I’d consider buying these just to have them in my collection, but it would just be a fun read and collector’s-item/museum-piece-kind-of-thing. Not sure I’d ever play them or read them more than once.

That same edition, too?

Or during Rome lol.

Republics don’t work. They always just end up authoritarian.

There isn’t really a single form of communist government, same as there isn’t a single way to do democracy or capitalism. Every country does it different, experiments a different way. For all we know, the perfect way to do it is just waiting for us to discover.

For example, I’d say the US’s form of liberal, bourgeois democracy is one of the worst ways to implement it, but it was also an early experiment with it and deserves credit for at least trying it and helping us learn what to do and what not to do.

And we haven’t even bombed you to the stone age yet to take all your oil! (or coal? Whatever Australia has) Imagine it would be even more after that lol.

Same, man, same lol. I’m still patriotic during the Olympics, but if we’re going to be funding genocides, assassinating leaders, and starting wars and shit, fuck it, I hope we lose them all lol. Let’s just start over on the whole project.

I invite US balkanization at this point so I can go hang out in the new sovereign state of whatever CA, WA, and OR will be called. Hawaii can come, too.

You should compare countries of similar development. That’s a good thing. People always compare the richest capitalist countries with the poorest communist countries, but by doing that always ignore the mass amount of poor capitalist countries, ones that are poor specifically because of capitalism.

Russia, for example, was extremely poor and behind. Comparing them to other majority agrarian societies during the Tsar makes way more sense than comparing them to countries that had been post-Industrial Revolution for awhile already, like Britain, Germany, or the US. That wouldn’t make any sense. They were trying to catch up but they were still only just getting a proletariat from their burgeoning heavy industry and rail industries when the Revolution happened. They were way behind the West otherwise. Yet in a short period of time they managed to catch up.

China even more so was basically all peasants. Vietnam, Cuba, Korea, etc all the same, extremely poor, small, or both. So they should be compared with countries of relative equal development, which tends to be the countries in the global South, like Africa or Latin America.

Then there’s the fact that they are kept at low development through purposeful exclusion from global markets, via sanctions, propaganda like the “Radio Free” programs, coups, support of separatist or terrorist groups, taking of national resources, being kept in debt by the IMF, and so on.

The USSR had to deal with a civil war, rising up during WWI and being sabotaged by the Germans, more civil war, foreign meddling, and all while being the first successful communist revolution. Yet they still managed to raise literacy, raise health outcomes, raise average life expectancy, gender equality, science and technology, end the cycle of famines (after the first one or two they had when they were still building up), had faster growth during that period than any capitalist country (except maybe the US, which was doing imperialism at the time and the biggest hegemon), all while helping sustain other socialist countries, like Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea.

Well at least here we can pretty easily see where the money goes by looking at the billions of dollars given to Israel and the military.

I’m so used to hearing that this technology is 10 years away, or whatever the old adage was, that i can’t believe we’ve been seeing actual progress on this front in the last few years. Maybe it will actually happen eventually!

How so? I heard their protocol was better than Activity Pub, but I don’t really know the details or what the difference is.

Dems aren’t allowed to say that because they are owned by the very same rich people lol

So that’s what happened to it. Well that’s sad =(

I figured it meant drama happening from players going out and then breaking up or something like that. Seen that before, but I could totally believe your theory, too lol.

He cites the issue in the blog post, but it will probably be a hard one to find on the internet. Someone else in this thread tried, but wonder if it’s the kind you have to go to a library and look at that microfiche or microfilm to find. That would be cool if someone finds a link.

Some of those quotes blew my mind. It sounded exactly like FATAL. I couldn’t believe it lol.

Good point, and I think that was main thesis of the article. There were sexist parts of the game, but nothing easily fixable. Gygax and Arneson created something greater than themselves, that could live beyond any flaws they had (well, Gygax, so far nothing on Arneson luckily).

I agree. It doesn’t mean we ignore all the good they did, but it does give us a more well-rounded view of our heroes, which I think is useful to humanize them. We can take the good and evolve from the bad. This blog post isn’t asking anyone to quit D&D, it’s asking people to recognize the flaws of our forefathers of the hobby, recognize that the hobby has changed from that time, and to look forward to further change, growth, and inclusion for all of us. They created a game that will live beyond them, which is kind of awesome. At least that’s how I read it.

Hell maybe one day I’ll have kids and grandkids and they’ll think I’m backwards in some way, and I’ll be worried or skeptical because I think they’re too radical or weird in some way. But in the end, I’ll hope they’re right despite my misgivings, because the world is better that way - if the world’s next generation is able to carry things on and improve the state of affairs at the same time. We should want that and cheer it on. And looking back at things like this, including acknowledging the flaws of our progenitors and ourselves in addition to their great works, it let’s us see all that and celebrate it, the path we’ve taken from there to here.

I’d agree with that, and I think that’s what makes it acceptable to play the game nowadays and not be ashamed. If we didn’t move past that as a hobby, it would be bad and we should boycott it. But because we have, it means we can instead acknowledge the past and learn from it. So there’s no need to ignore it or hide from it.

Oh Yay! Admittedly, I didn’t try it recently but I remember seeing an article that was down. If it’s back up, I’m glad to hear it.