Speciesism and the current TG

[Jonathan Gupta]

How will you as a headmin combat speciesism or do you believe its fine.

[RaveRadbury]

How will you as a headmin combat speciesism or do you believe its fine.

I'm interested to see how things go now that the IRL 1-letter knockoff slur is gone. Gonna be keeping an eye on it.

[Maxipat]

I go a bit about it in my response to dragomagol, but i believe there are 2 types of specieisms - systemical and personal:

One is a "non-discriminatory" specieism towards everyone of that particular species / all non-humans, such like ai's asimov lawset, non-humans being paid 20% less or human supremacist bartender deciding they only serve humans today and throw "taildraggers" at lizards. This one is great, has actually meaningful opportunity for roleplay and organic conflict to come out of it and doesn't feel targetted at you specifically.

The other type, personal specieism, is the kind where a player decides "i want to grief moths today", find a random moth in the halls and starts abusing them with flashes, cuffs etc etc just because "they're specieist towards moths". And yet they just found that one random player, usually someone that's less robust than them and just griffs them for barely any reason. And i really would like to look into the latter more closely, at which point it gets too much and whether should we even allow such explicit rule 1 break/self-antagonism to happen on our servers, just because they gave "im specieist" excuse.

Of course life is not as black and white as this, i believe there is middle ground where someone throws specieist insults (that arent just 1-letter-off slurs) and it's still targeted at someone in particular, but admins should be encouraged to look into that and gauge at which point it crosses the line from "specieist roleplay" to "using specieism as excuse to break rules". At bare minimum specieism should open you to getting your ass beaten up by the person youre specieist about without ability to fight back lethally or incapacitate them for longer than necessary (kinda like with valid arrests but without arrest part).

[iansdoor]

How will you as a headmin combat speciesism or do you believe its fine.

Speciesism with a bit of backstory, can drive a story or push a narrative. I think if the intentions are IC only, that they are fine as long as the aggressor isn't blatantly breaking rule 1, or rule 11. Anything OOC that bleeds in IC, I don't appreciate and there is no need for it.

Example that you and I know is that Jimmy little doesn't like lizards and will, at any valid rule 4 opportunity, will hunt them and turn them into lizard-slaying boots, with his lizard killer gun. I laugh at this notion. He doesn't kill every lizard he mets or become disinterested in chatter with every lizard. I am in the belief that he means well, and I see that is the ideal speciesism.

[xzero314]

Speciesism is part of the setting I think so long as its not used as a way to grief other people then hold up as a shield. Asimov is a pretty large example of build in speciesism.

An example off the top of my head: The shaft miner that had a bad run in with ash walkers and irrationally mistrusts ALL lizards as a result. Its a character Flaw by all means. But they don't use it as an excuse to not RP with lizard players. Or to grief the rounds of any lizard players they come across. Its a character trait they use as a guideline when deciding how to respond to situations and conversations IC.

Using "Im spacist" as an excuse in any fashion to grief somebodies round or anything that would run afoul of rule 1 is not acceptable though.

[TheRex9001]

I wanna keep it, with the l word gone hopefully something more creative can be built that isnt just real life racism with letters swapped. Using as an excuse to like kill someone or ruin all their shit sucks though, but that is already covered by rule 1. Speciesism should also facilitate interactions and not be a big ol fucking filter that prevents players from interacting. Its always gonna be worth watching how the culture shifts and reforms around speciesism so I may change my views throughout the term.

[Jackraxxus]

It's called spacism and I wouldnt want it banned I like insulting the different forms of disgusting filthy org*nics in unique and interesting ways I'd hate to have to call them all fleshbag.