DShomshak

I haven't done a great deal working law in my Fantasy campaigns as plot points, but it's a good idea, I tend to pay more attention to government, though. The D&D campaign I'm just starting, the setting is the Plenary Empire, a multi-species society loosely based on the Byzantine Empire (in that it's old, bureaucratic, and is clearly in decline as bits secede in civil wars or are conquered by its neighbors). The ruler is the Autocrat of the city of Pleroma. There is no hereditary aristocracy as such, though the super-rich oligarchic families often manage to pass Exarchies (provician governors) and bureaucratic ministries doewn to a son, daughter, niece or nephew. The population is more than half human, but with significant minorities of dwarves, elves, halflings and orcs, with smaller fractions of other races. All are nominally equal as citizens, as set forth in the ancient dictum" Whoever would live under Plenary law is allowed to live on Plenary land." Many nonhumans have autonomous homelands with their own traditional forms of government, such as small forest kingdoms of elves, monarchic dwarven city-states, halfling provinces with elected mayors, and the tribal council of the Bone Desert orcs. (The caravans of the gnomes are ruled by a "Gnomish Council" that doesn't actually exist, but the gnomes keep up the paperwork as a perpetual joke.) But everybody mixes in the cities. The Autocrat is nominally all-powerful, but after centuries of delegation the ministries have most of the real power and are not going to give it back. The Autocrat can appoint anyone to a ministry or Exarchy as seems prudent. At the Autocrat's death, the ministers and Exarchs gather to select whoever they want as the new Autocrat. (Bribery is often involved.) The campaign is starting in Thalassene, the City of the Sea, the Empire's biggest trading port. Thalassene is an Imperial Free City, subject directly to the Autocrat. It used to have a Lord Mayor elected by the top guildmasters and merchants, but a usurping Autocrat repaid a supportive Admiral by making him the ruler and abolishing the office of Mayor. This doesn't matter much for the aediles of the Imperial civil service. A smart Lord Admiral still pays attention to what the aediles and guildmasters want, though. One of the top guilds is the Juridi, the guild of judges, lawyers and notaries. They have a gaudy marble guildhall, but smart people suggest their real center is the Pandect, a government building holding records of every law and court decision in the Empire's long history. (Or it's supposed to, anyway.) Every Imperial city above a certain size and administrative rank is supposed to hold a Pandect. Victory in court cases often depends on which side can assemble the largest and most impressive body of law and precedent from the Pandect's immense and contradictory supply. (Assuming the judge is honest.) Two points of law that rarely come up: The Empire limits contact between religious and secular authority. This is practicality, not a philosophical commitment to freedom of religion: The Autocrat and civil service don't want spiritual competition. Anyone registered by the Ministry of Cults as in holy orders cannot hold a government post, except on the staff of a city's Pantheon (temple to all gods -- again, a practical matter because you don't want to piss off a god by failing to honor them). The druid college of Falcata Mons is millennia older than the Plenary Empire. Legend says its hilltop is where the elder god Doxomedon surrendered to his usurping son Adrigon, and gave the first legal defense as he pleaded for his life. Doxomedon warned that divine patricide would unmake all physical and moral law: Adrigon would rule so long as he was strongest, but would inevitably be overthrown in turn. It worked: Myth says Doxomedon is bound but was not slain. Plenary law still recognizes the authority of Falcata Mons as the court of final appeal: Its elders can overrule any mortal authority on grounds of natural law, including natural rights, and the good of the world as a whole. This authority has not been invoked in centuries, but it's still on the books. I also wrote up a new background, Bureaucrat, for PCs inspired by China's Judge Dee or Japan's O-Oka. Nobody's used it yet, though. The PCs are starting as a neighborhood watch in a district of Thalassene. There's also a regular City Guard, but it's so undermanned and corrupt as to be nearly useless. Dean Shomshak

My psych major/preschool teacher sister thinks Trump must have had an utterly miserable childhood. I've heard his rather Nazi-like father drilled into young Donald that "You're a killer!" and that he was genetically superior to other people, destined to dominate and win. Hell of a burden to place on a child. Though my sister adds that to explain is not to excuse. Dean Shomshak

Well, I hadn't known that mind flayers weren't in Pathfinder. (WTH? So many other critters from D&D are.) As I mentioned, I haven't looked at Pathfinder much. I merely commented on what seemed to be a belief that aboleths were a Paizo creation. Sorry for the miscommunication! Incidentally, I did recently pick up the Pathfinder Bestiary 2 for less than half price at my FLGS (going out of business sale, 😭), and it included adaptations of actual HPL creations such as the Great Race of Yith. So go figure. Dean Shomshak

Fanaticism and hypocrisy often go together. When you declare one goal to be an absolute, transcendent good to which all other interests must be sacrificed, why, you can compromise any other ideal or take any means to that end. And because you are soooo righteous, any trifling sin is forgivable. IIRC, the night before they flew planes into buildings in the name of Islam, at least some of the 9/11 hijackers went drinking at girlie clubs. They were sure of Heaven, so they felt free to enjoy the sinful pleasures of the decadent West. Dean Shomshak

This is an important thing. I think one should draw the distinction between kitchen sink and toolkit. The former just throws everything into the setting haphazardly to have it there. The latter throw everything in the setting in the expectation you will pick and choose the parts you need to create the campaign you want -- and tells you so. I haven't read any Golarion material, so I can't venture an opinion on how and why Paizo chose to publish Golarion as they have. But But elves, androids and kaiju in the same world might make sense -- from a publishing POV -- as a set of resources from which you pick and choose, without expectation that you actually use all of it in a single game. From this POV there isn't really a Golarion that contains all these disparate elements: It's a "sum over histories" for the many possible Golarions you might construct. It's an approach I'm taking with my new "Magozoic" D&D campaign, set in an Earth of 250 million years in the future that's gone magical, a la Dying Earth or Zothique. (Though I can't make it as lushly fantastical as Vance or C. A. Smith.) It's also going to emphasize social and political conflict in a multispecies society. Most monsters just aren't going to appear, even if people are vaguely aware they're out there. (Well, I also threw out the D&D cosmology because I'm me,and the official cosmology made statements about the world that run counter to the themes I want.) Dean Shomshak

I must also give Ed Greenwood some credit for helping me learn the worldbuilding craft. Before the Forgotten Realms was a whole published setting, he used it to give background for spells and books of magic in his "Pages from the Mages" series in Dragon. These were good examples for my teenage self to learn from. Next exposure was the Forgotten Realms Gazetteer, for either 3rd or 4th edition, I'm not sure which. It seemed very checklisty and blah. Even the "local color," such as the Faerun-specific musical instruments, became boring when baldly presented in a list. It did not inspire me to look further. 5th Edition D&D is trying to take a different approach, developing background in more detail for small bits. More slowly building a mosaic than a large-scale but colorless sketch. I won't comment on individual bits of background, but I do prefer the approach. Dean Shomshak

Historical correction: Aboleths appeared in the AD&D Monster Manual 2, published 1983, and have been in every D&D edition since, including the 5th ed Monster Manual. They are thus very much part of the WotC IP. Dean Shomshak

Hugh mentioned the inefficiency of the Canadian tax micro-credits. When The Economist talks aout taxes, they often mention this factor. For instance, consumption taxes are highly regressive but also highly efficient -- I gather that means there's high certainty of the tax being collected, and relatively low cost to the collection. Income taxes, OTOH, can be made progressive but collection and enforcement are relatively expensive and the super-rich easily find ways to evade them. Andrew Yang talks about a Value Added Tax, which is supposedly a form of consumption tax, but the one time I tried reading an explanation I didn't understand much of it. The Economist also favors a land tax, which I gather is not the same as a property tax, but in ways I did not understand at all. So there are lots of ways for governments to collect taxes as the user fees of civilization. That's about as far as my understanding goes... but it's enough to get suspicious when someone claims its actually simple, whether it's simply outrageous or there's a simple answer. Dean Shomshak Dean Shomshak

Education, which was brought up before, may be a case study. Private schools get to pick their customers. Public schools in the US do not. My understanding is that no matter what a child's physical or mental handicaps, which may make educating the child very expensive, public schools must take them. (Though OTOH some months back I heard an NPR story about Texas public schools having a set budget for special needs students, and if the state or a district gets more such students than were budgeted for, parents get hit up for the difference -- which can be impossible for the parents. But I may be misremembering or misunderstanding what I heard. Do our resident Texans have any knowledge of this?) Dean Shomshak

Education, which was brought up before, may be a case study. Private schools get to pick their customers. Public schools in the US do not. My understanding is that no matter what a child's physical or mental handicaps, which may make educating the child very expensive, public schools must take them. (Though OTOH some months back I heard an NPR story about Texas public schools having a set budget for special needs students, and if the state or a district gets more such students than were budgeted for, parents get hit up for the difference -- which can be impossible for the parents. But I may be misremembering or misunderstanding what I heard. Do our resident Texans have any knowledge of this?) Dean Shomshak

Education, which was brought up before, may be a case study. Private schools get to pick their customers. Public schools in the US do not. My understanding is that no matter what a child's physical or mental handicaps, which may make educating the child very expensive, public schools must take them. (Though OTOH some months back I heard an NPR story about Texas public schools having a set budget for special needs students, and if the state or a district gets more such students than were budgeted for, parents get hit up for the difference -- which can be impossible for the parents. But I may be misremembering or misunderstanding what I heard. Do our resident Texans have any knowledge of this?) Dean Shomshak

Like I said before... See Afghanistan, the Central African Republic and other Third World anarchies. Pay taxes to the bureaucracy, or pay taxes to the warlord... which taxes you have no say in at all, and may include your daughter. Establishing central authority that is willing and able to maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is the first, absolutely necessary (though not sufficient) requirement for a society in which prosperity is widely shared instead of concentrated to a predatory few. The taxes necessary to keep this state function will always be less than the loss from giving it up. I would like this fact to be part of high school civics classes. Dean Shomshak

"no representation without taxation." Fair indeed. But yeah, they'd still find ways around it. <sadface> Dean Shomshak

"no representation without taxation." Fair indeed. But yeah, they'd still find ways around it. <sadface> Dean Shomshak

I liked seeing Biden show some fire with his "I have actually done this" speech. He is certainly the most experienced candidate, and I think experience counts for a lot. Kudos to Bernie for honesty in forthrightly saying that his Medicare For All system raises taxes on the middle class, and calling out Warren for not being equally forthright. Warren in general did not impress me. Mayor Pete sounded ready for the Oval Office as a person who understands the gravity of the job, and he speaks well too. After Trumpalumpagus' word salad, being able to speak not just in sentences but in paragraphs should count for something. Steyer's vanity candidacy disgusts me and he gave me no reason to change my view. Klobuchar made good points about realism and her Midwest background. Bluntly, only about 16 states are in play in the upcoming election, and many of them are in the Midwest. Candidates shouldn't worry too much about pleasing California or Connecticut or, conversely, Alabama or Mississippi: Those electoral college votes are certain no matter who runs or what policy they espouse. Play to Pennsylvania and Michigan. Kamala Harris never really stood out for me. Neither did, um, I forget. I've heard interesting things elsewhere from Andrew Yang, but he wasn't given much time. Tulsi Gabbard seemed unhinged in her "Regime Change In Syria" rant. The only regime American troops were changing was the Islamic State. Obama tried to get further involved in the Syrian civil war; the Republican Congress blocked him, though I believe it was for the wrong reasons; as far as I can tell, he stuck by that and no American soldiers shot at any Syrian troops. Even if she didn't seem to e living in a parallel universe, I'd still reject her extreme military pullback views. All in all, the debate showed several people I'd be happy to see in the Oval Office. Dean Shomshak

Well, there are countries where nobody has to pay taxes. It may be the law, but the government has no power to collect. Try Afghanistan or the Central African Republic. At least, nobody pays taxes to the state. They pay a great deal to illegitimate collectors, from the clerk who demands a bribe to do his job to the bandit warlord who demands tribute not to kill your entire village. There are systems of extraction that deliver far less in return than taxation to a democratic state. Once again, see Why Nations Fail. Dean Shomshak

My current favorite Fantasy treatment of gods is Bujold's Curse of Chalion and other stories set in the World of the Five Gods. People know perfectly well the gods are real; their saints work miracles. But you don't see big, splashy manifestations. The guiding principle, as one saint explains, is that "The gods have no hands in the world but ours." The gods cannot force their will on anyone. Even the miracles, channeled by mortals who can set their wills aside to serve as vessels for divinity, tend to be subtle. It's a world in which gods are very important -- but they work through religion. Dean Shomshak

I actually find myself offering a half-hearted defense of Middle East Forever Wars as possibly the least bad option. Others have mentioned the problems with simply throwing up our hands and walking away. ISIS rebuilds (or the next generation, possibly even more virulent, as ISIS was more virulent than Al-Qaeda). The Kurds, one of our few allies, get slaughtered. Russia and Iran increase their influence; American credibility plummets. The great problem with the Middle East is that what happens there, doesn't stay there. For comparison, Africa regularly produces horrors that make the Middle East look tame. Think of the long trench war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the decades of bandid anarchy through Central Africa, and the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. But they don't metastasize, the natural resources keep flowing out; and so we cluck our tongues in concern, then do nothing. But the Middle East has produced a movement that doesn't just want local power. Jihadists want to kill us for being us. When Osama bin Laden listed his grievances, they weren't limited to political issues such as support for Israel or American military bases on sacred Sudi sand, which Western governments could in theory do something about. He listed music, movies and TV as intolerable affronts. Jihadists won't leave us alone, because from their POV the West is engaged in a relentless propaganda assault to lead people to Hell. Our governments can't stop this, and I don't want them to try. At the other pole, instead of Get Out we could Get Tough. Accept that the only way to contain the Middle East is to rule it as its people are accustomed to being ruled. This is not nation building: It's empire building in the old style. Brutal punishment for anyone who steps out of line (and their families). Extract resources to pay for it all. Appoint satraps to do the rough stuff, collect the taxes and tribute, and take the fall in rebellions. Let favorites get filthy rich at the people's expense, but occasionally execute them without warning. In a technical sense, I think it would work. It's how the Ottomans ruled, and lots of empires before them. But I don't think we could do it. 19th-century colonialism, in all its many-layered brutality, relied on the colonized people being invisible to the colonizers back home. The more people saw, the less they liked it. The genocidal horror of the Congo Free State was undone to a great degree by journalists. At least I hope we couldn't rule the Middle East as the latest despot keeping order, because we wouldn't be us anymore. So what's left? I would like a better alternative than endless whack-a-mole against Jihadists and knocking down strongmen as they arise, spending trillions and spending lives. But I haven't heard one yet. Well, maybe there's one slim hope: We do have cultural influence. Young people are getting different ideas and wider perspectives. Some groups are trying to get their crap together and govern -- notably the Iraqi Kurds, who (I recall hearing, mostly on BBC newscasts) in the years between the Gulf Wars were resolving their infighting and administer northern Iraq in a competent and non-horrible way. So, while playing whack-a-mole find the people who are least bad and try to help them grow. I guess this would be nation-building, but starting with the proposition that we don't have to start with existing borders. It also requires accepting that this is a labor of decades. One problem I see with past failed attempts is that the US always acted with one eye on the exit, letting the entrepreneurs of violence and fanaticism know that they could out-wait us. (A taliban fighter interviewed for a documentary about the movement said this flat out: To paraphrase: You'll get bored and tired of dead soldiers. We won't. You'll leave. We'll still be here and take power again. The prediction seems accurate.) It all sucks, but we may be the onbes who need to pull up our big-boy pants and accept that some things may need to be done even when they are slow, hard and uncertain of success. Dean Shomshak

I just heard a fascinating episode of "On The Media" (public radio program(. First half on conspiracy thinking, with some historical perspective. Historian Richard Hofstadter (in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics") thought conspiracy theories were a product of marginal people, especially extremists, to explain their marginality. Guest interviewed suggests there's a second strain, at least as strong, of the powerful spinning, and believing, conspiracy theories to explain why the world doesn't obey them. J. Edgar Hoover's Communist obsession and the rest of the Red Scare as an example. Useful distinction given: "The liar knows he's lying. The BSer doesn't care." Trump is very clearly a BSer. And yes, the drug dealer's Rule Two was brought up: "Never try your own supply." Trump and many of the people around him either believe their own loony scenarios or, as BSers, simply never consider or care what's true. Second half devoted to the Ukraine affair and the Trump campaign's long entanglement with that oligarch-riddled, disinformation-plagued country. Very useful in laying out the cast of characters, their interconnections, and the timeline of who was really doing what and when the lies were told. Dean Shomshak

Humiliation is a powerful force. After 9/11, reporters asked Jihadists what drove their hatred of the West in general, and the US in particular, and they often heard about humiliation. Humiliated by the US being so powerful when their governments are so weak. Humiliated by American cultural dominance. Humiliated by not getting good jobs despite college degrees. Humiliated in a thousand ways, large and small, which they found it convenient to blame on the US. Humiliation so deep it was worth killing themselves to strike back. I've read similar reports about Trump loyalists, from Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land to a Cracked.com article on "Five Reasons People Voted for Trump." Many Americans feel humiliated by their perceived loss of caste privilege, their loss of certainty in a good job, of being dismissed by people with more education. They'd rather burn the house down with themselves inside it than live with that humiliation. It may seem stupid and crazy, but it's how people think. I can't swear I wouldn't act the same way under the proper circumstances. Dean Shomshak

This is the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" problem. How can so many people vote against their obvious material interest? The answer is that not everyone values material interest as highly as liberals think they should. Many people value other things more. One thing I hear again and again about Trump supporters is they love him because he enhances their self-respect by attacking the "elites" whom they think sneer at people like them. To try understanding this, several months ago I heard about a study in which people were asked what they would give up to maintain a good reputation. Significant percentages, IIRC, said they would rather lose an arm than be thought a child molester, for instance. (I don't recall the exact examples, but it was stuff like that.) So let's try that. How much money would you need not to care if people thought you were... * a homophobe? * a KKK member? * a rapist? * Or whatever. If you can find a reputation so vile that no amount of money could compensate, congratulations, you've discovered transcendent values. You may not like the transcendent values for which Trump loyalists would (literally or metaphorically) lose the farm; you may think they are irrational (I do); but try to consider that they may not be acting from flat-out stupidity. Dean Shomshak

This is the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" problem. How can so many people vote against their obvious material interest? The answer is that not everyone values material interest as highly as liberals think they should. Many people value other things more. One thing I hear again and again about Trump supporters is they love him because he enhances their self-respect by attacking the "elites" whom they think sneer at people like them. To try understanding this, several months ago I heard about a study in which people were asked what they would give up to maintain a good reputation. Significant percentages, IIRC, said they would rather lose an arm than be thought a child molester, for instance. (I don't recall the exact examples, but it was stuff like that.) So let's try that. How much money would you need not to care if people thought you were... * a homophobe? * a KKK member? * a rapist? * Or whatever. If you can find a reputation so vile that no amount of money could compensate, congratulations, you've discovered transcendent values. You may not like the transcendent values for which Trump loyalists would (literally or metaphorically) lose the farm; you may think they are irrational (I do); but try to consider that they may not be acting from flat-out stupidity. Dean Shomshak

Yay! I was able to do a search and copy a link without getting booted offline! Fresh Air For Oct. 3, 2019: Trump's 'Border Wars' : NPR www.npr.org/.../2019/10/03/766531424/fresh-air-for-oct-3-2019-trumps-border-wars Fresh Air For Oct. 3, 2019: Trump's 'Border Wars' Hear the Fresh Air program for October 3, 2019 Two points stand out in the reporters' results of their interviews with 150 or so members of the Trump administration (including a half our with The Great Man himself) about Trump's campaign to curb immigration and build the wall: * As Old Man likes to say, the cruelty is the point. Trumo kept having ways to make the wall not just a barrier, but punitive: Paint it black so it gets real hot and burns people who try to climb it. Concertina wire to slash crossers, Spikes on the top -- not just against crossers, but to prevent birds from perching on his it and defacing his beautiful wall with their poop. And yes, a moat with snakes and alligators. Plus casual viciouslness such as wanting border agents to shoot stone-throwers. * And Trump is not a secret evil genius with a master plan; in private he's even more of a deranged half-wit than when he seems when in front of the cameras. It isn't just that people have to keep telling him, "Sir, you can't order that, it's illegal." (Which just makes Trump angry.) It's that an hour or a day later he's forgotten and makes the same suggestion. No information penetrates unless it fits his current fit of temper. We already knew most of this, but it's freshly appalling to hear it all laid out in one place, on one focused topic. Dean Shomshak

Speaking of which, I finally got around to scanning this satiric fable from Feinberg and Shapiro's Life Beyond Earth (published 1980) -- in this case, making fun of what they considered prematurely pessimistic interpretations of the Viking lander test results: Fable 3 The results of the fifth space probe of minor planetoid three were being described at the Jovian Conference on Space Research. Sarpedon, the chief scientist in charge of the probe, reported on it: The probe passed through the thin atmosphere of planetoid three successfully. From the experience that we gained by previous unsuccessful probes, we were able to construct this probe out of special materials that could resist the extreme environment at the gasliquid interface of the planetoid. The highly' oxidized outer coating of the probe enabled it to avoid the fate of probes number one through four, which rapidly combined with a toxic gas in the planetoid's atmosphere. When the probe reached the interface, it was subjected to the chemical action of the hydrogen-oxygen liquid compound that forms the main component of the interface. This gradually removed the oxidized protective coating of the probe and so exposed the inner machinery to the toxic atmosphere. As a result, only seventy-two minutes of data were obtained. But this data is enough to confirm the previous opinion of the best scientists— that life is impossible on such planetoids. If the toxic atmosphere and liquid surface were not enough to show this, an immense flux of deadly radiation of optical light was detected at the surface, which was hardly screened by the thin atmosphere. This radiation can dissociate many chemical compounds that are essential to life, and is more intense at the interface of planetoid three even than in outer space near our planet. Also, the temperature at the interface is as low as that in the uppermost levels of our planet. This means that chemical reactions proceed very slowly, and life processes would be extremely sluggish, if indeed there has been time enough for life to evolve there. Finally, none of the complex molecules with which we associate life could be detected at the interface. A sample of the liquid region showed the overwhelming part of its composition to be oxide of hydrogen, with small amounts of dissolved sodium chloride and other metallic salts. There are minor traces of dissolved oxide of carbon, as well as traces of volatile carbon compounds of a type not known on Jupiter. One mobile subprobe was lost in an unknown way, apparently falling into a floating mixture of hydrogen oxide with solidified and nitrogenized carbon compounds. The high temperature of the probe eventually melted this mixture, but not until the probe had been dissolved and oxidized. Small amounts of solid material from the interface were recovered by' another subprobe and placed in a nutrient solution containing essentials of life such as hydrogen cyanide, at an absolute temperature twice the normal value at the interface. At first, the solid material reacted chemically with the nutrients, liberating various gases. But after a short time, the reactions stopped and no further activity was observed. The unwillingness of any hypothetical organism to use rich nutrients is a serious blow to the belief that planetoid three is a home of life. On the basis of these results, it appears safe to conclude that planetoid three is not a place where life can exist, and no further biological probes of that planetoid are warranted. Our future studies of the minor planetoids should concentrate on planetoid two, whose thick atmosphere and high temperature at the interface make conditions there much more similar to those on our own world, the only one that we know is hospitable to life. Perhaps life, as we know it, can exist (if only in an attenuated form) on the second planetoid from the central star, but surely not in the wholly alien conditions of the third planetoid. Sarpedon stopped burping spurts of hydrogen sulfide, which was his method of communicating with his fellow scientists. They, in turn, signaled their approval of his conclusions by producing small pulses of heat, intense enough to boil some of the magnesium chloride crystals contained in parts of their bodies. The result was a small train of bubbles in the dense hydrogen surrounding them all, forming a beautiful but transient pattern pleasing to the speaker and audience alike. On planetoid three, known to a few of its inhabitants as Earth, countless living things were being born, existing, and dying every second, unaware of the negative verdict about their possible existence which had been rendered by Jupiter's leading scientists. ----- Feinberg and Shapiro tried to think outside the box to identify every imaginable habitat for Life As We Don't Know It. One critic said they thought so far outside the box they lost sight of the box completely. But they provide some excellent ideas for SF. Dean Shomshak

It is possible I misunderstood wat Mr Vance said, or (after several months) am conflating it with other impeachment discussions. IIRC the House does nave a Sergeant-at-Arms, or something like that, who is in fact armed. But I do not know the limits of what the House can order its one troop to do, or if the House could deputize additional sergeants to assist it in its constitutional duties, so I'll withdraw the point. Dean Shomshak