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Sympathy for the heretic

João Paulo said:
You mean the legitimate Thermian Argument?
No problem.
This dude tackles and smashs Dan Olsen's fallacious stupidity.

Creepy Garbage; or, Dan Olsen and the Importance of Believable Hypotheticals
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Ah, yes, the smashing of the idea of the thermian argument.

How did this argument get smashed again-
I will end this right now: there is no way in Hell that Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs is not a porno.
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...

So what this man is saying is that the criticism of a work having pornographic themes is illegitimate because having pornographic themes means the work is pornography- which, according to him, can't be criticized.

Let's skip over asking 'why can't I criticize porn,' because I'm sure that will lead to a derail of epic proportions, and instead look at it within context of 40k.

If having pornographic themes means that X work is pornographic, it logically follows that having themes of fascist propaganda means that Y work is... fascist propaganda.

Are you sure- like, really 100% totally sure- that this is, in fact, the argument you want to make against the thermian argument in this thread, right here, and right now? That this, specifically, is how you want to defend 40k?
 
Vindictus said:
Ah, yes, the smashing of the idea of the thermian argument.

How did this argument get smashed again-

...

So what this man is saying is that the criticism of a work having pornographic themes is illegitimate because having pornographic themes means the work is pornography- which, according to him, can't be criticized.

Let's skip over asking 'why can't I criticize porn,' because I'm sure that will lead to a derail of epic proportions, and instead look at it within context of 40k.

If having pornographic themes means that X work is pornographic, it logically follows that having themes of fascist propaganda means that Y work is... fascist propaganda.

Are you sure- like, really 100% totally sure- that this is, in fact, the argument you want to make against the thermian argument in this thread, right here, and right now? That this, specifically, is how you want to defend 40k?
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Also, it's not a porno. It's goblin slayer. Which I have been assured - assured - is not a porno, but a very serious anime.
 
So, it's been two years, so reviving this thread means I need to bring in something good. Frankly, I'm not a good enough communicator to write something good. If you ask me to write an interesting game setting I've got you covered, but something about the political complexity of a game system and I'm going to get tongue tied and start making nonsense.

Fortunately I don't have to. A Quora question about WH40k popped up, and many of the responses are quite fascinating and hit a number of points that this thread hit, complete with a similar pattern of sea-lioning, avoidance of the issue... as well as people outlining quite well written essays explaining why and how they feel Games Workshop could, uh, use some work on their messaging.

So without further ado, here's the link.

www.quora.com

What makes people believe Warhammer 40k is a game for fascists and Nazis?

Answer (1 of 34): Because the bad apples are louder than the rest of the hobby. Fortunately we now have Henry Cavill who is open about his love for Warhammer and youtubers like Markiplier. Unfortunately we get individuals like Arch who say some stupid things and end up the face of the hobby due ...
www.quora.com www.quora.com

www.quora.com

Do some 40k players secretly like the fascist, ruthless Imperium?

Answer (1 of 61): There is a running joke in the fandom, that while Harry Potter fans dream of getting a letter from Hogwarts, and Star Trek fans desire to explore the frontier where no man has gone before, the fans of Warhammer 40,000 decidedly do not wish to live in the four-hundredth century. ...
www.quora.com www.quora.com

At the very least it's a fascinating read that, while perhaps not directly related to the topic of this thread, certainly has strong parallels to it.
 
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Tithed_Verse said:
www.quora.com

What makes people believe Warhammer 40k is a game for fascists and Nazis?

Answer (1 of 34): Because the bad apples are louder than the rest of the hobby. Fortunately we now have Henry Cavill who is open about his love for Warhammer and youtubers like Markiplier. Unfortunately we get individuals like Arch who say some stupid things and end up the face of the hobby due ...
www.quora.com www.quora.com

www.quora.com

Do some 40k players secretly like the fascist, ruthless Imperium?

Answer (1 of 61): There is a running joke in the fandom, that while Harry Potter fans dream of getting a letter from Hogwarts, and Star Trek fans desire to explore the frontier where no man has gone before, the fans of Warhammer 40,000 decidedly do not wish to live in the four-hundredth century. ...
www.quora.com www.quora.com
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The answer to the second one is a pretty obvious yes, a lot of them aren't even quiet about it.
 
Tithed_Verse said:
So, it's been two years, so reviving this thread means I need to bring in something good. Frankly, I'm not a good enough communicator to write something good. If you ask me to write an interesting game setting I've got you covered, but something about the political complexity of a game system and I'm going to get tongue tied and start making nonsense.

Fortunately I don't have to. A Quora question about WH40k popped up, and many of the responses are quite fascinating and hit a number of points that this thread hit, complete with a similar pattern of sea-lioning, avoidance of the issue... as well as people outlining quite well written essays explaining why and how they feel Games Workshop could, uh, use some work on their messaging.

So without further ado, here's the link.

www.quora.com

What makes people believe Warhammer 40k is a game for fascists and Nazis?

Answer (1 of 34): Because the bad apples are louder than the rest of the hobby. Fortunately we now have Henry Cavill who is open about his love for Warhammer and youtubers like Markiplier. Unfortunately we get individuals like Arch who say some stupid things and end up the face of the hobby due ...
www.quora.com www.quora.com

www.quora.com

Do some 40k players secretly like the fascist, ruthless Imperium?

Answer (1 of 61): There is a running joke in the fandom, that while Harry Potter fans dream of getting a letter from Hogwarts, and Star Trek fans desire to explore the frontier where no man has gone before, the fans of Warhammer 40,000 decidedly do not wish to live in the four-hundredth century. ...
www.quora.com www.quora.com

At the very least it's a fascinating read that, while perhaps not directly related to the topic of this thread, certainly has strong parallels to it.
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Man that first one has an answer in it which honestly kind of hits the nail on the head in a lot of ways...

This is an Ork. When the Imperium purges undesirables, it is not jews, or some other ethnic or religious minority. Frankly the Imperium couldn't care less, as long as you have the proper amount of limbs and don't fap with barbed wire into pentagrams.
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Because, to be clear, the Imperium absolutely does purge undesirables. Psykers, mutants, poor people (see various portrayals of the Arbites rolling into an underhive and just gunning down or arresting everyone they see)... and this is even acknowledged in the post, given the line about "so long as you have the proper amount of limbs".

But they don't count. Because they're mutants.

Now you can make a whole bunch of posts about why the Imperium feels it needs to do that, posts which I have seen in my quests more than once and have argued over at length, but that's not really the point. Whether the Imperium is justified or not, in this regard, isn't really the point. The point is that there is a segment of imperial society, born on imperial words to imperial parents, working in imperial factories or pressed into imperial armies, which the Imperium regularly and with great zeal exterminates.

And because of how the debate has evolved and been framed, people will in the same damn sentence acknowledge that the Imperium does this and state that the imperium doesn't purge ethnic or religious minorities.
 
I mean two years on, looking back, it still infuriates me how people refuse to see how heavily queer and non-cis coded Slaanesh is, and no amount of "no Slaanesh is excess, not just sex" or "The Imperium doesn't care about LGBT people" will reduce the harm from that.
 
IfIhadaHammer said:
I mean two years on, looking back, it still infuriates me how people refuse to see how heavily queer and non-cis coded Slaanesh is, and no amount of "no Slaanesh is excess, not just sex" or "The Imperium doesn't care about LGBT people" will reduce the harm from that.
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I had an awful argument about that just a few months ago >.<

I mean, for fuck's sake they use PURPLE AND PINK as their colors! Fuck!

Also, frankly, the Skaven seem pretty, uh, coded to me too. Though maybe I'm a little oversensitive.
 
That one escapes me, boss. I mean, I'm very much open to the argument, but I think that the Skaven being schemey and backstabby is just because that's what rats are in pop culture.
 
comradepitrovsky said:
That one escapes me, boss. I mean, I'm very much open to the argument, but I think that the Skaven being schemey and backstabby is just because that's what rats are in pop culture.
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They feel coded as... You know the old saying "If the jew didn't exist the anti-Semite would invent him?". They're somehow both weak and strong. Somehow both constantly backstabbing and unified. And it's an entire race. Iunno. Just feels... weird.
 
comradepitrovsky said:
That one escapes me, boss. I mean, I'm very much open to the argument, but I think that the Skaven being schemey and backstabby is just because that's what rats are in pop culture.
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And it's a very common tactic for bigots to rhetorically associate minorities with rats and similar pest animals.
Tithed_Verse said:
They feel coded as... You know the old saying "If the jew didn't exist the anti-Semite would invent him?". They're somehow both weak and strong. Somehow both constantly backstabbing and unified. And it's an entire race. Iunno. Just feels... weird.
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While that's an entirely fair read, I personally tend to view the Skaven as an extremely incisive parody of fascist governments. Their society is characterized as a hypercompetitive death cult structured around appeasing the whims of their arbitrary and capricious leaders, while also working to undermine, betray, and replace said leaders at every opportunity. Their main goal is securing greater and greater amounts of territory to live in by invading the surface world. They have a love of flashy-yet-utterly-impractical superweapons which regularly fail in spectacular ways, and their main shock troops are literally called stormvermin.

The joke, of course, being that Warhammer portrays this not as the mindset of a Proud Warrior Race like fascists want to see themselves as, but as the mindset of the egomaniacal cowards and perpetual losers that fascists actually are. The Skaven are fascists stripped of their pretensions of glory.
 
Or to repeat the oldjoke, you don't need skaven in 40k the imperium is right there.

Everything the Skaven do thematically being to me the above fascist stuff while also being an over the top paradoy/potrayal of industrializing society and its propensity for jamming people together into filth and misery and overwork until they literally start eating each other, is fully covered by what the imperium does.
 
I'm also going to note that if the Imperium did find a religious minority it would absolutely exterminate them for apostasy. It seems like this is pretty uncommon like current religious stuff is regarded as akin to how we'd regard Greek Paganism, but if they were to find a catharic cult or something it seems pretty clear that'd be a matter for either Eclisarchy enforcers or the Ordo Hereticus.
 
I mean, the Skaven even call their god "The one true god". They're the only monotheistic group in Warhammer Fantasy. The only way they could be more Jewish is if, in their history, they were kept as slaves by another race for a while and rebelled....

FBH said:
I'm also going to note that if the Imperium did find a religious minority it would absolutely exterminate them for apostasy. It seems like this is pretty uncommon like current religious stuff is regarded as akin to how we'd regard Greek Paganism, but if they were to find a catharic cult or something it seems pretty clear that'd be a matter for either Eclisarchy enforcers or the Ordo Hereticus.
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for example a group that felt that the Emperor was evil AND chaos was evil would certainly be removed.
 
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Essentially the argument is that the Imperium doesn't target real world minorities, because they don't exist in the world of 40k. That is, however, a runaround. It's not important whether the Imperium targets the exact same groups; it matters whether they target groups in the same way, for the same reasons.

And let's be clear- they absolutely do.
 
Maugan Ra said:
Man that first one has an answer in it which honestly kind of hits the nail on the head in a lot of ways...



Because, to be clear, the Imperium absolutely does purge undesirables. Psykers, mutants, poor people (see various portrayals of the Arbites rolling into an underhive and just gunning down or arresting everyone they see)... and this is even acknowledged in the post, given the line about "so long as you have the proper amount of limbs".

But they don't count. Because they're mutants.

Now you can make a whole bunch of posts about why the Imperium feels it needs to do that, posts which I have seen in my quests more than once and have argued over at length, but that's not really the point. Whether the Imperium is justified or not, in this regard, isn't really the point. The point is that there is a segment of imperial society, born on imperial words to imperial parents, working in imperial factories or pressed into imperial armies, which the Imperium regularly and with great zeal exterminates.

And because of how the debate has evolved and been framed, people will in the same damn sentence acknowledge that the Imperium does this and state that the imperium doesn't purge ethnic or religious minorities.
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40k has displaced the iconic fascist purge from minorities onto a new class of "magical" undesirable who is different enough from actually existing minorities to pass fantasy muster. You can even have actually existing minorities get in on the purging, something they've been making more explicit when they push to make the Imperium more ethnically representative in the fiction.

It was easier for 40k to manage its fascist imagery and ideas when 40k was much more obviously a grimdark parody because you didn't have any heroes and didn't need to show anyone in a particularly good light. But over time 40k has made motions towards being a grimly heroic and inclusive fantasy of fascism, as absurd as that sounds. This creates a tension between parodying fascist ideas and creating fascist heroes who you might like. I don't think it make much sense to try and separate 40k from the fantasy of fascism as much as to mark out that 40k is fantasy and not in any way a positive model for real life. This requires constant battle with reactionaries within the fandom, but if you want to enjoy 40k that sort of ends up being your responsibility.
 
@Dromon
Last time I read it was a long time ago, but I seem to recall the Salamanders being the only Space Marines that were explicitly black, and that they were nearly purged over it?

That was a long time ago... is that still the case?
 
Tithed_Verse said:
@Dromon
Last time I read it was a long time ago, but I seem to recall the Salamanders being the only Space Marines that were explicitly black, and that they were nearly purged over it?

That was a long time ago... is that still the case?
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The diversity of space marines still sucks, particularly among named characters. The Celestial Lions are mostly black and pretty awesome, but visual diversity among space marines and painted miniatures in particular is a huge failure of GW that they need to remedy. They've done better and have featured individual black Ultramarines and Imperial Fists in lore and books, but it's an area they absolutely need to improve.
 
Maugan Ra said:
Now you can make a whole bunch of posts about why the Imperium feels it needs to do that, posts which I have seen in my quests more than once and have argued over at length, but that's not really the point. Whether the Imperium is justified or not, in this regard, isn't really the point. The point is that there is a segment of imperial society, born on imperial words to imperial parents, working in imperial factories or pressed into imperial armies, which the Imperium regularly and with great zeal exterminates.
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I think the thing that leads to people getting so confused on this is that the Imperium's exterminations are instrumentalist rather than essentialist.

There are two basic forms of genocide. Instrumental genocide, where you deliberately seek the destruction of a minority because it accomplishes a political or military goal and the minority is in the way of that goal, and essentialist genocide, where you seek the destruction of a minority because the goal is said destruction. Now, all genocides will contain elements of both aspects - it is very hard to destroy a targeted group without finding some justification to make them worthy of destruction - but you can still analyze these tragedies and come to a conclusion as to whether the primary goal is destruction for the sake of destruction or destruction for the sake of a larger strategic desire.

The Holocaust was heavily essentialist, with Nazi Germany seeking to accelerate its annihilation of so-called "undesirables" even when doing so took away resources from the war effort. This actually makes it atypical, because most genocides aren't primarily essentialist. The Holocaust has basically become the go-to example of genocide, despite this atypicality. Not without reason - its existence is the reason we even have the term "genocide" in the first place - but regardless of the reason it still distorts understanding.

The Imperium's genocides are actually far more typical. Its exterminationist tendencies are pretty clearly instrumentalist. The Imperium, in the year 40,000, murders aliens and mutants and everything else because it's a deeply broken, paranoid state that sees all deviance as an existential threat, as a result of millennia of trauma and decay. And the Imperium has plenty of reasons to believe it's under existential threat, given the state of the 40k galaxy. The instrumentality of Imperium mass murder is also visible in how "works with Eldar" or "hires Ork mercenaries" is exceptionally distasteful but still politically defensible enough in the Imperium that sometimes people still do it. The strategic acceptance and political divide between "mutant" and "abhuman" also suggests some degree of political flexibility when mutants are deemed useful enough to be "not threatening." And moreover, the Imperium is also casually murderous towards its "pure-blooded" citizens in good standing whenever they become even moderately inconvenient, and even its elite forces and exemplars are expected to die en masse when it serves the Imperium's needs. I ran some napkin numbers for Space Marine doubling times, and they are absolutely insane in terms of how quickly a Space Marine chapter can replenish losses simply by how each Space Marine is basically biologically immortal and creates enough gene-stuff to make 2 more Space Marines in 10 + 10 years. The implication of these numbers, if taken seriously, is that the Space Marines get regularly culled to such a degree that this is necessary to keep Space Marine numbers stable, with Space Marine growth being gradual and hardly seen as explosive. So people end up deciding that the Imperium's wars of extermination "don't count" because they involve more than annihilation of minorities solely for the sake of annihilating minorities. However, instrumentalist genocides and near-genocides are actually more common than essentialist ones. The relationship between counterinsurgency and genocide isn't a Venn diagram, it's basically a small circle inside a much larger circle. The Imperium isn't special or more moral than your typical participant in these sorts of atrocities because it genuinely believes that it's under existential threat.

There's also an interesting implication here about the Imperium circa the Great Crusade, which killed alien species and annihilated hostile polities despite much less of a threat perception, although I think that'd be the subject of an entirely different post.
 
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And there are, to be clear, parts of the Imperium of Man and the WH40k setting that are places that are relatively free of prejudice. It's not what the Imperium's defenders will tell you - there are no mythical basically democratic free spots - but there are trading ports, Adventurer Areas like Precipice, and the like where you can have your RPG party of a Dark Eldar, a Tau, a Mechanicus agent, and a former IG soldier, and they'll be basically fine. Mos Eisely kinda things.

Because, well, people are basically good, at the end of things.
 
comradepitrovsky said:
The Salamanders are black, but they're like black the way coal is black, not black the way that human beings are black. If that makes sense.
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I've literally met humans who were so black they almost looked blue. Like... there's some very black people out there.

for example, I had a roommate who was a refugee from Zaire in college who was extremely black, and I had a Moroccon professor of statistics who was even blacker. And I had another professor from Gambia (He was my professor for a history elective) who was so black he looked like a glitch in the matrix and he wore bright purple clothing with yellow trim which had a very interesting visual effect. I think he's the blackest person I've met, but they were all in the 'coal black' range.

The point I'm trying to make is that 'coal black' is within normal human skin color ranges.
 
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