@JaySherman said:
The game has been suffering because of this ever since. I'm just afraid that if I call things to a halt and the players lose RP momentum, they wont' come back.
Players will go where the fun is. If it's a half-baked idea that's having trouble getting speed because you can't get a foothold, they won't stay there long anyway. But if you pause it, and come up with something awesome, you can be sure they're gonna come back. That's the nature of the beast.
Disclaimer: I have no experience with being staff, just with interacting with them, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt.
That said? I don't see why you can't do both. Problems don't just come in one flavor, they come in a variety of flavors, and can be gone through with levels. For example:
Level 1 - Aggressive or inappropriate language/minor misconduct - a private warning, handled initially in a professional and friendly manner to let them know that Behavior X is not the sort of behavior you wish to foster in your environment. Then see if the behavior improves, perhaps over the course of a short time.
Level 2 - Aggressive behavior toward staff / players. Moderate misconduct. A private warning, as above, though I would also back this up with a bulletin board post to the appropriate sections detailing the behavior and implementing a clear warning that such action cannot continue and will be met with disciplinary actions. Also applicable for repeated instances of Level 1.
Level 3 - Abusive behavior toward staff/players, extremely inappropriate public conversation, major misconduct. This is the level that I would make a clear and immediate warning,,probably more publicly as this behavior is something 'clearly unacceptable' as well as an immediate bulletin board post as in Level 2. Failure to comply results in much harsher punishments.
I would also make it known, via policy page, that there are levels of behavior and levels of punishment for those behaviors, so that you can reference them as a policy and not something done simply off-the-cuff, and make sure to stick to it clearly regardless of who it is that's infringing on it.
This way, you can get the best of both worlds. It's still not a perfect solution, but it gives you options for differing severities of action in a clearly defined way that you can referene as consistently applied. Perhaps include examples.
@Admiral said:
...the Irish. Buncha drunken leprechauns is what they are.
Lol yeah, my phone's autocorrect frequently hates on me. I corrected it.
@2mspris said:
@ThatOneDude With frequency. There are a few Amish women locally who are using the computers to manage finances or to take college classes. There are a few men who have used them for the purpose of advertising one craft or skill or another they have for work, to deal with government stuff they are request to do and for different financing/budgeting things as well. And then there are a few Amish men who have been caught trying to use it to find themselves mail order brides or attempt to look at porn. (In the library, which we have blocks again, so then begins the awkward "I'm trying to look at family pictures but the computer won't bring them up and I wondered if there was something wrong with it.") They don't have mad computer skills, but it's like phones that they are allowed to use as long as it's not in their house. There are a lot of them that carry disposable cell phones around, and my understanding is that they are suppose to leave them in an outbuilding and not take them in the house when they return home. Though the frequency of how many get to do that may have changed in the last couple of years, given that there was cyber sexting/harassment case not long ago locally where the suspect was a young Amish man. (Txting pictures of his junk to a 12 yr old girl he fancied.)
The Amish are allowed to use telephones, they just can't have them inside their house. Many Amish have telephones in their barn for this reason. I'm not sure what the logic behind this is, but that's my experience, just as they're not allowed to own cars, but they're allowed to hire drivers to take them places where they need to go.
Edit: My phone decided that Amish were Irish. Interesting.
@Coin said:
Original:
Players familiar with other World of Darkness sources, like World of Darkness: Book of Spirits or Werewolf: The Forsaken, might recognize that geists share aspects of ghosts and of spirits, the ephemeral denizens of the Shadow who embody everything from plants and animals to abstract concepts like hope, fear, and hate. That’s intentional: for all intents and purposes, geists are ghosts that have found a way to “hybridize” themselves with spirits.
Exactly how they do this is a mystery: it could be that Sin-Eaters are right, and it requires a trip to the Underworld — Avernian Gates certainly exist that open into the Shadow as well as the physical realm, and it could be that ghosts must find their way to one of these gates to devour a spirit. Maybe the Underworld journey isn’t always necessary: spirits do enter the physical world sometimes, and a ghost in the right place at the right time could catch one unawares and absorb it. On the other hand, maybe it works the other way around: maybe a spirit of disease finds the resonance of a ghost that died of leukemia appealing and consumes it, thereby absorbing the fragmentary human consciousness into itself.
Whatever the “truth,” it’s largely irrelevant from the Sin-Eater’s point of view; the Bound have no means of interacting with the Shadow, and unless they’re extremely well-schooled in obscure occult lore, they probably don’t even know it exists, or that animistic spirits inhabit everything in the World of Darkness. They simply explain what they observe as best they can.
v 1.1:
Players familiar with other World of Darkness sources, like World of Darkness: Book of Spirits or Werewolf: The Forsaken, might recognize that geists share aspects of ghosts and of spirits, the ephemeral denizens of the Shadow who embody everything from plants and animals to abstract concepts like hope, fear, and hate. That’s intentional: for all intents and purposes, geists are ghosts that have found a way to “hybridize” themselves with spirits.
Exactly how they do this is a mystery: it could be that Sin-Eaters are right, and it requires a trip to the Underworld — Avernian Gates certainly exist that open into the Shadow as well as the physical realm, so it could be that ghosts must find their way to one of these gates to devour a spirit. Maybe the Underworld journey isn’t always necessary: spirits do enter the physical world sometimes, and a ghost in the right place at the right time could catch one unawares and absorb it. On the other hand, maybe it works the other way around: maybe a spirit of disease finds the resonance of a ghost that died of leukemia appealing and consumes it, thereby absorbing the fragmentary human consciousness into itself.
Whatever the “truth,” it’s largely irrelevant from the Sin-Eater’s point of view; the Bound have no means of interacting with the Shadow, and unless they’re extremely well-schooled in obscure occult lore, they probably don’t even know it exists, or that animistic spirits inhabit everything in the World of Darkness. They simply explain what they observe as best they can.
You decide!
Lol, they changed 'and' to 'so'. That's the only difference. I wonder how players will find a way to exploit that?
@Misadventure said:
I thought the UK had been abolistionist for a few decades by the time of the US Civil War, going so far as to police the waterways.
They had. I think that this is highbrow irony in the form of 'go running back to the people that you just declared independance from to help you from the other guys you want to declare independance from', or possibly a reference to the War of 1812 and how Britian just kind of voluntold American sailors that they were British Navy now. Either way, it'd be funny to run to them for help. 
@TNP said:
@Derp said:
Example above: I feel that the confederate flag is a symbol of state's rights...
I think you're partially correct. The Confederate flag is a symbol of states' rights when you take into consideration that the phrase 'states' rights' is a dog whistle. What else do they trumpet states' rights about? Segregation. Miscegenation laws. And most recently, the right to discriminate against gays. They are indeed inextricably linked.
Quite a bit, actually! One of the most recent examples was the forced Medicaid reform that came along with the Affordable Care Act. Other past examples are Income Tax, Social Security Tax, water rights, import/export taxation, etc.
As for miscegenation and gay rights, there are more sides to that story even within those communities. I'm a gay man that feels that we should be looking in the other direction re: gay marriage and gay rights. The fact that you allow the state to sanction certain marriages and not others just means that there's still going to be some minority out there who doesn't feel like their rights are being upheld. For instance, marriage as a legal status deprives those who wish to remain single of tax benefits and many other things under the law. In order to make marriage actually -equal- among American citizens, what you'd actually have to do is just end marriage as a legal status that grants benefits and privileges that others don't get, which in and of itself is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. I'm a gay man that falls into that camp, so I can say with some certainty that this is one of those things that does affect me, and I'm on the opposite side of the debate.
State's rights isn't about miscegenation, bigotry, etc. It's about people being able to choose for themselves. Individual rights aren't won by creating special classes of citizens that are uniquely untouchable, they're won when -every- citizen is uniformly sovereign in the same manner. Are my views in the minority? Sure. But I think they're valid, still.
@DamnitJim said:
This shit is not hard, people:
All forms of (non-consensual) kidnapping and slavery are gross violations of human rights. The kidnapping of Africans (mainly by Africans) and their enslavement in the New World (mainly by whites) were crimes against humanity. Likewise, ethnic cleansing and physical genocide are gross violations of human rights and crimes against humanity.
Some portion of some particular US families' inherited wealth is due to the historical exploitation of slaves.
It does not therefore follow that a significant fraction of the US or 1st world wealth wouldn't have occurred without slavery. (E.g. see Canada, Australia, New Zealand, which are wealthy now even though slavery was never important in their economies.)
The ethnic cleansing and physical genocide of native peoples did support the high level of economic development we see in many countries. E.g. compare/contrast the comparatively high level of economic development in places where most native people were wiped out (US, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, Siberia) with levels of economic development in neighboring places where native peoples were conquered rather than exterminated (Mexico, Paraguay/Peru, New Guniea/Polynesia, Mongolia.) The ethnic cleansing and physical genocide allowed the seamless replication of the already highly productive European economic model in these land areas.
It does not therefore follow that the ethnic cleansing and physical genocide were good things or even historically inevitable. People at those times chose to commit those crimes.
It does not therefore follow that the slavery of Africans, the genocide of native peoples, colonialism or imperialism were necessary prerequisites for the Industrial Revolution. (E.g. See Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Taiwan, Singapore, which all either never had colonies or were themselves imperial possessions some empire .... contrast vs. Spain, Portugal, Russia which were early colonizers, imperialists or slavers, but which failed to have early Industrial Revolutions and are all still economic laggards.)
If you want to argue about the preceding and haven't read at least 3 or 4 books and 10 or 20 serious scholarly articles on economic history and development, STFU and go do your homework. You're like people who want to argue about vaccines and moon landings who've never studied biology or taken a physics class.
If you have done your homework, I'd love to talk.
Economic development I have not followed, to be honest, though I would agree with most of your points simply from studying another of the tangentially related social sciences.
Re: pts 1-3, yes, I believe that slavery was barbaric and should not have happened, but it did. That's unfortunate. I also feel that it happened about a century and a half ago, and so it has had time to cool down. Given that there has been plenty of social and legal reform to try and correct that mistake (with limited success, given that even laws can't change cultures, on both sides) I don't think that we're living in a culture that in any way condones it. Therefore, I don't particularly respond to arguments that root back to slavery with any sort of seriousness, but I'm more than willing to engage in such discussions as urban segregation and poverty, equal opportunity, etc. Those things are contemporary and relevant. Slavery is only as related to those issues in the same way as religious persecution and crowding is related to the State of the Union. You can make a foundational argument, yes, but -plenty of shit- has happened between Point A and Point B that can't just be easily glossed over. Loving, Brown II, Cooper. Strides have been made, equality has been established. It's time to start looking for contemporary causes of issues rather than focusing on historical ones. Especially in regards to point 3, in 1860, only something like 8% of american households owned any slaves at all, and far fewer owned slaves in any number that would allow for substantial economic prosperity based on it.
I am firmly NOT saying that I agree with racial discrimination in any sense. It's just dumb, at this point. Any sort of discrimination is, really. What I AM saying is that if we're going to make any progress on it going forward, we have to focus on issues that are actually contemporary, much as they did in Brown and the other cases mentioned above, wherein they determined that 'seperate but equal' as was established in Plessy was NOt in fact equal due to psychological and social stigmas (the doll test is pretty famous). Nobody argued that this was an effect of slavery, they argued that they were caused by contemporary cultural issues, and in doing so they made fantastic headway. Hearkening back to arguments about slavery ignores the very real implications of things like cultural indoctrination into poverty and urban isolationism.
But this is exactly why you can never really have these types of arguments. As soon as you do, it sets off a chain reaction of things that are entirely unwinnable, because you either agree with the other side, or you disagree and get labelled a flaming racist. It doesn't matter -what- your grounds for dissent are, or why you feel that one argument is relevant whereas another is not, you're just hating all over someone else. Example above: I feel that the confederate flag is a symbol of state's rights and a pushback against encroaching federalism that grossly violated the Constitutional rights of the states and their sovereignty (and we had to add three Amendments to the Constitution to back the view of the Union on the matter, so it's not like this was at all clear cut on either side), but people are very gung-ho about it being all about race. And then you look at things that have stemmed from that (like the Affordable Care Act and its Individual Mandate, or the cutback on workable hours for part-time workers who -already- weren't making that much working 40 hour weeks on minimum wage) and you say 'maybe they had a point' you're a bigot.
It's unwinnable, sure, but I also don't feel that it should be kept silent for fear of hurting other people's feelings. It's a real issue, there were -other- real issues, and there -are- real issues with civil rights that could be examined without someone taking it all the way back to the white man keeping his boot on the neck of the black man to run the plantations.
@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
@Misadventure said:
Who, alive today, would you blame?
People who fly the Stars and Bars or the Bonnie Blue Flag without understanding what they mean.
People who fly the Stars and Bars or the Bonnie Blue Flag who absolutely understand what they mean.
Individuals who serve or have served in the U.S. government or the military who fly either flag, doubly so.
People who build monuments to Stonewall Jackson.
People who name bridges, schools, or hospitals after confederate generals.
People who refuse to admit their state turned traitor over the right to own slaves, even after you read said state's secession declaration aloud, to them.
People who support Voter ID laws.
People who use gerrymandering to put a political stranglehold on any area with a large minority population.
Politicians who punish participants in SNAP for a statistically insignificant amount of fraud instead of coming down on the crooked shop owners who must be in on it for SNAP fraud to happen, at all, period.It's a long list. I blame them. I absolutely blame them.
Your list here is slightly contradictory. The stars and bars are a symbol of States' rights, not a pro-slavery tribute, though since we're taught in school now that the Civil War was about slavery (which it was not) that's an understandable attitude. You can't completely suppress a piece of american history that's important for the development of the current nation and still expect to build a foundation for an argument based on an outcome of that part of history. So, like... you're arguing on both sides of the fence, here.
@ThatOneDude said:
RL Peeve: Dudes that run at the urinal next to me with their dick in their hand before they get to a point of privacy behind that divider that separates the urinals.
I could see how that would be somewhat unsettling, but I also have to wonder why were you looking in the general area of another dude's dick if you didn't want to see dick? That one seems like blame could be shared.
