It's for the page on 'Chaotic Good.' The use of freedom here made me think of the way freedom is bandied about by reactionaries. Because d&d is relevant right now, the lib energy of d&d, and the way we love to look at our world through pop culture, I immediately realized libertarians and radlibs see themselves as the chaotic good type. They get to be pro individualist capitalism and they get to pretend they could be the good one with it.
But when seen through this subtype of chaotic good, good before freedom, you see the way their understanding of 'good' is held back by wanting to protect rights.
It's just funny to me how libs who want to protect something like free speech are actively prioritizing that over the good for others. Like they actively know it's not good to let people just say something offensive, but they should just have the right anyway.
It's something that I appreciate in leftist spaces. I'd rather have a content filter or spoiler tag over slurs/fucked up images. It's not the best system, but Hexbear is one of the few places I feel safe talking and it's within a community that also excludes bigots.
I dunno. What do people think about the Character Alignment chart and its applications to morals and philosophy? Does something like that help you better conceptualize politics? Where do you think the liberalization of character alignment hurts society most?
Also, since I'm high, I'm also willing to answer questions. And I feel chatty. Will also do requests for short pieces of writing, creative writing advice, stories, opinions, or whatever.
The D&D alignment chart was Gygax trying to reconcile the Catholic derived morality of Tolkein's works with Michael Moorcock's anarchist worldview (those two being the chief fantasy authors he was pulling inspiration from for DnD)... which is why it's almost completely useless as any sort of lens to view the world.
Tolkein was writing children stories for children, then a grand re-imagined English mythology- of course Good(tm) and Evil(tm) exist, with no shades of grey. But what is good and what is evil? Whose good? Whose evil?
Moorcock's cosmology of Order vs. Chaos is a direct criticism of that kind of religious dogma, in fact his work was often a direct criticism of Tolkein's work in-and-of itself. Order (those who uphold Good(tm) )means Inquisitors, Crusaders, Stormtoopers- the heroes of Tolkein's work (to be fair to Tolkein I don't think he meant it that way, but it's the way it pans out if you look at it long and hard enough). Moorcock's themes came down to "No Gods, No Masters."
These are two diametrically opposed ideological viewpoints, one a very pointed criticism of the other. So of course Gygax's big-brain idea was to make them the X and Y axis on a chart.
If you're using the chart as a tool to help you conceptualize abstract ideas- sure, go for it! Lord knows we all need some help wrapping complex ideas into things easy to understand for normal people. But just remember the limitations of it, that it's ultimately just a toy to help people build toy models of worlds to play in, not a realistic model of this world.
40k stole Chaos from Moorcock (that's where we get the eight pointed star from), but I kinda wish they kept the morally ambiguous chaos instead of the rar-rar evil stuff. You know, like Khorne is the god of war, but also the god of courage, honour, etc. Obviously, the Imperium are still space fascists. 40k didn't really inherit a real throughline on "order" as opposition to Chaos (except a very occasional reference). And really, having centralised gods is antithetical to chaos anyway, so 40k winds up being a mixed bag.
(also warhammer fantasy, which no one has heard of)
So what you're saying is DnD needs Tolstoy to balance the contradictions out