I love Shadowrun. Sure, it’s still a grim dark dystopia where megacorps and their puppet states are grinding mankind into paste with senseless war, murder, destruction and debauchery, rogue AIs are devastating us while tech industries keep us pacified with digital drugs and bigotry is keeping us weak and divided, but at least there’s actual elves and dragons and stuff.

Buoyancy. It has weight, but if it’s lighter than air, it still floats.

Or that a battery powered dumpster is a pickup truck?

Before the Artificers it was the rangers who were “stealing the stealth thunder from the rogue.” Heck, I remember in 3rd ed when people said the Bard was “stealing the Rogue’s lunch” because their skill mastery made them decent with traps.

whistles quietly in Armorer Artificer, stealth build

… yes… not fair at all…

I mean, you’re not wrong, but that doesn’t mean we can’t choose to do better today.

I’ll take that deal. As long as Mexico doesn’t try to get cute like last time. If we’re going to stand against exploitation of both of us, we need to stand together, eh?

Trump is a senile lunatic, of course the nonsense spewing out of his brain is contradictory. Nothing he is doing makes any rational sense on any level. People are just trying to play idiot-whisperer to sus out what random two malfunctioning brain cells are going to form his next policy choice (foreign or domestic). Of course what they’re saying is contradictory, the random-bad idea generator running the country is a contradiction factory.

Yep. And there will be more jobs running the power plants than the data centre. For a project that’s revenue projections are effectively tech moguls going “Trust me bro!”

Well they do claim to be a free, democratic nation. “Claim” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence, but it is accurate.

On the one hand, if you’re walking into a totalitarian state and criticizing the ruling autocrat, then sure, that’s a skill issue. That’s not supposed to be how it works in countries that at least purport to be free. At the very least, we can at least be frustrated at the false advertising.

I think we’re all clear on the assignment. We’ve all taken a hit for the sake of “Buy Canadian” and other movements, to help with re-alignment, and we all know we’re going to have to support each other as shocks continue to hit. An important factor, however, is the pain needs to be distributed in a reasonable way. The TSE index funds are seeing solid and gaining dividends. We need to see some more movement from the top income brackets in putting those dividends back in to domestic industry to help compensate for inevitable job losses.

they act in a different way from the other, which they very much do. The basis of their power comes from different roots, and because of that, they have different interests, different goals, different avenues of action, different preferences in compromise with wider society.

I firmly disagree. There is no meaningful difference in motivation or expected outcome. The behaviour is functionally identical. In neither case is there any commitment to compromise with society, both Aristocracy and Plutocracy leverage economic factors to control and contain the wider community, to arbitrary and capricious ends; frequently little more than the further consolidation of power. The terminology is different, it sounds different, but it does not behave different in any meaningful way. Any social contract is entirely grounded in what we choose to demand as a society, not intrinsic to the flavour of elite class.

It’s the same motive, the same tools, and the same outcome, just re-branded and with a fresh coat of paint. Plutocracy in this era leverages scientific and evidence based psychological conditioning, social control, and new communication mediums to play on a variety of fundamental cognitive biases and limitations instead of leveraging religion alone as the primary means of containment of the governed, nothing more. As I said, it’s Aristocracy with a business degree. If you want to get specific it’s Aristocracy with a business degree and a marketing team instead of just the clergy.

The point is that the basis of aristocratic power comes (in part) from a position of extraordinary legal privilege, not simply being able to escape consequences for crimes.

We’re so very close but we’re not quite getting that last point. What I’m saying is it’s a distinction with very little meaningful difference. It’s interesting from an academic point of view, but that’s it. How they rationalize their privilege and sell their legitimacy to people makes no difference.

In principle you are correct, in practice the functional difference is very much negligible. As anyone who has ever tried to hold a plutocrat accountable in court can tell you, their equality under the law is more theoretical than how the world really works. The cults of personality, the careful reputational management, the nepotism and cronyism, dynastic rule and insularity, it’s all there, it’s just got a different window dressing.

On paper their power is different. In practice, not so much.

Fascism is what you get when Aristocracy gets a business degree. The difference between a feudal lord and a CEO is non-farm income.

We spent 100 years engineering the world to decrease birth rates and punish people for having children “they cannot afford”, then immiserate the majority of people, eliminate any kind of opportunity to enjoy life, community, family, or recreation without spending ungodly amounts of money to enjoy simple human pleasures that have been part of being human for hundreds of thousands of years, work them relentlessly 24/7/365 (or as close as we permit them) for the sake of business efficiency, destroy the environment so survival itself becomes dependent on the business cycle, and we wonder why no one wants to raise a child in this environment?

Honestly, we have spent a century ruthlessly punishing people for even thinking of making a marginally irrational decision and then wonder why they won’t indulge in an objectively irrational activity for the emotional fulfillment.

As far as I’m aware, no on officially still worships Baal, although there might be some surviving fragments of that tradition in Tunisa oddly enough. Carthaginian beliefs pre-Christian/Islam was deeply Phoenician.

Edit: Grammar

Moloch (seemingly derived from the words for King and Shame) was the one who required child sacrifice. Baal was a storm god, like Zeus. Often considered the chief rival of Yahweh (YHWH) during the Jewish conquest of Canaan as they were, at the time, both storm gods.

Banned for “hate speech” for telling an American propagandist to get his American propaganda out of my country. Apparently Reddit is helping with the effort to destabilize and invade Canada.