Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
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User ID: 2188
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
You're right, it's absolutely fascinating that baseball was ever popular anywhere.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
This is smuggie-tier material. You're not using 'omnipotence' to mean anything like what we do when we use the word, and I suspect you have very little idea of the context regarding the matter.
So what we're left is,
"Oh, your story makes sense internally? Well let me just motivatedly redefine terms until it doesn't. Wow, you look so dumb now."
Do what you want, I guess, but if you'd like to know what we actually think and why your criticism doesn't seem even remotely applicable, I'll be happy to tell you.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do?
Not following, here.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
Yes, that's what I just said. He wanted to be with us that badly. If He hadn't, He'd presumably have just not bothered with us or gone through that.
Still not sure what else you're implying. If God wants to marry us, which is rather what this whole thing is about, He wants a bride capable of choosing Him. That also means that we're capable of choosing to reject Him, hence everything else that happens.
Maybe you're suggesting that God could simply have created us capable of choosing Him and also incapable? If so I think your notion of 'omnipotence' is broken.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
Yes: That's what's necessary for God to be with us, and He loves us enough to do it.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
What help is there to ameliorate the invincible globalist elites being out to get me?
Same help there's always been. God. All you're doing right now is surrendering to the very real demonic forces which have successfully convinced you that not only are you helpless, but there's not even a fight worth fighting. Maybe question those assumptions.
Go to church, make yourself a worthy husband, and raise a solid family that will carry worthwhile values into the next generation. It's about the hardest thing there is to do, but also the worthiest.
And if you're not called to family, then there's about a million and one other things worth doing as well, and many communities of people who will be happy to support you in the work.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
Generally speaking, God's not into smiting people in the OT, though it's often read that way in the West. Mostly what we see is God removing His divine protection and letting people suffer the consequences of turning away. Yes, even the great flood. He pulled back His ordering of the primal chaos and it broke loose. Yes, even the people who get smoked by His presence in the temple. That's just what God's presence does to fallen humans (and also why He protected us by expelling us from Eden). He gives very specific instructions to the effect of "this is how you can live with Me safely" and people reject those and the consequences are what you'd expect.
Happens also with Ananias and wife in Acts.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
I'm honestly a little conflicted about who I should support.
This might sound a little glib but it's an honest question: Why do you feel compelled to support either side, here, or even to have an opinion on the matter at all? Seems to me that something's been snuck into the process such that the question is being begged. But should this be the case?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
Come on. You really ought to at least say why you think so.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
Sir, I believe you have erred in your placement of this post, and that it was intended as a response to the one below.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
What exactly do you mean by Tolkienesque?
I’m curious as to which systems you think get closest.
Well there are several overtly based in Middle-Earth. MERP is the OG here, with more modern versions such as The One Ring and even a series of supplements for playing in Middle Earth using the 5E rules. I want to run a One Ring game but haven't found the time or people for it. Hopefully in a decade I'll be able to do it with my kids.
Point is, neither of these groups seem like they’d end up at Tolkien, and I can’t think of any systems that really try to implement such a style. Maybe a low-magic variant of 2e?
Yeah, I really like 2E for this, with 1E attitudes toward magic, i.e. it's very rare. A +1 sword is a big deal for even mid-level characters, and giving a magic weapon of any kind to a minion is a huge deal.
There's a style of play called 'E6' (idk why) where the basic premise is that characters can ascend to level 6 as normal but advancement stops there. This keeps them feeling roughly mortal which I think counts for a lot. Beyond that point in normal campaigns it becomes more and more difficult to give them real challenges beyond simply enemies with comparably-scaling stats, which feels clicky to me. In E6, as the campaign goes on, they continue to accumulate wealth and prestige, which opens the door to interesting options. And of course magic items, while hard-won, gradually serve to give them a sense of legendary prowess. But at the end of the day, one bad encounter with a gang of low-level enemies can still wreck them entirely. And they never really get the sense of being able to walk into combat without concern.
In one game I tried something out where beyond level 6 they could only attain further advancement in levels by eating dragon hearts, and dragons were as difficult to find and kill as you'd expect. I liked this approach because it really slowed down advancement and provided some kind of justification for why normal people could get so superhumanly powerful. Also it ends up feeling a little bit like Birthright, which I've always loved.
Haven't tried it, but I bet that Westeros campaign setting from... 20 or so years ago? probably would be a good fit as well. IIRC it was partly based on the idea that the players are, and only ever will be, eminently vulnerable. And it seems to be very low-magic, in keeping with the setting.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
I like my rpgs to be as Tolkienesque and possible and have collected about all of the relevant systems, but I find that it's difficult to get a group together which shares that aesthetic taste. By and large, people really do seem to prefer pop-fantasy. Damn millennials. They ruined the millennium!
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
Idk about good but it certainly was eye-opening. Did you catch the username? I was confused about how cocaine comes from scorpions and wanted to follow up via PM.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
Here is the problem with advocating censorship of "bad" ideas: If it is permissible make rules about what ideas can be expressed, then someone has to make those rules. And who will that be, people with power, or people without power. Obviously the former.
I don't see why that's a problem, though I can certainly see why it would seem problematic to people with certain assumptions.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
I remember being astonished to learn that Vietnamese tourists will generally bring their own dried food to eat during their travels. Asia really is a foreign country.
There have absolutely been times and places where unionization was necessary, unless one has basically zero consideration for human misery and abuse. Martyrmade has an excellent piece on the topic, "Whose America? (Part One)". But yes, like any other institution they can go rotten, and clearly have in many cases.
EDIT: Here's the link. https://martyrmade.com/22-whose-america-ep-1-rough-extraction/
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
there’s simply no way to have biological creatures cross interstellar space within less than twenty or so generations.
Some organisms can go dormant for long periods. Perhaps indefinitely.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
8mo ago
I'd like to hear more. So far in my experience when people say that they're just talking about game theory.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
8mo ago
There's a reason most parenting guides say "don't beat your kids". It really screws them up
Do you have any sources on this which attempt to control for the causation possibly running in the other direction? I.e. low-quality children simply more likely to be beaten.
This could be fine with some commentary. As Incanto said below it would be good to enumerate some examples that occur to you, and ideally offer some additional insight beyond the quote itself.
Personally I think there's some truth to it. Arcane language certainly is handy for bamboozling the peasants. It even works on the managerial class, since they're often a particular combination of embarrassed to call the speaker out, thus admitting that they're ignorant of the subject, and unwilling or unable to go to the effort of educating themselves on the particulars. C.f. how few people have any idea regarding the basics of how the financial system works. It's just something for the professionals to handle, I guess. Hope they're competent, honest, selfless public servants!
One of my favorite words to hear in normie discourse is "the economy". It's fascinating to imagine what internal understandings people are referencing when they say that. Got particularly interesting during the covid crisis, which imo revealed some of the enormous gaps in popular understanding of such matters. Particularly frustrating to me was the notion that we need to prioritize "lives" over "the economy". One wonders what they imagine is responsible for producing things like modern healthcare.
So I guess the insight I want to add here is that higher-ups will throw such words around to keep their inferiors convinced that smart people are in control, sure, but also that those inferiors will do their best to bluff by mimicking what they've heard so as to bolster their arguments, all the while swallowing the fear that someone will call them out and force them to explain precisely what those words mean.
Try asking someone who complains about 'capitalism' exactly what that is, sometime.
Probably a much earlier antecedent would be religions, which were often founded on a model where the people in charge had access to special knowledge which justified their position and which would explicitly not be shared with the followers. Many exceptions, of course.
(EDIT to continue) Occurs to me that this dynamic is particularly troublesome in the sort of democracy-ish model most modern nations seem to be pursuing. How can an electorate be expected to make good decisions when the key to securing votes is a confident smile and the ability to plausibly throw out a bunch of power-words in pleasant-sounding ways?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
8mo ago
The Chinese government isn't sufficiently based or red-pilled to do that, hence the imprisonment of the scientist who used CRISPR on humans.
If dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything, his "imprisonment" involved working on a similar program at some kind of black site. Show us you can cooperate, and someday you'll be able to go back to your normal life. Or, maybe not.
the Chinese are mostly happy to follow western norms in these matters.
Well, they're happy to do so in Western-public-facing matters. I believe they still have organ theft vans rolling around, yeah?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
8mo ago
But this one will have grizzly bears, which could be pretty awesome.
I think about that story a lot. That and Baxter's Mayflower II.
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