Bay 12 Games Forum

Okay, a bit of clarification. "Affects your perceptions and judgement in negative ways that are known to increase your chances of harming others".

... yes, when you end up going in for a coronary without insurance (or with insufficient insurance) that harms others. Yes, if your fast-food clogged heart kicks it on the road that, s'know, harming others. Yes, you taking horrible care of yourself and the subsequent effects on your family, friends, dependents, community, etc., is... harming others. And so on.

I don't actually care about the harm that people do to themselves, I only care about that harm that they do or could do to others. As such a law making marijuana illegal serves that purpose perfectly. If I don't use it, and I remove myself from situations where people do, then it's impossible for me to be penalized by the marijuana laws (assuming I'm not framed).

Okay, do you actually believe this? Do you genuinely think that making cannabis illegal has served the purpose of removing cannabis from circulation? It is painfully obvious it has not. It is equally painfully obvious that it is in no way meaningfully impacting the rate of use, as is strongly noted by usage trends in areas that legalize. Criminalizing cannabis has not served to sqelch use, it has not made anyone safer, and it is actually outright counterproductive in regards to keeping users from potentially harming others (because it leads to them being in situations with poor or adulterated product and in situations where they are considerably more likely to cause harm, i.e. regularly interacting with criminals). Throwing people in jail for drug use does. Not. Work.

Do you actually think that you are in no way effected by the societal effects related to criminal activity in the US? Do you not realize that, yes, there is a notable and significant economic and societal cost to turning many millions of individuals in this society into second class citizens? Do you actually think that something like drug use -- the potential to, maybe, harm some one -- justifies throwing them into a situation where rape and assault is orders of magnitude more likely, to rob them of the right to vote, and to significantly impair their ability to support themselves through gainful work? How the zog does that help anything?!

If the situation as is is your idea of "serving the purpose perfectly", then in my eyes you have an incredibly twisted idea of what perfect is. The US penal system is literally one of the world's atrocities and you're speaking praise of it and suggesting it's actually doing something positive. Blows my freaking mind.

Criminalization of drug use does not work to stop drug use. It serves to depress it, sometimes, but it mostly just utterly fucks with a lot of peoples' lives, makes actual help exponentially harder to get, and makes everything for basically everyone involved that much worse. The reason recreational drug use in general needs to be decriminalized -- and in cases like with cannabis, where the harm is no more than current legal recreational drugs, outright legalized -- is because criminalizing it does not freaking help. Basically everything about the criminalization process in the US is freakishly maladaptive for dealing with drug use! You're literally suggesting we should cause more harm than drug use itself would, and then do the exact wrong things to stop or adjust for the addictions involved!

Gah!

Sweet zeus, my immediate thought on making that avatar bigger was, "What would happen if you replaced a live owl's eyes with glass eyes?"

Like... could they keep living? What would it look like when they tried to move? To fly?

Is there anything sadder than watching a blind owl trying to achieve liftoff?

E: Sweet monkey hell that thing in your ava's actually alive.

... let's pre-emptively not go sweet bro on this thread, yes? Font fight the fiftieth should occur somewhere else.

SNES: Chaos. Freaking. Seed. Needed to get that out of my system. That game is gorram amazing.

The super robot wars games. Didn't you say you hadn't played them yet, Guni? You have some on all three mentioned systems, even! You need to go play those. They're some of the most wonderful fanfiction ever professionally produced.

If you've yet to do ogre battle, go do ogre battle. SNES or PSX version, whatever. Bahamut Lagoon, perhaps. The langrisser games... they're on both the SNES and the PSX, iirc, and fantranz'd over the years.

Chaos World is a bit older (NES era) but also pretty neat. This was also pretty darn awesome.

I think you've played the old Front Mission stuff? If not, definitely do Gun Hazard. Liva-a-Live? Monstania is an alright little SRPG. This. This. Thi-- actually, just [blegh, editing] check out aeon genesis translation project. Most of the[ir] completed projects are some variation of golden.

GBA, I'm not sure there's terribly much worth mentioning that aren't obvious, ha. Dragon Quest Monsters, maybe. Perhaps check out Oriental Blue -- it's a fantranz'd one that's pretty solid, from what I remember of playing it. The Summon Night games, if for some reason you missed them.

If you're willing to go to other systems, this was a pretty neat little gamegear game.

Bunch of PSX stuff probably worth mentioning I've forgotten about. Bunch of a lot of stuff worthy of mention I've not mentioned/forgotten. But those are some nice places to start. And, as always, I recommend skimming through a list [squelch] of translated games, as per the obvious major translation website asked not to be mentioned. It's not a guaranteed thing, but it's fairly likely that if someone's gone through the trouble of translating a game, they think it's worth playing.

E: *grumbles vaguely*

But that doesn't mean I have to approve of it either.

Approve of it personally? No, of course not. But if you actually have interest in preventing harm to others, as what the rest of your passage noted, you have a current moral obligation to approve of its legalization or, at the absolute least, its decriminalization. Because the state of things as is is significantly more toxic and harmful to people than just about anything else could be.

Right now, the state of criminalization in regards to marijuana (and, to be frank, a host of other similarly harmful recreational drugs) is doing significantly more harm to the US (which is the country in regards to which this discussion is framed) -- to the people, in the US -- than even the current, illegal, use of the drug is. The lack of regulation resulting in laced or dangerously prepared material, the criminal element involved in its procurement, the incredibly screwed up state of our justice and penitentiary system, including the cultural treatment of ex-cons, resulting in basically catastrophic harm to anyone actually prosecuted for possession... those are just the domestic harms that have come from criminalization.

And that's not getting into the issues abroad which are also being caused by marijuana criminalization -- notably that, instead of it being grown and sold locally and legally, the substance is being used to fund some of the most vicious criminal organizations in the world. Right now, the states' fucked up implementation of the bugshit insane war on drugs is actively aiding in the destabilization of entire goddamn countries.

If ideally you want heavy restrictions and breathalysers and so on, and so forth -- that is also fine. And it's a goal to work towards. But in the mean time, if you genuinely hope to reduce harm to people, your immediate moral goal is the recension of the criminalization of marijuana, probably as part of a larger campaign to decriminalize the possession and use (if not necessarily their production, but frankly, probably that as well -- heavily regulated, but legal, is the functional ideal*) of recreation drugs as a whole. We do not need users in jail. We do not need them economically crippled for life. We do not need them getting sometimes-extra-deadly substances from back-alley dealers. If they need help, we need to get them help -- rehabilitation, instead of imprisonment. If they can function, then they need to be allowed to function, just like we allow alcoholics and chain smokers to function by not throwing them in prison and ruining their chances at work. And so on.

The states have pretty much categorically demonstrated that, at this point in time, we cannot handle criminalizing recreational drug use without doing catastrophically more harm to most users (and society in general) than the use itself. Maybe we'll be able to in the future, but right now? We need to stop -- if not entirely, then certainly mostly -- and seek a better way.

*Not because it's a desirable end, but because criminalization is a significantly worse one, and, as you noted, we don't really have a different tool to use in regard to the situation at the moment. It's either criminalization or some strain of legalization, and of the two there's not actually a choice if you're interested in reducing harm.

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For the shared personal note? I'm a near complete teetotaler, even to the point of having almost entirely cut of caffeine use (I've had like two caffeinated drinks and shared one two-liter bottle of caffeinated root beer in the last year... and a little bit of chocolate, I suppose.). I wouldn't use marijuana if you paid me to. If there were a way to make the substance just vanish into the aether, I'd pretty much be behind it (providing we had a good replacement for its medical uses). I would say similar things for pretty much every recreational drug on the planet. And all of that is entirely irrelevant to me, because the harm our criminalization of recreational drugs is doing is worse than just about anything we could do short of intentionally addicting our entire population to heroin. From the principle of doing less harm, of approaching the problems inherent in recreational drug use appropriately, we can't criminalize recreational drug use. It's the wrong approach, the incorrect tool. And our insistence on using it is causing genuinely massive harm, far in excess of what harm the drug use itself brings about.

It's called luck. To use the obvious christianity as an example, if you had replaced OT YWHW with some other psychopathic rage beast that the text happened to claim is female (say, Lloth) you still probably would have the same results we have now, assuming it got the same historical breaks. That's really just about all there is to it.

If by india and china, you mean hinduism, things are weird there regarding genders. If by the rest of it, you mean ignoring vast swaths of religious history (i.e. basically everything not abrahamic), then. Whatever. Grecian/roman stuff coming from gaia, great hordes of african and native american stuff, all sorts of all sorts. There's absolutely nothing abnormal about a female creator deity. That it's not the primary trend in certain areas at this time is more than a little meaningless.

It's worth noting it's not exactly uncommon for western derived media involving a created pantheon, game related or not, to also have female creator deities. If they're common in games in particular, that has considerably more to do with fanservice than anything notably cultural.