The fuck is that pirate clown

For the mobile users: this mf is right on my dashboard

Over there on the right

I have low vision, so I legit did not see the clown until I read this. I got jumpscared by this clown.

we rag on D&D 5e a lot for justifiable reasons but i'm still glad i've played a lot of it because it makes Baldur's Gate 3 fully comprehensible to me. never was able to get into Divinity: Original Sin 2 because the combat system didn't click for me

I like 5e, always have. I don’t get why people rag on it so much, could someone explain?

A brief overview of commonly cited issues:

-The class by class balance is not great and as levels get higher and higher, spellcasters dominate the game more and more.

-The ability check system is a blunt object with a lot of swinginess and binary pass-fail results.

-A personal gripe: your combat build affects your effectiveness during your RP. If you want to be the best possible diplomat/party face, you have to play a charisma-primary class. In other games you can play a bruiser in battle and a suave operator in RP without the mechanics of the game limiting your effectiveness.

-The health scaling is not well optimized in the early levels. Your health basically doubles from level 1 to level 4 but enemy damage doesn't double, so you start as being a glass cannon where a fireball could cause a TPK and shift into a much more reasonable situation by level 3-4.

None of which is to say it's awful or anything, I've played and enjoyed a lot of 5e and it works fine for Baldur's Gate. But I think there are a lot of better-designed RPGs out there, and I think if more people played them, D&D would not have the stranglehold that it currently does.

It feels weird to call this a criticism of 5e when these are (almost) all things 5e mitigated compared to its predecessor.

4e had weird class balance but it was significantly better wrt spellcaster vs non spellcaster and health scaling was much better. The ability check system was still bad but I don't think it meaningfully changed wrt the issues I listed

Tbh my biggest gripe I have with D&D is that it totally dominates the ttrpg sphere. Most of my problems with 5e can be dealt with by switching to a different game, but it’s way harder to find prewritten content for other games and people willing to give other games a try.

I think when a lot of people talk about 5E’s predecessors, they really mean 3.5 and earlier. 4E was kind of its own thing that cared a lot more about being a balanced game that actually played well on a tactical level, but also cut out a lot of weirdness and space for creativity that people enjoyed in older editions. Lots of complaints about it feeling “video gamey” and people considering it basically a different game from the other editions.

Assuming szhmidty is really talking about 3.5, I think they’re pretty much right on all counts. 

There have been some good discussions in my orbit about how you pretty much can’t have a character that fits with the class fantasy a lot of people are going for with martial classes that can also punch in the same weight class as a high level caster. It’s fine if you want to play Fafhrd or Jaime Lannister, but you’re never going to be bringing as much to the table as someone who can blow up a whole city block or raise the dead. A martial character who was operating on that level would look a lot more like a superhero, and that’s not what a lot of people want.

I could imagine more thematically appropriate types of characters in a similar punch-weight-class as casters that aren’t superheroes. Like... Kratos or something.

To be clear, when I say “superhero,” I’m speaking rather loosely. I don’t mean they’d literally be wearing spandex. One of the examples I offered in a prior conversation was Neo from The Matrix, for instance. The point is that they’re not just badass normals, they have actual explicit superpowers. I haven’t played much God of War, but from what I’ve heard of it Kratos would absolutely qualify, if anything he might be kind of overqualified. I mean he’s the new Ares, right? Like he’s actually basically a god (ergo the name). Also isn’t he undead? Point being, he’s not just some guy who’s really good at hitting things with swords and not getting hit with swords.

A lot of mythical heroes and demigods would also fall into this category. Characters like Heracles, Cu Chulainn, and Rama are basically “fighter” archetype, but they perform feats that no human, not even a slightly implausible action hero, could, and often they have various explicitly supernatural powers. (Heracles probably wouldn't work as a character in an extended campaign because he starts out already extremely powerful, but ol' Setanta could, as could a lot of the more over-the-top versions of the knights of the round table.)

I feel like you can do this as long as you get rid of the idea that spellcasters can do this stuff surgically-targeted and on-demand, particularly in the middle of a fight. If blowing up a city block or raising the dead requires an elaborate ritual that lasts from sunset to midnight and you have to do a bunch of weird prep, Conan can just come and stab you while you're doing all that. But, like: that's how fantasy and mythological magic actually works, right? D&D's idea of "combat spellcasters" and wizards who fight with lightning and fireballs and shit is largely an invention of D&D itself, originating in a wargamer's desire to have something analogous to artillery in a high-fantasy context. (The reason this didn't work at the level of adventure gameplay is because artillery need staff.) Just make wonderworking slow and hard to direct precisely, and make martial atuff agile and easy to direct precisely, and you have a *different* military metaphor, guerrillas/commandos vs. entrenched infrastructure. Doesn't that sound like it works better for a dungeon crawl?

Of course people want to play magic-users who feel magical, and they want them to have a reason to go into the dungeon rather than just hang out someplace safe raising the dead, but this idea that they need to have as active a role in fights as the class whose name is "Fighter", and that they should skirmish by shooting fire from their fingertips rather than by just stabbing people with some esoteric tricks, is an idea that largely comes from D&D and its derivatives, and you really can just not do that. In the context of a dungeon, magic-users could very well just play the same role as rogues except for weird occult shit instead of traps and locks, and then later they could use a weird gem you found to do some wacky thing like animate a suit of armor to fight for you, or whatever, and that'd be cool.

Spellcasters-as-artillery as justification for instant spellcasting is a funny idea, because actual artillery takes time and preparation to set up.

I would like to play an RPG in which spellcasters actually do serve the same role as artillery did in, say, WW1. Softening enemy positions so that infantry can advance, besieging enemy fortifications, advancing or retreating slowly as trenches change hands.

“The entire British museum is an active crime scene” - John Oliver

[image description: two pictures, one above the other. The first image shows a statue originally from the Acropolis in Athens, now in the British Museum. The statue is a column shaped like a woman. It is labelled London. The bottom image is from the Acropolis Museum in Athens, showing the other five matching column/statues, with a space for the missing statue pointedly left open. This picture is shot from above and is labelled Athens.

image in savvysergeant’s reblog: screencap of tags from two people. Feeblekazoo’s tags read: the degree to which the Acropolis museum is designed to shame the British Museum is spectactular. butherlipsarenotmoving’s tags read: the acropolis museum is the most passive aggressive museum i’ve ever been to and i love it

/end id]

For those of you who don’t know museum drama, one of the largest and most famous parts of the British Museum’s collection is the so-called Elgin Marbles, which were looted from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin in the 18th Century. (The Acropolis is the hill in Athens, Greece which has some of the most amazing Greek ruins anywhere, the most famous of which is the Parthenon.) Elgin had (or at least claims to have had) permission from the Ottoman Empire to take stuff home with him, but a) this is one empire asking another empire if they can loot stuff from the other empire’s subjugated people, so, not exactly any moral high ground there Elgin, and b) he took a lot more stuff than the Ottomans said he could have.

Greece has been asking for those statues and sculptures to be returned since they won independence in 1832. That’s right, 1832, 190 years ago. The British Museum has had a number of excuses over the years, one of the biggies of the late 20th Century being “we couldn’t possibly give them back because Athens doesn’t have a nice enough museum to display them” and ignoring Greece’s response of “we will BUILD a museum just for them if you will just give us our damn stuff back!“

Finally, Greece said “fuck you” and built a museum at the bottom of the Acropolis called the Acropolis museum. It is huge, it is gorgeous, the collection of objects is amazing and the educational bits (“this is what it is and why it matters”) are really well done. It’s probably one of the best archaeological museums in the world; it definitely is the best collection of ancient Greek artifacts in the world, both for the size of the collection and the way it’s displayed.

Oh. And it is amazingly passive-aggressive. Every single piece of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum has an empty spot on display waiting for the piece to be returned to Greece. For example, there are a lot of pieces where Elgin took, say, the nicest (or easiest to remove) one of a set. The column/statue in the OP’s image is one of these. Friezes from the roof of the Parthenon are another example. The Acropolis Museum displays each one of these sets with space for the stolen pieces, along with a picture of what the stolen piece looks like and where it is. It is a giant middle finger at the British Museum, disguised as helpful information.

There’s no chance that the British Museum will return any of this in the next generation. It’s not up to the curators at the British Museum; they don’t get any say in this. The board of governors of the British Museum is made up of old posh English people who genuinely believe that the Empire was awesome and England has a perfect right to everything in the British Museum. They have set policies about what can and can’t be removed from the collection, and according to those policies nothing of any historical or monetary value can be given away or sold. And they actively promote the idea that their predecessors had a perfect right to loot the cultural heritage of the world, and that the museum has a perfect right to keep it forever. The only way to get anything out of the British Museum and back to its rightful place would be to completely replace the entire board of the museum with new people who think completely differently. And that’s not happening any time soon, alas.

By the way, the British argument that Greeks wouldn’t know how to care for the antiquities……. Greece has 206 archaeological museums. It’s not only incredibly demeaning as an argument, it’s also straight out false and misleading.

One thing (and with the massive caveat of I don’t disagree with the above in the slightest): the Board of Trustees isn’t like that. They’re not all white, they’re not all rich, and they’re not all English. By and large they’re academics. I was speaking to them the other week with regards to repatriation when I visited and they’re actually very much all for it (bar one or two exceptions…looking at you George) and are working on things. A group of 5 of them I can confirm actively loathe Elgin and the marbles room. The problem lies with the British Museum Act of 1968 (hereafter referred to as BMA68) which was a law created by the government to prevent anything within the BM, which the government owns but wants very little do to with unless you’re trying to repatriate fyi, being removed in the “national interest”. Repatriation is, annoyingly, illegal in the case of the contents of the BM. So the Board have been trying to change this by putting pressure in various areas to get the laws changed, and the government screws them by enforcing term limits for serving on the board and then trying to stack the board in their favour to prevent further action. It’s a game of politics and the government do not want to give up BMA68 at all.

I know we like to categorise everyone we’re up against in the fight for repatriation as “old, white, rich guys” but it’s not helpful when it is decidedly not the case. We need to be mad at the right people and focusing on efforts to change this ridiculous law. At this time, supporting projects like the International Training Partnership, which is the BM’s way of building a network of curators and training them so organisations like the British Government can’t say “hurr durr they can’t look after their artefacts” because actually they can, we trained them ourselves. The network of curators also allows them to build mounting international pressure. It’s not going to happen overnight, but the pressure is building now, I promise you.

I know that Greece keeps including stuff about returning stolen antiquities every time they’re doing a diplomacy with the UK in particular and any larger bodies.

I just want to point out that if the British returned stolen artifacts every time someone asked them to, a lot of those artifacts would no longer exist. The National Museum of Brazil burned down in 2018, resulting in the loss of over 18 million artifacts due to inadequate firefighting infrastructure. It might be a bit too soon to place absolute faith in the ability of middle-income countries like Greece to preserve historical treasures for thousands of years to come.

Britain is arguably the most stable country on Earth. It was last successfully invaded in 1066. If we want to preserve these artifacts for future generations, then they should be in London where they’ll be relatively safe.

On the other hand, if we want to use these priceless historical treasures for petty short-sighted nationalist dick-measuring contests, then by all means send them back to Athens.

London was last bombed the shit out of in 1941, just 82 years ago, and the UK had an active, violent, bomb-throwing secessionist movement as recently as 1998. There is still today a peaceful secessionist movement that has a non-negligible chance of separating Scotland from the rest. So no, the UK is not especially politically stable nor a particularly safe place to store your old rocks for thousands of years to come.

That is true, that just means that the ideal place to store historical treasures is actually Canada. Britain is still an improvement on Greece, which is in a precarious position geographically. Britain was bombed during WW2, Greece was successfully invaded and occupied resulting in the deaths of 7%-11% of the population.

“The entire British museum is an active crime scene” - John Oliver

[image description: two pictures, one above the other. The first image shows a statue originally from the Acropolis in Athens, now in the British Museum. The statue is a column shaped like a woman. It is labelled London. The bottom image is from the Acropolis Museum in Athens, showing the other five matching column/statues, with a space for the missing statue pointedly left open. This picture is shot from above and is labelled Athens.

image in savvysergeant’s reblog: screencap of tags from two people. Feeblekazoo’s tags read: the degree to which the Acropolis museum is designed to shame the British Museum is spectactular. butherlipsarenotmoving’s tags read: the acropolis museum is the most passive aggressive museum i’ve ever been to and i love it

/end id]

For those of you who don’t know museum drama, one of the largest and most famous parts of the British Museum’s collection is the so-called Elgin Marbles, which were looted from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin in the 18th Century. (The Acropolis is the hill in Athens, Greece which has some of the most amazing Greek ruins anywhere, the most famous of which is the Parthenon.) Elgin had (or at least claims to have had) permission from the Ottoman Empire to take stuff home with him, but a) this is one empire asking another empire if they can loot stuff from the other empire’s subjugated people, so, not exactly any moral high ground there Elgin, and b) he took a lot more stuff than the Ottomans said he could have.

Greece has been asking for those statues and sculptures to be returned since they won independence in 1832. That’s right, 1832, 190 years ago. The British Museum has had a number of excuses over the years, one of the biggies of the late 20th Century being “we couldn’t possibly give them back because Athens doesn’t have a nice enough museum to display them” and ignoring Greece’s response of “we will BUILD a museum just for them if you will just give us our damn stuff back!“

Finally, Greece said “fuck you” and built a museum at the bottom of the Acropolis called the Acropolis museum. It is huge, it is gorgeous, the collection of objects is amazing and the educational bits (“this is what it is and why it matters”) are really well done. It’s probably one of the best archaeological museums in the world; it definitely is the best collection of ancient Greek artifacts in the world, both for the size of the collection and the way it’s displayed.

Oh. And it is amazingly passive-aggressive. Every single piece of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum has an empty spot on display waiting for the piece to be returned to Greece. For example, there are a lot of pieces where Elgin took, say, the nicest (or easiest to remove) one of a set. The column/statue in the OP’s image is one of these. Friezes from the roof of the Parthenon are another example. The Acropolis Museum displays each one of these sets with space for the stolen pieces, along with a picture of what the stolen piece looks like and where it is. It is a giant middle finger at the British Museum, disguised as helpful information.

There’s no chance that the British Museum will return any of this in the next generation. It’s not up to the curators at the British Museum; they don’t get any say in this. The board of governors of the British Museum is made up of old posh English people who genuinely believe that the Empire was awesome and England has a perfect right to everything in the British Museum. They have set policies about what can and can’t be removed from the collection, and according to those policies nothing of any historical or monetary value can be given away or sold. And they actively promote the idea that their predecessors had a perfect right to loot the cultural heritage of the world, and that the museum has a perfect right to keep it forever. The only way to get anything out of the British Museum and back to its rightful place would be to completely replace the entire board of the museum with new people who think completely differently. And that’s not happening any time soon, alas.

By the way, the British argument that Greeks wouldn’t know how to care for the antiquities……. Greece has 206 archaeological museums. It’s not only incredibly demeaning as an argument, it’s also straight out false and misleading.

One thing (and with the massive caveat of I don’t disagree with the above in the slightest): the Board of Trustees isn’t like that. They’re not all white, they’re not all rich, and they’re not all English. By and large they’re academics. I was speaking to them the other week with regards to repatriation when I visited and they’re actually very much all for it (bar one or two exceptions…looking at you George) and are working on things. A group of 5 of them I can confirm actively loathe Elgin and the marbles room. The problem lies with the British Museum Act of 1968 (hereafter referred to as BMA68) which was a law created by the government to prevent anything within the BM, which the government owns but wants very little do to with unless you’re trying to repatriate fyi, being removed in the “national interest”. Repatriation is, annoyingly, illegal in the case of the contents of the BM. So the Board have been trying to change this by putting pressure in various areas to get the laws changed, and the government screws them by enforcing term limits for serving on the board and then trying to stack the board in their favour to prevent further action. It’s a game of politics and the government do not want to give up BMA68 at all.

I know we like to categorise everyone we’re up against in the fight for repatriation as “old, white, rich guys” but it’s not helpful when it is decidedly not the case. We need to be mad at the right people and focusing on efforts to change this ridiculous law. At this time, supporting projects like the International Training Partnership, which is the BM’s way of building a network of curators and training them so organisations like the British Government can’t say “hurr durr they can’t look after their artefacts” because actually they can, we trained them ourselves. The network of curators also allows them to build mounting international pressure. It’s not going to happen overnight, but the pressure is building now, I promise you.

I know that Greece keeps including stuff about returning stolen antiquities every time they’re doing a diplomacy with the UK in particular and any larger bodies.

I just want to point out that if the British returned stolen artifacts every time someone asked them to, a lot of those artifacts would no longer exist. The National Museum of Brazil burned down in 2018, resulting in the loss of over 18 million artifacts due to inadequate firefighting infrastructure. It might be a bit too soon to place absolute faith in the ability of middle-income countries like Greece to preserve historical treasures for thousands of years to come.

Britain is arguably the most stable country on Earth. It was last successfully invaded in 1066. If we want to preserve these artifacts for future generations, then they should be in London where they'll be relatively safe.

On the other hand, if we want to use these priceless historical treasures for petty short-sighted nationalist dick-measuring contests, then by all means send them back to Athens.

Last weekend was the 70 year anniversary of the US-UK overthrow of Iran's democratically-elected government.

Here's what I wrote about the coup back in 2019:

Doesn't "nationalize" just mean "steal at gunpoint"? It kinda sounds to me like this guy picked a fight with the British and the British won.

D&D Has Too Many Rules

I'm prepping some stuff for an upcoming D&D session and I come across paragraphs like this (and this is the basic rulebook, mind you):

This is not a complaint specifically about crafting. Everything is like this: traveling, having conversations, carrying things, eating. And my thought is: I cannot possibly imagine putting in the effort and above all the bookkeeping to keep track of all of this. And so I exercise my prerogative to just... not.

Combat doesn't have this problem, because combat is basically what D&D is about. I'm okay with having to keep track of my hit points and spell slots and whatever else in order to run a combat encounter. I'm not okay with having to do the same amount of work to determine my budget for renting out an inn between phases of the campaign.

Counterpoint: Rules like these were in D&D long before many of the more complex aspects of the combat rules were added to the game. D&D is about logistics. Sometimes people don't like your logistics and you have to make them die mad about it.

Counter-counterpoint, the crafting rules in D&D 5e are almost as stupid as they are useless. They have no synergy with any other part of the system.

If D&D is about logistics then it's doing a shitty job of it.

Okay class, show of hands. Who can tell me where you all went horribly, shamefully wrong?

No one? None of you?

Good. Shut up, sit down, and listen while I explain the definitely correct answer -- no don't interrupt -- You don't get to talk until you've figured out how dogs play basketball.

~(disclaimer: do not smash your computer before either reading to or skipping to the end)~

First things first: let's start with the most obvious option to the most obvious case and consider the sort of world created from treating it normatively and assuming for simplicity (but without loss of generality) that you personally would mostly prefer to live. Which is:

You pick the waiting room

Despite being aware that "The Killing Room" might technically end up not killing you after all, you nevertheless decide it best to avoid the room that is very clearly labeled as "The Killing Room" and for the most part does exactly what it sounds like.

Normative outcome -- A pretty clean and simple world. Anyone who wants to live can just go into the waiting room, and should there be anyone who wants to die they can just go into the killing room, and the worst case scenario is that if for some reason too many people want to die, the killing room mercilessly refuses to kill them and so they all have to live. (Leaving them no worse off than they were before this particular suicide prospect).

If you chose both The Waiting Room and The Red Pill, you may then quite plausibly be wondering what the hell everyone else was thinking (more likely, you already know, but), instead of speculating I decided to just give some people the question 1-on-1 and push them on their answers. (Whether or not I pushed too hard and thereby unfairly or unjustifiably changed their initial opinion isn't relevant here, as the strength of their opinion is not the thing we are after. (But I absolutely steamrolled them, yes.)) The answers for the three out of three people I selected by convenience are Real Human #1:

Real Human #2:

Real Human #3: (this one is from an IRL conversation from like 12 hours ago so it's quoted -- but more or less verbatim, and verified by the person I had it with. I did not need to do any pushing here so this breaks the pattern, but when you use a shoddy methodology you get shoddy results. Them's the breaks).

To summarize, what the people above (and quite likely the majority of people who picked blue) seem to have done (and I verified that they agree with this characterization) is notice the first option presenting them with

"Enticing," they thought, ". . .but hardly worth a poll. So the crux must be yet to come. It is simply the way of things." And lo, the question continues :

4. This choice is a risky one, by which you must prove your courage, and trust in your fellow man. 5. Unlike those damned defecting red-pillers, who will do anything to save their own skin.

Then they decided that thinking time was over, and voted for the world they wished at that moment to see, with no further consideration as to whether the red-pillers were also just voting for the world they wished to see, nor if that world was one they too would actually find preferable to the blue-pill one they were about to vote for. I strongly suspect any skepticism you might have that this is what most people did, will most likely be dispelled by just posing the pill "dilemma" to some people you know, and finding if they agree that the thought process above looks approximately like the one that they had -- and further, I am skeptical that you are truly skeptical. We're not here to discuss why some/most(?) people might *unjustifiably* pick the blue pill, of course. But I want to keep the above conversations / summary here for reference because it will be the only waypoint we have back from the edge of absolute insanity later. In it's rawest, purest, most bullet-biting form which 18.8% of you actually somehow fucking chose, the foundation of that madness looks like -- after being presenting with the room scenario

You pick The Killing Room:

Because, just as you finished thinking through the implications of choosing The Waiting Room, some masochistic part of you shouted "BUT WAIT! What if someone accidentally went into The Killing Room?? Have I not the moral obligation to try to save them at massive personal risk to myself despite my lack of knowledge as to whether any such person exists, and with blind trust that enough people will aid me in this endeavor to not amount to a meaningless gesture that costs the lives of both me and everyone similar in this regard to me??"

And then you think "Hm, it does seem pretty unlikely that someone would accidentally pick the very clearly dangerous killing room so maybe this is a bad idea," thankfully "-- BUT WAIT" you say, ruining everything again. "The fact that I just considered my moral obligation of going into The Killing Room to save someone who might have gone in there on accident means other people may also have considered their moral obligation to do the same. Which means the killing room might be full of people who are just trying to save someone who may or may not have gone into the killing room on accident and may or may not even exist.

Therefore, regardless of whether the person those people went in there to save actually exists, I have a moral obligation to save all of those wonderful people who were willing to go in there!"

Normative outcome-- A very fraught and neurotic world in which, even if everyone doesn't hold themselves responsible for protecting potentially entirely hypothetical others from potentially entirely hypothetical mistakes- they do hold themselves responsible for protecting also potentially entirely hypothetical others who do potentially hold themselves responsible for protecting hypothetical others from hypothetical mistakes, and everyone must operate further with blind trust that yet more people will hold themselves responsible for protecting others who are holding themselves responsible for protecting hypothetical others who are holding themselves responsible for protecting an entirely hypothetical person from an entirely hypothetical mistake.

Two things here strike me as especially unfortunate. First, I cannot claim this as a pure reductio ad-absurdum -- because 18.8% somehow. And second, according to the ultimate results of the killing-room poll, the 18.8% of you who made this decision would tragically (and to society's great loss) have perished in The Killing Room here. But if it's any consolation, at least you will not have to live this way anymore.

With this admittedly baffling but totally consistent ground work laid, let us proceed to the much more tenable but ultimately

Endearingly Insane Reasoning that By Sheer Fucking Miracle Somehow Doesn't Drag Everyone Into Hell Along With You

Which is . . . largely what you suspected it would be from the description of what it would require to choose the Killing Room. Except that because The Killing Room now has the much more innocuous name "The Blue Pill". It is in fact entirely valid to claim (and further clearly evidenced by the solid 60% swing in the polls) that the risk to your life here is clearly warranted due to the dark and terrible power of ~*branding*~.

Where the Red-pill Wait-roomer would look at the swing in these results and think "Yeah, looks like you can pretty easily dupe people into objectively terrible decisions if you just make the morally neutral/good choice sound like the morally bad one" The Blue-pill Wait-roomer would instead think "This change in opinion is entirely reasonable and justifiable, after all, the removal of the 'Killing Room' label would be expected to result in a markedly increased probability that someone would mistakenly choose to take what is otherwise very clearly a suicide pill. And the fact that they would do so specifically out of good intentions means we should do everything we can to protect those who make the mistake."

^^^THIS PART RIGHT HERE IS WHERE EVERYTHING JUST COMPLETELY BREAKS^^^ Because up until here this hypothetical was not melting into reality. Everyone except the Waiting-Room Blue-piller was either implicitly or explicitly discussing normative claims. The entire discourse read not as "truly, what will I do in light of this situation in which I find myself" but merely "What should one do, in such a situation."

On purely normative grounds, Red-pill Wait-roomer clearly wins. Everyone should clearly choose the red pill, and everyone should clearly choose the Wait Room, and the result is that literally no one dies against their will nor even has to risk dying to prevent anyone from dying against their will. But the Blue-pill Wait-Roomer, in all their unapologetic insanity (bless them) has completely disregarded the boundary between what everyone should do and what anyone might do, and forced everything into a hellscape of "what everyone should do in light of the fact that not everyone *will*"? (And to make matters worse, with an argument further bolstered by the fact that almost everyone *did.*) And I want to be clear here, what's bad isn't the fact that the Waiting-Room Blue-piller just pulled a "Nowhere in the rules does it say that dogs can't play basketball," because that is actually entirely valid and perhaps these metaphorical dogs should metaphorically be allowed to play basketball. What's bad here is that pulling this move immediately results in the all of the Waiting-Room Red-Pillers, without objection and seemingly without even noticing, also swapping out their entire roster for dogs. Those dogs look like the Red-pillers countering (validly) "In applying the normative claim that we have a moral obligation to do everything we can to protect those who made a well-meaning mistake, you are ignoring that you force everyone ELSE to risk death. This has its own moral weight." To which the Blue-piller can reply "There wouldn't be any risk of death if everyone chooses the blue pill like they should!" To which the Red-piller would reply "There wouldn't be any need for everyone to choose the blue pill if everyone just chose the red one in the first place!" To which the Blue-piller responds "But you have to protect the who people might incorrectly choose the blue one!" To which the Red-piller responds "But that would require risking all of the lives of everyone who chooses to help!" To --WHICH FUCKING SIDE OF THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN HYPOTHETICAL REALITY AND ACTUAL REALITY IS ANYONE FUCKING EVEN ON ANY MORE??? If you want to avoid the hellscape by just banning dogs from basketball, Red-pill Wait-roomers win. Blue-pillers should get on the correct side and stop forcing everyone to risk death. But just for fun let's look at an especially amusing situation we get into where, presuming we have decided on some particular ground rules by which dogs play basketball, the Waiting-Room Blue-Pillers get to make something like the following argument: "Choosing the Blue Pill was clearly the correct choice, because the fact that everyone did actually do it means I was right to trust in my fellow man because look -- everyone lives!" This argument is great because 1. The fact that so many people overwhelmingly chose Blue is an equally strong argument that it's fine to choose Red. And 2. It is almost certainly the case that way back in reality, somewhere around those screenshots we placed for markers (remember those?), the reason everyone chose Blue has almost nothing to do with agreement that everyone should risk their lives to protect everyone risking their lives to n-levels of recursion protect someone who may or may not accidentally have chosen blue and may or may not exist, but has primarily to do with the fact that they just didn't think it through too hard and wandered off after answering. 3. Rational Blue-piller knew this in advance, and only got into this situation by correctly having next to no faith in the ability of their fellow man to think things through. 4. It is 100% true. 5. But only in hypothetical space where dogs can't play basketball, and would almost certainly almost certainly collapse to dangerously false in the real world where someone's literal life being on the line serves as incentive for everyone to give it another moment's thought and 6. BUT NOW WHICH SIDE OF THE BOUNDARY AM I MYSELF ON HOW DID I GET HERE AND WHY DO I HAVE A TAIL??

Further Notable Objections:

This doesn't matter at all. If interpreted to mean that less than 50% must choose blue in order for all to live, everyone should still pick red to ensure that blue is less than 50%. If greater than 50% must pick blue in order for everyone in blue to live, then everyone should still pick red (as it assures everyone who wants to live, will live).

2. "As a deontologist, I recognized that the option were either to choose possible death so that I may be responsible for killing no one, or choose to potentially kill someone so that I may avoid death."

Yeah that's all well and good but a. You are actually someone who you just chose to kill and b. If everyone deontologically chose the red pill then no one would have died and c. You risked killing literally all of the people who decided to risk themselves in order to save your sorry ass.

To argue for the value of ~*branding*~ :

I can come up with a branding that shifts the vibes even further:

"Everyone taking the poll must vote for one of two candidates for Dictator. Candidate Blue promises he won't kill anyone. Candidate Red promises to kill everyone who voted for Blue. Whichever candidate gets more votes will enact their policy."

This is still game-theoretically equivalent to the other two cases, but hopefully in this case it seems clear that you "should" vote for the peaceful candidate rather than the murderous one.

The red pill justifications sound insane in this case:

"Voting for Blue is suicide"

"Red wouldn't have to murder anyone if everyone just voted for him like they should"

In my example the branding is unambiguous in one direction. The branding of the waiting room vs murder room is unambiguous in the other direction.

The branding of the pills is more ambiguous. Is blue a suicide pill, or is red a murder pill? I think that ambiguous branding makes people more likely to argue about that case.

No it isn't.

Politicians do more than one thing. Voting for the red politician gets you ruled by the kind of genocidal psycho that kills all obvious opposition and then, predictably, starts killing everybody else too

Once you put in enough epicycles to make the situations equivalent ("Besides the murder they have the exact same policies," "you have future sight so you know they'll go through with it" etc./) you have effectively turned them into a suicide pill and a survival pill and we're back at the original problem with no additional insight.

You could also just as easily use this scenario:

If not elected, Candidate Blue will go insane and murder everyone who voted for him.

Candidate Red won't kill anyone no matter what.

If you're going to add a psychotic murderer into the scenario, you can just as easily add it to either side. I would argue the original scenario puts the death more on Blue than Red anyway, so this fits better.

50 WORDS TO USE INSTEAD OF “SAID”

Do you ever find yourself over-using the word “said” in your writing? Try using these words/phrases instead:

(NOTE: Keep in mind that all of these words have slightly different meanings and are associated with different emotions/scenarios.)

Also remember that “said” is invisible on the page, and that you aren’t ever overusing “said”, even if you’re scared you are.

You could write a novel using nothing but “said” to indicate that people are speaking and nobody will ever notice, complain, or think you’re a lazy writer.

It sure as fuck doesn’t feel like it while you’re writing, though.

I fucking notice and it bothers the shit out of me when I read it

I’m the exact opposite. I will go through my writing and look very closely at every time I don’t use ‘said’ or ‘asked’. 

 "Here’s a bunch of unusual, non-conversational euphemisms for 'said’ and 'asked’“ writing advice and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

oh most of that list is awful, no doubt

but “said” over and over bothers me. do things that show something about how they say it, or just use action narration to make it clear without using said

don’t say “verbalized” instead of “said,” but say “spat” or “shrieked” or “grumbled” or “sobbed” or “growled” or “threatened” or “hissed” or “gasped” or “choked” if they fit

No, do not do that. Do not do that at all.

you know the wizards council will use this to expand the surveillance kingdom and erode nonhuman rights

👏dragon 👏blood 👏can’t 👏erode 👏mythril 👏beams

everyone else is funnier than me I quit

not to nerd about this (I'm about to nerd about this) BUT,

in any wizarding world they would not have a hexagonal building. especially one of that importance. the reason for this is that a hexagon is periodic monotile. this means you could magically duplicate the building and tessellate it, covering the area in copies of the building so that nobody could figure out which one is the original.

to put less technical terms on it, y'know those little shapes that everyone played with as kids? with the yellow hexagons?

these things. do you remember putting the hexagons together? they fit together perfectly

here's an example of hexagons fitting together. Imagine that each of these is a magical copy of a government building, with only one of them being the original one that people would want to work in. maybe that is the only one with the files in it. that would suck.

a pentagon does not tile like this. if you have ever tried to put a bunch of pentagons together you will find that gaps are formed which can't be filled by other pentagons (this assumes that we are using only regular pentagons, meaning all sides are the same length and all angles are the same size). you would end up with something that looks a bit like the above image. note the black gaps in the structure. perhaps this is why the pentagon (the government building) is shaped like that.

so what would the people of the wizarding government do in order to prevent this? they certainly wouldn't build a hexagon, and they would also avoid other monotiles (shapes that can cover a space with no gaps). a pentagon would work well for this as shown above, but if we are going with the assumption that all things would change slightly from the world we live in (and the 9/11 that happened here), I recommend a heptagon, as it is the regular polygon with the least number of sides (other than a pentagon) that does not tessellate, as shown below.

as a bonus, here is a page from the book savage shapes, part of the series murderous maths. this features the exact scenario I mentioned, though this was done by aliens rather than through ordinary magic. a huge thank you to murderous maths for kickstarting my love of mathematics and also being so goofy (in all the best ways)

You forgot to mention why a building in a tiling shape would be bad though.

Wizards would build their structures as hexagons, because then they could use duplication magic to easily make more of them! Plus if they ever wanted to hide which government building is the real one, they could do exactly as described, and then only they would know which Hexagon has the important files inside and which are fakes.

My toxic trait is writing the whole AO3 summary of fics I've written like 5 words of

I promise that fic of Valjean's first 3 days after his release is coming it's just taking a little while @prudencepaccard

take your time!!!

Writing a summary before writing the story itself is often a good idea! It's like starting an essay by writing the thesis statement.

The funniest part of the conspiracy theorist worldview is the implication that human nature is extremely good. Like, if every political assassination and terrorist attack and major war can be traced back to a single source of Evil, if people could only do those things under threat of violence or mind control, then the vast majority of humanity must be startlingly Good.

Of course, this does also lead to the horrid implication of "We only need to rid ourselves of this small group to end all Evil and save the pure-hearted People", a stance immediatly leading to genocide, but beyond that...

Fundamentally optimistic and naive worldview, that's why they are so wiling to be taken in by hucksters.

Conspiracy thinking seems to involve a kind of willful destruction of your ability to understand the existence of a world outside yourself.

Like one feature is this conflation of everything that makes you upset as coming from a single source. Hillary Clinton, trans kids, and Islamic fundamentalism are all upsetting ideas to you, so they must all be on the same team somehow and also specifically trying to upset you and people like you.

@d007ization

"I wonder if you have to destroy the concept of a world outside yourself or some people just never come to realize that their innately tribalistic thinking isn't an accurate reflection of the world. I know I've fallen into that thinking plenty of times, and I'm someone who has the awareness, time and energy to consider the way I think!"

I think it goes beyond tribalism.

Like, I don't like Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists, but I do at least recognize that they have their own internal reasons for doing what they do, and that, say, they probably don't like the Trump administration, and vice versa.

So, I occasionally listen to the Knowledge Fight podcast that covers Alex Jones, and one thing is that Jones says he believes both of the following things:

This really blew me away when I first heard it.

Because... Like... If the deep state actually stole the election through massive voter fraud, then surely breaking into the Capitol building to demand justice is actually a pretty proportionate response? In fact I would argue that it would be an extremely mild response to, you know, the end of American democracy.

But conspiracy theories about FBI informants who caused what would otherwise have been a totally peaceful and law-abiding protest to turn into a riot are apparently really popular with people who are deep into the stolen election conspiracy theory.

My hypothesis about this is that the riot was a terrible PR move for the MAGA right. Most Americans were aghast at the riot.

So... The riot part of the protests is now psychologically upsetting for certain conspiracy-minded people, and exactly because they are conspiracy-minded that upset has to be projected onto a hostile outside actor who causes that upset to hurt them. It can't be that the riot reflects a weakness in them or their allies; it must have been caused by some outside force.

Like, honestly "If it weren't for the FBI, we would have peacefully and legally protested the complete destruction of America as we know it" is not a sensible or coherent world-view to me. If you're in a mindset where you are making judgements about a stable external world, and you believe that part of that world is that the Biden administration stole an election, then you don't need these conspiracy theories about FBI agents riling up otherwise peaceful crowds.

This is a reasonable hypothesis, but I have reason to think it's incorrect.

Although there is a genuinely-violent hard right in America, liberals and the further left have traditionally underestimated the conservative desire to live in a stable, functioning society even at the cost of suffering some level of injustice. At some point--perhaps in the wake of Prohibition's failure, but there were always conservatives who thought the Temperance movement had gone too far--religious conservatives developed unspoken rules of proportionality regarding political activity. These rules were easy to weaponize against left movements, but for decades the majority of the right abided by them as well.

Only in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement did right-wingers realize that their proportionality rules were dooming them to failure. Even today, a large portion of the (primarily religious) right honors them in the breach--"One day when those dang leftists are vanquished, we can return to living in a stable society!" In this context, the notion of a peaceful protest march against a stolen election really does make some level of sense. Only when the police actually roll in and begin clubbing you (or worse) does violent response become appropriate.

The libertarian (that is, theoretically anti-authoritarian) right wants something fundamentally different out of democracy than the left. The left wants the government to enact the collective popular will. The right wants the government to leave people alone to enact their individual wills (unless someone wills to directly harm another).

This may all sound somewhat absurd from a left-liberal perspective, but it fits neatly into the historical context of a Christian right that, once upon a time, believed that government was inherently violent and therefore Christians should not be involved in it at all. Even the remnants of this stance no longer hold the reins of authority in an increasingly-authoritarian GOP, but invoking its tattered memory gets you a long way with people who still *wish* the world would let them go that way.

I guess I still don't understand the purpose of the "false flag" narrative even in that context.

Surely, as an individual one can believe that the protests should have remained peaceful while still understanding why people other than oneself would respond differently to those events?

PS - "These rules were easy to weaponize against left movements, but for decades the majority of the right abided by them as well."

This bugs me, I think there is a level of whitewashing here, particularly when it comes to race; obviously, violent vigilante racist movements and ad hoc murderous race riots have both frequently been deployed frequently in American history.

More importantly, and linked to the above, at that point we're talking about people who aren't going to the Capitol protests at all because they know that the election was just disappointing, not stolen.

In theory it's possible to say "those guys are idiots they don't represent me", in practice no one wants to shift blame to potential allies, everyone is more sympathetic to allies' stories, and believing that your side could ever do any wrong is harder than imagining that your morals are sacrosanct and so anyone doing a bad is a non-believer and/or a foreign agitator.

"Those bricks that happen to be near protest sites aren't just there because construction happens in a city, it's clearly a set up by the feds!"

With due respect that's very much a paradox; the people who went to the January 6th riot spent the aftermath tearing their whole movement apart accusing each other of being feds. I was thinking of this because I just heard a podcast about a guy named Ray Epps:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/12/why-cant-right-wing-bubble-give-up-ray-epps/

The conspiracy fringe is not saying that somehow the FBI must be involved, they latch onto specific people and essentially exile them as enemies of the movement. If you were interested in solidarity with potential allies, and were sympathetic to their stories, you'd take a guy like Ray Epps at face value.

Admittedly, there is a difference between "Someone not in the middle of the event, commenting on it, who only has the vague notion of respect for their side to win or lose" and "Guy caught on camera storming the Capitol, who now risks jail, and also needs to explain why being in or not being in the Capitol was good while not copping too much blame from the cops."

(Meta note: I may be moving the goalposts a bit, I don't think so but it can be hard to tell from the inside.)

I don't think that description really meshes with the Epps story?

There's literally nothing about Epps story that is worth commenting on; basically he doesn't have a story, at least not one that's different from any other yahoo who wanted to storm the capitol. He just happened to be caught on film while people chanted "FED! FED! FED!" at him.

What I'm getting at is why does he need to be a federal operative instead of an idiot?

It's not about preserving solidarity with other people in the movement, Carlson singled him out as a pariah and he alleges he's been the subject of death threats and similar behavior.

This is an enormous shift of blame onto not just a potential, but an actual ally; this is a characteristic of such paranoid witch hunts.

I feel like your analysis is missing the fact that infiltrating dissident groups and provoking terrorist attacks is something the US Feds actually do, not just in the minds of conspiracy theorists but in real life, too.

There's an old joke that goes like this: How do you tell which members of the KKK are FBI plants? They're the only ones who pay their membership dues.

You live in a society where your government definitely does in fact conspire to stage attacks against themselves so that they can swoop in and arrest the perpetrators. "Conspiracy theory" is not a synonym for lie. Yelling "conspiracy theorist" at anyone who suggests the government might have (gasp) perpetrated their ninety gazillionth conspiracy against the public doesn't make you smart, it makes you a bootlicker.

Is Epps a fed? I dunno, maybe. If you go to a KKK meeting, point to a random person, and say "he's a Fed!" you have about a 50/50 shot at being right. If the Salem trials had a 50% hit rate, the phrase "witch hunt" would probably mean something else.

So, you figure that Epps might be a super deep cover fed who lied about it under oath and is now being charged by the government as a way to keep up the cover story?

This kind of dodge is very annoying to me.

You say that like it's a gotcha. "Checkmate, atheists!" But that carries the unstated final sentence, "And the FBI would never violate police procedure or lie under oath."

Except the FBI would totally do all of those things, so what's your point?

The US government destroys evidence, tortures people, fabricates evidence to justify torturing people when it turns out the people they tortured are innocent, assassinates foreign leaders, instigates coups, puts random people on the no-fly list, bombs weddings, illegally detains US citizens, and occasionally executes US citizens without trial.

But this is the line they won't cross? Lying under oath? Really? Really?

If you want to see a US civil servant or law enforcement professional lie under oath, just turn on C-SPAN and wait.

Is that really what you think?

This actually does seem like a willful abstention from making any kind of jdugement.

It's not impossible that Epps is a deep-cover agent who posed for years as a Trump supporter and lied about it under oath and upended his entire family life to keep his cover intact and, even though he went through all that to maintain his cover, is now also suing Fox News for libel. And since truth is an absolute defense against libel, if Fox News can prove Epps is a Fed they can win the case, and they'll have a ton of discovery rights which will enable them to dig into his history to find any evidence of his job as a deep cover FBI agent. And he's doing all this with the goal of convincing a group of people to, in his own words "Peacefully" enter the Capitol building.

EDIT: Oh, and also the government is apparently going to charge him to keep his cover that much more intact and this whole scheme was cooked up by the Trump era FBI. Oh and also they're doing all that in this case even though they didn't go to any of these lengths in the story about FBI agent provocateurs that you posted.

That's not impossible, but I hope you can see why I find it incredibly unlikely for reasons that don't just amount to naiveté about government honesty.

It's possible in the same way that it's possible that you're being paid to say all this by the Russian Government.

I mean, are you going to sit here and tell me that the Russian government would never pay somebody to post on tumblr? Like that's the line that they would never cross? Really?

It is possible that I'm being paid to say all this by the Russian Government. Because they do pay people to post on social media. The Chinese do, too.

For that matter, the US government also influences social media for their own ends, and unlike the Russian government they can lean on the social media companies directly through agencies like the FBI, and they can get ex-CIA and FBI agents employed in jobs inside Facebook and Twitter.

The funniest part of the conspiracy theorist worldview is the implication that human nature is extremely good. Like, if every political assassination and terrorist attack and major war can be traced back to a single source of Evil, if people could only do those things under threat of violence or mind control, then the vast majority of humanity must be startlingly Good.

Of course, this does also lead to the horrid implication of "We only need to rid ourselves of this small group to end all Evil and save the pure-hearted People", a stance immediatly leading to genocide, but beyond that...

Fundamentally optimistic and naive worldview, that's why they are so wiling to be taken in by hucksters.

Conspiracy thinking seems to involve a kind of willful destruction of your ability to understand the existence of a world outside yourself.

Like one feature is this conflation of everything that makes you upset as coming from a single source. Hillary Clinton, trans kids, and Islamic fundamentalism are all upsetting ideas to you, so they must all be on the same team somehow and also specifically trying to upset you and people like you.

@d007ization

"I wonder if you have to destroy the concept of a world outside yourself or some people just never come to realize that their innately tribalistic thinking isn't an accurate reflection of the world. I know I've fallen into that thinking plenty of times, and I'm someone who has the awareness, time and energy to consider the way I think!"

I think it goes beyond tribalism.

Like, I don't like Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists, but I do at least recognize that they have their own internal reasons for doing what they do, and that, say, they probably don't like the Trump administration, and vice versa.

So, I occasionally listen to the Knowledge Fight podcast that covers Alex Jones, and one thing is that Jones says he believes both of the following things:

This really blew me away when I first heard it.

Because... Like... If the deep state actually stole the election through massive voter fraud, then surely breaking into the Capitol building to demand justice is actually a pretty proportionate response? In fact I would argue that it would be an extremely mild response to, you know, the end of American democracy.

But conspiracy theories about FBI informants who caused what would otherwise have been a totally peaceful and law-abiding protest to turn into a riot are apparently really popular with people who are deep into the stolen election conspiracy theory.

My hypothesis about this is that the riot was a terrible PR move for the MAGA right. Most Americans were aghast at the riot.

So... The riot part of the protests is now psychologically upsetting for certain conspiracy-minded people, and exactly because they are conspiracy-minded that upset has to be projected onto a hostile outside actor who causes that upset to hurt them. It can't be that the riot reflects a weakness in them or their allies; it must have been caused by some outside force.

Like, honestly "If it weren't for the FBI, we would have peacefully and legally protested the complete destruction of America as we know it" is not a sensible or coherent world-view to me. If you're in a mindset where you are making judgements about a stable external world, and you believe that part of that world is that the Biden administration stole an election, then you don't need these conspiracy theories about FBI agents riling up otherwise peaceful crowds.

This is a reasonable hypothesis, but I have reason to think it's incorrect.

Although there is a genuinely-violent hard right in America, liberals and the further left have traditionally underestimated the conservative desire to live in a stable, functioning society even at the cost of suffering some level of injustice. At some point--perhaps in the wake of Prohibition's failure, but there were always conservatives who thought the Temperance movement had gone too far--religious conservatives developed unspoken rules of proportionality regarding political activity. These rules were easy to weaponize against left movements, but for decades the majority of the right abided by them as well.

Only in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement did right-wingers realize that their proportionality rules were dooming them to failure. Even today, a large portion of the (primarily religious) right honors them in the breach--"One day when those dang leftists are vanquished, we can return to living in a stable society!" In this context, the notion of a peaceful protest march against a stolen election really does make some level of sense. Only when the police actually roll in and begin clubbing you (or worse) does violent response become appropriate.

The libertarian (that is, theoretically anti-authoritarian) right wants something fundamentally different out of democracy than the left. The left wants the government to enact the collective popular will. The right wants the government to leave people alone to enact their individual wills (unless someone wills to directly harm another).

This may all sound somewhat absurd from a left-liberal perspective, but it fits neatly into the historical context of a Christian right that, once upon a time, believed that government was inherently violent and therefore Christians should not be involved in it at all. Even the remnants of this stance no longer hold the reins of authority in an increasingly-authoritarian GOP, but invoking its tattered memory gets you a long way with people who still *wish* the world would let them go that way.

I guess I still don't understand the purpose of the "false flag" narrative even in that context.

Surely, as an individual one can believe that the protests should have remained peaceful while still understanding why people other than oneself would respond differently to those events?

PS - "These rules were easy to weaponize against left movements, but for decades the majority of the right abided by them as well."

This bugs me, I think there is a level of whitewashing here, particularly when it comes to race; obviously, violent vigilante racist movements and ad hoc murderous race riots have both frequently been deployed frequently in American history.

More importantly, and linked to the above, at that point we're talking about people who aren't going to the Capitol protests at all because they know that the election was just disappointing, not stolen.

In theory it's possible to say "those guys are idiots they don't represent me", in practice no one wants to shift blame to potential allies, everyone is more sympathetic to allies' stories, and believing that your side could ever do any wrong is harder than imagining that your morals are sacrosanct and so anyone doing a bad is a non-believer and/or a foreign agitator.

"Those bricks that happen to be near protest sites aren't just there because construction happens in a city, it's clearly a set up by the feds!"

With due respect that's very much a paradox; the people who went to the January 6th riot spent the aftermath tearing their whole movement apart accusing each other of being feds. I was thinking of this because I just heard a podcast about a guy named Ray Epps:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/12/why-cant-right-wing-bubble-give-up-ray-epps/

The conspiracy fringe is not saying that somehow the FBI must be involved, they latch onto specific people and essentially exile them as enemies of the movement. If you were interested in solidarity with potential allies, and were sympathetic to their stories, you'd take a guy like Ray Epps at face value.

Admittedly, there is a difference between "Someone not in the middle of the event, commenting on it, who only has the vague notion of respect for their side to win or lose" and "Guy caught on camera storming the Capitol, who now risks jail, and also needs to explain why being in or not being in the Capitol was good while not copping too much blame from the cops."

(Meta note: I may be moving the goalposts a bit, I don't think so but it can be hard to tell from the inside.)

I don't think that description really meshes with the Epps story?

There's literally nothing about Epps story that is worth commenting on; basically he doesn't have a story, at least not one that's different from any other yahoo who wanted to storm the capitol. He just happened to be caught on film while people chanted "FED! FED! FED!" at him.

What I'm getting at is why does he need to be a federal operative instead of an idiot?

It's not about preserving solidarity with other people in the movement, Carlson singled him out as a pariah and he alleges he's been the subject of death threats and similar behavior.

This is an enormous shift of blame onto not just a potential, but an actual ally; this is a characteristic of such paranoid witch hunts.

I feel like your analysis is missing the fact that infiltrating dissident groups and provoking terrorist attacks is something the US Feds actually do, not just in the minds of conspiracy theorists but in real life, too.

There's an old joke that goes like this: How do you tell which members of the KKK are FBI plants? They're the only ones who pay their membership dues.

You live in a society where your government definitely does in fact conspire to stage attacks against themselves so that they can swoop in and arrest the perpetrators. "Conspiracy theory" is not a synonym for lie. Yelling "conspiracy theorist" at anyone who suggests the government might have (gasp) perpetrated their ninety gazillionth conspiracy against the public doesn't make you smart, it makes you a bootlicker.

Is Epps a fed? I dunno, maybe. If you go to a KKK meeting, point to a random person, and say "he's a Fed!" you have about a 50/50 shot at being right. If the Salem trials had a 50% hit rate, the phrase "witch hunt" would probably mean something else.

So, you figure that Epps might be a super deep cover fed who lied about it under oath and is now being charged by the government as a way to keep up the cover story?

This kind of dodge is very annoying to me.

You say that like it's a gotcha. "Checkmate, atheists!" But that carries the unstated final sentence, "And the FBI would never violate police procedure or lie under oath."

Except the FBI would totally do all of those things, so what's your point?

The US government destroys evidence, tortures people, fabricates evidence to justify torturing people when it turns out the people they tortured are innocent, assassinates foreign leaders, instigates coups, puts random people on the no-fly list, bombs weddings, illegally detains US citizens, and occasionally executes US citizens without trial.

But this is the line they won't cross? Lying under oath? Really? Really?

If you want to see a US civil servant or law enforcement professional lie under oath, just turn on C-SPAN and wait.

The funniest part of the conspiracy theorist worldview is the implication that human nature is extremely good. Like, if every political assassination and terrorist attack and major war can be traced back to a single source of Evil, if people could only do those things under threat of violence or mind control, then the vast majority of humanity must be startlingly Good.

Of course, this does also lead to the horrid implication of "We only need to rid ourselves of this small group to end all Evil and save the pure-hearted People", a stance immediatly leading to genocide, but beyond that...

Fundamentally optimistic and naive worldview, that's why they are so wiling to be taken in by hucksters.

Conspiracy thinking seems to involve a kind of willful destruction of your ability to understand the existence of a world outside yourself.

Like one feature is this conflation of everything that makes you upset as coming from a single source. Hillary Clinton, trans kids, and Islamic fundamentalism are all upsetting ideas to you, so they must all be on the same team somehow and also specifically trying to upset you and people like you.

@d007ization

"I wonder if you have to destroy the concept of a world outside yourself or some people just never come to realize that their innately tribalistic thinking isn't an accurate reflection of the world. I know I've fallen into that thinking plenty of times, and I'm someone who has the awareness, time and energy to consider the way I think!"

I think it goes beyond tribalism.

Like, I don't like Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists, but I do at least recognize that they have their own internal reasons for doing what they do, and that, say, they probably don't like the Trump administration, and vice versa.

So, I occasionally listen to the Knowledge Fight podcast that covers Alex Jones, and one thing is that Jones says he believes both of the following things:

This really blew me away when I first heard it.

Because... Like... If the deep state actually stole the election through massive voter fraud, then surely breaking into the Capitol building to demand justice is actually a pretty proportionate response? In fact I would argue that it would be an extremely mild response to, you know, the end of American democracy.

But conspiracy theories about FBI informants who caused what would otherwise have been a totally peaceful and law-abiding protest to turn into a riot are apparently really popular with people who are deep into the stolen election conspiracy theory.

My hypothesis about this is that the riot was a terrible PR move for the MAGA right. Most Americans were aghast at the riot.

So... The riot part of the protests is now psychologically upsetting for certain conspiracy-minded people, and exactly because they are conspiracy-minded that upset has to be projected onto a hostile outside actor who causes that upset to hurt them. It can't be that the riot reflects a weakness in them or their allies; it must have been caused by some outside force.

Like, honestly "If it weren't for the FBI, we would have peacefully and legally protested the complete destruction of America as we know it" is not a sensible or coherent world-view to me. If you're in a mindset where you are making judgements about a stable external world, and you believe that part of that world is that the Biden administration stole an election, then you don't need these conspiracy theories about FBI agents riling up otherwise peaceful crowds.

This is a reasonable hypothesis, but I have reason to think it's incorrect.

Although there is a genuinely-violent hard right in America, liberals and the further left have traditionally underestimated the conservative desire to live in a stable, functioning society even at the cost of suffering some level of injustice. At some point--perhaps in the wake of Prohibition's failure, but there were always conservatives who thought the Temperance movement had gone too far--religious conservatives developed unspoken rules of proportionality regarding political activity. These rules were easy to weaponize against left movements, but for decades the majority of the right abided by them as well.

Only in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement did right-wingers realize that their proportionality rules were dooming them to failure. Even today, a large portion of the (primarily religious) right honors them in the breach--"One day when those dang leftists are vanquished, we can return to living in a stable society!" In this context, the notion of a peaceful protest march against a stolen election really does make some level of sense. Only when the police actually roll in and begin clubbing you (or worse) does violent response become appropriate.

The libertarian (that is, theoretically anti-authoritarian) right wants something fundamentally different out of democracy than the left. The left wants the government to enact the collective popular will. The right wants the government to leave people alone to enact their individual wills (unless someone wills to directly harm another).

This may all sound somewhat absurd from a left-liberal perspective, but it fits neatly into the historical context of a Christian right that, once upon a time, believed that government was inherently violent and therefore Christians should not be involved in it at all. Even the remnants of this stance no longer hold the reins of authority in an increasingly-authoritarian GOP, but invoking its tattered memory gets you a long way with people who still *wish* the world would let them go that way.

I guess I still don't understand the purpose of the "false flag" narrative even in that context.

Surely, as an individual one can believe that the protests should have remained peaceful while still understanding why people other than oneself would respond differently to those events?

PS - "These rules were easy to weaponize against left movements, but for decades the majority of the right abided by them as well."

This bugs me, I think there is a level of whitewashing here, particularly when it comes to race; obviously, violent vigilante racist movements and ad hoc murderous race riots have both frequently been deployed frequently in American history.

More importantly, and linked to the above, at that point we're talking about people who aren't going to the Capitol protests at all because they know that the election was just disappointing, not stolen.

In theory it's possible to say "those guys are idiots they don't represent me", in practice no one wants to shift blame to potential allies, everyone is more sympathetic to allies' stories, and believing that your side could ever do any wrong is harder than imagining that your morals are sacrosanct and so anyone doing a bad is a non-believer and/or a foreign agitator.

"Those bricks that happen to be near protest sites aren't just there because construction happens in a city, it's clearly a set up by the feds!"

With due respect that's very much a paradox; the people who went to the January 6th riot spent the aftermath tearing their whole movement apart accusing each other of being feds. I was thinking of this because I just heard a podcast about a guy named Ray Epps:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/12/why-cant-right-wing-bubble-give-up-ray-epps/

The conspiracy fringe is not saying that somehow the FBI must be involved, they latch onto specific people and essentially exile them as enemies of the movement. If you were interested in solidarity with potential allies, and were sympathetic to their stories, you'd take a guy like Ray Epps at face value.

Admittedly, there is a difference between "Someone not in the middle of the event, commenting on it, who only has the vague notion of respect for their side to win or lose" and "Guy caught on camera storming the Capitol, who now risks jail, and also needs to explain why being in or not being in the Capitol was good while not copping too much blame from the cops."

(Meta note: I may be moving the goalposts a bit, I don't think so but it can be hard to tell from the inside.)

I don't think that description really meshes with the Epps story?

There's literally nothing about Epps story that is worth commenting on; basically he doesn't have a story, at least not one that's different from any other yahoo who wanted to storm the capitol. He just happened to be caught on film while people chanted "FED! FED! FED!" at him.

What I'm getting at is why does he need to be a federal operative instead of an idiot?

It's not about preserving solidarity with other people in the movement, Carlson singled him out as a pariah and he alleges he's been the subject of death threats and similar behavior.

This is an enormous shift of blame onto not just a potential, but an actual ally; this is a characteristic of such paranoid witch hunts.

I feel like your analysis is missing the fact that infiltrating dissident groups and provoking terrorist attacks is something the US Feds actually do, not just in the minds of conspiracy theorists but in real life, too.

There's an old joke that goes like this: How do you tell which members of the KKK are FBI plants? They're the only ones who pay their membership dues.

You live in a society where your government definitely does in fact conspire to stage attacks against themselves so that they can swoop in and arrest the perpetrators. "Conspiracy theory" is not a synonym for lie. Yelling "conspiracy theorist" at anyone who suggests the government might have (gasp) perpetrated their ninety gazillionth conspiracy against the public doesn't make you smart, it makes you a bootlicker.

Is Epps a fed? I dunno, maybe. If you go to a KKK meeting, point to a random person, and say "he's a Fed!" you have about a 50/50 shot at being right. If the Salem trials had a 50% hit rate, the phrase "witch hunt" would probably mean something else.

If they came out with real transition, like “grow you a whole new body and put your brain (i.e.,  you) in it” transition, would anyone on the right still care about their “trans issues” anymore?  If so what would their arguments be?

Yes.

First, people with a general sense of immutability-of-sex would not accept this for obvious reasons.

Second, the technologies used to grow an entire human body or substitute for a human body will probably be subject to criticism and might constitute an abomination similar to abortion.

Third, this doesn’t address social issues all that much.

Fourth, the overall transhuman project that this implies will absolutely be a serious problem and source of objections.

I am granting you – for the sake of your argument that – abortion is murder and fetuses have souls. I can see where you’re coming from. Brain transplants and cloning would indeed be an ethical can of worms.

But can you imagine, for the sake of crazy eddie’s argument, a kind of “real” transition? I don’t know what it would look like. Pills that magically make you grow new genitals, fully reproductively functional ones. HRT on steroids, in a manner of speaking. Fully reversible, too.

Even a magical perfect brain transplant transition method doesn't address issues like male socialization or the residual effects of having your brain exposed to male hormones for your entire life. It also doesn't affect whatever differences there are between male and female brains (female infant rhesus monkeys prefer dolls to wheeled toys and vice versa for males).

I don't personally subscribe to that level of gender essentialism, but I can imagine a brand of trans-exclusionary feminism that's uncomfortable with the idea of a natal male brain in a female body being allowed into a female locker room. It's the same kind of feminist who posts things like "male lust for women is fundamentally predatory, unlike lesbians who are pure and soft."

guy who opposes drag queens bc he thinks it’s inappropriate to glorify the monarchy in public

Drag Queens don't glorify the monarchy, they mock the monarchy. Just like Springtime for Hitler.

Drag Queens aren't really a type of queen. The similarity is due to convergent evolution.

See also: freeform, diceless RPGs

The idea that the Spanish Reconquista was "driving away the Muslim Invaders" is kind of funny when you consider the timescales involved.

Most of Iberia fell to the Umayyads between 710 and 780 AD. Iberia had been Christianized in the early 4th century, so that is about 400-450 years as Christian territories (a lot of that with the Visigoths' Aryan Christianity). The majority of the Reconquista happened between about 1100 and 1300, so that is about 400-600 years as Muslim territories.

Granada was finally captured in 1492, approximately 780 years after it had first been captured by the Umayyads. Not only is that almost twice as long as it had been nominally Christian, it is approximately 80 years longer than Granada had been Roman (c 220 BC to c480 AD)!

I think it's not so much about driving off the Muslim invaders in Spain as it is about driving off the Muslim invasion, the whole 1000-year long meta conflict. When Granada fell it may have been 780 years since the Muslims first took it over, but it had only been 39 years since the fall of Constantinople. The Muslim conquests were very much an ongoing phenomenon.