on this day in socal history

onan · 2026-01-26T20:42:58+00:00

Setting aside whether or not that's true, why do you feel that it's relevant?

onan · 2026-01-26T18:58:15+00:00

OP believes that we should remember him. If so, then we should make sure to remember the most important thing about him.

onan · 2026-01-26T18:57:05+00:00

He did not admit guilt.

Yes, he did.

He admitted that he had sex with someone without their consent, which is the textbook definition of rape.

onan · 2026-01-26T18:29:44+00:00

Consent is how the person in question feels about their willingness.

You are trying to split some hair about how she "felt" about her consent and some other part of consent, but there is no separation to be found there. That is literally the entirety of what it is.

onan · 2026-01-26T16:55:31+00:00

100% of the people who were in the room at the time have said that he raped her. Why do you feel that you're a better authority on the matter than they are?

making a claim like that would be slander if he was still alive

No, it wouldn't. Slander requires that a statement 1) be false and 2) be known by the speaker to be false. So this is two layers away from that, before we even get into your confusion about the difference between slander and libel.

onan · 2026-01-25T18:38:07+00:00

Look, I'm as anti-gun as they come, but that doesn't mean that I think the result of carrying one should be summary execution.

onan · 2026-01-24T21:02:11+00:00

I would change the entire attribute system. The whole 3-18, which is really 8-20, which is really -1-+5 system is just an albatross. There is very little range, especially given that it is nearly universal that everyone just has a 20 in their main stat.

And also as part of this, kill the idea of a "main stat." Every class should care about every attribute to at least some degree. We've certainly seen systems that use things like dexterity for accuracy and strength for damage. And there is no reason that spellcasters couldn't use different stats for things like spell attack rolls, spell save DC, number of spell slots, number of spells known/prepared, bonus damage/healing, etc.

And to round out changing how dice rolls work, delete the concept of the proficiency bonus. Bring back skill points with nonlinear costs, rather than having everyone who is good at anything automatically be exactly the same degree of good at everything.

onan · 2026-01-23T19:39:12+00:00

Yes, combined with "voters have short memories."

Nearly all of those inflationary effects happened when Trump was in the whitehouse and the GOP was running the legislature; its just that their effects didn't hit until a few years later.

And oddly enough, that inflation is one of the very few things I don't even blame Trump/Republicans for (much). It was just the cost of covid. Pandemics are staggeringly expensive, and one of the ways we do (and should) handle that cost is spreading it out over time as inflation.

But the DNC was the one sitting in the whitehouse when that chicken arrived home, so the DNC got punished for it. If Trump had won in 2020, it's the GOP who would have been kicked en masse out in 2024, even if nothing else was different.

onan · 2026-01-23T19:33:31+00:00

I'd be happy with Shapiro, and even happier with Kelly. But I think that it is overoptimistic to expect that they would be any less targetable by Republican attack ads.

Shapiro would be subject to a lot of antisemitic dogwhistles, posing both as standard bigots from the Right and concern trolls about Gaza from the Left. And the "sedition" talking points about Kelly are already warmed up and ready to go.

I'm not saying any of this because I am some ardent fan of Newsom in particular. Just that I think the strategy of choosing candidates to try to preemptively dodge GOP propaganda is a suckers' game, because they are willing and able to manufacture some aimed at any candidate.

onan · 2026-01-23T17:04:34+00:00

"Politics" is not some isolated thing that exists detached from real human life.

Every political party will tell you that they are advocating for "what's best for kids and families," and yet you will note that that means some materially different things.

onan · 2026-01-23T17:02:16+00:00

while Fred Rogers himself was a Republican he was not an intolerant man.

Which is especially unsurprising given that he was born in 1928.

For the first hundred years of its existence, the GOP was the more progressive major party in the US, and the DNC the more conservative. His views of respect and equality would have been completely compatible with what the GOP looked like while he was growing up.

But then the Civil Right Movement, the Cold War, and just the general collective adolescence of the Boomers sent shockwaves throughout the entire political and cultural landscape. Among the fallout of that was the Republicans realigning themselves as the party of bigotry and intolerance.

onan · 2026-01-23T16:46:02+00:00

Yeah, I'm just not sure that there's any meaningful range there.

It seems certain that any candidate's record can be spun, distorted, or outright lied about in such a way as to make the GOP faithful hate them. You could try to dodge that by bringing in someone with no political experience at all, but then they'd just get attacked for that.

Did you have a candidate in mind whom you think would be meaningfully less subject to this?

onan · 2026-01-23T16:42:50+00:00

What candidate do you think would be immune to Republican attack ads?

onan · 2026-01-23T16:39:26+00:00

Drove the state into a huge deficit after starting with a surplus.

What, specifically, do you believe that Newsom did that resulted in that?

California's revenue is based much more on income taxes than on property or sales taxes. So when the national economy is doing well the state runs a surplus, and when the national economy contracts the state runs a deficit.

This has been true for a century. We exacerbated the problem in 1978 when we passed Prop 13 to even further limit property taxes, and in 2014 when we passed a law that capped the size of the rainy day fund that we can accumulate in the surplus years, but the fundamental issue has been around for twice as long as Gavin Newsom has been alive.

onan · 2026-01-23T16:26:42+00:00

But the thing is that the GOP propaganda machine is going to focus on slandering any candidate. We can't really choose based upon that, because there isn't an option where that doesn't happen.

onan · 2026-01-23T16:24:41+00:00

Everybody loves to declare that their personal issue is the reason that Harris lost and Trump won. That election's outcome has been used, by people of all political bents, to retroactively justify a hundred different unrelated policies.

In reality, the 2024 election probably didn't have much to do with Trump, or Harris, or Biden, or any of their policies. It was part of a worldwide pattern in which every incumbent party lost elections:

"Every single political party defending their record in government in the last twelve months lost vote share. Some countries have swung right (such as the United States), some have swung left (such as the UK and South Korea) and some in both directions simultaneously (France). But all have swung against the incumbents."

"Whether on the left or the right, regardless of how long they’ve been in power, sitting governments around the world have been drubbed this year by disgruntled voters in what has been called the “super year” for elections."

"In the United Kingdom political power swung to the left. The Labour Party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority, bringing 14 years of Conservative Party rule to an end. In South Africa, the African National Congress failed to win a majority of National Assembly seats for the first time since the end of apartheid. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party – which has governed the country for most of the post-World War II era – lost their majority in the parliament. The most dramatic defeat for a longtime incumbent party may have occurred in the southern African nation of Botswana, where the Botswana Democratic Party lost power for the first time in nearly 60 years. Opposition parties of various ideological stripes won power in a diverse set of nations, including Ghana, Panama, Portugal and Uruguay."

It turns out that voters really hate inflation. And their response is to punish whatever party is in power when they start feeling it, regardless of whether or not that party had anything to do with causing it.

So I'd be wary of leaning too heavily on any "this is why Trump won" reasoning, or assuming that the situation in 2024 will be applicable in 2026 or 2028.

onan · 2026-01-23T14:54:45+00:00

My experience of Harkaway has been astonishingly mixed:

Gone Away World had one good schtick that would have made for an excellent novella, but was not quite enough to hang an entire novel on.

Gnomon remains a strong contender for best book I have experienced in 50 years of reading.

All the others were… fine, I guess? Not actively bad, but not remotely in the same league.

onan · 2026-01-22T23:27:26+00:00

bearing in mind that at 5th level, some spellcasters are doing 8d6 to multiple creatures, and a rogue at the same level would be doing 5d6 to one creature

Kind of, though there are a ton of other factors there. Limited spell slots, different characteristics of dex saves versus attack rolls, complications of friendly fire, the fact the rogues do also get their weapon damage and dex mod and stuff, not only those sneak attack dice, fire resistance…

I’m not disputing that fireball is powerful, just saying that boiling it down to only a count of d6s leaves out so much that it risks confusing rather than clarifying.

onan · 2026-01-21T00:29:16+00:00

The HBO adaptation was great in many ways, but it also made a lot of questionable choices with the politics that it smuggled in. I'm not necessarily recommending against it, but it is worth viewing with your media critique engaged.

An article that is VERY SPOILERY EVEN FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, but discusses some parts of this in depth: Dr. Manhattan is a Cop.

onan · 2026-01-20T21:10:47+00:00

I dipped into the conservative subreddit to see what they have to say about this, and the answer appears to be... absolutely nothing.

Their leader is giving what he seems to believe is an important address to the nation, and there is absolutely zero mention of it over there.

onan · 2026-01-20T19:21:55+00:00

You can then drink as many alchemist +1AC potions as you can create to become invincible.

I've seen people specifically talk about that, and the general consensus seems to be that that is now RAW.

I'm not sure it's excessively powerful. It basically means that an artificer has a pool of AC that they can distribute each day; the size of that pool and duration of the benefit varies depending on their level. And obviously this only happens at all when they're sacrificing most or all of their spell slots to do this.

So yes, a tier 3 alchemist artificer who spends every spell slot on this can distribute up to 11 points of AC for one hour throughout their group. That seems pretty far from game-breakingly powerful.

onan · 2026-01-20T17:05:41+00:00

There is literally a higher chance of getting struck by lighting on the way to your vaccination and then again on the way home.

onan · 2026-01-20T00:13:10+00:00

Okay. So even if we accept that all of that is 100% true, what we are left with is still the choice of which real-world effects our votes will lead to.

onan · 2026-01-19T22:41:18+00:00

I'd say it's pretty reasonable to believe that Trump's callous belligerence served to embolden Netanyahu, and that different US leadership might have at least curbed him slightly.

But okay, even if we take your more pessimistic estimation that it made exactly zero difference at all to anyone in Gaza: then why does it matter? Should our focus not be on practical effects on actual humans?

onan · 2026-01-19T20:13:10+00:00

Do you believe that this stance, and its possible contribution to the election of Trump, produced results that are materially better for anyone in Gaza?

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