Bay 12 Games Forum

If I could pick any fictional incompetent to be President, it would be Chance the Gardener, AKA Chauncy Gardiner from Being There.

President Bobby: Mr. Gardner, do you agree with Ben, or do you think that we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives?
[Long pause]
Chance the Gardener: As long as the roots are not severed, all is well.

Maybe it's just my parents generation talking but I was taught that you are not supposed to 'like' any of your news sources.  They are supposed to report the news in a balanced way.  If you like a particular publication's spin they are doing it wrong and you should not use it (or any single publication for that matter) as your only source of news.  Even the most neutral of publications have humans as writers and editors.  Bias is inevitable.

While I have on occasion made mistakes and jumped at only one source when I'm looking things up, or posting on my lunch breaks, or other such times when I don't have time to do a thorough check, or full access to subscriptions, we should all strive to have multiple sources whenever possible.

Now that's a neat perspective. But then aren't you at the mercy of News Aggregators instead of individual News sources? It would seem that you have to rely on a "favorite" somewhere, right?

If a doctor said that the only way to save you is this life altering procedure... and you asked how? And they said "No, you are not a doctor"... Well that wouldn't happen. Even assuming a doctor wouldn't debate you on this (and they MIGHT), they would at least give you every bit of information you need... You can petition the medical board, get second opinions, find other individuals.

Actually this is a terrible example.

How the fuck should I know what a doctor tells me? Ask a different doctor? Ask him to explain years of medical knowledge? No. I've had enough of these people who think they know as much as doctors. Or even, that they should know as much as a doctor. What madness! At the end of the day, you have to put your life in the hands of people who cannot explain to you what it is that they are going to do. Not because they can't explain it, in general, but because you personally do not know enough about being a doctor to know what they mean. They can explain it to you through metaphors, but that's not really how it works; that's a simplified version, as if for children. If one doctor disagrees with another, how are you supposed to figure it out? Because more doctors tell you it should be X, instead of Y? What's the difference between you and the nutty anti-vaxxer who hunts for a doctor to support their ridiculous anti-vaccine views?

Basically, yeah. You are at the mercy of a profession. A group of people with hidden knowledge giving you simplified versions of reality for your own good. And that is ok. Not everyone needs to be a doctor. No more than that everyone needs to be a scientist, or an internet technician, or a lawyer, or any and every other professional field. Frankly no one has time for that. We're all mortals with finite time on this earth, so we learn things on a need-to-know basis. A doctor wouldn't tell you "No, I am a doctor", but honestly, wouldn't it be fair to? Who cares what you think you know about medicine, really? How many times has someone come up to you about a subject you're an expert on, and said "Well no that's not how it works?" Or gone on and on about their ridiculous misconception of what you say until you give up and say "Just let me do my job?" Like we need more people idiots on this earth complaining about "expert knowledge"...

Judge on the basis of "Other people listen to these doctors and get better/worse" because that's A) The only thing you should care about, and B) The only thing you can actually be the judge of. Anything else and you're just annoying someone more knowledgeable then you are.

I don't Republicans would go that far. The near demise of the Healthcare bill gives hope. When elimination of the Filibuster is under consideration than I'd be concerned.

I think he's implying that because the Nazi party had the word socialist in it, Republicans would disapprove of them. While this statement, by itself, raises alarm bells I didn't even know I had, the second-half might actually clear it up: I think that the line about redefining words is actually intended to raise a point about we use and abuse language in political discourse, using the "Nationalist Socialist" thing as an example.

Or he's being completely literal and saying that calling Republicans Nazis is just wrong, because Republicans can't be Nazis, because they hate socialists.  Which... I leave to someone with more sleep and fewer pending deadlines them myself to deal with.

Quote from: Scarlet_Avenger on May 31, 2017, 07:07:31 am

Quote from: Virtz on May 31, 2017, 03:50:06 am

I'd also note that "nazi" stands for national socialist, and while your right wing is pretty nationalistic (as any is, really), it's about as anti-socialist as it gets, to the point where "socialist" is an insult on your political scene. A tendency I'm noticing in American politics is redefining words with negative connotations to mean people you disagree with and not yourself.

Do note that North Korea refers to itself as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which is about as far away from the truth as you can get. Names of groups/countries/people tend to be a projection of what that group thinks themselves to be, not what they actually are.

So you think the National Socialist party wasn't actually socialist by our understanding of the term? How so?

Oh, ok. Have fun you guys. I'll merely add in while I'm not a fan - to put it mildly - of comparing Trump or Republicans to Nazis (My grandfather would actually return from the grave to slap me), you're kind of going too far with this line here:

And I wasn't aware that hiring a paramilitary for security is synonymous with "gas the jews".

I don't think anyone reasonable is arguing that (and anyone unreasonable who is not currently the President of the United States can be safely ignored). Nazism was a lot of things to a lot of people during the existance of the original NSDAP. It was genocide, it was racial purity laws, it was militarism, it was a lot of different things. What I mean here is that setting the standard as high as literally quoting Mein Kampf is already a bit of a problem, I think; not specifically with Nazism, but with any "ism" that people don't like. People say "Well if I'm not actually gassing jews I'm not a Nazi" or "Well if I am not going around flinging racial slurs at people in the street or lynching negroes, so I'm not a racist." It reminds me of something from Catch-22 (Censored because I don't remember forum policy on these things, and I'd like to not be warned today.):

Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It's a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a n****r, k**e, w*p, or s**c.

You're right that people have an amazing ability to make negative words mean "people I don't like", but you should also remember the "and not me" part. You're going on about the context of the NSDAP party, and that's fine; but when you consider that someone may well just be referring to Neo-Nazis, your analysis loses a bit of punch. These things are real, and it should be possible to call something out as being a part of that without all the "But HOW DARE YOU" that comes up. Yes, it's possible to be a racist or a nazi without personally murdering six million Jews, and the fact is that standards tend to inflate towards that, for ourselves, and away for others. Both angles need to be rememebered.

(Also fuck you I NEED TO WRITE AN ACTUAL ESSAY DAMN IT)

Max, do you really think the US entered WW2 because they disliked Nazis?

Do you think the US would have gotten involved if they did like Nazis?

They didnt. And neither did the Nazis dislike America - the US literally was the foremodel to them, they based many of their race laws on examples set by America. The only reason the US got involved was because of Japan attacking them.

A) I would not confuse considering US eugenics laws as a legal model, and admiring the country as a whole. Nazis respected the methods and efficiency of Bolsheviks, for example, but the massive violence visited upon the Soviet Union indicates that that sort of respect counts for little. B) Nazi Germany declared war on the US, not the other way around. The US declared war on Japan in response to Pearl Harbor, but not Germany. Germany and Italy declared war on the US three days later on December 11th, with the US only responding later that day; hardly a coincidence. C) It's not like the US was actually as neutral as it claimed to be before Pearl Harbor. Lend-Lease was pretty huge. US support was real and significant.

But seriously, has anyone seen a sign of life ever since Trump abruptly ended his late night Tweet in gibberish, and the tweet was removed 6h later?
It kinda looks like he keeled over and died while typing his last tweet.

Best explanation: Trump is actually a physical manifestation of my will to live (I'm so sorry), and when my will to live gave out while writing endless text, so did he. As the poets say, "covfefe". (I demand "covfefe" or some variation thereof be the new thread title! Make it happen!)

On an unrelated note, massive blast in Kabul claims at least 80 lives.

Quote from: Frumple on May 24, 2017, 02:27:06 pm

life is frankly kinda' shit.

That's subjective. People have lived in much simpler ways than we do now and been as happy – or more so, modern rates of depression are pretty high and highest in first world countries.

I mean, my life is pretty objectively shit. I've actually stopped telling people how I'm doing, because I find it annoying to have to console other people through the process of learning about my upbringing and current situation.

Unfortunately, it seems US policy is not yet sufficiently enlightened to focus entirely on my needs, and until I acquire an impressive track record of political donations and investments in the Trump family businesses, it seems likely to remain so for the near future. Sad! #MakeMiskoGreatAgain

Quote from: EnigmaticHat on May 24, 2017, 05:15:45 pm

Quote from: Frumple on May 24, 2017, 04:58:58 pm

Quote from: Gizogin on May 24, 2017, 04:28:21 pm

The Congressional Budget Office released its score on the revised AHCA. By 2026, it is projected that 23 million more Americans will be uninsured, compared to the current law. Premiums are expected to increase for the old and the poor, while higher-income Americans will see a reduction in premiums. The original version, the one that never made it to a vote, would have increased the uninsured population by 24 million people over the same period, so it's technically an improvement over their previous proposal.

Remember that the House passed this resolution nearly three weeks ago, without waiting for the CBO to score it.

You missed the best part. The previous one was projected to save (for a certain sense of the word) the gov't 150 billion over a decade, along with that 24 million more uninsured (and who knows how many others less insured). This one has that 23 million uninsured over that period, but it also has a savings projection of, get this, 113 billion. They somehow managed to write up a healthcare proposal less efficient than the original train wreck, with barely any gain for it. It's almost impressive, in a pretty morbid way.

So what you're saying is, the second proposal could have just been 100% subsidizing the insurance plans of 1/24th of at-risk Americans and it would have been a better proposal?

The problem is republicans really aren't seriously focused on the issues. They're focused on bandages; the "subsidizing 1 million people's health insurance" thing is also a bandage, but it's a very obvious and naked bandage (even though it is cost-effective). Republicans are insistent on pretending there isn't that much of a problem, that the bandages aren't so much bandages as improvements, and other nonsense; if they were honest about the bandages, they'd have to ask a question they don't want to ask: "If the bill requires such massive bandages, maybe it's just a bad bill to begin with?" Then if they'd have to go back to the drawing board, but there's no evidence that they even have anything on that drawing board. This is one promise that would benefit them politically to forget about.

I need goals to enjoy CK2. Whatever they are, they have to be extant. It also helps me get right back into the action, where otherwise I wouldn't really be interested in continuing. That's how my old Rome game got to where it was: there was always something to do. It's a lot more motivating when I can come back and think "Ok, let's start that long-delayed war against the Fatimids to secure our holdings in Jerusalem", or if I don't want to do that, continue my campaigns in Iberia to destabilize the Andalusians, or maybe see what my vassals are doing in the frontier regions of the empire in the Caucuses and Africa (the answer is almost always infighting of some sort, with the occasional suicidal attack on someone much bigger than they are).

Otherwise, it's just me on Speed 5, facepalming every time I have to handle the education and marital status of some third cousin twice removed in the distant Frisian branch of the family. And hell that happens anyway sometimes! But that's usually a sign that its time for a little break.

Um, what oil crisis? The only 'oil crisis' that I see is a self inflicted one from OPEC when they tried to lower prices in order to force American shale oil out of business.

First, there was an oil crisis in 1973, when OPEC imposed an Oil Embargo on the US for its support of Israel during the Yom Kippur war. Then, we had the 1979 oil shock in response to fall and rise of Iran. Note that the latter had a small (4%) actual affect on the oil supply, but the Panic meant that oil prices more than doubled. We also had the 2000s Energy Crisis, where the price of Oil was on a steady upward march until the 2008 recession.

I don't see the need for scare quotes.

Quote from: Puzzlemaker on May 23, 2017, 02:57:32 pm

So, what can actually be done about net neutrality?  Are there any protests planned?

Because protests solve everything.

I, for one, would rather have protests on Net Neutrality than another "Impeach the Cheat(o)" rally. Drawing attention to Donald Trump's policies takes the focus away from this "with-us-or-against-us" culture-war mentality, because, thus far, his actual policies (as opposed to the flashy things like the travel ban) are pretty unpopular.

I was sort of wondering why Trump would put the US in such a position. I mean extra military also means you need more oil to support said military, and in our current oil crisis having a strategic reserve is even more important.

Almost all of Donald Trump's policies are reminiscent of that whole "sue the Saudis" bill that passed a year ago or something. Obama very clearly stated "This bill is short-sighted and will expose us to retaliatory legal action", and Congress flipped him off and overturned his veto by a wide margin. Then, lo and behold, Mitch McConnell placed the blame on Obama for not reaching out to Congress enough.

Donald Trump is Congress, in this scenario. He hears "Sue the 9/11 hijackers Bill" and thinks "Oh wow, obviously we gotta do that, why wasn't that done before? Sad!" Then he marches on forward, no matter what consequences are or aren't waiting just over the horizon.

Meanwhile, on a note completely unrelated to Sweden: Jeff Sessions vs. Sentencing Reform.

The parties were moving in the same direction on sentencing reform and moving away from the harsh minimums and other products of the crackdown on crime in the 90s. Progress was slow,  but both in Congress and in the states, Republicans and Democrats had an issue with which they were becoming more bipartisan, not less.

Jeff Sessions, however, in his role as Attorney General, has been moving in the opposite direction: overturning Obama-Era rules and calling for mass incarceration in order to thwart drug crime. The rules have received significant criticism from Congress and others, and in the case of the states have ignored Sessions and continued to move in the opposite direction.