Supdupadog said:
Therumancer said:
The point is that love it or hate it, and whatever side your own, it's already been won.
Dude, you don't "win" cultural diversity and stuff.
It goes on forever and ever and ever.
Actually you do. It's only really an issue when your being unfairly prevented from doing the same things as everyone else. Saying that if your black you simply cannot hold X job, or you cannot show a gay person being gay in the media, or whatever else. Once those kinds of barriers are removed, the legitimacy of the battle is over with. The opportunities exist, it's not up for people to embrace them. The opportunities being there does NOT mean your going to see people of these groups equally represented in media alongside the majority when the number of people is no where near that great, it simply means society is not going to prevent any representation. At the end of the day for the overwhelming majority of people this means going out and living a normal life, living paycheck to paycheck, and taking your orders from someone else, before eventually passing away after an unremarkable life, having never come close to realizing your dreams. Your typical black guy is not going to get to be part of the upper 1% even if everyone would like to be there, and your gay guy isn't likely to be a movie star playing gay characters, or whatever else. No one will prevent this from happening, and a few will probably make it, but most won't, and of course with relatively small groups of people those on the "dream level" are going to represent a small percentage of the group at the top, which will always largely be made up of the majority. Most media will be heterosexual in it's orientation as the majority is heterosexual, at least in the US, the majority of the 1% will be white because at least for the moment whites are the majority (though with time that will probably change given current trends, and when it does you'll gradually see the top 1% change as fortunes are inevitably lost and gained by say latinos who seem poised to become the new majority according to many sociologists, the 1% probably changing a generation or two after the societal breakdown changes).
People want to keep these issues alive forever and ever and ever, because it becomes easier for a one time minority to blame "oppression" for their failures. A people fighting a real battle tend to look at the top echelons of society and the media, without often thinking ahead that opportunity does not mean being guaranteed a spot at the top. It's easier to blame whites, straights, or whomever else, than to just realize that being one of the masses sucks, and it doesn't matter who you are. Being able to be promoted to management at work and in theory to one day wind up running the company doesn't mean it's going to happen for you, and discrimination has nothing to do with it. What's more politically the spectre of discrimination provides a powerful took for keeping people rallied, when there are no real issues left, nobody is say going to throw you in jail for being gay, or a TV show is not going to be banned for having a gay character in it, politicians wanting to hold together power bases breed unreasonable expectations leading to people thinking "well it must be discrimination if 50% of the video game characters aren't gay, equal would be 50% right?" (ignoring of course the simple fact that since gays are a small minority you'd still see a small minority represented in the media) and points like the one made in this article. At the end of the day these kind of arguments tend to go back to large political organizations that basically need a conflict to exist. Nobody is going to just flat out disband a powerful gay rights group, or something like the NAACP, especially given the amount of money and power commanded by the people at the top. Without a fair agenda or any real enemies or battles to fight new ones are created. This is how you get things like Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, and the NAACP going after George Zimmerman for shooting some dude who was beating his head into the pavement, even going so far as to lie about what the guy who attacked him looked like, it's important to have enemies/issues and make them seem like a real threat, because without them the power goes away.
The point is pretty much like the one Bill Cosby makes about education and black culture. The opportunities exist, it's the fault of Black America that it keeps squandering them with things like the whole "git rich or die trying" attitude pretty much spitting in the face of what civil rights leaders had been fighting for, with blacks retroactively becoming exactly the kind of entitled problem so many people fighting for them insisted wouldn't happen. While it wasn't Bill there was for example in 1915 a silent movie called "Birth Of A Nation" which was pretty racist, having to do with the founding of the KKK (as if it was a good thing), the entire "fried chicken is racist" thing arguably came from that movie as one of the scenes had to do with a "what if blacks were elected officials" and had a bunch of black people that were supposed to be officials lounging around being rowdy, with one of them eating Fried Chicken with his feet on the table in the middle of town hall (if I remember). A recent article about the insult aimed at Tiger Woods made a reference to it. You look at that kind of stereotype, and then compare attitude among a lot of blacks now that the battle has been won, and need to ask yourself if the point of what they were fighting for was entirely missed. You literally have a situation where a lot of blacks would rather be dead, face down in a ghetto with a gun in their hand and drugs in their pocket, than to work 9 to 5, which is "tantamount to slavery, replacing a bullwhip with a paycheck". With gay America it's a similar thing to an extent, it's not a crime to be gay anymore, nobody is going to ban a book or a film for having homosexuality in it, the opportunities are all there. Lacking any other real issues it's all about "well, why aren't there more gay characters" and things like that. That's no more a sign of racism and
oppression as a black guy not being in the top 1% is.... and no, a minority will never have the presence of the
majority in any aspect of a society, that's not racism, it's simple math, if everyone has the same opportunities you won't see them outright prohibited, and more than if you couldn't have any at all, but your never going to them having equal representation than a those with more or a presence within society. If you add societal intertia into it and institutions that are self-perpetuating (like say old money) that does mean it can take generations before changes
catch up there, not because of racism or bigotry, because that's simply how things work. After all half the point of civil liberties was specifically to give equal opportunities, not to try and take anything other people already had
away from them. In the context of gay rights, one could argue this is a big part of why so many people have gotten irritated about pushes to retroactively insert gays into established franchises, effectively "taking them away" rather than the opportunities being exploited to simply see the occasional gay character appear in newer media that came about once it was no longer illegal to do so.
I guess this post won't go over as intended (not that I'm going to argue it seriously) because I imagine using Black America and education/opportunities as a counterpoint is a little controversial itself in this crowd. I've never been the best at trying to make these kinds of points. The bottom line of what I'm saying here is that the legitimacy of these kinds of arguments DOES end once the opportunities have been won. Once you start saying "this is what we're entitled to see right now" and presenting it as right and proper, instead of simply saying you should have the opportunity to make it happen, that's not a legimate complaint. In this article in particular the guy is acting like there is some kind of an issue with gays being under represented in video games, and really that's not the case when you consider what a minority they are, there are indeed loads of examples. What's more as the issue becomes harder to make a big deal out of, you've had to see the whole "gays in gaming/media" change the argument to continue to have something to fight about. After all in this article simply having gays there being *gasp* normal people isn't enough, having a few games with gay sex scenes (Dragon Age) apparently doesn't count now either. It's becoming pushing for the sake of pushing, when really it's just time to say "hey, we won" and give it a rest. Indeed it seems more likely that gay America is going to create it's own backlash by pushing too hard, a lot like you've also seen with attacks on Black culture, which is what apparently prompted Bill Cosby to start coming out years ago to speak on the subject (and as I've said before, I disagree with him on a lot of stuff outside of this, but if you haven't, I really think people should read his stuff on black culture and education).