Lianodel @ Lianodel @ttrpg.network

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356

Joined

2 yr. ago

I thought, "Doesn't Illinois have one of the few good state flags?"

Nope, I was thinking of the city flag of Chicago. The state flag is literally just the state crest on a white background. It would absolutely benefit from a redesign. :p

Do you think the same people who refused to show up for Hillary in the 2016 general voted for Biden in the 2020 primaries?

Well, no. I'm not sure what point you think I was making.

My point is that the DNC isn't going to be pushed left by a loss. The leadership is old, stubborn, and stupid. They'll tell leftists to shut the fuck up during the primaries because they don't matter, then blame them after a loss because suddenly they did matter enough to make the difference. When it turns out that most leftists held their noses and voted Blue anyway, they'll just ignore it. Then, if we get to vote again, they'll take exactly the wrong lesson, and just push harder to the right.

The point in bringing up 2016 is because they did push a centrist candidate, she did lose to a fascist clown, and then, four years later, they pushed Joe Biden. Why on Earth would anyone expect them to do anything different if it happens again?

Yeah, that's one of the episodes that immediately came to mind.

Harley: There's one thing I've gotta know: why'd you stay with me all day, risking your butt for someone who's never given you anything but trouble?

Batman: I know what it's like to try and rebuild a life. I had a bad day, too, once.

It was absolutely a rehabilitative vision of justice. The same thing happens with The Ventriloquist, where Batman is extremely supportive, and goes to great lengths to talk him down after he was manipulated into returning to crime. Heck, there's even a villain, Lock-Up, who personifies a cruel, punitive form of justice. He even reveals the guard's abuse, through a clever ploy, as Bruce Wayne, in a hearing about Arkham.

You're pretty much describing a scene from Batman: Year One. He crashes a party full of rich people to intimidate them. It's actually the good Frank Miller comic I was talking about.

Time to take a meme on the internet too seriously! :D

There are two things that bug me about the weirdly frequent discourse on Batman.

Firstly, there's no one version of Batman. You can find bastard fascist Batman, and you can find actual justice Batman. Hell, you can find both by Frank Miller, depending on the point in his career. My favorite version is from The Animated Series, and you'll find tons of examples of Batman using kindness and compassion to affect meaningful change, instead of reveling in violence as though it solves anything. Heck, he's nicer to working-class folks, even sympathetic criminals, than to his fellow rich people.

Secondly, I think it's a talking point with bad optics. Batman rules. Why let the fascists have him? If there are loads of ways to look at and interpret the character, I'd rather focus on the one that makes him the good kind of class traitor, anti-fascist, anti-cop, and fighting for economic and social justice.

I'm sorry, but I can't be optimistic about this.

Even if we accept it was bait, and not just the DNC pivoting to the right, I think it was a losing move. Who is this going to sway? Republicans aren't the kind to be well-informed and swayed by the changing circumstance of current events, so it won't peel any of them away. As for the rest, it just shrank the differences between the two parties, whether practically or purely optically. It's not like this just finally demonstrated that the Republicans were a fucking joke of a party when it comes to actual governance.

So we showed that the Republicans are incompetent hypocrites, as though that's new information, and as if that realization would change any hearts or minds. And in exchange for this completely worthless prize, all it cost us was a now bipartisan consensus to push The Big Lie about immigrants. I don't consider that a victory.

The DNC is still the lesser evil, and there's still a significant margin. I just wish that margin was growing because the Democrats were moving left, not because they're both moving right but at different speeds.

Also... we've seen this happen before. Hillary loses to Trump, we live through four years of a fascist administration (and all the shit that comes with it), then in 2020... we get Biden.

That user is, simultaneously, using criticisms of Biden to justify recreating the conditions that brought him into office.

And that user also used the Palestinians to justify letting the DNC lose to Trump, even though Trump is even more bigoted and pro-Israel. It's saying the best "strategy" to voice discontent over the genocide is to... accelerate it.

I'm not willing to go through four years of fascism, then if we get to vote again in 2028—which we wouldn't be able to take for granted—likely get some other milquetoast conservative Democrat. I'd rather spend the next four years trying to fight and push Democrats to the left than to fight GOP fascists.

...this might be why I like hiking and camping, now that I think about it.

Honestly, same. I just got in the habit of checking quotations before posting them, so I got the full version with actual source.

"All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."

—Clarence Darrow

My halfway-optimistic view is that fascism is doomed to fail. It's just too stupid not to, and the stupidity is core to the entire movement.

...but the half-way pessimistic part of me has to bring up that they're going to do as much damage as they can on the way down. Hopefully that's kept to a minimum.

If you value freedom of expression, that doesn't mean you need to extend that to people who fundamentally oppose it. To maximize freedom of expression, you can't tolerate the people who would outright destroy it.

It's also a slippery slope argument. We can just crack down on Nazis. And as for the government cracking down on other groups... they already do that. We see crackdowns on plenty of other demonstrations, with more repression and violence. Tolerating Nazis isn't helping the good guys, because people in power don't care about applying the rules evenly. Besides, even if we took the slippery slope seriously, then we have to consider what happens when we just let literal Nazis go about their business.

Everyone. Everyone. The article is five SENTENCES long.

Two climate activists on Tuesday targeted Botticelli’s masterpiece “The Birth of Venus” hanging at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, attaching images of recent flood damage in the Tuscany region on the protective glass.

(Emphasis mine. I also wanted to pause to mention that this is likely a sentence you wouldn't have to click through to read, because it's in the preview on Lemmy.)

Authorities immediately cleared the room and the two protesters were brought by carabinieri for questioning. Under a new law, the protesters risk up to six months of jail time.

The protest materials were easily removed from the glass without leaving a trace, and the room where the painting hangs was reopened within 15 minutes.

The activists from the Last Generation climate movement said they were protesting the Italian government’s failure to address climate issues that result in more frequent floods and landslides, including severe flooding in Tuscany last year that left at least six people dead and caused widespread damage.

I'm sorry, but complaints about any damage done by this protest aren't exactly serious arguments.

I will, begrudgingly, when my friends run a game. Playing it is okay, running it is a nightmare, and I really don't want to spend money on this game.

It's a shame, because D&D has been a huge part of my life, but nowadays, when I want to play D&D, the best way to do it isn't to use D&D.

And that's if they even offer a physical version. I'm betting we'll see a lot of digital-only content. And if you want to use it in the official VTT, I imagine the monetization is going to be even worse.

Correct about physical books, and I doubt physical books are going away. However, WotC has been leaning towards digital distribution, and hired on people with experience in software-as-a-service.

By all means, keep playing the version of the game you own! But it looks like the future of D&D might make a lot of content available to rent, not to own. Hopefully I'm wrong, but honestly, there are plenty of other games that let you own your stuff.

Yeah. On the face of it, it's a good move, but the full story is far worse.

• They "updated" the OGL to be far more restrictive, impose unsustainable fees past a certain level of gross profit, and would grant WotC the full right to use, sell, and even license your work to others, irrevocably.
• They tried to de-authorize the original OGL retroactively, fully against the spirit and practice of the license, using some legal chicanery. While the OGL 1.0a was perpetual, it didn't use the word irrevocable. (WotC's rights to your content, of course, were clearly put in irrevocable terms).
• They only moved to CC-BY after public outcry. While the results were good, it was for PR, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
• There's a new edition coming anyway. Unless they surprise me and put it under CC-BY as well, I'm betting they'll try again to use a really restrictive license.

Also, even though WotC walked back from de-authorizing the OGL 1.0a, the damage was done. Every publisher I'm aware of that had used it has since moved away from it entirely, with surprisingly little change to the product.

True, but (a) IIRC, not all 5e books are even available as PDFs, and (b) D&D seems to be leaning towards a service business model. I doubt they'll get rid of books entirely, but still, Paizo has a more straightforward "buy the thing, own the thing" approach.

Peskov claimed on Wednesday that Carlson’s position on the conflict with Ukraine is “not pro-Russian by any means, and it’s not pro-Ukrainian; rather, it’s pro-American. But at least it stands in clear contrast to the position of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media.”

Pffft hahaha, what a fucking racist dork. That's some 4chan-level shit.

Also, while I think it's overall a good article, I think calling Tucker a useful idiot is unfair. When I think of a useful idiot, I think of someone who means well, but is on the wrong side without realizing it. Tucker's not a smart man, but he knows what he's doing. If you ever watch his shit (which I only recommend to verify his grift), he's not just disconnected from reality, but actively contrary to it. He's trying to poison the well, while inoculating his viewers to reality and any argument based on it. He's not simply wrong, he's lying. He knows what he's doing is wrong, but he's doing it anyway, for his own benefit.

Well, they don't care about their own hypocrisy. They're happy to paint their opponents as hypocrites, even if they have to make something up to do it.