SleepingSilence

Digimon: Genesis [On Temporary Hiatus]

@Shiny Keldeo Understood that and alright, just imagining some people may find there's quicker by circumstances. If not knowing they're partners, then at least meeting. It is a digimon rp after all. ;3

Would you prefer the kids possibly meeting each other first without the digimon found?

Will probably write my next post by end of tonight. If nothing distracts me. <.< (I will have at least started.)

Edit: On second thought I have a good compromise in mind. Writing now.

Beating the Death Game (Sword Art Online)

@Aquanthe You sadly cannot delete unwanted posts.

The pace in starting up a roleplay

You get that itch, you browse the forum, and then you find that roleplay you really want to enter—or you decide to make your own. At which point you have entered the all too familiar waiting game until the eventual IC. Have any of you noticed that it is often several days or even a week or so later until a roleplay truly starts?

So the thought crossed my mind, but do some people space out the process of starting a roleplay to a length that is too long? That decision to wait until a certain date/number of "interested" comments before migrating from Interest Check to eventual OOC. Could, or more should, a GM place a character sheet template in the Interest Check so people can start working on their characters sooner? And how much should a GM prepare their own works (OOC, Characters, and IC #1) before choosing to start their roleplay?

Understandably there is a point when you go too fast and it falls apart, but I wanna hear thoughts on what pace has worked for others, and whether there are choices you would whole heartily avoid because they burn too fast or too slow.

@NuttsnBolts

It's the forum itself, it is not a normal thing for RP's to take as long as I've waited for people to write characters, for the gm to even start the RP, and then for people to post or say that they drop before posting anything. I've also never had so many damn people feel the need to nitpick every single thing they could possibly do. It's like people are TRYING to waste as much time as possible before the damn RP starts. It makes it very tedious, and it kills my interest in doing them and almost makes me continue out of obligation that I don't want to be "the asshole that drops mid RP" but so many people's direction and ability to go with the flow. (or complete lack there of.) It has made me, completely alter my CS, completely rewrite sections of my story, made the goddamn stupidest rules to a RP I've ever seen. Some that actively slow the roleplay down.

But no, I usually don't put widespread interest in RP's that I won't even bother doing if it takes slightly longer than I expect. Or in less than a week say I can't do it because life or disappear without a trace. Or even worse START/CREATE the rp and waste everyone's time in the process and then quit the RP you created. (Seriously, If you "have real life stuff." Please, don't run a campaign! >.<)

If you're asking how much time should the GM go over his own interest check/OOC before he posts it and starts the roleplay...it should be long enough that he doesn't have to get asked simple questions that they should probably think they'll be asked if they leave the information out. Once the OOC is posted and interest has already been met. It shouldn't take long at all for the RP to start. If you didn't plan for "NPC" characters and what you wanted to do to start your own RP. You shouldn't of posted the interest check/OOC in the first place. At the rate some of them go, I'd almost suggest to pre-write some the first post of the RP. That way it's already done (or at least part of it.) and maybe gives people an idea of what you're looking for, especially if the premise is incredibly vague or complex.

The other forum I roleplayed in, free/starter rp's always were instant (post a character and join right in.) type and there is a surprising lack of those on the free section...which is meant to be fast paced and just for newer players or those who want quick role-plays to mess around in in between longer ones they're doing. And the others ones took maybe 2-5 days to start once everything had been accepted and dealt with. There was a lot more going with the flow. If you had proper spelling and stuff and didn't blatantly make a screwed up CS, you were almost always accepted without issue. Which I consider far more reasonable...but that place had a LOT of differences.

Inkarnate's Music Discussion Thread

@Inkarnate If you mention us, we'd get the message quicker. Just saying. :3

But I will do so. For you. ;P Put it in a hider.

What Are You Listening To?

Beating the Death Game (Sword Art Online)

I was waiting for the few people that haven't posted yet, if its confirmed drops. I will just presume.

Digimon: Genesis [On Temporary Hiatus]

@Shiny Keldeo Just to make sure I'm not stepping on more toes. Once we enter the digital world does it matter when or where the digimon meet us? You told me that it's a random coincidence, so there's like no specific location everyone needs to meet in or anything is there? Once we get to the digital world, the partners could be there? Or are we purposefully delaying the meeting of the digimon?

How *I* See Communism: A Discussion of Spamtastic Proportions

Yes, we should be careful about how we record and read history.

@Vilageidiotx

1. There's a difference between saying 85 to 100 million deaths are hard to verify 100% vs "it's just propaganda!" which leads to the question. By who? The FBI? The hundreds of places that record those deaths? You can't tell someone to be careful, if we're diving head first into conspiracy theories with absolutely no evidence.

Fascism is a whole other ball park. I stuck to Nazi's because they we pretty straight forward in that they, like, just built camps and killed people in them. But Facism's death count runs into the same issue as Communism's. So much of the other things Fascism did was done during wartime, which makes it awkward. Do we count passivizing rebellions or attacking enemy civilians?

I will note though that Fascism wasn't around very long and didn't take hold in much of the world, holding on only fifty years, and thirty of those years being in the person of a Francisco Franco cowed by the western democracies to at least kinda act good. If we wanted to compile a "Which political structure killed the most people" list, monarchy would take the cake because it's been around forever and in most countries in some form.

@Vilageidiotx

2. I feel this part of the conversation is off topic and an unimportant to the topic at hand. People can argue both were started for good intentions (in a way.) But it's clear history shows both lead to awful oppression. To be careful about history, you actually have to study that history so you don't repeat the same mistakes.

Again you're talking about everything beside communism, now you're going into monarchies. (which actually seemed to be what the congo state was since it was controlled by a king, and had nothing to do with free market capitalism. Which you acknowledge in this post.) Even if they claimed as such, it clearly wasn't being practiced.

I'm fine with counting "Gun to head" parts, which would be political pogroms and what not. I'm pretty sure that was central to my original argument, that we should count direct murders and not indirect deaths. Hence the whole holocaust thing. I'm not saying that Stalinism is innocent. I'm saying we are padding the numbers for propaganda value and that is intellectually dishonest.

@Vilageidiotx

You say that again, but propaganda from who? It's been recorded all around the world by many different people and organisations. Where is the evidence that those numbers are padded? You need to provide some kind of evidence to claims of intellectual dishonesty/lying. Well, what proof do you have of that lying? And once again, I will point that leaders have purposefully starved there populace. And that laws exist for willful ignorance. Even if you try to not blame the leaders that caused those famines...it could very well be the system in place that caused those in the first place.

Which I'm sorry, but it WOULD be there fault. (Actually you could argue, it would be even worse if it wasn't the leaders doing it. Because then you have to ask, what did cause mass famine? Is it the system they inherited that lead them down that path?) In free market capitalism we have no bread lines or food shortages...the poor in this country are obese...there's a stark contrast to say the least.

Exactly. That was the point I was making. Indirect deaths are too fuzzy to count. I wouldn't count "Homeless person who freezed to death for lack of housing" either.

@Vilageidiotx

But why is it too fuzzy too count if there isn't anyone else to blame? If no one. Then why nothing? If communism is a terrible system that caused food shortages, then yes it is to blame for that. A lot of the stuff your link provided is very more than likely gang related crime. If "racial segregation" doesn't immediately give that away.

You're being pedantic. You know as well as I do that by "Democracy" i mean the Liberal governments. It's been short-hand for that since forever.

I feel like you believe I am arguing that the Communist states were innocent.

@Vilageidiotx

No, my point was you brought up "democracy" and "capitalist" to make a point about the united states and how it could possibly be just as evil and violent as a communist regime because those things had an instance of violence in the past and why we aren't questioning our political system, when we are questioning communism? Then you provided two completely different systems that have nothing to do with how our system works. Just because people say we're a "democracy" a lot doesn't mean it's correct, and it's usually used for a political reason. (like when pointing out that democracy is evil.) So that's why I corrected it.

If it was a harmless/off-topic assumption, I'd of left it alone but if you're going to make a statement that's basically. "The United states system could be just as bad as communism because look a french revolution happened, they're a democracy just like we are!" I'm forced to correct that. There's a reason why we aren't a democracy and people need to also be more careful with the words they use.

And if you aren't doing these things on purpose, I apologize. I'm not saying you're denying everything. But there is seemingly a lot of deflections going on. The only purpose I can think of bringing up every other system you can think of, when they weren't originally apart of the discussion. Is attempting to compare them...

If they aren't making the point I assume they're making, Then do they have a point to begin with?

That second link, if you dig around their stats a bit, makes the argument that Alabama is wealthier than the United Kingdom.

@Vilageidiotx

$35007.96 is the average median family income earner in the UK. (2016)

$41,657 average median family household income in Alabama. (in the year 2000) which is the 42 highest...(meaning quite low.)

I mean I don't "know" 100% if that's a true statement, but it kind of seems like it can be true...

forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/08/2..

According to this, Britain IS poorer than ANY U.S state...

mises.org/blog/if-sweden-and-germany-b..

So is Sweden and Germany apparently...

But I feel like this is getting into the weeds, when the whole question is..."Why communism over free market capitalism?" or even "Why communism over socialism?" And the whole question. "Ignore the bad communism, let's name one that was good instead...?"

Taking that particular statement literally would be to suggest Marx wanted people to be moved with brooms... taking it metaphorically, which the author of this article does, is how you decide it means death. Or disenfranchisement, which is how I would take it.

@Vilageidiotx

I suppose it would highly depend on how karl marx behaved as an individual. Which no surprise, Marx was an asshole.

intellectualtakeout.org/blog/karl-marx..

A bit from my previous link.

1. Revolution:
Marx taught that a revolution to destroy Capitalism was both necessary and inevitable. He acknowledged the possibility that the revolution in England and the United States might be peaceful, but he believed that most revolutions would be violent. Lenin dismissed the possibility of peaceful revolution and declared that violence was essential.

A debate on the question whether revolution must be violent is presently raging in the ranks of the Communists. Certain Communist parties, known as Euro-Communist, such as the parties of Italy and Spain, believe that the revolution may be peaceful while others ridicule the idea as reformist. All are agreed that violence is permissible.

An example I can pull out of my head to explain why this matters is this; in the eighties in Ethiopia while it was ruled by the Communist Derg, there was an infamous famine that became a humanitarian crisis that until this day colors what everybody imagines when they think "Ethiopia." It was exacerbated by forced collectivization of farms, and by the Derg's embarrassment at their situation and effort to keep foreign aid out of the country. We could do what I have complained of above and throw those numbers into the Communism Death toll, but it gets complicated.

Ten years prior to Derg rule, Ethiopia was an American ally ruled by an old monarchy. Feudalism was in place and limited how much land was being worked. There was a famine. This famine, incidentally, is seen as one of the main cause of the Communist revolution that took place soon afterwards.

...and now. in the modern world, Ethiopia requires foreign aid to stave off famines. It is a very corrupt Republic, but still a Republic. They are selling large swaths of arable land to Asian firms growing food.

In all three cases, droughts largely cause the famine to start, and political circumstances make it worse.

Which begs the question, how do you create a number from any of them that can be blamed souly on the political structure of that society? If a famine happens, how do we differentiate between natural deaths and death by mismanagement? Any way you try to do it will be arbitrary.

@Vilageidiotx

Forgive me, my back is killing me right now. So I might be reading things wrong today. So what I gathered from that is...it used to be monarchy in the 70's that was an American ally?...Then in the eighties it became a communist ruled nation and a giant famine happened?...That even today as a "Federal Republic" it hasn't recovered from? Is that the gist of it?

Well...if you want to wonder if communism caused the famine in the first place, or it was just a coincidence. Compare them to other communism systems taken place? Did famine happened in all of those to? It's not like it happens out of nowhere...

Which are we trying to argue here? That famine weren't part of communism, just the leaders and governments that enforced it? Like Stalin purposefully made the famines happen...Or famines can never be done purposefully and can't be influenced by the system making/distributing the food?

And once again ignoring the implementations done in the past. What Karl Marx says in that video, is disturbing and he clearly doesn't grasp how society works.

How *I* See Communism: A Discussion of Spamtastic Proportions

We should be very careful with the "Communism killed X amount of people" thing, since more often than not it is propaganda with questionable methodology.

This is the problem; with Nazis, we can pull up a number easily because Hitler literally corralled those people into camps and killed them methodically, and because this was an explicit goal of Nazism. With the deaths by communism thing however, it gets weird.

Do we count famines? Collectivization certain exacerbated them; force collectivization of the peasants is one of the most glaring failures of the Soviet system. But they weren't malicious deaths (in the sense that death was not the intended goal of the regime). Mao didn't want to cause a famine. Who knows with Stalin, I'm not well read enough on the subject to get into it. If we are counting non-Malicious deaths though, doesn't the same thing apply to capitalism then?

Do we count extra-philosophical additions by specific regimes? Democracy has the Reign of Terror and the post-1776 Native American genocide on their hands, and capitalism has the Congo Free State, but none of these things were explicitly demanded by democracy or capitalism. Like I said, with Nazism we can safely put their murders on Nazism itself because racial purity was explicitly part of their philosophy. But Communism doesn't say "We need to kill people who live in cities." So does Pol Pot count?

History is super complicated shit. When we say "Communism killed X amount of people" the implication is that Marxist philosophy ordered those deaths, which isn't necessarily the case most of the time.

@Vilageidiotx

1. I don't think we should be careful about something that has caused ten of millions of death. It's not propaganda...it's recorded deaths. It's kind of dismaying to deny those regimes happened. It's a high amount, no matter where you get the facts...

2. I didn't want to bring up fascism and Nazi's because their slightly different, and I didn't want there to be a compassion made...but even then communism dwarfs the fascist kill count. (*Not implying Nazi's were good in anyway.*)

3. They didn't have any food because they had bread lines and massive shortages. (like all of them have throughout history.) Because of the system they inherited, vs the overabundance that capitalist countries have. I wouldn't even try to compare "LACK OF EDUCATION" to REGIMES that put guns to people's head.

"The investigators found that approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty. "

wsws.org/en/articles/2011/07/pove-j13... <- Basically same study and it's arguing that poverty (being poor) is the link to death. And if that's true, does making everyone poorer somehow help that?

Also bet anyone a bizillion monopoly dollars almost all of these stats are linked to gang related crimes...which this neglects to mention. And even if you try to say capitalism killed them somehow, which isn't even what this link implies. 245,000 to millions isn't the most convincing comparison.

abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/FedCrimes/story?.. 80% According to this.

breitbart.com/big-government/2014/05/0.. Half from FBI and 90% according to others.

And no gang's aren't capitalism's fault...

4. Okay? We aren't a democracy, we're a constitutional republic so have no idea what you're even attempting to compare there...

"The Congo Free State was privately controlled by Leopold II, King of the Belgians through a non-governmental organization, the Association internationale africaine. Leopold was the sole shareholder and chairman, who increasingly used it for rubber, copper and other minerals in the upper Lualaba River basin (though it had been set up on the understanding that its purpose was to uplift the local people and develop the area). The state included the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo and existed from 1885 to 1908. The Congo Free State eventually earned infamy due to the increasingly brutal mistreatment of the local peoples and plunder of natural resources, leading to its abolition and annexation by the government of Belgium in 1908."

Yeah the whole "CONTROLLED BY A KING" part kind of makes me think this has absolutely nothing to do with a free market capitalist system.

Also, I feel like the video addressed this but it is a valid point. "Ignore the bad ones, name one good one that's been tried..."

5. Again, if we're trying to argue that poor people in a capitalist country (somehow means death it's responsible for.) Which I hate to use this argument because it sounds quite pessimistic, but our poor are still the best off compared to other places. So if being poor is linked to death which is the argument for a bad system...we'd have the best case against that...

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/09/h..

mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-midd..

Because in many cases, if you don't want to blame famine and starvation on deaths, alot of them were ignored and caused from direct actions, and not because of some by product or coincidence. A ton of people were still killed by actions personally directed by the leaders and governments of those regimes.

From article below.

"Some apologists for Communism acknowledge that Communism has killed in the past, but they blame this on incidental factors such as the traditions of cruelty and violence which existed in the countries conquered by the Communists, and they do not believe that killing is an essential ingredient of communism itself. They believe that the triumph of Communism in the United States, England, or Western Europe would not lead to mass slaughter. Are they right or are they suffering from a dangerous delusion? To answer this question, it is necessary to know why Communism kills."

schwarzreport.org/resources/essays/why..

A simple, direct answer to the question, "Why does communism kill?" is-because the founder of Communism, Karl Marx, told them it was necessary to kill a large segment of the population in order to attain the basic objective of Communism.

Marx states in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Apologists for Marxism contend that Marx did not intend that this statement should be taken literally. They affirm that he was referring to the gradual elimination of property owners by the transformation of the economic system which Communism would bring to pass. They cannot deny, however, that many followers of Karl Marx, including Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot have taken this affirmation literally and have proceeded to kill the "middle-class owners of property" once they have acquired power.

A part of the article in question...

How *I* See Communism: A Discussion of Spamtastic Proportions

<Snipped quote by SleepingSilence>
(despite a lot of people claiming that socialism is literally renamed communism which it isn't) A less likely theory is that because so many people think communism = socialism, communists and socialists just get lumped together.

(ie axing all social welfare and letting people hopefully figure shit out on their own). I know people are going to say "you're stupid/blind/foolish for putting your faith in a centralized government!" but I don't really care since again, I have faith in the central government just like how people have undying faith in the free market. I find that to be a foolish notion, so in a sense, everyone is a fool to everyone else.

@ClocktowerEchos

Just a very quick response, more to get my "belief" across. Despite me posting a video saying otherwise. I do think "calling socialism and communism the same thing." Isn't a productive statement either and is often brought up, when I do think there called different ideals for a reason. And there's probably a little more nuance than the average person may think.

I certainly won't be the one to argue that, (the welfare system axing thing.) Just because I don't really think there's an easy/sensible way to do so and frankly I think it's absolutely necessary for temporary moments of crisis. But I will give credit to those that do, in all the problems those good intentions have done. And I will argue to death, that charity is a possible and completely viable solution, and isn't just some "made up" thing. People don't want to see starving bodies on the street, people will pay as a collective for things they want. Kickstarter and Gofundme are highly used platforms.

Also my first video going into the "people that have faith in government is same/similar to people that have faith in free market." There is a difference. (At least in my opinion which I will share. ^3^)

In the video it states, Karl Marx believes "all forms of power in ANY system, there is inevitable corruption that follows."

Which is a true statement. So, the obvious question that follows...Now what do you do? If you don't like the corrupt big bank, that went bankrupt and needed bailouts to stay afloat. Do you instead go to a locally owned credit union that didn't get bailouts? Or do you let that become "The bank" your only bank. I think trusting in people/ideas blindly is silly regardless. So, I know "picking from the lesser evils." doesn't sound super appealing. But it has to better than having no choice at all. I just wanted to say that I do think there is a difference between relying on a single body vs as many bodies as the people want. You can't realistically have competition in a communist state. At least that's how I'm aware how their system works...

My two, poorly minted cents

@ClocktowerEchos

Don't devalue yourself. (I know it's sarcasm.) But I think you did a perfectly suitable job expressing your opinion. :3