449 replies to this topic

[Sug]

Ash Rose, on 05 October 2021 - 07:48 PM, said:

the issue was and is: folks should be able to say trans rights or put trans in their unit names because there is no good reason not to, full stop.

But where does it end? Not like, "where does it end?" where does it end... I mean like, who's to say what people can call their teams, who makes that call. Thankfully it's not me. Whew. Can you imagine? Trying to make people happy? Awful.

People probably ask them for things all the time. Can I have a team named CIS Rights? Can we get a blue lives matter decal? Or a Kamala Harris camo pattern? What would that even be? Her face? What would be the point of that?

I'm glad I don't have to make decisions about any of that. I don't have a dog in this fight and I wouldn't look twice at a name with Trans in it. I would just rather not have ANY of it in the game.

I already have people giving me a "God bless" at the start of a match and then other people telling me over coms that they just want me to know that the US government is probably going to shut the whole internet down in the next 10 days because of a bunch of suitcase nukes loose in the country...

1453 R, on 05 October 2021 - 07:50 PM, said:

On the contrary Sug, Ash Rose: this is the second thread where a bunch of people have protested that Piranha simply talking about the subject at all is a violation of their core ethos that will inevitably destroy MWO and even BattleTech itself forever.

Well that's just dumb.





Luckily there aren't enough mute people to cancel me.

1453 R, on 05 October 2021 - 07:50 PM, said:

Feels like the kind of place where a little bit of reality check might be necessary, ne? Like a bit of hearing from the other end of the issue, however rare someone willing to admit to being from the other end of the issue might be in this place, might do slightly more good than finding a bunch of people who already agree with the idea and saying "hey, y'all still agree with the idea?"

yes. Mechwarrior Online. THE place for reality.

Come and get it.


The only thing that makes people change like that is something affecting them personally, and even then it's like a 40% chance.

I dunno. I just don't see 30 years from now, a sitting president begins his memoirs,

"And that's when it all changed for me. A stranger on the opposing team of an event with dozens of participants, named their team after their opinion, and I was moved. "

Edited by Sug, 05 October 2021 - 08:30 PM.

[Sug]

RickySpanish, on 05 October 2021 - 07:56 PM, said:

"Like trying to bring democracy to Afghanistan". Man, I like that phrase. I like it a lot. It's like playing chess with pidgeons but more current. So what do you think, 1453 R, you going to send us poor folk who were no-shows at the airport some planes to Freedom?

I mean like, you're trying to force information/opinions/beliefs onto people who have absolutely no ******* interest in and lack the experience to even understand them.

Best case scenario, that guy on coms was right and the vaccine will turn everyone's kids trans and then around 40% of the parents will understand.

[Ash Rose]

Sug, on 05 October 2021 - 08:23 PM, said:

But where does it end? Not like, "where does it end?" where does it end... I mean like, who's to say what people can call there teams, who makes that call. Thankfully it's not me. Whew. Can you imagine? Trying to make people happy? Awful.

People probably ask them for things all the time. Can I have a team named CIS Rights? Can we get a blue lives matter decal? Or a Kamala Harris camo pattern? What would that even be? Her face? What would be the point of that?

I'm glad I don't have to make decisions about any of that. I don't have a dog in this fight and I wouldn't look twice at a name with Trans in it. I would just rather not have ANY of it in the game.

I already have people giving me a "God bless" at the start of a match and then other people telling me over coms that they just want me to know that the US government is probably going to shut the whole internet down in the next 10 days because of a bunch of suitcase nukes loose in the country...

I don't know or care where it ends, and I don't need to answer that because the name trans rights is no more connected with whatever extreme hypotheticals folks are imagining than a name like "We like Cheese" or "The Green Knights" or whatever. The unspoken part of the argument people are making is that the names at the heart of the debate are somehow more 'risque' than any other name we see floating around the simple fact is that they are not.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

pattonesque, on 05 October 2021 - 04:16 PM, said:

you do care, quite a bit. otherwise your response would be, well, nothing.

what about the existence of trans people provokes this response in you?

Most people except trans people don't care what they think they are, whether they think they are a different gender, a different animal species or an alien, what they eat or what sex they have, as long as they don't constantly bother you with it.... Huh, I am so unhappy, because no one sees me suffer, because no one sees me as special ... Most of these people have mainly a self-expression problem and an identity crisis, an addiction to be perceived as special by others, to be unique, although they are not, they are divas who are looking for their audience. Whining at a high level, and no comparison to the LGTB* people who are religiously or ideologically persecuted, *****, tortured and murdered in other states.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[Sug]

Ash Rose, on 05 October 2021 - 08:38 PM, said:

because the name trans rights is no more connected with whatever extreme hypotheticals folks are imagining than a name like "We like Cheese" or "The Green Knights"

I can't find the correct emoticon but I'm giving you a look.

[Ash Rose]

Sug, on 05 October 2021 - 08:41 PM, said:

I can't find the correct emoticon but I'm giving you a look.

I genuinely have no idea what you mean.

[LordNothing]

Ash Rose, on 05 October 2021 - 08:04 PM, said:

I genuinely don't think you are going to win hearts and minds on the robot shooting forum, like yeah, some people have some very silly fears about "the SJWs" or whoever destroying everything they know and love, and the jump to compare {Godwin's Law} with the people they literally put into camps is uh... Y I K E S, but I don't think engaging in an argument here is helping anything, speaking from my perspective as a trans fan of the game. Only saw the thread from some folks pointing and laughing at it and I made the mistake of touching the metaphorical poop.

extremists on both sides are quick to invoke the joseph goebbels playbook in a mad dash to get their way and get people on their side and before you know it people are shouting propaganda at eachother and reinforce further divisions. i mean that's my yardstick for detecting extremism. hyperbole abounds and people start using childish slogans to describe the other side.

the reality is that the sides are almost blurry to the point of being indistinguishable. i don't understand why the people who accept the notion that gender can exist on a spectrum can paint politics in such black and white terms. you will find people against your issue, people who just dont care, the sympathetic but without skin in the game then you got people like me with skin in the game but think that we are going about it all wrong. politicizing identity always seemed oxymoronic to me. i can stand around waving a flag that i know is going to piss certain people off and make me a target, or i can live my life and deal with the battles as they come. the latter has worked out well for me. the former is only fanning the flames.

[Commoners]

The6thMessenger, on 05 October 2021 - 08:19 PM, said:

That's the point, it's intellectually vague, as we all have our own beliefs and pet causes. Everyone thinks their pet causes is the most important in the world, that's why they hold it. Imagine if everyone else started putting up Save the Amazon Forest, Save the Ughyr Muslims, Save the Animals and be Vegan.

No one here is saying that those causes aren't important, but this is just not the right place to talk about them so we don't really ******* care. And to frame it as we're just anti to these causes for not wanting it tainting our space for MWO is disingenuous.

So let's approach this from an angle of established policy that we know has come down from PGI:

PGI's stance is that human rights that are considered protected statuses are not considered political in nature for the purposes of moderation in game or on these forums.

You've brought examples in that are plainly not part of those protected statuses, which means that they would be considered non-discussable content in the game due to their political nature.

Save the Amazon Forest is an environmental issue. Environmental discussions don't fall under the human rights umbrella.

Save the Animals and be Vegan is an issue of animal rights, which are very clearly distinct from human rights.

Save the Ughyr Muslims actually would be an a-okay slogan to toss out in chat because they are a persecuted religious minority group. I'm sure CCP censors wouldn't enjoy this, but I'm pretty sure Battletech and MWO wouldn't make it onto the approved game list in the PRC anyway so we shouldn't need to worry about the sales viability of the franchise in China. (I think the Capellans existing just generally would make the CCP hate this franchise anyway.)

As a slightly separate but still relevant concept to that, the people arguing that these things are gumming up comms haven't been complaining about salutes, gghf's, greetings, "Die..." (nuclear weapon), "Orbital pillow cannon pompf"s (flyby), other people who have catchphrases that they say every match, twitch channel links (various high profile streamers for MWO), the various volleys of "i'm gonna shoot you" back and forth between teams, or the general innocuous chatter that happens in allchat and voice in the first minute of a match in almost every match. How many threads do we have on the forums that talk about those interfering with gameplay historically?

The one anomaly that we really have to any of these innocuous catchphrases being banned is Veigle, but even then it wasn't an issue of him blanking out comms with "Hello, ladies" to the point where no one could communicate. The crux of the issue seemed to be that the ladies in question that were being addressed were uncomfortable with being addressed and he refused to stop even when asked to, and it was the moderation hill that he chose to die on.

I'm sure there's someone who has demanded complete comms discipline and has made a thread about it, but I'm willing to bet that if that thread did exist, that they were probably laughed off writ large by the community.

E: I think I need to add an edit just to head off someone trying to be clever about this: Obviously if someone is literally spamming voice and allchat by repeatedly slamming ctrl + v throughout the game or they are running a hot mic where they're unendingly talking about something it's different from someone punching out eleven letters at the start or finish of a game. In that case it'd be spam regardless of content and I think we can all reasonably agree that it'd be obnoxious.

Also: This one is ACTUALLY unrelated to all of this discussion-- I looked at the leaderboards for the comp teams to look at their names and have been laughing my *** off at some of them, but how have the ****** Roughnecks survived as a team name?

Edited by Commoners, 05 October 2021 - 08:54 PM.

[Sug]

Ash Rose, on 05 October 2021 - 08:44 PM, said:

I genuinely have no idea what you mean.

An incredulous look that one might see the camera pause on, given by the titular character of sitcom from the 80's that shall remain nameless. Possibly to his son Theo. As a response to him saying something nonsensical. Whichever emoticon conveys that. That's what I'm looking for.

Commoners, on 05 October 2021 - 08:46 PM, said:

So let's approach this from an angle of established policy that we know has come down from PGI:

No one cares what the commoners think.

Edited by Sug, 05 October 2021 - 08:57 PM.

[ccrider]

If real people are playing this game then it's the right place to bring up these topics. Full stop. There aren't a bunch of AI pilots here, there are real humans with real feelings, facing real threats to their existence. If breaching the subject to fellow humans isn't appropriate here, where is it appropriate? Should they scream into an empty Doritos bag so as not to offend anyone's beliefs and just continue suffering? Look at these forums as society at large; the same "don't bring this up in this place" issue is everywhere. If you, as a person, can't bring yourself to feel the slightest empathy for someone else plight you're not really a human being at all.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

Quote

[color=#959595]trans folks have had a rough time -- discriminated against both in the law and outside of it, ostracized from family, high rates of suicide as a result of the latter. I don't think allowing "trans fights" and "trans rights" as team names and in chat is the catering you think it is.[/color]

iis the suicide rate so high because of the discrediting? or because of the basic personality problems? most trans people have severe mental disorders, is being trans just another escape from reality and one's own perception? one escapes from one stereotype role into another to find that the grass is not greener there? that an operation does not change the ego and the problems with the perception, but a mutilation of the body is to fulfill an idea, why targen transmen a beard, to seem particularly masculine and to fulfill a cliché which exists only in their head ... there is not the man or the woman, but 8 billion individuals. In other countries, mothers mutilate their girls to make them more desirable for marriage, women starve themselves to death to satisfy the stereotypes in their heads of what a woman should be, and transmen mutilate their bodies to be what they think the opposite sex is ... something that only exists in their ideas instead of just being themselves, not willing to realize that they only lied to themselves, did everything to follow a sick idea, mutilated their functioning body, but will never be a man or a woman, but always just a mutilated being chasing a dream.

I can surgically transform into an indigenous person (but never their cultural history and experience), have a cat face molded, transform into an asexual alien (or how I imagine it) but I will always be me, no matter what body, and always have the same problems with myself.



Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Edited by MW Waldorf Statler, 05 October 2021 - 09:20 PM.

[Ash Rose]

Sug, on 05 October 2021 - 08:55 PM, said:

An incredulous look that one might see the camera pause on, given by the titular character of sitcom from the 80's that shall remain nameless. Possibly to his son Theo. As a response to him saying something nonsensical. Whichever emoticon conveys that. That's what I'm looking for.

I guess all I can say is I am just as incredulous at the notion that the name "trans rights" is anything but deeply mild and innocuous as a name.

[Commoners]

Sug, on 05 October 2021 - 08:55 PM, said:

No one cares what the commoners think.

Yeah, it's pretty clear too, because we legitimately have people asking various shades of, "But what is the difference between me saying a neonazi slogan and me saying women's suffrage in chat?"

E: I'll further expand. One of these is someone slinging out a slogan that is covered under the human rights umbrella. One of these is hate speech.

Both of them are covered under the same line of the ToS which reads:

• vii. incites discrimination, hate or violence towards one person or a group because of their belonging to a race, religion, nationality, sexuality, gender or other human rights-protected group of persons;

If something falls under that 'protected groups of persons' umbrella, it's not considered political in in game chat and isn't considered a moderatable offense.

Edited by Commoners, 05 October 2021 - 09:13 PM.

[Sug]

Ash Rose, on 05 October 2021 - 09:01 PM, said:

I guess all I can say is I am just as incredulous at the notion that the name "trans rights" is anything but deeply mild and innocuous as a name.

Your incredulousness fuels mine.

ccrider, on 05 October 2021 - 08:59 PM, said:

. If breaching the subject to fellow humans isn't appropriate here, where is it appropriate?

https://mwomercs.com...ic-discussions/

Edited by Sug, 05 October 2021 - 09:14 PM.

[The6thMessenger]

Commoners, on 05 October 2021 - 08:46 PM, said:

So let's approach this from an angle of established policy that we know has come down from PGI:

PGI's stance is that human rights that are considered protected statuses are not considered political in nature for the purposes of moderation in game or on these forums.

That's not really it. The causes themselves aren't the point, it's that we can all find our causes.

For example, bring democracy to the middle east, because guess what, freedom and liberty are human rights, and in many cases muslim world typically falls short on that. And then you realize that they don't actually conform with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but rather the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights -- which means they are allowed to murder apostates, which would have been against the 18th Article of UDHR. It's laughable that they have a seat in the United Nations.

The Philippines has this rampant war on drugs that as a result unlawfully killed hundreds (yes, extra judicial killings); China has basically slavery in their sweat shops apart from the muslim camps; USA has lots of war crimes, hell they just offed 10 civilians with 7 kids in a drone strike few months ago. Health and Safety is human rights. You can find lots of human rights violation everywhere.

Because guess what, humans are pretty ******* awful creatures, a plague on this planet. The world is a complicated place, with awful things happening in every nook and cranny that we don't get to see in our every day life.

See these Trans-Issues, sure they are important, but have you ever seen people ripped apart? Their homes razed, that their dead, their little brothers, their sons, just thrown on the god damn community fire for cremation to prevent the spread of disease. There is no end to these suffering, the solution is nothing short of human extinction.

Right, spamming isn't nice, but guess what imagine if every one of those 24 players start commenting about their pet causes? Imagine if the 19,000 of the population made their own threads about their pet causes? This will not even be MWO forums anymore, it's just MWO community discussing anything but the actual game.

Again, that is not to say that these pet causes doesn't matter, it's just not the right place.

Commoners, on 05 October 2021 - 08:46 PM, said:

"Die..." (nuclear weapon)

It's Das.

Edited by The6thMessenger, 05 October 2021 - 09:30 PM.

[Sug]

The6thMessenger, on 05 October 2021 - 09:14 PM, said:

It's Das.

I default to das. Screw definite articles.

[The6thMessenger]

Sug, on 05 October 2021 - 09:25 PM, said:

I default to das. Screw definite articles.

Die is feminine, Das is neutral.

Because I am literally figuratively literally shaking.

Edited by The6thMessenger, 05 October 2021 - 09:28 PM.

[Sug]

Damn it Messenger. Stop liking my posts. You're clearly insane.

[The6thMessenger]

Sug, on 05 October 2021 - 09:28 PM, said:

Damn it Messenger. Stop liking my posts. You're clearly insane.

I resent that.

I'm not insane, I'm just ahead of the curve.

[Sug]

The6thMessenger, on 05 October 2021 - 09:33 PM, said:

I resent that.

I'm not insane, I'm just ahead of the curve.

What an insane statement. There's a curve now? What?