The fascist coward covers his face because he’s afraid of consequences.

Fuck this bullshit.

You can be against an evil settler-colonialist state like Israel without being a racist, conspiracy pedaling piece of shit that drives hatred and violence towards people who have nothing to do with it.

We deal with this psycho shit from the right all the time, and it’s wrong when they do it. Try having goddamn principles.

You should read The Dawn of Everything, there are chapters devoted to the question.

The ‘Age of Reason’ was an age of debate. The Enlightenment was rooted in conversation; it took place largely in cafés and salons. Many classic Enlightenment texts took the form of dialogues; most cultivated an easy, transparent, conversational style clearly inspired by the salon. (It was the Germans, back then, who tended to write in the obscure style for which French intellectuals have since become famous.) Appeal to ‘reason’ was above all a style of argument. The ideals of the French Revolution– liberty, equality and fraternity– took the form they did in the course of just such a long series of debates and conversations. All we’re going to suggest here is that those conversations stretched back further than Enlightenment historians assume.

Let’s begin by asking: what did the inhabitants of New France make of the Europeans who began to arrive on their shores in the sixteenth century?

At that time, the region that came to be known as New France was inhabited largely by speakers of Montagnais- Naskapi, Algonkian and Iroquoian languages. Those closer to the coast were fishers, foresters and hunters, though most also practised horticulture; the Wendat (Huron), concentrated in major river valleys further inland, growing maize, squash and beans around fortified towns. Interestingly, early French observers attached little importance to such economic distinctions, especially since foraging or farming was, in either case, largely women’s work. The men, they noted, were primarily occupied in hunting and, occasionally, war, which meant they could in a sense be considered natural aristocrats. The idea of the ‘noble savage’ can be traced back to such estimations. Originally, it didn’t refer to nobility of character but simply to the fact that the Indian men concerned themselves with hunting and fighting, which back at home were largely the business of noblemen.

But if French assessments of the character of ‘savages’ tended to be decidedly mixed, the indigenous assessment of French character was distinctly less so. Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelize the Algonkian- speaking Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi’kmaq, but reported that the feeling was mutual: ‘They consider themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.” They are saying these and like things continually.’ What seemed to irritate Biard the most was that the Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French had more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.

Twenty years later Brother Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect Friar, wrote similar things of the Wendat nation. Sagard was at first highly critical of Wendat life, which he described as inherently sinful (he was obsessed with the idea that Wendat women were all intent on seducing him), but by the end of his sojourn he had come to the conclusion their social arrangements were in many ways superior to those at home in France. In the following passages he was clearly echoing Wendat opinion: ‘They have no lawsuits and take little pains to acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment ourselves so much, and for our excessive and insatiable greed in acquiring them we are justly and with reason reproved by their quiet life and tranquil dispositions.’ Much like Biard’s Mi’kmaq, the Wendat were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another: ‘They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.’

Wendat cast a similarly jaundiced eye at French habits of conversation. Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be particularly bright. People who tried to grab the stage, denying others the means to present their arguments, were acting in much the same way as those who grabbed the material means of subsistence and refused to share it; it is hard to avoid the impression that Americans saw the French as existing in a kind of Hobbesian state of ‘war of all against all’. (It’s probably worthy of remark that especially in this early contact period, Americans were likely to have known Europeans largely through missionaries, trappers, merchants and soldiers – that is, groups almost entirely composed of men. There were at first very few French women in the colonies, and fewer children. This probably had the effect of making the competitiveness and lack of mutual care among them seem all the more extreme.)

Here’s another section where they quote a debate between Kondiaronk, a Wendat chief, and the governor of Montreal in the 1699:

Kondiaronk: I have spent 6 years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that is not inhuman and I generally think this can only be the case as long as you stick to your distinctions of “mine” and “thine.” I affirm that what you call “money” is the devil of devils, the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils, the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity—of all the world’s worst behavior. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false—and all because of money. In light of all of this, tell me that we Wyandotte are not right in refusing to touch or so much as look at silver.

Do you seriously imagine that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris? To take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make up? To bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happens to have been born with an inheritance? Do you actually imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry? That I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into Naval service? If on the other hand, Europeans were to adopt an American way of life, it might take a while to adjust but in the end you will be far happier.

Callière: Try, for once in your life to actually listen. Can’t you see, my dear friend, that the nations of Europe could not survive without gold and silver or some similar precious symbol? Without it, nobles, priests, merchants and any number of others who lack the strength to work the soil would simply die of hunger. Our kings would not be kings. What soldiers would we have? Who would work for Kings or anyone else?

Kondiaronk: You honestly think you’re going to sway me by appealing to the needs of nobles, merchants, and priests? If you abandoned conceptions of mine and thine, yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve. A leveling equality would take place among you, as it now does among the Wyandotte and yes, for the first thirty years after the banishing of self-interest no doubt you would indeed see a certain desolation as those who are only qualified to eat, drink, sleep, and take pleasure would languish and die, but their progeny would be fit for our way of living. Over and over I have set forth the qualities that we Wyandotte believe ought to define humanity: wisdom, reason, equity, etc. and demonstrated that the existence of separate material interest knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason.

I bet the billionaires who back it will put Candace Owens in charge next.

They’re called Ferengi, but yeah close enough.

Lots of stuff from I Might Be Wrong by Radiohead. Like Spinning Plates, especially.

AI you say? Here’s 69 million dollars. Make it happen!

I think people’s favorite is whatever they grew up with.

I played a lot of MechWarrior 2 as a kid. Give me the stompybois.

Yeah, it’s a fascinating insight into what cops think about the people they arrest.

If you like Actual Play shows, the Film Reroll podcast plays exclusively in GURPS. They play a fairly light version of the rules, but still make custom mechanics for various settings that show how modular of a system it is.

The show takes the premise of a movie and plays it out as a roleplay campaign. My favorite is Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, in which the GM tells the players they’re playing an obscure teen romance from the 80s so that they wouldn’t know they were in a horror movie. I probably wouldn’t recommend that for a table, but the actors know to expect tricks and it works very well as entertainment.

If I’m camping, absolutely. Preferably in a hammock. It’s hot as hell where I live.

Gabbard doesn’t have a principled bone in her body. The only thing she cares about is climbing the ladder.

She’s a willing useful idiot.

The Senate doesn’t have gerrymandering like the house does. There’s definitely still bullshit based on the way representatives are appointed per State, but they can’t redraw districts to pick their voters like they can for the House.

I’ll never learn to spell the word “medieval” without spell check.

That’s right.

Happened to me a few months ago, I rented a room and inspected the mattress as I always do.

Tons of bedbug stains on the corners. I asked for a refund and they refused, so I requested a charge back with the pics I took.

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Vargas, however, wasn’t quite finished: She sat and waited for nearly 15 minutes, alerting passing vehicles that ICE was sitting in the middle of the tracks.

“I know he was upset about that,” she said.

This lady’s a certified badass.

The second thing Vargas realized was, “The more time I spend with them, the less time they spend with my community. That’s how I see it.”

Think of it like your email provider: you can still get email from Hotmail even if you have an AOL.com account.

Where this analogy breaks down is that some instances have defederated from others. This means “we don’t want your data, and we won’t import it.”

But if you pick an instance that is widely federated then you can see and interact with most of Lemmy.

I actually just finished my weekly session running MotW, our second in the campaign.

I’m really liking it so far; it’s probably my favorite PbtA other than the original AW so far. They seemed to understand the design philosophy better than most.

The investigate a mystery move in particular works really well to keep the momentum of the game up.