FaceDeer

And once again, we see the real mechanism by which terrorism “wins”. Israel has hurt itself in its confusion.

Looks like we’re in another period of “double-check every headline to see if it’s real or from the Onion” for me…

Supply military and financial aid, sure, but no boots on the ground.

The US is failing to do even that minimal level of assistance in this case. No American troops are helping Ukraine fight, it’s all been training and supplies. That’s all that’s been requested by them. And that’s what the Republicans are blocking.

Which is funny because that would have been even more inaccurate. “Millions of light years” is off by a factor of 15,000 or more. “Millions of miles” is off by a factor of 400,000,000 or more (2 million miles is 0.00000034 light years).

Calling this “slavery” is ridiculously overly-emotive. You can’t enslave a dead person.

Yeah, close that protocol! Build the walls around our garden higher! No need to wait for them to actually do something worth defederating over, we just don’t like them!

This is silly. A major social media network is trying to join the Fediverse and everyone’s keen on stopping it. If Meta does something dirty or damaging, sure, defederate them then. But I was kind of hoping that open protocols would flourish, not just end up as another bunch of balkanized forums and Reddit-likes.

It’s one of those “greater good”, “breaking eggs to make an omelette” things.

I think it’s you who’s fooling yourself. You’re dehumanizing your opponents and therefore losing the ability to understand them. Saying “oh, they’re just evil” is giving up. And if you believe in democracy it means that you end up in a situation where you end up letting that “evil” win.

Do you think fully half of the general population of the United States are downright evil? A bunch of Snidely Whiplashes laughing maniacally as they do things purely to cause suffering?

Of course they think they’re doing this for the good of their victims. That’s why this is all so pernicious.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

-- C.S. Lewis

It’s not China’s place to make that choice for Taiwan. If they want to entice Taiwan to join them voluntarily, well, they’ve done a pretty bad job showing how “beneficial” that would be when you look at Hong Kong.

Have I considered that China would like for the people it invades to just roll over and accept their new masters instead of fighting back?

Yeah, I considered that. It seems likely that they would want that. I have yet to think of any good reason why they should get that wish, though.

There’s already a PHP backend, kbin, though judging which is a better language for this sort of thing is outside of my wheelhouse.

Okay, he hadn’t done anything wrong to us. I guess we could have paused the main campaign to spend a while investigating him, but we were doing one of those save-the-world things so we didn’t have the time. :)

Indeed, hence the sticky philosophical puzzler. I would think that the clerics themselves would start getting affected by the spell. Fortunately (for them), the effect of the spell when cast on someone of the same level as yourself is only deafness for 1d4 rounds. The Church could probably cover that up.

There was another interesting related situation that came up in an actual campaign I was in, involving the Blasphemy spell (a variant that only kills non-evil targets). My party and I were in our “home base”, a mansion belonging to an allied NPC noblewoman, planning out our next excursion. A powerful demon we’d been tangling with attempted to scry-and-fry us, teleporting in and nuking us with Blasphemy. Unfortunately there were a lot of low-level NPC staff working in the noblewoman’s household and the spell wiped them out instantly… except for one guy, who happened to be of evil alignment. He survived the encounter because of that.

Even though his alignment was evil, though, he’d never done anything wrong and didn’t seem like he had any reason to do anything wrong in the future. So we weren’t sure if we should fire him or what. It wasn’t illegal to simply be evil, you had to actually do something evil before you could be punished. We just warned him we’d be keeping an eye on him, in the end, and kept him on staff.

I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.

Here’s the SRD entry for the spell. It definitely nukes the neutrals.

The evil equivalent is Blasphemy, which nukes all non-evil creatures. Yes, the neutrals get it from both sides.

Then there’s Word of Chaos and Dictum, the Law and Chaos equivalents of those Good/Evil spells. Neutrals, believe it or not, death!

Pick a side, you neutral scum!

Back in 3rd Edition D&D there was a spell called “Holy Word” that could kill non-good creatures within a 40 foot radius of the caster, if the caster was sufficiently high level relative to the creatures. Good creatures were completely unaffected.

When tightly packed you can fit about 2000 people into a 40-foot-radius circle (total area is 5000 square feet). So one casting can deal with the population of a good-sized town. My gaming group speculated for a while about a society where it was a routine ritual to round up all the peasantry and nuke them with Holy Word to keep the population clear of evil. Never incorporated it into any campaigns, though. It’s a bit of a sticky philosophical puzzler.

“Okay, roll for initiative and place yourself on the map” is the perfect time to reveal to the DM that you were in fact conversing with that guy while hiding thirty feet away behind a pile of crates.

Whatabout, whatabout, whatabout.

You realize that if country A does something bad, “Country B did something bad too!” is not actually a defense of country A’s behaviour? Indeed, it just implies that you agree that that behaviour is bad.