Uff, sorry mate, I'm too old to be any active keyboard warrior, would love to have this discussion over a beer, but it would take too much time and energy to type it all out. I'll just say that with "psychotic" I was referring to a whole slew of problems our society has these days, racism being just one of them.
And to conclude this, in wise words of Mr. Mackey: Racism is bad, mkay.
Nuff said.
edit: had to edit this post, will be my last posting here as even moderators have turned ill:
That is very ill and very low of you, you lost all my respect and your credibility.
I'm going to go ahead and call this wrong. Viewers don't construct context, they construct interpretation. The context is the framework, the boundaries defining a situation. Interpretation is deciding what those boundaries actually mean.
Context: a person pulls out their wallet at a store and drops $20
Interpretation 1: money isn't very important to them, they drop it and don't even notice!
Interpretation 2: that person isn't aware of their surroundings, maybe they are impaired?
Interpretation 3: hey, they dropped $20, I should return it to them
Interpretation 4: hey, they dropped $20, it's my lucky day! Hope they don't see me picking it up before they realize its gone.
The context won't change: someone dropped $20 at a store. The rest is interpretation unless investigated, opening a line of communication to discover the real answer.
Rant over.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
That's actually a good example to show how things can go horribly wrong if context is applied wrong:
1. Person A really likes white cars.
2. Person A buys white car.
3. Person B now calls Person A a bigoted racist piece of shit for owning a white car.
4. Person A doesn't know what they did wrong and the divide between people increases.
Not racist, but still a good example for Magic things taken out of context: Triumph of Ferocity. The fight where Garruk wanted Liliana to lift the Veil curse from him was completely taken out of context with social media echo chambers screaming "RAPE!", resulting in Garruk being shifted out for years. That this wasn't the flavor of the card and that Liliana won the fight as depicted in Triumph of Cruelty was completely ignored.
It isn't "overly sensitive" at all. It is just sensative. The "overly" rejoinder is your commentary, not a fact of their response.
That is so out of context is is hard to reply. Sure, their new marketing and design methodology is likely (in the long-term) flawed in my opinion, but they are not in the business of catering to me, they are in the business of selling cards. Been working swimmingly for them in that regard.
You focus on the wrong part. The fact is that this game is aimed at being inclusive. These cards are not deemed to fit that ideal. You can disagree freely. But there is rational and justified belief on this front, even if you don't see it that way. The thing is, these card, if they ever saw play, likely would in EDH. At the store I go to, there are numerous sub-teen kids that play. So no, I don't agree that none would ever see these cards. And the precedence of them having existed so long tells us nothing but that Wizards was blasé from the get go and ongoingly, not that action now is unjustified.
You really are aimed at this "conspiracy" angle. I honestly don't think I can help you. Who's to say indeed. Probably best to just sell out now.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
I find this to be most disagreeable sentence in this entire thread. People are not children or babies. They do not need to be shielded from "offensive" material, particularly when that term is ever-changing, has no agreed upon meaning, and is inherently subjective.
In fact, I would go as far as to say you are doing the whole world a disservice by engaging in this type of paternalism. For example, in high school (at least when I was there decades ago and during essentially the pre-internet era) we were exposed to quite a number of books with racist themes that I'm sure were highly offensive to some of the teenagers reading them. This was a good thing.
Why you might ask? It sparks conversation. It sparks introspection. It sparks growth in individuals.
In today's climate, I don't think we could have had those important conversations. Someone would get offended. Their parents would complain. And the teacher may get in trouble or fired. This is a step in the wrong direction.
The wrong approach is to "root it out" which really just means ignore it or pretend it never existed which is what we're really talking about in the context of this conversation. By that logic, they should just stop teaching slavery in school and pretend it never existed. As you say, too offensive. Just root it out.
The right approach is to face ourselves as imperfect human beings head on. That is the only way for growth and real change as opposed to pandering and virtue signalling.
I think they've been doing this for years, they are just tightening the standards. How many cards got made/proposed/named/art submitted for and they said, "woah, no way!" and never saw the light of day? I have no idea, none of us do (unless there are secret Wizards employees lurking here).
They've done this before on a smaller scale with the pentagram/satanic artwork and depictions/use of demons. Maybe they will eventually ban some cards that actually see large amounts of play and people will have to make workarounds. That's it. But ultimately if people are less hesitant to approach the game because designers are (at least now) more actively approaching problem cards and acknowledging them and doing something about it, then is that not ultimately good for the game?
I think the point is if you compare polls from minority groups from the 90s compared to the last 10 years, the one's from the 90s said racism is less of a problem and that race-relations were better. Now, do we actually believe racism is more prevalent today than the 90s? No. So why do the polls from minority groups suggest that? Could outrage culture (i.e. people seemingly spending every waking moment of their day actively looking to interpret things in a manner in which offends them) have anything to do with it?
You don't even need the full context of the story to get the gist of what's going on.
Picture: Some dude pinning down a woman and threatening her with a weapon.
Flavor text: "Rid me of this curse, witch, or die with me."
So dude wants the evil witch to lift her curse from him or otherwise he's willing to kill her and then himself.
But hey, he chokes her, therefore it's sexual innuendo.
Except the exact same logic and the exact same groupthink is actually being applied in both situations. You're fooling yourself if you think you can neatly separate these things. Hasbro's approach to this is due to the new societal norms we are seeing crop up and if you think that has/will be confined to just this card game you are fooling yourself.
This isn't about the card game. This is about way way way more than that. This is just one ugly manifestation of a broader societal shift.
Magic actually perfectly and ironically embodies this. In the past, it was religious fundamentalists calling for censorship of this game. Now the woke people are the new censors. I disagreed it with then. I disagree with it now.
Well, I have read it, how does it clarify that it is not violence against women again? The only context the card gives is a man threatening a woman.
Yeah, because in school there is the context of discussion. This is a game which does not facilitate that at all. Again, see my earlier post.
The issue is not really safetyism or protectionism, but rather, making the game friendly, inviting and inclusive. You want to talk about topics such as racism, sexism and the like? Do that within a facilitating context, not a card game. Not everyone wants to have that discussion in a leisure activity. To expect Wizards to facilitate such discussions through Magic cards themselves is not a burden they could ever fulfill to anyone's satisfaction.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
Or could it be (even if these mention statistical analysis are robust and meaningful) people now just realize what is really going on and are more contingent of it?
You might want to look up what statistics were used from from the 1890's Census here in the US to see how statistics were used to present a broad and overtly racist ideas, leading up to and fueling many of the Jim Crow laws that were then put in place. Statistics are only meaningful when you can really isolate all the factors going into them. I hardly imagine we can do that here.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
I disagree that you can neatly separate areas of society/life that can be censored from areas that cannot be censored. Once you have a society that accepts censorship, it will permeate the entire society likely in a rapid and insidious fashion. If you don't make a stand early on this issue, it will spiral out of control until we are literally banning books in school, which oh by the way is already happening for the very same reason and why people are justifying these bans.
My disagreement with the banning of these cards is purely based on principle so if you are going to say "well this doesn't have a big effect so it's worth sacrificing it on the altar of not being offensive" I will say I disagree fundamentally with that notion. There is no degree of censorship that should be allowed in any aspect of society purely for some subjective notion of being offended.
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