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The argumentum ad antiquitatem isn't entirely invalid in this context, though. There was a pretty big revolt against an entire edition of D&D because it didn't do things the way they had always been done. Players are, to a greater or lesser extent, looking for continuity with the past of the...

The reason the question of who counts as a "person" is so important is that, once you count as a person to somebody, their moral intuitions toward you are basically similar regardless of culture or religion: we'd be hard-pressed to find a society where one can lie to, steal from, or injure a...

I'm not sure that's true -- especially not the "always" part. "Plausible human culture" stands in contrast with "always-chaotic-evil monsters bent on destruction". Where orcs and drow are presented as the latter, they're definitely not the former. It's worth noting that even in their original...

I think the fact that we're having this conversation is evidence that what seems clear to you is not so clear to everyone. And simply blaming them for not listening hard enough is unlikely to clarify matters. "Position X is obvious, and if you think Y you're just not paying attention." How well...

The Klingons are just humans in costumes, though. Figuratively as well as literally. There's nothing particularly alien about their psychology or culture. It is a complex and interesting fictional culture, to be sure, I'm not criticizing the writing there, but it could plausibly be a human...

Complications arise in that a foot is an objective physical object that you either stepped on or you didn't, whereas the meaning of a fantasy scenario is a matter for interpretation. Going the other way, if somebody were to claim that orcs carry a lot of cultural signifiers of medieval Germanic...

Forget active healthy gorillas. Back in the bad old days, carnivals used to let the strongest men in town try their luck wrestling defanged and hobbled chimpanzees. The humans' money was as good as gone as soon as they put it down.

It is also that. But it is making specific historical and literary claims, so it seems to be striving toward or paying respect to the metric of "Are these claims supported by the evidence?" An article is good when all the pieces come together, and they don't here.

Normally when the first paragraph of an article brings up an author and then makes a strong claim about that author's intent, I interpret that claim as a thesis statement: "This is what I am going to demonstrate." I think the article is bogged down by trying poorly to do this historical/literary...

"Personhood", or "moral personhood" for specificity, is the term a philosopher would be most likely to use.

It purports to be: "This is the first installment of a two-article series about the racist origins, nature, and ramifications of orcs, a malevolent humanoid species from English author JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasy setting. I started researching this article with the hypothesis that a...

They're... not, actually. Hodes barely does any analysis of Tolkien's text in an article that is supposed to be, y'know, that. I'm not saying that Tolkien was actually a sensitive progressive with no problematic elements whatsoever, but if you want to demonstrate the problems, you should find a...

WotC is a business. They are not in business to promote politics of any sort, they are in business to make money. Whatever the personal opinions of their staff, they wouldn't be doing any of this if they didn't think it would make them more money than doing otherwise. Note that every "political"...

Gotta agree with this. Setting aside all the questions about real-world racism and just taking the in-game fiction at face value, goliaths are like eight feet tall. If anything, +2 Strength undersells it. Note that firbolgs get a Strength bump too, even though they live in far more hospitable...

There is a difference between dismissing the content of an argument and pointing out that a person attempting to advance an argument is shooting themselves in the foot. I'm not going to touch on the content of the argument, because that's waaay outside the scope of this thread. But I am going to...

"Black lives matter" means exactly what it says. You don't have to stop and explain that you don't mean what it looks like you mean. And to bring this back around to the topic, most if not all of this fifty-two-page thread is based on people not liking the wording of D&D's "race" system, so I...

You refrained from spelling out what "ACAB" literally stands for. I recognize that this whole paragraph of explanation is difficult to fit on a signboard, but I also suspect a part of you recognizes that "All Cops Are Bastards" might well be the worst possible way to condense it. Orcslayer78 was...

I think you'll find that everybody gets more from this kind of conversation if we all respond to what the other side is actually saying, rather than the stuff we would like them to say because it's patently silly and thus really easy to refute.

In the books? Extermination by the men and elves. In the movies? As far as can be discerned, they all fell into an extremely convenient pit.

You might be technically correct (depending on how one interprets the "action" in "bonus action"), but this seems like a strange rules artifact, and I've yet to encounter a DM who doesn't let people use bonus actions as their regular action. Well, I guess I have now, but you take my point.