Yes, MORE on religion and role playing

[Thuringwaethiel]

Apologies beforehand, because I have a feeling my following comments may sound quite edgy..

On the female characters issue, yes, there were a lot of "males are better" ideas floating around in games; but that wasn't always the case.

I don't think anyone said every single popular system was utterly 100% trough-and-through misogynist. I believe the point was something along "too much sexism" and that indicates (to me) that although there might be good things, they are too few and far between. A couple of good examples do not comfort me if the overall feeling is hostile, openly or not.

Just to grab a few fragments from D&D--

[*]Drow females were not only more potent than drow males, they were more potent than nearly any other player character race; were it not for the assassin out to get you caveat, they probably would have dominated play rather quickly in many games.[*]Several pantheons were headed by female or androgenous characters. Amaterasu Omikami is one of the few Lawful Good pantheon heads in the old Deities & Demigods book, and one of the more potent. Corellon Larethian, of the Elfish pantheon, is trans-gendered.[*]Probably the most powerful player character in any D&D game I ever ran was a female elfin fighter/magic-user played by a girl.[/list:u]

The second point is valid (and a happy surprise to me). But what I've heard about drows, they are described as utterly evil species, much worse than your average "licensed to kill" orcs and kobolds. And they are a matriarchal community, lead by strong females. The message? Third point has more to do with that single gamer group than with the system. Of course individuals can see through the flaws of the system and go their own way, but why should the system have those flaws at all? And many, maybe most gamers won't bother. They just continue the flawed tradition.

About the "geek issue" I agree with MJ enough to keep my mouth shut..

[Mike Holmes]

But what I've heard about drows, they are described as utterly evil species, much worse than your average "licensed to kill" orcs and kobolds. And they are a matriarchal community, lead by strong females. The message?

And they're black, too. Had that struck you at all? The evil elves are the ones that are black.

All terrible. But all the result of men doing the writing who'd been canalized by society to put these things in. That doesn't exonerate them. But it means that you won't see any change in RPGs until you see a change in society. You won't change anyone's mind on this level. That is, you won't get people to stop putting mysogynist (or racist) stuff in books until you educate them that it's a bad thing to do in general.

Why am I so confident that it's not related to something intrinsic to RPGs? Because there are better RPGs out there at about the rate that there are better people out there in society. And you'll note that newer RPGs get better all the time, as the public has improved. Many RGPs, I'd even go do far as to say are subject to the feminist agenda - at the very least they're willing to make the slight bow to it and alter their text in the politically correct manner. In Hero Quest, they state that generic players are refered to as male, and Narrators as female. What are they saying there about power structures?

I agree; nothing intentional. But, again, I don't think there's an agenda to the earlier work either.

My suggestion? Use your capitalist weapon, and vote for the better games with your dollar. Then play them. That's how to change it from the inside, if there's any way.

Mike

[Valamir]

...errr...
am I understanding this right?

Because the Drow are pigmented black, have a matriarchal society, and are evil this is evidence of racism and sexism in RPG history?

I don't think PHP allows a font size big enough for me to type the word "nonsense" as emphatically as I'd like to.

Its a good thing that wearers of goatees and sharp little mustaches aren't a vocal minority or we'd be crying foul on Snidely Whiplash too.

Crimminy...

If you stare at a potato long enough, sooner or later you'll see the face of Elvis.  But in the end...its just a damn potato.

[greyorm]

Based on my "anecdotal data," *hee hee* I WOULD say that a great many gamers - myself included - are, to varying degrees, somewhat socially dysfunctional

Honestly, everyone is socially dysfunctional to varying degrees. I haven't met one human being who isn't in some manner. So, I don't know that I would label any specific group as "socially dysfunctional" because they all happen to share a hobby, or even say that gamers as a whole are more (or less) socially dysfunctional than the rest of society.

Eowin had to look like she was going to barely be able to pull it off, no matter how much she said "I fear neither pain nor death" beforehand. THAT is the external reality that constantly tells me that, because I have a vagina and breasts, I can never be as epic a hero as the people who have penises.

That scene annoyed me a great deal...ok, ok, I thought it sucked -- I mean, come on, it was Eowyn, a woman of Rohan and a shield maiden! She KNEW how to use a sword. The scene simply didn't match the book at all, which is what ruined it for me, and even failed to highlight the earlier establishment about her ability with a weapon from the second movie!

However, my wife and her friend seemed to like it a lot, and cheered when Eowyn finally put her sword through the Witch King and said her line. She also (jokingly) pointed out that it was a woman that slew the Witch King, instead of a "helpless man." Hrm, I'm going to have to ask her if she even considered the "stumbling, helpless woman" part of it.

I need to re-read the GNS model stuff about sims again, but I was not saying that combat can't be a part of narrativism.  It's just not a focus...is often fudged in favor of story. Are you sure narrativism isn't read as touchy-feely? People need to take it like a man when they can't climb that mountain or kill a bad guy, right?

No insult intended, because the concept does take a bit to get, and the terms are non-intuitive, but I think you need to reread the model again -- you're committing some of the "major misconceptions about GNS categories" ideas in your statements.

Narrativism has nothing to do with downplaying combat, or its importance (see TROS, frex), or fudging what the dice produce as results in order to adhere to a "story" (ie: aesthetic or desired outcome). Narrativism is about exploring issues, not producing a story, or character interaction, or characterization/acting, though it is regularly confused as such.

Here, I think, is the best way I can explain it (something I recently developed while thinking of what to reply and why I keep seeing this mistake repeated):

It occurs to me that, as a generality, women seem to prefer the theatrics of games, whereas men appear to prefer the tactics.

That is, most gamers appear to consider interaction with NPCs and PCs (ie: lots of talking, playing out personality conflicts, etc.), characterization (ie: character acting, posing, reacting to situations in-character) to be what is generally referred to as "ROLE-playing" (as opposed to "ROLL-playing," which is also generally derided and looked down upon).

Since ROLL-playing they assume does not have anything to do with stories, then (logic follows) that the ROLE-playing must be story-oriented. But this is wrong; neither of these is more or less Narrativist -- both are pretty straight Sim in most cases.

That is, theatrics are not inherently Narrativist. Playing a character, talking in character, getting all emotional and angsty (to pick on Vampire for a moment), and interacting with other personalities is not Narrativism.

Let me ask you this:  Have you ever witnessed a situation where women weren't taken seriously as gamers?  If so, please tell the story(ies) (this is an official add to my other three ethnographic questions).

I can honestly say "no." When I said I'd never run into it, I meant it!
That's why I found it so odd!

Hrm, well, wait, I can give one example: there was one player in one of the groups I GM'd a number of years ago whom was scorned and muttered about privately regarding her ability as a gamer and (both player and charatcer) behavior. The player was a woman.

However, given the circumstances, and the fact that the muttering was coming from both men and women, and one young, gay male, I don't believe that our not taking her seriously and rolling our eyes when she played had anything to do with her sex.

She was flighty (ie: didn't appear to pay much attention to what was happening in the game; or if she was trying, couldn't keep anything straight), had a habit of changing her character sheet on the fly and without notice (cheating), notably lied about herself as a person by way of serious contradiction a number of times (ie: she was a writer -- no, a school-teacher -- no, a cruise line entertainer -- and "no memory" of having told us the other things). I don't want to say she was a bad person, because she was always pleasant, but all of this, particularly the last, didn't lead to much trust among the group of her. I doubt her sex had much to do with that, however.

that the group of gamers is a safe place for men, and they can foist off their "web of relationships fear" on the game scenario, leaving them free to bond with the other men. When women get brought into game situations where the men are insecure and hostile to the presence of women, it may be because the presence of a woman destroys the "male bonding sphere" and the larger web of relationships they distrust has now been brought back into the metagame situation.

Hrm, that's really interesting...I think you are perhaps on to something regarding the group being a safe place for a specific type of guy: sort of like a bachelor's club. When male member A brings his engaged to the club, the other men feel betrayed/shown up/abandoned.

I think, however, this can happen very easily with women, as well; and, IME, women in the same situation are equally as vicious as men, but to the other woman of the group (ie: "What's he doing with HER?" "She's so fat/stupid/ugly/adjective." "I can't believe her, bringing that guy here...", "What does she see in him?" etc.) though often perfectly cordial to the guest. Their displeasure tends to result in treatment of the other woman differently during the interaction, as more cross and judgemental than would otherwise be the case.

(Ok, where do I get my data? I'm one of those guys women seem to love to make into "one of the girls" -- yes, I'm "that guy", you know, the guy who during high school all the girls were friends with, but wouldn't date. Oh, the emotional scars! -- so I hear it all, as an honorary female.)

[greyorm]

In reply to Mike's statement, black is the color of "evil" in Western culture, and was long before modern racial (skin color) issues even came onto the scene. It is a cultural holdover that has nothing to do with marking dark-skinned people as evil or trying to culturally oppress them. Rather, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Ainur Elmgren has a few things to say about this issue regarding Tolkien, and the fact that he made his orcs black. I don't necessarily agree with everything she states, but it is worth a read, I think.

[clehrich]

No, I'm with Mike on this one.  Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, to be sure, but sometimes it isn't.*  If you don't like his Drow example, here's one that seems oddly to confuse Americans (in my experience) but which Europeans seem to see instantly.  Of course, this is totally anecdotal data, but...

In Star Trek: TNG, they introduced a new species/race/culture, the Ferengi.  They were short and bald, had hook-noses and snaggle-teeth, and were 100% totally focused on money all the time.  Furthermore, they had an entire culture founded upon a vast and complicated legalistic text, which was all about rules of acquisition.

Now for some reason, a lot of Europeans, as well as myself and a few Americans, all seem to read this as (unintentionally, to be sure) a really crass Jewish stereotype.  I mean, every single element here is a classic.  But lots of folks will swear up and down that we're over-reading.

Again, take Phantom Menace.  Is it just me, or did this seem to be Battle of the British Colonies?  Hong Kong vs. the Jamaicans, with the English looking on and not helping much.

I'm totally with Mike on the Drow.  Considering that AD&D monsters were all graded into alignment, i.e. whether you were allowed to kill them just for existing, what's a little sexism and color-racism here and there?

Chris Lehrich

*During one show of You Bet Your Life, Groucho encountered a woman who said she had 9 children.  "Nine children?" he exclaimed in some horror, to which the woman replied, defensively, "Well, I love my husband."  Groucho retorted instantly, "Madam, I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while."  He got in a lot of trouble about that.

[John Kim]

But all the result of men doing the writing who'd been canalized by society to put these things in. That doesn't exonerate them. But it means that you won't see any change in RPGs until you see a change in society. You won't change anyone's mind on this level. That is, you won't get people to stop putting mysogynist (or racist) stuff in books until you educate them that it's a bad thing to do in general.

Why am I so confident that it's not related to something intrinsic to RPGs? Because there are better RPGs out there at about the rate that there are better people out there in society.  

OK, I partly agree with this -- that it is a matter for education.  However, I emphatically disagree that "education" has to mean, say, sitting down in a classroom for a course entitled "How To Not Be Racist".  

RPGs can be educational -- just as movies and novels can be.  Art (especially pop art) is hugely influential in social attitudes.  Like other forms, RPGs can be and indeed are a forum for discussion moral and social issues.  So, for example, when I played a woman in a Lord of the Rings campaign, it forced the players to think about issues of women's roles.  When Jim decided to play a homosexual in my new http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9726">James Bond 007 campaign, that also forced the other players to consider issues of sexual orientation.  

So I guess I'm saying you can change people's minds on this level.  Now, it isn't mind control -- if someone is really set in their opinions than playing an RPG isn't going to change it.  But they can learn things and be exposed to new ideas through RPGs.  

Many RGPs, I'd even go do far as to say are subject to the feminist agenda - at the very least they're willing to make the slight bow to it and alter their text in the politically correct manner. In Hero Quest, they state that generic players are refered to as male, and Narrators as female. What are they saying there about power structures?  

I agree; nothing intentional. But, again, I don't think there's an agenda to the earlier work either.

Hmm.  There are several games which use this approach that seem pretty anti-feminist -- notably Last Unicorn Games' Star Trek and Decipher's Lord of the Rings RPG which I gave text examples of earlier in this thread.  I don't have HeroQuest, but this same pronoun convention was in Hero Wars.  The feminist agenda (if any) of female GM seems balanced by the fact that the set of sample players and PCs are all male (Rick/Kallai, Peter/Rollo, and John/Rurik in HW).

[clehrich]

But it means that you won't see any change in RPGs until you see a change in society. You won't change anyone's mind on this level. That is, you won't get people to stop putting mysogynist (or racist) stuff in books until you educate them that it's a bad thing to do in general.

RPGs can be educational -- just as movies and novels can be.  Art (especially pop art) is hugely influential in social attitudes.  Like other forms, RPGs can be and indeed are a forum for discussion moral and social issues.  So, for example, when I played a woman in a Lord of the Rings campaign, it forced the players to think about issues of women's roles.  When Jim decided to play a homosexual in my new http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9726">James Bond 007 campaign, that also forced the other players to consider issues of sexual orientation.

This is something I touched on in my Ritual essay.  I do think that a feminist game, for example, is possible, and would mean something quite a bit different than changing the pronouns around.  It would be a game, probably Narrativist by GNS, in which the Premise centered around gender issues, specifically of women.  I think that such a game would have interesting social effects, because if done "hard" -- that is, not mincing around feeling good about ourselves -- we the players would be forced to confront deep social issues on a very personal level.  One possible result would be a greater consciousness of the social divides in our society, resulting in a potential for activism outside of the gaming context.

This is only a notion, you understand, but I just don't think gaming has to be limited to preexisting conventions and acceptance within the gaming group.  I mentioned (in the essay) the example of a rape scene.  This could be a powerful thing, forcing everyone to examine very deeply their feelings about rape and its meaning.  But as a rule, Social Contract conventions are brought in to prevent this sort of thing; the argument is that conflict or personal assault of this sort is necessarily bad for the gaming dynamic.  If you want to be extreme about it, imagine a rape scene in which both characters are PC's.  Again, as a recent thread has shown, there is a common (though not universal) acceptance that this can never be good gaming.  So long as this is accepted as true, there is really no possibility for gaming to break out of its narrow social role as "fun" and actually have a transformative effect politically.

I guess it's the same claim that Artaud and the like made about theater: until we break out of the script that says "you can do this but you absolutely can never do that," we can't really make this art form challenge us or anyone to the deepest levels.

Chris Lehrich

[M. J. Young]

But what I've heard about drows, they are described as utterly evil species, much worse than your average "licensed to kill" orcs and kobolds. And they are a matriarchal community, lead by strong females. The message?

And they're black, too. Had that struck you at all? The evil elves are the ones that are black.

The drow as a race were indeed evil; but I was addressing them as a player character option, and they were not any more limited in alignment than any other character race. The minotaur of Krynn was also generally evil, if I recall correctly, but player characters could be good. Hengeyokai were the only player character race for which alignment was strictly dictated--you had to be the alignment that matched the animal (or the animal that matched the alignment). My point was that one of the most powerful player character choices was female drow.

As to them being black, well, if they live underground and thrive by stealth, it would make sense that they would be dark so as not to reflect so much light, and so hide better in the shadows. Being black was one of their advantages, as it gave them very high numbers on surprise rolls, quite beyond what was afforded normal elves.

Many RGPs, I'd even go do far as to say are subject to the feminist agenda - at the very least they're willing to make the slight bow to it and alter their text in the politically correct manner. In Hero Quest, they state that generic players are refered to as male, and Narrators as female. What are they saying there about power structures?  

I agree; nothing intentional. But, again, I don't think there's an agenda to the earlier work either.

Hmm.  There are several games which use this approach that seem pretty anti-feminist -- notably Last Unicorn Games' Star Trek and Decipher's Lord of the Rings RPG which I gave text examples of earlier in this thread.  I don't have HeroQuest, but this same pronoun convention was in Hero Wars.  The feminist agenda (if any) of female GM seems balanced by the fact that the set of sample players and PCs are all male (Rick/Kallai, Peter/Rollo, and John/Rurik in HW).

I agree. In Multiverser, we did not use this "feminine pronoun for the referee" notion (which was popular with White Wolf) because we always found it jarring to read in the text of other games. Languages descended from Proto-hittite use the masculine pronoun when the antecedent is "person of unknown or unspecified gender"; the feminine pronoun means "female or feminine" antecedent. Whenever I'm reading anything and it says "she", I immediately think, "she who?", not because of some sort of misogynist attitude but because my linguistics training tells me that "she" must refer to a specific individual, and "he" may refer to a generalized concept of unspecified gender.

At the same time, although we didn't use many examples in the text, we used female player characters in quite a few of them.

The character file in the appendix includes three (very individual) women and seven men (and a boy and a dog); however, these characters were all developed by players during playtest, and were selected as those who had had the most impact on the development of the game concept--and since a large part of that playtesting was done while E. R. Jones was in the army, a disproportionate number of the available players were male. So our pool was skewed up front.

I think that there are discriminatory actions that do not reflect attitudes as much as habits; these certainly need to be corrected, but it doesn't mean that those who have these habits are themselves prejudiced. At the same time, there are also sensitivities which are quick to impute such attitudes in the strangest places.

In Verse Three, Chapter One, one of the protagonists met a group of brightly colored bird-like bipeds, and befriended them; she became aware that they lived in a rather tense relationship with another group of feathered bipeds, dark-feathered creatures across the lake. When she was joined by a second protagonist, a young black man who is sensitive to race questions, and mentioned this to him, he immediately struck on the fact that these birds were segregated by the color of their feathers. It had never occurred to her, and she assumed that they were different species altogether. He said she didn't notice it because she was white. Is it more prejudicial to fail to notice that the birds were divided by color, or to assume that someone failed to notice it because they weren't black? If the people who designed the drow made them black to make them visibly distinct from standard elves in a way that would make them better suited to an underground environment, is it more prejudicial if they didn't realize the supposed racial connection, or if we assume that their not having noticed it means they innately brought forward their cultural prejudices?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

--M. J. Young

[John Kim]

there is a common (though not universal) acceptance that this (strife) can never be good gaming.  So long as this is accepted as true, there is really no possibility for gaming to break out of its narrow social role as "fun" and actually have a transformative effect politically.

I guess it's the same claim that Artaud and the like made about theater: until we break out of the script that says "you can do this but you absolutely can never do that," we can't really make this art form challenge us or anyone to the deepest levels.  

I don't agree with this.  Indeed, I think that "fun" entertainment is much more important politically.  For example, I would say "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" has had much more political impact than an un-fun arty work like, I don't know, maybe "Boys Don't Cry".  On the one hand, cathartic entertainment is sort of status-quo conservative in its effect -- but clever efforts can manipulate within the system.  Essentially, "Boys Don't Cry" is preaching to the converted.  The people who go to see it aren't likely to be transformed by it because they are the type who will go to see an art film about a cross-dressing woman who gets shot.  

I would say the same thing about games.  I picture a cool political-agenda game being one where people have fun and don't think about it as transformative, educational, unfun experience.  Instead, there would be a bunch of small questioning moments within the narrative.  

I have been pondering about doing this in my James Bond campaign.  It is set in 1984, which is a interesting period compared to now.  The Soviets are in Afghanistan and various groups are helping out mujahedeen like Osama Bin Laden to fight them.  Saddam Hussein is fighting Iran with aid from the U.S. and others.  I am pondering having James-Bond-ian adventures which relate to helping out these causes.  It would be subtle, only slowly or later would the players realize what their characters are aiding -- and it could be dismissed as a joke, but it would I think be a joke which would stay in their minds.

[contracycle]

I think that there are discriminatory actions that do not reflect attitudes as much as habits; these certainly need to be corrected, but it doesn't mean that those who have these habits are themselves prejudiced. At the same time, there are also sensitivities which are quick to impute such attitudes in the strangest places.

Whats the distinction between a habit and a prejudice?  I can;t see one - you're either doing it or you're not.  A huge quantity of such discrimination occurs precisely habitual and non-deliberate because the person has never bothered to investigate the idea.  To disntinguish between "habit" and "prejudice" is only to let them off the hook and validate the behaviour as harmless after all.

Yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes an iconically homicidal black matriarchy is just a homicidal black matriarchy.  Theres not much "reading between the lines" necessary here and I c\nnot see the drow as defensible, really.

[S'mon]

Re the Drow - to me they clearly aren't based on white male American stereotypes of black American culture, at any rate.  They're matriarchal because they're based on notions of spiders, where the female eats the male after mating.

I'm not sure how recent the notion of the colour black representing evil is.  I think in western culture black has represented death for a good while, and death easily becomes associated with evil.

The Ferengi = Jewish notion may be because Europeans are much more conversant with anti-Semitism than modern Americans are.  I don't think it has any grounding in the writers' intent, I think Rodenberry & co in creating the Ferengi were intending to satirise US-style free market robber-capitalism.  The STTNG Federation as conceived by Rodenberry is apparently communistic.

Edit: probably worth mentioning that Tolkien's orcs are based off fear of the British urban proletariat - they're black from the soot.  :)

[montag]

Whats the distinction between a habit and a prejudice?

A predjudice is wrong by definition, a habit is an action. Habits may be judged this way or that by others, but they are not wrong in themselves, without an external point of reference. Predjudices on the always wrong, otherwise we'd be talking about opinions.
Alternatively you might distinguish them in that habits are actions, behaviour, whereas predjudices are positions, mental stances. So you got (mobile/immobile) and (behaviour/mind) as two further dimensions.
Hope this helps.


Re: Ferengi: Me and my fellow German Star Trek fans and viewers have always considered the Ferengi a neither particularly subtle nor particularly clever criticism of American style capitalism. It never even crossed my mind to consider the Ferengi might be a caricature of Jews. So either everyone's innocent or Anti-Americanims beats Anti-Semitism any day. ;)

[Librisia]

Valamir, greyorm, M.J.

Sure, a cigar is just a cigar.  But when you keep choosing the same KIND of cigar over and over and over and over and over and over, the cigar becomes a symbol of the way you view the world, no matter what the "origins" of your choice of cigar might have been.  Fact is, if blackness as a marker of evil didn't fit with the racist agenda of U.S. cultural enterprise, it would have ceased to be used.  Don't fool yourselves.   Just because black was the color of the Judeo-Christian devil before slavery of Africans started as a business, that doesn't mean it didn't suit the slave trade's goals nicely.  It did, in fact.  As in written/spoken language, the meaning of symbols changes over time.  

This also applies to M.J.s Proto-Hittite pronoun usage.  Sorry, but He and She both mean specific individuals now - your training may make you more sensitized, but that is not the current language usage.  Your example only heightens my own argument about the external/internal reality split in U.S. culture at large and gaming in particular

Nice one on the sooty proletariat in Tolkien, S'mon.  Let me add to that reading: How many upper class people of African descent do you think there were in England in the 1940's-50's?  :-)

I think M.J.'s Verse Three, Chapter One example actually takes an earlier point further (I'm sorry, I can't comb over the posts anymore to remember whose it was); more women in rping are needed to weed out sexism.  Feminism (though I have not couched it in these terms) is about fighting injustice.  So, what we need is a more balanced OVERALL DEMOGRAPHIC in rping to help improve it (as well as Mr. Kim's political usage of the game - you go, boyeee!).  

I don't know how you handled that bird people situation, M.J., but it would have been an excellent way for the group to continue to explore the issue of racism with the help of the young black man in your group.  He was right.  She didn't see it because she was white.  That's life.  What would be racist in this situation is to fail to acknowledge the young man's point of view.  I think in the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere) we perpetuate "isms" (racism, sexism, homophobia..ism) because we are too freaked out by our participation in those attitudes to own them and work to change them.  

So the "cigar is just a cigar" argument fails here, because obviously, to myself and others in this discussion, it's NOT just a cigar anymore.  It's difficult, but stop taking it personally.  Why not ask us to help you understand why it's not just a cigar?  By getting defensive and saying, "well I'M not sexist/racist/homophobic!" you're not necessarily worsening the problem - but you aren't being part of the solution, either.

In a general state of agreement with Kim and Lehrich's latest posts: Many of you don't see the problem with the examples regarding gaming here because the gaming industry is a mirror of yourselves, and what you see reflected in the mirror looks like yourselves.  What many of us see in that mirror is distorted and maimed because all of the reflections given back in that mirror tend to look like YOU (white, middle class, male, heterosexual).  Not only do we need feminist game design, we need womanist game design (African-American women's issues), we need Africanist game design, we need Queer game design... the list goes on.

I think it's possible, Lehrich, to have these kinds of game designs - or as Kim illustrated, to use current games to further these agendas.  

*steps down off the soap box*
Sorry, I just can't get away from calling people by their last names.  An academic habit, I suppose.  Y'all will just have to put up with it.  :-)

greyorm, yes, I DO need to go back and reread the gns stuff.  When I do, I will happily post my corrections to my own statements so far.  So, bear with the mistakes until I get to it, please ...  :-)

montag, I think it's valid to say that the Ferengi can be read as both a Jewish charicature AND as an indictment of U.S. capitalist practice.  

I intend to put up an ethnographic survey in the not too distant future.  Taking into account input from this discussion, I think doing it off the forge would be most useful.  I would be happy to have help constructing the survey, because I don't think it has to exclude data that would be of use to others here (and elsewhere).  I'll start another thread to get that going so we can hash it out.

Krista

[contracycle]

Alternatively you might distinguish them in that habits are actions, behaviour, whereas predjudices are positions, mental stances. So you got (mobile/immobile) and (behaviour/mind) as two further dimensions.
Hope this helps.

Its the behaviour that is damaging, not the mental opinion.  Anti-racism must attack the behaviour, not implement Thought Control.  Discriminatory behaviour cannot be excused merely because it is habitual; equally, seeking to identify and label someone as a Bad Person is wholly beside the point.  Its the actions that matter.