Jamaican is LRP, but it shouldn’t be banned. Call them Predators, Boogeymen, Stalker (cheeky breeky).
Whoever thinks that the term Jamaican coined years ago was racially motivated needs to go outside and speak to people and not be terminally online.
Preds best whitelist let’s go!!! #predupdate2024
Uh, hey buddy, you misspelled something.
It should be “Synth best whitelist let’s go!!”
Don’t worry tho I corrected it for you 
It hurts to admit that I did not know the complete lore behind the ‘Jamaican’ but it was recently discussed in the lore channel.
Yes, the one take on the reference is the dreadlocks that the Yautja are described as having. The origin hair style, known as dreadlock, is mistakenly attributed to the Rastafarian culture or Jamaicans. “The oldest historical record of an African tribe rocking locs can be credited to the priests of the Ethiopian Coptic religion, who were wearing the style as early as 500 BCE. Heading on over to India, the earliest historical reference of locs comes from 1800 BCE.”
While it is correct that the Yautja ‘dreadlocks’ are not hair, those tendrils are styles, braided, and decorated. It would be very difficult to give an accurate description of something that spends a great deal of time invisible. During the times that it is visible, it is a 6 to 9 foot tall monster, decorated with the skulls of its victims, charging with sharp weapons.
But none of that is the reason that the Yautja are called Jamaicans. In Predator 2, the setting was LA was embroiled in a gang war. Specifically, the two gangs were the Columbians and the Jamaicans. The first victims of the predator were members of the Columbian gang. The leader of the Jamaicans, King Willie, was known to be brutal and carry a machete. The police assumed the skinned and beheaded Columbians were the handy of the JAMAICANS when it was in fact, a Yautja. This remained the case until Gary Busey corrected Danny Glover with the quote ‘A fucking alien’.
The reference used is actually part of the movie lore. The CM RP rules require that Yautja may only be known by rumors. There is no USCM doctrine on them, no direct after-action report of the events of Predator or Predator 2.
I will quote the reporter from Predator 2:
“Tony Pope, live with Hard Core. On the scene and in your face, it’s like Dante’s Hell down here. Smoke, fire, oppressive heat. As Columbian and Jamaican drug fiends once again transform the streets of L.A. into a slaughterhouse! Who the hell’s in charge down here? The cops? Uh-uh! They’re outmanned, outgunned, and incompetent! Mr. Mayor, on vacation at your home in Lake Tahoe: Get off your butt, get down here, and declare martial law!”
How dare you.
While we are speaking of lrp things that people find offensive I find the use of “Bald” to be be offensive to the elderly and those with balding genetics.
It negatively associates incompetence and idiocy with something that people are not able to control.
It is both an ageist and sexist term. It is low rp to refer to people as bald.
I demand it also be removed and taken as seriously as this thread.
Calling preds jamaican has never been an issue. No one got offended by it in the entire history of CM but some people decided to make it an “issue” to push their own demented social justice political agenda on a 2D spessman game.
You may think that calling preds jamaican is LRP but that it is racially motivated is acting in bad faith to the community and no amount of articles you pull up is going to convince me otherwise.
As the Prophet of Truth from Halo 2 would say.
“Politics… sigh how tiresome.”
I mean, yeah. The thing where you’d have PFCs calling “jamaicans” those weird, humanoid figures that ran around at massive speeds while almost perfectly invisible in a colony infested with the perfect lifeform is stupid (despite the dreadlock argument). And afterwards you’d get lance corporals, corporals, sargeants and then officers calling them “jamaicans” despite the fact that OG jamaicans don’t go running around at mach 5 while invisible as they drag the PVT that decided to shoot them.
But here is the thing, do you seriously expect me to be like “uhhh sir, there is an odd humanoid currently eviscerating the PVT and the 2 PFCs and the CPL that decided to help the PVT after he opened fire. What is that? What I’m supposed to do?” No man, I’m just going “JAMAICAN KILLING US HELP” because “jamaican” is recognized by everyone and because we don’t have time to re-enact the predator movie and pretending to be scared while the yautja is killing us for RP sake. Leave RP to fobbits and shipside personnel when they get free time.
And on the part of:
I don’t know man. Am I weird? Am I missing something? Am I a missfit for thinking that people that get emotionally obliterated by the ocasional (shitty) joke of the jamaicans are legitimately pathetic and that they should both get a grip and grow a thick skin? I don’t even care about their origins. The only way I’d say that something must get banned is if it is legit harassment and the jamaican joke (despite how overused and shitty it is) is not harassment. Harassment would be spawning IC as a legit jamaican, and having a guy walk up towards you, insult your origins, kill you and drag you under the LZ landing pad to gib you and then afterwards insulting you a little more.
And the question that began this paragraph is legit. I’m legit unsure if I am in the wrong or if we’ve all gone insane.
I think the whole point of calling them jamaicans is that we aren’t allowed to say predator per the first contact rule, but I’m happy to be corrected by staff if I’m wrong about this. I think if jamaican gets banned then people will just say spook instead, and then probably someone will make a thread saying spook is offensive too, who knows. 
even if this gets passed , Most predators will just don’t fucking care about being called jamaican.
I mean this kinda just supports the idea that its an LRP term that people use to meta preds. Everyone can defacto ‘know’ about preds because ‘I have heard about Jamaicans in space :)’
I dont get how people are trying to say this entire argument is illegitimate from the racial aspect when the entire other half of the argument is that its an LRP meta term for anyone who spots a cloaked humanoid moving at high speeds.
Banning the term Jamaican would force people to have to use the most minor amount of brain power to be create a new callout which is fun silly RP and create confusion on the radio towards what the player is trying to say (also a good thing).
Why not just not use the term yourself if you don’t like it, and let others use it if they want?
because this is policy and we have RP standards? RP is something that can be collectively brought down by people spamming LRP meta stuff on the radio? thats how RP is? RP is fun and its fun when people participate in it?
RP is never made better by limiting what people can or cant say. LRP will be LRP regardless of if it uses jamaican or not.
I think people misunderstand the entire thing. If you ban the word “jamaican”, people will just find a new way to announce that its a pred round on comms in a short lrp way.
It’s not a word problem, it’s a RP problem.
Example.
John “Pred” Hunterr says “Jamaicans!!”(they used to just say maicers, now it’s a banned lrp term)
Jane “High” Arpee says “Just saw some weird fuckin’ humanoid with dreadlocks run past me… Looked like a jamaican to me.”
I’d also like to add that us calling predators jamaicans does not in any way, shape or form actually add to the oppression they may experience as a nation or race.
PS: This thread is being made by a person who’s a bad actor both IC and OOC(metacommed to arrest people as MP and moved onto baiting player reports after they got banned) and one of the people making huge replies is Call me Arty who’s tried to get the same word banned for a long time. Don’t get baited like I did. You’ll say something stupid and catch a ban.
Right, so trying to get back to basics instead of own-zoning (and also because I have a busy day so the usual neurotic act of pulling Discord and Forum messages to that someone’s a hypocrite or dishonest isn’t viable), I think that there’s certainly a lot of arguing for the continued use of ‘Jamaicans’ that just . . . doesn’t track.
They Did It In The Movies:
Compared to the more recent and the more successful entries into the franchise: Predator 2 is the lowest-grossing, and second-lowest rated. It’s incredibly easy to tell that it is nobody’s favorite predator movie, with the only long-lasting effects it’s had being as the movie that added some of the more fun weapons like the combistick and smart disk, and for the greater lore establishments such as the Xenomorph skull in the background of the same scene where we discover the Predators are a larger society instead of lone wolves, and have been hunting for a while.
The nickname didn’t come up in the second movie. The context is that the Police and other gangs were dealing with a Jamaican gang, many of which had dreadlocks, so it makes sense that they could mistake a the Predator one of the gang me- except at no point did anybody see the Predator and think they looked like the gang members. While following-up on crimes the Jamaican Voodoo Posse committed which included hanging people upside down and cutting them open, they immediately rule-out the Jamaicans and Latin gangs because they logically fit. From here the person who saw the Predator kill the Jamaicans calls them ‘El Diablo’, our detective talks to the Jamaican gang boss about this third-entity and King Willie calls him a “spirit from the other side” and a demon, and they even have a full scene where a bunch of glowies take the protagonist into a van and directly show him that they know what the Predator is, tied him to the first movies, explained that they know how his weapons work and can cloak with stealth technology they want, know that he’s an alien.
To summarize a wall: Predator 2 is a post-first contact scenario where the US Government recognizes the Predators and their abilities, tied them to multiple other sightings, desire their technology, and even the fucking LAPD couldn’t racially profile the guy with dreadlocks as Jamaican while they were directly fighting a Jamaican gang IN THE LEAD-UP TO THE RODNEY KING RIOTS.
Oh they were also allowed to indiscriminately kill anybody holding a gun, while cloaked, regardless of whether or not anybody fired those weapons, pointed them at the Predator, or even if they could have potentially seen them: as observed when he busted through the roof of a train to kill a bunch of civilians defending themselves from gang members before anybody fired once. We’re not giving that a pass for lore-accuracy or roleplay, and nobody’s fighting for the right to call Runners “Dragons” or “Beasts” as a beloved reference to the worst-rated, third-worst-performing Alien movie.
Source: I watched the movie.
It’s not a secret that this server has had an issue with toxic in the past: There vocal outrage a few days ago with the r-slur ban, and some years back for the n-word, then variations on the n-word, and then variations on those.
That’s where this asinine double-standard comes in: Whose voice matters? “Your voices on this don’t matter, because you’re white, but we get to use this word because we (white) don’t see it as racist, and because some people who have Jamaican ancestry say it’s fine” is already obnoxious, especially on top of the fact that of course there aren’t that many Black, Queer, Female, Jamaican, or other minority groups to speak against this shit. SS13 has a basis in /TG/ - a 4chan board - hosting large communities, and the largest influx of players the game saw in potentially its whole lifespan coming from a Danish guy who larps as an African warlord and ends every video with an antisemitic Patreon plug: of course a lot of those groups will see that alone and be able to tell this space wouldn’t want them. Then they come in, see people fighting over their God-given right to say slurs on the internet, only for a bunch of guys playing characters whiter than Starship Troopers get off a ship ready to go and “kill some Jamaicans” while someone doing an Engrish accent orders them to do a kamikaze attack, and have that reinforced.
Hell, one of my very first experiences in SS13 was saving the station from a wizard by accident, only for someone to call my character a N-word but starts with L because I was playing a Lizardman and lynching me. I’m certain they could have come-up with an in-character justification or asked their pet skink if that was okay, doesn’t change the results.
If you do want to look to a person of color’s advice or comfort for once, the only ones in this community are the people who made it through the filter that caught everyone else.
The space was made unwelcoming towards marginalized groups, and that’s who “exclusivity” is for: not some blue-haired liberal arts majors who are able to enter these spaces without immediate harassment based on their religion, culture, or the color of their skin. The only time Jamaicans are brought-up being in context of whether or not it’s valid to use that name on some pixelated aliens isn’t a good look.
TL;DR: ‘Jamaicans’ isn’t accurate to any of the movies, the movies exist post-first-contact where we can call them “Predators” and “Aliens” just fine as they’ve been deemed multiple times on-screen while knowing what their tools are like. Pretending to care about PoC voices means nothing when a community hostile to them was fostered and rejected any PoC who were bothered years ago, meaning it becomes an argument of whether or not to hold onto the same behaviors that made the community barely hospitable to marginalized identities in the first place.
Patrice. Nerd Emoji.
Why is this thread still open? Thousands of other actually meaningful threads have been closed in a snap of fingers, something about this tells me that whoever is in charge will definitively ban the usage of Jamaican in the future.
Can we call them Brazilians instead? I’m from Brazil and I’d love to be represented by an alien with big cannons that skins people for fun
And thousands more haven’t been? I don’t see your point here.
Arty I don’t mean any disrespect but, are you Jamaican? do you have Jamaican ancestry? a Jamaican citizenship? many Jamaican friends? have you even been to Jamacia?. if not how on earth can you speak for a community you have nothing to do with. Not every community is the same or feels the same way. just because you might be part of one marginalised community dose not make you apart of all of them and understand what all of them want/are thinking.
Now Its not because you are white or anything most people I know couldn’t give less of a shit about that. The issue is you are completely ignorant of what the community wants or what the community thinks. You quite literally don’t have any evidence to back up these ‘racist’ allegations. Find me one Jamaican person who has complained about it or stated they will stop playing because the really tall hunters with dreadlocks are being called Jamaican. There arnt any. There are so many causes to fight and genuine issues in this world where people are actually being prosecuted and hurt because of slurs and such. Go fight those where your input into there lives/community’s would actually be appreciated. I honestly believe you have a good heart and are trying to help jsut not it.
Not one single person i know from Jamaican or the Caribbean or any minority would stop playing if they heard someone say something like that. Yes there are certain phrases and words that would stop someone from playing but this just simply isent it.
I know you don’t care, but I’ve literally got a trans flag that says “She/Her” next to my name; as-if this thread weren’t already a testament to how taking literal seconds to verify something and choosing a slightly different arrangement of under a dozen letters could make parts of the player base more comfortable at no cost to yourself beyond the smallest possible measurable unit of effort.
It’s good of you to call that out, and to highlight that. White Savior conditions are fucking obnoxious and you’re right to call them out.
I am white, and not even remotely mixed. My older brother is black, but with no defined islander heritage, though I’ve grown up with him my whole life and therefore grew-up alongside his culture. Yes, an autistic kid calling people ‘homie’ and giving people ‘props’ after listening to rap and quoting the Boondocks because that’s what my brother shared with me is just as cringey as you think it is. It also means I can’t exactly tune that part of my head out, knowing how much shit he got for being one of the two black kids in town. Recently - and I know this is going to sound convenient as hell - I worked for over a year in a bakery with a Jamaican boss. We didn’t get on famously but we traded stories about our lives. She recommended a brand of Rum and best vacation spot in her hometown, I told her about Better Call Saul and she wouldn’t shut-up about it for months: spoiled the last season for me.
That’s all anecdotal on the internet and I’m not showing you my or my family’s face, so while we’re at it: I’m also Harvard-educated, 6’6", and didn’t fuck your mom but did have a nice evening with her where we found ourselves without a sexual connection but stayed as friends.
Otherwise, I do what I can to inform myself when my lived experience doesn’t give me anything to refer to or speak from. That’s why I’ve gone out of my way to try and monetarily support creators from outside my lived experience - Black, Jewish, Caribbean, Transmasculine, British, Parents, Historical Education, and so-on - and listen to their viewpoints. That’s what being a good, intersectional snowflake is all about: If I’m queer, disabled, and poor, and want other people who are queer, disabled, and poor, but a different color than me: then I need their help and contributions for fights that involve me specifically, and they need my help where I can give it.
That’s the post. I care because I went out of my way to listen and observe, and I’m talking because while others will hopefully speak on my behalf in their spaces, I want to speak for them in mine. We can’t be everywhere at once, and of course we’ve got larger systemic issues making entire states or countries inhospitable to marginalized identities: but being able to unwind in a game where people aren’t making it a matter of statistics to see whether or not someone is made unwelcome in the community or not sure is nice.
I still would rather Jane “High” Arpee tbh that is more immersive and interesting
