Bay 12 Games Forum

"Copious amounts of blood", smj. Know some folks hold otherwise, but "tendency to lead to bloody rebellion" isn't exactly a plus point, for me, particularly at the moment and in this country.

... can anyone actually name a populist movement that didn't end in either collapse or copious amounts of blood? Scrounging around a bit through history stuff because one was escaping me and it's... not going well.

I guess it depends a bit on what sort of populism you're talking about. The base wikipedia version (which is more or less the one just linked above, too) isn't exactly difficult to notice where the likely problem is, ferex. On one hand, elite/other exploitation and manipulation does occur, but on the other hand the sort of rhetoric that hinges on that kind of message is... easy to exploit, itself. Very easy, and has a history of getting people to do rather incredibly stupid things. Add on the extent they tend to be cults of personality as much as anything, and it should be pretty easy to see part of the reason people are as bloody leery about them as they tend to be. Far from an exhaustive list of reasons, that, but a start. There's a hell of a lot of historical examples of why populism is maybe not what we want to be encouraging.

I'unno about y'all, but I'm pretty comfortable without caesar dissolving congress and declaring themselves emperor.

Re: the bless discussion from yesterday: Always minor earth. No exceptions, everything else is secondary. Every nation, every strategy, even if you don't have native sacred mages, even if you're going scales. Always minor earth.

... is all I really have to say :V

... I may be missing a joke, but isn't that just flatulence caught on camera? Cause that's what it looks like.

Big companies spend around 1.5 times as much on patent enforcement as on RnD.

And usually significantly more than either on marketing. Folks mumble about R&D costs but they're pretty obviously not what's mostly driving business's funding decisions.

Thing that pops up fairly often about similar or identical products on the market somehow removing a company's ability to profit or incentive to produce new goods is bupkis of the highest degree, too. Almost every market on the planet is flooded with available replacement or substitute goods, and it doesn't exactly slow business or the production of new goods down all that much. Businesses today know exactly how to leverage a substitute good or initial market introduction to make hella' dosh, and even little ones can manage it pretty well. It's bloody rare they actually need a monopoly to recoup R&D costs and a fair deal more besides.

And nah, we have better than capitalism. The whole mixed economy thing that lets capitalism deal with what it's good at (elastic goods that respond effectively to market forces, mostly), and state control handle the rest (healthcare, infrastructure, etc., etc.). Even the US, grand fellatrix of the market, uses that particular system. Pure capitalist systems tend to end poorly, very rapidly, unless they're limited to very specific subjects or kept under strict control.

Damn, sb. Good you're alright, but sucks it happened. Least you're still alive and can learn from it. And yeah, condolences on your pet. That has got to feel like shit

Was it just not paying attention or somethin'? S'been what started a few in this house this year, if none of that magnitude.

I don't think I am, Frumple. By and large, I do not see people who have a real support of the police. I'd like to support them, and I think they're mostly good guys, but I think that there's some serious issues, too. Mind you, this is recently, and it's not a topic I see brought up all that often irl.

Mate, if you don't see real support of the police, you have not watched TV once in the last three decades. Or read the news, or listened to the radio, or been somewhere besides under a rock. They are supported to the point that people, millions of them, try to blow off some sketchy as hell shit. To the point they functionally don't see legal repercussions, that they get sodding millions in grassroots donations, and more, and more, and more. This has been constant for the extent of my life. It is still constant, for all some people are starting to get slightly pissed that support is being taken advantage of, and even among them the majority message is "reign in" not "hate".

You practically have to be trying to miss this stuff.

And yeah, you were misinterpreting like the buggery with what you quoted. MSH was the only one that came even close to anything approaching hate, and even that was in relation to a believed excess of support. And MSH basically does hate the police.

Folks don't dislike the police, by and large. They hate it's reached the point they have solid ground to be fucking terrified of them, and everything related to that. Cops get a shitton of respect even with that, and there's friggin' piles of folks that have basically zero concern over how cops have been acting for the last long while. There's already been examples of that in this particular discussion, too.