vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
Epicurus claimed to believe in gods, though. His gods were just non-interventionist. It's also clear from the works of Philodemus that early Epicureanism had a much more accommodationist approach to traditional religious rituals than later Roman Epicureans like Lucretius did.
Heck, even the Stoics got away with some "blasphemous" ideas, since they seemed to believe that temples and other houses of worship were unnecessary, and that the Logos/God/Zeus could be found out in the natural world. They were pious and impious at the same time.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
I would actually say that the center of gravity of the OSR has shifted to 0e and Basic more than 1e or 2e for quite some time. OSRIC was the first OSR game, and it was based on 1e, but most people have moved on to other clones or NSR games these days.
The specific issue that he picked seems like bullshit TDS nitpicking, and given the vlogbrother’s passive aggressive approach to politics I am not surprised
I mean, I feel that way about a lot of anti-Trump complaints on the object level.
To use another example: On one level, I don't care what the President does to the White House one way or the other, no matter where the money is coming from, or what the "proper procedures" for renovations are. On the other hand, I can also understand general concerns around procedures and principles, and those being the thing that divides rule of law from arbitrary one-man rule.
I also have the feeling that renovating the White House is something that a President that is popular with his own base, and the current center of gravity of his party should easily be able to get pushed through via the proper process. I don't think Trump is a tyrant, but I do think Trump 2 has shown far more arbitrary exercises of power that are arguably unlawful than is really justified by the actual scope and size of the problems being dealt with.
Like, I'm not an immigration hawk, but I can at least sort of understand the idea of declaring an emergency to try and deal with that problem. But eliminating the penny and White House renovations should be easy slam dunks that require zero political capital to solve the "right way," and if they aren't maybe we genuinely are so incompetent we don't deserve a republic.
I certainly didn't expect someone to read my comment, and just start publishing D&D content without any further research, but I suppose the further clarification for those interested is nice.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
WOTC making orcs basically humans with an odd skin tone is an unusually poor choice. Really speaks to them missing the fundamental purpose of morally unambiguous enemies in a game. I get the real point is they don't want a race of dumb savages so they have to change them into human with oddly colored skin. Like an identifiable group of real life humans drawn in fantasty style.
I think the strange thing to me is the weird double think involved. 5.5e turned humanoids into homework monsters by making the DM have to manually apply racial traits to the NPC statblocks, and reclassified a few humanoids as other creature types, but it still has bioessentialist "evil" races all the same. Even if the front of the Monster Manual clarifies that alignment can be changed by the DM, it is really hard to imagine, say, Mind Flayers ever having a good relationship to humanoids, given their diet.
And 5.5e still has monsters that are practically only ever going to be used in a "horde of unambiguous evil" way, like undead and fiends. Like, sure, it might be fun to have an antihero vampire or a risen fiend under certain circumstances, but most DMs are not going to put much thought into it, and just start breaking out the undead or fiendish hordes.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
Generally I ignore WotC. I think it was some 5-10 years ago a bunch of their higher ups said something like "We need less white dudes in this hobby" and I decided not to give money or attention to people who hate me. But a buddy of mine sent me this video reviewing a book of short adventures WotC published. His conclusion is that WotC has forgotten how to design adventures. Cool dunk bro.
I mean, D&D is under a Creative Commons license now, so no one needs to care about what WotC does ever again. Doesn't matter if they go woke(r) or if Elon Musk turns it into another chud hobby, the books are free for anyone to modify and change forever.
Even if you want to pay money to companies actively supporting a contemporary game, there's plenty of options across the political spectrum from relatively woke companies that still make decent products (Paizo, Kobold Press) to more right-wing or neutral companies (a fair few OSR publishers.)
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
I think it is possible to overstate this thesis. I think D&D has a Star Wars-like thing going on with it: Star Wars was a massive blockbuster, watched and enjoyed by tons of men and women. It is also the case that autistic men gravitated towards it as a long-term special interest at a much higher rate, and so they became the core of the Star Wars fandom.
D&D Red Box was a huge Christmas smash hit the year it came out. While I have no doubt that male players outnumbered female players back then, I would find it extremely plausible that tons of kids, male and female, got D&D Red Box in their Christmas stockings, tried to start a campaign and had it peter out after a few weeks or months, and that this group constituted the majority of all D&D players back then. The ones who stuck around were probably disproportionately autistic men, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if you subtracted them you would have a much more gender-balanced (though still skewing male) early audience for D&D than you might expect.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
Vancian magic in prior editions (my experience is with 3e, which itself was a softening of the system by including 0-level spells) is a terrible, actively un-fun system. It sucks ass to find yourself in a situation where it sure would be nice to cast (insert spell here), but you only prepared one copy and you already cast it so you're SOL.
But 3e/3.5e also had more robust magic item buying/crafting rules, so it was easy to spend a little extra money to have your highly situational spells as scrolls or wands for when you need them, so you could reserve your spell slots for your more generally useful spells.
There is a reason why the birth of D&D 4 -- where WotC started to streamline things to make the game more newcomer-friendly -- drove fans to the fork of 3.5 called Pathfinder.
I'm not sure I would describe 4e's sin as being "streamlining" or "being too beginner friendly." They made the decision to use grids instead of feet, but the earliest editions used table inches. They replaced 3e's point-based skill system with a simple yes/no, but most TSR editions didn't have a general skill system by default. They threw the lore in a blender, but by the end of 4e's life the World Axis lore had basically everything from the Great Wheel, and it almost ends up being a change of emphasis and presentation more than an actual, substantial change to things.
Heck, it's a bit silly to say that 4e was the start of D&D trying to make itself newcomer friendly, when there is an entire line of Basic D&D under TSR (BX, BECMI and the Rules Cyclopedia) that all manage to be pretty easy to play and run, and are still playable to this day.
It seems pretty obvious to me that racial and sex-based bonuses exist in the real world. If a kid wants to become the worlds best long distance runner, but is a girl of European origin, then I am sorry to say that it seems very unlikely that she will ever beat the best male long distance runner from Kenya.
Of course, sex-based bonuses, while clearly present at least for physical (and social!) attributes in the real world, are totally absent in D&D. Women melee fighters are just as viable as men, and most non-evil societies are shockingly egalitarian compared to a medieval baseline. And as far as racial bonuses are concerned, the almost exponential scaling of power with the character level means that a STR-based halfling fighter will still be slaughtering creatures twice her size by the dozen eventually. So in a sense, the game mechanics of D&D were more woke and blank-slatist than reality for a long time.
I agree with you to an extent, but 1e did allow for superhuman stats for humans: 18/100 for males and 18/50 for females. A cap reminiscent of Hercules vs. Xena levels of strength.
However, my feeling is if you're going to allow for larger than life heroes with more strength than is actually humanly possible, who cares about maintaining strength differences between sexes? I'm genuinely fine with either option - either different superhuman caps for men and women, or superheroic men and women being potential equals - but I have a slight preference for the latter, since we're not even talking about real biology anymore anyways.
Heck, even Greco-Roman mythology had Camilla and the Amazons as examples of warrior women with immense strength, so it is hardly "woke" to allow for them in fantasy.
The lack of alignment also strikes me as silly, it was always a defining characteristic of D&D. Sure, I can see how the Always Chaotic Evil trope might be Problematic, but this can be fixed without getting rid of the E-word altogether. Just say that most goblins follow evil goblin gods, problem solved. And of course, the cosmology of D&D has not suddenly changed merely because alignment is not a stat any more, it is pretty clear that the followers of Baal or Shar are evil even if you do not spell it out.
I also do not think that the alignment system lead to an overall reductionist morality, you could still have plenty of shades of grey. Or even two lawful good characters going to war with each other if loyalties and circumstances conspire to pit them against each other.
The weird thing is, they haven't even gotten rid of alignment. Flip through the 5.5e Monster Manual, and you'll see that every monster statted there has an alignment. 5e and 5.5e just de-emphasized alignment (most spells and effects like "Detect Good and Evil" interact with creature types like Celestial or Fiend instead of Alignment itself), and presented things slightly differently. (Like, the 5.5e Monster Manual says up front that all of its alignments are suggestions, and you as DM can change them if you want, but has that ever not been the case? Even if, say, 1e doesn't give you explicit permission, what DM is so devoid of creativity that they couldn't conceive of the idea of a fallen Astral Deva/Angel?)
The big change is in how they emphasize and present humanoid creatures. The 5.5e Monster Manual basically defaults to making the DM do homework and apply racial traits to the NPC stat blocks for all of the humanoid races (including orcs and drow), and shunts a lot of creatures that were historically humanoids into other categories (like goblins becoming fey, and lizardfolk becoming elementals.) I don't like most of 5.5e's changes, and have continued to run 5e with my local group (with a healthy dose of OSR philosophy and sensibilities because I love that playstyle) but it is simply false to say D&D got rid of alignment.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
The election day change in previous years was: 2008: +3.2% (but back into the negative the next day) 2012: +0.8 2016: +0.1% 2020:+2.1% (due to the fraud saga, the one day change may be insufficient here).
I don't doubt that there might be single-day effects attributable to presidential actions. I'm sure the stock market also reacts when we announce a new war or whatever.
I'm more interested in long-run effects, that don't wash out over time. I'd be interested in seeing stock market data going back as far as we have it, along with presidential election day bumps and whether they washed out over time, and whether they tended to be "retroactively justified" by the conditions of that presidency. A one day bump means basically nothing. I'll agree it is people trying to anticipate the effects of the presidency, but there's plenty of cases where markets do silly and unjustifiable things, it's just that other people end up making money when people do that.
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
I think there's a lot of bad storytelling around the stock market in general.
I sometimes listen to the Wall Street Journal's Minute Briefing, and they always mention how the market did that day, and give an explanation for why it went up or down.
Their explanation is always plausible, but my basic issue is that if the stock market is generally just on a random walk, and you always grasp for the nearest plausible explanation, you're going to be completely wrong about why the market was up or down in a given day a lot of the time. Like, in the world where the market had gone slightly down, instead of slightly up and more or less the same news items had happened that day, how much does that change how they tell the story that day?
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
I definitely agree that this is a reason to not naively hope for raw "number go up." Other factors affect the overall resilience and robustness of the economy, and might go along with slightly worse numbers in the short term.
I'm certainly in favor of bringing production of certain critical infrastructure home, but have we done a good job of doing that over the last few years?
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
I have tried to avoid such fallacies. It was probably more than a decade ago that I first read the president doesn't affect the economy nearly as much as people seem to think, and I've tried to bear that in mind no matter who is in charge.
In most cases, it would be like trying to treat the president like a Fisher King who makes the weather good or bad by their mere presence in office.
I'm always open to specific causal stories that are exceptions to this rule, but I don't naively assume the president has anything to do with the stock market one way or the other. (Liberation Day and the brief stock crash that followed would be part of the exceptions that I allow for.)
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
Couldn't a lot of it be because the average effective tariff rate didn't actually go up that much? I think it might be reasonable to say both that tariffs had less impact than many economists predicted on the economy this year, and also state that this might not have been true if Trump had stayed the course with his Liberation Day tariffs.
Whether we're in a bubble or not, sources are reporting that 40% of the stock market is tied up in tech/AI stocks. If we're in the initial phases of a singularity (a big 'if'), then we might expect the economy to do well in spite of almost any burden we could place on it.
I think I perceived you as trying to claim more than you had warrant to claim. If you're just saying "the stock market did incredibly well, and the tariffs didn't have that much of a negative impact", then I'm fine with that claim. If you're claiming it did well because of Trump and his policies, then I would like to see a causal argument that explains what he did that had such a strong positive impact that another president wouldn't have done. My prior from past reading is that presidents generally don't have much measurable effect on the economy one way or the other (certainly much less than people commonly believe), and while I would expect Trump to be the exception to that (for both good and ill) if anyone was going to, I think his own concern about the stock market creates its own feedback loop that makes the statement true of him as well.
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
I guess I would have two questions here:
- In general, how sure should we be that the stock market today is doing well because of Donald Trump and not in spite of/unrelated to him? Are there any past economic studies that let us estimate the usual impact of presidential policies on stock market behavior, so that we can have priors here about how much effect Donald Trump could reasonably have?
- How does the current era compare to things like the Nifty Fifty asset bubble, and the Dot Com bubble? I thought Zvi Mowshowitz did a good job laying out the bubble-skeptical take, but I still wouldn't completely rule out the possibility that we're in bubble.
My initial intuition is that in the real world you could have genuinely bad policies (say, New York doing rent control) being overwhelmed by all the positive economic trends in a society. Just because the numbers are going up, doesn't mean they wouldn't be even higher without the drag caused by bad policies like minimum wage, rent control, and, potentially, tariffs. Does your analysis account for this? If it does, could you please elaborate more how you distinguished the various possibilities involved? And if it doesn't, could you add analysis to this effect?
vorpa-glavo
12d ago
It might be possible to describe me as a "stalwart norms enjoyer", but I have also quixotically been trying to cultivate a sense of tribalism around my state and regional culture, and and a sense that my "out group" is everyone else.
This is an ongoing process, but it means I am trying to genuinely not care about every outrage that happens in another state on the right or the left. Those are basically foreign countries, and as long as they mostly play by the rules of our constitutional system, they can rot or flourish for all I care about them.
Who cares what the silly foreigners in Dixie or Tidewater or Yankeedom get up to? I don't live in any of those countries, and I'm sure they're better equipped to manage their own affairs than I am. As long as they don't make it my problem if/when things go wrong thanks to their bad policies, why should I care who they elect?
Don't get me wrong, the coresidents of my state can look out at the foreign nations that are part of our federal league and try to learn what to do and what not to do based on the practical experience those foreign nations get up to, but I'm not a busybody. What can an attorney general in Virginia do to my kith and kin in my state? Does he have any real power to harm me, being away in the far off foreign nation of Tidewater?
As long as the dirty Tidewaterers don't start moving to where I live and make things go to shit with their inferior cultural values, I feel safe and secure in my own city.
I do care what the leader of our military league does, because it affects people in the region I actually care about as well. I don't think that makes me a hypocrite.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Regarding the origins of wokeism, recently I chanced upon the concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), it also has a Wikipedia entry. Basically there are people who argue that general wokification of institutions is an internal development of some of the American elite's religion, via Unitarianism and then Unitarian Universalism, and the general "be nice, don't judge, don't harm" morality of Oprah with a deistic God you can occasionally call upon for some encouragement but doesn't demand much, just to be kind, there are many equally valid paths etc. This is of course not the same as the mandatory activism required by woke, not merely a lack of judging etc. But it is the basis for the willingness of simply nice decent people to obey such demands.
I've encountered the concept before, but while I think it captures something about the secularization of society and the rise of "spiritual but not religious types", I don't think it is very explanatory.
I actually think the Guilt-shame distinction (which you partially touched upon in your third paragraph) probably goes further to explain much of the shape of contemporary life. I honestly think guilt culture is just another angle of approaching Western individualism. In shame-honor culture, what is important is your place in the collective. This is the source of your pride and honor. In a guilt culture, various social technologies are used to make it so that the rules are inside peoples heads, and are pre-enforced by the knowledge of the self-flagellating guilt that will result from stepping a toe out of line.
While Christianity is one path towards a guilt culture, given its emphasis on individual repentance and salvation, I think in modernity things like Wokeism show one way this kind of culture can be maintained in a secular way. However, I think Wokeism is a lot more prone to what I see as a likely failure state of guilt culture: anxiety. If all the social structures of a guilt culture are oriented towards making human animals feel guilt, a basic problem emerges. How do you know when a person has "cooked enough", and feels enough guilt that they won't do bad things anymore? You don't.
So some people get "overcooked" or "burnt" by guilt culture, and do indeed develop a psychology that won't do bad things or break the rules at the cost of crippling anxiety. And I think because Wokeism is an amorphous mass movement, without the supernaturalism or the 2000 years of practical wisdom of Christianity to deal with it, it is a lot more prone to such "overcooking."
Relatedly, I suspect that a lot of dysfunction in pluralistic, liberal democracies is due to clashes between a wider guilt culture, and pockets of shame culture that still exist in various parts of society. For example, in America, I would put forward African American ghetto/gang culture as more of a shame culture. (I know I'm not the first person to suggest this. Thomas Sowell hints at this in his "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and I'm sure I've read similar things around here, though I am currently unable to properly credit who here might have said something like this.) I think there's always going to be a bit of a clash between the two, especially if elements of the shame culture end up including a rejection of elements of the guilt culture's hierarchies and values.
While I think it is possible that the Kumbaya, "Let's all get along" aesthetic of Moralist Therapeutic Deism (MDT) is one foundation for Western guilt culture, I actually think it is precisely backwards. In the West, people don't decide to act nice and decent because of MDT. Instead, people adopt MDT because their brains have been programmed into guilt machines, and they thus already have a great propensity to act nice and decent most of the time.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Marina Abramaovic
She's mostly pre-woke, isn't she?
Sure, she's still alive, but her heyday and peak relevancy are long behind her. Now she's just one of those old ladies that gets trotted out whenever there is a slow news week and people need to be reminded of what a Legendary and Influential Artistᵀᴹ she is.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I'm perfectly happy to accept the official narrative, if investigators say that it wasn't arson.
However, we live in an era where the internet has created so many different epistemic bubbles that question whatever the experts and authorities say, on both the right and left. On one hand, I think this can be a healthy thing. If you're a woman in the 1940's, and the medical authorities are telling your husband that he should get you a lobotomy to deal with your various issues, is it better to be married to a sheep who follows everything the authorities say, or a contrarian who maybe rubs some people the wrong way but whose questioning of authority leads him to rejecting lobotomies (maybe without any good evidence or reason for his actual rejection)?
I agree that objective facts matter. It is my hope that all people will embrace the idea that even if deferring to experts and authorities is often a necessary shortcut for getting by in the world for most people in most circumstances, you should be prepared to do your own research and have the independent conscience to depart from the crowd if that is what your reason or character tells you to do. On the other hand, sometimes you're going to lose to reality, and it will turn out the experts were right all along.
But it's all about humanity not putting all of its eggs into one basket. It is positively good for humanity as a whole if a small portion of us become Amish, or reject modernity for religious or ideological reasons, or join cults, or have their children die of diseases we have reliable vaccines for, because the diversity of practices maximizes the odds that there will be at least one group of humans available to inherit the ashes after the sheep do something so stupid and destructive that it kills billions of humans, or leaves most of humanity infertile, or does anything that almost wipes out the whole species.
There should be room for normie rule-followers, of course. They're the salt of the Earth, and society would be intolerable and impossible without them, no matter what shape society takes. But I think we should feel grateful for the insurance policy that groups that are often easily mocked or not taken seriously because they depart so far from consensus reality provide.
All this to say, I think it is completely fair to mock lefties that are so caught in their epistemic bubble that they can't conceive of the idea that fires just happen, and there's no need to invent an arson conspiracy with corresponding government conspiracy. Probably, they are just wrong, and they're just departing from objective, consensus reality for no good reason. But that's also not the worst trait a group can exhibit.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Is that true though? The common image painted of Europe at that time is as a powder keg ready to go off. It might not have happened in exactly the same way, but do you really believe that if not for Franz Ferdinand's assassins, most likely paths of European history don't result in a Great War of some kind?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Heck, if you're trying to satisfy curiosity, I'd say branch out and check out more "exotic" things like Eastern Orthodox churches or Iskcon (Hare Krishna) temples in your city. If your city is anything like mine, they will be 50-90% immigrants following a deeply rooted tradition, and it is just fascinating seeing all the ways people do religion.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
But honestly, the best comparison is probably MLK as there are few instances to choose from. Would you hold a moment of silence for him?
I think the issue is that most of us, Left, Right or Radical Centrist, grew up in a world where we were told MLK was basically a saint our whole lives. It's trivial for somebody with that background to say they'd hold a moment of silence for him in 2025.
We're in a very different position from the people in 1963 who were watching things like the March on Washington with fresh eyes, and who might have validly feared that 250,000 black people marching on the nation's capitol was an implicit threat to anglo-American culture and values at the time, and not just in a straightforwardly racist or xenophobic way. Even if MLK himself was intentionally non-violent, I think a lot of people living through his rise to prominence were scared of the downstream effects of what he was advocating for.
The question of holding a moment of silence for him in 1968 would have been in a vastly different political context than asking the same question today.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I suspect it is a little of column A, a little of column B.
I could easily believe that progressive children from high TFR, socially conservative groups that historically reliably swing Democrat like Hispanics or Blacks outnumber many others on the left. That would still lead to a lot of "burned by conservative parents" stories, but would code as "Blue to Bluer" instead of "Red to Blue."
That said, I know a strangely high amount of ex-Mormons, and many of them seem to be in the "Red to Blue" category, so it does happen. But Pew Research definitely supports the view that a majority of kids end up following their parents. Although even their numbers have a slightly lower retention rate among Republicans (81% of teen children of Republican/leans-Republican parents are also Rep./lean-Rep, while 89% of teen children of Dem/lean-Dem parents are also Dem/lean-Dem.)
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Yeah, I should have probably brought up this disanalogy somehow, since people here have brought up that Christians had a high TFR compared to other Romans before.
However, my main point is that while Leftists grow memetically, it might not quite be correct to call it "parasitically."
Like, putting aside their high TFR, when Christians showed compassion and charity to lepers, Roman tax collectors and ex-prostitutes, they weren't being "parasitic" on all those groups.
And in the modern day, when mentally ill black sheep move away from home, and find the LGBT community or progressivism waiting there to embrace them and all of their messiness, I don't think it is correct to call it "parasitism." Those communities are taking the cast offs that the families with lots of kids didn't want in the end.
Like, I get why some people on The Motte have a natural aesthetic distaste for the way the progressive left seems to embrace weakness, mental illness and ugliness. But you can't cultivate an attitude like that, and then be surprised when a leper colony has formed behind your back, and become part of a larger coalition opposing you.
I have seen so many broken people "bloom" for lack of a better word when they became a part of the LGBT community in my city. They went from struggling people with no friends, and painful family connections to people who could embrace being the weird black sheep that they were, becoming more confident and emotionally stable in the process. How is that parasitic? Especially when the "solution" to that supposed parasitism for the other political tribe is one they will never realistically embrace.
If doesn't surprise me they got rid of alignment in BG3.
5e still has alignment for player characters, but it doesn't really do anything mechanically. The one effect I can think of off the top of my head that cares about PC alignment is rakshasas still being vulnerable to piercing damage wielded by good creatures.
More options
Context Copy link