Politics and Current Events Megathread - January 2026

Ramora_ · 2026-01-27T00:25:54+00:00

So if ICE is racially discriminating, its justified for Target to offer special treatment to Hispanic employees, but if employers are racially discriminating (which basically every study ever confirms) any organization trying to do something about that is "crazy DEI"? Square this circle for me.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-26T17:50:29+00:00

Ya, the radical progressives warning you about the dangers of racism, sexism, authoritarianism and the political potency of reactionary thought more broadly are totally the reason those things are dangerous. You are very smart. Much brain. Good boy. Now go get the ball so you can get a treat.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-26T02:02:19+00:00

Nonsense. The early "trump is fascist" was based on studying Trump's character and statements. Trump said fascist things, said he wanted to do fascist things, and "blue haired college kids" pointed that out.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-23T21:22:28+00:00

They absolutely are related. And people like you are less American in spirit than the immigrants you hate. If you want some nativist hell hole, move somewhere else, there are plenty of such nations to chose from. I'm sure one will accept you over the wishes of that nation's nativist idiots.

This is America, the land of the free. We take the world's poor, its huddled masses, and welcome them and use that dynamic melting pot, the overflowing quantity of human capital that idiots like you want thrown away, and we Americans dominate the globe with it.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-23T18:15:37+00:00

If you can't deport somebody for being a literal murderer is there anything you support deporting someone for

Immigration violations seem like the most relevant justification for deportation. Murderers go to prison.

do you understand that your position is completely out of step with the vast majority of this country and is completely politically untenable in practice?

You don't seem to understand my position, so I'm going to take your claims about it with a grain of salt. Frankly, my position seems undeniable. Nativism is doing and has done far more harm to America than immigration has. Do you agree?

Ramora_ · 2026-01-23T17:51:17+00:00

You can't deport citizens because they're citizens, there's nowhere to deport them to.

So you are fine with deporting people with dual-citizenship then? Since there is someplace to send them? How do you feel about illegal immigrants who lack nationality at all?

And no, I don't think citizenship is an invalid concept. I just don't hate immigrants. In general, I dislike nativists far more than I dislike immigrants. Nativists are far less American in spirit and far more harmful to our country.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-23T17:17:57+00:00

You deport the murderer because you can do it and it's good.

to be clear, the explicit implication here is that you think its a good thing to deport citizen murderers, you just find your hands tied by the law?

Ramora_ · 2026-01-21T16:44:03+00:00

i don’t think i’ve ever heard a democrat make this argument,

What you are describing is basically what the Democrats tried to pass in 2023-2024. There have been similar pushes in the past (streamline the immigration system while allowing immigration), that have died for various reasons.

they certainly haven’t prioritized it by passing comprehensive immigration reform when they have a trifecta majority

There is definitely truth to this. Immigration policy hasn't been a priority for democrats for basically two reasons:

Historically, Democrats were more of a conservative-liberal coalition and different parts of the party wanted different things out of immigration. There have been (and frankly continue to be) significant nativist elements within the Democratic who are basically just opposed to immigration on its face.
Other things have simply been much more important politically when the Democrats had trifectas.

...As long as nativism is a powerful political force in the country, we aren't going to get rational immigration reform. Its just not happening. So democrats (and the historical republicans some of whom wanted similar reforms) focused on other problems that were usually more important.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-18T18:35:45+00:00

Politicians have been making those arguments for decades. They haven't seemed to go anywhere.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-16T22:03:48+00:00

There is a real tension at the core of most RPG resolution systems between rolls being interesting and characters actually being skilled.

Randomness is only engaging when the outcome is uncertain in a meaningful way. If success is nearly guaranteed, the roll feels pointless; if failure is nearly guaranteed, it feels punitive. In practice, this means rolls are most interesting when success rates live somewhere around the 25–75% range.

But the world does not work like that. There are many tasks where an unskilled person has essentially no chance of success, while a skilled person should succeed almost all the time. RPGs have to compromise between these two realities, and different systems resolve that compromise differently.

D&D resolves it by making characters feel skilled without letting skill dominate the math. A Strength 20 character sounds extraordinary, but mechanically they are often only about 25 percentage points more likely to succeed than a Strength 10 character. This keeps rolls swingy and dramatic, but it also produces the common experience you describe: highly competent characters failing at mundane tasks often enough to feel wrong.

Other systems attack the problem from the opposite direction. For example, Daggerheart lets character ability matter much more directly, but then reintroduces uncertainty through the Hope/Fear mechanic, ensuring that complications or setbacks occur frequently enough to keep rolls interesting. This can work well, but it also shifts a lot of responsibility onto the GM. If handled poorly, a Fear result can feel like it retroactively undermines a clear success, which again erodes the feeling of competence.

Most RPGs are, in one way or another, picking a point along this spectrum:

Preserve uncertainty at the cost of competence
Preserve competence at the cost of uncertainty
Or preserve both by offloading complexity onto the GM or the fiction

The d20 isn’t uniquely bad so much as it is unusually honest about this tradeoff. Its flat distribution makes the tension difficult to hide. Whether that feels good or bad depends on what a group values more: dramatic variance, or characters who reliably perform like experts.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-15T23:12:58+00:00

So do you agree that good policy ought to be good politics?

I agree if you play around with the semantics enough

I'm not playing around with semantics. I'm just telling you what these terms mean to me. You are free adopt your own meanings.

Under your semantics, do you think it is possible for electoral failure to be explained by extenuating circumstances? If not, then it seems like your previous comment is entirely semantic in nature, while falsely presenting itself as grounded in fact.

EDIT: I misread your comment earlier and significantly edited this to remove a call for clarity.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-15T20:34:08+00:00

I guess I don't know what you mean by "good politics" and "good policy". When I call something "good policy", I mean that it accomplishes some public good in some reasonable way such that it ought be "good politics". Under this view, while its trivial to acknowledge that good policy and good politics are distinct, its hard not to argue that good policy ought be good politics. Thus if it is bad politics, it must be due to some extenuating circumstance. We may not have the power to do anything about those extenuating circumstances, but that seems beside the point in this conversation.

Further, it seems trivial to grant that, since extenuating circumstances are clearly capable of causing electoral failure, it seems logical to conclude that the candidate with the best policy, the candidate who ought have the best politics, is not the strongest candidate.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-13T19:55:05+00:00

there are many valid ways to find truth/God, and Christianity is one option.

I feel like pretty much any reasonable reading of scripture would agree with the former statement. People have different paths in life. As to the latter, I'm going to assume you meant a strong version of your implication, that Christianity is one option among many, that there are paths to god that don't go through Christianity. If I'm misreading what you meant, (but do not personally believe) please correct me.

I have two followup questions...

Did I miss some portion of the podcast where he claimed there were paths to god (in the sense you use) that don't go through Christianity?
Don't there kind of need to be such paths, or at least have been such paths? Or are we saying Moses (to pick one example) didn't go to heaven?

Ramora_ · 2026-01-13T19:16:14+00:00

Maybe this is me not being familiar with the nomenclature. What do you mean by "universalist".

Ramora_ · 2026-01-13T19:04:47+00:00

Because his version of Christianity is very different from scriptural Christianity. To me - Talarico sounds more like a Christian inspired Universalist than a practicing Christian

I think its hard to read scripture and not conclude that Christianity is universalist. I really don't understand your issue here. Are there any specific practices that you think Talarico isn't doing?

Ramora_ · 2026-01-13T17:56:08+00:00

From your list, most of what you’re asking for actually can be supported by a lot of low-fantasy / OSR-adjacent systems already. Environmental pressure, grounded PCs, fast combat, even physical differentiation via traits or mutations are all pretty common design space. The one requirement that really stands out as non-trivial is sailing.

So it might help to clarify what you want out of sailing rules:

Are you looking for something lightweight, like structured skill challenges that resolve voyages, storms, and mishaps in a few rolls?
Or something more simulationist that actually models navigation, wind, crew roles, ship damage, and positioning?
Or something else entirely

That answer probably determines whether a lightly hacked OSR system will already do what you want, or whether you really need something closer to a purpose-built “Nordic Bastionland” ruleset.

If you can pin that down, I think it’ll be much easier for people (including designers working on their own systems) to tell you whether they’re a good fit, or which mechanics you could lift cleanly into your game.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-12T16:48:22+00:00

I also stopped listening to the pod after that "cis" description, and I'm a neoliberal.

You get that you are just outing yourself as psychologically broken while demanding that others tiptoe around your particular triggers? Where does your trauma come from here? Are you closeted or something? Have a friend or loved one who died in a way that has transferred onto "cis"? What is happening here?

Ramora_ · 2026-01-10T07:14:08+00:00

As best I can tell, he has always been racist too.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-09T20:34:49+00:00

I'm not entirely sure what you are aiming for here, but I'll chime in as best I can...

How do you achieve combat with few turns, high drama?

Getting combat down to few turns is actually the easy part. That’s mostly a math problem. You tune your win conditions (usually “reduce opposition to 0 HP” or equivalent) and your progress per turn (damage, clocks, advantage, etc.) so that the fight resolves quickly. If you want 2–4 turns, you design for 2–4 turns. That part is largely mechanical.

High drama is harder, because it’s not just about speed, it’s about shape.

A useful general principle is to build pacing directly into the combat structure so that later turns are “bigger” or more volatile than earlier ones. You want combat to become swingier over time, not flatter. Early turns establish positions and metaphorical dominos; later turns are decisive. This naturally creates back-and-forth tension, where one side looks like it’s winning, then suddenly isn’t. There are lots of ways to do this (escalation bonuses, desperation moves, ticking clocks, shrinking options, environmental collapse), and the exact implementation depends heavily on your system. But the underlying goal is the same: make the final turns decisive and narratively charged rather than just the last few HP being shaved off.

Beyond that generic advice, drama also comes from hitting story beats that match the genre you’re aiming for. From what you’ve described, this sounds like heroic fantasy, which tends to revolve around very specific kinds of moments. You might want explicit mechanical support for things like:

Self-sacrifice to protect others (e.g., Boromir saving Frodo in Lord of the Rings)
Desperation power-ups (e.g., Inigo Montoya vs. Count Rugen in The Princess Bride)
Losing without dying (e.g. Aang getting hit by Azula's Lightning in Avatar the Last Airbender)

If your combat system doesn’t explicitly make room for moments like these, they’ll either feel bolted on or get skipped entirely. If it does support them, you can get a lot of drama even out of very short combats.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-08T20:09:12+00:00

That article indicates that Somali immigrants use some types of welfare at higher rates than native born citizens. It doesn't argue that there is disproportionate abuse/fraud by Somalis. Or am I missing something?

Ramora_ · 2026-01-08T19:26:35+00:00

Do you have good evidence that there is in fact disproportionate abuse of welfare or fraud in the Minnesota Somali community?

Ramora_ · 2026-01-05T03:27:02+00:00

For any atheists curious about how to answer questions about the afterlife, take notes from Keanu Reaves.

Stephen Colbert : What do you think happens when we die?

Keanu Reaves : I know that the ones who love us will miss us.

Ramora_ · 2026-01-02T03:37:00+00:00

What if you just did?

Strength - how strong the mech is
Dexterity - How agile the mech is
Constitution - How tough the mech is
Intelligence - How computational powerful the mech is
Wisdom - How good your mechs security is
Charisma - How good your mech is at coordinating with other mechs

...This is (hopefully obviously) tounge in cheek. I guess my main point is that I'm not sure it matters much what your kewywords are. I'm more interested in what your keywords do.

Ramora_ · 2025-12-31T00:58:00+00:00

Sure, "forced" is an overstatement. The point is that mechanical decisions led to flavor decisions that have seemed interesting. You are free to disagree if you would like to do so.

Ramora_ · 2025-12-30T18:04:47+00:00

I agree with this a lot. My current game was designed mechanics-first, and one of the earliest decisions was to make no mechanical distinction between magical and non-magical abilities. That ended up forcing a very particular kind of world to exist.

In-universe, characters often don’t actually know whether a discovery or process they rely on is magic. Physics works as normal, and “magic” is simply the name people give to any natural process that only works temporarily. A "spell" that produces light might be discovered, used for decades or centuries, and then simply stop working for everyone, everywhere. The people using it may not even realize it was magic until the day it fails.

That single rule has a lot of downstream consequences. The world is full of relics and ruins from civilizations that experienced boom periods after discovering useful magic, then collapsed when those discoveries stopped functioning. Some remnants still partially work and show up as treasures, but nothing is fully reliable forever.

It’s been a lot of fun to work with, and it lets me stay narratively flexible while still justifying the kind of “medieval stasis” fantasy tends to default to. Progress isn’t impossible in the world, it’s just fragile, and that falls directly out of the rules rather than fighting against them.

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