MTG Salvation

Quote from JohnSwift »

There are different factions inside libertarianism that want different things, just like there are different groups within Conservatism and Liberalism in America today. (If you don't believe me, compare Russell Kirk to Sean Hannidy.) Minarchists are probably the biggest faction (or group of groups) within Libertarianism in America, but they aren't the only ones. Anarchocapitalism, or right anarchism, is also a well-entrenched position in Libertarian thought. Indeed, Murray Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian himself, was an AnCap. To answer Lithl's point, different Libertarians say different things. There seem to be a couple reasons for this:

--Some don't understand the theory, or don't take the time to look it up. I've meet people before who say that they want people to just be able to do whatever they want, but have never heard of the Nonagression principle or Lockean defense of property rights. As such, they can come to a lot of conclusions that are in conflict with libertarianism.

--Some come to libertarianism on utilitarian grounds, and advocate for more freedom because it is useful for societal wellbeing. (That term is honestly just a fancy way of saying "things being more in line with whatever I consider to be good." Thankfully there are a lot of things that most reasonable people agree on. Just about everyone I've ever met would say that it's better for people to be well-fed and enjoying themselves rather than starving and dying, for example.) Because they advocate liberty on the basis of outcomes, not on the principle of the matter, they also can come to conclusions that can conflict with libertarianism. They say essentially "freedom is the way to go because it works." Utilitarian Libertarians can argue that their positions are consistent with libertarianism, with varying degrees of plausibility.


--Some come to libertarianism on basis of the principle of the matter. Starting from the principle that you own yourself and own other stuff, ought not to violate anyone's property rights. The philosophical justifications for this vary. Natural rights theory is the main one, I think, but I may be mistaken, as I haven't been exposed to enough people in the movement to definitively say. Taken to its logical conclusion, this leads to Anarchocapitalism--the theory that since governments,force you to pay taxes without consent or a legitimate ownership of the land and do a number of other things to abridge your rights, that they are inherently in violation of human rights and ought to be eliminated in favor of private companies and charities. Many people who believe in the principle balk at this conclusion, however, and come to minarchism or conservatism as a result. They'll offer justifications for governments' existence, primarily that we need it to survive. This is probably dominant because it is so very intuitive. Thus, conflict among libertarians who believe in libertarianism based on the principle can arise, but it is different from the kinds of disagreements that arise between principle-based libertarians and utilitarianism-based libertarians in that squabbles between principle-based libertarians focus on what policy is implied by libertarian theory and/or values. Utilitarian vs principle on the other hand usually boils down to argument over what justification ought to be used in setting the political structures advocated in libertarian circles: the Utilitarian says "do what works" while the advocate for principle says "do what's right, based on our ideas/values."


I hope that clears things up.


EDIT: There are a lot of Libertarians outside the Libertarian Party. Also, you can dispute the libertarian credentials of some people in it. It's not exactly representative of libertarianism as a whole, therefore.

How would you define correct libertarianism?

Quote from DJK3654 »

The fear of dying is not just about not existing though- it's about stopping existing. That doesn't happen around you being born, but it does happen when you die.

While loss aversion is significant, I don't see an appreciable difference. I'm still comparing the experience of not existing to existing now. While I'd rather continue existing at present (put me in a bad enough situation and non-existence will become preferable), I don't view the experience of future non-existence to be terrifying.

It's also not really correct to think in terms of what you lose, because you aren't existing consciously in a state of nothingness. You aren't conscious either, you can't be aware of a sense of loss to begin with. Or a sense of boredom.

Quote from jaredpeyton »

What do you guys believe about salvation? I Read articles such as http://biblereasons.com/salvation-and-being-saved/. This is really getting to me. I've been thinking about life and the afterlife lately. Does Jesus save us? Has anyone else thought about this stuff? Looking for opinions. Thanks for anything you can share.

Fortunately, there is no compelling reason to believe that an afterlife exists. All our experience indicates that a person's mind and identity is dependent on and determined by their physical brain. You don't exist before your brain develops. Taking brain damage can radically change a personality. You can lose a limb and keep on living, but destroy the brain and it's all gone.

We're pretty clearly software and the brains are our hardware. Destroy the hard drive of a computer and ask if the data that lived on it goes to an afterlife. Obviously there's no reason to think so, and it would invalidate our understanding of how things work.

This shouldn't be troubling, unless you live in terror of your memories of how it felt to not exist for billions and billions of years. I personally don't remember that experience as being too troubling.

Complete List of Submitted Decks and Pods


What Happened
64 Entrants were randomly broken into 8 pods. Each deck was played as directed against each other deck in that pod, until it claimed two victories in a row. The finisher with the best record advanced to the Pod of Champions. In the event of a tie for the best record in a pod, both decks were advanced. This happened once.

Pod 1 Champion
from sadisticmystic1
39 Chancellor of the Forge, 21 Leyline of the Meek

Pod 2 Champion
from corran132
20 x Sire of Insanity 40 x Black Lotus

Pod 3 Champion
from DunSkivuli
30 Force of Will, 30 Surgical Extraction

Pod 4 Champion
from Ston3notS
40 Force of Will 20 Surgical Extraction

Pod 5 Champion
from LightsOutAce1
40x Black Lotus 20x Frost Titan

Pod 6 Champion
from nomorepghtrash
12 x Cabal Therapy 25 x Bloodghast 23 x Swamp

Pod 7 Champions
from benbuzz790
42x Chancellor of the Forge 18x Leyline of the Meek

from Amps2Eleven
20x Plains 28x Angel's Grace 12x Isochron Scepter

Pod 8 Champion
from cobaqua
17x Leyline of the Meek 43x Chancellor of the Forge



Final Results
9th - corran132
The combo of Black Lotus and Sire of Insanity was formidable turn 1 disruption, but couldn't survive in the final pod. Chancellor of the Forge acts before turn 1, while Force of Will and Surgical Extraction would disrupt and dismantle the deck. What with Bloodghast enjoying discard and Frost Titan being a more dangerous threat overall, Lotus Insanity wasn't able to rack up many wins in the pod of champions.

8th - nomorepghtrash
Cabal Therapy is powerful turn 1 disruption, and being able to use therapy on yourself to accelerate bloodghasts with landfall is a powerful option. However, this deck also fell to the Forceful Extraction and Forgeline decks. The slower clock and lack of blocking also gave the edge to other early pressure decks.

7th - LightsOutAce1
Black Lotus and Frost Titan are a potent combo, able to lock down a lot of the competition. However, while many of the games were close it ultimately lost out against the Forgeline decks in our testing and naturally couldn't handle Forceful Extraction.

6th - Amps2Eleven
Angel's Grace + Isochron Scepter actually managed to beat Forgeline in our testing, which earned it a lot of points (as Forgeline was a very common deck among the finalists). The deck wins by setting up an Isochron Scepter with Angel's Grace and waiting for your opponent to draw their whole deck (while Angel's Grace prevents you losing to mill). Unfortunately, Angel Grace's use of Split Second didn't protect it from Surgical Extraction once in the graveyard, and the deck also lost out to disruptive decks with a fast clock.

5th - DunSkivuli
Surgical Extraction + Force of Will was one of the most commonly submitted decks. The deck attacks at a wicked angle, countering whatever your opponent plays and immediately extracting it. If your opponent refuses to play a card, they just wait for you to discard to hand size. Eventually they win by milling because your deck is gone. However, Chancellor of the Forge + Leyline of the Meek never gives the opponent a spell to counter. While they do discard to hand size, their clock is much faster than an opponent trying to extract their deck the slow way.

4th - Ston3notS
In Forceful Extraction mirrors, the first player to get a Surgical Extraction in their graveyard for any reason generally loses. This is because the deck has no reasonable way of stopping an opponent from extracting their extraction once it’s in the grave. You can counter the first extraction, but it’s an instant - they’ll just put another on the stack on top of it. Trading 2 for 1 with forces to extractions each time isn’t sustainable with 7 card hands. Extracting your own extraction to fizzle your opponent is a possibility, but it forces you to play defense with your extractions instead of offense. This means that players take turns discarding copies of Force of Will until one player has 8 Surgical Extractions in hand and is forced to discard one of them. Then they usually lose. This means the deck with more Surgical Extractions is actually at a disadvantage, because they consistently draw 8 copies before their opponent. Because Ston3notS had only 20 surgical extractions in comparison to DunSkivuli’s 30, he won the mirror.

3rd - sadisticmystic1
Chancellor of the Forge + Leyline of the Meek was a vicious uncounterable combo with a 2 turn clock (in most cases). Because this deck does its thing before turn 1 it also proved to be immune to most disruption. Forgeline dominated the Pod of Champions, with only Angelic Scepter beating it cleanly. Frost Lotus gave it a serious fight, but was far more likely to get significantly awkward draws than Forgeline, and inevitably stumbled first in our testing.

2nd - benbuzz790
In Forgeline mirrors, the deck with more tokens generally wins (as the Leyline buffs all tokens on the board, including your opponents). benbuzz790's list ultimately blinked first in the playoff against cobaqua's own list. Cobaqua noted that he chose a slightly more Chancellor-heavy list specifically for this reason.

1st - cobaqua
Our double trouble champion. I'd like to use this space to note the sheer dominance of this archetype. Only three decks in the archetype were submitted. Each took one of the top 3 slots in the tournament.

Final Thoughts
Congratulations to the 3 creators of the Forgeline deck. I'd also like to mention some of the quirks of the meta. Surging Flame was a popular threat, but not nearly as popular as the copies of Mindbreak Trap and Leyline of Sanctity included to answer it. While uncounterable threats, counterspells, hand disruption and leyline of sanctity were all common sights, not a single copy of The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale or Blightsteel Colossus was played (both cards I expected to perform well, as Blightsteel Colossus never actually enters the graveyard and Tabernacle seriously disrupts both swarm and lotus+threat decks). This allowed Forgeline and mill strategies to run rampant.

Additionally, while 6 distinct players mentioned how well their list was positioned against Chalice of the Void, only one player actually brought a Chalice of the Void to the tournament.

All in all, this was a lot of fun. If you'd like to see another of these events or have suggestions for the format, let me know in the comments.

Complete List of Submitted Decks and Pods


What Happened
64 Entrants were randomly broken into 8 pods. Each deck was played as directed against each other deck in that pod, until it claimed two victories in a row. The finisher with the best record advanced to the Pod of Champions. In the event of a tie for the best record in a pod, both decks were advanced. This happened once.

Pod 1 Champion
from sadisticmystic1
39 Chancellor of the Forge, 21 Leyline of the Meek

Pod 2 Champion
from corran132
20 x Sire of Insanity 40 x Black Lotus

Pod 3 Champion
from DunSkivuli
30 Force of Will, 30 Surgical Extraction

Pod 4 Champion
from Ston3notS
40 Force of Will 20 Surgical Extraction

Pod 5 Champion
from LightsOutAce1
40x Black Lotus 20x Frost Titan

Pod 6 Champion
from nomorepghtrash
12 x Cabal Therapy 25 x Bloodghast 23 x Swamp

Pod 7 Champions
from benbuzz790
42x Chancellor of the Forge 18x Leyline of the Meek

from Amps2Eleven
20x Plains 28x Angel's Grace 12x Isochron Scepter

Pod 8 Champion
from cobaqua
17x Leyline of the Meek 43x Chancellor of the Forge



Final Results
9th - corran132
The combo of Black Lotus and Sire of Insanity was formidable turn 1 disruption, but couldn't survive in the final pod. Chancellor of the Forge acts before turn 1, while Force of Will and Surgical Extraction would disrupt and dismantle the deck. What with Bloodghast enjoying discard and Frost Titan being a more dangerous threat overall, Lotus Insanity wasn't able to rack up many wins in the pod of champions.

8th - nomorepghtrash
Cabal Therapy is powerful turn 1 disruption, and being able to use therapy on yourself to accelerate bloodghasts with landfall is a powerful option. However, this deck also fell to the Forceful Extraction and Forgeline decks. The slower clock and lack of blocking also gave the edge to other early pressure decks.

7th - LightsOutAce1
Black Lotus and Frost Titan are a potent combo, able to lock down a lot of the competition. However, while many of the games were close it ultimately lost out against the Forgeline decks in our testing and naturally couldn't handle Forceful Extraction.

6th - Amps2Eleven
Angel's Grace + Isochron Scepter actually managed to beat Forgeline in our testing, which earned it a lot of points (as Forgeline was a very common deck among the finalists). The deck wins by setting up an Isochron Scepter with Angel's Grace and waiting for your opponent to draw their whole deck (while Angel's Grace prevents you losing to mill). Unfortunately, Angel Grace's use of Split Second didn't protect it from Surgical Extraction once in the graveyard, and the deck also lost out to disruptive decks with a fast clock.

5th - DunSkivuli
Surgical Extraction + Force of Will was one of the most commonly submitted decks. The deck attacks at a wicked angle, countering whatever your opponent plays and immediately extracting it. If your opponent refuses to play a card, they just wait for you to discard to hand size. Eventually they win by milling because your deck is gone. However, Chancellor of the Forge + Leyline of the Meek never gives the opponent a spell to counter. While they do discard to hand size, their clock is much faster than an opponent trying to extract their deck the slow way.

4th - Ston3notS
In Forceful Extraction mirrors, the first player to get a Surgical Extraction in their graveyard for any reason generally loses. This is because the deck has no reasonable way of stopping an opponent from extracting their extraction once it’s in the grave. You can counter the first extraction, but it’s an instant - they’ll just put another on the stack on top of it. Trading 2 for 1 with forces to extractions each time isn’t sustainable with 7 card hands. Extracting your own extraction to fizzle your opponent is a possibility, but it forces you to play defense with your extractions instead of offense. This means that players take turns discarding copies of Force of Will until one player has 8 Surgical Extractions in hand and is forced to discard one of them. Then they usually lose. This means the deck with more Surgical Extractions is actually at a disadvantage, because they consistently draw 8 copies before their opponent. Because Ston3notS had only 20 surgical extractions in comparison to DunSkivuli’s 30, he won the mirror.

3rd - sadisticmystic1
Chancellor of the Forge + Leyline of the Meek was a vicious uncounterable combo with a 2 turn clock (in most cases). Because this deck does its thing before turn 1 it also proved to be immune to most disruption. Forgeline dominated the Pod of Champions, with only Angelic Scepter beating it cleanly. Frost Lotus gave it a serious fight, but was far more likely to get significantly awkward draws than Forgeline, and inevitably stumbled first in our testing.

2nd - benbuzz790
In Forgeline mirrors, the deck with more tokens generally wins (as the Leyline buffs all tokens on the board, including your opponents). benbuzz790's list ultimately blinked first in the playoff against cobaqua's own list. Cobaqua noted that he chose a slightly more Chancellor-heavy list specifically for this reason.

1st - cobaqua
Our double trouble champion. I'd like to use this space to note the sheer dominance of this archetype. Only three decks in the archetype were submitted. Each took one of the top 3 slots in the tournament.

Final Thoughts
Congratulations to the 3 creators of the Forgeline deck. I'd also like to mention some of the quirks of the meta. Surging Flame was a popular threat, but not nearly as popular as the copies of Mindbreak Trap and Leyline of Sanctity included to answer it. While uncounterable threats, counterspells, hand disruption and leyline of sanctity were all common sights, not a single copy of The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale or Blightsteel Colossus was played (both cards I expected to perform well, as Blightsteel Colossus never actually enters the graveyard and Tabernacle seriously disrupts both swarm and lotus+threat decks). This allowed Forgeline and mill strategies to run rampant.

Additionally, while 6 distinct players mentioned how well their list was positioned against Chalice of the Void, only one player actually brought a Chalice of the Void to the tournament.

All in all, this was a lot of fun. If you'd like to see another of these events or have suggestions for the format, let me know in the comments.

Typh's argument here can be summed up like this.

"Assume that the nazi policies were positive for society. However, nazi policies were negative for society. Contradiction!"

No. Seriously, this is just crazytown.

The argument that the holocaust is what happens when you care about people is a great example of the mental game of twister that Libertarians have to consciously perform. Even if building a military was established as a bad thing, that wouldn't demonstrate that caring about people is bad. It would just mean that building a military is a bad way to help people.

This is a new level of facepalm.

Format Rules
1) Your deck must have exactly 60 cards in it.

2) Pick 2 cards. Your deck can contain only those cards and basic lands. The 4 card limit does not apply.

3) Your deck cannot be capable of winning before each player has taken a full turn against an opponent that has a deck comprised of 60 grizzly bears. Why 60 grizzly bears? The goal is to prevent the most absurd fast decks like Chancellor of the Dross. Previous versions of this rule said, “Your deck can’t be capable of winning before each player has taken a full turn”, but some players cleverly abused that by killing themselves, forcing their opponents to ‘win’ early and therefore be disqualified. We’ve found this “against 60 grizzly bears” restriction solves both problems.

4) Wishes are banned.


Tournament Procedure
1) We pilot all submitted decks for the participants, then report the results. All decks are played against all other decks. They are ranked according to their overall win record.

2) Decks will be played going first and second against each opponent. If your deck wins only one of the two games, the decks will be rematched until one deck wins both games or until 10 total games are played. If 10 games are played this way the match is considered a draw.

3) The games are played with hands and decklists revealed. This makes it easier to determine the optimal play for each player, so your deck won’t get sabotaged by a less skilled pilot running it for you.


Deadline
Submit Your Decks by Sunday 7pm EST (PM me). We run them for you against all other decks and report the results..

Quote from Typho0nn »

Quote from Blinking Spirit »

Quote from Typho0nn »

I wasn't saying you were talking about socialism, I was saying you didn't add any references or examples. You just blanketed. I was giving some examples of where the 'well-being' of people was looked after in the terms of socialism and communism and had failed. But could you add some references or examples to your 'argument'/statement.

Me, two posts before what you quoted, because you didn't read the thread for context like I told you to (not that you should even need to be told): "I will say that we do have some instinctive recognition for human rights in the form of our moral sense, because evolution has been chugging away at this same problem for millions of years."

A little bit earlier: "Give Hobbes and Locke another look -- especially Hobbes. Rights aren't just any old social contract; they are the optimizing contract. Think of human society as a math problem and rights as the solution."

You think I may have been talking about human rights, perhaps? "Life, liberty, and property" and all that?

I was providing examples of how societies that looked after well-being tend to fail, using examples of different scale. (It was a counter argument, not that you should even need to be told how to argue)

Alright... and how do these relate to; "Cultures with norms that promote their members' well-being tend to survive and expand; cultures with other norms tend to collapse and disappear." How are they doing better from "Human rights" and "moral sense" and expanding. I can't see how you have argued that these things are allowing to survive and expand. Rights are constantly violated when expansion is needed. Government will forcefully buy out any property for expansion as in China and has happened here in Adelaide with the Southern Express way/Port rd expansion.

Still don't see an example backing up your claim about people being executed as punishment for tax evasion. Since you've failed to demonstrate this repeatedly now, I'll assume you're incapable of coming up with an example and are tactfully surrendering the point.

Quote from Typho0nn »

Quote from Blinking Spirit »

Quote from Typho0nn »

Cultures that promote their members well-being, through communism or socialism tend to collapse, or many deaths involved. Look at USSR, Venezuela, Nazi-Germany, Mao China. The freer the culture the better they tend to expand and survive and improvements in overall quality of life; USA, Australia, S Korea, Today China. You have no reference or examples... for your 'argument'.

You have no idea what my "argument" even was. Read the thread for context. I was not talking about socialism.

I wasn't saying you were talking about socialism, I was saying you didn't add any references or examples. You just blanketed. I was giving some examples of where the 'well-being' of people was looked after in the terms of socialism and communism and had failed. But could you add some references or examples to your 'argument'/statement.

Speaking of examples, I'd still love to get some examples of people being executed in modern Australia for the crime of tax evasion.

@Typho0nn. I think I missed where you listed the number of people that have been executed in modern Australia as punishment for not paying taxes. I'll settle for just 3 examples.

Yep. Evolution's got to do at least some of it, because any species with a murder rate higher than its birth rate is going to do pretty poorly in the Darwin sweepstakes.

Quote from DJK3654 »

They are the same thing though. The Craig Timberg article as in the OP is using Propornot as a source. The NaturalNews site does a pretty reasonable job of arguing that Propornot are not a good source, and therefore the article is lacking.

That assumes that we should pay some attention to the argument itself, rather than just dismissing the claim entirely because the source was wrong about something once. There seems to be little room for this in the post I was quoting.

Quote from DJK3654 »

Quote from Stairc »

Quote from warghoul »

Member when the CIA said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

http://www.naturalnews.com/2016-12-07-washington-post-admits-fake-news-propornot-source-defamation-craig-timberg.html

Remember when Naturalnews wrote that vaccines were causing the cancer epidemic?

Relevant quote:

"Get it yet? Vaccines are the SOURCE of our modern-day epidemics of chronic disease. There is a dark, deadly truth about the vaccine industry, the CDC and vaccine scientists everywhere. The truth is that vaccines are the vector by which cancer and other diseases are spread through the human population."
-Linked Article

I think they make a pretty good case that the Washington Post's argument isn't good though. WP was making it out that the issue was very extensive, which seems at least a bit much.

Doesn't matter. They got something wrong once. It seems that Warghoul (who's just repeating Trump's twitter feed of course), is implying that means we shouldn't take this report seriously either.

Quote from warghoul »

Member when the CIA said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

http://www.naturalnews.com/2016-12-07-washington-post-admits-fake-news-propornot-source-defamation-craig-timberg.html

Remember when Naturalnews wrote that vaccines were causing the cancer epidemic?

Relevant quote:

"Get it yet? Vaccines are the SOURCE of our modern-day epidemics of chronic disease. There is a dark, deadly truth about the vaccine industry, the CDC and vaccine scientists everywhere. The truth is that vaccines are the vector by which cancer and other diseases are spread through the human population."
-Linked Article