New Scaratings

It is one thing to be banned for something you do. It's another to be banned for something someone, somewhere at some time, might do.

My team is being literally being banned because Hobbits&Co. at Red Fox are afraid of the Bogeyman. Their position is, "Oh no, we're not scared of your group, we're afraid of the Bogeyman, so we have to ban you to keep him away."

And what is the Bogeyman? He is this fearsome telebeast, only made possible through the use of evil electronics, that will somehow cheat its way into conquest over all good and decent people who play in bars. Circus performers can tame lions and tigers, but this beast is so fierce that those who make all the rules can only think of banning it.

There's one huge advantage the Bogeyman has over actual teams using the technology: Since he's not real, you can't disprove his existence.

I am not the bogeyman, but to change monsters for a moment, I am definitely a Dr. Victor Frankenstein; I put this cyborg together. Due to COVID, then closure of the last bar in NYC with the game, we have had no choice but to play remotely for just about three years. We came up with a way to use remote technology to help people at a bar play Showdown. and have done this for the last six months. This group has a track record, and it is less than overwhelming. In fact, it has stayed in the same general vicinity competitively as the bar-based Mad River team did pre-COVID: not a top contender in premium games.

I have spoken at length elsewhere as to why some worries about this technology are unwarranted in real life and how other hypotheticals can be addressed with reasonable restrictions, and will summarize them here on request, but there's one new point I would like to make.

When I read the Red Fox complaints about how this form of play would create an overwhelming force that would invariably cheat their way into conquest, perverting and molesting the sense of team and "fair play" and "spirit of the tournament" or whatever other buzzwords that mean whatever Hobbits&Co deem them to be. I thought, "Wait a minute, I've heard this script before."

And I have. We all have. It is a well-used script, the one that creates and condemns the threatening, the criminal, the foreign "Other" out to destroy home and country and people (or team). It is the script often used in anti-Semitism, in various colors of racism, in xenophobias of all types. It is the Yellow Peril with Yellow being replaced by Techno.

And just like the Yellow Peril, the only cure they see for it is to completely ban it, just like the United States banned various Asian nationalities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

No wonder why they prefer saying, "These are the rules."

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“When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy . . ., I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.” --de Tocqueville