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Ron Paul: Defense Bill Establishes Martial Law In AmericaAnd this is why Ron Paul to stupid to be president. In the US we live enmeshed within vast matrices of all-encompassing laws and codes that are enforced at the discretion of law enforcement officials. Lives and property are routinely destroyed for minor offenses or just the appearance of minor offenses. Children are charged with sex crimes. Elderly cancer patients are taken from their wheel chairs and have their diapers searched at the airport. Peaceful protesters are sprayed with chemicals and beaten. We live in a de facto police state already, whether or not you have felt the boot on your neck; these new developments only make it official. Ron Paul is wrong about a lot of things, but not this.
There were relatively more native Americans in the mid-19th century, so that was nice in a Dances With Wolves kind of way. But seriously, let's just go back to 10th century Iceland. ORM EGILSON Oh, but seriously seriously, nothing we do will matter. The advances in technology coming in the next few decades will consume humanity, and we will disappear into the machinery. The 1% will be immortal cyborg vampires, and the 99% will be soldiers, service workers, and organ farms. Merry Christmas, everybody!
Yeah, slavery was central to the public discourse, rhetoric, and politicking of the time, but to say the Civil War was just about slavery is kind of a Pollyanna approach. I don't really disagree with any of that. One of my favorite things to do is to make fun of "libertarians," but lately a strong federal government seems to me to be a double-edged sword. And it interests me to think about what other economic and political turns America might have taken if slavery had not existed.
That first song almost sounds like a Poe -- it's so explicitly, defiantly hateful toward the Constitution, the american eagle, and the very ideal of freedom that one suspects it was actually written to show off the hypocrisy of Confederate sympathizers who also claim to be patriots. It's not quite as unambiguously anti-Confederate as Tom Lehrer's "I Wanna Go Back To Dixie," but it can certainly be read that way. My own opinion on the Confederacy matches John Scalzi's (see here and here as well) -- to claim that preserving slavery wasn't the single most important cause of secession, or that it would have happened at all without that issue, is to be either ignorant or dishonest. The two most important differences between the Confederate Constitution and the U.S. Constitution in regard to states' rights were that the Confederate Constitution denied states the right to abolish slavery or to grant citizenship rights to free blacks, and that the Confederate Constitution explicitly denied states the right to secede from the Confederate States of America. Yeah, slavery was central to the public discourse, rhetoric, and politicking of the time, but to say the Civil War was just about slavery is kind of a Pollyanna approach. That is, we like to assume that the result of the Civil War was positive progress, and we point toward the end of slavery to prove that fact. (Note: I don't mean to downplay at all the horror show that was slavery. Any country that engages in such practices deserves to be destroyed.) But to say that it all comes down to slavery is like saying that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about terrorism. Yeah, 9/11, Osama bin Laden, yadda, yadda, but a lot more is going on than just a supposed fight against terrorism. As an American citizen, I am about to lose the last of my guarantees to civil liberties with the passage of the current NDAA, but is that because of terrorism or are there other more complex economic and political issues in play? Comparing slavery to terrorism might not be the best argument, because slavery actually existed and wasn't a nebulous concept, but my point is that history might end up recording this time period as an Age of Terrorism, when it was an age being dragged along by economic forces just like any other.
The Confederacy was fighting against the same centralization of power in the hands of the banking industry that Occupy Wall Street is protesting against today. Discuss! Just kidding, don't discuss that. Get The Long Riders on DVD and watch David Carradine make the band sing "I'm a good ol' Rebel." Gods and Generals... not a great movie, but Stephen Lang as Stonewall Jackson was worth it.
The school system is not a fiscal failure; it is a moral failure. True, the village idiots tend to rise through the ranks of school administrators, but I think the fact that we've given over the schools to bureaucrats whose main worries are statistics and not hurting anyone's feelings -- students and parents -- is a failure of purpose and vision, which is a moral failure. Somewhere along the way we forgot how to teach and enforce cultural standards. And I hate to sound reactionary -- when I don't sound like rabid right-winger, I chime in as a bleeding-heart liberal.
It doesn't matter who you plug in as teachers at this point because the public school system has become a human storage facility that lives and breathes standardized testing. The problem isn't that too much money is being thrown at the schools; the problem is that money is being spent on the creation of a politically correct dystopia where kids are as likely to read 10th Century Chinese poetry as they are Melville or Thoreau. Diaper-wearing "mentally challenged" children are being taught alongside other kids, in the same classrooms, dragging down the curve. Children attack teachers and get a pat on the head and a couple of days off from school. The school system is not a fiscal failure; it is a moral failure.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm trying to get at. I guess I'll put Durkheim on the TBR list. And I think a lot of people turned to Dungeons and Dragons out of a craving for the stories and myths that transmit values -- or at least the trappings thereof.
True, the character of the West has changed and evolved over the centuries, but we reached a point where we pulled that process up by the roots and put it on the shelf. And even though, yeah, traditions and history don't validate themselves, we can't live without them without becoming nihilistic. What really struck me about the London riots (following them on the internet here in the US, anyway) was all the rioting in the Muslim parts of London... No wait, there was none as far as I know. Why? Probably because they have a community they care about founded on traditions that they are not going to throw away. People absolutely crave that and do not want to live without it, and if we can't manage to provide some kind of tradition for the next generations besides the choices of consumerism and fundamentalist Christianity (both afflicted by materialism), we are going to falter and fail on a wide scope. p.s. As to whether secular people can be spiritual, I guess I meant by the "spiritual" vital emotions or feeling a kind of fullness and joy in life accessible to every human no matter their beliefs.
Ok, thread blew up and might end up being locked, so I'm not going to give this the attention it deserves, but... The mixing of cultures is inevitable and has been going since different groups of people discovered different ways of doing things. What bothers me is ideological multiculturalsim. A civilization that bends over backwards to tolerate and appease all worldviews doesn't have a coherent one of its own. A society that teaches that values and traditions are arbitrary and all equally valid uproots itself from its own history. And when people feel uprooted and unconnected, they no longer care and they become nihilistic in a basic, existential way. This is a broad generalization coming, but I'd say that modernism and post-modernism have dealt the West a crippling spiritual blow to both the secular and the religious. And until we deal with that fundamental issue it is all just right vs left ping pong.
Yeah, anyone who mentions values is a dangerous lunatic, but the people who see this as a purely material problem are just full of humanity. The Right serves those who are really looting the West and doing more damage than rioters can ever do, and the Left just pleads to provide more comfort in the cages of the poor. Until we figure out who we are and what we believe in there will be no solutions, and Europe will probably be mostly lost to a different way of life that will provide tradition and a connection to the sacred. But by all means continue on with the right versus left chatter. It has solved so much.
These rioters are what you are going to get after raising generations in a relativistic, value-less, multicultural, consumerist environment in which everyone feels entitled to whatever they want just for the great feat of being born. Prevent access to the consumer goods they need to fill the holes in their souls, images of which they are bombarded with constantly, and when economic realities set in and they can't have those things they are going to simmer in rage. Do bad economic policies need to change? Certainly. But the heart of the problem is that Western civilization is sick and rudderless. Why should backward and/or medieval immigrants to the West change their practices or worldviews once they get here and see how empty and hollow our societies are? Europe will be fully part of the Islamic world by the end of this century, and the US will be a strange, little Byzantine Empire. I think I'll have a margarita! Edited for spelling but not pessimism.
Yeah, you can just stick with Light X-bow and you are only one feat behind the Archer and other Fighters. Your range is 30' less than the composite longbowman (more if he is the Archer archetype) but... that kind of range doesn't come up every game. So you are a Feat behind with a lesser weapon that can never add STR damage to an attack and can never double the damage on the first attack like a bow, BUT... if you stick it out until 11th level or so, you have a 10% greater chance of getting use out of critical feats than a bowman with the same feat selection. 10%. You've selected a markedly inferior weapon so that after who knows how many sessions, if your character lives, he eventually gets a 10% greater chance to get off critical feat effects. Worth it? Not to me. Now, crossbows are cool, and there are a lot of crossbow-wielding characters to make, but it's a mistake to build a Fighter around this particular weapon imo.
Okay, Sangalor, let's talk about your Crossbowman a little bit. First off he is a Fighter with 10 STR, making him useless in melee until he takes Point Blank Mastery or gets Safe Shot at 13th Level (which the Archer gets at 9th). So basically his role in the party is to get off a couple of shots and hope that the enemy doesn't close, at which time his main activity will be hoping the rest of the party wins the battle before he gets chewed up. (And unlike the DEX-based Rogue who has Skills, he has almost nothing else to bring to the table besides, "I shoot at things.") But how many shots is he getting off? Well, that's interesting when it comes to the crossbowman at low levels. You're going the Heavy X-bow and X-bow Mastery route, which means that you took Rapid Reload: Heavy Crossbow at 1st. Now when you take Rapid Shot at 2nd, it is useless because loading the Heavy X-bow is still a standard action. Your Rapid Shot feat doesn't kick in until you take Mastery at 3rd level. So you are a Fighter who just spent two feats on what costs wielders of other weapons only one, and you had a dead feat at level two. Now if you are just making a 15th level X-bowman out of thin air, this might not matter as much; but if you are actually playing one at low levels, this is a pain in the butt. And because of Rapid Reload and Crossbow Mastery, you have had to start your 15pt-buy X-bowman with 14 WIS and 10 STR because Iron Will is out of the question, and you are a feat behind the Archer who will be taking Many Shot at level 6 (and doubling the damage on his first shot) when you are still taking Deadly Aim -- not that Many Shot will every apply to your crossbowman. Now, if you are starting a campaign at 12th or 15th level, by all means make a Crossbowman with critical feats and have a blast on the occasions when you threat and confirm a crit, but if you are starting a campaign at 1st level you are going to be disappointed in how feat-taxed your Crossbowman is to not even be able to keep up with the Archers and melee Fighters when it comes to dealing damage. It's nice to have concepts you want to see played out, but the actual game after game crunch is not friendly to the crossbow. Other notes: This conversation has mostly ignored Archer's combat tricks such as Disarm. I don't think any reasonable judge would allow Gloves of Dueling to apply to x-bows or bows.
What did I just say? Run the DPR Olympics on the Archer and Crossbowman. It won't be close. Everything that helps the crossbow helps the bow, and the crossbow will never add STR damage or have Many Shot. Meanwhile the Crossbowman has to use a feat on Rapid Reload -- and Crossbow Mastery if he wants an additional one point of average damage with the Heavy Crossbow.
Who plays at 20th level? You're talking about a theoretical Crossbowman that just shows up at 15th level or so with his critical feats, his one possible saving grace. That's not how people play, usually. By all means, at your next character creation session make a 1st level Crossbowman and enjoy his long journey to Blinding Critical. If you all want to do a DPR Olympics between Archer and Crossbowman, knock yourself out. It's so not even close I don't see the point. Only on the internet could this even be a discussion!
There's no way that an additional 10% chance at crit threat makes up for the crossbow being thoroughly outclassed by the bow at every level. By that reasoning it would be every fifth roll, not fourth, and with your last iterative attack being at nowhere near your highest attack bonus, rolling a 17 or 18 might not even help at that level. Never mind actually confirming the critical. You're imagining the best (though few) possibilities for the Crossbowman but ignoring the fact that he is going to lag behind most if not all other Fighters on the way to being high level, where he gets his crit feats, while being blown away by the Archer. It's not even close, really. If you want to play a crossbow-wielding guy, fine, have fun -- really. But be prepared to be mechanically unspectacular compared to all the other martial types.
Crossbowman only adds DEX to damage as a readied action, half DEX bonus at 3rd level and full bonus at 11th, which means it doesn't apply to full attacks. And I'd like to see the math on a 10% boost in crit threat range making the Crossbow do "way more" damage than a bowman who is firing more arrows (Many Shot) and adding STR damage to each one, and whose crit multiplier is x3. And the Fighter does not have feats to spare. Feats are what the Fighter has going for him and they have to be chosen wisely. The crossbowman wastes them compared to other Fighters. The crossbow is a failure as a Fighter's main weapon. Players should have fun and go with their imagination, but Crossbowman is going to be frustrating from a mechanical standpoint.
Not to rain on your parade, but Crossbowman is a pretty terrible archetype mechanically. You are going to have to burn feats on things like Rapid Reload and Crossbow Mastery and still be behind the curve as far as martial characters dealing damage. You will never be able to add STR to damage the Many Shot feat is never a possibility. IMO they should have folded Crossbowman into the Sniper Rogue archetype somehow. If you are deadset on it, though, you might want to look go in the direction of Improved Critical and the critical feat chains. If you just want a crossbow-themed character, then I think Inquisitor or Rogue would be more interesting to play.
To say you pity someone their ignorance is a way of saying that you do not fear them intellectually. But usually if someone feels the need to say that they are not afraid of something, they actually are. So I would see it as less of a personal attack and more of an admission of weakness.
People focus waaaaay too much on DPR and I think it is a result of the MMO min max generation more than anything.Not the way I hear it. Fighters and paladins didn't dream of gauntlets of ogre power and holy avengers in 1E because of roleplay considerations. C'mon, man. How can anyone say that anything up to and including 1E was anything like the way the game is now? Players wanted magic items to be more badass, not because they were expected in order to feel mathematically adequate and on an even playing field at any given level. The entire consciousness of the game has changed because the background practices of the gamers has changed, and those background practices include years of playing highly regimented computer RPGs.
I didn't mean to imply that so-called Libertarians aren't right about anything, and it's the things they are right about that probably attracts a lot of people in the first place. But the ideology as a whole is grounded in an idealization of the past and seems escapist to me. (And I would say the same about some of the far Left.) A lot of ideological thinking is fantasy thinking, but I find Libertarian ideological thinking particularly atavistic, misanthropic, and deluded. We'd be better off all standing in the middle, taking a pragmatic stance, and figuring out what works and what doesn't instead of seeing everything through the lens of this or that ideology.
I think capitalism is a key component of freedom and innovation. But I also think that the ultra-wealthy and international corporations are bleeding the US dry. So, yeah, we need more of what the religious fundamentalists and fantasy-prone, misfit Libertarians call "socialism."
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