No one in the Almayer really knows what Jamaica is, so they would be intrigued when I yell it out over comms
My character is an educated snowflake with some basic knowledge about Jamaica
Me, I started the trend of calling them Jamaicans (real) i’m sorry for being fucked up and not watching out for people of colors in the community, I should’ve called them “Fishnet Daddies” or “Bigfoot” before it went too far
Words words words. We get it, you’re white. now can you stop policing every niche hobby you are in please?
So could we just call them Dreadlocks? I mean, honestly, it makes a lot more sense than “jamaicans”. If we really believe the most iconic and immediately distinguishable feature of Predators is the dreadlocks, why are we making an extra connection to call them “jamaican”?
Marine sees alien with dreadlocks → Marine remembers that Jamaicans are stereotypically depicted with dreadlocks → Marine calls them “Jamaicans”
or
Marine sees alien with dreadlocks → Marine calls them “Dreadlocks”
I don’t know why we’re doing extra steps just to keep a dumb nickname. I mean, when I started playing, i know I was really confused when people started yelling about Jamaicans.
I think this is actually the way to go. We all agree that “red dog” and “rhino” were dumb enough to allow marines to just… call a xeno a xeno. Now, please imagine if were calling Runners “Indian Dogs” and insisting that it was actually a clever nickname. Sound ridiculous and racist? You’re right, exactly like calling Predators “Jamaicans”.
I’m confused, so do marines know what Jamaica is or not? Is your character the only one allowed to know about Jamaica? The United Americas is a coalition of North, Central, and South America, so why wouldn’t it be possible to have a Jamaican marine? Did all cultures get forgotten by the UA (or maybe they just forgot about the black cultures)? Seems like you’re saying two different things.
Listen, I’m super happy that you got to start a trend, and I understand that you’re feeling defensive about it. I’m sure you’re very proud, and told all your friends and family about the funny meme you started. Unfortunately, it seems a number of people are kinda tired of it, and recognize it as stupid and LRP. If they decide to retire the term, I’ll make sure you get a commendation or plaque or something.
I’ll be entirely honest here. I think those of you who are writing essays and desperately trying to tie this into a racial thing are beyond demented.
As someone who also has Carribbean and Jamaican family members I can personally say you are all reaching too far to justify what is clearly you shoving your politics into the game.
I’ve had racial abuse thrown at me my whole life and I’ve never felt as insulted as much as you all clearly are for a race/ethnicity/culture I know none of you belong to or even remotely understand.
Thank you for being offended on my and some of my family’s behalf.
I will keep using Jamaican and I encourage everyone else to do so as there is no negative racial link to our community’s usage of the word.
Further more It’s very reasonable to call the humanoid alien with dreadlocks a fucking Jamaican. It’s very natural to put a familiar stereotype onto things we do not understand and “Jamaicans having dreadlocks” is not a negative stereotype so there is no issue here.
Idk go ask @Ediblebomb he’s the one who decided that Jamaica is esoteric knowledge to marines now
I don’t need a plaque because I lied. People have been calling preds “Jamaicans” long before me and I don’t find it LRP. Is it stupid? Yes, but it I find believable in-universe for people to call them Jamaicans. And I admit, I don’t fully know who you are -so feel free to correct me- but you seem to me like the annoying newcomer who barges into communities and demand for it to make changes to accomodate you instead of leaving. Everytime we bow our heads, you want us to go lower and lower.
May i remind everyone we already had this discussion before on the previous forum and it was collectively agreed it was a stupid idea?
I think the reason why crimson is proposing it now is because they now think they might actually have a chance of Management taking this suggestion seriously.
Jamaican is just the normal in-game term people use to refer to preds. It just stuck years ago and if you see a pred IC, that’s just what you call them. It’s not even a joke or anything funny, it’s literally just the de-facto IC name.
Same thing with deltard. It’s just what people call them, and I have to agree with Steelpoint here- Just remove first contact and people will use ‘pred’ instead of ‘jamaican’.
First contact is already dumb as hell considering people only RP with preds to try and fight them (or if they’re a synthvivor who talks with them for 2 hours straight). 9 times out of 10, people are just shooting at predators on sight so predator first contact is just as dated as xeno first contact imo.
CM’s (and Aliens’) universe is a shit one to live in, Earth is a shithole covered in megacities, smog, underground megacities whose inhabitants have never seen the sky, and nuclear wastelands that used to be megacities, the UA is plagued by crime and every mugger has an assault rifle. The colonies, while somewhat better, are still controlled mostly by corporations or the obviously heavily flawed TWE, UA, and UPP, and due to their extreme remoteness are even less likely to know about Earth cultures. It’s not exactly unlikely that most citizens aren’t going to be educated (could end the sentence here but I’m not certain about it so I won’t) on other cultures either, what they need is a worker and they don’t care about anything else.
Oh also they blew up the internet, so there goes yet another avenue to learning about Jamaica.
(Important note: I don’t think it’s impossible for your characters to know about Jamaica, it’s just very unlikely for some random marine to, officers might have gotten real educations, or your marine might even be from Jamaica)
Please stop playing online games if this offends you to the point that you feel the need to draw to your ancestry. It’s not that complicated.
If you hear a marine say this and assume they‘re being racist then that’s honestly hella entitled considering people probably used the term long before most of you (and me) even started playing this game. I don’t come and join a game community midway and then ring the bells to try and police their in-game jargon.
Grow some skin, for the love of whatever deity you prefer.
The major problem is that none of these people herald from any of these races or cultures they are speaking for.
It’s a bunch of white kids trying to represent me and my peers and protect us because we need our white saviours to tell the mean white people off for offending us.
Thank you for thinking about lesser minorities such as myself.
I am glad that you have had good experiences with this community, feel comfortable here, and take no issue with that language.
I too would like to live in some utopian post-slur post-offense society where no words are ever said with the intent to hurt ever again. Unfortunately, we live in the slow decay of the post-2012 apocalypse as the Mayan people predicted and instead live in one where we can’t be sure of another person’s intentions.
I use slurs - our slurs - with my close friends daily. They’re honestly kind of freeing to be able to take control of. However, just because I could individually grant someone the ability to use one on me, doesn’t mean they get to share theirs with others, or if Freddy Mercury rose from the dead and gave everyone permission to start calling queers ‘homos’ again, because he doesn’t speak for me, and I don’t speak for all queers.
With that being said: I also don’t trust a single person to try and draw a line in regards that don’t cover me. I know the n-word doesn’t affect my pasty ass directly, but it sure affects my brother and many of my life-long friends, and I sure wouldn’t be on good terms with them if they kept silent company with someone disparaging me and many of my other comrades. More likely than not, it’s the same person calling both groups those words because they don’t give a shit about either.
It’s a stale joke, your permission means nothing to people who did it for years without it and would continue to even if you told them not to, and I wouldn’t be comfortable if my identity was the one tied to the walking loot drop people made a hobby of hunting and skinning, and know the same people trying to defend ‘Jamaicans’ would be here in the alternate timeline where the gang in Predator 2 were a bunch of Spanish guys in crop tops or queer gals in fishnets that could get pointed to and made into a nickname that’s both more letters and takes longer to type than ‘Predator’ or ‘Pred’ just for the purpose of being lul so funneh.
You cannot be sure of intentions, correct, that’s where nuance comes in my boy. We have banned toxicity and harassment already.
You already have the tools at your disposal to deal with people who intentionally mean to cause harm, however these tools and rules often are misused to punish those who did not intend harm.
You do not OWN a slur, no one does.
You do not OWN language.
Correct, you have no right to greenlight other people’s use of the word outside of interactions with you personally and you also have no right to dictate what language others can use and you cannot pretend to defender another minority group that at present isn’t even asking you to.
You are a moral busy body and you need to stop controlling what others say until it crosses the line we already have drawn - that line being when people are ACTIVELY MALICIOUS. The rhetoric you advocate for is a gross overstep.
I implore you to look at the interaction between your posts and those of myself and other saying the same as me, community support is on my side and I urge you to think why that is. You’re trying to do good and make this place more comfortable for everyone but you’re not even related to the side you’re trying to protect and the mechanisms you ultimately want in place will be abused like they already have been.
Edit:
If we’re going to ban certain language it needs to be specific and within reason and ontop of that we also need to take into consideration the context around it’s use.
We should have the n word banned and f*G banned but we shouldn’t be throwing the book at people’s face without looking at how it was used and the intent and then decide if we want to excommunicate people afterwards.
My own situation is a good example, I uploaded a fucking dumb video to the maincord in shit posting cuz I thought if I’m gonna post something so dumb it should be there and I meant no offence by sending it. I was immediately banned and given no opportunity to try explain my actions and intent, Grim perma’d me and removed my WL all because of over policing and terrible enforcers.
Jamaican for Preds is not comparable, there is no racist or derogatory undertones present here.
I think we should officially nickname them as “Predators” I think this is a good idea because they hunt and then they attack the prey and predators do that too.
Then why don’t you let a Jamaican person come and make the complaint about the use of the word in relation to pred? You do not represent them. They represent themselves. You have a white savior complex. Get over it and leave people alone, stop trying to make a fake dispute where there is none.
If I were higher ranked I’d feel confident to nuke this thread or toss it into the acid.
There’s a genuine discussion to be had about the terminology in-universe human characters use in reference to Predators, since I broadly agree that terms like Jamacian are low-brow to use. I can also agree that there is no real sense of “mystery” regarding Predators since the moment someone screams “JAMACIAN!” On the radio, everyone is now instantly aware that the Yaujta are present. There is no roleplay about this being some new xeno species.
However, this discussion about the “racist implications” of the term are non-productive and serve only to inflame the board.
The racial implications are at the core of the discussion as uncomfortable as you may or may not find it.
The Yautja Council has spoken here and seems fine with the term so the only variable left that could disallow it’s usage is the perceived racial implications right now.
Remove the thread if the perceived racial issues are no longer a factor in that potential decision, otherwise the thread should remain up and not be nukes…
I’d rather have better RP around it myself but as it stands Preds are pretty inconsequential to rounds and thusly not really that important to enough to the round as a whold to warrant large change to address “Jamaican” being somewhat LRP.
I think this is indicative of a broader issue with how predators affect the dynamics of rounds in a way that doesn’t really fit with RP expectations. An interaction with a pred always goes down the route of they try to murderbone you or you ignore them enough that they can’t find an excuse within their rules to click you until horizontal (or die really unrobustly).
If you’re a marine seeking out the fight then there’s a good chance you’re either not going to take them seriously or try and be insulting in the 2 lines of conversation you have before the saloon brawl starts. A term like Jamaican shows you don’t respect their Google docs OC clan honour or whatever so is a quick route to the fight.
Shouting to command “Jamaican sighted” is more of an RP issue than an abuse one but I wouldn’t say it’s much different to how everyone used to say “red dog” when we had to RP first contact with xenos. But it’s always hard to create good rp around preds because they always feel so superfluous to a round
This post is genuine and it’s not satire. It took forever to get the slur banned in-game as it finally did recently after I brought it to management’s attention again, and I don’t know why it’s such a huge deal to swap to something else. Dreadlocks do not automatically make you think of Jamaicans, I don’t know who’s trying to bluff anyone with that stereotype. Jamaicans are real, human, people, and not humungous green monsters. The AvP doesn’t refer to predators as “Jamaicans” anywhere else and to even call their appendages dreadlocks I think is a stretch, but it doesn’t have any racial implications so I don’t think that’s relevant to the policy I wanted discussed here.
CM has had a long history of allowing racial stereotypes and slurs, and while that’s finally coming to its end, this is something that has to go too, or it just leaves the door open for more. The excuse “another community allows it” or “it common place” does not make it ok. There are lots of things in the world that the majority has approved of that were absolutely not ok, and just following the crowd does not make anything ok to be doing. If people were using any other ethnicity, I would still be making the same policy feedback page.
Here’s some solutions to people who have brought up legitimate concerns:
A solution for this is to take a mixed approach. Instead of it being purely first contact, marines can have minimal contact with them. They know of their existence, but not much else. They’re often seen around XX-121 and connecting with them, so they may think they’re apart of the hive, or perhaps a natural predator of them. They don’t need to know much else - biology, technology, etc, just a general description or indication of their existance more than “just rumors”.
As connected to the earlier reply, a codename can easily be typed up and given. YJ-228, for example.
No, they’re not only to flame. They’re genuine concerns that I’ve had, along with other community members, that have been seeking the removal of the usage “Jamaican” for this purpose. It’s taken forever to shift the community away from slurs, and this is one of the last gates, if not the last one, that holds the door open for them. These things don’t even have hair. Even if they had it, dreadlocks are not synonymous with Jamaican people. People of any ethnicity and any race wear and have dreadlocks, and it’s obvious that using it is just to mask racist remarks that the same people who would scream slurs no longer can do.
What exactly does the community gain from being able to refer to Yautja as “Jamaicans”? It’s LRP. It’s not anything like their description. It’s just used to metagame and slide around the rules about current Yautja knowledge. What, so people can mask insults? Like I don’t get what qualities it adds to the game, at all. Not a single person has brought up a single reason why it should stay except “I’m X ethnicity and it doesn’t bother me”. I don’t think this holds anyways because if it involved any other race, including my own, I would ask it be removed. After all, it just holds the door open for bigotry.
I’m not asking to ban random words that have no context or meaning behind them, I’m asking to remove an LRP, racially motivated term that the CM has coined for no reason in particular, which originated in its heavy-slurred past. Nobody’s losing their free speech, and if for some reason roleplaying so egregiously offends you, call them whatever you want within the rules, except a racially motivated term.
I also have yet to see anything that even looks like dreadlocks. Just the thought process of “hair-like tentacles appendages → dreadlocks → Jamaican human beings” is just incredibly dumb. Since when does hair bleed green? Hair is not made of tentacles. Hair does not bleed green. Hair doesn’t have scales.
i kill people who call my pred jamaican not because i find the term offensive but because my pred finds the idea of being compared to a lowly human offensive ; 3
anyway kill preds behead preds and whatnot shoot them on sight they were designed after jamaicans so they look jamaican
also this is most likely bait so dont get too invested and dont get banned over it
comrades. More likely than not, it’s the same person calling both groups those words because they don’t give a shit about either.
