Same thing in Russia (where they'll prefer a Russian troll to a Polish human), and a bit the same in Hong Kong (where they'll be more comfortable with a native meta than with a foreign human).
I think it's either because the writers weren't writing about their own countries or because they found stupid that ethnic prejudices would disappear because of metahuman prejudices but couldn't change what had been stated since 1st ed.

As for the PH, I'm also disappointed by the way it's handled most of the time. Even in Loose Alliance, the description of a tolerant and overall nice PH by a PH member sounds totally fake. Personally, I like to consider that some of the PH aren't violent anti-metahumans groups but just some lobby group for humans, with some valid points, such as concern about elves and dwarves occupying all senior positions because of their age.

I suspect that Riley37 was referring to the "Don't Ask-Don't Tell" in the context of a hypothetical 2LT Alexander declaring his preferences, thereby forcing the Army to respond.

When I was in back in the early '90s, Don't Ask-Don't Tell was just coming out (so to speak), and met with some initial resistance, but ultimately was accepted as sensible. It was actually a significant progressive step from their previous policies of actively searching for gays to exclude. I'd imagine that it won't be much longer before "Don't Ask - Don't Tell" becomes "We Really Don't Care As Long As You Do Your Job". Agree?

I would. If men and women are equal then they should be equal, that includes using the same facilities. We don't have Colored showers anymore because separate is never equal. To segregate based on gender is just as appalling as segregation based on skin color.

Given the historical effectiveness of the Sacred Band of Thebes and other sexually-bonded armies, it is absurd to ban homosexual contact in modern military service and makes substantially more sense to make sexual relations between soldiers who serve together compulsory without regard to gender.

The only real issue is pregnancy, which alone incapacitates more female soldiers than guns, rockets, and bombs do together. This is why sexually bonded armies work best if they are exclusively homosexual. But there are ways to prevent that now.

Yeah!

Not so sure about this part, though. I'm pretty sure that forcing people to have sex with people, regardless of gender, would probably be bad for morale.

Yes I'm aware, and the post you quoted was a reply to Kzt regarding Nazis.

My initial post spoke of facist and not necessarily nazis.

Italy didn't buy much into the racial issue (other than thinking of ethiopians as subhuman and gassing them into submission), but still rampant nationalism and belief that "might makes right."

Hey I have never read the book but I remember that only militairy can vote in ST.

I still want to read the original book though.

Well, this IS a psi-fi game forum

The military is specifically prohibited from voting. Only citizens can vote (acquired by completing a term of federal service, which is far more likely to some kind of of civil service than military work).

I thought to be a citizen you had to serve a term of militairy service. Otherwise I stand corrected.

in order to be a citizen you had to join the military.

The only problem being that in Shadowrun they actually are scientifically superior to metahumans like orks and trolls. The average troll is much taller and twice as strong as the average human, and only a third as intelligent. Orks come off a little better in that they're nearer human size but they're still nearly twice as strong as humans and only two thirds as intelligent or social. Plus they've got a shorter life span and mature much faster hitting adulthood incredibly early, throw in the fact that they birth in litters of anywhere between four and eight kids at a time and you've got a bunch of muscle bound anti-social intellectually sub-normal little fuckers that are going to out breed us!

But not if he wants to be a sociopathic runner who tortures captured enemies to death in his hideout? Geeze.

Which edition are you playing? Orks and Trolls are only have slightly lower IQ potential, alot of Trolls and Orks can be just as smart as an ordinary human.

If anything, it's the metas that are scientifically "better" than humans. Stronger, tougher, more agile, more charismatic etc.

Orks have a shorter lifespan, but so what? And where does it say they USUALLY have 4-8 babies at the same time?

The rest (also) sounds alot like HP, good work

Well the thing is, there is a nice fat distinction between most players and slave brokers. Few people are going to confuse the player with the character and think that the person sitting next to them might harbour secret slave brokering tendancies. This is not necessarily the case with racism. A player sitting there spouting about how X aren't as intelligent, or are naturally violent can make me uncomfortable. I have to trust someone quite a bit to accept that this sort of talk is 100% distinct from their character. Racism doesn't have to be the extremes of Nazim, it can be as subtle as a statement that different races have different educational needs.

So yes, it makes perfect sense that we are more wary of playing or having racist characters in our games than we are of having people play murderers and slave brokers.

Spoken like a true Humanis-apologist. There are three points in that need addressing (and I'm doing so to both show how subtle and persuasive Humanis can be in putting these arguments, and how an intelligent troll in 2070 could respond to this):

1. Birth rates. A healthy human woman could fairly easily have eight or more children in her life time. How many women do you know that have eight or more children? Modern birth control today is able to prevent unwanted pregnancy and, though still expensive and not fully reliable yet, medical science even allows one to choose how many children you will conceive. Only prudishness and embarrasment on the subject of sex, or the belief that one's children will somehow remain "pure" until marriage, prevents effective use of contraception through the UK and the USA. By 2070 - an age in which we have genetic engineering, implantable phones and where artificial eyes cost the equivalent of around £200 / $500 - contraceptive technology has no doubt become even more vastly hassle-free. And given the social fluff in SR material, it's hard to imagine prudishness or naivity preventing its early use. Orks, like everyone else, will usually have as many or as few children as they want. What will make the difference, as it always does, is education and opportunity. Now it may be that more orks are poor as a percentage of all orks than with humans, but that is a social factor and not a product of race. Therefore the correct factor to be complaining about is the social factors, not orks' reproductive capacities.

2. Average intelligence: There are two things that matter here. The less important perhaps, is the perception of average intelligence of trolls being 1/3rd as intelligent as humans. This is unsubstantiated. What the rules say is that trolls have a unaugmented cap of 5 for logic and intuition. I'm going to leave intuition as it's less of a direct parallel to what is probably meant by intelligence in this context - i.e. academic and reasoning ability. This logic cap does not mean that the typical troll is less intelligent than the typical human. It means precisely that the smartest trolls are not as smart as the smartest humans and that is all. A logic of 5 is still the smartest person most of us have probably met. As very few people of any race reach their potential, it's only a subjective take on the rules to say that the lower cap is reflected in a lower average further down the scale. Most of us rise to the level of necessary ability, that is to say, what we need to get by and no further. It requires effort to do more than we need, else we'd all have doctorates. So what if a troll does have to work slightly harder and could never reach quite the heights of a human in this area? They would only have to work a little harder to reach the same level as everyone else. When today's educational system doesn't push anyone to reach half of their potential, it's not going to matter if some require a little extra study to keep up because there's plenty of capacity spare for that extra effort. Though all this is simply if the logic penalties on trolls were present further down the scale which by the rules, is not substantiated. All it gives us is a lower cap.

But the second issue on the subject of lower intelligence is perhaps the more important because it is an observation of racism. Prejudice means to pre-judge, literally. It means making an assumption about them based on some other factor such as race or nationality or whatever. We know that trolls can have an intelligence of 4 or 5 before augmentation. To say that trolls are less intelligent is a generalisation and is racist. There's no way to know if any given troll you meet is smarter than you or not. When you pre-judge, then that is racist and we get all the accompanying problems and failures.

Finally, a level 1 cerebral booster costs 10,000 . That would be about £4,000 / $8,500 tops in today's terms. Yeah, you might not have it lying around, but you could get it or borrow and pay it off. If society really thinks that a troll's logic cap is a handicap, then that sort of money is peanuts to a society. Trolls are a minority, remember. Any reasonably healthy society would see it as being in their strong economic interests to make such "corrective" surgery available for free. You say SR2070 isn't a healthy society? Well perhaps not, but again the problem is society, not the race.

3. Something implicit in the argument but not stated, which makes it all the more subtle, is the assumption of different interests. When you say "they will out-breed us" you make two assumptions. The first is that orks will have different interests to humans. Why should this be the case? When the economy sucks, it sucks for everyone. When there's a war, all sorts of people die. If there's an ork mayor elected, it's not as if humans are going to rounded up in pens. In fact, with the popular perception of humans being more intelligent, humans could well be more prized as employees and leaders. Orks, humans and trolls have the same needs and aims. The second assumption of course is that the increase in the number of orks will lead to a decrease in the number of humans. Unlike real-world racial groups, there can be no merging of races, no "fucking till we're all the same colour." Orks and humans breed true. The only way orks are going to squeeze out humans is if (meta-)humanity hits a population cap such as food supplies or living space. Perhaps that could happen, but after wars, viruses, disasters etc, the world is currently a little emptier than it used to be. Plus the space migration is in early stages. There is space. And if the worry is that increased numbers of orks will lead to increased ork influence, well see the first part of this point - human and ork have the same goals for society - peace and prosperity. If your worry is about orks gaining greater influence, then the most effective response is not to try and repress orks, but to diminish racism so that influence never breaks down along racial lines in the first place.

I put these points to show that there are answers to Humanis, but how easily those answers can be missed and racism left unchallenged when people are afraid.

Well if the "cold-hearted criminals" are shadowrunners then yes, they probably would dislike Humanis and other overt-racists. After all, if your Ork/Human/Troll teammate saved your life by pulling you of a hail of bullets, then you'll be disinclined to support those that tell you he's sub-human.

As to an elf-hating player not meaning the player is racist (and I'm going to assume you mean an elf-hating PC), I never said it did. But maybe you've never had people say seriously and sincerely to you that your race should be nuked off the face of the earth or exterminated some other way. My point is that it's a lot closer to plausibility that someone is a racist than it is that they are a "slave broker". Hence increased desire on the part of people to put distance between themselves and racist characters. That's only reasonable. Let me illustrate the principle again in another way. How many all-straight, all-male groups contain a player that said, 'I think my next character will be a homosexual.' And I don't mean they retreat into exagerrated and camp stereotyping, I mean realistically and sensitively. I'm obviously not saying homsexuality is equivalent to racism in that its a negative thing (I'd sooner someone fancied me than beat me up), but it's an example of something that has equally interesting potential for role-playing and character development but which many players will not want to bring into a character for fear of confusion.

And there's another count against playing racists which is simple distaste. For most of us, thankfully, we've never seen a murder or a stabbing. Those of us that have, often find it slightly harder to go back to playing characters that casually stab or murder others. Many of us have witnessed or been victims of racism. It makes it less palatable to play a character that is racist. To some degree, it is normal to like or respect the character that we are playing. Playing a racist is normally going against that which is possible, but is unusual. Playing a character that shoots people is less going against that not because shooting people is better, but because shooting people is less likely something we're very familiar with.

Wary of going too far off topic, but perhaps this'll resolve quickly...

You are correct that I haven't served. I made a decision long ago that if Congress actually makes an unambiguous declaration of war, I'll volunteer; but I don't think Congress has done so since 1941. (USA Congress, that is, this topic is largely American-oriented.)

More relevantly, looks like my post was based partly on outdated info. Discharges based on sexuality or sexual conduct rose steadily from the 1994 adoption of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" for several years, then have been dropping since 2001. However... there's evidence that a few commanders still do "witch hunts" for homosexuals, that a female soldier who rejects a male soldier's advances can be threatened with accusations of lesbianism, and so forth. I'm glad that you didn't run into those behaviors, and that they're less common than they used to be, but a pattern of witch-hunt incidents was documented by the New York Times in 1996, and your dismissal of "incorrect conclusions" is taking your own experience as the way it always has been for everyone.

Back to Shadowrun: which militaries in 2070 are integrated? UCAS, CAS, Tir, other? I can easily see some militaries assigning trolls to all-troll units, for ease of standardizing rations, issuing weapons with usable grips, and so on; dwarves do better with dwarf-mod web gear and weapon grips/handles; but do those separate units get fair treatment? Can an INT 5 LOG 5 CHA 4 troll get into Officer Candidate School? (this would be a troll that's smarter than human average, and way smarter than troll average; trolls can take Exceptional Ability, so a few are well above human average; NB that in SR4 they have lower caps, not -2 penalties, so if the range is 1 to 4, then I imagine most goblins have mental stats of 2 or 3.)

My main current character is a troll rigger whose parents are both human (born in 2042, goblinized in 2055) and who *hates* the Sons of Sauron. Last story arc involved selling sabotaged rocket launchers to SOS just before they attacked a dwarf warren.

People have different threshold regarding certain subjects, and that's only natural. But that doesen't set the threshold for everyone else. It's up to the individual group to decide what they can and cannot include in a game.

For example, I've played with a GM that abhorred violence towards animals and told us if we did that in his games we would be thrown out. Personally I couldn't care less if a fictional guard dog was shot or a cow slaughtered for meat, but that's just the way it was.

Most of my groups are VERY liberal though - which means pretty much anything goes. We don't need to describe horrible stuff in detail (unless that is the point to create a horror story), but racism, rape, murder, torture, cannibalism, blasphemy religious intolerance, slavery and chauvinism can be played. As long as people keep it strictly IC.

For example, last game I played was set in Roman times, and the characters were supporting slavery, believing in the superiority of one people over others, rapists and murderers (you know, soldiers). PCs and NPCs were also more or less bisexual (not negative, but less a taboo those days).

Still if someone were in my group that had a problem with some of these (yes even getting gay advances IC), I would either respect that and change the style or play with someone else.

BTW, since racism is a part of SR, do you mind playing racist NPCs?

If a player hates elves, and plays all their characters as elf-haters, then that's not *proof* that they're a racist about human skin color (and nose shape and so forth), but I would sure be wary of that player. There is a player in my group who runs his PC as a casual killer; I'll game with him, but I'm less likely to become close friends with him. The other players run their characters as killing when it's necessary, and not when it isn't. The discussions about when it is and isn't necessary are part of the game, and they also tell me something about the personalities of the players.

Opposing the Tir nations and the machinations of the Immortal Elves is one thing. Saying "I hate them all, even the elf baby born yesterday to human parents" is another thing. I speculate that more often than not, it would reflect some deeper aspect of hatred in a person's worldview.

I think this is confusing the view of players and characters. I'd be wary of people who think that because I play a racist character that I am racist myself - since as the GM, I play a lot of very evil characters in every session.

Also, one can dislike elves as a player (lots of reasons for that, "Complete Book of Elves" to name one thing), yet play characters who do not hate elves. It's separating player and character. People who can't do that I'd be wary to play with - they might confuse other stuff too.

Why? I'd consider most cold hearted killers as sociopaths, and those can easily say "all trogs are bad, but Geeky here is ok, he's a good troll".

We are talking about criminals, people shooting security guards for being in the way, people poisoning entire neighborhoods for cash, sabotaging planes and wrecking homes and lifes to further some johnson's ambition, sell people to organ leggers, and similar stuff. The idea that someone who dehumanises all his victims to the point of torturing them and selling them to be eaten/harvested for organs should suddenly care about the bunch of non-criminals who dislike metahumans seems rather odd. To quote the grimoire "Not unheard off, but odd" - and certainly not the norm in my games.

In the Army, at least before I got out, women had a different scoring chart than men for the Physical Fitness Test. Like what I mentioned above, that is the way it is. Doesn't mean it's right or prudent, but it doesn't stop it from being regulation.

I would like to put into a hat that men and women serving together in a combat unit is a bad idea, mostly because of the men. I'm sure there are plenty women who can keep up, and do just as good of a job. But men in combat (in general) don't make the same decisions when women are involved. And I don't think we are likely to see that change any time soon.

Don't forget that pre-judging, or at least being prepared is something of a safety mechanism and not always 100% bad. If you think someone might be a violent criminal based on your experience with a particular race/nationality/social class/appearance, etc., that judgement might end up saving your life. If you give him/her the benefit of the doubt and get robbed + shot in the face because of it, it's too late to say "oops, maybe I should have been a little more cautious."

The biggest problem, IMHO, is that people who pre-judge generally lock onto their assumptions and aren't willing to change them, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. If I generally think that people who didn't go to college are dumb and undereducated, and I meet someone who didn't go to college but is very intelligent and educated, I would be falling into that trap if I refuse to acknowledge that person's abilities.

And then you have people like me, who are "prejudiced" against everyone. I pre-classify everyone I meet as either worthless or a threat (sometimes both) until proven otherwise. I don't hate people because they are different...in fact I don't really hate anyone. However, I won't give you a spot in my circle until you've earned it. That's a safety mechanism that keeps myself and my family protected.

In Shadowrun, I see this sort of attitude as being common amongst professional runners. They may not hate you because of your tusks or skin color, but they will damn-well consider you dangerous and a possible threat until you prove otherwise.

I feel this way about humanity now. (My theory is that Evolution will be no longer taught in schools in two generations because the creationists are outbreeding us, which violates my daily allowance for irony. Irony poisoning people, the silent killer.)

Its actually pretty common for pc's in my group to be at least a little bit racist. We've never played a Humanis Policlub group, but that's mainly because no two players ever want to play the same concept. So it might be one human character that's always grumbling about the halfers and the trogs, the elf griping about the breeder, the ork grumbling about the softies and the troll saying, "I petted the elf too hard George," or whatever. (Okay, there was a little casual anti-troll bias in that last sentence, but as I am currently playing an urbane, witty troll boxer/private detective, I'm going to excuse myself this one time.)

And I think organleggers and BTL pushers and slavers are looked down upon. (Thieves and killers not so much, but those are more like jobs in SR. Psychopaths are looked down upon, at least in comparison to "professionals". As in, A psychopath kills for no reason, I kill for money, its a job... wait, that didn't come out right.)

And racists make good bad guys. You take qualities like ignorance, intolerance and a propensity for violence, and in the words of Carl Weathers, you got yourself a stew. You make a group of npcs that are racist, chip dealing slavers who organleg their victims, and for the pc's thats as guiltless a slaughter as going against toxics or insects. Even if you believe as I do that SR is best as a game of blurry grey rather that b&w, sometimes the players really appreciate the elements that are charcoal and eggshell.

...this brings me back to the example I first posted.

The character in question (I think we all know who that is) was had a very rough time growing up in the Tir. Obviously this is going to colour her perceptions. In part of her backstory there was an elf mage, a friend of the woman who took her in, who was very helpful, but it took some time for trust to be built up. The elf mage she encountered before that only dealt with her to cover up the physical effects that stemmed from the mistreatment she received at the hand of her father. Much of this experience occurred when she was between the ages of ten and twelve, where most kids begin to develop their "world view". Her view was basically that all elves were out to get her, to hurt her, to lie to and about her. Even her own family.

Though seven years removed from this (after having spent some time in Japan) she still has a distrust of elves that is built on what she experienced. This is particularly so since the Tir underwent change following the crash and much of the council, as well a lot of the nobility, jumped ship with many heading to Seattle where she now lives. No, she is not one to gun or cut down every elf she sees on the streets, that would be dishonourable. However, this does not preclude her being wary of their intentions and in light of the current scene as mentioned above, justifiably so. What if her Father is living somewhere in the Elven district? What if his mage buddy is there? What if she runs into a couple of her former schoolmates who used to pick fights with her and they recognise her?

In the last group, there was an elf mage on the team. She didn't go looking for the first opportunity to take him out as he had made no moves against her. However, she rarely let him cover her back and even refused healing from him at first. It took a lot of convincing but eventually he proved to her that he didn't have some secret "Tir agenda". The two finally formed a cooperative "working" relationship, although I still wouldn't call it '"chummy". Given time, yes she may come around more however the scars still run very deep.

Oh come on. That's like saying movie actors who play villanous roles in films must be villanous people in real life.

I always thought that was odd. Perhaps I'm looking at it the wrong way, but it seems to me that the army is saying, "Here's the situation: you need to be able to do X many push-ups (or whatever, I know it's a cheesy example). If you can not do X many push-ups, you are not strong enough to be a soldier, you are a liability to your squad, and you will get people killed. What's that? Oh, well you don't need to. Nah, I'm sure it'll be fine."
Figure out what the requirements are, and make that be the requirement. Different leagues in sports are okay, that's a sport. A game. War isn't. It's not as if some big dude is gonna not kill you because you're a girl, and it wouldn't be fair.
Anyway, I just thought it was odd. But like I said, maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way.
And of course, it's somewhat of a different situation in Shadowrun, where it's not just some minute differences between genders, but massive differences. If there's a set bench-press requirement, every troll will pass, no exceptions. Running time? The differences in speeds for the metatypes will generally overshadow small differences from skills. So what does that mean? Does that mean that every Ork and Troll is qualified to be a soldier, or does that mean that there should be different standards. Should they be segregated in units, so that each unit can cater to each metatypes needs and have racially modified equipment that everyone can use? It would probably be more effective, but seems wrong. If you have racially(meaning metatype) segregated units, you end up with, to paraphrase South Park, "Operations 'Human Shield', and Operation 'Hide Behind the Trogs'". Even if that's not the intent, it's sure as hell gonna look like that from time to time.

Awesome. Well-said.

You draw an interesting parallel. Today, Army Physical Fitness Tests (APFTs) are scaled based on both gender and age. A 27 year old male has to do 77 push ups in 2 minutes in order to get 100 points, while a 62 year old female only has to do 25 for the same score. As it was explained to me, the rationale for this was that it wasn't fair to hold women or seniors to the same standards of upper-body strength as they held mid-aged men. That the scaled scoring represented the performance that you'd expect from someone in each demographic that could be considered 'fit'.

In the SR universe, would trolls, orks, dwarves, etc each have their own set of standards? Or would they always just breeze through the testing with no effort? Or would all the standard humans flunk the test because the standards had been raised to accomodate trolls?

Dang... what about the 27 year old females then if the 62 year olds have to do 25?

Yeah, I left out the age component, but that's exactly how it was when I was in. The same rationale for the different standard was given to me by a female Captain back when I was in PLDC. The ability to do X+ reps of a given exercise, in a given age group, by a given gender = "fit". She said it had nothing to do with how much weight you can haul around or lift over your head or whatnot. Of course, the charts were biased in other ways as well.

In my case, I'm short (5'6") and stocky, and have a wide/strong upper body, and somewhat short arms. Basically, I'd probably goblinize into a Dwarf. This build made pushups VERY easy, and despite being no where near fit when I entered the service, I could max my pushups within 2 weeks of being downrange. My short legs/short stride made running a whole different thing entirely. I struggled the entire cycle to meet the minimum time for a 2-mile run (15:54 for a male aged 17-21). And there were a couple of guys in my platoon that were tall (6'4"+) and skinny, that could barely do 15 pushups on their first PFT, but could EASILY max their 2-mile run (13:00 for male aged 17-21).

So, if you ask me, the Army in 2070 will probably set the standards at whatever, in their minds, defines "fit" for the most common recruit. If the human recruits outnumber the metas, then the standards will be set for Humans

I see, so the tests aren't supposed to establish a required performance level to do the job, but rather to make sure you're "fit" for your age/gender.
That makes more sense.
As you say, biased in other ways, but more sense than the way I was looking at it.

50
APFT chart

[edit]The Army's choice to test relative fitness, instead of testing absolute performance, might eventually go away as it slowly evolves toward integrating men and women in combat arms branches. Right now there are lots of arguments about women in combat arms based on whether the average female soldier can carry the light infantryman's 80 pound ruck on the forced march, or load 50 pound tank rounds quickly (some can, and some can't...just like some men can and some can't). In the future, maybe the criteria will be more based on physical performance tests. "I'm sorry Sergeant Rock. Infantry fitness tests require you to run 2 miles within 14 minutes. Since you take 18 minutes to run 2 miles, you're being transferred to Quartermaster corps and will be renamed Sergeant Pudge."

If they went this way, I could definitely see some natural segregation developing within the Army as strength 6+ orcs and trolls all got assigned to MOS's that were more strength-dependant.

If by mind playing them you mean I don't, no. I do have racist NPCs, though I play their attitudes as believable and not as caricatures. If you mean does it make me a little uncomfortable sometimes, then yes, a little.

When a person comes out with something distasteful, whether it's racism or rape or any of the rest, it's not unreasonable to want to reassure yourself that this is not actually coming from their genuine desires or beliefs. With a machine-gun wielding troll mowing down dozens of security guards, it's usually apparent that it stems not from a genuine need to murder but from a video game mentality that doesn't really attach any emotional significance to things. When a more realistic and close to home thing appears, its very realism puts it on a different level. Hence a desire for reassurance and a common uncomfortability in playing such a character amongst players.

Fixed that for you...

Urk - sorry! Was typing from memory.

Assumed that there was only the one ronin.

*Runs*