Aermas wrote:Killer Cyborg wrote:
Hm.
Loaded question.
As instead which species overall I DO think is most threatening to humanity, because I'll probably say "humanity."
That's the base perspective you need to start with.
Also, what do you mean by "threatening?"
Floopers pose zero threat to our species directly, but the fact that they're MDC magical beings seems to pose a threat to the self-perceived Manhood of certain factions of humanity, as if their existence somehow makes humans lesser.
This is in fact one of the overall themes of racism and often genocide.
Floopers are from a base human perspective, a species of, indestructible teleporting people.
Yes.
Also, they're ambidextrous, double-jointed, and naturally agile.
And this threatens your manhood somehow...?
I'm entirely comfortable with it.
Add you this that they are ALL conmen & thieves who exploit others... sounds like a predator to me. Imagine some poor old grandma trying to be nice to this Flooper & he takes all her money & leaves her to starve.
What the book tells us is (VK 133) "The typical flooper is... a lazy thief."
Note that you've taken "Typical" and tried to pretend that means "ALL."
Which is typical of how racism works; take a perceived common trait, and pretend that it's an immutable rule that applies to every member of a group.
Floopers are "usually Unprincipled or Anarchist," alignment-wise, so it's not like they're an Evil species, just problematic.
But note that "usually" (like "typical") is a generalism, NOT a hard and fast rule for all members of the species; there are necessarily Good floopers and Evil floopers as well, and there is no note that either of these kinds are "all but unheard of" or anything.
Same page tells us "Floopers don't mean to be bad, they just hate work and like to play a lot."
Basically, like children.
Not exactly a reason to exterminate them as a species.
Mr. Drak has 16 Floopers working for him.
We are told in canon, "It has taken Mr. Drak years of discipline and the patience of a saint to break most of his circus Floopers from stealing, and there is still the occasional theft."
So in canon, with patience and discipline, Floopers are capable of NOT being thieves, even for the ones who are predisposed toward theft.
They can change; it's not written into their DNA.
If your basis for arguing that Floopers should be exterminated or driven off-world is that they're often Anarchists and Thieves, you'd make a lot more sense arguing that ALL Anarchists and Thieves are killed or driven off-world regardless of race.
By singling one species out while ignoring the Anarchists and Thieves in certain other races, your bias is showing.
Killer Cyborg wrote:Anyway, for an answer all I can say is that most D-Bees are just humans in alien drag, fundamentally the same as humans are but with mild cosmetic differences akin to the countless Star Trek species that are just humans with weirdly bumpy noses.
Asking which D-Bee race is "least threatening" to humans is like asking me which non-white "race" in real life is "least threatening" to whites.
It assumes that there's some kind of real threat posed by purely cosmetic differences, like skin color, pointy ears, and so forth.
And there isn't.
The only threat is to the fragile egos of the deranged, who place an insane amount of importance on how people look.
I'm gonna ignore the uncouth strawman & political baiting here & just ask which species do you think is a human in as you rudely put it, "drag"?
Like I said, most of them.
I'm not going to give you a list of dozens.
If you want one simple example, turn to P. 18 of the RMB, and look at the Family Origin chart.
Note that this is in the Optional rules section; you don't need to roll on these tables, because they're purely cosmetic; they have ZERO actual effect on what your character is like as a person.
You might choose to have your character act a specific way just because you rolled that you're a First Born, or not.
You might choose to have your character act a specific way just because you rolled that you're Obese, but you don't have to; it doesn't affect attributes or skills or anything, much less personality or morals.
Some tables are for role-playing character flavor, like Disposition. You could end up with a "Mean, suspicious, vengeful" character if you choose to roll there, but you'd get to pick how that plays out. There's no rule about it.
Anyway, Family Origin has the following possible results:
1. Earth Native. The character is human.
2. D-Bee; Human (or close to it), but parents came through a Rift from another dimension.
3. Earth native, but human mutants with a history of psionic powers in the family.
4. One parent was a native Earthling, the other a D-Bee.
5. Earth Mutant (1-50%), or D-Bee (51-90%, or alien (91-00%) that is humanoid but has unusual features. Roll twice on the following table to determine the character's
appearance or select two different features...
Right there in the rules of character creation, we're shown that there is zero practical difference between an Earth Mutant, a D-Bee, or an Alien when it comes to anything other than essentially cosmetic features. Yeah, you might get some bonus SDC or something. You might be able to use your tail to hold a coffee mug.
But the
character is fundamentally the same whether you roll on these tables or not; there is nothing inherent about having a tail that makes your character have a mind or morals that are any different than any human character.
And the same applies if you roll that your character is a D-Bee or a half-D-Bee; it has zero mechanical effect on your character's personality or morals, or anything else.
It's cosmetic.
The only thing "nonhuman" about them compared to rolling a human is how you choose for that aspect to come up in the game, IF you choose for it to come up in the game.
Heck, the Family Origin table doesn't even affect other tables like the Sentiments Toward The Coalition table or the Sentiments Toward Non-Humans table!
It's not anything real or significant in the game or the game world, except to the extent that people playing the game or living in the game world
want it to be.
If you roll that your character is a D-Bee with "zero body hair," then having zero body hair is
literally the only difference between your character and an identical human character, as far as game mechanics go.
You can play them like a normal human, or you can play them as a Mork-like weirdo, but that's your choice that has nothing to do with the in-game reality. You could make the same choice to play a normal human that way; it's a player-created character personality trait, NOT any inherent racial difference.
The only inherent racial difference in this case is a lack of body hair.
And the other stuff on the table is mostly the same. You might have fur, or scales, or look ape-like, but those are literally the ONLY inherent differences that this origin table has.
Killer Cyborg wrote:The whole human race isn't endangered by D-Bees. So it's not really the same deal.
Also, exterminating animals is one thing, and exterminating sapient beings is another.
No, man.
Sapience means they're not "an invasive species" at all, unless they're actually hostile invaders waging war on you.
Mostly, D-Bees are essentially the descendants of refugees, and they have just as much right to be on this planet as anybody else, especially since they've been here hundreds of years.
I wouldn't call North Americans of European descent living here TODAY "an invasive species" just because their ancestors displaced natives hundreds of years ago.
Sure, and white people could leave the USA and "go back to Europe."
Or, if we really put our minds to it, all move to Mars or something.
But it's not a reasonable ask or expectation; we've been here for generations.
What I'm missing from your questions is any reason why D-Bees SHOULD relocate somewhere else.
Sure, there are some cases like the Xiticix where there doesn't currently seem to be any way to mutually co-exist with humanity. But those are the rare, extreme cases, not the norm.
In many or most places on Rifts Earth, humans and D-Bees co-exist without much problem, except for the problems caused by racists who just don't like the idea.
Beyond that, remember that the Coalition States considers humans from other dimensions to be D-Bees who are just as much threat as any other kind.
They're not about protecting humanity any more than Hitler was about "protecting Germans."
That's what they claim, but you can tell their real agenda by the way they define the key terms.
If a parent says "I'm going to protect this family," then defines "family" as not including a bunch of his children, he's not being honest with his declarations.
Cutting through all that other stuff again...
i.e., "ignoring the point(s)."
D-Bees are various Species. They have invaded Earth, not all were hostile invasions, but invasions nonetheless.
Invasion: "an instance of invading a country or region with an armed force."
Try again.
Therefore they are an invasive species. They take Earth resources, they kill Earth humans, they propagate their species over humans.
Humans take Earth resources, kill Earth humans, and propagate over other species.
What about it?
(For that matter, in come cases the D-Bees are helping propagate OUR species. See the "one parent was a D-bee" part of the Family Origin chart.)
