrong in the sense of being incorrect in his words is really secondary here to the fact that he is wrong in the sense of being morally indefensible in his actions.

Because whatever he’s using Bad Dominicana’s words to say, the fact is, he’s using her.

He knows—or at least has no business not knowing, given that he’s mining her Twitter timeline for pull quotes—that her writing makes her a target for abusive backlashes. He must know that there’s a receptive audience out there looking for acceptable targets to pile onto and an excuse to pile on them.

His piece is one of many out there right now that are full of hand-wringing and head-shaking over the plights of the poor, beleagured Joss Whedons and George R.R. Martins of the world, a world in which apparently anyone can just say anything to anyone else and it’s supposed to be okay. Cultural critics, activists, and bloggers like Zahira Kelly are routinely held up as being the face and muscle of an unstoppable juggernaut that lashes out without warning and strikes without repercussions.

This ignores the actual realities of online discourse. What power the internet has as an equalizer means that stuff can fly in every direction at once. As Joss Whedon got full blast the rage of angry/disappointed comic fans, internet trolls, and those labeled as “Social Justice Warriors”, there were people taking full advantage of the opportunity to lay blame for both that whole fustercluck and Joss’s decision to leave Twitter at the feet of feminists.

And always, always, these attacks somehow spiral out and grab hold of people who have nothing to do with them. It’s opportunism. At WisCon 39, on the panel at call-out culture, we discussed this tendency as it has shown up on Tumblr: somebody finds themselves involved in an argument or controversy (or wants to find themselves there); they pull in someone they know has a dedicated hate-following. The target of such a proxy attack is inevitably stereotyped as either “strong” or “thriving on attention”, or both, and thus immune to pain and in no need of empathy.

Edward Schlosser is participating in that pattern of behavior. Zahira Kelly isn’t his colleague, or his student, or anything to him except a villain for a story that needed one. Forget his calm, cultured mild-mannered professor at a midsize school act. When he appropriates tweets from an AfroLatina blogger and holds them up as the example and cause of everything that is rotten in the state of Denmark, this man is Gaston in the village square, holding up a stolen magic mirror and saying “IT’S TIME TO TAKE SOME ACTION, BOYS… IT’S TIME TO FOLLOW ME.”

It’s incitement, it’s exploitation, and it is abuse.

We should not stand for it.


Folks, it is downright eerie how many people are trying to leave comments on this post and either clearly haven’t read it, or read it and assumed that I’m saying “Edward Schlosser is wrong, wrong, wrong about his premise and I’m going to nitpick the way he treated an unrelated third party purely as a means of attacking his message,” as though it’s impossible for me to actually care about the subject I’m actually talking about.

The latest offender asked me if I’m in academia (a question this post answered!) and then dropped a link to her own blog post in support of his point. I treated this like spam. I’ve been telling people all week that if they want to debate Schlosser’s larger point, they should do so in their space. That’s not an invitation to use my space as a billboard.

If you want to comment on this piece, make sure you’ve read it and know what it’s actually about.

 

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

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I don’t know if green tea with mint is my personal miracle elixir for creativity, or if the taste and smell of it is just a memory trigger for certain times in my life, or I am just feeling the euphoric effects of being well-rested after a couple of weeks of being anything, or what, but yesterday afternoon, and then again last night, and then when I woke up this morning, I was having a lot of thoughts about A Wilder World, the roleplaying game system I’ve managed to bring almost to a point of completion multiple times over the years.

I haven’t talked about it in public much lately, but I have had a few private conversations about it, particularly with Shweta Narayan, that helped crystallize what wasn’t gelling in the recent, most close to complete iterations.

As I see it, there are three basic problems with the system I devised.

I: It basically starts with high level play.

The idea of hybrid characters who are “complete” at level 1 instead of having to multiclass/dumpster dive over a series of levels to get the exact combination of abilities you want is important to me. If you want to be a rogue with an animal companion or a wizard who fights with two swords, you shouldn’t have to spend half your adventuring career assembling your schtick and winding up less competent overall than your peers. That’s key. That’s the whole kernel of the idea.

The problem is that my solution gave you characters with something like 12 to 16 distinct special abilities at level one. For a player like me who is experienced with high level play in other systems, this is not a big deal. I’m used to the juggling of multiple resource pools and keeping track of multiple moving parts. I thrive on that. But not all players do, and newer players can be turned away or overwhelmed by that kind of complexity.

Even a lot of the people who were excited by AWW were more excited about it as a character generation system than an actual game to play. Which, you know, I get that. But it should be a game people can actually play.

5th Edition D&D manages to both impress me on a design level and frustrate me as a player with its approach to this, in that most classes at level 1 aren’t much more complicated than a level 1 character in some flavors of OD&D and then grow into customization and complexity over the course of the next two levels, blossoming into a character that falls somewhere between 3rd and 4th edition. I’m particularly impressed with the fact that nearly every character class can have spellcasting abilities by level 3, if they desire that path, without any feats or multiclassing.

In terms of learning curve it really seems well thought out, and is similar to what I had intended in my more D&D-flavored side project Adventure Song. But that kind of solution doesn’t work for A Wilder World, where the idea is that if you’re a magic-using thief or warrior you can have that at level one.

II: Because nearly every ability is “exception based” and abilities come in packages, thing stack weirdly…

…a problem that is compounded by an overly-specific attribute system that allowed you to achieve things like being a skilled warrior or master attribute either by stat points or by picking appropriate archetypes.

So if you wanted a character who was scary, you could put all your points in Coercion, or you could take an archetype like Intimidating or Brute, or you could buy gear that makes you look imposing, or you could put all your points in Coercion and take archetypes like Intimidating and Brute and buy gear that makes you look imposing. All of these things would make your character scary, sometimes in different yet overlapping ways.

Some balance might be retained by dint of there being a point of diminishing returns and the saying about “putting all of one’s eggs in a basket”, but when there are so many different complementary roads going up the same peak it’s hard from a design standpoint to figure out what all the ramifications of combining them are, to say nothing of doing it from a player’s standpoint.

This is part of why I kept running into problems with the math. The result of the system was that edge cases weren’t actually edge cases.

III: The numbers were never quite as transparent or intuitive as I had hoped/thought/intended.

My goal was always to keep A Wilder World fairly light on math so that it would be approachable and fast paced.

Now, math is not my particular forte, by which I mean I’m a lot better with words than numbers. But I’m good enough with words that there’s a pretty wide territory for my number skill to dwell in, and so I’ve learned over the course of my game design hobby that I tend to underestimate how my abilities to do arithmetic quickly in my head stacks up against the average person’s. I’m also better at remembering something I myself wrote than other people are, because I wrote it.

These two facts add up to me routinely failing to realize how complicated the number schemes I was using could get. Even when the rules were clear, the results were less intuitive than I’d believed.

When I was talking with Shweta earlier this year about shifting to a system that is less dependent on math to resolve conflicts and more reliant on the idea that each character has certain areas of expertise/ability, the system I came up with for codifying that grew pretty complicated pretty quickly.

These are all serious problems that become apparent whenever I step back and look at what I amassed in my aborted test draft of A Wilder World, to the point where I don’t think it is viable as anything except an experiment in mash-up character design. And I do think it is a good example of that. But what I want is something that is both playable and as easy to pick up and fast-paced as I intended it to be.

And I’ve hit on a new approach for that. I was going to say that I think I’ve hit on the right approach, but the thing is, I’ve thought that before. And been wrong.

And the other thing is, wrong or not, it was still worthwhile.

I mean, this is one of the big advantages of game design approached as a hobby rather than a multi-million dollar industry. I can spin my wheels and try things out and learn from the experience.

I’ll be blogging about the new approach in more detail, but just as I started my blogging about A Wilder World by laying out the basic principles I was aiming for, I wanted to start this new round by talking about what I need to avoid.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

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This is Part I of a three part post delving into my thoughts on a new iteration of A Wilder World. Parts II and III will deal with magic and combat. This part deals with the basics of the die resolution system and character creation.

First, the attribute system is basically just… out. Having twenty different axes of numerical customization right alongside the “take two or three concepts and smush them together” character creation thing, it was like having two pretty strong but unrelated bases of character generation in the same game.

While I liked the idea that you could make your Acrobat/Assassin more or less acrobatic than someone else with the same build and then choose how to spend whatever points were left over, it also meant you could make an Acrobat/Assassin who utterly failed as an Acrobat/Assassin. You can’t stop players from making borked characters if they want to, but in a “plug and play” character creation system you shouldn’t need a guide to tell you how to spend your points.

Without attributes, all we care about is notable abilities, notable differences from the norm. To use an example from D&D spin-off novels, we’ll take the Icewind Dale characters by R.A. Salvatore. Wulfgar the human barbarian has what we might call legendary strength, especially when fueled by his rage. At one point he arm-wrestled a balor (which is a balrog with the serial numbers filed off), and at another juncture he took the edges of a dimensional portal and bent them shut. I mean, it was a magical device with an actual edge so he wasn’t literally grabbing space and time and folding them, but still.

So, legendary strength.

His adoptive father, Bruenor, is a dwarven warrior, so we’ll say he has notable strength. We would expect him to win a tug-of-war with the average human more often than not, but lose to Wulfgar.

Bruenor’s other adoptive child, Catti-Brie, is a human swordswoman and archer. As a reasonably fit hero, maybe she’s a bit stronger than the average adult human even in a time and place when the average adult human is a laborer, but her physical strength is not the thing that people remember her for. If she’s the one trying to shift a heavy rock, it’s only because neither Bruenor nor Wulfgar is around and her magical piledriver bow and magical stonecutting sword are both missing… all of which is to say that it’s not terribly important for us to know exactly how strong she is because she doesn’t solve problems with brute strength. Her solutions are often Gordian in nature, but she doesn’t need as much raw strength as either her foster brother or her father to back them up.

Their friend Regis, the pampered halfling confidence artist, deals with heavy rocks by persuading very strong people to move them for him. In a team of what is basically fantasy superheroes, the fact that he’s there at all is an indication of the fact that his superpower is charm: he is friends with all the most powerful people. It is probably worth noting that strength is even more affirmatively not his area than Catti-Brie, but having noted that, it is not necessary to quantify in exacting detail exactly how not strong he is. We just know he’s not strong.

Now, we could use words to describe these levels of ability, and back around maybe January or so I was toying with a color-coded system, where average would be green, yellow and red would be one and two levels below, and then we’d use the shiny metal colors for higher levels of ability: like copper, silver, gold, platinum, mithril.

That’s a lot of levels for a system that by design doesn’t need or want to be very granular, and it also has the disadvantage of not being visually intuitive. There would be a period in the learning curve where you’d still have to look up what “copper” means, and there’s no reason to suspect right off the bat that “copper” beats “green”.

So let’s stick with numbers. We’ll call where Catti-Brie is 0. She’s probably a bit stronger than average, but not so much that the game cares to mark it, and it’s not her particular area of expertise. In most situations, she’s going to have better things to do than apply elbow grease, and allies who are better suited to those problems where only raw muscle will suffice.

Bruenor we’ll say is +1. Wulfgar we’ll call +2, with another +1 when he’s enraged. Regis is -1.

This gives us a way of referring to differing levels of ability in a way that the difference is obvious at a glance, but we also need a way of meaningfully translating it into game terms. There isn’t really a combination of die rolls where straight up adding +2 for Wulfgar’s Strength as compared to -1 for Regis’s would really capture the difference between a relatively sedentary halfling and a legendary human warrior.

So let’s borrow a page from D&D 5E’s rather elegant replacement for a lot of “stack ’em to the heavens” modifiers, their concept of advantage/disadvantage: rolling extra dice and then taking the better roll or, in the case of disadvantage, the worse.

We’ll stick with the conceit of only using 6 sided dice for A Wilder World, for reasons of simplicity, predictability, and accessibility. If we define checks or rolls by a Difficulty number that is the minimum number needed to succeed, we can have tasks defined from Difficulty 2 to 6, with odds of success ranging from 87.5% to 12.5% for the average character.

If you have a score of -1, you have to roll twice and use the worse result. If your score is positive, you can roll extra dice and use the highest one. Each additional die halves your chances of failure, without ever dropping the odds to 0.

So say that a non-raging Wulfgar is trying to kick in a wooden door. We’ll define this as a Difficulty 5 task; the average person would have a 1/3 chance of managing it. He rolls two extra dice, and if even one of them is 5 or higher he succeeds. That’s pretty close to a 70% success rate, compared to Catti-Brie’s 33% success rate. Note that I’m doing the math here, but it’s not at all necessary for players to do the math, just understand that more pluses = dice = more chances to succeed. You can roll your three dice and glance at them and if anything is 4 or higher, you know you made it.

Meanwhile, Regis has an 11% success rate. Which might seem high, and some people are doing the math in their head to figure out how many tries it would take him before his success was basically guaranteed… but the thing is, AWW goes with the philosophy that a check is not “Does it work this time?” but “Does this thing I’m trying to do work?” The random factor abstracts away all the different innumerable variables that would be in play in real life. So it’s not that Regis can try to knock down the door nine times and he’s bound to succeed once. It’s that 11% of the time, when Regis encounters a door like this, he’s able to take it down.

It still might seem odd that any door that Wulfgar can take down is theoretically within Regis’s reach, which is why there’s another wrinkle to difficulty levels. For now, let’s call it magnitude. It’s the “you must be at least this awesome to ride” filter on doing stuff. Magnitude is noted as a minus after the difficulty. Imagine a reinforced security door that is Difficulty 5-1.

What’s the minus do? It shifts your effective score, and if you’re left with lower than -1, you can’t even try.

So when faced with the reinforced door, non-raging Wulfgar has Strength +1, Bruenor has Strength 0, Catti-Brie has -1, and Regis has -2, meaning he’s out of the running.

There is a thing called Heroic Effort where you get to use your whole dice pool for check you’re awesome enough to attempt, but it’s a resource-tracking thing. It’s not too limited, because part of the idea here is that each level of ability is a whole order of awesomeness above the next plus down, but it’s also not automatic.

Now, I’ve been talking about Strength as a concept here, which seems like a stand-in for an attribute even though I’m saying that the system is attribute-less. This is why I also used Rage as an example of something that could conditionally stack with the Strength bonus, to ease into the next concept I’m bringing up.

As much as I like the smushing-together-two-archetypes system… it really contributed a lot to the problems I described in my last post. It’s a great idea, for something that functions more like D&D, but with a focus on gonzo character customization—kind of like D&D 4E’s Gamma World spin-off, or D&D 4E’s hybrid system—and with D&D 5E style “grow into your complexity” system.

It’s not great for a system like A Wilder World where part of the idea is that characters can be relatively “feature complete” at level one, or where the idea is to keep conflict resolution/risk management on a quick and easy basis.

So here’s my new basic concept for character creation: you make a list of stuff your character has going for them. Each of the things you list are considered Abilities. Most abilities are 1 Character Point, though some might wind up being 2 or 3, and some (many) of them will be available at different levels; Strength +1 is one point, Strength +2 is two points. The Storyteller can cap how high an ability can be at character generation depending on the intended power level of the campaign, and also sets how many points are available.

Me, with my taste for high-flying action-adventure at level one, a sort of cinematic fantasy feel, I’d go with something like 10 or 12 points, but it’s possible to play with a pool of 4 or 5 points.

A secondary list of the same length follows the first. These are things called Perks, which are smaller than Abilities. Knowing a language is a Perk, while being a skilled linguist who can find a basis for communication in any language is an Ability. Possessing a musical instrument and knowing how to play it is a Perk, while having an alchemist’s kit and knowing how to use it is an Ability. Having a small side weapon or light armor is a Perk, while having a full-sized weapon or metal armor is an Ability.

While Abilities and Perks can be roughly sub-divided into different categories like gear, followers, skills, advantages (advantages specifically describing things most people can do naturally but you can do better, i.e., things that would otherwise be attributes), there are only these two steps in character creation: spend points, pick perks.

The Abilities would be a lot more roughly sketched than any special abilities listed in the previous iteration. Many of them—particularly the pseudo-attribute Advantages—will basically just consist of describing the areas of endeavor they cover, as well as some rough guidelines for figuring out the fringe benefits (like being strong = can carry heavier burdens for longer). Some of them will have specified mechanical effects, including bonus perks. Points in Linguist = extra languages, for instance.

The archetypes I spent so much time lovingly devising will be included as basically packages of suggested abilities: these are good things for merchants, these are good things for nobles, these are good things for assassins, et cetera. While this makes the plug and play element a little more involved, I feel it makes character creation as a whole simpler, and also more flexible and consistent.

Under the previous version, multiple archetypes essentially had “knows special contacts” as a special ability but the handling for each one was different. Same thing with archetypes that had flexible item allotments, or the ability to summon helpers.

Of course, with attributes and archetypes gone, magic is going to work a little bit differently, though the basic structure of it will be familiar to those who read the old system. The basic ideas of “magic comes in different flavors, magic can do anything that could be done without magic plus a few extra things depending on the flavor, and magic pays for its flexibility by being costly, difficult, slow, and loud compared to the mundane way” are all there, though the whole cost of magic thing is being refined in a way that I think will be more interesting.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

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…for the people who are trying to comment on it right now.

(That’s this post: http://www.alexandraerin.com/2015/06/edward-schlosser-is-a-liberal-professor-and-his-students-terrify-him/, for reference.)

The short version of what’s wrong is that Schlosser wants to talk about the toxic call-out culture that he says affects his teaching career. To do it, he held up a woman on Twitter who was saying nothing about him in particular or any single specific identifiable human being and said that she, identified by name and linked to, is the problem.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Why is it an example of toxic call-out culture that creates an aura of silence and fear for her to call out the presence of white patriarchal bias in a lot of what gets labeled”scientific thought”, but it’s not an example of toxic call-out culture for him to hold her up, call her specifically by name, and say, specifically, that she’s causing this problem?

There’s a serious double-standard at work here, and I am not going to be entertaining comments on this or the previous post from people who refuse to acknowledge it. You want your comment to be approved instead of deleted, you need to explain why you think what he did was cool and in no way hypocritical, and it needs to make sense.

Also, if anyone else wants to say that I’m playing identity politics, then you need to articulate a cogent reason why this disparity exists. Because I didn’t even say that it’s racism or sexism! I didn’t! I just pointed out what happened.

So if you’re looking at that and are jumping straight to “YOU ARE JUST PLAYING IDENTITY POLITICS! EVERYTHING IS SEXISM AND RACISM WITH YOU PEOPLE!”… ask yourself why. Ask yourself how you got there, because I didn’t lead you there. You found yourself there on your own.

You looked at what was happening, and you saw something that made you think about sexism and racism… right before you went foaming at the mouth to scream that it wasn’t.

How’d that happen, do you think?

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

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alexandraerin

August 2017

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