- Posts: 10733
- Thank you received: 5119
Bugs: Recent Topics Paging, Uploading Images & Preview (11 Dec 2020)
Recent Topics paging, uploading images and preview bugs require a patch which has not yet been released.
F#@k H.P. Lovecraft
- SuperflyPete
- Offline
- Salty AF
- SMH
The things you don’t seem to know about Mexico (as someone who lived there 5 days a week for a year) is this:
Mexicans are racist as fuck. Like, 1000 times more overtly racist than us. They literally do not hire “Indio”’(native Mexicans) and negritos (dark skinned). They see them as subspecies. The fact that they took photos with your kid should have clued you into this. They are xeno as fuck. If you sneak into their country you WILL do prison time.
The difference between us and them is that they accept that people are racist and don’t make a big fuss about it. It’s almost a caste system. So, Mexico is vastly inferior in that regard, as we try to be better.
Just a bit of fact from someone who isn’t a one time visitor who had a revelation. You should travel more. If you want to know what America should be like, regarding race, go to Toronto. They have it down. I lived there for a while and in Montreal (same as in Mexico, on weekdays for a year). Montreal can be very racist.
Michael Barnes wrote: To be clear, I am not a paid influencer. My current income from hobby games writing is $0.
Sorry I thought GW comped you copies of games.
- Michael Barnes
- Topic Author
- Offline
- Mountebank
- HYPOCRITE
- Posts: 16929
- Thank you received: 10375
- Colorcrayons
- Offline
- D8
- Wiz-Warrior
- Posts: 1693
- Thank you received: 1703
moofrank wrote:
...and ditching a look at the latest Arkham Horror...
This is Lovecraft filtered through Nikki Valens...there is no way any of that will filter through her...
This is a salient point. One that needs repeating.
- Michael Barnes
- Topic Author
- Offline
- Mountebank
- HYPOCRITE
- Posts: 16929
- Thank you received: 10375
- Space Ghost
- Offline
- D10
- fastkmeans
- Posts: 3456
- Thank you received: 1304
- hotseatgames
- Offline
- D12
- Posts: 7176
- Thank you received: 6291
- SuperflyPete
- Offline
- Salty AF
- SMH
- Posts: 10733
- Thank you received: 5119
Michael Barnes wrote: This is true- I’ll wait to hear about it before I completely dismiss it. If there is anyone working in games today who could actually subvert the racist subtexts And do something interesting with it...it’s her.
There’s no level of revisionism that she can do to change the fact that he was racist, though. I mean, you can look at any Mythos after it based on Lovecraft, and no matter how sanitized it is, the fact remains that it stands on the shoulders of a man who was a bit deplorable.
- Michael Barnes
- Topic Author
- Offline
- Mountebank
- HYPOCRITE
- Posts: 16929
- Thank you received: 10375
But also not likely possible in an FFG/Asmodee game...
I repeat, he could not have written what he wrote without being racist. Maybe not even if he were the lynching type. Then he might have believed it possible to triumph over those evils. I don’t know.
Do you treat it like Taymor’s Caliban and make the representation of whatever Great Old One just a regular black or mixed-race guy that’s misunderstood or rightfully angry?
Lovecraft was a scared little douchebag that spun some awesome art from that fear. Whenever you see someone being an ignorant asshole you have to know it comes from fear. Rather than using anger, rage and violence he used a pen to settle himself down. His nerves killed him he was so wound up with fear. As was popular at the time he put down every culture that wasn't WASP. I'm white but also of Irish Catholic descent and undoubtedly a guy like him would look down his nose at me for that reason. It's just the way it was and it sucked.
GorillaGrody wrote:
Not Sure wrote: I very strongly agree with his followup post that "fuck it, everything's worse, your shit doesn't matter, stop bumming me out" is a basically nihilist view. I can't get behind that.
I’m not sure about that, because I can’t make it out, but I have a feeling that you’ll hate what I actually said more.
What I actually said, reworded, is that the idea that all contradictory evidence deriving from a single source is mere hypocrisy, and dismissible at face, is contrary to any known process of developing and acting on information. Such an idea promotes inertia. It is the main mode of shit like South Park and Bill Maher, but it’s also replaced most of what counts as news online and on television. No one has anything nice to say about Trump but that he’s supposedly not a hypocrite. And that serves a very specific kind of nihilism which says that, as a white guy, I’m going to live as comfortably as I can until it all goes to shit, at which point I get to use m’guns.
I don't know why you'd feel I would hate that, reworded or not. I agree with what you said in both phrasings, and I was just a lot more glib about how I repeated it.
I'm not going to double-post for the followups (since I was the guy who split the discussion first), so for the second post I think you and I have very different notions of what "left" and "right" mean. If you feel that there's never really been an actual left-wing in American politics, then I could see how we're arguing past each other. This isn't a productive place to hash any of that out, so I can drop it. Be nice to each other on the site was my main point. There are some perfectly good right-tending folks here.
SuperflyTNT wrote: So, the question regarding his racist view is whether his racist stuff has caused anyone else to become racist. I doubt that highly. I think, at best, it's his own personal hangup and some of the subtle stuff slipped into his writing, which didn't affect the whole of his writing's impact. He created Cthulhu, not KKK.
This is a very very low bar. The issue isn't "does his writing make people racist?" The issue is "does this industry need to base such a high amount of its IP on something that's pretty exclusionary to anyone but white males?" What's the upside there? Is it acting as a signal that some people aren't welcome? Those are the questions worth asking.
Do what y'all want, but for my own part, Lovecraft's racism is such a minor, minor portion of his overall writing that nobody remembers it directly. I mean, think of how many characters and places you can think of off of the top of your head, how many stories you can name, and then ask yourself how many times he said something racist and how impactful that comment was to the overall story. I think it's pretty clear that it's a minute part of his overall writing.
Okay. Your prerogative. I'm not even interested in trying to make you feel bad. Different folks can come to different conclusions. I'd say check out the NPR link I put above for a different viewpoint, if you're interested. TWBG really isn't very diverse, so it can get echoey in here.
Regarding the spoiler, I hope you find what makes you happy. The other day I had some Constitutional discussion filtering through my mind, and I knew you'd be a good guy to cross-check with, but I couldn't figure out a non-fighty way to engage on that. That sucks, honestly.
Don't read below. Trust me.
Don't tell me what to do! I do what I want!
Not Sure wrote:
GorillaGrody wrote: By contrast, Lovecraft was purely representative of a strain of middle-class, middlebrow American ultrarightism which has gone unchanged for a hundred years. He was afraid of non-whites, female bodies, and the idea of biological evolution, learned just enough about these things to freak himself out even more, and so decided he would hide in his little apartment, in his little town, and write stories about miscegenated vagina monsters until he died.
Nothing about this was remotely right-wing, especially at the time. There were lots of full-fledged racists on all sides of economic theory (example: Wilson, as I stated). I'm about as lefty as you'll find on the site, but I really think continuing to paint HPL as "right-wing" is just baiting the right-leaning members of the site, and incorrect. We have a whole Trash Talk section for that. I stopped going there for my own mental health. The defection of Southern Democrats to the GOP after Johnson completely changed the left/right landscape with regard to race as political policy, and that was long after HPL was dead.
www.dailysignal.com/2017/05/10/ugly-racism-karl-marx/