All I ask is that I meet a guy who (a) is cute, (b) is romantic, (c) is intelligent, (d) puts out and (e) lives nearby. Is that so much to ask for? =P
In my experience, cute seems to be inversely proportional to putting out. Also, intelligence seems to be inversely proportional to putting out.
For example, I had a complete jackass try to get into my pants and I hung with him for like two hours, at which point I realized I was not that desperate. All kinds of people will put out; they tend unfortunately to be people who are neither intelligent nor particularly cute.
Well, they did try to kill me. I just defended myself... In the most evil way possible.
I take it you're referring to what I've come to call "The halfling incident" where they stabbed me with my own swords?
One word: Metagaming. My cousin and his girlfriend's characters would always team up and do things by themselves, ignoring the rest of us. And my other friend and his girlfriend would team up as well. Basically, they would look out for each other and leave me to fend for myself. It was pretty fun for a while, but I got really annoyed after about 4 games. That's when I turned into a jerk and my character got pissed about being left out of the alliances.
...Oh, and also because I'm a horrible person:D
Wow. That's BS. Couples should not be frickin' idiots when participating in roleplaying games. We understand that you are in "love," and we don't need to understand that everywhere.
And... new topic. How was everyone's FNM? I came in 1st, but the competition there isn't that intense, and only 8 people show up usually. I'd go to the other store, but there's this guy there that I enjoy looking at.
(I swear, if this topic somehow goes back to BUTTS then I will be forced to ... uh... contribute.)
Agreed. Evil characters can be really interesting and fun to interact with (and play) if you follow the idea that evil means you do things for your own benefit; it doesn't mean you're a jerk to everyone. That way you can have an evil character who meshes very well with the party even though he has different motives. You can even end up with someone who does things that look good in the short run because they know it will give them far more personal gain in the future (like being the party med kit).
Hmmm. You see, that's what my playing group takes ethical neutrality to mean: "you do things for your own benefit." We take evil to be "you seek to harm others." Needless to say, having good PCs = party tension.
I haven't played any evil PCs but I have played some characters that really looked like they'd be evil for a while, and I loved those. Really more DMPCs . . . . I'ma looking at you, Karin and Adrian.
I like clerics. I like bards even better. I wish there was bards that was as powerful as clerics. I'm looking forward to the 4E cleric a lot. It's said to feel a lot more like playing a caster rather than a self-buffing tank.
Argggg. Evil characters.... Ugh. It can be fun, but my experience is that players don't do a very nuanced, tasteful job of playing evil alignments. And I always play Chaotic Good, so that doesn't work too well. :/
EDIT: I agree with Photon Eater. Having to deal with equipment kind of sucks. I try to play characters where I don't have to deal equipment as much. It is more fun for me to figure out what my character is and how she/he is going to be.
Concerning biofuels: We can make gas from switchgrass. About a month back Talk of the Nation on NPR had 2 guys on that could make gas from ocean algae and from waste like tires and diapers. And this guy figured out how to burn seawater! Of course the greed of the oil companies would rather drive our entire world into the toilet so they can wipe their rears with $500 bills.
What if the equilibrium is a price that is still too high for the poorest nations to afford? Just say to them "oh well, too bad, you have to starve because the market says so"? Forgive me if I find that a poor answer.
And if you think water scarcity wouldn't have an impact on food prices... well, I think you just need to consider that for a bit.
The comment Cherryboom made has a decidedly different flavor than some remark that "X is gay." Saying that means that X is bad because gay is bad. Cherryboom's remark makes an ironic reference to self-loathing people with evil politics, and it is funny besides. It should not be considered homophobic.
I think your comments are important, and I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to labor the semantics of points where we have commonality, because it seems we basically agree philosophically on this issue.
However, I think your remarks do reveal something else that is interesting about this policy.
I know it seems rather tiring of me to labor the point, but it seems like when people make the argument about the policy being justified, it has to do with purely unquantifiable terms. It would be great if we could know how many people were caught or how many plots were foiled even if we could not know who the specific people are. I insist on this point because I take it very seriously that the burden of proof is on the government for this policy, and it seems like "national security" is being used as a catch-all excuse to avoid the question "Does this policy actually make us safer and if so, how?"
And the whole, "If you're an upright citizen, you have nothing to fear" argument is rubbish. It misses the point: the government tends not to give power back. Today, they want to listen to your phone calls. Tomorrow, it's reading your email. The next day, who knows what it will be? It's a slippery slope once you start down that path, and it's one I'd much rather avoid.
Your comment is very interesting, because I think we should be especially weary of these kinds of policies, as they are basically emergency powers. We're in a kind of limbo where we have this state of emergency which the government can declare (and let down) at will. So really, if the government wants to keep these powers, it can just claim a state of permanent emergency, for reasons which, again have to be kept secret. (Here, I'm taking emergency to be a general, heightened state of alert.)
The level of secrecy is getting to be quite excessive, and it seems odd that government would demand such transparency from its citizens without meeting a similar standard itself. (And by odd I mean ridiculous.)
The reason I take it to be important that the government--as you say--takes power and does not give it back is that what is happening is that the social contract is eroding when we think of the direction where we are headed, which is that the claims that the people can make against the State is ever dwindling.
Eh... maybe. It's fallacious to speak of the "Founders" as some monolithic, unanimous entity in any case, but even if we do take the results of the Constitutional Convention to be a generalized summary of their views, we see a Constitution that has sacrificed some of the paranoia advocated by the hardcore "minarchists", the anti-Federalists as they would come to be known*, in favor of strength and functionality. To get to specific Founders, Madison and Adams were both in the strong-national-government camp; indeed, the Constitution as written was rather weaker than either would have liked, especially Adams. Washington, by his own admission not much of an intellectual, largely stayed out of the debate, but seems to have been sympathetic to Madison's views. Hamilton stood up in the Convention and called the British Parliament (!) the best government ever established. Jefferson was probably the most "libertarian" of the big names - other than nuts of little influence like Sam Adams - and he wasn't a part of the Convention, being in France obsessively buying books, art, and wine at the time.
*Indeed, even the anti-Federalists, for the most part, were motivated more by loyalty to their states, and fear that a strong national government would override the state governments' freedoms, than by a suspicion of government per se.
I don't speak of them as having all believed the same thing. However, I do maintain that they believed in a government with limited powers and processes for how the State overrides individual claims to such rights as privacy (which we can reasonably infer from the Third Amendment) and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure (made explicit in the Fourth Amendment). Basically, the Founders, despite for example, Madison and Hamilton's belief in an "energetic" government, believed in specific limitations on government power.
I think it's easy to fill in the blanks as to why they supported such restrictions. I take their motivation to be a firm belief that unchecked government power is not to be trusted. (Here, I have generalized uncheck government power and straight up government power, which for my argument mean basically the same thing: government power cannot be trusted, which is why it has to be decentralized and limited by certain processes which are made clear to everyone.)
Please enlighten me as to the fallacy of this approach.
I agree that saying, "Hey we caught these bad guys!" would be a good thing to do. HOW we caught them, however, should absolutely never be disclosed to the public. When it has been, the terrorists have changed their methods (the aforementioned cell phone issue, which I believe was first reported in the NYT.) Terrorists read newspapers and watch the news, too. The enemy is not uninformed, so withholding methods is prudent.
Sorry, that's what I wrote, but not what I took myself to be saying. If I restate the point, I mean that if the policy of having wiretaps were successful, then it is prudent to believe that the government would in some way make it clear that there is a direct causal link between government infringement on individual privacy and the maintenance of public safety.
That is, if the policy were justified, the government would be able to say "boy, good thing that we all assented to this controversial policy, because it made us safer in this particular concrete way that is beyond dispute."
Perhaps it is my ignorance, but are there any concrete cases where we have been made safer by the existence of this policy?
What if it's helping to maintain the current level of security? What if getting rid of it would prove a detriment to the country's security?
Well, I don't know. And that's my whole point. It's because I don't know that there is a problem. It would be really nice if I knew whether or not this policy is constructive or not. But I won't know because the government gets to keep all the secrets, and we the citizens can't keep any.
This is, unfortunately, true. The government is much bigger than it needs to be, and I doubt they're going to give any of that size back in the next eight years.
So am I to take it that you find a national security state to be okay, but the government should scale down otherwise? I should think that in general, we want government to be less intrusive in many ways including with respect to the existence of methods of gathering information which challenge our traditional customs of legitimate search.
A valid point - however, if they manage to prevent and attack, I highly doubt they would be bragging ("Hey, we caught this guy that we think was going to bomb something!").
Why? Government loves to brag when it does something well. Since security is the big buzzword now, it seems like the government would be all over a story like that. Besides, it could release details about how it caught the would-be perpetrators which would serve as a startling reminder that we citizens need the government in our pants to keep us safe.
I guess I trust the government a bit more than you guys do.
I would argue that one should proceed from the assumption that government cannot be trusted. It's the assumption that the Founders proceeded from, and it also seems to be the assumption best supported by a general reading of history: to the extent government is good, it's because it is minimal and stays out of everyone's hair.
The US is no longer minimal government. We're moving towards maximal government, and there is and will never be a reason for it.
In my experience, cute seems to be inversely proportional to putting out. Also, intelligence seems to be inversely proportional to putting out.
For example, I had a complete jackass try to get into my pants and I hung with him for like two hours, at which point I realized I was not that desperate. All kinds of people will put out; they tend unfortunately to be people who are neither intelligent nor particularly cute.
Wow. That's BS. Couples should not be frickin' idiots when participating in roleplaying games. We understand that you are in "love," and we don't need to understand that everywhere.
This conversation, plus phallus = win
Of course. You're not goin' all prudish on us, I hope.
Okay, that was exceedingly awesome. Kinda how it works, too.
That's rly cool. Gotta luv FNM. I remember one night playin' affinity. Good times. Also what list were you playin'?
That has got to be the gayest thing I've read all day. And I've read some pretty gay things. Ruv roo, too.
Fixed.
Hmmm. You see, that's what my playing group takes ethical neutrality to mean: "you do things for your own benefit." We take evil to be "you seek to harm others." Needless to say, having good PCs = party tension.
I'm really excited about 4E in general.
EDIT: I agree with Photon Eater. Having to deal with equipment kind of sucks. I try to play characters where I don't have to deal equipment as much. It is more fun for me to figure out what my character is and how she/he is going to be.
How anti-capitalist of you!
I know all kinds of things that could be done about it. The problem is that the solutions I'm thinking of involve things that horrify most people.
Yay for the free market, hey?
Time to shake my capitalist magic 8-ball...
"Yes"
Keep being awesome, Cherry.
However, I think your remarks do reveal something else that is interesting about this policy.
I know it seems rather tiring of me to labor the point, but it seems like when people make the argument about the policy being justified, it has to do with purely unquantifiable terms. It would be great if we could know how many people were caught or how many plots were foiled even if we could not know who the specific people are. I insist on this point because I take it very seriously that the burden of proof is on the government for this policy, and it seems like "national security" is being used as a catch-all excuse to avoid the question "Does this policy actually make us safer and if so, how?"
Then do please pardon me. It seemed to me like you were defending the reasoning behind the policy.
Your comment is very interesting, because I think we should be especially weary of these kinds of policies, as they are basically emergency powers. We're in a kind of limbo where we have this state of emergency which the government can declare (and let down) at will. So really, if the government wants to keep these powers, it can just claim a state of permanent emergency, for reasons which, again have to be kept secret. (Here, I'm taking emergency to be a general, heightened state of alert.)
The level of secrecy is getting to be quite excessive, and it seems odd that government would demand such transparency from its citizens without meeting a similar standard itself. (And by odd I mean ridiculous.)
The reason I take it to be important that the government--as you say--takes power and does not give it back is that what is happening is that the social contract is eroding when we think of the direction where we are headed, which is that the claims that the people can make against the State is ever dwindling.
1) Butthead rule for critical failures on attack rolls: Roll 1d12. If it comes up 12, you die... 9-11 you break your weapon... Stuff like that.
2) Called shot -4 to attack roll. Broken as all hell.
3) Complete magic-psionics transparency.
Ya. I hate house rules.
I don't speak of them as having all believed the same thing. However, I do maintain that they believed in a government with limited powers and processes for how the State overrides individual claims to such rights as privacy (which we can reasonably infer from the Third Amendment) and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure (made explicit in the Fourth Amendment). Basically, the Founders, despite for example, Madison and Hamilton's belief in an "energetic" government, believed in specific limitations on government power.
I think it's easy to fill in the blanks as to why they supported such restrictions. I take their motivation to be a firm belief that unchecked government power is not to be trusted. (Here, I have generalized uncheck government power and straight up government power, which for my argument mean basically the same thing: government power cannot be trusted, which is why it has to be decentralized and limited by certain processes which are made clear to everyone.)
Please enlighten me as to the fallacy of this approach.
Sorry, that's what I wrote, but not what I took myself to be saying. If I restate the point, I mean that if the policy of having wiretaps were successful, then it is prudent to believe that the government would in some way make it clear that there is a direct causal link between government infringement on individual privacy and the maintenance of public safety.
That is, if the policy were justified, the government would be able to say "boy, good thing that we all assented to this controversial policy, because it made us safer in this particular concrete way that is beyond dispute."
Perhaps it is my ignorance, but are there any concrete cases where we have been made safer by the existence of this policy?
Well, I don't know. And that's my whole point. It's because I don't know that there is a problem. It would be really nice if I knew whether or not this policy is constructive or not. But I won't know because the government gets to keep all the secrets, and we the citizens can't keep any.
So am I to take it that you find a national security state to be okay, but the government should scale down otherwise? I should think that in general, we want government to be less intrusive in many ways including with respect to the existence of methods of gathering information which challenge our traditional customs of legitimate search.
Why? Government loves to brag when it does something well. Since security is the big buzzword now, it seems like the government would be all over a story like that. Besides, it could release details about how it caught the would-be perpetrators which would serve as a startling reminder that we citizens need the government in our pants to keep us safe.
Do you mean to say that you think the program is still justified even if it might be doing nothing at all to improve security?
And by more stable, how much more stable do we get than zero domestic terror attacks since 9-11-2001?
I would argue that one should proceed from the assumption that government cannot be trusted. It's the assumption that the Founders proceeded from, and it also seems to be the assumption best supported by a general reading of history: to the extent government is good, it's because it is minimal and stays out of everyone's hair.
The US is no longer minimal government. We're moving towards maximal government, and there is and will never be a reason for it.
If marijuana is illegal, it should be made legal.