Funny Events of the "Woke" world

[Ag3ma]

As an example of Ed Greenwood's setting power levels, Daggerford is a small (400 people) town in the middle of nowhere.

This is not quite true.

Daggerford also includes a host of hamlets with hundreds more farmers (mentioned in passing and otherwise ignored), and overall states it's about 1000 people who live in the area. It's also not the middle of nowhere. It's the seat of a ducal castle (many of those high level people are his family and retinue): he might be an unimpressive duke, but he's not minor nobility either. It's a prominent stopover on a major trade route thus lots of (potentially wealthy) caravans pass the area, and regarded as a significant strategic point by the local realm, Waterdeep, for that reason. There's also a little snippet about the availability of stuff in Daggerford, which is low for high end stuff including basic potions (double normal cost), and in terms of magical items somewhere between nil and more-by-accident-than-design as the shopkeepers probably wouldn't realise even if something they had was magical.

So do you see my point?

I accept that as a player experiences whilst playing, FR seems full of magic. But even the campaign setting you've chosen illustrates that for the majority of the population, it is not - just they are all but ignored and removed from players' notice.

I also accept there can be a disparity (apparent or real) between the game and the worldbuilding. This may be sheer inconsistency. It may be, or be akin to, what people in computer gaming have termed "ludonarrative dissonance". A setting needs to meet the requirements of the gameplay. If a mage requires training, there has to be a more powerful mage available to do so. A powerful priest should probably be on hand with raise dead just in case one of the PCs gets themselves killed. At very high levels, there needs to be the odd place in the world where level 20 demigods can go and have a challenge. So therefore, the game must provide even if "unrealistic".

However, I see no reason the settings must prove the overall worldbuilding "wrong" or vice versa, when there's no need for them to be inconsistent. The explanation is that campaign settings represent "points of interest" where stuff is going on and more people of power are for adventurers to be and gaming to occur, whilst the majority of the (populated) world that's not in a campaign is much lower power and more boring. The PCs thus operate in a privileged environment within the wider world.

 

[Satinavian]

Honestly, FR worldbuilding is not particularly good or consistent. It is a huge pastiche of scenes and inspirations and inserts of things that seemed cool or were made for a module or a book.
Something like Eberron would be significantly more consistent.

But comparing those two and the prevalence of magic, well, while Eberron seems to have far more of it and it is more part of daily life, FR has more of the high level stuff because of all the many many novels and modules featuring such.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

This is not quite true.

Daggerford also includes a host of hamlets with hundreds more farmers (mentioned in passing and otherwise ignored), and overall states it's about 1000 people who live in the area. It's also not the middle of nowhere. It's the seat of a ducal castle (many of those high level people are his family and retinue): he might be an unimpressive duke, but he's not minor nobility either. It's a prominent stopover on a major trade route thus lots of (potentially wealthy) caravans pass the area, and regarded as a significant strategic point by the local realm, Waterdeep, for that reason. There's also a little snippet about the availability of stuff in Daggerford, which is low for high end stuff including basic potions (double normal cost), and in terms of magical items somewhere between nil and more-by-accident-than-design as the shopkeepers probably wouldn't realise even if something they had was magical.

So do you see my point?

Daggerford has a magic school with at least one teacher more powerful than the court wizard.

I accept that as a player experiences whilst playing, FR seems full of magic. But even the campaign setting you've chosen illustrates that for the majority of the population, it is not - just they are all but ignored and removed from players' notice.

I also accept there can be a disparity (apparent or real) between the game and the worldbuilding. This may be sheer inconsistency. It may be, or be akin to, what people in computer gaming have termed "ludonarrative dissonance". A setting needs to meet the requirements of the gameplay. If a mage requires training, there has to be a more powerful mage available to do so. A powerful priest should probably be on hand with raise dead just in case one of the PCs gets themselves killed. At very high levels, there needs to be the odd place in the world where level 20 demigods can go and have a challenge. So therefore, the game must provide even if "unrealistic".

The thing is other settings don't necessarily provide those things.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

As for gender and sexuality, D&D hardly talks about it at all. And even less than in the earliest versions. That is a topic they seem to deem to dangerous and don't want to be associated with at all. I mean, sure, the BoeF-controversy is some time ago but it is not as if they reversed course here. Several other big publishers are far more open to it.

I'm not sure if I'd want WotC writing anything on gender and sexuality. Not necessarily for fear of them being dumb about it, but because the topic tends to the very personal and should probably only be done in groups you're very comfortable with.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The bulled D&D nerds who got excluded from all the cool clubs just want their turn to be bullies who get to exclude others now.

It's not even that. Geek culture has been mainstream for decades now, zillion dollar industries cater to it. They act like they are in the Satanic panic for funsies.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

I'm not sure if I'd want WotC writing anything on gender and sexuality. Not necessarily for fear of them being dumb about it, but because the topic tends to the very personal and should probably only be done in groups you're very comfortable with.

They included a blurb about how the elven creator god in one on their settings was gender-fluid so people can make what they want. This wasn't actually a change, but the upgraded language sent some culture warriors into a tizzy

 

[Ag3ma]

The thing is other settings don't necessarily provide those things.

That's probably because of the reasons Satinavian explained - it's much more a patchwork of lots of people's ideas with different ideas and motivations, and almost certainly loose central oversight.

 

[Eacaraxe]

In 5e, they very explicitly state that you shouldn't feel constrained in any way by the gender binary when making characters, so yeah.. pretty much anything goes. There used to be a statement to the effect that some elves were born hermaphroditic in emulation of Corellon Larethian, although they seem to have dropped that from newer printings as real life intersexed people sometimes are sometimes referred to as hermaphrodites, which is incorrect and offensive.

Personally, I'd imagine gender in any given D&D setting is at least as diverse as it is in the real world. Orcs have generally been depicted as an explicitly patriarchal society, for example, while drow are explicitly matriarchal.

I don't see why there wouldn't be trans people in D&D, both in terms of people who use magic to literally change their appearance and people who just live socially as another sex to the one assigned to them at birth. Historically, it was a bit of a thing for people assigned as women to disguise themselves and live as men in order to escape the limitations placed on them within a patriarchal society, but if you dig a little deeper there's often clear evidence that they were experiencing what we would call gender dysphoria or actively saw themselves as their acquired gender. Those kinds of feelings are actually pretty ubiquitous in human societies in much the same way as same sex attraction.

That's the point I'm making: trans people and trans identity are two separate phenomena. Gender dysphoria has been recorded since antiquity, and people who would have been identified as transgender today have existed the entirety of human history. That includes identified non-binary genders, and gender expression inconsistent with biological sex, throughout history.

The contemporary trans identity is explicitly a response to post-Industrial Revolution WASP social and political hegemony; the oppression of non-cisgendered, non-heterosexual, being and expression in Western society; and the then-burgeoning civil rights struggle for non-cisgender persons. When people say gender is a social construct, trans-ness is one of those constructions.

The question isn't whether or not trans people would exist in the Realms. The question is whether or not that identity group would emerge, being the precipitating factors which led to its rise in the real world do not exist in the Realms. My position is it would not, as nothing in any source material indicates trans people are a discrete and insular minority which faces historic or ongoing oppression. When the resolution to gender dysphoria is a quick trip to a nearby temple of Sharess or a magefair for a potion or spell to change one's biological sex to match their gender identity, which might come at a cost of some hours' public service at most (remember, clergy of good deities rarely charge for services sought in need or in good faith) and little to no judgment, there's little to no basis to argue trans people are actively oppressed.

Remember, it's explicitly canon that wizards, sorcerers, and clerics use alter self and other transmutation spells to participate in (sacred or just plain drunken) orgies at temples and magefairs, as sexual and gender expressions other than their own.

Is Raistlin severely physically disabled? It's been a long, long time since I read these books (I was a child, which was ages ago) but I was of the impression he's just pretty weak and coughs a lot. Gives strong 'people with disabilities are jealous of you and will turn to evil' vibes, whereas Caramon is pretty inside and outside.

Yeah, he is. He's barely capable of standing or walking on his own, can't function without his staff, and is prone to bouts of coughing up and vomiting blood. That's with his herbal tea. Without...well, there was that whole stretch of Dragons of Winter Night where Tanis' group was traveling by coach, and Raistlin was deathly ill, bedridden, and barely survived.

It didn't help his case he was taxing himself beyond his means to master the Dragon Orb, but his disabilities were the big thing. He was bad enough off that single teleport mishap was enough to mortally wound him, and it's ambiguous whether or not he actually physically died at that point.

Raistlin's, Caramon's, and Kitiara's relationship is honestly a lot more complex than "Raistlin is jealous because he's disabled". I can see how it appears to be such without having read the books, or having read them superficially, so I don't begrudge people anything more than "maybe you should give them another read".

 

[Thaluikhain]

It didn't help his case he was taxing himself beyond his means to master the Dragon Orb, but his disabilities were the big thing. He was bad enough off that single teleport mishap was enough to mortally wound him, and it's ambiguous whether or not he actually physically died at that point.

Was trouble teleporting because of his disability, or because it was more powerful magic than he should have been playing with, though? Not read the books in awhile, but I thought it was mostly due to it being danerously high level magic, and that's why he'd not try taking anyone else.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

That's probably because of the reasons Satinavian explained - it's much more a patchwork of lots of people's ideas with different ideas and motivations, and almost certainly loose central oversight.

Not wrong in theory. It's hard to say since Greenwood has complete creative control over everything and everything is ostensibly okay'd by him. But I don't know how practically true that is given the breadth of lore written. I do know his stuff tends to be the more high magic stuff.

 

[Ag3ma]

Not wrong in theory. It's hard to say since Greenwood has complete creative control over everything and everything is ostensibly okay'd by him. But I don't know how practically true that is given the breadth of lore written. I do know his stuff tends to be the more high magic stuff.

I suspect it may have not been overseen with a clear eye to consistency. Stuff might well be okayed on the basis of "Doesn't cause a shitstorm", "Close enough for government work" or "that's a laugh why not" rather than an iron grasp on rigour and consistent philosophy. And maybe in a way that's no bad thing, because they have to cater to everything from players who want menacing, grimdark challenge to a drunken lolfest, and anything from levels 1 to lots.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

I suspect it may have not been overseen with a clear eye to consistency. Stuff might well be okayed on the basis of "Doesn't cause a shitstorm", "Close enough for government work" or "that's a laugh why not" rather than an iron grasp on rigour and consistent philosophy. And maybe in a way that's no bad thing, because they have to cater to everything from players who want menacing, grimdark challenge to a drunken lolfest, and anything from levels 1 to lots.

Well also as pointed out other setting manage to maintain consistency and can provide wide ranging and tonal adventures, and I'm certainly not going to say FR is consistent. Even ignoring this argument they use edition updates to make big setting changes and have for years. We also get things like Icewind Dale, which if I remember correctly is so low magic because it wasn't actually written by Greenwood, instead it was added to the setting later by another author, which is why it sticks out as weird.

 

[Eacaraxe]

Was trouble teleporting because of his disability, or because it was more powerful magic than he should have been playing with, though? Not read the books in awhile, but I thought it was mostly due to it being danerously high level magic, and that's why he'd not try taking anyone else.

Teleport is innately dangerous, regardless of circumstance; at that point, Raistlin would have been able to cast it easily but the chance of splinching is always there. He splinched, and he just wasn't healthy enough due to his disability to survive it. That's pretty much it, the why and how of his mishap isn't as relevant as it having happened.

Well also as pointed out other setting manage to maintain consistency and can provide wide ranging and tonal adventures, and I'm certainly not going to say FR is consistent. Even ignoring this argument they use edition updates to make big setting changes and have for years. We also get things like Icewind Dale, which if I remember correctly is so low magic because it wasn't actually written by Greenwood, instead it was added to the setting later by another author, which is why it sticks out as weird.

The irony to this is that Icewind Dale got a major league magical glow-up in 5e. Zhent and Arcane Brotherhood activity, Revel's End, illithid sniffing around up there for some yet-to-be-published reason, whatever the hell is going on with those obelisks that keep showing up in 5e published modules, not to mention the fully intact Netherese enclave and active Mythallar.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Yeah, he is. He's barely capable of standing or walking on his own, can't function without his staff, and is prone to bouts of coughing up and vomiting blood. That's with his herbal tea. Without...well, there was that whole stretch of Dragons of Winter Night where Tanis' group was traveling by coach, and Raistlin was deathly ill, bedridden, and barely survived.

Shoulda got a Restoration spell. Or a batch of flying brooms

 

[Terminal Blue]

The contemporary trans identity is explicitly a response to post-Industrial Revolution WASP social and political hegemony; the oppression of non-cisgendered, non-heterosexual, being and expression in Western society; and the then-burgeoning civil rights struggle for non-cisgender persons. When people say gender is a social construct, trans-ness is one of those constructions.

Exactly.

While we think of bourgeois Victorians these very asexual beings, being sexually repressed actually means you have to talk about sex a lot. So yeah, the irony is that in trying to eliminate non-conforming gender and sexuality from society, the conservative bourgeoisie of the 18th and 19th centuries ended up creating a vocabulary that we could reclaim for ourselves to assert our own existence.

But, as I always point out whenever this comes up. Sex is also a social construct in exactly the same way. There have always been men and women (and in some cases, others) but the concept of sex, the concept of a biologically inherent identity derived from the reproductive function of the body, is also a comparatively recent invention. Until a couple of centuries ago, the medical understanding of the basic mechanics of reproduction and sex determination was still rooted in magic, not biology.

We tend to use the term "social construct" in a specifically critical mode. What I mean by that is that we only tend to call something a social construct when we are alleging that it is in some way deceptive or a lie, but in reality humans are inherently dependent on social constructs to understand and interact with reality. The way we classify objects into discreet categories is a social construct. The fact that we look at two sets of sex organs and understand them to be distinct types is a social construct.

People 500 years ago lived in the exact same reality we do now, but the social constructs through which they made sense of that reality were completely alien. So yes, the understanding of gender non-conformity was usually very different. But so was the understanding of things we would take for granted, like the condition of being male or female.

Let me ground this in an example. Until literally few centuries ago, it was very commonly believed that people could spontaneously change sex. Women (especially young women) were seen to be especially prone to growing penises and becoming men. This was understood to be sufficiently rare that it was generally worth recording when it did happen, so we have huge numbers of primary source accounts of it allegedly happening.

What does it mean to be a trans in a society where the understanding of sex includes the ability to spontaneously change your physical body through the cultivation (usually accidental) of internal qualities? In some ways, that's a far, far more limiting belief system. You can't claim to have the internal quality of being a particular sex because, if you did, your body would exhibit the correct anatomy. On the other hand, there's potential for socially accepted and normalized gender fluidity that modern conservatives would probably find weird and shocking. The most likely explanation for all those girls who spontaneously grew dicks is that they always had dicks, they'd just lived as girls because being a girl just meant filling the social role of a girl, the anatomy didn't matter if noone saw it.

 

[Hawki]

California community colleges go off the rails with DEI

This could be a long article if I summarized all the mishigass going on in the community college system of the state of California, but I'll try to be brief and put the items in numbered form. The ups

whyevolutionistrue.com

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Exactly.

While we think of bourgeois Victorians these very asexual beings, being sexually repressed actually means you have to talk about sex a lot. So yeah, the irony is that in trying to eliminate non-conforming gender and sexuality from society, the conservative bourgeoisie of the 18th and 19th centuries ended up creating a vocabulary that we could reclaim for ourselves to assert our own existence.

But, as I always point out whenever this comes up. Sex is also a social construct in exactly the same way. There have always been men and women (and in some cases, others) but the concept of sex, the concept of a biologically inherent identity derived from the reproductive function of the body, is also a comparatively recent invention. Until a couple of centuries ago, the medical understanding of the basic mechanics of reproduction and sex determination was still rooted in magic, not biology.

We tend to use the term "social construct" in a specifically critical mode. What I mean by that is that we only tend to call something a social construct when we are alleging that it is in some way deceptive or a lie, but in reality humans are inherently dependent on social constructs to understand and interact with reality. The way we classify objects into discreet categories is a social construct. The fact that we look at two sets of sex organs and understand them to be distinct types is a social construct.

People 500 years ago lived in the exact same reality we do now, but the social constructs through which they made sense of that reality were completely alien. So yes, the understanding of gender non-conformity was usually very different. But so was the understanding of things we would take for granted, like the condition of being male or female.

Let me ground this in an example. Until literally few centuries ago, it was very commonly believed that people could spontaneously change sex. Women (especially young women) were seen to be especially prone to growing penises and becoming men. This was understood to be sufficiently rare that it was generally worth recording when it did happen, so we have huge numbers of primary source accounts of it allegedly happening.

What does it mean to be a trans in a society where the understanding of sex includes the ability to spontaneously change your physical body through the cultivation (usually accidental) of internal qualities? In some ways, that's a far, far more limiting belief system. You can't claim to have the internal quality of being a particular sex because, if you did, your body would exhibit the correct anatomy. On the other hand, there's potential for socially accepted and normalized gender fluidity that modern conservatives would probably find weird and shocking. The most likely explanation for all those girls who spontaneously grew dicks is that they always had dicks, they'd just lived as girls because being a girl just meant filling the social role of a girl, the anatomy didn't matter if noone saw it.

Seeing 100 year old newspapers be like "This dude has secret knowledge of how to cut women's hair, he used to be a dame" or "this soldier came back from the war a smoking hot gal!" and then go on to be like, 1000% more respectful than a modern publication would be is fucking *wild*. Not to say, "everybody was fine with it back in the day" because, like, Nazi book burnings and what not, but there was a lot more Fuck It, We Ball energy

 

[Schadrach]

and was filmed at the actual site of a real-life lynching?

By that metric the song "Gave Up" by Nine Inch Nails is about murdering pregnant women with your cult in an attempt to start a race war. The video for it was shot in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered, and had Marilyn Manson involved (if you watch the video, the guy with the long black hair doing a bad job of pretending to play his instrument and who gets a lot of screen time is Marilyn Manson) for more semiotic flavoring.

I mean, it certainly sounds like an excessive number of times to put his hands up but I don't think they should have shot him for it.

I mean where are all these hands coming from after the first two? Is this person some sort of serial killer who collects hands as trophies?

Or alternatively everyone should have them, and the game is Mad Max but with very small vehices.

That might hypothetically be fun to play, in the way that Auto Assault was an interesting idea for an MMO. If they exist and are readily available for the kind of money starting characters have, that's what any setting would turn into quickly as these things supplant most other means of conveyance (and sheer proliferaiton might actually result in an ADA-compliant setting).

Flight is one of the most common abilities in the entire damn game

So, I have a bad habit when coming up with characters to have something at random inspire me on some mechanical idea and then go digging deep through the books trying to figure out how ot make it happen within the rules and then build a character around the concept . And usually the concept is something weird and out left left field like "what's the closest I could get to being a cleric while actually being a sorcerer?" (I played this one in a 3.0 campaign - what set off the thought process was flipping through Deities and Demigods while listening to Type O Negative and happening to see the asterisk beside Kossuth while the song Pyretta Blaze happened to be playing - CN Gnome Sorcerer raised as an orphan by a cleric from the temple of Kossuth in Thay, the cleric took an early manifestation of my innate magic as an omen, character was very much a zealous believer but opposed to the temple and was starting essentially a Kossuth reform movement by the end of the campaign) or "What's the least identity a character can possibly have?" (played that one in a 3.0 campaign where we were going to start at high level - managed to figure out a complicated build that could shapeshift at will into almost anything and gain it's Ex and Su abilities with very little else as far as useful capabilities or identifying features, he wasn't even sure what his natural form was anymore, and hadn't been a proper humanoid in years let alone the one he was born as) - that sort of thing.

And yeah, there started being races with no adjustments or anything that could fly back in 3.5, generally being able to fly was at least a +1 ECL in 3.0.

Honestly I blame 3rd edition, which tried to standardize prices in accordance to caster and spell levels opposed to tailor cost to effect and utility. Case in point, those magical soaps with baked-in Cleanse/Prestidigitation effects that cleaned anything washed with them regardless what dirtied it or how dirty it was, which in past editions sold for a silver or two and were available in any adventuring market, but under 5e rules would go for 25-100gp apiece and "had" to be special ordered.

The 3e rules for that sort of thing even spelled out that they were a guideline only and not hard and fast rules and you should consider the actual utility of the item when setting prices for unusual/custom items as a DM.

I played plenty of D&D, but I never actually liked the system very much. The big advantage, of course, is that it has comprehensive support (i.e. campaigns) especially for beginners. I'm not fond of things which have this massive profusion of special abilities, spells, etc. (some of which are frankly silly), or excessively fiddly with dice rolling and all that stuff. There's got a basic combat system, use it: you don't then need eight class-specific special melee attacks to bolt on because someone thought "Hit it with my sword" somehow isn't sufficient.

Two systems I've played a bit of and don't get enough love are Hero System and Arcana Evolved. Hero System is meant for superhero games but can readily be adapted, since part of the benefit to it is that you can create more or less literally anything you can think of and there is probably a way to assign it a point value. Arcana Evolved was Monte Cook building his own 3.75E with blackjack and hookers and does a lot of things very well or at least interestingly (like having racial levels that basically let you double down or expand on racial abilities, separating agile and brute fighters into different classes, separating agile fighter from skillmonkey, the universal spell list, making heavy use of spell descriptors as a mechanic) combined with a unique assumed setting.

You can literally google "blm reported peaceful building on fire in the shot" to find what I said literally happened, it's not an anecdote, it demonstrates the difference in how the media portrayed BLM vs Jan 6th for example.

If I recall the text at the bottom during the clip describes it as "fiery but mostly peaceful" or something to that effect.

Girdle of masculinity/femininity...go!

I mean, it's an utterly pointless magic item mechanically, no stat changes, but they included it as far back as 2nd edition as far as I know, possibly further.

Made me think of a YouTuber ragging on the official conversion of Tomb of Horrors that included having to a take a moment and rant about that trap that utterly ruins your character by changing their sex and how that shouldn't be allowed to happen without the player's consent after complaining about a bunch of other stuff earlier in the dungeon where my first thought was "this is why you should be *careful* and always have twine, chalk, a ten foot pole, etc as basic adventuring gear." I'd love to see them run a converted version of the Labyrinth of Madness, that module was just mean.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

It didn't, though. Doing what you think is right is not the same thing.

The US half-assed almost all of its responses, from testing to quarantine guidelines to lockdowns. Then it rushed to end restrictions ASAP for the sake of business income. It provided inadequate support for the effected, both people and businesses, meaning that people were pressured to go back to work when sick. And then we have the idiocy of leaving the provision of vital equipment to the goddammit inter-state free market bidding war.

You'll notice the US experienced a worse infection rate and mortality rate than most other developed countries, by far. This from the wealthiest country on earth?



Yes, that would be the main one. Pretty fucking major fuckup. The other Scandinavian countries had a superior early response, yet you never cite them, because they don't play into your "no restrictions" narrative.



Blah blah blah, same old broken record.

Testing didn't matter much with covid, Japan did great and couldn't give 2 shits about testing. I've explained several times why testing and tracing doesn't work with covid. The US quarantine rule was 10 days (which is overly cautious) and the CDC reduced it to 5 days and everyone flipped out. Lockdowns don't work. So how did the US mess up any of those things? Doing the lockdowns caused inadequate support because everyone got laid off and thus lost their health insurance. The US is also by far the unhealthiest developed country.

Sweden did arguably the best in the Europe based on excess deaths, and they did none of the stuff the "scientific consensus" said to do. Also, Denmark was the 1st country in the EU to remove all covid restrictions (in the midst of covid spiking too).

Blah, blah, blah, still no evidence...

Firstly, this is gross hypocrisy, because you can't even explain why they're right in the first place.

You spend a minute or two Googling to splurge something - anything - irrespective of quality and without even rudimentary checks, and expect everyone else to devote hours into debunking it. Do you not see the problem here? This is how bullshit wins arguments, because it's much easier and faster to throw misinformation than disprove. The thing about information, and even science, is that you can find someone saying pretty much anything. You can post studies showing that homeopathy or prayer cures diseases if you want, and that's an important context when you dump a paper claiming ivermectin protects you from covid, "prove me wrong". It's disrespectful to others to impose this sort of burden on them whilst only putting in a tiny fraction of that effort yourself.

I would remind you of the huge amounts of time I put into crappy sources you've presented, because honestly I looked through and analyzed quite a lot of them back in 2020/21- which you've now conveniently erased from your memory. Do you know what you've done much of the time: you have ignored that analysis and carried on misrepresenting them, based on nothing but sheer ignorance and unwillingness to admit error. I got pissed off bothering over 2 years ago. I'm not feeling well disposed to put in that kind of time in now either.

Because you don't actually understand much, really all your arguments boil down to "X said Y". That's not the end of the world, as long as you properly examine the bona fides of the people saying it and the wider context of debate - for instance why "scientific consensus" is useful. The problem is that you haven't even done that. For instance, Marty Makary is not a reliable source and patently never was: where he was right, it was pretty much more luck than insight. And where you have leaned on real experts like Paul Offitt, you've been awfully selective in what you've chosen to take from them.

There's a huge amount of data out there, and there have to be ways of filtering it. Who has written something, their reputation, their associations, and their track record is a simple "first pass" to remove likely junk. If any of it does turn out to be useful, it'll be cited in other work and you can haul it back out of the discard pile.



Okay, thought experiment time.

A new respiratory disease emerges which has similar infectiousness to covid, no vaccine exists, and it kills 50% of those infected. Are you still going to tell me the government can't order lockdowns and mask mandates, because they aren't proven to work? (Actually, I bet at that point everyone would stay at home as much as possible and wear a mask without the government even having to tell them.)

Hey, there you are unfortunately having to do some shopping - socially distanced, naturally - and some guy is walking round maskless, potentially breathing out a 50% chance death sentence for everyone else in the store. Would you feel comfortable shopping in that store, with that guy who thinks masks aren't proven to work and no-one should be allowed to make him use one? Are you truly willing to bet your life on it?

Again, it's not on me to prove lockdowns don't work, it's on you (or whoever thinks lockdowns do work) to prove that they work. You don't just get to say something and make someone prove you wrong, that's not how science works. The lockdown crowd has provided no evidence that lockdowns had any actual benefits (or even would have in the first place).

You gave me shit studies as well... And you're the one claiming expertise is such things. Hell, you can't even admit that there was no evidence for Iraq having WMDs, yet I'm the one that doesn't know how to analyze information... Not only was there no evidence whatsoever, it didn't even pass the common sense test.

The fact that you claim Marty Makary is not a reliable source is hilarious, what significant/major thing was Makary wrong about? I'm guessing you think someone like Peter Hotez is a better source when Hotez literally just yelled at people for going to the theaters over Barbenheimer weekend telling people to wear N95s and keep up with boosters (and no evidence that boosters do anything besides in the vulnerable). What have I purposefully omitted from what Offit has said?

Funny how your line of logic immediately goes to people doing common sense stuff. Same thing Sweden did and just treated people like adults. Whereas the US made stupid ass rules that even a child could see as being stupid (and kids literally asked their parents stuff like why do we have to wear a mask in class but don't have to in the lunch room?). And thus trust in public health is lost when you make such stupid rules and then don't admit you were wrong and continually double-down on being wrong (kinda like a certain former president that does the same stuff but since it's your team instead, you defend them). No, I wouldn't care if someone in the store wasn't wearing a mask because if you had a virus that deadly, I'd be wearing a mask that doesn't matter if the dude next to me was wearing a mask. And if we're talking about a virus exactly like covid but 50% fatality rate, then people wearing or not wearing cloth/surgical masks indeed doesn't matter. You had covid surges just as bad in mask wearing areas as you did non-mask wearing areas. It was always hilarious when a covid surge happened down south that the left would say something like "that's what they get for not wearing masks and ignoring covid restrictions" then when a surge happened up north the left would say "there's was nothing we could do about it".

California community colleges go off the rails with DEI

This could be a long article if I summarized all the mishigass going on in the community college system of the state of California, but I'll try to be brief and put the items in numbered form. The ups

whyevolutionistrue.com

California is so fucked up.

Just wow at the following:

"Persons that say they are ‘not a racist’ are in denial of the racial problems and inequities that exist."
"Merit: A concept that at face value appears to be a neutral measure of academic achievement and qualifications; however, merit is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race-based structural inequality. Merit protects White privilege under the guise of standards (i.e., the use of standardized tests that are biased against racial minorities) and as highlighted by anti-affirmative action forces. Merit implies that White people are deemed better qualified and more worthy but are denied opportunities due to race-conscious policies. However, this understanding of merit and worthiness fails to recognize systemic oppression, racism, and generational privilege afforded to Whites."

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At work, we just did our yearly DEI bullshit yesterday. Our boss put it on as basically background noise and we just made fun of it to no end. There was this one scene where an employee was talking about getting a great deal on something they bought and the other employee said 'you must've really chewed him out to get that price', then employee gets offended because they're Jewish but like literally anyone can be Jewish since it's a religion so I guess you just can't make a comment about anyone haggling down a price on something because they just might be Jewish. Another one was really funny because it totally didn't convey whatever the intent was. It was about an employee on the phone with another employee complaining about a co-worker misgendering them and it gets resolved by the person being misgendered realizing they are just being over sensitive in essence. I'm like "uhh, is it just me or was that scene basically saying someone complaining about being misgendered is basically hysterical and needs to be calmed down?" and everyone was like "yeah... I think so".

 

[Zykon TheLich]

Made me think of a YouTuber ragging on the official conversion of Tomb of Horrors that included having to a take a moment and rant about that trap that utterly ruins your character by changing their sex and how that shouldn't be allowed to happen without the player's consent after complaining about a bunch of other stuff earlier in the dungeon where my first thought was "this is why you should be *careful* and always have twine, chalk, a ten foot pole, etc as basic adventuring gear." I'd love to see them run a converted version of the Labyrinth of Madness, that module was just mean.

I mean, I could see if someone was really invested in a specific character they might get a bit upset at that, but then it's reversible and the sort of person to get really invested in a character would probably be the sort of person to roll with it and rp a quest to change back. Certainly wouldn't mess your character up as much as diving headfirst into a sphere of annihilation. Odd thing to get upset about in the grand scheme of weird and gruesome shit that could happen to a character in DnD.