#i logically understand that people actually mean commune or group or something innocuous

[deservedgrace]

The lack of understanding and empathy for cult survivors is really alienating. Because the same people that (rightfully) get upset hearing domestic violence jokes or rape jokes will make jokes about starting a cult.

[bigenderbefriender]

On Ethos:

So here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot: there’s actually not a whole lot of difference between respectability politics and identity politics. Namely, they both assign value to arguments based on the person giving the argument rather than the quality of the argument itself.

Which, I know, is a big step to take, but hear me out:

Respectability politics is predicated on the idea that people who are /successful/ must inherently know more. That is to say, people who are educated, who can adapt to changing norms, and who can talk eloquently are inherently the best sources of information. Under this system, the inverse is also true: those who are uneducated, those who fail to meet norms, and those who do not speak eloquently are bad sources of information.

This makes sense to some degree; you’d naturally expect a person with an advanced degree in a topic to have a more sound opinion in that topic than some random person on the street. The problem here is that someone’s respectability (as I loosely defined it above) and their knowledge of a topic are correlated, but NOT causatively related (especially when it comes to the social norms aspect).

If, for instance, we were to consider the topic of poverty in the United States, it would be easy to look to published economists and study what they have to say in order to form our opinions. However, this strategy is flawed in that there is a prominent survivorship bias as to /who/ gets published. College is behind a huge paywall, and grad school even higher. That means that the people who can publish books on economics must have had—at some point—the money to go to college. Whether this is because they came from a wealthy family or because they had the social capital to make their way through or for any number of reasons, they have had that money. This naturally excludes people who do not have the time or energy to work to earn that much money on top of money to live on. Then we can look at the differing opinions between these two groups: people who come from wealthy backgrounds or who believe that they were just good enough to put themselves through college no problem (by relying on their social capital) have a vested interest in publishing information that protects their privilege and the systems that keep them at their current status. That is, the wealthy have a vested interest in selling poverty-as-moral-failing because this ideology keeps them afloat. Ideas that disagree are necessarily a minority because they cannot be developed in the conditions that American poverty actually enforces.

Similarly, let us look at the basis of identity politics and an example of its failing. Identity politics is predicated on a simple concept: “I am a member of a group that is oppressed in x way, and therefore I am familiar with that type of oppression.” It’s simple, it’s innocuous, but it’s a powerful statement. In particular, the ideology demands the inverse be true as well: those who are not members of an oppressed group do not have familiarity with that brand of oppression. Another aspect of identity politics is the idea of intersectionality: that there are multiple axes of oppression that do not superimpose but magnify each other.

From these ideas, a basic formation can be created, wherein members of the majority with respect to a particular issue are expected to sit back and accept the discussion of a minority group about that type of oppression. Again, this makes sense: you don’t expect your typical white person to understand the intricacies of racism, so they should generally sit back and let others talk about it, right?

There are a couple of problems with this. First, it requires that any interaction be understood in the context of a majority/minority axis, wherein one person has systemic power over the other. However, this is actually rarely the case; if, for instance, an indigenous woman and a black man are talking about racism in the United States, neither of them actually has any structural power over the other. One may be individually biased against the other, but that actually doesn’t matter on any grand scale because neither of them can use a position of authority to discriminate against the other. Are we, then, to consider these two part of the same group? Well, yes, according to identity politics. They are both poc, so they must be the same. Never mind that the stereotypes and oppression of black people and natives are rooted in completely different ideologies; anti black racism is rooted in the idea that black people need to be motivated, by poverty, by violence, by whatever means possible to work for white people. That is, anti black racism is based on the idea that black people should be slaves. Anti-indigenous racism is based on the idea that natives are savage, uncivilized, a people of the past. Anti-indigenous racism is predicated on the idea that natives should not exist. Neither of these people has structural power over the other, nor are they part of the same group, so idpol is useless in analyzing their interactions.

The same goes for people from wholly different axes of oppression. The classic example is that of a white woman and a black man. Which has moral authority to criticize the other? Well, neither, not on the base of minority status alone. But idpol demands that this question have an answer, and that will change a lot depending on who you ask (and what minority group they identify with most strongly).

The second problem with idpol is that it creates a strong in-group/out-group dynamic. Those who are members of a minority group have their voices elevated, their opinions discussed. Those who are not are shut down, told to be better allies and to stay out of the way. The natural result is the creation of identities that appear to be minority groups because they fall outside of what is truly the majority for the express purpose of joining the in-group. The most prominent example is within the lgtbq+ community: there are several identities out there that serve as ways for straight people to validate their opinions (heteroflexible and sapiosexual are two that come to mind). The perception that this is happening on a large scale (regardless of whether it is, and in fact despite the fact that it isn’t) results in gatekeepers, be they terfs who think that trans women pose a genuine threat to feminism and women, or be they regs who think that asexuality is just another way to sneak into a community that isn’t theirs. The toxicity that results is its own condemnation.

This in-group dynamic also reinforces unhealthy beliefs within minority communities. @betterbemeta has already discussed the masochistic epistemology discussed by Natalie Wynn, and I won’t attempt to recreate that discussion. I will add to it, though, with another example: that of the mogai subgroup of the lgbtq+ community. Within this group, any identity is a valid minority identity (if you’ll notice, the opposite reaction of terfs and regs). This, of course, leads to “identities” that are actually the result of trauma being promoted as healthy forms of human sexuality (the example that comes to mind is thinking sexual thoughts but becoming repulsed whenever any action is taken to fulfill them; it’s an older example of course, but I’m sure some of you will remember it).  The core belief here is that if any identity can be justified as being sufficiently painful—interchangeable in this context with being sufficiently oppressed—it must be valid and therefore included in the community.

Finally, this disregards the role that interaction and study can have in creating robust opinions.  An example I saw (albeit many years ago now) is that a gay 13 yo knows more about being gay than a 40 yo straight queer studies professor.  Which, to some degree can be true: even proximity to the community doesn’t really teach you what it means to be in it.  However, there is something to be said for experience.  I’d argue that through her work during the AIDS crisis, Debbie Reynolds learned and knew much more about the lgbtq+ community and its history than most members of the community today know.  Not because she was just inherently smarter, but because that work pays off.  Likewise, the experience of a gay man living in Los Angeles is very different from the experience of a gay man living in Oklahoma City.  That doesn’t make either opinion better, or worse; even if they contradict, there’s no point in trying to assign value to their opinions based on who’s had the “more oppressed” experience.

So at this point I’m sure you’re wondering what the point is: what’s the alternative? After all, idpol is extremely popular, and for good reason: it’s a powerful tool for understanding the distribution of knowledge within a larger society. But both it and respectability lolitics are victims of the method of thinking that I’d call ethos politics: the politics formed by assessing a people’s opinions based on some identifiable aspect of their being.

My suggestion would be a dual system that mixes the best aspects of pathos and logos. At the core of every logical argument is a set of assumptions (axioms if we’re thinking mathematically, just assumptions otherwise). These assumptions can only be justified by pathos; no logical argument can support, for instance, my beliefs that every human has inalienable rights and that it is the government’s responsibility to protect those rights. I can only argue from a pathos perspective: if either of those conditions is unmet, people will suffer unnecessarily. From those, a number of logical derivatives can be established and argued.

[lumsel]

TF2 is a cutting parody of Overwatch and I can prove it

And when I say parody, I don’t mean it as in one of those “Minecraft Parodies” you see on the youtubes where they switch some lyrics around and call it a day without really commenting on the source material, I mean it as in TF2 is a biting deconstruction of Overwatch and everything it represents. Now I’m sure you have all sorts of questions involving release dates and, I dunno, logic, but bear with me here for a moment because this shit runs deep:

Overwatch’s characters have a diverse range of origins and personalities, presented as the best of the best from all over the world. Artists, Innovators, Heroes, Overwatch lets you play as great people who fight for great causes. Granted, there’s a bit of some weird dissonance between how they act and how they play, we’ve all made jokes about how weirdly cheerful Mei is about killing people, but overall they’re just a bunch of lovable goofs. Hell, even the so-called bad guys are impossible to hate, because they just have so much personality baked into them.

TF2′s cast is comprised of foolish, incompetent mercenaries, who are explicitly not the best of the best but rather a bunch of idiots the Administrator got to fight her pointless battles without any motivations beyond the money they earn. They aren’t lovable; entertaining to be sure, but they aren’t exactly the kinds of folks you’d sit down and have a beer with. Examining them at an individual level reveals further criticisms:

The Soldier’s name is a clear reference to the Overwatch hero Soldier 76, and further comparisons can be made from there. Soldier 76 is a disgraced war vet who takes the world into his own hands, travelling the world to fight evils and save people. The Soldier amps it up to 11; a mentally ill civilian who becomes convinced he is fighting Nazis in a war that ended years ago, and is in actuality blowing up innocents. No one man can understand the complexities of worldly conflicts enough to actively fight for the “right side” without screwing everything up, and the Soldier personifies this notion to an extreme, portrayed as not only insane but also highly jingoistic, alluding to an undercurrent of american exceptionalism that exists in 76′s All-American Hero stylings.

Pyro is a take on Bastion. They’re both unintelligible and gender-indeterminate cuties who retain their innocence in a cruel and brutal environment. Of course, Bastion’s dissonance between its purpose and its personality is played for drama, for how tragic it is that this adorable robot is built only to kill. The Pyro, by contrast, portrays innocence in spite of violence as twisted. Compare their promotional shorts: Bastion’s ends with it deciding against its original purpose (and the purpose it serves in gameplay) and exiling itself to the forest to care for a cute bird, while the Pyro’s portrays the violence and innocence as a symbiotic relationship, showing that they hallucinate the carnage they cause as spreading love and cheer. TF2 tells us that the innocence of a DPS character in a shooter is not endearing but terrifying, because the two aspects cannot coexist without extreme cognitive dissonance. The Pyro can delight in violence because, in their limited understanding of the world, they see violence as delightful.

The Medic lampoons Mercy and to a lesser extent every support character in Overwatch. There is something faintly hypocritical about a character claiming to want to help people as they serve as an accomplice to a violent, bloody war effort. Mercy may rarely score any kills herself, but she enables the continued destruction caused by every combatant she heals. The Medic puts up no such pretense of being a good person, he loves the pain and violence perhaps more than his compatriots who actively dole it out. He is no harmless doctor, he is as great a threat as the men with guns, if not even more dangerous - and he doesn’t even have a damage boost on his medigun. The Medic's habit of experimenting on his teammates for shits and giggles is, too, a joke about Mercy, this time referring to her canon involvement in turning Genji and Reaper into killing machines. 

The Sniper is, like Roadhog, an Australian who is actually a New Zealander who sounds like nothing like either. I don’t have anything insightful to say here, I just think it’s funny.

But the one thing that binds them - the one thing they have in common? They are all sadistic assholes. Every character has a cackling, evil laugh they let out when they’re on a kill streak, they all bask in the glory of slaughter unashamedly and unabashedly - they are guns for hire, after all. In a way, they aren’t so different to the Overwatch cast in this respect; even the bright and peppy tracer has a host of voicelines cheerily mocking the people she has just murdered with her twin pistols. But what TF2 does differently is make this obvious. The nine classes have no purpose in gameplay beyond causing and enabling murder, and rather than distract you from this fact with charming personalities, it lets you pity them as the mean, cruel bastards that they are. These are no “heroes” to be looked up to, they are the waste product of a world better than them.

Overwatch’s map design is beautiful, to be sure, with a clean, futuristic aesthetic and a wide diversity of metropolitan locales to explore. But when you think about it, the levels don’t make a whole lot of sense. The payload maps are all cities that tend to have only one road in them, they’re peppered with hazardous falls despite being mostly innocuous metropolitan areas, and the architecture is often questionable at best. While some maps have a clear goal that the two teams are fighting over, i.e. Volskaya’s factory, some are just places where a fight is happening for no reason. Illios is the perfect example, you go to a well, a lighthouse and an excavation site but there’s nothing to be won in any of the areas. Of course, asking “why are we fighting here” was a mug’s game to begin with - the gameplay in is non-canon, after all.

TF2′s map design is specifically engineered to draw attention to its own senselessness.  The payload tracks aren’t roads, they’re literal tracks, on the ground, which just happen to lead directly to the enemy team’s giant stockpile of explosive barrels. Control points aren’t just game abstractions, they’re giant metal discs on the ground, marked out with hazard tape and set up to display a giant holographic team emblem. One place where they differ is TF2 is not content to allow a map to have no valuable resource in it to be fighting over, even when said dedication raises more questions than it answers. That granary isn’t just a granary, it’s actually concealing a secret spy base. The lumberyard? Secret spy base. Hydroelectric plant, which actually might be tactically advantageous to own? ALSO A SECRET SPY BASE! “Secret spy base” is the punchline to every map’s visual narrative, and serves as a challenge to the philosophy of Overwatch’s design, by implying that those innocuous locales you visit, all those wells and lighthouses, they were actually just secret spy bases this whole time.

Even the art direction in OW’s fascination with a vaguely utopic golden age is reflected in TF2′s usage of idealised 60′s-ea illustration as a clear inspiration. The visual language utilised by a people who were proud of the world that they shaped, despite the festering problems lurking deep within it, is perfect for the ugliness of the TF2 universe. The painterly, illustrative style isn’t used for white picket fences and well-kept lawns, but ramshackle shacks, industrial monstrosities and machines of war. This is no better time nor a better place, it is a war. It is blood and gore and fire and pain and all the worst parts of humanity condensed into bite sized 10 minute matches.

And the war they fight is pointless. Not pointless in the sense that it is non-canon, but that it is canon and yet it still means nothing. It’s a pitiable battle between two brothers over their ancient, useless gravel estate, with all the lasers and rockets only existing to claim more useless gravel. The fights don’t mean anything, the story isn’t important, and the resources aren’t world-changing, they’re just pointless bloodshed for pointless rewards, a hauntingly accurate summation of the philosophy of a competitive shooter.

Overwatch’s world is one like our own, but... different. Set in a fantastic and wonderful future, it portrays a world coming off of the heels of a great robot war. It is populated by robots called omnics, who are either a metaphor for all marginalised groups ever or evil badguy robots depending on the what the writers need right now. In addition, Overwatch likes to add it’s own additional spice to real world locales: South Korea is threatened by a giant badguy robot and has hired professional gamers to fight it, Australia has been devastated in a nuclear holocaust and is now a desolate wasteland, and The Moon has recently been overthrown by sentient gorillas(?) who now rule its colonies. It’s all a bit silly, to be sure, but it’s made with love, and it’s all just so earnest you can’t help but love it back.

In the TF2 community, there is some debate over whether or not Abraham Lincoln inventing stairs as an alternative to the rocket jump is canon information or not. What is definitely canon, however, is that spaceflight was invented in 1900, New Zealand is a once legendary sunken metropolis destroyed by an incompetent scientist, and Amelia Earhart was a hotdog mascot. The world isn’t just quirky, it’s gonzo, with ghosts and charismatic war profiteers and rocks that radiate pure intelligence all being mentioned in the same sentence with nary a wink. 

You can tell TF2′s lead, Robin Walker, was an Australian man angry about the nation’s treatment in Overwatch, because in TF2 Australia is a world leader inventing all of the major technologies in the setting and is the main catalyst for most of the world’s politics. Tellingly, you never actually go to Australia in-game, because the conflict that TF2 portrays is as stated earlier completely removed from anything remotely important in the setting. Of course, Australia is also said to be populated entirely by idiots who get in barfights all the time and choose their king by boxing with kangaroos because if there’s one thing that TF2 avoids like the plague it’s the genuine idealism that Overwatch so loves.

And Overwatch’s incredible technology levels, showing the world of 60 years from now being populated by megastructures, holograms and hovercars, is parodied with the setting of TF2 having all the same, but 60 years into the past. Because Australium, you see. The quaint interpretation of global politics is now extended into full-on alternate history wherein the Space Race was just the US and Russia feebly attempting to measure up to Australia’s impossible standards and Musician Tom Jones is murdered by the Soldier for being his wizard ex-roommate’s new best friend. It shows the inherent arrogance OW painting its own picture of what the world is like by painting that picture onto the past instead of the future, allowing us to immediately understand the contrast between how the authors portray the world and how it actually was - and letting us laugh at just how different the two really are.

This theory would be completely perfect with no holes in it whatsoever, were it not for one key issue: TF2 came out seven years before Overwatch was announced.

There is only one explanation for this: this is a case of analogous evolution where the Overwatch team made many of the same gameplay decisions as the TF2 team but TF2 understood the absurdity of said gameplay and decided to emphasise it whereas Overwatch elected to ignore it and justify its fiction through supplemental material, combined with TF2 actively parodying tropes that predate both games that Overwatch somewhat coincidentally indulges in due to the developers of one intending a dark satirical tone and the developers of the other trying for something more optimistic TF2 was engineered by Valve at some point in the future and sent back in time like a videogame terminator to destroy Overwatch before it was ever born in order to ensure CSGO’s dominance in the competitive PC shooter field. Valve failed to take the key moral lesson away from the first Terminator movie, however - any endeavor involving time travel is doomed to fail from the start, as whatever action you take has always been taken and the past cannot be changed. Just like Robot Arnold Schwarzenegger, TF2 not only failed to prevent Overwatch’s existence, it ultimately proved instrumental in the game’s conception when the spark of inspiration (here representing Kyle Reese) made sweet, sweet love to Jeff Kaplan’s brain before dying in a dynamite explosion. For shame, Valve. I thought you would have learned from Skynet’s mistakes.