D&D General On Early D&D and Problematic Faves: How to Grapple with the Sins of the Past

I feel like there are entire cable news channels, which helped create the problem, that would beg to differ.

And you know who the most entrenched, virulent, and unhinged segment of the population used to be?

The old timers, plugged into said cable news channels, every waking hour.

You know who wasnt?

The people who were just out at work, or out at the park, or out anywhere, but not glued to the TV to watch those cable stations.

Fast forward with some 'progress' and what do we all have at our reach every waking second? At work? In the bathroom? At home? On our nightstand?

Whats the first inanimate object people are reaching for now? Its not an alarm clock. Whats the last inanimate object they put down before they finally pass out? Its not a book.

Its a different scale now, and anyone thinking about knows it.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

And you know who the most entrenched, virulent, and unhinged segment of the population used to be?

The old timers, plugged into said cable news channels, every waking hour.

You know who wasnt?

The people who were just out at work, or out at the park, or out anywhere, but not glued to the TV to watch those cable stations.

Fast forward with some 'progress' and what do we all have at our reach every waking second? At work? In the bathroom? At home? On our nightstand?

Whats the first inanimate object people are reaching for now? Its not an alarm clock. Whats the last inanimate object they put down before they finally pass out? Its not a book.

Its a different scale now, and anyone thinking about knows it.

It is like 100x the strength of the old cable TV echo chambers, but enables us to quickly reach a consensus and form into literal or figurative mobs. People who watched news all day when we were younger could be annoying but their speeches rarely reached past the barstool. And there was often much more face to face interaction involved. If you had an older family member taking oddball views from stuff they saw on TV, you still had other things connecting you to that person. I think when all we have is a persons words and a screen name, it is easier to demonize them
 


This feels needlessly aggressive, especially when we're discussing online communities turning people needlessly aggressive.

Inception GIF


Probably fair, I apologize, as I've seen for years people push back against it, despite people from the same companies that are the 'problem' coming out and saying 'yeah we have the best people on this, we are getting your kids hooked and messing them up' I get frustrated.

Still, my bad, I apologize.
 

It was more difficult to avoid other information in the pre and early net days. You can be completely immersed in echo chambers now with algorithms pushing you farther down the rabbit hole.
No, not really.

I mean there's entire periods of horrific examples of people being incredibly terrible to other groups of people because of what they happened to be told.

While we do still have horrible people in the world, and I'm not going to pretend we don't, we generally aren't quite as willing to believe in final solutions as we used to be.

Or, put it another way. When someone was found to be against social norms, there was a time in very recent history, in our own countries, where those people would be forcibly sterilized, institutionalized or imprisoned. Now? Now, people who are found to be against social norms lose their jobs. Sometimes. It's pretty rare that we drag people who don't follow social norms out of their homes and murder them in public anymore.
 

It was more difficult to avoid other information in the pre and early net days. You can be completely immersed in echo chambers now with algorithms pushing you farther down the rabbit hole.

By that same token the "let us present these two sides as equal in the debate" is how you get a professor of Astrophysics with multiple scientific prizes to his name, debating with Dave from [] about whether or not the Earth is flat, and why the professor won't take Dave's "evidence" of his own eyes seeing a flat world seriously.

There are also sites and apps that are actively working to combat echo chambers, such a Ground News which consistently shows media from across the spectrum to compare and contrast.
 

While we do still have horrible people in the world, and I'm not going to pretend we don't, we generally aren't quite as willing to believe in final solutions as we used to be.
Hard disagree.
Or, put it another way. When someone was found to be against social norms, there was a time in very recent history, in our own countries, where those people would be forcibly sterilized, institutionalized or imprisoned.
Now? Now, people who are found to be against social norms lose their jobs. Sometimes.
And sometimes it's done covertly until it gets exposed.
It's pretty rare that we drag people who don't follow social norms out of their homes and murder them in public anymore.
Well, at least we have that red line to guide us.
 

Hard disagree.

And sometimes it's done covertly until it gets exposed.

Well, at least we have that red line to guide us.
I dunno. It's been a few generations since the last time we had large groups of people act on final solutions. The idea that somehow people were less likely to believe garbage and live in an information vacuum in the past seems a bit out of sync wiht history, considering what widespread beliefs of the time led to.

I know there's this big push to believe that somehow we're living in the worst of times, but, seriously, by every possible measure, we are better today than we were fifty years ago.
 

No, not really.

I mean there's entire periods of horrific examples of people being incredibly terrible to other groups of people because of what they happened to be told.

Unfortunately this is a hard discussion to have without getting into politics but I think it is true we aren't where we were in say the 30s on this stuff. I don't think that means we can't be concerned about trends


While we do still have horrible people in the world, and I'm not going to pretend we don't, we generally aren't quite as willing to believe in final solutions as we used to be.

No, but demonizing language is one of the steps towards that kind of thinking. I think we would have a long way to go to get there. At the same time, I have seen language and views expressed in recent years that would have stunned me twenty years ago

Or, put it another way. When someone was found to be against social norms, there was a time in very recent history, in our own countries, where those people would be forcibly sterilized, institutionalized or imprisoned. Now? Now, people who are found to be against social norms lose their jobs. Sometimes. It's pretty rare that we drag people who don't follow social norms out of their homes and murder them in public anymore.

I think we shouldn't minimize how much a regular person's life can be ruined by public shaming or attention on social media. A job is everything. That is a roof over your head, that is food on your table, and jobs are hard to get for a lot of people (especially jobs that pay all the bills). Being ostracized, in an age of global interconnection through social media and the internet is one of the worst things a person can experience (even in ancient greece that was considered an especially cruel punishment----though there it was a formal punishment so there is clearly a difference). It is true people aren't getting dragged from their homes and murdered, but I don't think that is a reason to be happy or okay with how cruel we are being to one another in this age. Also suicide is a very real byproduct of this kind of social media behavior. Many people are one bad day on social media away from taking their lives.

I think it is unwise to compare the present situation to say Nazi Germany or forced sterilizations of the past. Those are objectively much worse. But I look around and I do not like what people are becoming in their interactions with one another, in the levels of cruelty folks seem comfortable with when there is keyboard distance between themselves and the life they are trying to ruin
 

I dunno. It's been a few generations since the last time we had large groups of people act on final solutions. The idea that somehow people were less likely to believe garbage and live in an information vacuum in the past seems a bit out of sync wiht history, considering what widespread beliefs of the time led to.
The problem is that we are growing closer to having this period again and this behavior has continued in other parts of the world.

Civility and open discourse is dying. Society is becoming more tribal. People will take the worst examples of the respective sides and paint everyone with that brush and say things like “you cannot debate, tolerate, or accept evil.”

It happens all the time. It happens here in tons of threads.

It is not a huge leap from they’re evil to pull them from their homes.

The majority of people are being used and played to prevent from settling on compromises that will best serve them.
 

Remove ads

Top