Bay 12 Games Forum

Thought experiments can be fun, but Body Armor For All is as insane a proposal as "It Wouldn't Be A Problem If Everyone Had Guns". When gun proliferation has reached a point that it's advocates propose treating civilian spaces as a warzone as a solution, it's pretty apparent their priorities lie with continuing gun proliferation over human lives.

Think I have to check out of this thread. Too pissed about this, and about the dissociated way people tend to talk about mass shootings, and how people talk but don't take action. On the off chance you read this, take the time you'd spend replying, or crunching numbers on a funny thought experiment, and call or email or sign a petition to send to your Senator.

Take some kind of action, please. We can stop this shit, and we need to. All of us need to.

EDIT: Here's a link to check how each US State's Senator voted regarding background check laws at the end of last year, including links to email or otherwise contact them if you live somewhere that voted against them.

Thankfully, I didn't lose anyone in the Orlando shooting. However, on different occasions, I've lost several relatives and one friend to gun violence. They were all shot and killed in Crimes of Passion, with weapons purchased shortly beforehand without a problem. One shooter was a substance abuser, and another was undergoing treatment for psychological problems, and neither should have passed a decent background check and been allowed to buy a weapon. I really wish they hadn't, but that's how it is right now in the US. I hope we can change this in my lifetime.

The NRA et al. have worked hard and spent a lot of money to create the narrative that laws are powerless to stop gun violence, and that the only cure for the misuse of Guns is to have More People buying More Guns, and apparently holding them against each other's heads all the time. This is sociopathic and absolutely fucking insane as a model for a society; a constant Cold War with your neighbors, with mutually-assured destruction on a person-by-person basis? And yet the myth persists, against all odds. If you yourself are a believer, I urge you to take a step back and consider some things.

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Consider, first, where the money is in this situation. Guns and Gun Manufacture are a colossal industry with incredible spending power; very large organizations like the NRA are given much of these profits to fight Gun Control on all fronts, discrediting and misrepresenting legitimate studies, funding slanted studies of their own, creating a network of propaganda and magazines to spread their curated information, hiring huge teams of lawyers and lobbyists, and "donating" to cover the campaign costs of a large number of congress members (and using that as leverage to keep that congress person sympathetic to their business). This is public knowledge, yet some people still continue to treat their platform as anything other than self-sustaining propaganda.

Secondly, a quick crosspost from the Sad Thread.

...but when the "If everyone in that club had guns, this wouldn't have happened" argument came out, I tried my best to explain how these sorts of mass killers don't usually expect to survive, and often commit suicide right afterward. They see themselves as heroes and martyrs, whose actions and deaths will be publicized by the news and become an inspiration to other violent extremists who share their views. More guns don't stop that... being gunned down in response only helps further polarize the folks that sympathize or idolize these killers.

Shooting At The Bad Guys, or even holding guns at each others heads every day of our lives, just makes it a fight, and Humans have a really shitty neuropsychological loophole when it comes to fights. Get enough Anger and Adrenaline in your bloodstream, and it shuts down your Empathy and Conscience; we literally can lose the capacity to understand others, accurately judge what they're thinking, etc. if we think someone or their "group" wants to fight us. This is why Fearmongering, indoctrination into certain forms of violent extremism, and similar propaganda works on us Humans. This is our psychological nature, being used against us by unscrupulous people who want to maintain forms of power.

Finally, to preempt some rebuttals. Yes, laws cannot actually control people's behavior, just like locked doors can't actually prevent people from breaking and entering; if someone is dead-set on it, they'll bust a door down or break a window, get in, and hope to escape before the cops show up. Yet, no one thinks twice about putting locks on our homes anyway. The goal of these security systems, much like laws, isn't to prevent break-ins from being possible; it's to scare borderline criminals away from committing a crime, to make the crime take more effort or expertise and impeding the crime itself, and to slow down Crimes of Passion done in the heat of the moment, in hope that their conscience or empathy have time to kick back in.

This whole thing is really upsetting me. This should have never happened, but due to the sheer stupidity of the system some maniac was able to buy guns and shoot 50 people without any trouble.

Also,

Quote from: My Mother

Unfortunately, Trump is right about that. The only way to stop terrorism is to keep those fuckers from coming over here.

Why the fuck is it that whenever something genuinely horrible happens mother has to make some retarded comment like this?

The obvious rebuttal is that the fucker in question was an American, born and raised.

Had to navigate some similar discussions with my folks last weekend. That part of the family literally and figuratively buy Alex Jones' brand of coffee, think of Trump as some kind of messianic hero, only actually know/care about the second amendment, mail-order and stockpile ammunition in the basement, and have a small arsenal of semi-automatic weapons, concealable pistols, night-vision scopes, and so on between them. That aside, my father's also the sort of guy who says "I'm okay with it, but I don't think gay people should be public about it."

We dodged homophobia this time, but when the "If everyone in that club had guns, this wouldn't have happened" argument came out, I tried my best to explain how these sorts of mass killers don't usually expect to survive, and often commit suicide right afterward. They see themselves as heroes and martyrs, whose actions and deaths will be publicized by the news and become an inspiration to other violent extremists who share their views. More guns don't stop that... being gunned down in response only helps further polarize the folks that sympathize or idolize these killers.

No one had a rebuttal; instead, the discussion jumped immediately into talking about how stupid and unnecessary transgender bathroom laws are, and how we "Need to protect little girls from pedophiles," so... yeah. That's family for ya! :Y

This shit really wears me out. There's only so much one can do, when people believe they hold absolute knowledge, without any test in reality.

Nah it's not insulting/rude at all; aphantasia seems to run in my family, and I have problems with certain kinds of imagination, including a weak/fuzzy ability to visualize imagery and such in my mind's eye. Example: I learned to do visual art by externalizing my imagination on paper/digitally and iterating on it a lot. Don't think starting a drug habit is the way to cheat at magical thinking either. :3

Anyway, posting here was kind of a desperation move. I'mma just keep working at it until I find a process that works, and see what I can do. Much obliged for the pointers!

Hey y'all. I'm here to bemoan some writin' problems of mine, and maybe hopefully find some pointers?

I have a Fiction problem; specifically, I have extreme trouble whenever I want to imagine a setting that operates on non-realistic or magical rules, or which ignores the rules and elements of our universe, or which is otherwise set in a simplified fictional reality. When I start writing characters or creating a setting, I keep getting caught up in thinking about things in terms of Planets and Biology and Conservation of Energy and Things That Happened and other forms of realism that I can't help but take for granted. Some of the time, this style of setting works, but it's more often been a hurdle for me as a writer. I LOVE simplified, imaginative settings that are a significant departure from the one we know, and that's closer to what I want to be writing most of the time. That aside, it seems like avoiding Mostly Realistic ideas frees up a bunch of room for stronger archetypal characters, unexpected worldbuilding and situations, and that whole sense of discovery and surprise that sort of fiction conveys.

TL;DR, science and pre-existing knowledge is bogging down my writing, and getting in the way of my ability to think magically, and/or create certain kinds of surreal/imaginative situations and settings. Moreover, not only is it hard to challenge this taken-for-granted realism all the time, it's also using up a bunch of mental cycles I'd rather be using creating meaningful situations and characters. How do you compartmentalize realistic elements or scientific understanding of Earth, people, physics, the Universe, or whatever when creating settings? And how do you foster that ability?

Rolan, if you try the tamago at some point, you must tell me how it is. I put off trying that when I could, and now I am full of egg-based longing and regret!

Honestly, I think that the residual Bernie Sanders campaign is less about trying to be president at this point, and more about proving that there's a pretty significant chunk of the US Electorate who would support Democratic Socialist candidates and policies. It also demonstrates that a candidate pushing for those policies is able to garner the support of a large number of disaffected voters who otherwise don't get involved in the process, despite the fact that "Socialism" is still a dirty word in much of the US. It's more about demonstration of a principal, and a statement by his supporters, rather than a legitimate campaign at this point.

I don't think that's a bad thing, either... far from it. Hoping that the relative success of the Sanders campaign, and the fallout of this latest chapter in the hijacking of the GOP by backwards-looking bigots and fundamentalists, will both do something to shake up the status quo of the present Two Party System. Sociologically speaking, we're going through a lot of the End-Of-Dynasty type death throes demonstrated by regime changes in China and Rome... tensions keep getting higher, faith in the government is declining every year, social unrest continues to simmer, and our media keeps painting dreams of revolutions and society-collapsing apocalypses. Forgive the grandiosity here, but I'm hoping this means we have a shot at steering toward major systemic reforms, rather than letting it implode under it's own incompetence, war, rebellion, and the general dissatisfaction of the masses.

Here's something I didn't write. Quick Background; John Milo Ford was a Science Fiction author with a habit of engaging in random acts of creativity throughout his day to day life, often in unexpected spaces. Neil Gaiman mentioned him turning memo emails and invitations into songs, etc. If you're curious, here's an online retrospective on some of his works: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008033.html#008033

Anyway, something about a sonnet like this being written as a passing comment on a blog post really struck me. Ephemeral beauty in an ephemeral place, for ephemeral creatures.

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John M. Ford, October 13, 2003

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days --
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.

Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.