Author Topic: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)  (Read 11920 times)

AnomenMustDie

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Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« on: August 18, 2005, 12:11:24 PM »
@ -Mazzy's redemption of Korgan

For some interesting views on redemption in general try this: http://forums.spellholdstudios.net/index.php?showtopic=7041

I think it is a blunder storywise and hope that it will be optional, please. For me, even to think Mazzy is a good romance match for Korgan is racist.

I second the racist bit...in fact, I found the whole you-can-only-romance-if-you're-a-certain-race thing offensive, to say the least. The only thing that really seems to make sense is Viconia personally hating surface elves. I felt Baldur's Gate 2, although being a very good game, perpetuated a little bit of racism and prejudice we find in the real world: with the romance limited to certain races bit, and the whole Yoshimo (Japanese guy) turned traitor bit (stereotyping of Asian males as being sneaky traitors). Plus, the voice actor doesn't even speak Japanese well (when saying 'Yokkatta,' the pronunciation is WAY off).

Offline Silk

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Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #1 on: August 19, 2005, 04:22:04 AM »
The voice actor isn't Japanese.
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Offline NiGHTMARE

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« Reply #2 on: August 19, 2005, 05:09:33 AM »
Dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, etc aren't different races, they're different species.  If other sentient species existed in real life earth, it's highly debatable whether inter-species relationships would even be socially and legally acceptable, let alone to every individual's personal taste.

Besides, a person is only racist if they hate members of other races.  Just because a person is only interested in romancing someone with the same colour skin as their own, it doesn't neccessarily make them racist.  If someone will only mate with members of their own race because they believe their race is superior to all others, then yes they're racist; otherwise, it's just personal prefference... just like only being interested in blondes, preffering brunettes, having a thing about blue eyes, etc.
« Last Edit: August 19, 2005, 05:21:28 AM by NiGHTMARE »
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Offline jester

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Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #3 on: August 19, 2005, 07:28:11 AM »
Well you are sort of right there I have to admit, but I am lacking a proper word here. 'Specist' or sumpthin. Then again we always have Randy Newman.
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Offline NiGHTMARE

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« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2005, 07:36:16 AM »
Put it like this: if a chimp, pig, or whatever were genetically engineered to be as intelligent (or more) than humans, would it be "speciesist" to not want to have sex with it? :P Personally I say it would still be bestiality.
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Offline SixOfSpades

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Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2005, 08:18:33 PM »
Besides, a person is only racist if they hate members of other races.
A person is racist if they make any value judgements at all, based on no other factor but race. The magazine Ebony is a prime example: Written by, published by, photographs by, about, and read by blacks and blacks only, this is pretty much as racist as it gets. No hatred of other races involved.

As far as another species being as (or more) intelligent than humans: My personal benchmark is that if the creature understands the concept of "I think, therefore I am," and believes that that concept applies to it, then it's as good as human (of course, to prove this, the creature would have to be able to communicate with us as well). In this instance, it would be immoral to eat the creature (even if it is not, technically, cannibalism), and that if it's adult and gives its consent, it's morally ok to have sex with it (even if that is, tecnically, bestiality). Not that I personally would indulge in the latter, of course.

But, um, we seem to be veering from the topic of ToB Unfinished Business here. *tries to steer the thread back*

Offline fallen demon

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« Reply #6 on: September 02, 2005, 02:10:42 AM »
Not that I personally would indulge in the latter, of course.
Which is exactly NiGHTMARE's point, even if it would be socially acceptable, you can't critisize someone for not wanting to sleep with another species.

Although can't different species not create fertile offspring by definition? Would this make humans and elves the same species?
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Offline NiGHTMARE

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« Reply #7 on: September 02, 2005, 06:12:57 AM »
It depends whether genetics are supposed to the same in the D&D as they are in real life, or whether it depends on magic, or whatever :).
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Offline fcm

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« Reply #8 on: September 02, 2005, 11:46:51 AM »
Not that I personally would indulge in the latter, of course.
Which is exactly NiGHTMARE's point, even if it would be socially acceptable, you can't critisize someone for not wanting to sleep with another species.

Although can't different species not create fertile offspring by definition? Would this make humans and elves the same species?

Techincally, dogs and wolves are of the same species -- even though you take a chihuahua and a big-ass timber wolf, and they only look marginally alike. They can, however, produce viable offspring, if you could get around the particulars of mating two animals of completely different sizes like that.

Oh, and I wanted to say that racism is the action of supremacy. You can't be a racist unless you act on some supremicist idea. In that way, there are many, many, many black/white supremecists in the world, but only so many racists. And Ebony is not a racist magazine, it is simply ethnocentric. There's a massive difference.


edited because I always forget this board is UBB and not HTML.
« Last Edit: September 03, 2005, 08:30:17 PM by fcm »
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Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #9 on: September 02, 2005, 01:41:06 PM »
Although can't different species not create fertile offspring by definition? Would this make humans and elves the same species?
Technically, if 2 animals can interbreed and produce viable offspring, then yes, they're the same species. But if there were definite hereditary physical differences between the two animals, as there are between Humans and Elves, then they're different subspecies. An interesting paradox of this rule is a certain bird (I think it's the snowy petrel or something like that) that lives around the Arctic Circle. It originated around Scandanavia, and then extended its range to the east and west, staying in the same climatic niche. The two branches of the line eventually met, around the Bering Strait. Now, as the line of territorial expansion spread, the different populations of (what had once been) the same bird began to take on slightly different characteristics. Each population is able to interbreed with the populations on either side of it, making them different subspecies, except that the breeding cannot cross between the birds on either side of where the line came together--they are too genetically different to produce viable offspring, making them different species.

In D&D terms, that means Elves and Orcs are different species, but because they can both breed with Humans, they're the same species. Whatever. Personally, I'm of the opinion that all the races should be able to breed with each other (with probability of actual conception occurring determined by a roll of the die, with penalties for the amount of sheer difference between the races involved, such as Half-Orc and Halfling), but that offspring would always be sterile, which is always the result when two different species somehow manage to produce young--e.g., mules.


Techincally, dogs and wolves are of the same species -- even though you take a chihuahua and a big-ass timber wolf, and they only look marginally alike. They can, however, produce viable offspring, if you could get around the particulars of mating two animals of completely different sizes like that.

Oh, and I wanted to say that racism is the action of supremacy. You can't be a racist unless you <b>act</b> on some supremicist idea. In that way, there are many, many, many black/white <i>supremecists</i> in the world, but only so many racists. And <u>Ebony</u> is not a racist magazine, it is simply ethnocentric. There's a massive difference.
Dogs and wolves are different species: Canis domesticus and Canis lupus. I've never heard of any fertile interbreeding between the two, even with the more wolflike dogs.

In my mind, ethnocentricity is no different from racism, as continues focus on the viewpoint of one subset of the human population inevitably leads to the disregard of all other points of view. Use whatever politically-correct terminology you choose, but ethnocentricity IS racism, there is no distinction between the two. If it makes value judgements on no basis but a person's race, it's racist. I am not going to allow anyone to run around saying, "If it favors minorities, that celebrates our diverse ethnic heritage, but if it favors whitey, that's just plain racist."

Offline Rabain

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« Reply #10 on: September 02, 2005, 04:04:51 PM »
Could a male shapeshifted Druid/Mage sire offspring with a female of the creature he is changed to?  If Demons/Gods can sire offspring with humans/elves doesn't this make the whole "species" argument moot?  The precedent is set that anything is possible in the FR setting regardless of species, race or sexual preference.

@ -Mazzy's redemption of Korgan:  worthy addition for the little lady with the big heart. Mazzy and Korgan decide they want to have a child together...Mazzy says some prayer to Arvoreen...bam!...Morgan arrives 9 months later! :)
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Offline fallen demon

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« Reply #11 on: September 02, 2005, 08:21:19 PM »
It depends whether genetics are supposed to the same in the D&D as they are in real life, or whether it depends on magic, or whatever :).
In any case, I don't think any real world biology terms are applicable to the difference between humans and elves (at least not in D&D)
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Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #12 on: September 03, 2005, 10:37:14 AM »
I'm going to go through and trim this thread down for conciseness in a bit, and will probably move the dog stuff to EFCB. Just so you don't think it has vanished. :)
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Offline NiGHTMARE

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Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #13 on: September 03, 2005, 10:58:11 AM »
Could a male shapeshifted Druid/Mage sire offspring with a female of the creature he is changed to?  If Demons/Gods can sire offspring with humans/elves doesn't this make the whole "species" argument moot?  The precedent is set that anything is possible in the FR setting regardless of species, race or sexual preference.
Gods in D&D can only have children with a mortal by possessing a mortal host to "do the deed", and they would presumably still have the same inter-species fertility limitations as whatever species their host body was (e.g. a god possessing an elven body couldn't have a child with an orc).
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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #14 on: September 03, 2005, 04:18:26 PM »
on racism (or specism I suppose):

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« Last Edit: September 03, 2005, 09:27:05 PM by Operadragon »
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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #15 on: September 03, 2005, 05:42:20 PM »
I'm going to go through and trim this thread down for conciseness in a bit, and will probably move the dog stuff to EFCB. Just so you don't think it has vanished. :)

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Offline fcm

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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #16 on: September 03, 2005, 08:33:56 PM »
Dogs and wolves are different species: Canis domesticus and Canis lupus. I've never heard of any fertile interbreeding between the two, even with the more wolflike dogs.

Dogs and wolves produce fertile offspring.

4. What is a wolf hybrid?
A wolf dog hybrid is a cross between a wolf (Canis lupus) and a dog (Canis familiaris) or
between animals where one or both parents contain recent wolf genes. Wolves may possibly
hybridise with other species of Canidae, but these are not of practical concern.
Commonly, the dog breeds used are the Nordic breeds such as the Siberian Husky, Eskimo
dog, Alaskan Malamute and the Samoyed, or the Japanese Akita or German Shepherd Dog.
However, most dog breeds have been crossed with wolves at some time.
Hybridisation infers a mating between two different species resulting in sterile hybrid
offspring. The offspring from a wolf x dog cross are fertile and able to reproduce. This fact
led to the taxonomic reclassification of the domestic dog by the Smithsonian Institute in 1993
as Canis lupus familiaris, a subspecies of the wolf. This reclassification is not widely
supported. A proposal has recently been put to the International Commission on Zoological
Nomenclature to reserve different names for domesticated animals arising from wild
ancestors (Gentry et al, 1996), which is strongly supported by taxonomists, zoologists and
biologists (Kitchener, 1999, personal communication). It is this organisation which judges
whether a scientific name is correct; however it cannot rule that one particular name is
uniformly accepted. Taxonomists feel that there are so many structural and behavioural
differences between domestic dogs and wild wolves that they should remain separate. It is
therefore likely that Canis familiaris will remain a distinct species for the foreseeable future.
This is crucial to the way in which wolf hybrids are currently scheduled under the DWAA
(see below).
Obviously, wolf and dog are very closely related species. Scientists have expressed the
opinion that dogs are domesticated wolves (Zimen, 1980), and that the wolf and the dog share
a close common ancestry (Fox, 1991).
Since the dog and the wolf are able to interbreed successfully, the misleading term wolf
hybrid has been replaced with wolfdog for the purpose of this report.


http://www.defra.gov.uk/wildlife-countryside/gwd/wolfdogs/wolfdogs.pdf

In fact, the wolf-dog hybrid market places huge emphasis on how much "wolf" is in an F2, F3, etc. dog.
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Offline Operadragon

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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #17 on: September 03, 2005, 11:37:52 PM »
Quote
Oh, and I wanted to say that racism is the action of supremacy. You can't be a racist unless you act on some supremicist idea. In that way, there are many, many, many black/white supremecists in the world, but only so many racists. And Ebony is not a racist magazine, it is simply ethnocentric. There's a massive difference.

That's a very first-semester Sociology major way of thinking, dear. In point of fact, there are too many shades of grey to go along with that shotgun spray, set of brightline standards that you are laying out up there. So you say to be a racist, one has to think that he or she is better than that person. You're probably right insofar as that is what most people think. That doesn't make it true, though. And since it's accepted that way, it's probably the reason that concept and definition of racism has perpetuated itself into the buzzword that it is today, and since people drop the word without a second thought nowadays, it has snowballed into a concept of requirement for any differences between people that don't look alike, talk alike, have a different amount of melanin inside them, or come from different sides of a body of water or otherwise imaginary line of demarcation.

Look at the Oxford dictionary definition of racism here: http://www.askoxford.com/results/?view=dev_dict&field-12668446=racism&branch=13842570&textsearchtype=exact&sortorder=score%2Cname

That definition was published in the original version of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928, although the project began all the way back in 1857. It remains the most complete dictionary in the world. Shows how language has changed in the span of eighty years, huh?

Now I understand what you're getting at, but the cause-and-effect way you're going about relating supremacists to racists is backwards: You first say that racism comes from supremacy, but then you say that there are tons of supremacists, but few racists. Well...which is it? Chicken or Egg? It's like you're using this "all squares are rhombuses, but not all rhombuses are squares" argument and that existential logic just doesn't cut it.

Now I'm sure the peanut gallery wants an example of how something could be considered racist without being supremacist. O.K., here it is:
Affirmative Action
The concept that a person's race be the deciding factor between two candidates for a job who are equal in every qualification would be racism without a supremacist mindset. There are other examples, but I would say that is the most prominent and recognizable way.

If we go all the way back to race, which is the real issue, anyone who's taken genetics to any degree at all, then they know that there is very little genetic difference in all humans, and that the only race is, in fact, the Human Race. Racial division as we know it is a social construct, not a physiological one.

And lastly, to say there's a massive difference in ethnocentrism and racism is just naive, not to mention completely contradictory to the other claims you make. The fact remains that ethnocentrism feeds the racism monster by focusing on what makes people different from one another, rather than embrace the things that bring people together. A prime example is the hyphenated American concept. The idea that a person is an Italian-American, African-American (or Afro-American), or a bevy of other hyphenations applied to the base idea of being an American is ridiculous. To me, you can't hyphenate your nationality unless you have dual citizenship. Which, for the uninitiated, means that you should only call yourself an "Italian-American" if you are a citizen of both Italy and the U.S. The whole concept is again, racist without being supremacist. It's labelling yourself as something else before being an American, and that does nothing but widen the gaps between ethnicities.

Just be aware that the popular idea is not always the truth. Not that what I say is the truth. It's one man's educated estimation of how things are, and why people shouldn't be influenced by institutions whose time has passed.

I'm going to step aside now so the contrarians can circumvent logic and good taste with dazzling displays of ad hominem attacks and fallacies galore.

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Offline CORVIS TERRIBLE MOUNTAIN GOD

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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #18 on: September 03, 2005, 11:50:32 PM »
I'm going to step aside now so the contrarians can circumvent logic and good taste with dazzling displays of ad hominem attacks and fallacies galore.

Sorry, honey, I've got a headache.

Just for future reference, tacking something like that onto the end of a post to paint anyone who disagrees with you in a negative light before they even post is a pretty stale, transparent tactic.

Offline fcm

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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #19 on: September 04, 2005, 12:07:39 AM »
Operadragon - ah, you are smart. There are a lot of things that I'd like to say but am unable to articulate . . . so I guess I don't really know what I'm talking about in the first place, then? Oh well. I'm doing what I can to understand as much as possible about . . . the world. I should probably keep my mouth shut about certain things, but my track record with that kind of thing is very poor. Oh well.

Anyway, I just don't consider Ebony and Jet or whatever "racist" magazines simply because they're based on the interests of a specific group of people. That would mean that virtually every magazine in circulation is an offensive "ism/ist" of some sort. I'm sorry, I just don't see it. If the KKK had a magazine, or if there was some kind of neo-nazi publication, then maybe I'd bite -- but last time I checked, Ebony didn't have any militant propaganda about hating other races in it -- it just talked about black issues/culture. Am I missing something about this?
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Offline Operadragon

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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #20 on: September 04, 2005, 12:53:19 AM »
Nah, dear...don't feel that way...

You keep thinking for yourself...that's the important thing. That's all I wanted out of it anyway. Just keep thinking for yourself.

And Ebony isn't a racist magazine, it's just that some of the things written in ethnocentric publications are deliberately meant to keep 'race relations' stirred up. It's not "racism" as you and I know it, but it is racism of a lesser degree; it keeps people focused on segregating themselves culturally from each other.

But no big deal. We can talk all day long and disagree about everything and still be friends. :)

Take care and I'm sure we'll talk about something we agree about later on.

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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #21 on: September 04, 2005, 12:56:10 AM »
...it keeps people focused on segregating themselves culturally from each other.

There's a beer commercial on this topic, here in Canada.  Or was.  Poor Joe and his obsolete socialist ideals.  When will they ever learn?
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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #22 on: September 04, 2005, 01:11:21 AM »
For real?

Know of a place to download it? Sounds interesting.

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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #23 on: September 04, 2005, 01:16:38 AM »

And Ebony isn't a racist magazine, it's just that some of the things written in ethnocentric publications are deliberately meant to keep 'race relations' stirred up. It's not "racism" as you and I know it, but it is racism of a lesser degree; it keeps people focused on segregating themselves culturally from each other.

Racial issues in America aren't "fixed" by any stretch of the word, though . . . I think it's important to keep people aware of problems so that they don't get complacient. With things like racism, of course it's going to chafe nerves and get people upset -- but it has to, doesn't it? I'm confused, though. Blah. I've been told about nintey different things about this subject and I'm not sure which ones to believe.

It doesn't help any that I've never read an entire issue of Ebony.
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Re: Speciesism, dogs and D&D (split from UB forum)
« Reply #24 on: September 04, 2005, 01:17:05 AM »
Quote
Sorry, honey, I've got a headache.

Sorry to disappoint you, bub...I date girls.
I'm going to step aside now so the contrarians can circumvent logic and good taste with dazzling displays of ad hominem attacks and fallacies galore.

Just for future reference, tacking something like that onto the end of a post to paint anyone who disagrees with you in a negative light before they even post is a pretty stale, transparent tactic.

I rest my case.
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