PrimeJunta

Perpetual motion and the global conspiracy to suppress Nikola Tesla's free energy inventions, anyone? (I'm not saying it was aliens, but ... :aliens:)

Nah it's turned into a SIJW-vs-SJW free-for-all on any and all subjects. We have some guy who wants us to prove sociology to him, another who's wondering if it's OK to be mean to Jewish bankers, some stuff about global climate change, Ferguson, and the moon landing. Grab a beer and join the party. Only 22 posts until mods lock the thread for length.

@Heresiarch Ah, a global climate change skeptic as well. You an anti-vaxxer, moon landing denialist, or 9/11 truther too, by any chance?

After that one guy did FO:NV using no healing at all of any kind, I doubt Josh would underestimate what truly obsessed gamers are able to do.

Tolkien himself has explicitly stated that Middle-Earth is Earth, but "at a different stage of the imagination:" Source: http://www.lordotrings.com/interview.asp There's other stuff there too; for example the constellation Valacirca is what we call the Great Bear, and so on.

we saw what they (obsidian) were doing. did you expect to get a blow-by-blow account o' what every team member were doing? am not recalling that as a kickstarter pledge. *quickly reviews kickstarter page* nope. nothing such as what mc suggests is on kickstarter page. HA! Good Fun! Yes, a lawyer's answer indeed. Nah Gromnir isn't always wrong.

BUT MY VOICE MUST BE HEARD

Memory is a fuzzy thing but I seem to recall 'tank' being used when discussing BatMUD back in the late 80's even. Edit: can't have been late 80's at BatMUD was only started in 1990. So must've been very early '90's. Might be I'm thinking of some other MUD though. It was before I went to the army which was in late 1990... AberMUD? TinyMUD?

Conan the Barbarian. Which pretty much founded the genre. Robert E. Howard explicitly sets it on Earth during the "Hyborian Age," which is some time not that long after the end of the Ice Age, but before the emergence of the first historical civilizations (Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese etc). The Cimmerians would eventually become the Celts, the Carinthians the Greeks, the Aquilonians the Romans, the Zingarans the Roma, the Picts the English, the Keshans the Egyptians, the Khitaians the Chinese, and so on and so forth. All based on racist-essentialist ideas current at the time of course. Still good reads though!

Actually yes, your degree of privilege can be quantified, if you're so inclined. It's a multi-factor equation for sure. Your nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, native language, and many other things go into it. It's also entirely possible to be privileged in some respects (e.g. race) and disadvantaged in other respects (e.g. class or wealth). And groups definitely can be privileged or disadvantaged relative to each other. Whites are privileged relative to blacks. Individuals with inherited wealth are privileged relative to individuals with no inherited wealth. Straights relative to gays. So for example a white gay male enjoys white and male privilege, but is disadvantaged from homophobia. A black woman with inherited wealth is privileged from class but disadvantaged from race and sex. Which one of these privileges or disadvantages is relevant is situational of course. If a cop stops and searches her car because he thinks she must've stolen it (being black and driving an expensive car), she's suffering from racism. When she successfully lobbies for a change in regulations that gives her business an advantage, that's class privilege in action. Substitute "Jew" for "black" if you like: a rich Jew with inherited wealth will enjoy class privilege and suffer from anti-Semitism. The one does not preclude the other. As to the "punching" question, satirizing said rich Jew for class privilege would be punching up, but doing it by employing anti-Semitic tropes would be punching down. Seriously, it's nowhere near as obscure or complicated as you're trying to make it out to be. You as a Scanian may suffer from (probably pretty mild) disadvantage from Svealanders, while enjoying (probably pretty major) privilege relative to the recent Lebanese immigrants to Malmö.

"Tank" at least has been in current use since 1994 or longer. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_%28gaming%29#Origin ]

Jeebus. This is so elementary it's in introductory textbooks. It's like you're asking me to link to a peer-reviewed article demonstrating that the Earth goes around the Sun. But here you go, about 800,000 references: [ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=racism&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp= ]

It's all about figuring out where you stand in the social structure, usually by picking up on cues from other people; how they relate to you, how you relate to them. Most children start out by imagining they're the center of the universe, then eventually realize that they're not: that what they say impacts different people in different ways, and what different people say impacts them in different ways, and then they learn to modulate their behavior accordingly. What's perfectly cool between very close friends might be entirely unacceptable between strangers, even if the individuals in question belong to the same general social grouping. The shorthand for this is "growing up." Specifically in your case? I understand that Scania has a pretty nasty history of racism towards a whole bunch of groups, so if I was a Scanian I would be extra-careful not to play into the stereotype of Scanians as ignorant bumpkins who only beat up Arabs because they think they're Jews.

You do realize that you're asking me to prove an entire academic discipline to you in a forum post? You do realize that's exactly like the young-earth creationist asking you to prove general relativity to him in a forum post?

Punching up is not the same as punching down.

^ It doesn't seem to be working very well.

Dividing the day into quarters is "natural" -- sunrise and sunset, noon and midnight. The quarters could be different lengths in different seasons (assuming Eora has an axial tilt), of course. It doesn't split into three with similar "natural" markers. A twin star could produce that kind of natural division. Another possibility would be that whoever designed the clock was from a dominant culture with a high-latitude capital, where winter solstice would (coincidentally) have daylight for about 1/3 of the cycle (and summer solstice would have 1/3 of night). Seems a bit contrived to be sure, but weirder reasons for scales and measures have happened, like Fahrenheit's 100-point where it is because Mr. Fahrenheit happened to be running a temperature on the day he fixed the scale. If there is an in-lore explanation for the division into 27, I'd be curious to hear it. Even if Josh came up with it ex post facto.

They could've done that just as well with a 32-hour day though. Mah immershun!

I've experienced black-on-white racial prejudice first-hand twice in my lifetime. Both incidents were extremely unpleasant, but only feelings were hurt. The first time was when I was dating a black girl and her father made it clear that he did not approve. The second was when I had sent a polite "Thank you for your application" reply to a job applicant, who accused me of rejecting the application because he had an African name. I can only imagine what it must be like to experience stuff like that and much worse on a daily basis rather than once every twenty years or so.

Yeah but what difference does it make since game time proceeds at a different rate anyway? Why display it as 27 hours per day? :mystery:

That is not true. The sociological definition of racism is in broad use among academics who study society, i.e., sociologists. You'll find it or something like it in any introductory sociology textbook. This one, for example. It is based on broad and extensive research going back more than 50 years or so. It is also in use among a large group of non-academics interested in social issues. All that is fact. That you believe the sociologists are wrong is neither here nor there. The definition is still in broad use and asserting that it's not won't change that. You will also need to do a good deal more work to demonstrate that they're wrong than simply asserting that it's "pure sophistry." Edit: Added citation.

@Heresiarch Read the thread. The discussion you're replying to is based on my citing a sociological definition of racism. Edit: in case you're lazy, here it is again. (BTW there is no such thing as 'social Marxism.' There's plain ol' Marxism and a whole bunch of schools of thought under that umbrella. I, for example, am a Bernsteinian-Eurocommunist with occasional bouts of Trotskyite revolutionary fervor, and when it comes to philosophy of history, my thinking is closest to Eric Hobsbawm's.)

That doesn't make much sense either as game time does not flow at the same rate as real time over here. Not sure how long a day-night cycle takes, but it's a LOT less than 27 real-time hours. More like an hour maybe?

27 hours. I find that rather odd actually. An hour is an arbitrary division. What prompted the Eorans to divide the day-night cycle into 27 rather than 24? Of course 24 is entirely arbitrary as well, but at least it divides neatly into 12 (day/night) and 6 (day until noon/day after noon, night before midnight/night after midnight). 27 OTOH is 3^3, but the day doesn't "naturally" divide into 3. If whoever created the division was mathematically inclined, I'd have expected her to settle on a power of 2 as that divides up even more neatly than, say, 24. I'd have gone with 32. The Earth of Numenera has a 28-hour day, but that's because the Earth's rotation has supposedly slowed while the length of the hour has been retained all through the billions of years and rise and fall of vast civilizations. (Which strikes me as a bit puzzling also frankly.) Mysteries...

That's not the concept. It's simply one aspect of racism (sociological), namely systemic racism. There was a whole list of ways in which racism (sociological) manifests. What's more, the definition of 'racism' I linked to is also an established one in common usage. It's the standard usage in sociology, and it is in broad use among non-academics who are actively interested in the concept -- activitsts, politicians, and what have you. So, I'll make an alternative proposal: in situations where both definitions of racism are in use and there's a risk of confusion, how about we add a qualifier to one or both usages? Say, "racism (sociological)" or "racism (s)" for the definition I linked to, and "racism (ideological)" or "racism (i)" for the one you linked to? Nuance is always lost. Brevity is also a virtue. IME discussions usually devolve into bickering about semantics -- like we're doing here -- unless everyone agrees simply to clarify terms once a misunderstanding is identified, and move on. Life is not academic writing which requires you to define your terms from the outset.