The underlying cause is they are more emotional driven than the baseline human, I think. We’re all emotional, but I feel like some people really let the truthiness gutfeel of emotions rule the day and facts are just not that important to them.

Pick like any of those and you see they had a choice between feelings that make them feel smart or part of an in-group, or facts that made the world clash with their beliefs. And because they’re kind of fools and cowards, they go with the feel-good most of the time.

I know a gay couple that are pretty right leaning, but they learned a long time ago that their own people don’t accept different opinions so they just play pretend whenever they go out into the LGBT spaces and they are their normal Republican selves at home or with their right leaning buddies.

It is extremely misleading to characterize this as “different opinions”. The republican party is extremely hostile to queer people. We’re not talking about like “i like pop-punk and you like 90s-r&b”.

Also if people really are lying about their beliefs so hard, that’s fucked up. Most of us learn that lying is bad in early childhood.

I’m not even conservative and I learned to shut up and play pretend for the short time I went to college because questioning the professor or showing you don’t go a long with the narrative is a great way to get targeted by the teachers and other students.

I feel like there’s a lot of detail missing here. Yeah, if you were saying like “I just don’t think gay stuff is natural” other people might have said mean things to you, but that would’ve been because you had a shitty opinion. Most right wing views are absolute dog shit, so it’s not surprising people would target them. You wouldn’t be persecuted for “going against the narrative”, you’d be derided for having bad ideas.

For the record very few people on the right actually believe women shouldn’t have the right to vote. Most of them say it as a joke because they know how much it rubs certain people the wrong way. It’s kinda like the guys that complain (jokingly) to their wives that they need to get back in the kitchen and make them a sandwich. Yeah some of them actually mean it and fuck those people, but the grand majority do not view women that way at all.

“I was just joking” is a common top-of-the-funnel for horrors. Explain why it’s funny to make jokes like “women belong in the kitchen” or “well we all know black people are [negative stereotype of your choice]”.

I’ve had several women tell me about how they’d have a date or two with a guy who’d said he was “liberal” or “moderate”, but it quickly became apparent he had horrible views about the world.

To your larger point, there may be people who pretend to be left-wing but secretly hold shitty beliefs, but those people are bad people.

And it sounds like you just want to feel persecuted by people for “going against the narrative” and don’t want to accept that right wing beliefs are, i repeat, dog shit, and make for a worse world.

I mean, there are reasons why right wing people don’t admit it. “I don’t think women should vote” isn’t going to make a lot of friends with women, for example. I don’t “lock myself” into avoiding Republicans, but their beliefs are often reprehensible so we don’t get along.

But also I live in NYC and I’m sure there are trump supporters, but most people recognize him as a scumbag and threat.

The problem is every republican idea is a bad one.

Is this the thing where people act like their little suburb in ~Oklahoma (population, 10k) is “the real world” but a major city like NYC (population, 8 million) is some sort of fake world?

Groundhog’s day if the day is pretty normal. Not like a day where I have the flu or AWS is down. There’s a lot of books to read, movies to watch, one night stands to have.

Also I think my friends would believe me that groundhog day was happening. Might be able to get a slightly better situation than the movie.

People shouldn’t put up with pollution. If the courts won’t block pollution, there are other ways.

Windows sure is bad, though I haven’t seen an actual blue-screen in years. That’s some foul luck.

Oh yeah I got a cheap wireless mouse and keyboard for it, worked fine. One or two crashes, but mostly just fine.

I think the rich assholes are banking on protests never ascending beyond chants and the occasional march. Maybe some blocked traffic.

When the right wing leaders are dragged out of their mansions at night and hanged from the nearest tree, and all the would be witnesses say they didn’t see anything, then we’d be getting somewhere.

Laws only matter if they are enforced.

The right wing doesn’t care about law or consistency. They care about in-groups to protect and out groups to bind.

If “how do treat strangers” is a viable metric for assessing if someone is a good person or not, the the right wing are not good people.

I think at least New York now requires jobs to post a range. I haven’t even seen bullshit like “$50k - $500k” - maybe the law was written strongly enough that they can’t loophole it that way.

Need more honey pots.

Put up ads saying there’s a measles party at a time and place. Anyone who shows up doesn’t leave and their kids are vaccinated.

Been doing the job search and it’s frustrating how bad most of the job postings are. There’s so much filler nonsense.

I pretty much just want to know like

• tech stack
• team size
• big picture what the company does
• if they’re assholes about in-office mandates
• salary range

Some postings are like “must know Java, go, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, or rust” and I’m like do you use all of those?

I just feel like there’s a lot of “You hate every piece of capitalism, but you won’t connect the dots to see they’re all coming from the same source.” It won’t be enough to restore social security payments if we still have billionaires just walking around, or we keep this broken two-party system that also empowers less populated areas. Just to name two issues off the top of my head.

We need larger, structural, changes.

But I guess everything starts somewhere.

Yeah… Some of the solutions start easier (someone just shoots musk and his lackeys dead) but bring high chaos.

More stable solutions I don’t even know what they’d look like.

It really bugs me that “divisive” is used as the bad word. There are so many reasons for something to be “divisive”.

It’s like saying “don’t make people angry” but treating “punched someone in the face” and “a man held hands with his husband” as the same. They both made someone angry so they’re both bad!!

If people are divided on a topic you should figure out why, what’s true and what’s false and in between, and resolve it. Don’t just sweep it under the rug as a thing you’re not allowed to talk about.

A couple years ago at a bar I was talking to a guy, and he mentioned he’d started playing DND. I went, “oh cool. Which edition?”

He said, “what?”. He didn’t know there were other editions. He didn’t know there were other RPGs. I think about this a lot and try to remember a lot of people aren’t really deep in the hobby. They show up once a week to play a game with their friends, and that’s about where it stops. Which is fine. Totally valid way to spend your leisure time. But very different than where I went.

Ah yes. I believe the term for that is “fantasy heartbreaker”. Fascinating history, really.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/9/

https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasy_heartbreaker

This sounds like a personal hell to me.

I mean, it might work if your group is all kind of on the same wavelength to begin with. But if that’s the case, you could also easily start with a system you like and go from there instead of reinventing all the wheels.

A lot of people have only really played D&D and its close relatives. I like to describe that in this metaphor: Imagine someone who has only every seen the lord of the rings movies. They’ve watched them over and over, both cinematic and directors cuts. They know all the lore and all the minutia. And then they sit down to write their own movie. Maybe a sci-fi space mystery to change things up. And this movie? it has horses. Because movies always have horses, don’t they? They’re in like every movie. So when the detective is stuck in the burning theater, his buddy should ride in on a horse and save him.

So I 0%, maybe even some negative percent, want to have to sell a group on “RPGs don’t actually need six attributes” or “you don’t need to have separate rolls for to-hit and damage” for the first time in their lives.

Secondly, most people are bad at design. Sorry. It kind of follows from sturgeon’s law (“90% of everything is crap”). Most people don’t set out to make crap, but it happens anyway. Most people firing from the hip are just not going to make good systems. Especially if, as above, they’ve only ever really played one kind of game. So, no, I don’t want to deal with the guy who’s like “On a natural 1 you should drop your sword” who doesn’t realize that, because fighter types make a lot more attack rolls, they’re going to drop their swords way more often than you’d expect of the archetype. I am reminded of an unhappy time in an old, bad, D&D game where I fruitlessly tried to explain effective HP to the wizard. (Since D&D 5e stops counting damage at 0, there are some weird interactions between initiative, healing, and damage.)

Third, even if you avoid all of that, even if you have a group with a deep and wide knowledge of game design, you’re going to end up with an inelegant mess. Why does intimidating someone mean a simultaneous roll-off of increasingly large dice, but bluffing someone means drawing poker hands? Because those rules were added on different sessions, and Mike was really into poker and convinced people it would be cool. Wrestling someone you flip coins, but knife fighting you roll d4s. Sword fights use this complicated table Joe insisted would be fun, but magic is just a roll off. No thank you.

I’d rather just play Fate, which is already pretty loose about how to interpret conflict and consequences.