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Yeah, the whole deal is that we never actually silence anyone. We just give them a little quarantine thread, and if they decide to stop posting like dickbags, they're free to do so. We, however, are also free to ridicule them. As a result, usually they leave after a bit.

Note that no longer posting like a dickbag doesn't necessarily entail any grovelling. It's exactly what it says on the tin. If you make a post that is helpful, funny, original, or at least doesn't consist of perpetuating your bullshit/drama, it won't get moved over here. At least, that's my understanding of the practice. I'm not a mod or admin.

Reddit is supporting Sanders in the same way they supported Ron Paul in 2008.  Ie; with cult-like adoration and general creepiness.

It did occur to me half a month ago that Sanders just might be the Ron Paul of the left. It was a pretty dismaying realization.

I think I remember that now. If I recall correctly the feats in Pathfinder and later editions of DhD tended to be on a tree. Could it simply be done that way?

No.  Cohorts are followers, not leaders.  While they are a cohort, they may not benefit from the leadership feat.

Also, the "leadership feats" I was discussing are supplemental.  "Commanding Voice" is one, for example, that raises the DC of loyalty and morale checks by 2.  Requires Cha 13+ and BAB1.  There's a tree of feats that comes off of this.

Oh, ok. I was misreading Joseph's reference to "leadership feats." My bad.

The idea of "leadership feats" kind of intrigues me. Not got anything particular in mind, but perhaps they could effect tolerance for abusive NPC uses.

No, there's a specific feat called Leadership, and it's broken as hell. It basically lets you play an additional party member, though at most it can be up to 2 levels lower than your own, and whether you or the GM actually controls it is a matter of houseruling. I'm guessing Roger prefers to treat them as semi-independent NPCs, though.

Considering pre-WotC D&D allowed you to gain henchmen as defacto lower level PCs plus however many hirelings you could afford plus what ever your class' name level followers, if any, were, the feat is less broken since you have choose it to gain followers and a cohort.

You have a point, but a disposable PF wizard is nothing to sneeze at.

This shit's all on you and your apparent inability to socialize like a human being.

It wouldn't matter at this point if I became a genuine person and stopped with the edgelord trolling shit.

There is nothing I could say or do that wouldn't raise suspicion.

All I can do is ask to be forgiven.

Suspicion? Suspicion of what? Worst you can do is rustle our jimmies. I used to shitpost. Nobody really cares as long as you git gud.

The idea of "leadership feats" kind of intrigues me. Not got anything particular in mind, but perhaps they could effect tolerance for abusive NPC uses.

No, there's a specific feat called Leadership, and it's broken as hell. It basically lets you play an additional party member, though at most it can be up to 2 levels lower than your own, and whether you or the GM actually controls it is a matter of houseruling. I'm guessing Roger prefers to treat them as semi-independent NPCs, though.

[What kind of person thinks that strippers are so brave, strong, and talented?]

What kind of bitch gets a email sent to them, published it then makes fun of it?

What kind of person self describes themselves as a hardworking, good-hearted, socially conscious lesbian?

What kind of person thinks that strippers are so brave, strong, and talented?

What kind of person thinks other people even care?

Wha?

The person in the story has a high opinion of strippers

Why shouldn't they?

More importantly, why did you focus on the stripper line when Meunster seems to think lesbians can't be good people?

I also noticed the "what kind of bitch" thing.

Missed that on the first couple readthroughs. So much bad in such a compact package!

First couple readthroughs? By god, go do something better with your life.

Dude, you got quoted like seven times, with escalating levels of disgust. It ain't rereading if it keeps showing up on the screen.

Dammit, Roger, why are you so good at putting adventures together?

I'm really curious to see how this ties into the Temple of Elemental Evil. I don't actually know much about that adventure, though, so for all I know it could have been obvious all along and just gone over my head.

In critical theory and deconstruction, logocentrism is a phrase coined by the German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the 1920s to refer to the perceived tendency of Western thought to locate the center of any text or discourse within the logos (a Greek word meaning word, reason, or spirit). Jacques Derrida used the term to characterize most of Western philosophy since Plato: a constant search for the "truth."

Logocentrism is often confused with phonocentrism, which more specifically refers to the privileging of speech over writing.

Logocentrism is manifested in the works of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many other philosophers of the Western tradition, all of whom regard speech as superior to writing (believing writing only represents or archives speech), but who more generally wish to establish a foundational presence of Logos or "reason" obtained from an origin of all knowledge (e.g., God or the universe).

----------------------------

Derrida believed Western thought has been riddled since the time of Plato by a cancer he called "logocentrism". This is, at its core, the assumption that language describes the world in a fairly transparent way. You might think that the words you use are impartial tools for understanding the world - but this is, Derrida argued, a delusion. If I describe, say, Charles Manson as "mad", many people would assume I was describing an objective state called "madness" that exists in the world. Derrida would say the idea of "madness" is just a floating concept, a "signifier", that makes little sense except in relation to other words. The thing out there - the actual madness, the "signified" - is almost impossible to grasp; we are lost in a sea of opposing words that prevent us from actually experiencing reality directly.

Derrida wants to break down the naive belief that there is an objective external reality connected to our words that can be explored through language, science and rationality. Any narrative we construct to understand the world will inevitably be built on supressed violence and exclusion. So, for example, the narrative of 'madness' has been shown by Derrida's colleague and friend Michel Foucault to be a highly elastic concept that is used to stigmatize 'dissidents'; it is a categry that serves the powerful. None of our words is immune to these power-games. There is tension, opposition and power in even the most simple of concepts.

Current events which touch on this ---

Growing acceptance for trans people - this involves accepting the socially constructed nature of gender roles. The idea of Male and Female just being a floating concept, a signifier.

On the other side of the fence, you've got the American confederate flag. The flag is coming down all over the place, and so we're also seeing some disgusting defense mechanisms.

I listened to a John Oliver episode last night in which he described the flag as "objectively racist", and I flinched a bit. I think what a flag "really signifies" is a floating point, and we're never going to find anything "objective" there.

I think that the discussion about the flag's "meaning" is missing the point and should be avoided; we should be talking about its consequences.  To me, it's not about whether the flag is racist or not, we should be focused on how people relate to and react to the flag. How black people feel when they see the flag is not up for debate.

History and context are relevant, though.

Yes, they are. The flag may not be objectively racist, but it was objectively used by racist people for racist purposes, and there's quite a bit of evidence backing that up, given that it was a fairly recent time period. The one thing that I could see giving the flag a strong contender for an alternate meaning would be if an organization at some point down the line appropriated it in an entirely different context, for entirely different purposes, the way the Nazi party did with the swastika. However, like the swastika, I think this would need to occur centuries or possibly millennia after the fact.

I think at this point in history, it is unlikely that any group without a racist agenda would use the flag, and if they did, rather than changing its widely-accepted meaning, they would instead be suspected of racism. What's more, they would likely attract racists to their cause, and thus become a racist organization from the inside. So what we're dealing with is a symbol, yes, but it's a symbol with a very strong memetic pull, if it makes any sense to put it that way. Whoever repurposes this symbol, I think, will need to be far removed from its original context; I strongly suspect that if it ever is repurposed, it won't be by Americans.

It's basically a documentary about Arizona.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, there were anti-chemtrail ads on the subways last year. Whoever paid for the ad space seems to have run out of money, though.

There were?

Yeah, last summer. They looked pretty inconspicuous until you read the text, they mostly just looked like shots of the sky at sunset.

The Ork idea of a good time does involve the sack, rape and pillage of entire systems though.  I think you could argue the Imperium for a lesser evil simply because while it is cruel and vicious it is not arbitrarily so.  They will wipe out an entire planet with orbital bombardment, but they'll do it to contain heretics, not because they thought it was fun.  I mean, Orks are the jokey, lighthearted faction in WH40K, but they're still basically massive bastards.

Hey, Orks don't rape anyone. This is entirely because they're ambulatory algae with no genitals or concept of sexuality, but they still don't rape anyone.

Sorry, should've been more clear, I meant rape in the sense of "rape, loot and plunder" ie; killing and stealing, not the other kind.

So.... that quote was referring to the plant all this time? Huh. I completely misunderstood it all this time.
I guess the world is not as bad as i thought if all these rape, loot and plunder stories from the past are about rapeseed-oil and not about forced sex.

If you're going to be a pedantic ass, for fuck's sake at least make sure you're right first.

rape (v.)
late 14c., "seize prey; abduct, take by force," from rape (n.) and from Anglo-French raper (Old French rapir) "to seize, abduct," a legal term, probably from past participle of Latin rapere "seize, carry off by force, abduct" (see rapid).

Latin rapere was used for "sexually violate," but only very rarely; the usual Latin word being stuprare "to defile, ravish, violate," related to stuprum (n.), literally "disgrace." Meaning "to abduct (a woman), ravish;" also "seduce (a man)" is from early 15c. in English. Related: Raped; raping. Uncertain connection to Low German and Dutch rapen in the same sense.

rape (n.1)
early 14c., "booty, prey;" mid-14c., "forceful seizure; plundering, robbery, extortion," from Anglo-French rap, rape, and directly from Latin rapere "seize" (see rape (v.)). Meaning "act of abducting a woman or sexually violating her or both" is from early 15c., but perhaps late 13c. in Anglo-Latin.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=rape

Also I would generally recommend against trying to pull a pedant move on Cain, in general, because it is a near guarantee that you will be wrong.

I, too, was unaware of that meaning.

Well, here's my reasoning:
>Tau do everything for the Greater Good and seem to be the least belligerent faction overall, even being willing to engage in diplomacy. They're "good" by virtue of having no plans for genocide.
>Eldar are huge dicks who exploit everyone else for the benefit of the Eldar race, but like the Tau, are ok with the survival of other races and don't really make any more trouble than they have to.
>Imperium are Catholic Space Nazis. They want to kill everyone else because the horrors of the galaxy have given them collective shell shock and they've learned millennia ago that nobody can be trusted. They're evil because they're paranoid and fearful.
>Necrons are arguably less evil than the Imperium in the new lore, but fall lower due to roughly half of them being mindless death machines. The intelligent ones mostly just want to rebuild some vestige of their long-dead empire and take back stolen artifacts. Have cooperated with Space Marines in the past.
>Tyranids have caused widespread destruction and misery for every faction except the ones that are into that sort of thing. They aren't really evil in the sense of active malice, but they've probably killed more people than all the other factions combined and their weapons tend to be unbelievably cruel.
>Orks, as noted above, are the backwater savages of WH40k. They just want to fight everyone for their own amusement, and they don't really seem to understand the concept that other races value their lives.
>Chaos is super evil. Read up on the Daemonculaba if you don't believe me.
>Dark Eldar are even worse, their entire culture revolves around rape and torture and their spaceships are literally fueled by suffering.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, there were anti-chemtrail ads on the subways last year. Whoever paid for the ad space seems to have run out of money, though.

The Ork idea of a good time does involve the sack, rape and pillage of entire systems though.  I think you could argue the Imperium for a lesser evil simply because while it is cruel and vicious it is not arbitrarily so.  They will wipe out an entire planet with orbital bombardment, but they'll do it to contain heretics, not because they thought it was fun.  I mean, Orks are the jokey, lighthearted faction in WH40K, but they're still basically massive bastards.

Hey, Orks don't rape anyone. This is entirely because they're ambulatory algae with no genitals or concept of sexuality, but they still don't rape anyone.