How many are orcs?
But at the same time, he’s the embodiment of evil. He’s the most evil that can exist.
If you define evil as the opposite of the guy who created everything, then sure, you can’t actually have evil, as evil is just the absence of God, which doesn’t exist.
But for all practical purposes, this isn’t what evil is. It’s a useless term if you define it as such, because it by definition doesn’t exist within the realm of creation.
Melkor was part of creation, but tried to screw it all up… But ultimately he couldn’t actually screw it up, since he was just part of it. Basically the same as the devil in Christian mythology. Since he’s created by God, he’s inherently subservient and cannot actually defeat the will of God. He’s evil while still being “part of the plan”.
He’s evil for any useful definition of the term.
I don’t even know what you’re saying or why.
This discussion started when you posted a twitter link to a Times of London article, in which some random person seemed to suggest that:
It’s hard not to miss that repeated notion in Tolkien that some races are just worse than others and some peoples are just worse than others and it seems — in the long term, if you embrace this too much — it has dire consequences for yourself and society.” He said that he would rather explore why the orcs were serving Sauron. “You can easily imagine that all those people doing the Dark Lord’s bidding were doing so out of… (quote cut off because of paywall)
Hard to know what exactly is being said in the article because of the paywall. But somehow the response here was a long thread about whether orcs were intrinsically evil or not. What’s interesting is that it’s entirely possible that the person in the Times piece was referring to the Umbar or the Haradrim or the Easterlings (literally also known as the Swarthy Men.) These are human races who served Sauron and are assumed to be evil. It’s the article’s author who inserted “orcs” into the snippet of quote we get.
The original dude is a sci fi author who claimed that it was problematic to create the orcs as simply evil beings, without investigating their internal motivations, and that it promoted racism by suggesting a whole race could be evil. It was a silly take because their internal motivations were, “we were created by the devil to do evil, and we are monsters.” They weren’t a subset of humans.
Yeah, that was unexpected.
No, he was talking about actual orcs.
Can you quote the source for this? It’s behind a paywall. You’re just asserting this.
…who has written a single novel in 2009. I will give you $10 if anyone in this thread can name it without checking Wikipedia. Who cares? This thread is should be about liberal stupidity, not stupid liberals. All you do here is post something sorta-kinda incendiary by the Washington Times or the New York Post or the Daily Caller or The Hill or the Times of London, and then poke it with non-sequiturs until someone debates you on some tangentially related topic. All the while, you insist things without presenting evidence and totally ignore any point that you can’t debate.
I mean I guess, like @ArmandoPenblade, I find it a little amusing. I’ll admit I chuckled a couple of times while reading the posts seriously debating orcian ontology. But it doesn’t mean anything. So far, there’s very little in the entire 2000 posts here that make me cringe to be a liberal. Bring on the big guns if you’ve got them man.
They’re pretty interconnected.
And I’d say declaring calling fictional evil beings evil = racism is pretty stupid.
Thing is anytime we point out something stupid on the left, the goalposts start moving and we end up in “well they’re not in power so it doesn’t matter” territory. Assuming people don’t call you names for pointing out that someone is shady or the like.
The point of this thread was to make fun of liberals who are stupid or say/do stupid shit. It can also encompass stupid liberal ideas, though I think those are mostly hashed out at this point other places.
If you search for the guy, you can find other sources. He actually references both someraces being worse than others, and some groups of people being worse than others (which could be interpreted as referencing some of the different groups of men).
Either way, they are the bad guys. In a fictional world.
Maybe this isn’t the thread for you, dude.
That’s why it’s dumb. Because orcs are fictional monsters.
I wonder, is The Turner Diaries racist? I mean, it’s full of things like other races being defined as bad, but it’s fictional. Can we say that the author just made those people up as a plot device, and they don’t really exist as anything other than evil plot devices, so it can’t really be racism?
Dismissing the modern myth of Middle Earth as mere fiction seems reductive.
Art reflects life! That’s the whole point. There’s no harm in discussing the subject or in differing opinions.
Sometimes Timex’s refusal to consider alternate viewpoints is literally hilarious. Other times it seems like stubborn, close-minded… conservatism??
Are those other races human beings that exist on earth?
You just don’t get it, man. It’s stupid.
No, not really. They’re cardboard caricatures of other human beings that exist on the earth.
It’s not obvious that’s what happened here. The source is paywalled and the word “racism” appears nowhere in the the available snippet. The Times of London is a Murdoch outfit and, like all those other rags I mentioned above, specializes in framing liberals in the most damning way possible.
OK, sure, but is this guy a liberal? Who is he? Exactly what about his actual statement is dumb? I can go on twitter right now and find 1,000,000 statements made by liberal randos that are dumb. And I can find 10,000,000 that are dumb if you remove their context. What is the point of that?
There aren’t any goalposts to move. Are you trying to convince us that there are stupid liberals in the world? I don’t need any convincing; there are plenty of liberal anti-vaxxers, for instance. Are you just trying to find stuff to laugh at? I feel like there’s funnier stuff out there than “Hey, this dude thinks that the black and white moral system in Tolkien doesn’t apply well to reality. What an idiot, hur hur hur.” Are you trying to implicate all of liberalism for stupid stuff one of us says? That’s… an uphill climb.
So they are racist stereotypes of humans?
Sure. The author made them up. They’re not real.
Are the orcs a racist stereotype of humans?
Can I ask a question that doesn’t have one correct answer?
Not being a mind-reader or a medium, I don’t know. But some people think they are. Is that the liberal stupidity part — that some people think they are but you think they’re not?
Sorry, your question is wrong.