Seriously, you accuse me of incoherency and then try to claim that commenting on the incredibly prolific and reccurent issue of cultural misappropriation and misrepresentation among neopagan religions (emphasis plural), which I brought up as an example of why neopaganism is a "serious" subject, is somehow "elitist"?
whiskey tango foxtrot?
I accused you of incoherency because how you responded made it pretty much impossible for me to untangle what you were arguing, and I think that was intentional at points because of how you bundled your responses together, forcing me to do more work.
I also think you've been somewhat dishonest from our first exchange. You call wicca 'Fluffbunnies,' say they are all all women well enough off to not have real issues, so clearly that can't have had a political impact or take sides, and generally treated them as silly. You've also generally treated them as offensive, but that in no way changes that you fundamentally take them less seriously because they're 'Wicca' instead of 'Astruar', or for that matter 'Odinist.' You literally give them less respect then Neo-Nazis.
Then I cite sources, pointing terr connection to groups like the Fairy Circle, and you assert that you're already show your work (you haven't, I'm the only one who has cited anyone) and don't have to do more. You've decided that anything to do with wicca makes someone incapable of having meaningful poltical view or influence, or asserting themselves in ways that matter, or going through suffering for their beliefs.
While I agree that Wicca is silly, I'll agree with anyone who says any religion is silly. On the other hand, the kind of silly you're talking about is the kind that get bandied about in discussion where Protestants explain how Catholics aren't actually Christians because they're pagans who worship the Saints and the Trinity instead of God.
See, I could believe that the Traditions as they are now are morally superior to the Union as it is now, in the sense that groups that don't have a lot of power have to be more moderate in their actions and they could act as a break towards the worse elements of the Union.
I have a lot more difficulty believing that their victory/the weakening of the Technoparadigm (barring a Judgement/Mass Ascension outcome, which I interpreted as a 'good end' and also as kind of unlikely) would be all that good, particularly pre-Revised where technomagery wasn't as acceptable. Because we know what kind of world they made when they ran the show. It was Mortals: the Dysentery and it was kind of shit.
Also, just to pursue an idle thought, is there indication that a strong enough Consensus could erase itself, and create a purely materialistic universe where, say, thoughtcrime isn't crime? It seems like a potentially interesting Judgement scenario.
I really don't want to dig up Ascension, because it sucked. Also, nothing you pull from it can really be concidered at all canon on the level of the other books. I do remember where we see a universe where magic is completely cut off, leaving only static reality in one of the Ascension scenarios, though. I would take what happens with a handful of salt, though.
The world is left a dying fading thing where emotion fades into static nothing, will goes to die, and the current status quo becomes semi-permanent in that as nothing can really change, but it will constantly fade. It will stay like, though even lessening, for the thousand some-odd years it take reality to completely sputter out. The Umbra resists better, we don't know it's final fate, though it presumable ultimately dies when the earth dies.
Consensus dresses up the fundamental forces in mage, but they remain themselves. This principle is call Cosmological Constants, and along with Historical Inertia and Consentual Reality forms the three principles that form reality.
You can change the game, but not the players. The whole thought-crime approach MJ12 is taking here is interesting and actually makes sense, but is actively not supported by canon. Every time hiding pollution and it's side-effect comes it, it's clearly presented as them hiding it, not trying to eliminate it. Likewise the it's presented as the Traditions calling them on a crime, not sabotaging a technology.
That makes sense as long as you accept that too much order inherently is fallible to primordial corruption. Too much order is a consistent bad-guy throughout almost all the oWoD lines. You can argue how much crossover you should use, but pollution as a consequence of Technocratic hubris is the most supported reading.
Fuck that. One of, if not the first person to suggest that gay rights should be a thing is Jeremy Bentham. The guy who coined the term "Panopticon" and who was advocating for a single world order by writing a unified treatise of domestic and international law. NWO as fuck, guys. The things TheLastOne brings up as "bad things done by the Technocracy" are also interesting because if you look into them, a lot of them have much more nuanced histories. Like lobotomies. In actual history, lobotomies were:
1. Initially rejected by the scientific establishment as horrific and immoral (who are Technocratic as fuck)
2. Finally accepted because the initial experiments, out of apparent luck, led to the curing of mental illnesses without any major apparent side effects
3. Eventually side effects were discovered and the rate of lobotomies (which were being applied to people who were generally nonfunctional in society) started slowing
4. Was finally banned in the 1950s by the Soviet Union, who are also Technocratic as fuck
Strangely enough, this makes it seem like what the Traditions did was remove a Technocratic technique from their arsenal by convincing the masses that it horrific side effects when in its original form . We know that the Traditions can and will do this. The New Age medicine sellers who are fighting the good fight for the Traditions are also the people who claim vaccines cause autism and modern medicine is poison. Environmentalists who talk up the carcinogenic effects of coal and oil, which directly harms people when they start believing it.
I can get behind that. They do sabotage each-other when they can get away with it, and the Traditions aren't saints. While I could make some argument based on some of the thing Pentex gets up to backed by Syndicate money, but I'm pretty sure we'll all be happier if none of us goes down that road.
You aren't going to get them being gay rights advocates though. Both because it's thematically wrong (they represent the suffocating force of conformity), and because we have an actual canon answer which is 100% beyond death of the author as it's spelled out (it's the Verbena).
When you look at how a lot of the immoral things the Technocracy is accused of were originally sold as extremely effective with little moral quandrary, things start looking very much against the word of the authors. In fact, given how consensus reality works, it seems that the people to blame for all those brain-damaged lobotomy patients are whichever Traditions genius realized they could strike a blow for Freedom by targeting this. Collateral damage? We're fighting a system. They brought it onto themselves. (Seriously, watch The Matrix, a movie explicitly inspired by Mage, and see how many innocent people doing their jobs the heroes kill. Listen to how Morpheus dismisses concerns of collateral damage by talking about the enemy as a 'system.') To support the developers' interpretation of mage, you'd have to end up basically rewriting all of history to remove any form of nuance. Which is fine if you want to run a game like that!
But if you want your game to hold to actual history and how societies interact, it quickly falls apart.
Some of that goes, sure, because the Traditions aren't good guys, they're rather gray. Some of it isn't going to, because of thing like the pollution issue, or lots of Progenitor medicine. It's been years since I looked at the Progenitor book, but I remember it being the most blatantly viscerally evil of the conventions, with them releasing medicine they knew was unsafe as an experiment. Which is again anther example of consensus failing to enforce what people believe, because consensus isn't the only force at work. Even before we get into thing like cosmological constants, historical inertia means you have to chip away at problem in steps, and spiritual influences can further slow it as disease spirits active fight the cures.
Rather then do this, they tend to jump straight to mass human testing to watch how some of their products (dramatically) fail and see what they learn from it.
The negative right-wing stereotypes such as their religious fanaticism?
Their anti-intellectualism?
Their ultranationalism?
Their lack of international scope?
Their desire to turn the clock back on progress and modernity?
None of these are true-in fact, the opposite holds. You say they were rewritten to be negative right-wing stereotypes but that doesn't hold. The Syndicate are quite literally the Jewish Bankers that the Neo-Nazis rail against, and that's the closest thing you get to the 'negative right wing stereotypes.' Because they're not just big businesses colluding. They're the entire financial system being controlled by hostile parties to the chosen ideology. Literally everything else: "Evil scientists," "New World Order." "Evil biologists," mesh with the things the right wing claims the left are doing.
The Syndicate owes more at this point to Libertarians and Ann Rand, they have whole bits that are pretty much direct lifts, and the idea of powerful corporations making backroom deal and undermining the force of government is a powerful fear.
Where the Syndicate is the shadowy backroom dealer, Iteration X is the Corporations themselves. Technology that, rather then lifting you up, is used to reduce you to nothing but a competent in the great machine. At the same time, they're the communists, who liberals always have to remind everyone they're not. The represent the fear of rightwing factions undermining things like minimum wage and non-vocational education. Being a disposable replaceable component.
The Progenitors are Nazis. I keep saying this because it gets mentioned in a number of places. It's... sort of weaksauce, can't they do modern evil at the level of the Nazi medical experiments, and they don't want the Technocracy to be THAT evil anyways - that's the Nephandi shtick. Also they cause cancer, but that would play better if they were industrial and you could say industrial pollution, but they're not. They also do unethical medical experimentation... but that's just not on the same scale as the rest.
The New World Order grew out of fears of the FBI and the CIA and how Nixon used them to harass liberals and civil rights protesters. They're also the unethical agents who assassinate foreign figures and get America involved in overseas conflicts that have nothing to do with us. They the fear of goverment cracking down on free speech, which is a pretty constant liberal fear, and one of the big reasons we tend to be very pro privacy of information. The NSA has recently shifted that fear to on the internet, and away from physcial shadowy agents to put bugs on you, but mage is a product of its time.
And, again, I keep saying this, but the Void Engineers largely don't play on any of these fears.
