It's commonplace around here for anyone who has an anti-government stance and talks about the things that are going wrong to get the "conspiracy nutjob grab a tinfoil hat" treatment.
It's blatant flaming, but they don't get warned because even the mods say the same thing, or are laughing at them too.
This is a Debate thread. The proper method to discuss moderation policy is our helpdesks or PM. Spam warning issued. - Blinking Spirit
-
- italofoca
- Registered User
-
Member for 11 years, 8 months, and 12 days
Last active Thu, Sep, 24 2020 20:51:28
- 0 Followers
- 3,120 Total Posts
- 267 Thanks
-
Aug 22, 20133
IcecreamMan80 posted a message on RIP US Constitution... The death of the 1st AmendmentPosted in: Debate -
Aug 22, 20131
Jay13x posted a message on Relationship advice needed badlyThe sex life suffers as a relationship gets older (as well as the people), but one things I'm getting from this is that you're coming at this all wrong.Posted in: Real-Life Advice
One of the very first things I did when my wife and I started being intimate is have a long, serious talk to her about what she liked and what I liked, and how she felt about things. I also asked what I was doing wrong and what I could do better.
That last part is something most guys miss. From a woman's point of view, our egos are very tied to our performance in bed (which is true), so many develop a habit of telling fibs about a guy's performance to salve their ego. Eventually, it develops to the point where the woman feels like she can't tell the guy what he's doing wrong, because she's been telling him it's fine for so long.
I say this not because I think it's necessarily your situation, but the mentality is similar. The bottom line here is that your girlfriend is not as engaged in sex as you are. It's pretty clear that she feels obligated to meet your wants but isn't actually excited by it herself. She may also have issues preventing her from fully enjoying the act.
Stop looking at this as something you are being deprived of, and have a real conversation with her about what she wants. Since sex has been such an issue for you for so long, she may feel hesitant or even afraid to tell you how she really feels about your love life, so you need to come at this from a much less egocentric standpoint and really make her feel like it's safe and okay to tell you how she feels, especially if you've fought about it in the past.
Right now all I'm getting from you is 'My girlfriend isn't as into sex as I am, how do I fix that?', when the real question is 'My girlfriend and I don't feel the same way about our sex life, how do I bridge that gap?'. Part of fixing the problem is recognizing that you are also part of the problem. Come at it with an honest 'What am I doing wrong?' about the whole approach to love making, not just your performance itself, and you should get some answers.
She may be wondering why you haven't committed to her more fully, or other relationship problems may be making their way into the bedroom, or it could have nothing to do with you all together. Never assume that it's her problem alone, or that it's just about sex. Love life problems could just be a symptom of some other issue.
It also sounds like you are a little too impressed with yourself as a boyfriend. I doubt you are as great as you seem to think, and it's always best to assume others don't view you the same way you do. Further, just because you are a good boyfriend and in great shape doesn't obligate her to be sexually attracted to you. I say these things not to insult you, but to humble you. Ego is a major problem in solving relationship issues.
Also, 'too sensitive' is a real thing. If she says somethings a problem, take her at her word. Women's sexuality and biology is different from men's, but it sounds like you expect her to react to everything as a man would, which is a fundamental mistake a lot of men make.
Edit: One more thing - 'just laying there' is usually how women enjoy themselves. Remember that they work differently than men do, simple physical stimulation isn't always enough, and frequently they have to focus on it to enjoy themselves. It's as much a mental exercise as a physical one for them, so I'd highly recommend reading up on women's sexuality, because I'm not sure you really understand it. It sounds more like you expect her to be a porn star - who are actresses first and foremost - and not a normal woman. Media tends to portray a woman's sexuality like men want or expect it to be, no how it actually is, so disabuse yourself of the notion of what she should be doing. -
Jul 30, 2013
1
Drawmeomg posted a message on A Problem for DeterminismPosted in: PhilosophyQuote from italofoca
- Someone have to choose between A and B within a limited time frame. It does prefer A or B over nothing.
- The same brain process take makes A desirable is also making B desirable in the same precise same amount. Everything else is constant.
The same way as in an indeterministic universe. A very poor intellect might be paralyzed by choice. Most actual consciousnesses will use a tiebreaker.
This tiebreaker probably has to be indeterministic from the standpoint of the consciousness - that is, it doesn't have to be genuinely indeterministic, it's sufficient that *I* can't predict the outcome right now.
If determined forces would make A and B 'draw' wouldn't the brain fall in a eternal dilemma ?
Possible solution:
- The brain can trigger a truly random experiment to decide. It doesn't need to be truly random, just random to the own brain's domain (such as, i will pick left if it's night time and right if it's day time - those things are not truly random, but they are random to the brain since he don't control the time of the experiment).
It might sound weird to present a problem and a solution but it isn't ! I want to know if there's a scientifically proven solution to this or even if the problem is formulated in a valid manner.
Genuine randomness simply doesn't matter here. Nobody would argue that most computers (as macro level constructs) are indeterministic in practice, and yet they don't suffer from this problem.
It's very easy to write a totally deterministic rule for a system along the following lines:
1. Weight each option according to desirability versus cost to achieve.
2. If the weights are different, choose the highest weight.
3. If the weights of the two (or more) most desirable options are identical, look at an external physical event complex enough to be beyond this system's power to compute the outcome (e.g. a coin toss, a roll of some dice), and tie the various potential results of that event to the options tied as most desirable. E.g. if the coin flip comes up heads, choose A, otherwise choose B. -
Jul 30, 2013
1
Crashing00 posted a message on A Problem for DeterminismPosted in: PhilosophyQuote from italofoca »- Someone have to choose between A and B within a limited time frame. It does prefer A or B over nothing.
- The same brain process take makes A desirable is also making B desirable in the same precise same amount. Everything else is constant.
If determined forces would make A and B 'draw' wouldn't the brain fall in a eternal dilemma ?
Two-stage models might be interesting to you. Robert Kane, specifically, writes well on this problem. -
Jul 29, 20131
bitterroot posted a message on Normative Evolutionary EthicsPosted in: PhilosophyQuote from Taylor
Because part of our survive depends on empathy. We evolved as pack animals, and tribalism is a strong concept within our psych. An individual human cannot survive on his own; we NEED each other to flourish.Quote from bitterrootAssuming you can define "fitness," why should an individual human care about the fitness or survival of the entire human race? Wouldn't evolution say I should value my own persistence over the persistence of the human race?
The iterated prisoner's dilemma teaches us a lone psychopath can do well in a society, but a society of psychopaths can't do as well as a society of collaborators. It behooves a society to remove its psychopaths.
Clearly not, or else no one would have evolved Altruism.Quote from bitterrootGiven the choice between dying or killing 1,000 other people, wouldn't evolution favor individuals who would choose to save themselves and kill others?
First of all, this "clearly not" explanation reminds me of creationist arguments about evolution like "if humans evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?" or "if having a high IQ is better, then why hasn't evolution gotten rid of dumb people" or "wouldn't people be more adapted to survive if we could fly?" You can't just look at an ex ante trait and conclude that evolution shaped it in a mathematically perfect way. Sufficed to say, evolution is a sloppy and imprecise process, and it 'seeks' (to the extent one can apply that word) local maxima, not absolute maxima. Altruism might be a local, metastable fitness maxima. You are probably right that the sociopathic, iterated prisoner's dillema would destroy society (meaning it would be unstable) but it would probably lie at a higher fitness level than altruism for the individual genes engaging in the behavior. Evolution operates at the gene level, it can't "see" a society or a species. So are you introducing time-invariance as an additional criterion, or is fitness maximization still sufficient?
Moreover, every evolutionary explanation of altruism that I've ever read, including your link, speaks only to "in-group" altruism. Humans had an evolutionary incentive to be altruistic to their families and their tribe, with whom they share genetic material and resources. In addition to altruism, evolution created racism, xenophobia, genocide, and other decidedly horrible things. "Go kill all the men in the neighboring tribe so you can procreate with their women" was a behavior decidedly incentivized by evolution, and which has been extremely prevalent in, as far as I'm aware, every human society ever. Name even a 5-year period in the history of mankind during which widespread genocide was not occurring somewhere in the world.
And if you think that individualized behaviors like murder and rape are disfavored by evolution, think again. Sure, evolution doesn't say "murder and rape everyone you can at all times," it says "murder and rape at certain times when you achieve a significant benefit." That's why, even in the highly civilized and highly educated western world, with laws that promise life in prison or lethal injection, thousands and thousands of rapes and murders still happen every year. I'm not saying everyone is just waiting for their chance to kill and rape (I'm certainly not, and I like to imagine most people aren't), but these behaviors would have no reason to persist at such a high frequency, against the threat of such horrible punishments, if evolution hadn't favored them in the past.
And that's why I think an evolutionary ethics system is doomed to failure. Most of the benefits of modern society have been about overcoming our darker evolutionary tendencies. Evolution doesn't say "be altruistic." Evolution says "be altruistic when it benefits the proliferation of your genes, kill when it benefits the proliferation of your genes, and basically do whatever it is at any given point in time that benefits the proliferation of your genes."
And evolution doesn't understand we're not still living in a tribal society with limited resources. It tells us to get obese eating fats and sugars, it tells us to distrust people who look different from us, etc. Society and the individual have to put the muzzle on evolution and shut down these horrible behaviors that were selected for in the past. -
Jul 16, 2013
1
Crashing00 posted a message on Normative Evolutionary EthicsPosted in: PhilosophyQuote from TaylorI think it's time I try to recap what's being said to see if we're both on the same page or if we are talking past each other instead. (And I don't think I'm qualified to give a full definition/description of 'evolution,' both social and biological. So, I'll skip that question as well if you don't mind)
I'm afraid I do mind, at least in some sense. I mean, obviously you don't have to say anything you don't want to say -- but I think one should know what one's claims are, and by asking you to define evolution I am only asking what you think you mean when you use the word. I am not trying to goad you into providing an "incorrect" definition of evolution so I can say "ha ha, your definition isn't technically correct." Definitions can't be wrong. My goal is to gain an understanding of what you're asserting. If we're having a semantic disagreement, the only way to get to the bottom of it is to try to analyze it in more primitive terms that we do semantically agree on.
Now, your point—I believe—is that there is no reason to bring up evolutionary biology in this discussion. That it really does not matter where we got our biology when talking about what causes us to flourish and what increases our well-being. We could have been snapped into existence by God or made in a laboratory by aliens, neither matters when talking about what we should or should not do. You feel that my talk of biological evolution is pointless at best and “the cart before the horse” at worst.
I would say this is a good summary of one of my core points, yes.
I agree with you IF you have already assumed--axiomatically--that the well-being and flourishing of “conscious creatures” is the only concern of ethics. We have to start somewhere, and it seems you feel it reasonable to start there. I—however—don’t like starting there.
I don’t feel it is correct for a conscious creature to assume axiomatically that conscious creatures are all that should matter, anymore than I would a mathematician telling me it was axiomatic that math is the best subject or a physicist telling me it is axiomatic that physics is the best subject. Well the latter might be true, it still weakens the argument.
I would say that it's a definitional matter, rather than an axiomatic one. Ethics, insofar as it is understood to be concerned with the search for the good, must be concerned with the well-being of conscious creatures. If that's not a part of the good, then I don't know what is. To say anything else would be to misuse the word.
As with any definitional matter, you can argue or disagree, but it would be semantic. The problem with these types of semantic swamps is that they are usually a waste of time. If you get into an argument with a mathematician about why 1+1=2, he's going to have to tell you that it comes down to how those terms are defined, and that's really just the end of it. If you want to dispute that definition and say that 1+1=3, you had damned well better follow it up with an interesting application of your new definition -- otherwise the mathematician is going to walk away.
The problem with many ethicists and the is-ought gap is that they drag the discussion into this semantic swamp and never say anything interesting as a result. In fact, they get very angry at people who do try to say interesting things and their response always seems to be to try to yank them back into the swamp, which is literally defined by the inability of those mired in it to ever articulate anything interesting. Well, I'll only go into the swamp if I'm promised an interesting way out of it.
(Since you now appear to be a critic of Sam Harris, you might benefit from reading his response to critics if you haven't already. In addition to answering some of your complaints here and below, he also quotes Thomas Nagel, who gives another excellent response to this particular point.)
I listened to Sam Harris explain in The Moral Landscape his reasoning about why consciousness necessarily makes consciousness matter, and I can tell you--unless I missed something--the argument was circular.
When we were discussing this in the other thread, I thought you agreed with the argument. In a universe devoid of conscious creatures, there would be no morality, because there would be no evaluative context for moral claims. Morality would be a sort of category mistake.
Even ignoring the circular nature of the argument, consciousness validating consciousness leads to issues with things like the experience machine.
Harris responds to the "Experience machine" argument himself, and it certainly is a valid question to pose. My answer would be different than Harris's -- I would say that if the classical Cartesian argument tells us anything, it's that the universe is indistinguishable from an experience machine. Thus we can expect no empirically-grounded theory of anything to be able to distinguish an experience machine from a non-experience-machine. If our criteria for rejecting theories is that they don't deal very well with experience machines, then we must summarily reject substantially every theory ever. Our criteria for accepting (empirical) theories is ultimately grounded in experience, for Chrissake.
However, the problem is that once again it strikes me as completely tangential to what we're supposed to be discussing. Your modifications to the theory don't address the experience machine at all! Okay, so it was our evolution that shaped our brains such that certain brain states please us, with the further (wrong) stipulation that evolution is an actual primitive force that does this rather than a search algorithm acting on anterior inputs. It still remains the case that certain brain states please us, it still remains the case that the experience machine gives us access to these states, and it still remains a question of whether to go in the machine that is not in the least bit helped by the introduction of the non-sequitur that is evolutionary theory.
So, I feel very uncomfortable starting the chain where it seems you wish to start it. I would rather go one “why” back. WHY should the well-being and flourishing of “conscious creatures” be the only concern of ethics?
Why should 1+1 be 2 rather than 3? Here, let me quote Nagel's defense of Harris:
Quote from Thomas Nagel »The true culprit behind contemporary professions of moral skepticism is the confused belief that the ground of moral truth must be found in something other than moral values. One can pose this type of question about any kind of truth. What makes it true that 2 + 2 = 4? What makes it true that hens lay eggs? Some things are just true; nothing else makes them true. Moral skepticism is caused by the currently fashionable but unargued assumption that only certain kinds of things, such as physical facts, can be “just true” and that value judgments such as “happiness is better than misery” are not among them. And that assumption in turn leads to the conclusion that a value judgment could be true only if it were made true by something like a physical fact. That, of course, is nonsense.
Quote from Taylor »Because I'm taking one step back, I felt it was necessary to start with Telos. What is the purpose of man? What gives us that purpose? What were we created to do? That is why I start my moral reasoning with biological evolution. I use it to justify why we should care about flourishing and why our ethics should be built around well-being. Biological evolution hewed us for that purpose, so it is our telos.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, "telos" has similar ontological properties to "ethics." For one thing, only a conscious creature can assign a "telos" to a thing. Suppose in our hypothetical lifeless universe of rocks, one of the rocks happens, through its collisions and erosions and bouncing around in the space, to have a brutally sharp edge that could be used for cutting (if there were anything to cut) and a blunt handle at the other end that could be used for grasping (if there were anyone around to grasp it) -- in other words, the rock could be used as knife, and a good one at that, if there were anyone around to do so. Would you call this state of affairs teleological?
No, says I, for there is no extrinsic finality -- there is nothing outside of the knife-rock that we could say wanted it to be that way; the universe didn't conspire to give it a knife-shape in any sense deeper than possible physical determinism and is as "happy" about it being knife-shaped as it would be about it being a spheroid. Nor is there intrinsic finality; the knife-rock itself does not "care" that it's a knife-shape; it could equally well have been a spheroid. It has no internal state or frame of reference that one can appeal to that would "bless" one configuration over the other.
Now if there were a conscious thing in the universe that wanted a knife, it could give that knife-rock a teleology, it could act such as to assign finality to the knife-rock's present state of affairs, and it could act in such a way as to preserve that state of affairs -- but not bloody well until the barrier of consciousness is crossed can such things happen.
That's what's unique about consciousness; that's why it's the line in the sand the crossing of which triggers all these other conclusions. And of course, since evolution isn't conscious, it can't assign telos to things.
(Incidentally, I don't think an evolutionary account of morality should begin by asking "what were we created to do?")
If you have another reason why we should care about the well-being and flourishing of “conscious creatures” other than an axiomatic, or circular, argument I would like to hear it. But, I don’t think you’ve given one yet.
Ex nihilo nihil fit. I can't reason from no axioms or definitions. If you want me to do that, then I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. If this is what it comes down to, then you were right in the first place: our disagreement is semantic and irresolvable.
Except they could be incapable of physical and mental suffering and/or happiness, so I don’t know why giving those things value would necessarily occur to them. They could also be incapable of empathy—like the Illithid—so they wouldn’t care about “seeing things our way.”
You're falling into some kind of qualia trap of the form "only experiencing something can allow you to understand that thing." Nobody's experienced a black hole; that doesn't prevent us from reasoning about them. Similarly, a creature that never experienced suffering is not precluded from making the logical deduction that it shouldn't be inflicted upon creatures that can experience it.
I've never been starving. I still understand, in the abstract, that famine is to be fought against and prevented where possible.
Remember, pure logic can’t provide axioms. If these creatures have different starting axioms for what they fundamentally care about, then their logical conclusions are going to be different as well. There is no reason to assume they would be naturally inclined to value things we think "conscious creatures" should value.
Why would a creature, in attempting to determine what it is that we fundamentally care about, start only from hypotheses about themselves? Once you've got a specimen of humanity in front of you to query and investigate, you are no longer constrained to whatever axioms or inputs you were using before -- you have new data which you can use to derive new conclusions.
(I would certainly not deny the possibility of an Ender's Game-esque scenario, where a conscious creature -- out of ignorance concerning the states of the other conscious creature's well-being -- treats another conscious creature horribly. But I would expect that conscious creature to have the capacity to condemn its own actions as immoral once the data about well-being becomes available to it -- just as, indeed, takes place in the Ender's Game scenario.)
-
Jul 15, 2013
3
Crashing00 posted a message on Normative Evolutionary Ethics[Transferred from the "would you kill a stranger..." thread.]Posted in: Philosophy
- While evolution certainly does generate selection pressure that pushes us towards moral behaviors, it doesn't follow that evolution explains or underwrites morality. You wouldn't say that the police (even when they are acting entirely in their proper capacity) explain morality -- while they are a force that tends to push morally-errant agents back on track, and you could even "map out" the track by doing random things and writing down whether the police intervene or not, their presence isn't what makes the track the way it is. The same is true of evolution.
- If we created some sort of sentient AI that didn't evolve (by virtue of us having created it), it would still be a conscious creature and one would still expect it to attain a sufficient understanding of moral principles such that it could both give and receive moral treatment, even in the absence of any evolutionary pressure whatsoever. Arguments about the well-being of conscious creatures (i.e. all moral arguments) cannot turn on those creatures having evolved, because it may well be possible for there to be a conscious creature that didn't or can't evolve -- yet we'd still expect a proper moral framework to encompass it all the same.
- Evolution should not be used as a proxy for "the contingent facts about how a conscious creature got the way it is." It happens to be the way we became how we are, but it's not a logical necessity and introducing it into morality ties your morality to contingent matters in a way that is at the very least not necessary and at worst just wrong. If, instead of having evolved, we were snapped into existence by God just as we are now, it would still be wrong to, say, pluck out a child's eyes, because our eyes would remain just as spectacularly important to our well-being as non-evolved creatures as they are to our well-being as evolved creatures. Evolution is the process that happened to result in our having eyes -- it is not the reason that eyes are useful to us. In fact, it's the other way around -- a visual system is useful because there is a niche carved out by the physical nature of our corner of the universe for sighted animals, and the genetic algorithm that is evolution felt out all the various paths of the search space and settled onto the peak corresponding to the niche.
Similarly, referring back to the classical argument about the failure of a society that permits murder to thrive under evolutionary pressure, it's not that evolution "makes" murder bad -- rather, it's that the badness of murder "makes" evolution favor those societies that are apt to avoid it.
The upshot of all of this is that placing evolution in a position that is ontologically prior to morality is putting the cart before the horse. Evolution can explain how a creature came to occupy a particular niche of its fitness landscape, but it cannot explain the shape of the fitness landscape itself. -
Jun 6, 20133
jimmyrussles77 posted a message on According to Ben Bleiweiss from SCG, Thoughseize will be reprint in M14i REALLY hate when people say that crap, "new players don't like x"Posted in: Speculation
you DONT work for wizards, stop acting like you do.
New players aren't morons. We were all there once, it's a bunch of crap and means nothing, so stop saying it. -
May 26, 2013
1
magickware99 posted a message on Which theology is the best? (The Worldview Comparison Thread)Posted in: Religion - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
2
This rule should be "Isn't a amalgamation of text trying to find a breach in the game's rules and design guidelines".
Seriously all those Barry's Land so far are weird as hell. For me any proposed Barry land should not fail the following test:
If someone asks "Why does this land isn't like the other basic lands?" and the answer is "to avoid a bunch of fringe and obscure interactions" then the proposed land fails the test.
In my opinion the only way out of the Barry's Land conundrum is ignoring your point 2. Seriously, preserving the functionality of Coalition Victory simply does not pay off for the weirdness of having a basic land that does not behave like one.
I still don't know why they don't make a errata for Coalition Victory saying "You win the game If you control at least one Plains, one Island, one Swamp, one Mountain, one Forest, one white creature, one blue creature, one black creature, one red creature and one green creature". This way Barry's Land and purple creatures could exist. I don't understand why some old unplayable junk cards should be casting constraints in the future of the game...
1
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/creativity/custom-card-creation/615071-new-banding-mechanic-for-medieval-siege-set
In this set blue will be based on mercantile coastal cities. Blue will have the worst army but the best navy and political scheming. Blue creatures will also revolve around sea monsters. To capture the flavor of sea battle I made the mechanic:
Maritime X (This creature can only attack if you control X or more islands. When it attacks it gets +X/+0.).
- The island requirement fits because strong color commitment is a theme in this set.
- It captures the flavor that initially your ships are only anchored and can only be used to protect you until you find some sea routes (get more islands).
- The gameplay they promote is nice for blue. The idea is that you will be defending yourself, trying to push your opponent away, until the turning point were your ships are ready and you can overwhelm then. Bouncing, countering and tapping will buy you time until you get more islands, while scry and card draw you help you reach the island count.
Example:
Foroza Longship 3U
Creature - Ship (C)
Maritime 4 (This creature can only attack if you control 4 or more islands. When it attacks it gets +4/+0.)
0/4
Is that too linear/simple ? Should blue get a instant/sorcery mechanic rather then a creature one ? It's too hard to balance being a mechanic with a downside and a upside ?
Some ship related cards:
Pirate Dude 1U
Creature - Human Pirate (U)
Attack Formation (When this creature attacks you may choose another attacking creature you control. If this creature or the chosen creature would be blocked, the blocking creature blocks each of those creatures instead)
Each Ship in Pirate Dude's attack formation have "whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, draw a card".
2/1
Fire at the Docks 2R
Sorcery (C)
Fire at the Docks deals 3 damage to target player. That player sacrifices a Ship.
2
And if they don't they SHOULD.
That's all I got to say !
1
3
If you see the last changes to game in the last 2 years have all being in that direction. Enchantments and Artifacts with game defining abilities were tuned down greatly because black can't deal with then (and red can't deal with one of then), blue counter spells have been greatly nerfed because they punished midrange decks too much, black aggressive hand discard such as Mind Sludge no longer exists because they autowin several kind of match ups, combo decks are only ok if they involve creatures (that in principle can be removed), red have gone a lot of anti-life gain hate so burn does not auto loose agaisnt decks with strong life gain options and so on.
This change goes in that same direction as they feel like green ability to sometimes randomly take a match away against decks that don't have uncondition creature removal is undesirable.
I think it's a great direction to take the game, the only problem being the difficulty of redefining the colors as so much of their tools are taken away and nerfed. Even hating how CoP played I still think white lacks identity without then, the same goes for blue and the permission control decks...
3
1
The main cycle:
Dinrova Necrologist UB
Creature - Human Wizard (U)
t: Draw a card, then discard a card. If a creature card is discarded this way up to one target Zombie creature you control cannot be blocked until end of turn.
1/1
Corpse Blaster 1BR
Creature - Goblin Artificer (U)
When Corpse Blaster enters the battlefield you may exile a creature card from a graveyard. If you do put a 2/2 black Zombie creature token onto the battlefield.
1, Sacrifice a zombie: Corpse Blaster deals 2 damage to target creature or player.
2/2
Blight District Nurturer 2GB
Creature - Elf Shaman (U)
When Blight District Nurturer enters the battlefield, put the top 4 cards of your library in your graveyard. If two or more creature cards were put in to a graveyard this way, gain 2 life and put a 2/2 black Zombie creature token into play.
t: Put a +1/+1 counter on target zombie. Regenerate that zombie.
2/2
Necropolis Caretaker 3WB
Creature - Spirit Cleric (U)
At the beginning of your upkeep you may exile a creature card from your graveyard. If you do, put a 2/2 black Zombie creature token onto the battlefield.
1WB: Zombie creatures you control gain +1/+1 and lifelink until end of turn.
2/2
Cards to go a long with then:
Shambling Messenger B
Creature - Zombie (C)
B, pay 1 life: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.
1/1
Undead Cultist B
Creature - Zombie Wizard (C)
Sacrifice Undead Cultist: target player looses 1 life. You gain 1 life.
1/1
Ebony Blade Elite B
Creature - Zombie Soldier (U)
Ebony Elite can't block.
When Ebony Elite dies, each player discards a card.
2/1
Kharvaz, the Nether Visitor 1BB
Creature - Zombie Horror Rogue (R)
Menace
When Kharvaz enters the battlefield, target creature you don't control gets -X/-X until end of turn were X is the number of Zombies you control.
Whenever another Zombie is put on or leaves your graveyard, return Kharvaz from your graveyard to your hand.
2/1
1
That explanation does actually work.
Rib Cage Spider art can't be reused because WotC don't commission art from Dana Knutson anymore and thus his artwork can't be reused in order to keep the game visuals consistent. A quick search (http://magiccards.info/query?q=a:"Dana Knutson"&v=card&s=cname) and you will find 100% of the cards Dana Knutson illustrated in the past, when reprinted in modern times, got a new art.
At best they could commission a new art for Rib Cage Spider but art commission schedules are very rigid and the change could have happened after the commission deadline.
4
In limited every card is not valued in a vacuum but in relation to all other cards in the set. There's a number of reasons why 1/5 2G reach common could be undesirable, such as promoting a 4/1 common creature or creating the right combat balance between this and the Ringwarden Owl - the Owl can take the spider out if it manages to trigger Prowess and becomes a 4/4, creating a interesting decision of whether to block it or not with the Spider.
All stats of common creatures in limited are done so to promote the correct combat interactions, you can't forget that...
Your first point is valid, I dunno why they simply didn't reprint the older spider.
1
Devotion is different, any permanent in the color will power it up so there's no need to make it common. To stay at common this will need a higher mana cost such as 2W.