Eskrima, RPGs, And Other Things

[citrakayah]

Recently, I’d been part of a party of adventurers in a Dungeons and Dragons game that met every Saturday (though we were moving to Wednesdays and Fridays). Note the past tense.

Last night, I was taken aside and informed that group dynamics were “not working out.” Given that my character was straight-laced chaotic good and over half the part was chaotic/neutral/lawful evil (though I really think the chaotic evil character wasn’t that evil, since he was merely a sociopath who killed evil people), I can buy that. Or maybe I somehow managed to piss everyone else off and not notice it, and no one explicitly told me. And the GM is open to, perhaps later in the year, doing another campaign that I can participate in.

I’ll acknowledge that I was a bit upset due to the fact that I hadn’t noticed any such undercurrents, but I guess that’s the price one pays for being autistic and having few social skills. I’m a lot less elegant offline than online. Would have been nice for them to tell me what it was, though. On the other hand maybe it wasn’t anything specific.

In any event. This does give me more time to participate in things like the Wildlife Society (whose last meeting I missed), eskrima (last few meetings missed in part due to being unable to find the location), and various other things. But still, kind of unfortunate.

Would be nice to join another campaign, whether face-to-face, play-by-post, or IRC.

In other news:

1. My echocardiogram was rather bizarre, at least in terms of my experience, though my heart was apparently normal. Also they won’t send me images of my echocardiogram, which is unfortunate because the video was kind of cool.
2. I started a speculative evolution forum called Saecula Novae because the mod on Speculative Evolution did several things I disagreed with, including but not limited to: closing and deleting threads without formal notice, unevenly enforcing rules, and not creating forums for community projects like promised.
3. Fuck anarchocapitalists. (Trigger warning: Sheer, mindblowing insensitivity to rape, which is used to score political points for a stupid ideology.)

Comments

[magpiestar]

Whenever stuff like your D&D situation happens to me, I just chalk it up to, most likely, social complexities going on that i have no knowledge of. Aka: it probably involves other people more than you.

I got fired from my job before I got the one I'm at now, and to this day almost a year later, I still can't give you a reason [and trust me I've puzzled over it /a lot/] other than that my boss just seemed to really not like me and nothing I did could ever be good enough for her, even if it was perfectly fine and acceptable. Eventually I just decided that something was going on in her head, or in her life that I couldn't possibly know in my position. I guess she just had her own motivations, whatever they were, that were not made known to me.

That's what I tend to think when this kind of thing happens. I hope that made sense.

[citrakayah]

It does. But it wouldn't be the first time I screwed something up, and I tend to blame myself first in an attempt, I suspect, to account for any cognitive biases that would shift blame away from myself.

[davv]

What strikes me, beyond the insensitivity to rape, is that the anarcho-capitalists there (and elsewhere too):

- don't seem to know about libertarian socialism or communism and argue as if anarcho-capitalism is the only anarchism in town (where I would argue anarcho-capitalism can't be very anarcho at all)

- haven't bothered to read the arguments by their own side. All too often I see people arguing for the "natural rights approach" without seeming to know of e.g. Friedman's thousand megawatt laser argument (basically a Sorites against that natural rights approach). And Friedman is an anarcho-capitalist himself - it's not like his argument is hidden in Das Kapital or something.

[citrakayah]

1. They do, it's just that they feel that anarchy is synonymous with a "free market." Of course, the idea of a free market is a myth. Anarcho-capitalists have this odd distinction between forces. They'll ignore the type of force where everyone refuses to sell you food and you starve, but not the type of force where, to deal with the fact that people won't give food to starving people, a group of people make them. It's irrational in the extreme, and founded on the idea of natural rights--and I don't believe in rights except as general guidelines.

2. An interesting argument by Friedman. And yes, they haven't read such things, because they fundamentally don't want to have to acknowledge the issue and would prefer to throw shit around.

[davv]

I find it interesting that the socialist anarchist side is not nearly as visible, comparably speaking, as they used to be. Either this is because they have become more quiet, or because the anarcho-capitalists have become louder; I suspect it is a little of both, but more the latter. But somehow, anarcho-capitalism has become the "default anarchism" for a lot more people than was previously the case. Why? Power of communication? Fragmentation of society? Did capitalism "win" and redefine the debate through Reagan and Thatcher, or did liberalism "win" and it is now the thing those who rebel rebel against? Or is it something else? I don't know. It feels like something is amplifying the libertarian voice somehow, but I can't get at whatever "it" is.

The natural-rights approach also provides some other very bizarre results. If I collude with everybody who owns property surrounding yours, I could form a "cartel" (so to speak) and demand that you pay exorbitant rates for anything you transport through our property. Essentially a siege, but with the twist that the one breaking the siege would be initiating force. As you said, they have an odd distinction of what force is. I imagine it follows from the intuitive idea that "if we could stop brute force" (i.e. the "make me" variety), "then society would be much better"; but the people who would use brute force for unpleasant ends here would use other forms of coercion if they couldn't use brute force. So the assumption of "everything else equal" fails.

[citrakayah]

I would argue that the thing amplifying the libertarian voice is money. I kind of view libertarianism as an offshoot of Randian "philosophy"--basically, the ideology that anybody who can't do well without some sort of assistance is unworthy. Libertarian ideology is basically Randian "philosophy," in my view, with the addition of the belief that nothing will go wrong. It's the kind of self-satisfied pontificating that bears absolutely no connection to reality... which is not surprising. I've heard libertarians and anarcho-capitalists complain that the scientific method is a "statist" methodology. They prefer "praexology" or whatever it's called, which is of course bullshit and basically an attempt to say that humans act the way you think they should.

In any event, I got sidetracked. My point is that the anarcho-capitalist view wouldn't exist without Randian "philosophy." As far as why the Randian view became popular, I would characterize it as a reactionary ideology, born in opposition to the Soviet Union, which gained power for the same reason social Darwinism did: It reinforced existence power structures. Anarcho-capitalism is a spinoff that purports to solve problems with existing power structures, but would in reality only reinforce them.


Which is why I honestly think that for a lot of the biggest supporters of anarcho-capitalism, the scenario you describe is not a bug. It is a feature. Anarcho-capitalism favors groups and/or individuals with large resources that can be applied to force people to buy their products, and anarcho-capitalism brushes off forces such as the inability to not buy something that is necessary for survival as insignificant.

Worse, anarcho-capitalism is paradoxical: If contracts are binding, period... well, what do you call it when the government sells you land with the understanding that, so long as you and your progeny use the land, you will obey certain laws?

[davv]

But if you talk about social Darwinism today, people will call you a racist. The reaction to the Randian view is not nearly so negative.

So I could guess the corporations (or whoever) think that anarcho-capitalism is useful while social Darwinism is not. But I don't think that's the whole story. It feels like it's also related to how many poor people in the US tend to vote against their interests (or so I've heard). That is, the idea of "I will be the one to win the capitalist lottery by skill alone" has become very effectively part of the culture... and from there, I imagine it's not so long a jump to say "but I don't have a chance, whereas I should have... something must be wrong, it's the state!".

But that doesn't entirely work either. It's not the poor who are proposing anarcho-capitalism - it's the Austrians, technologists, etc., who are comparably well off. If I were to construct a story there, I think it'd be something like "see all the good capitalism has done to us" ("I've never been poor so I see only the benefits"), "if we did away with the state entirely, we would have outrageous progress only heard of in science fiction". I.e. that the "success" of capitalism sells the radicalization in that direction. Then money would come into the picture in two ways: first, from the corporate support of the think tanks, and second, that money of the people who talk about anarcho-capitalism (since they aren't poor themselves).

I've heard libertarians and anarcho-capitalists complain that the scientific method is a "statist" methodology.

It appears you can find Lysenkos on the right, too :)

Worse, anarcho-capitalism is paradoxical: If contracts are binding, period... well, what do you call it when the government sells you land with the understanding that, so long as you and your progeny use the land, you will obey certain laws?

That's an amusing thought: that in some prior day, perhaps there was a natural right - and then the people gathered together in groups and made laws for themselves, collectively owning the property. That would just mean the anarcho-capitalists were late to the party: every group has agreed to subordinate its property to a state and so there's no free property left (absent the high seas, of course). The thought is made all the more amusing by that if the state legitimately owns the property, then an anarcho-capitalist revolution would be the very essence of imposition of force, the very thing they claim to be against.

I know it doesn't quite work like that: nobody would claim that the North Koreans voluntarily gave their property to Kim Il-sung. But it does show that states could easily reappear, and when I think about it, the megacorporations usually depicted in cyberpunk (with their private armies and so on) do quite resemble (plutocratically oligarchical) states. One might draw a comparison to the fall of Rome: a greater state crumbles, smaller "states" appear (the fiefdoms or megacorporations), each with their own defense apparatus. Again, the comparison is not perfect (the lords of the feudal realms did use the kind of force anarcho-capitalists abhor to control their people), but it's interesting.

It reminds me of something I read not long ago, where the author claimed free-market proponents misinterpret Coase (considered to be of "externalities can be handled by the market" fame). What he's saying is rather that a perfect market would produce the same pollution-handling outcome as a perfect regulator. But that goes both ways. If it's too hard for people to deal with the polluters one-on-one, they may use the equivalence in the opposite direction. I.e., states provide lower transaction cost compared to the alternative. There's no reason to automatically expect that markets would minimize transaction cost (the existence of corporations themselves suggest otherwise, since they are internally planned economies); and if the markets don't, then there's a perfectly good chance that states would just reappear.

[citrakayah]

I'd argue that that's only the case if you call it social Darwinism. If you say "People who are poor are poor because they are lazy" you get half the country agreeing with you, it seems. And that is social Darwinism... just not the kind that is explicitly racist (it's racist in that it refuses to recognize that the legacy of discrimination affects racial minorities).

It's true that it's generally the elite who talk about anarcho-capitalism, so the trend is for people who only see the good side to advocate it, but to some degree, wasn't that same trend present in social Darwinism? "I only see how well I'm doing, I think I've earned it, people earn their place in society?"

Technically, that's not essential for anarcho-capitalism, and I've seen anarcho-capitalists (okay, anarcho-capitalist) who accepted that the whole social Darwinism thing is wrong--something to their credit, I suppose.


Yeah. Then you have the anarcho-capitalists saying that psychology and sociology are bunk, and presumably that praexology is anything but worthless crap.


Exactly! And most anarcho-capitalists I've seen seem to think that so long as you were not coerced by a gun to your head to be part of a contract, then everything is fine and dandy.

I mean, I've heard anarcho-capitalists defend slavery so long as one sells themselves into slavery (never mind the potential for fraud, of course or coercion, of course, since their belief in absolute rights of that sort demand that the possibility be legal no matter how prone to abuse it is). So clearly they don't have a problem with someone being forced to maintain a contract that they desperately, desperately do not want to maintain.

As far as the Coase issue, that's an interesting piece. There's also one other thing that people citing Coase miss out on, and that's that if I'm polluting, it's in my rational interest to make sure that no one knows about it. And in the absence of a government authorized to use force to conduct surprise inspections, it's going to be harder to find out who is polluting.

[yourdeer]

Almost everyone I've played D&D with refuses to run evil-aligned campaigns, simply because sticking to the motives is really hard and it's difficult to keep people acting as a team. Monster campaigns? Yes. Morally-grey campaigns? Yes. Political intrigue? Yes. But straight up "my alignment is evil" has been generally frowned upon as something that makes it way harder for everyone there to actually have fun.

It is hard when one player character is the odd one out, whether or not the player actually is. This has happened with our friend Will, who is very dear to us but always wants to play a Lovecraft-inspired, mentally unstable magic-user. Usually there are no problems with that besides predictability, except when we're trying out new systems or doing one-offs. It made it really hard to GM Mouse Guard, because there is no magic in that world and a zany character in Mouse Guard is likely to get people killed, so I had to improvise a lot to figure out how to allow him to be useful and have fun as part of the group.

[citrakayah]

Indeed. In the campaign, my character was constantly paranoid--acitan view evil as a form of irrational insanity, and the character he was paranoid against had started a fight with a very wimpy cleric and then killed him by making him explode (necrotic cyst). Part of what I hate is when people play evil characters not for interesting roleplaying opportunities, but because they merely wish for more powerful characters who can break the game--not that that was what happened, that I can tell.

Though I don't understand how someone would enjoy playing a murderous psychopath...

[jewelfox]

I once saw a dialogue option in my brother of origin's playthrough of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which amounted to "That's all well and good, but I've decided to kill you now." It seemed, at the time, to have come out of nowhere and to be a complete nonsequitur.

The next time that brother GMed a Star Wars tabletop RPG, I decided to use that line to respond to everything.

He killed my character off. I deserved it. But boy, was it fun. >_> Not because of the psychopathy but because of the randomness.

I think the problem is when people have very different expectations of what they want out of a game, and are unwilling either to communicate those expectations to each other or to respect each other's expectations. Like when that brother deliberately sabotaged one of my games by driving his truck off a cliff, after getting frustrated with bad die rolls, without even talking about how to make the game work first. Or when he and his friend went through the motions of an entire side RPG campaign, taking 10 minutes to reply (in chat) and offering no feedback even when asked directly, and then I found out later they were talking behind my back about how the game had jumped the shark.

Sorry. >_> Um, in this case it sounds like they want an excuse to act out being mean, and decided it'd be easier to get rid of you than accomodate you. I suspect that they would have just murdered you in-character by that point.

[citrakayah]

Actually, about half of us were trying to figure out how to murder each other, and one character already kind of tried to include me in collateral damage after he nuked a town via daemon.

[jewelfox]

So did you manage to take any of them with you? >.>;

[citrakayah]

No. I didn't die, though, as far as I know. I would guess that my character finally ragequit and went back to gathering plant samples.

[jewelfox]

That sounds like a win for all concerned!

[crazy_raccoon]

So Lindiel and I have started to play DnD, her for the first time, me for the first time in a while.

We started Thursday, a session with our roommates.

Well, the DM is kinda high all the time, and has a LOT of bad habits I don't particularly care for. We're looking for other options.

Would you like to RP with the two of us? Whether play by post or on chat or webcam... I dunno.

[citrakayah]

That would be awesome!