MagicwillNZ

Breeding a hideous half-human that serves my interests pretty much fulfills one of my life goals. I think doing in a computer game will just have to do.

[quote]Option C, necessary evil, although it is completely unreliable, your sanity aside. It's the most dangerous force in the country and must be very carefully monitored and controlled or it will destroy you.[/quote] Your other points aside for right now, this one strikes me as the most annoying. Firstly, what has the political left been doing for the past decade if not being a government watchdog? You can argue how the Patriot Act and the government wiretapping are "social

[quote]ou could at least read up on the Manifesto before getting into this argument. I know, the father of Socialism couldn't possibly have been a racist sack of shit, it's just not possible! He was, get over it. Those damned immigrants were depressing wages! Oddly enough, it's the same problem you're still having in Europe. Not enough jobs, too many workers. While you rationalize to yourself how Marx wanting to strip immingrants, and just immigrants, of their pro

[quote]By the way, one of the ten points Marx wrote was to strip immigrants of their property. It's not exactly an order for genocide, but when Hitler took everything away from Jews and other undesirables that were polluting his country, it was textbook Marxism.[/quote] You know, I know this supposed to be your "shocker point" where you point out the inherent injustice of the Marxist system, but this makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, if you're going to move to a commune, and they t

[quote]Whether you define 'socialism' as government control of the economy or government control of the economy with a view toward some sort of social justice, depends on the focus of your analysis. Can we agree that fascism is a particularly interesting form of government and that it may not be useful to lump it in together with modern Europe? Besides, 'socialism', 'liberalism' ie. capitalism, it's all humanistic nonsense anyway.[/quote] I'm absolutely fine with this.

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="123" id="2523387"] I recreationally call myself 'what passes for a socilist in the US,' but pschoak's sort of got you here. Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, and Stalin all had a major area of ideological compatibility: authoritarian nationalism. You can throw in Pol Pot, Mao, Idi Amin, those wacky Kims in North Korea, and Castro for good measure.[/quote] Well... that's true. Stalin and Hitler could honestly find a lot of common ground. I don't a

I don't see how these dictionary definitions really help your argument. By your own admission only one of the definitions has anything vaguely to do with "nazis"... and even that I'm really quite leery. The third definition is mutually exclusive with the second. Are you trying to say the word "socialist" is used to describe the concept of state control? I cannot possibly argue with that. In fact you might very well be proving my point . The corruption of the term is how it bec

[quote]It's ok, really. You keep pretending I'm ignorant, and I'll keep pretending you just missed that whole "national socialism" bit. Revisionism has been the trendy thing to do for a lot longer than either of us have been around, so it's not like I expected you to believe the explanation in the first place.[/quote] I don't think you're ignorant. I just don't think you want to listen. I don't know what you're trying to prove with that dictionary definition. It's just three

[quote]In effect, you're a lunatic for being anywhere near it, let alone past it. [/quote] I just think that no system should be trusted too far. The free market is a system. I like the free market when it works but there are excesses. I think that we reward companies more for manipulating markets than we do for providing superior services and products at lower costs, and I think that's wrong. Even worse, I think that the private companies nowadays literally do get away with murder. D

You played NWN for the community and the modules, not the base game.

[quote]Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Fanon, and Frankl, among others, disagree. Strongly.[/quote] Oh yeah, sorry. Not exactly a philosophy nut here. I was getting existentialism confused with nihilism. [quote]I don't think that the original definition is indefensible. It's just interesting to see how political attitudes change and influence our supposedly disinterested lexicographers.[/quote] Yeah, that is actually a pretty intere

[quote]Not to pick on you, but this is exactly the opposite of existentialism.[/quote] Yes. That was intentional. You can't be an existentialist if you feel your life is full of meaning. That's a true statement. [quote]Interestingly enough, later versions of that dictionary (and other dictionaries) exclude any mention of Left/Right. They also tend to distance themselves from talk of the 'merging' of state and industry and tend towards talk of state organization/control of indu

[quote]Hitler being less socialist than Stalin just means Hitler was less socialist than Stalin. It doesn't mean Hitler didn't have a massive bent towards socialism, as one can see by the distinct lack of distance from the midpoint. The midpoint is half and half. Half communist is a hell of a lot of communism if you at all consider free markets to be the normal, optimal manner of running an economy. Nazi Fascism is a massive level of control, Soviet Communism is a more massive level of co

Here is the article from the website that cover exactly your question: http://www.politicalcompass.org/faq#faq4 Why is Hitler slightly right ? The Nazis were socialists, so they weren't fascists either. Let's start with the second part first. Some respondents confuse Nazism, a political party platform, with fascism, which is a particular structure of government. Fascism l

[quote]But just because he was not a socialist in everything he did, does not mean he was not a socialist in his philosophy of how a society should function (Capitalism, Socialism, Monarchism Communism).[/quote] [quote]What we should not do is say that Nazism = Socialism. Socialism was a part of Nazism, but not equal to it. It was much more and almost all of it bad.[/quote] Hmm... let me put it this way... I do expect both a facist regime and a socialist government t

[quote who="MrDelightful" reply="32" id="2520234"]The original post prompted a question in my mind, why research spells at all? Your character is a channeler right? A being that is "somehow able to access magic". Well, isn't that ability innate to that channeler? Isn't that natural (or supernatural) ability one that makes your character fundamentally from most other beings in the game? Only channelers can imbue their essence to make an area habitable to make your first

[quote]Mix those sorts of values with some mass production of consumer goods and a bit of modern media wizardry and you have folks effectively hooked and willing to speak of 'the free market' as if it was explicitly ordained by a superme deity, whether or not they ever read the Torah, Baghavad Gita, Bible, or Koran.[/quote] You know, the one thing I think is really harmful is how people believe that the free market is some sort of semi-ecological, self-correcting system that would wor

[quote]Your attitude is akin to comparing an Israeli kibbutz (the purest form of Communism) to Stalinist russia. Clearly the 2 are not the same in all respects, but both, at the core, preach community ownership of all property - communism. It is a sad time when people try to rewrite history because it embarrasses them.[/quote] But Nazism and Socialism don't preach the same thing! Nazism didn't "branch" off socialism... it was just called "socialism" to appeal to nationalis

[quote]Yes, the Nazis were in fact a socialist party.[/quote] While you do make some good points, Hitler did things that were very unsocialist. What socialist abolishes trade unions? Just because Hitler used the government to carry out projects does not mean he was socialist. The fact is Hitler didn't share any ideological similarity with socialism, and rejected all of its goals. His economic policies may seem socialist, but that's on a level that is superficial. The fact is,

[quote]Nazi Party = National Socialist Party[/quote] Oh wow, Leuthesis, there, you came straight in your gleaming armor and white steed to PROVE MY POINT. Socialism has as much to do Nazism as the Irish Republican Army has to do with American Republicanism. They share a name. Does the fact that Hitler put socialists in concentration camps mean anything to you? What about Hitler and Mussolini's support for corporatism? How about the fact that facism outright rej

Hey Mike, nice to see someone from down under. I'm a half-kiwi, half-american myself, so let me see if I can't answer you question. I find this subject really interesting. Many associate socialism here with Nazism, and if you say you're a socialist, they think you're saying your a Nazi. If you tell them the two aren't related, they'll merely believe you to be a liar... or more kindly, stupid. Many people think that socialism is a slippery slope, that if you give the government

[quote]Back in December of '08, TexasTim65 started a thread that has a bunch of different takes on the turn=day thing. Given the recent talk here & the persistence of turn=day in the beta UI, I'm starting to lean to not having any in-game calendar and just calling a turn a turn. Elemental is plenty ambitious enough without trying to tackle a major problem like building a 'temporal transmission' that can shift gears between the pace of a hot war, the pace of a growing peacetime dynasty, an

I don't think the FPS genre is going downhill... I just think the most popular titles are fairly uninspired when it comes to gameplay mechanics. If anything, games like STALKER and ArmA prove that FPSs are still being refined. In this day and age, really, it's difficult to find a genre that can go downhill... the market is such that if people demand a niche game they can probably get something fairly good from somebody, let alone just to go retro. On RPGs alone you've got from Mount a

Oh man, now you're going to get a million posts about why you didn't mention them... Oh wait. [e digicons]>:([/e] Nah, good job. [e digicons]:grin:[/e]

[quote] It presents a lot of believability hurdles. First, at the point at which you have children, are we to assume that we must hit the end turn button 5475 times before even one of our children reaches maturity? (15 years of age.)[/quote] Even in Medieval Total War it took 15 turn for a noble to mature... that was a long time. Honestly in TBS games the whole time scaling thing is a huge issue if you want to make a realistic game... campaigns that would take a year if they had been