TheDarkness

Well, just looking at Plano's online demographics, the city is prosperous, and the large majority of its population is white. Nearly half the population of St. Louis is black, and the city's economy has been in decline for decades. So at least two factors which tend to significantly promote violence, poverty and ethnic tensions, are notably less in Plano than in St. Louis.

"This is life, not the comments section"
 
The man should sell that on a t shirt
 
Also, am I the only one that wants to see Beaux interview a couple of the Democratic candidates on his show?

Two things on St. Louis to keep in mind.
 
One, it is a massive transportation (and thus, transport) hub in the center of the country, and that means it's a hub for all things legal and illegal.
 
Two, stats that speak of just St.Louis proper have the crime rate higher, but the actual urban area extends well past that, and so the numbers become closer to other cities when that area is included, though still high.
 
Third, there is very serious infrastructure problems and structural inequality problems from how the city used the New Deal and later, desegregation, to force black St. Louis residents to North St. Louis and move investment away from there. This meant that my parents generation, if they were black St. Louis home owners, would not have a fraction of the home investment that they actually did, even less for the fact that they were almost guaranteed to be paying much worse rates on their loans. (To be clear, I am white and from Chicago, which has similar structural issues.)
 
Plano had nowhere near the population of St. Louis during those eras, and so didn't develop along the same lines. In fact, Plano was not even approaching the same size as just St Louis(not St. Louis county) until after 2000. Infrastructure is going to be a huge factor in any comparison that will make it hard to compare those two cities for other factors.

Two things on St. Louis to keep in mind.
 
One, it is a massive transportation (and thus, transport) hub in the center of the country, and that means it's a hub for all things legal and illegal.
 
Two, stats that speak of just St.Louis proper have the crime rate higher, but the actual urban area extends well past that, and so the numbers become closer to other cities when that area is included, though still high.
 
Third, there is very serious infrastructure problems and structural inequality problems from how the city used the New Deal and later, desegregation, to force black St. Louis residents to North St. Louis and move investment away from there. This meant that my parents generation, if they were black St. Louis home owners, would not have a fraction of the home investment that they actually did, even less for the fact that they were almost guaranteed to be paying much worse rates on their loans. (To be clear, I am white and from Chicago, which has similar structural issues.)
 
Plano had nowhere near the population of St. Louis during those eras, and so didn't develop along the same lines. In fact, Plano was not even approaching the same size as just St Louis(not St. Louis county) until after 2000. Infrastructure is going to be a huge factor in any comparison that will make it hard to compare those two cities for other factors.

A knowledge test to vote, if done in a constitutional manner, would bankrupt the US in no time, as very large numbers of people would fail any stringent test, anything less would be pointless, as, for example, a passing knowledge of economics is effectively as worthless as none when dealing with some global economic issues one is voting on, and as soon as those large swaths of people can no longer vote, they also can no longer be taxed, as they can elect no representatives, unless failure on this test is a crime, which is an even worse idea.
 
No state(worldwide) with elections has ever really solved the problem of sufficient education of the voter base, and making the very people controlling the funds for education the ones who fund and serve as administration for the tests for who can vote is a really, really problematic ihing.
 
If the people are not wise enough to vote well in large enough numbers that it is an issue, there is almost zero chance that local governments hold no responsibility for it in the US education system, and it also means that at the federal level the citizens interests weren't being looked after.
 
So, literally, the government would be defining the qualities one needs to have to vote for the government, the administering of the tests, the retention of records, etc.
 
Which is why that's a more effective system to undermine democracy than to bolster it.
 
As has already been pointed out, the closest historical parallels we have to such tests were used against minorities and especially black Americans by people who often had to cheat to avoid the tests for fear of revealing their inadequate grasp of reality. That system made the American South an economically backward region that could not attract as much investment  as the North through the entirety of the first half of the twentieth century, Worse was the lawless conduct of those who did get to decide who voted, and that lawlessness was the reason they made sure to hold that power, not a byproduct, but the goal.

Heads up: on Thursday, antifa protestors from England, Canada, and the U.S. will go to the beach in France 75 years ago.

I'm not not sure how Daenerys's side feels they have the stronger position at this point.  Those mega ballista seem to completely negate Drogon at this point, yet they keep talking about how they're gonna make KL burn.  

Actually, the newspapers of the South almost universally wrote about the danger of slave violence on innocent Southerners during the time of the war and especially in the lead up to it. There really is no safe harbor from racism in this one. It was literally everyone's legal responsibility to turn in runaway slaves. Every single citizens. And, the lead up to the war has, as a major cornerstone, the North's refusal to accept that legal responsibility and how that played out in the courts and the responses. And then, the Northern citizenry's support of John Brown. And then the election of Lincoln, which every Southern politician of that time knew to be an abolitionist, irrespective of politics he played in speeches.
 
The War of Northern Aggression is a post war, post reconstruction narrative more than it was a narrative pushed befores and during the actual war. Sure, Southern leaders painted it as the North's fault, but they also made clear it was about slavery at every level of leadership, and the papers at the time in the South descended into such rank racism that the post-reconstruction attempts at distancing the whole thing from slaver appear silly. Before and during, slavery and the bogeyman of violent freed black Americans ravaging the innocent was the dominant media portrayal leading up to the war and during in the South.
 
I'm not sure how much I would want to deal with that as a player to just play a game. My entertainment need does not weigh very heavily in that equation.

Actually, the newspapers of the South almost universally wrote about the danger of slave violence on innocent Southerners during the time of the war and especially in the lead up to it. There really is no safe harbor from racism in this one. It was literally everyone's legal responsibility to turn in runaway slaves. Every single citizens. And, the lead up to the war has, as a major cornerstone, the North's refusal to accept that legal responsibility and how that played out in the courts and the responses. And then, the Northern citizenry's support of John Brown. And then the election of Lincoln, which every Southern politician of that time knew to be an abolitionist, irrespective of politics he played in speeches.
 
The War of Northern Aggression is a post war, post reconstruction narrative more than it was a narrative pushed befores and during the actual war. Sure, Southern leaders painted it as the North's fault, but they also made clear it was about slavery at every level of leadership, and the papers at the time in the South descended into such rank racism that the post-reconstruction attempts at distancing the whole thing from slaver appear silly. Before and during, slavery and the bogeyman of violent freed black Americans ravaging the innocent was the dominant media portrayal leading up to the war and during in the South.
 
I'm not sure how much I would want to deal with that as a player to just play a game. My entertainment need does not weigh very heavily in that equation.

Actually, the newspapers of the South almost universally wrote about the danger of slave violence on innocent Southerners during the time of the war and especially in the lead up to it. There really is no safe harbor from racism in this one. It was literally everyone's legal responsibility to turn in runaway slaves. Every single citizens. And, the lead up to the war has, as a major cornerstone, the North's refusal to accept that legal responsibility and how that played out in the courts and the responses. And then, the Northern citizenry's support of John Brown. And then the election of Lincoln, which every Southern politician of that time knew to be an abolitionist, irrespective of politics he played in speeches.
 
The War of Northern Aggression is a post war, post reconstruction narrative more than it was a narrative pushed befores and during the actual war. Sure, Southern leaders painted it as the North's fault, but they also made clear it was about slavery at every level of leadership, and the papers at the time in the South descended into such rank racism that the post-reconstruction attempts at distancing the whole thing from slaver appear silly. Before and during, slavery and the bogeyman of violent freed black Americans ravaging the innocent was the dominant media portrayal leading up to the war and during in the South.
 
I'm not sure how much I would want to deal with that as a player to just play a game. My entertainment need does not weigh very heavily in that equation.

You guys argue like you're the Asian market that actually makes these movies profitable or something.
 

A few musings...
 
I agree that the mega-overarching, split between 9 titles over 8 months and 20-odd issue, story lines turned me totally off, especially in conjunction with the massive decline in artistic effort.  Cripes, the newer stuff looks like elementary-school doodles sometimes.  
 
I think another potential explanation is, the existence of a build path is inherent in fantasy RPGs;  they were designed with that as a core assumption.  So yeah, fine, 1st level is WIMPSVILLE, but we can approach the power levels of at least a good chunk of fantasy heroes.  Trying to pull off the more popular comics heroes is really tough.  Power levels are hard to translate.  The versatility one tends to see is tricky to pull off, and generally expensive.  Thus, the fantasy RPG leads to wish fulfillment better than the supers RPG.
 
Something else that hasn't been mentioned.  Complexity and support.  Point buy is inherently more complex than level-based.  Mechanically, a level-based character takes little time to build.  (Well, possibly in later D&D 3.5 it got messy because of the explosive proliferation of PRCs that you wanted to plan for.)  Never true in point-based.  Plus, I find I need a more complete concept for point-based, because there are so many more options.  Support...monsters.  Items.  Locations.  Plot hooks.  TONS of everything for D&D that you could use or adapt pretty easily.  Not so much for supers.
 
That said, I also strongly suspect that the freedom to act as you bloody well want to act, with no repercussions whatsoever quite often, and the more concrete rewards system...the sense of moving forward steadily and consistently...are central points.

First, it probably helped that it was remote.
 
Second, and I'm not having any luck remembering or finding the name and region, but one influential party leader actually took great pains to prevent the destruction of heritage during the cultural revolution. I don't think that that leader was at work in this case, for some reason I'm remembering the leader having been in the Henan area, but again, that's totally off of my faulty memory.
 
The West has the unfortunate habit of overvaluing the effect of both the destruction of tradition in China and the effect of propaganda. The classic example is the Tainanmen Square massacre. Yes, internet searches on it are limited by the great firewall. BUT, everyone and their brother uses a VPN to get around this. And, aside from professors from my university, pretty much all the most meaty conversations I've had on the topic were with Chinese people in China. Westerners tend to know tank man and little else. Chinese contemporaries tend to know the role of the Yang family in it, the undercurrents at play, etc.
 
There is actually an article that was fairly well distributed in the West about how the Chinese population was longing for the West to help China at the time. The centerpiece of the article was a picture of a group of people with a Statue of Liberty they had made. The problem is, the people who made the statue were a group of artists, one of whom is my old professor's wife. The assertion that the meaning of the statue had anything to do with this is patently false, and given that she lives in the states, it's strange that they never did the slightest bit of research on their claim. Anyone who claims that there is any support for foreign intervention in China among Chinese is beyond ridiculous- there are few things considered to have been more disastrous for China by the Chinese over foreign interference.
 
In China, there is a long history of repression actually pushing things into the grassroots that then become so inextricably intertwined with the culture as to become inseparable. Every single repression of Buddhism and Taoism in Chinese history, including the Cultural Revolution, ended up making those things something people practiced at home more than at the temples that were no longer there. Which then, when the temple invariably reopened, made them instantly have a base of popularity again.
 
For another example of repression actually aiding the survival of a thing as a cultural heritage, one need look no further than the last destruction of the Shaolin Temple, which was actually due to repression of Buddhism by pro-Christian leaders. When the Buddhists began literally fighting back, the temple became a target. So ironically, the temple, destroyed by forces under pro-Christian leaders seeking to take property from temples in order for the state to make use of them, said leaders most decidedly later being tied to the nationalists, is rebuilt by Communists.
 
My experience in China has been that propaganda, for those living in a country with a long history of it, is more the art of what one must say than the definition of what anyone actually believes. The less its use, the more people believe it, the more, the less they do.
 
That said, a lot of monuments were destroyed. And now, there are whole industries of restoring temples. Weird world.
 
I currently live at the foot of Mount Tai, which is the most important of the five most famous mountains for any leader, as it was considered a duty to climb to its top as part of a ritual. Confucius references standing on a lookout and seeing his state of Lu. It is one of the few peaks that had each of the major group's temples atop it, and at its foot is the Dai Temple, which has an imperial home within. That home has a layout only allowed in three places, modeled after Confucius' ancestral home. The three versions are in the Forbidden Palace, in Qufu, where Confucius' ancestral home is found, and at the Dai Temple near me. All three are still in existence.
 
The Cultural Revolution was never close to organized enough to actually achieve the destruction of enough of the monuments and cultural heritage of China to actually achieve the much claimed end of traditional culture. Frankly, it was a bit of a ragtag affair in the end, and it broke Mao's power within the party. It's important to keep in mind that one of the first things that Deng set about doing, besides opening the markets, was retiring the old guard, and that he was entirely successful in doing so without using the same sort of unilateral power that Mao would have.

Y'know, given disco's early acceptance of women, PoC and LGBT folk, maybe that's not necessarily a bad thing...

Personally, I object to Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, not (just) because he appears to have problems controlling his urges (lust, drinking, anger) and not (just) because his decisions show support for an agenda farther to the Right that I'm really comfortable with.
 
 I object to Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court because when given a chance to state unequivocally that all Americans are equal under the law, up to and including the President, he couldn't do it. This, and this alone, tells me that he has no place on the highest court in the land.
 
Your mileage may vary, of course.

You're skipping the part of the post you're responding to that points out he solely does his virtue signalling when he's trying to undermine claims of drinking and/or rape allegations.
 
You might want to consider that while you claim others have a bias, you might not be exempt.
 
Also, I was actually trying to clarify when I asked what what 'Nor is being supportive of women exclusive with flirting. ' have to do with rape accusations? This statement seems out of nowhere,

In an interview Kavanaugh gave to Fox News, he said, "I went to an all-boys Catholic high school. I was focused on academics and athletics, going to church every Sunday at Little Flower, working on my service projects, and friendship – friendship with my fellow classmates, and friendship with the girls from the local all-girls Catholic schools." He also denied not just sexual impropriety, but having sex at all during high school and "for many years thereafter." If you don't believe the word "exemplary" suits how Kavanaugh characterized his behavior at that time, what word would you suggest?
 
The point raised by the above is not whether he drank or not, not even how much, or whether or not that's acceptable. The point, per evidence from multiple other people who knew him at that time, is that Kavanaugh misrepresented his conduct in the context of determining his fitness for one of the highest offices in the country. That speaks to his honesty, his motivations, and his character, and casts doubt on his denials of the more reprehensible behavior he's been accused of.

Honestly, this Kavanaugh thing is ridiculous. This is not a sex assault trial. It's a hiring committee. You're looking at a candidate for one of the best, and most tenure-protected jobs on Earth. It's okay to red-flag a CV! that is, and I cannot emphasise this enough, how hiring committees work.
. . .
It was also so completely avoidable. The Federalist Society maintains a fully investigated, cleared a short list of 10 members of America's obscenely narrow list of papabile, conservative Supreme Court candidates for just this reason, and expanded it to 20 at the President's request. (I bet that it would be a much better list if they were allowed to include graduates from historically conservative schools, but t that's just my wild ass theorising.) Kavanaugh did not make the short list, or the long list, and while there might be other reasons for that, it was no secret that he was a hard-drinking 80s frat bro. If I were the Federalist Society, I'd have excluded him, too! 
 
So my advice to the Senate Judicial Committee is, "Do what any hiring committee would do." You had hearings. You found a problem with the candidate. It doesn't have to rise to "no reasonable doubt" standards, because you're not trying to decide whether Kavanaugh belongs in jail. You're trying to decide whether he would be better at the job than a member of the 20 person long short list that came in above him. The answer to that would seem to be, by definition, "No." At this point, the Committee is basically going to the country with the argument, that "We owe this guy a job." And, just to be clear, America does not. Owe. Him. A. Job. .  

Kindly, the people who keep claiming how easy it is to claim you were raped, think about what you're saying, because it's verifiably false. I can't think of another claim so heavily weighted against the claimant.

Just because you don't agree with either side of what has turned into a two sided argument doesn't mean you aren't exactly as wrong as the two sides you hold yourself above.

To clarify, the dicking over continued until 1979, and, in fact, part of the reason that Khomeini ended up in power was also tied to how we tended to support far right nutjobs in the region, and at best turned a blind eye to, and at worst, encouraged their brutal suppression of anyone left of far, far right.
 
By the time the revolution occurred, the left in Iran was crushed to such an extent that it was child's play for the religious extremists to co-opt the revolution that they were only a part of, and then deal the final blow to the left.
 
There are some good state department papers on this process across the middle east, they were mostly written in relation to the rise of politicized Islam, before the rise of militant branches.

To clarify, the dicking over continued until 1979, and, in fact, part of the reason that Khomeini ended up in power was also tied to how we tended to support far right nutjobs in the region, and at best turned a blind eye to, and at worst, encouraged their brutal suppression of anyone left of far, far right.
 
By the time the revolution occurred, the left in Iran was crushed to such an extent that it was child's play for the religious extremists to co-opt the revolution that they were only a part of, and then deal the final blow to the left.
 
There are some good state department papers on this process across the middle east, they were mostly written in relation to the rise of politicized Islam, before the rise of militant branches.

Thanks for posting, and for an honest reaction. While this article doesn't describe me personally, that feeling described is something I think I lot of people carry with them, myself included. We have a close friend who is likely in this place in his life, and have no idea how, or if we should, broach the subject. It hurts to see him hurt, and to know how good he is at hiding it.
 
This bit, "I developed a deep feeling that it might be wrong to approach women and that it might be an imposition on them. I was certainly never going to be that guy who "used" women.
I felt women had the right to go about everyday life and enjoy a night out without having anyone approach them."    This really resonates. It is unfortunate how easy it is for polite courtesy can be synonymous with "invisible."
 
I had no idea about the "incel" culture, but I'm not surprised. The internet has shown itself to be a perfect catalyst for taking desperate/asocial/anti-social tendencies that were moslty isolated in the past, and forging a focused, brutal and often violent expression of them by connecting and allowing for unmitigated rage. It is so good at finding the hurt and pushing all the wrong buttons. 

My view is, the game has skills, they add to it, and the GM's job is making room for that to happen in a fun way. IF the skill based character is making way for more fun for the fight-based characters, my experience is they love that character.