I love everything about this deeply dorky conversation.

Potatoes are "pommes de terre" in french - earth apples.

... does that mean that the two points are sort of related? that's how it seems to me.

I think they're also talking about a societal trend of hypervigilance to antisemitic thought, not just one person in one place - in which case it is apples to apples. As far as I understood it, they're making the assertion that if one of their other profs made similar statement, but about say, "them wetbacks", that the prof wouldn't get the same level of discipline.

Do I believe that? no. Do I believe that they believe it? sure. Who's in a better place to say? fuck, Idunno.

In a lot of ways I kind of wish that I'd not really said anything because I'm not exactly enamoured with the whole "privilege" thing and don't ever use it in my personal life. I mean, I think it's a good idea to talk about, and to use as a tool of self-betterment, but using it against other people is garbage.

the fundamental basis of this discussion is that narcissistic assholes are allowed to be narcissistic assholes... so long as they aren't white males. And while the right to be a narcissistic asshole is a poor substitute for the right to be given the benefit of the doubt in pretty much every societal transaction, it still means that us white males must studiously bite our tongues when we encounter a narcissistic asshole... because otherwise, we're

(A) racists

(B) homophobes

(C) misogynists

(D) all of the above

simply for calling a spade a spade, an idiom that dates to Plutarch, but which you're likely to get called a racist over because if someone thinks it's offensive, it's offensive.

Yeah fuck this guy. Fuck everything about him.

I, too, was alive during The Great Gay Plague. So were a lot of us. And yeah - it killed a lot of amazing people. but these "communities" the author talks about, as if the "gay community" were the only community of note before or since, were insular by design. Homosexuals hung out with homosexuals, talked to homosexuals, ate with homosexuals, had sex with homosexuals. This allowed the heterosexual majority to point to AIDS as a disease of sin, and its victims as reapers of what they sowed. It still is - people won't say it aloud anymore, but there's an implied guilt in an HIV-positive status that you've done something to deserve it. And Tammy Faye had gay AIDs patients on the PTL club and it was scandalous. And Princess Di visited an AIDS ward and you'd think she was curing leprosy. And it got Rock Hudson and that meant that Rock Hudson was a sinner, not that AIDS got everybody and even when Magic Johnson announced his HIV status there was an implied "wages of sin" to his exposure.

Suicide? Wages of sin. Overdose? Wages of sin. Nobody accidentally commits suicide. You can't catch a drug overdose from a transfusion. And white women are dying in droves and they're dying in the middle of the country and they're dying in record numbers, but somehow that's MY FAULT:

Utopians on the coasts occasionally feel obliged to dream up some scheme whereby the unnecessariat become useful again, but its crap and nobody ever holds them to it. If you even think about it for a minute, it becomes obvious: what if Sanders (or your political savior of choice) had won? Would that fix the Ohio river valley? Would it bring back Youngstown Sheet and Tube, or something comparable that could pay off a mortgage? Would it end the drug game in Appalachia, New England, and the Great Plains? Would it call back the economic viability of small farms in Illinois, of ranching in Oklahoma and Kansas? Would it make a hardware store viable again in Iowa, or a bookstore in Nevada? Who even bothers to pretend anymore?

What the FUCK do you think I owe "Youngstown Sheet and Tube?" See, I have nothing against the Ohio river valley. Given the choice between helping the Ohio river valley or hurting the Ohio river valley I'll take help, every time. Most people would. But it's not like I don't have my own problems. Do they matter?

This isn’t the first time someone’s felt this way about the dying. In fact, many of the unnecessariat agree with you and blame themselves- that’s why they’re shooting drugs and not dynamiting the Google Barge. The bottom line, repeated just below the surface of every speech, is this: those people are in the way, and its all their fault. The world of self-driving cars and global outsourcing doesn’t want or need them. Someday it won’t want you either. They can either self-rescue with unicorns and rainbows or they can sell us their land and wait for death in an apartment somewhere. You’ll get there too.

Is it your fault? No. But is it MY fault? HELL no. And if you want to assume a pure position in which narcotics don't play, don't for a second assume I'm after your shitty land, bitch. Assume that maybe I don't know the magnitude of your problems, maybe you don't know the magnitude of mine, but maybe we oughtta put heads together rather than declare war if you want help finding a way out of your mess.

I didn't vote for NAFTA, bitch. And in my home town, the 50-under-50 obituaries meant drug-related murder. The suicides? That shit was spelled out.

'cuz apparently the desert Southwest is less passive-aggressively dickish than wherever you're at.

In a lot of ways I kind of wish that I'd not really said anything

This is Hubski. I'm glad you said something to spur me to think about it in different ways.

One point you said in your first post is "do they have a point? Yes." (I may be paraphrasing; quoting multiple posts is a tad annoying on my phone.) I emphatically agree with you here. There is a huge amount of noise distracting from the main issues that far too many people face. Even if I'm critical of some of the noise, I hope I'm not dismissive of those main issues.

Just remember, you are a poor replacement for the robot that your employer would prefer - especially if you are in an office job, or do blue collar stuff.

Reddit, I'm thinking of funny games I want to write. Can you give me examples and advice on RPG products that have inspired fun funny times?

Reddit

OK…? As a general tip: when making boilerplate text to paste en mass make something like !!!__PLACEHOLDER__!!! to easily see if you need to change something while pasting ;).

That aside and going more into the meat of your post, I don't like stuff made with a purpose of being humorous. I do like systems that are open to make humour as an emergent possibility. For example: Orkhammer. Warhammer 40k can be surprisingly serious and in-depth, despite its superficial '80s hair metal awesome outlook, telling about people at their lowest. But concept of Orkhammer simply takes it into the lighter tone. It starts with 'what if Orks could infiltrate Empire of Mankind and despite their cerebral deficiencies steer everything from the shadows?' and you end up with something so crazy that you can't help but laugh all the way from creating characters up to playing as this motley crew.

Paranoia is also really cool. It takes post-apocalyptic sheltered society under the rule of not-really-malevolent-but-mainly-because-it-does-not-get-evil AI and encourages humorous play and outcomes. It can be grim. It can be outright cerebral with a good GM. But in the end, it should be like a Catch 22 turned up to 11.

Games that are made solely with the purpose of making you laugh often come as that guy who hears a joke, smacks you over the shoulder, and yells the punchline into your ear after about an hour or two. That's hard to get in a natural manner and keep the fire burning.

Added later:

As far as inspiration goes, I don't have any. I am pretty convinced that it is if not impossible than at least highly improbable to design it with such intent and succeed. To give an example of the funniest "we all got headaches from laughing so hard" I had with my group came from a Shadowrun game "Renraku Arcology".

It's a grim and very eerie place, an arcology controlled by AI that can withstand nuclear war etc… that suddenly sealed itself. No communications, no signals from the inside or coming through from the outside aside of a few skilled hackers who made it mainly to setup an IRC server inside for bragging rights. Visuals in the book are creepy as hell. We were a squad of corporate military forces set there for reconnaissance after some engineers were trying to breach one access point for us to get inside. It sealed itself immediately after we went inside. No contact from the outside. Nothing.

We realised that we are in a clean corridor, but there was nothing that was supposed to indicate that there was any life inside. As in "this place was crawling with over 200k people and we can't detect even bacteria on the walls" clean. Lights are started to flicker, GM informed us that we hear something like a generator fluttering at the other end of the section.

All this tension, genuine fear and suspense was concluded with one of the players trying to play 'the funny guy' movie trope and said

Maybe Renraku just skipped on the last electric bill? Such a dishonour! No wonder they made this elaborate cover-up!

Rest of the campaign, despite maintaining a lot of eerie tones and creep factor was suddenly a big joke. We were cautious, but the moment we lost it completely was when my friend tried to play as a bait/decoy so that we could go around. He went into the open and yelled:

Seattle debt collection official, freeze! I have some nasty paperwork for you guys!

when exclaimed at something that looks like The Thing spliced with Event Horizon monstrosities was too much for us. Rest of the campaign was impossible to recover in terms of tone. We went all out as public officials here to deliver elec. bills to core AI.

Isn't India such a place where you can bust your butt for that $5 over and over because there is not a safety net that will supply you with the needs to survive?

Doesn't OSHA also make sure that desperate individuals aren't required to unreasonably trade their safety for that extra $5 as they may need to work for an unlicensed employer that chooses to operate outside of legal business boundaries?

Isn't Uber a version of the $5 situation?

I disappeared for a long time! It's because my hands were so broken from typing. For the last 8 months I have been unable to type, and a few months ago I finally admitted that I may never type again, and I certainly won't be using my hands for anything anytime soon. I'm in constant pain, but this week I managed to dictate (in LaTeX!) my research proposal for the next year of my PhD. I hope I can actually go through with this. Programming used to bring me so much joy. Now I do it by speech, and the frustration of it makes me want to die sometimes.

Look at that overdose map. That is the area of the USA that NAFTA and the Bush-era free trade agreements hollowed out. In many of those places, there is nothing left but the people who are too shell-shocked to do anything other than collect government checks and watch the city/county rot back into the earth.

Rural America is in a heap, deep trouble. And nobody really cares about "Fly-Over Country." The factories that used to power these small towns and counties are gone; our government makes it cheaper to raise chickens in Arkansas, freeze them whole, ship them to China for butchering, then ship them back. NOT FUCKING KIDDING.

So all those low-education jobs are washing away into the hands of our economic adversaries. And the local US tax payers that were employed and paying into the system, buying furniture, and homes, and cars are now barely making ends meet and on food stamps, if they are lucky. The factories that made furniture out of wood and leather that lasted long enough to give to your kids is now made out of pressboard and falls apart in 10 years. But that disposable cheap crap is 1/3 as much as the "real" stuff.

The author of the article comes off at tone deaf, out of touch, in the dark and condescending. The author almost certainly lives in either Brooklyn or Portland or any of the other Hipster havens that have been mostly spared from the knee-capping of large parts of the country.