Vilageidiotx

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

Also, why are so many... for lack of a better word, 'undesirables' prevalent in RP-ing communities?

@LHG100

i get the image of armed robberies and crack dens.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

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@Space Communist

Have you ever changed your mind about one of those big issues?

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Who wants to bet he signed up merely to plug into the argument because he somehow happened to find the debate?

@Dinh AaronMk

Sounds like the type of people we need to recruit to PoW.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

I would say elaborate because all I am getting is 'You are wrong' and 'People wrote words' but... you know, I really really don't want to have that elaborated to me. Like, ever. The last thing I want to read is an in depth argument about how Sonic the Hedgehog is deep and meaningful. So... we'll call this one a draw so I can go do something else.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

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Hahaha— I’m sorry, but you couldn’t be any more wrong on this one.

@Gowi

You're talking breadth, I'm talking depth. I'm also talking about the source material. You could, say, rewrite War and Peace to have Sonic characters, but that wouldn't give depth to the Sonic source material. You could write your own novel using those characters and it still wouldn't say anything for the source material, with the reason being I could rewrite War and Peace or write my own literature about the results of my bowel movements but that wouldn't mean those aforementioned bowel movements have some sort of intrinsic emotional depth.

At the end of the day, you take the basic source material of what Sonic is and ask yourself if there is anything deep about it. That's what this discussion amounts to. And when I say deep, I mean that the characters and stories at the base of the thing tell us something about life and human experience in a way that isn't superficial and common. Remember that what a fandom produces isn't considered part of the source material. That material in this case would be, like, the video games and saturday morning cartoon. And that's my question from the beginning, "how come all these fandoms latch on to shallow source material".

Have you ever changed your mind about one of those big issues?

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I think what you're referring to would be classed as social democracies. Socialism is a system in which the means of production, exchange and distribution are controlled by the workers. Capitalism is a system in which the said means are controlled by an individual. They are qualitatively different, in the same way a square and a triangle are qualitatively different (you cannot have a triangle with some square properties). Social democracy is simply a form of capitalism which prefers to use Keynesian economics rather than perhaps more libertarian economics.

@ACPM

In theory, though I suppose you could argue that in practice social democracy is socialism since it's as close as we've ever came at this point in our development. For the same reason there has never really been a free market economy (interventionism has always lay at the heart of the system, even in the robber baron days when that interventionism amounted to protective tariffs. Real free market economics is ridiculously unstable and unworkable, anytime we get close to putting it in practice damaging bubbles always arise), we've never really had a worker-controlled economy on a large scale (the "Commmunists" of the twentieth century, the Soviets, China, etc, were 'State Capitalist' in the sense that they have the state act as the ruling aristocracy in place of the bourgeois). So I guess really Sweden is as close as a nation has came to socialism, we might as call them socialist, for the same reason we might as well call Reaganomics "Free market economics" even though in practice it relied heavily on state subsidies for more major technical industries just as much as American economics have since 1941.

It depends on whether you think terms should describe theoretical constructs or practical constructs. There is something Platonic about it i guess; is there such thing as a perfect system and all of that.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

I'd like to say Vilage has been doing great work simply adding new snippits to the Wiki.

@Dinh AaronMk

Have you ever changed your mind about one of those big issues?

Religion is one I am sort of funny with (since everyone is bringing it up) in that i've always been just sort of ambivalent to it. I would have technically been religious as a kid, but all I remember is feeling superstitious about prayer until I found out you don't just get what you prayed for, after which I lost interest and religion kind of began and ended at "Bow your head at thanksgiving and think about video games until Uncle stops talking." So there isn't really a moment for me where I phased out of religious, I just sort have always been disinterested.

Though the history of religion is interesting shit. That part is worth the reading.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

Why do fandoms always form around shallow shit? Like, back in the day the big fandom was trekkies, and that made sense because Star Trek has enough depth to occupy a superfan. But Sonic? MLP? Those things have nothing to them. Its no wonder they are stereotyped for weird fanart and porn - there isn't really anything else you can do with them.

Sweep