Fleshgrinder's page

Bunnies have to eat their own poo to survive.

Just consider that when making them sentient.

"Uh... what are you eating?"
"My poo. Why?"
"... WHY ARE YOU EATING YOUR POO!?"
"My fermentation chamber evolved on the wrong side of my intestines. The first run through my body packages it up and then my fermentation chamber breaks down the plant matter so my intestines can absorb it... this means I have to eat everything twice."
"So how long ago was it that your race angered the gods?"
"Jokes on you, I evolved to think my poo tastes delicious."

This could lead to more people trying to "subtly" defending their item on the forums if they knew it was doing bad.

The anonymity ensures people aren't sitting around freaking out that their item is doing poorly.

And, don't forget, the judges still have final say, so what if your item had more votes than anyone but the judges still felt there were better items, how upset would you be?

Just relax and do a rough outline of your archetype, there is enough info on the Riverlands online to at least get an idea of where to start.

Dennis Baker wrote:

I think the stigma against something being a spell in a can is over-done. Some of the best items in the game are spell-in-a-can. The thing is the low hanging spell in a can fruit has been picked many times over.

I agree completely. Spells-in-a-can are easy to made and can be very decent items but they often lack that spark which would turn them into something greater than decent item.

Since the voting started I have seen a lot of decent spell-in-a-can items that were good items that could show in published modules but only a few of them were reaching beyond decent-but-unimpressive.

A good spell in a can is all about what the item is and how you activate it.

A rock that is warm and when you activate and throw it it acts like a fireball... that's boring.

A little mechanical monkey that you activate and it runs forward screaming and then explodes, that's awesome.

I have seen maybe 10 totally amazing items, a lot of decent though uninspired items, and a good amount of formatting mistakes, pricing mistakes, or items that just straight up ignored the advice threads.

Though some of the SIAC items had interesting enough activation methods or were made from odd items so I would give them a pass for being interesting despite being a SIAC.

Am I the only person that reads an item, and mentally votes it down to violating one of Shawn's rules?

I will even admit to voting for an item due to Rule 27.

Speaking as a Sean:

Might not bug Shawns and Shauns as much, but it drives us Seans up the wall.

Every min-maxed character has weaknesses. Usually big glaring ones.

Just make sure to include encounters that exploit that weakness.

Usually low Will saves.

Yeah, only that it doesn't work that way in reality. Villains have better stuff to do than spend their action on chugging a Cure Not Enough Wounds potion, while four or more PCs are wailing on them. Players hoard consumables. Most of the time a group will not let an enemy disengage and retreat, so that he can actually heal himself up as described in his tactics.

There's an entire "villain's escape tool box" listed on the NPC page of the PFSRD.

It gives you an entire list of spells and gadgets to assist in an escape.

Again, your problems appear to be completely confined to your GMing style, not the system itself.

I've just preferred kind of taking the opposite approach from E6.

E6 makes the players weaker so that the world around them seems more threatening.

I just made the world around my players more threatening.

Sure, they can scry, but lots of people can scry, so EVERYONE owns anti-scrying stuff.

The wizard can fly, but this is common, so anti-flight traps and such are installed everywhere.

Dave Mustaine:

A good guitar player with a voice only a mother could love.

His singing makes Megadeth un-listenable.

That and his recent conversion to insanity.

Spare me your tough-man terminology.

Then spare me the fake intellectualism.

You have still not substantially argued against the point I was making that the core balance of the game has certain assumptions ( which I am not going to repeat for a fourth time ), outside of saying that you can just adjust to that.

I have not done so substantially according to you. So far most posts seem to agree with me, and since we do not have a proper moderator the only thing we do have is the opinion of the audience.

Since part of my main argument is that keeping as close to the the core balance as possible is desirable

Desirable to you.

contrary to just eyeballing it and hoping for the best ( which is all that re-adjusting really CRs entails, outside of tons of work )

After 17 years of eyeballing, it ceases being eyeballing and becomes an advanced grasp of challenge mechanics.

We are quite obviously working at cross-purposes here.

No crap. You're trying to enforce a houserule you'd like to see on everyone. I am simply asking the core rules remain as is and I'm suggesting you houserule YOUR problem. Instead you'd prefer to modify an entire system to fix YOUR problem.

My argument is for the core balance and how magic item crafting undermines it.

Define core balance.

Show me an encounter that only the magic item rules can break.

Find me a design document that outlines what this almighty "core balance" is supposed to be.

Because the avaiable rules make it appear that core balance is inherently adjustable.

Your argument is how adjusting things is easy-peasy.

Nope, my argument is that you're wrong. I made a point about how easy encounter adjustment is to counter your point of it being "hours of work", which as been refuted by more GMs in this discussion than me.

Anyway, I'm done. You have been getting progressively more unpleasant and I can spend my time with better tasks. You can strut around like you actually won the argument, if you like.

You could have conceded some time ago, only you made the choice to keep failing to construct your argument well.

And I didn't win anything, I'm just the negative.

I didn't win, you simply lost.

Fleshgrinder wrote:

No, my argument simply rests on you being wrong.

I told you that.

My job isn't to convert you to my side, it's to make you look wrong in the eyes of anyone reading this.

Debate opponents aren't for agreeing, they are targets to do splash damage with.

As I said, you are using FOX News style debating. Shouting down people is easier than actually thinking about their arguments.

Oh, well. Makes it easier to ignore you in the future. Goodbye.

No, I'm using the basis of logical argument.

You made a positive statement, I believe it is wrong. I have nothing to prove, I simply have to poke holes in your argument.

Unless you consider the basis of western law to be "Fox news debate tactics".

You brought logical terms into this.

Be careful what you wish for, some of us actually take the time to understand logical debate and not simply throw words around like we know what we're talking about.

As posted by Orthos:

Burdens of the affirmative
Burdens of the affirmative is a basic part of debate. It is an agreement that the affirmative team must prove their points through evidence. This is to prevent the affirmative from creating fake plans that have no evidence on either side; therefore, the affirmative will always win.

You are the affirmative team.

So affirm or concede.

Or run, your choice.

It's a combination of instinct and childish humour.

There's some part of the male brain that still connects dominance with peeing on things.

Now, speaking as a life-long nihilist who spent 13 years in Catholic School, I practically have a PhD in blasphemy and desecration.

Okay, so what you need is someone with Knowledge (Religion) and you need to catalog the holy symbols and discover their meaning.

Anyone can pee on a holy symbol, or invert it, but if you know what its meant to represent, you can truly defile it.

For example, peeing on a virginity idol isn't as good as using it to deflower a virgin.

Inverting a crucifix isn't nearly as bad as displaying Jesus as happy and laughing, or in sexual ecstasy, while being crucified, as his suffering is a major key to the image. You've disarmed the image by removing the key to it.

Desecration of evil temples is easy. Steal valuables and give them to charity, specifically charities that counter act the evil god's specific spheres of influence.

Bless the remains of sacrificial remains.

Use a sacrificial dagger to carve up a roast and serve it to the poor.

Don't smash the temple, clean it up, make it look pretty and remove all the objects of worship.

Stuff like that.

Dude. I've put forth a detailed argument. You have not bothered to dispute me on any of its points, aside from "That's not how it works in my campaigns", which is not even germane to the basis of my argument of why magic item rafting is unbalanced against the core assumptions of the game.

As such, you already failed in trying to disprove the argument, because you are trying to disprove the symptons, not the root of it. If you want to disprove the mechanical reasoning I've put forth, the point of attack is my assertion that the core game mechanics are built of 4 PCs, WBL and 15 point buy = monster CR, not that magic item crafting works fine in your game.

Your move.

And I DID counter those by pointing out that CR, WBL, and a 4 PC party are GUIDELINES, not UNBREAKABLE RULES.

Because they are guidelines, they are designed to be modified.

Because they are designed to be modified, the "game is designed around 4 PCs, WBL, and monster CR" is false.

I pointed this out a post ago.

They even have guidelines of how to adjust the CR for a 6 or 3 person party.

Combine this with the fact that you are encouraged to use encounters with ELs up to 3 higher than your APL all combine to show that CR is not a fixed rule.

And because it is variable, it can deal with the current magic item creation rules, YOU just have to put a tiny bit of effort in as a GM.

So unless you're willing to attack everything that can negative affect CR, you're being intellectually inconsistent by cherry picking one problem that is only a problem if you use the CR system like biblical law.

No, that's how a debate WORKS.

I am not making a positive statement, I am simply making the statement that you are wrong.

It's like a court case.

You are the positive statement, the prosecution. You are making the statement that Pathfinder is guilty of broken magic item rules.

I am the defense. The defense never has to prove innocents, they just must cast doubt on the guilt.

The defense doesn't have to prove he didn't do it, he has to prove that the evidence that says he did is wrong.

This is the FOUNDATION of logical argument.

So, you have put forth the positive statement.

I am saying your statement is false.

Now give me the information I requested so that I may then begin the poking of holes.

If you fail to prove your case, the defense wins by default. Exactly as if the prosecution has failed the burden of proof.

You have given the mechanical example of how magic item creation rules can mess up CRs.

I have pointed out that CRs are a) guidelines and b) already easily messed up by simply having skilled players at your table, such as the infamous "min-maxer".

I have cast doubt on your first point.

You must now reinforce that point, or concede and move onto another point which I, again, simply have to poke holes in.

YOU wanted objectivity.

This is what that looks like.

Okay sunshine, you want to go debate mode?

First, you are the person putting forth the positive statement: Magic item creation rules ARE broken.

I am putting forth that they are not, that's the negative statement.

In debate rules, you go first, you have to prove your point without reasonable doubt. I only have to poke holes.

I am not required to put forth any argument, only to poke holes in yours, that's how a positive statement vs negative statement debate works.

It is impossible to prove a negative, it is only possible to disprove a positive.

First: You used the statement "If Item Creation rules are broken 98% of the time"

Please provide data to show the instance of how often the Item Creation Rules are broken. Include a sample size of at least three digits.

Please provide several SPECIFIC cases of the item creation rules breaking the game. Please provide as much detail as possible for these specific situations. Please provide access to the player's involved so they can be questioned.

Please show the math as to how much the power level of a PC increases when compared to CR when they are what you would probably considered "over equipped."

You want to get objective, then let's get objective.

I am only stating that your opinion is false, hence I have no evidence I need to display. I must simply criticize yours.

I had a Wizard in my last game who pretty much only had item crafting feats. The more he made and sold, the more I increased the magic item arsenal of local thugs who were taking advantage of his driving prices down.

When every humanoid encounter started having wand users, he came to the realization that he was an indirect arms dealer.

Magic item crafting is objectively problematic.

IMO, of course. ^^

By being your opinion it instantly ceases to be objective :P

I don't see many things in Pathfinder that are objectively problematic, I more see differences in preference of play, and PF doesn't support certain styles of play as well as it supports others.

Pathfinder has no issues that can't be solved by an inventive GM and mature players.

This applies to pretty much every system.

That's why I expanded on it.

It's not so much that you change the things you want as much as you realize that many of the things you think you want are actually just impulses to buy. Your brain succumbing to advertising.

When you learn to identify those "false wants", you can stop having them all together.

It also helps if you don't own a TV, don't listen to the radio, and use AdBlock online.

Fleshgrinder wrote:

Grand Magus wrote:

Fleshgrinder wrote:

It's easy.

Those atoms formed into biological molecules. The ones in our brain are combined in a complicated organ capable of functions akin a to computer.

.

Ha hahaha... oh man. Hurray for public school !

.

I could go into the very specific process of abiogenesis to the human brain, but there are these things called evolutionary biology text books that will explain it infinitely better than I.

The short form goes:

There is a clay found near volcanic vents under the ocean that acts as a hell of a catalyst for chemical bonding.
...

.

That's a neat story. But,

Unless you can explain how a group of atoms (our brains) can go around
and "exploring and cataloging" the other atoms around the place, I'm
going to have to say the meaning of "meaning" is still unbound.

.

I already explained that.

Atoms can form into more complex structures capable of more complex activities.

One of these structures is a wet processing center known as a brain.

And I already said, there is no meaning of meaning.

There is no meaning.

There are definitions based on given programming languages of given sensory devices.

Those definitions mean nothing to anyone but our particular processing center.

The definitions are entirely subjective, as nothing exists capable of assigning objective meaning and definition.

No meaning, no purpose, no karma, no destiny, no point.

Just the death rattles of a universe.

Beautifully meaningless.

Fleshgrinder wrote:

So five years ago I made the choice to sort of remove myself from consumerism as best I could. I stopped decorating my living places, I only bought new clothes to replace clothing that fell apart, I've been wearing the same pair of shoes for over three years.

I have almost completely squashed my desire to own "stuff".

When this comes up with others, I'm always surprised at people's reaction to my life style. They act as if somehow I'm the weird one.

Maybe you are. Are you dressing in near rags and do your shoes have holes in them after 3 years of use? If you look markedly different than your peers, you're going to stand out.

We live in a consumer society where the norm is that certain things get replaced after a period of time. And they aren't usually built to last that long as a result. So more than likely, your clothes and shoes are standing out because of their general condition.

So yes, you're weird. Accept that.

Meh, I look at it like being the first set of guys who were against slavery.

Right now, I'm weird, in the future people will figure out this consumerism thing is kind of stupid.

And I'm not trying to compare slavery and consumerism, I'm just using the comparsion of a set of people who were "weird" at one point and eventually became the norm.

And 3 years of use should not have your shoes falling apart, there's zero holes in mine.

Or my clothing.

I will replace the shoes when they no longer function as designed.

Or you can even use religion. In the late 80s and 90s I was in Catholic School as an atheist. I was the weird kid out.

In 2012, in Canada, saying you believe in God in public makes you the weird one these days.

And that was only 20 years to shift that dramatically.

Human creativity can often be described as "Everything is a remix", or "every post is a repost", or other such terms since the human "remake" cycle has existed since human language began.

While we used to remake myths and legends over time, causing new gods and goddesses, these days we remake our films, our books, our comics etc.

So, with that in mind, what are some things you wish would get remade? Good ideas with bad execution.

Here's my list:

Star Wars: I want someone to "Nolanize" Star Wars. I want a dark, gritty, violent Star Wars with moral relativism and the whole shebang. I'll likely have to wait for Lucas to die.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Pretend this movie didn't happen, use Pitch Black as the starting point and try again. The technology jump from Pitch Black to COR was just too huge. PB looks like it took place 100 years in the future, COR looks like it took place 1000+ years in the future.

I may add more as they come to me.

Fleshgrinder wrote:

You're assuming our knowing something is special.

It's not. Our brain is just the processing centre for stimuli entering our sensory organs.

The physical is all there. The perception of that stimuli may vary from person to person or animal to animal, but all of them receive that stimuli, that stimuli is there.

We're just wet machines exploring and cataloguing our surroundings and processing new ways to do that.

.

Unless you can explain how a group of atoms (our brains) can go around
and "exploring and cataloguing" the other atoms around the place, I'm
going to have to say you have no idea what you are talking about.

.

It's easy.

Those atoms formed into biological molecules. The ones in our brain are combined in a complicated organ capable of functions akin a to computer.

That computer is attached to a series of instruments (our eyes, nose, tasebuds etc.)

Stimuli enters those instruments, is sent to our processing center, processed, and then defined based on that processor

So we call a particular combination of atoms a rock, or a tree, but that's just how our programming language defines a combination of atoms with particular properties.

Life is nothing but a wet machine formed naturally through natural processes of mutation and adaptation.

It's not somehow special when compared to a dry machine, just different.

Our programming language is chemicals and electricity instead of binary, but it's the same idea.

Our dreams are basically like running a defrag cycle. Which is why lack of dreaming makes our brains go funny. We need that downtime for our brain to do basic filing tasks.

Our thoughts are never unique, they're just our recombination of stimuli we've encountered and cataloged.

We are literally just biological computers in a fleshy chassis.

So five years ago I made the choice to sort of remove myself from consumerism as best I could. I stopped decorating my living places, I only bought new clothes to replace clothing that fell apart, I've been wearing the same pair of shoes for over three years.

I have almost completely squashed my desire to own "stuff".

When this comes up with others, I'm always surprised at people's reaction to my life style. They act as if somehow I'm the weird one.

So I'm interested in understanding the desire to own stuff, as I never felt it nearly as strongly as most, and now have nearly eliminated it.

What drives you to buy stuff?

How much of your income would you say goes toward buying stuff of no actual mechanical use?

Not all necromancy is evil.

Cultures could exist where necromancy is totally normal.

Eberron has an entire society of good liches.

Have the two character's conflict but have the necromancer come up with a good rational and logical reason why undeath shouldn't be considered evil

Have his religion believe the soul is important while the meat means nothing.

Or have his religion believe that rising a dead enemy to help you can help lead his soul to a better afterlife.

The conflict can always be there, but the necromancer doesn't have to be evil so the conflict can come down to a matter of opinion instead of a good vs evil argument.

Well, a Tiger is a particularly hard animal to run from due to pounce and grab, but it's also an animal meaning it's easier to drive off if they can frustrate it by keeping the high AC guy in front of it.

The general problem with my players is they just don't think tactically

A military dictatorship isn't automatically Fascism.

Fascism is a very specific form of governance which often requires a dictatorship.

For example, there have been Communist dictators in history, and Fascism and Communism are on two different ends of the economic scale.

There's also been religious dictatorships without Fascist economic policies.

Sure, most people use the term Fascism the same way you're using it, but mis-representation of political ideals is what leads to a political system where no one has any clue what anything really means anymore.

Fan fiction has caused me to laugh harder than anything else in existence.

I used to think I was a fan of philosophy until I realized that philosophy is often the act of making a matter more complicated than it actually is.

While this has nothing to do with Slumbering Tsar, I did have the issue of explaining to my group 3 times last night that I will be mixing in encounters that are far higher EL than the party, so they should considering running away occasionally.

They nodded. It's like they understood. Then a dire tiger killed the barbarian (though he had one hero point left so it saved him from true death).

My players have no tactical sense to speak of.

Fleshgrinder wrote:

I just remember one houserule I use.

Anything with Ki points and Ki abilities is considered psionic. It's just a different form of psionics. As such, these abilities can be affected by anti-psionic abilities.

I don't really use psionics in my setting but that's an interesting idea. I can kind of see how that makes sense.

The monk had always bugged me being a class capable of stuff that appeared magical without being magic.

Then in 4th edition D&D, they made the monk officially a psionic class, so I just took the idea and applied it to my game.

It's just psionics that are channeled within the body, instead of expressed externally.

When I made my map with FT3, I ended up with one giant body of water with a lot of islands in it, so that entire area sort of became my Asian area where all the dragon empire stuff fits.

The beauty of making your own world is the ability to modify it when a player wants to play something that doesn't fit.

I have a house rule when it comes to any form of summoning.

If you do not have the creature stated out, your spell fails automatically.

I've always used the term for anything that wasn't a PC.

Though I did get in the habit of calling them "mobs" from playing MMOs.

Also, Fleshgrinder, read some history. The more I learn of history, the more I relaize that NO ONE can be fully trusted with power. Even the best of intentions go astray.

Before anyone perfected anything, people failed at it thousands of times.

That is never a good argument to not keep trying to perfect something.

And the perfection of human governance is more important than most things.

I'm actually what is commonly referred to as a "libertarian socialist", I don't believe we NEED government, but I believe we need certain things to be accomplished before we can naturally progress to a stateless society.

And we cannot progress to that society when people are still armed and afraid.

We need to progress to a world where it is truly 1 government by 1 people, all 7+ billion of us.

I'm not overly concerned what a bunch of rich land and slave owners wrote down about life and liberty a couple centuries ago. I live in 2012, and I'd like us to stop trying to adapt 200+ year old systems to 2012.

I'd like a 2012 system.

Yeah, I think that's the trick to a good sandbox is having that logical consistency.

A cave within an hour of town probably wouldn't contain some horrible beast without the towns people knowing it's there, or knowing that SOMETHING is there.

That was what I did last night, I invented some encounters that made sense for areas they may go, and then if they want there I had an encounter ready to go that made perfect sense for the area.

I find that the best tool for building a sandbox is the simple question "why?"

Drop a town somewhere... why is it there? Why is it the size it is? Why does it have the qualities it does?

This allows a natural world to build up around a town and sometimes adventure locations will sort of build themselves.

Right, my bad for going so off track.

To drag it back to the OP, I think the issue is that we're trying to fight the symptom not the disease.

The USA is an excessive paranoid nation compared to others. They fear their governments, their doctors, their news, their celebrities, and even invent fake organizations to fear like the illuminati.

The USA is built on fear, originally kubernismophobia (the irrational fear of government) and over time this fear became fear of basically anything different.

What do scared people want? Weapons. Even when I'm scared, having a blunt object in my hand reduces said fear. Just holding a good knife makes you feel more powerful and, hence, less afraid.

So you can take guns out of the hands of the scared people, but they're still afraid.

You have to hit the fear. You have to show people the statistics. Show them that today is safer than yesterday.

We have to get people off "the news" as they feed the public the fear.

You look at US news, and the world looks like its on the brink of destruction.

You look at the statistics and you realize we're living in an age people of history would consider Utopian.

Fight the fear, end the violence.

Go check out some of the TED talks on biology and the relatively new field of "genomics" and you guys would realize that my genetic engineering "fantasies" are a lot closer to reality than you think.

We're decoding the human genome at a very fast rate.

Did you know that every human who has ever climbed Everest and survived had the same rare gene? the A.C.E. gene. This gene appears to have a direct affect on a persons ability to deal with altitude sickness and low oxygen environments.

Every male power athletes who's ever won a medal in the Olympics who also had their genes tested also all shared ONE rare gene, which was something like the "R77" gene but I don't remember it exactly. Now this gene has yet to be decoded, we don't know exactly what it does, but EVERY medal winner who ever has been tested has that gene, and it's rare.

We are already a race of walking mutants who are evolving every day. I see no harm in guiding that evolution.

Why not give every human the ACE gene? Every human the R77 gene?

We have documents that say "All men are created equal" when science KNOWS this is not the case.

But it could be the case.

Mankind represents the "turning over of the keys" from the universe to us.

Let's take the wheel and give 'er.

Let's be honest here, a gun isn't going to protect anyone from tyranny.

That argument lost all meaning when governments started using tanks and Apache gunships.

We have a laser that can scan you at the molecular level, and drones.

If the US government wanted to become tyrannical, it would be a dictatorship tomorrow and no one could do anything to stop it.

They can fly a plane over the city, scan for any trace of gunpowder, and then drone those locations.

All of this being done by some dude in an air conditioned office in Nevada playing what is effectively a video game.

The only combat against tyranny is that sack of fat and electricity hanging out between your ears. It's the most powerful weapon ever built.

He knew they weren't real Americans. What else mattered?

To fix the aberrant nature of some humans, we must understand it thoroughly, else how else will we modify it?

Before you can reprogram the computer you have to know what language it uses.

True, but the media glosses over most "terrorist" attacks not committed by people with brown skin.

It's nice to see a little equality in reporting this time.

Especially considering that this is an occasion where the brown skin people were the victims.

I can only hope this tragedy will also help educate the average American to the difference between Muslims and Sikhs, though that's not to say the shooting would have been any better had it been against Muslims.

It's just kind of double sickening to me to consider that he may have killed them thinking they were something they were not.

It's an example of hatred and total ignorance combined into one package.

Despite my lack of belief in the validity of the term "terrorism", I am glad this is being labeled as domestic terrorism.

The mass majority of acts that could be considered terrorist are committed by white Christians in the US, not Muslims, and the media needs to start making sure people know this so some of this crazy fear mongering can end.

Or you could look at the environment.
The mass extinctions we've already caused.
The potential devastation of climate change.
The chemicals poisoning the waters.
The acidification of the oceans.
The mountains destroyed by strip mining.

Some has gotten better in the last few decades, some have continued getting worse. Almost all the damage done in the last few hundred years.

Again, noise. We have the technology to survive global warming. Not all of us, but enough.

We don't NEED other species. It sucks that we're wiping them out, but we can already grow meat in a tube.

Not to mention that with genetic engineering, we could potentially just modify our future generations to drink that poison water.

The humanity of the future may be half-machine hybrids living on a very different world, but they'll be there and their lives will probably be easier and happier than ours.

While I am pretty crusader-esque sometimes in my "spreading" of atheism, I try to do with with humour instead of vitriol.

Instead of saying "you're stupid for believing in god".

I would go "You do realize your religion is based on waiting for a cosmic Jewish lich to return to the earth and save us from a dude who's crimes include uniting the world's governments in 1000 years of peace.

You're basically waiting for an emaciated, undead carpenter to save us from Gandhi."

You don't have to do much to make religion sound humorous.

Thing is, in 17 years, I've never witnessed this argument at a real life table.

I've only seen this kind of stuff online.

I've walked into several of those old D&D gamedays with quite powerful characters and all it's ever done in real life is have people asking me how to build their character.

I've never seen someone set out to create a weak character.

Saint Caleth wrote:

A Man In Black wrote:

Thought out, empirically supported god ideas.

I'm 100% with you on legalization of various drugs being the first step here. As someone pointed out above, the repeal of prohibition dealt a significant blow to organized crime of the era. Legalizing some drugs and generally treating addiction as a medical problem and not a crime worse than murder is a good start.

I also agree that fixing the behavior and perception of the police is important. Ending the war on drugs would go a long way towards this goal as well.

Unfortunatly we have people like Andrew R responding with anecdote and visceral feeling instead of actual thought. Being a country of people like that is how we got to this point and we need to turn that around.

Ever question why things become illegal? or why criminals families hate cops?

We have pretty good records on why most drugs became illegal. Mostly corporate interests (cotton, booze, etc) and racial stuff (Mexican immigrants used weed as we use beer, by making it illegal it was much easier for cops to control immigrants. We addicted blacks to cocaine when we were using them as dock workers after slavery but before the end of segregation. The cocaine made them more energetic and better workers. By eventually making it illegal, it allowed the historically fairly racist police of the south to harass and control the black population due to them already being addicted to it.)

No one even bothered to hide these reasons, they're mostly public record.

Many southern police departments use higher calibre handguns, the reason for this? "Coke-crazed negros", it's still on the books written like that.

Humanity was having a fine time using drugs for thousands of years before that.

Grod have 5 Int.

You speak like Grod, but more stupider.

Not say Grod stupid.

Grod smart.

Why wait until there's something to frisk for when we can work on preventing the person from joining the gang in the first place?

Don't treat a symptom when we can cure a disease.

how dare i want personal responsibility to come before unlimited lifelong welfare. And as long as they rob my paycheck to cover it it IS my concern. You do not live among the poor urban folks do you? Or do you just buy into the loser syndrome and tell them it isn't their fault they make dumb choices

Wouldn't a superior option be working toward a society where we can afford permanent welfare for everyone?

We have this problem where we're getting more technologically advanced yet still working 40 hours a week.

Aren't we building the machines to make the work easier and shorter?

Then, get this, we invent assembly lines and people actually FIGHT AGAINST the automation of manufacturing...

Our technology level is 2012, but we're using a work week and schedules designed when? A hundred years ago.

And, just an idea, but if there's 10% unemployment, why don't the rest of us work 10% less and just spread the existing work out?

See, I may be crazy, but maybe the entire point of all this was to eventually not have to work or have responsibility.

To be a little poetic for a moment, just because we got kicked out of paradise doesn't mean we're not allowed to try and build one ourselves.