Best spin: Pundit‘s “persona“ is an unfunny joke. Read the room and let it die.
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TSR Giantlands
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Ancalagon
Dusty Dragon
... personal or persona?
Bolares
Hero
yeah, saying "pundit is a bigot, but comparing him to Duke is absurd!" is kind of pointless, there is no degree of acceptable bigotry...
Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad (he/him)
Sure. But scu [Edit - I had a sentence here, and I must have accidentally erased it during an edit and I don't recall what it was. So I didn't just want to let that half-sentence hang there without some explanation. ]
NOBODY is asking you to cut him any breaks or give him forgiveness points. I have no idea how you could get that impression from the post you were responding to. I don't know how much more clear I can make "Pundit is wrong about most things" that you'd think I am asking you to somehow cut him some special slack?
I think arguing over degrees of how bad someone is really super important though. For the reasons I gave.
We cannot get to the point where, if someone at some point in their life says something we deeply disagree with, that's it for all of eternity and they're written off as the worst of the worst of human beings.
And not because we feel bad for THEM. But because of the very reasons Popper was writing about - you hurt your cause, the issues you believe in deeply, when you do that. You fail to counter bad arguments with good arguments. The bad arguments then find their audience and grow and grow, because you've "excommunicated" them from having to respond to reasoned discourse directly about their ideas. And more importantly, you've written off massive swaths of humanity who become those audiences. You've basically removed yourself from the marketplace of ideas because you're "too good" to be seen discussing ideas with someone who you wrote off as "too bad" to talk to.
We're circling smaller and smaller niche circles of communication these days. And you can never persuade someone to see things the way you see them if you don't bother to even try to communicate with them (and by "them" I do not mean Pundit - I mean all the people who will listen to the things Pundit has to say, though they likely do not agree with all the things Pundit says.)
Yes, they're being authoritarian. Any time you dismiss dissent, and try to silence dissent, it's an authoritarian act. That doesn't mean all authoritarian acts are wrong - but it does mean the wisdom of Popper's Paradox is that MOST of the time it's wrong except in only the most dire cases. And expanding the definition of "dire cases" to include just about any real dissent isn't what Popper meant.
As for anger being righteous - that's itself a bit dangerous. It's OK to be angry with views you disagree with of course, and we all get angry. But all orthodoxies think of themselves and their positions as righteous. The people we're arguing with think of their views as righteous. There could be no better argument for "there is a new orthodoxy" than thinking our views are the one true righteous views. That makes this akin to a religious fight. And dehumanizing people becomes much easier if you think you're the righteous one.
Who has argued that anyone should support those things? I certainly have not. I thought it was hilarious that someone chided me for not watching the video, while arguing we shouldn't support that interview show. As if "support" wasn't "watching." I've never encouraged anyone to support those shows - I've said don't paint person A's views with those of person B purely because those two people have a public conversation. THAT to me is a toxic approach to communication. That was the heart of, "Were you see at a meeting with..." type questions.
None of that has anything to do with what I was advocating though. The authoritarianism is the "toxic by association" accusation and the "any level of toxicity is all levels of toxicity because the well is poisoned now" claims. Those are clearly established authoritarian beliefs throughout history and not justified by Popper's Paradox except in the most extreme cases, and even then only after every direct attempt is made to refute those beliefs (even if it's over and over again.)
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Sacrosanct
Legend
Are you seriously drinking that glass of spoiled milk?
What? It's not like I'm drinking a gallon of it.
More to the point, and I won't use any analogies because that gets into politics (I don't need to because you all probably know anyway), but it's been proven that it doesn't matter if someone is playing a persona to foster and encourage toxic beliefs, because it has happened, more than once, when people believing those beliefs have engaged in actual harming of others.
And it is of my opinion that the person who fosters and encourages that behavior is at some point culpable. I do not buy into the "I was just playing a personality" or "We're entertainment, not news, and any reasonable person should know what we say is so outrageous it shouldn't be believed" defenses.
I.e., even if Pundit is playing a character, he is fostering and creating an environment that encourages harmful behavior. Not just outright bigotry, but actual calls of violence against liberal gamers. And that, IMO, is something he has culpability for because he owns and runs the platform they are saying this, and encourages it with his "persona".
Bolares
Hero
Bigotry is not dissent
Gradine
The Elephant in the Room (she/her)
This is a strawman; nobody is arguing this. Of course bigots can reform. But making space for bigots to spread their bigotry on the off chance they'll just... reform themselves is both (a) a plan that is never going to work and (b) allows them to continue to harm their target marginalized victims.
This last point is what every bad "it's the wokescold mobs that are the real problem!" take seems to forget/dismiss/just not care about. Bigotry isn't a bad thing just because; it's not just something that's morally objectionable by default. That's a complete tautology. Bigotry is bad because it harms people, oftentimes people who already more vulnerable for a host of other reasons.
If you want to know what it looks like when bigots are given space to have their views shared and legitimized as "dissent", ask a trans woman in the UK how things are going in their country right now.
Gradine
The Elephant in the Room (she/her)
Incredibly important point:
Bolares
Hero
Another strawman, we are not saying that, we are saying any level of bigotry is all levels of bigotry, please stop calling bigotry other things.
PsyzhranV2
Hero
While Pundit may be an outcast in the insular community of TTRPG creators and designers, the views he boosts (whether sincerely or not) are unfortunately still very common and vocal in wider nerd culture. The targets of his bigotry, people outside the "White allocishet male" demographic that remains the unspoken default both in nerd culture and in Western society at large, are thankfully gaining more representation in the RPG field, but in real life their demographics continue to remain underrepresented and marginalized. Pundit's rhetoric may fail to convince dedicated RPG designers who have long since learned that he has nothing of value to contribute to the hobby, but dedicated RPG designers aren't who he's speaking to. He's speaking to bitter, entitled, and privileged men who don't know a d20 from a d12 and yet yearn for the "good ol' days" when there weren't so many "minorities" fouling up "their" hobby. They flock to him as a rallying point, to justify and strengthen their own hatred. And that has real world consequences. Working to counteract that isn't "authoritarian"; in fact, what's "authoritarian" is Pundit's own attempts to boost the status quo or even retrogression within the hobby. He is in the dominant position, and his victims are not.
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