u/Airtightspoon

I know Helseth banned it at the end of the third, but with the ousting of the Empire I can't really see any reason why it wouldn't get reinstated, but I haven't seen any sources on the state of slavery in the 4th Era. Has there ever been a mention of whether Helseth's ban held up?

I'm thinking about doing a no spellcrafting run. I actually kind of dislike the spellcrafting system. I think it just sort of overshadowed the actual base spells a little too much. I do use it though because I can't help myself lol. I think on my next playthrough, I wanna try playing without crafting custom spells. I'm so used to using the merchant spells as fuel for custom spells that I don’t even really know which ones are good. Is there anyone who uses the merchant spells heavily who has some good ones? I'm especially a little worried about dealing damage later in the game.

The idea of a legally-sanctioned assassins guild seems cool, but I've always wondered, if they have authority from the state, why do they need to bother really being asssassins? Aren't they more bounty hunters? Why do they need to go through all the stealth mumbo jumbo when they have a writ saying it's cool for them to kill this guy?

I've got two master's calcinator's sitting in my inventory worth 2400 gold each. My mercantile's only like 50, so I'm not even selling them at full price, but no one can afford them. It seems like you can literally only sell alchemy apparati to alchemist's too, even creeper won't buy them, but all these alchemist's are broke as fuck.

On the right, we like to talk about how leftists and liberals have this empathy towards people who would hate them that invites these same people to ultimately destroy them. But is it time to start talking about how conservatives have that same energy towards boomers?

Anytime a conversation about ending programs like medicare or social security comes up, the responses are always, "Well the boomers need them for their retirement," or "The boomers paid into them, so they need to get paid out."

There has never been a generation in human history that has been more selfish and unconcerned with the success of their young than the baby boomers. These are the people who say that young people shouldn't be able to buy houses because it would lower the value of their own homes. Why should younger conservatives give the boomers any consideration when it comes to policy making? Why should we keep paying into programs for their sake when there's no guaratee these programs will even have any money buy the time it's our turn to receive the benefit?

My mom's birthday is in a few days. I was talking to her on the phone earlier and asked her if she was doing anything. She said she's not "as usual" in kind of a passive aggressive tone. I asked her if she had anything planned and she just kind of scoffed and said "No son, I did not make any plans for my own birthday." A few hours after we were done talking, the thought just suddently entered my mind that it was almost like she had expected I would plan something, but I had no idea this was something I was even supposed to be doing. I always get my mom a present and wish her happy birthday, but I didn't realize I was supposed to be planning an activity or being the one taking her out to dinner or something.

To be clear, it's not that I'm against doing that for my mom, it just never occured to me that she expected me to be doing this (assuming she in fact does). To be honest, I've never really put much thought into the logistics of birthdays. As far as I know, other people have always planned things and I just get invited. My mom is also single (got divorced about 15 years ago) and has 6 other children (I'm the oldest ftr), most of which have already left the house, with the last one about to leave for college, so I don't know if maybe she's just feeling alone right now or what.

I called my girlfriend and asked her what she thought, she seemed surprised that I didn't have anything planned for my mom, and honestly kind of seemed a little disappointed in me. So now I'm kind of concerned that I've been doing something wrong the whole time. Am I the asshole here?

Christians nowadays are usually defending themselves from accusations of being big evil misogynists, but in many ways, Christianity could be considered anti-masculinity. While there is a separation of roles for men and women, Christianity does espouse many general virtues that are very feminine: meekness, compassion, humility, mercy, receptivity, and egalitarianism. While Christianity is ofted decried as oppressive, I would argue that the real oppressed are not the weak, but the strong. The strong are discouraged from seeking their full potential, and instead of sacrificing their strength in service to the weak. This is traditionally a very feminine mindset. Data suggests that more women identify as Christian for men, and that could be because Christianity emphasizes feminine values over masculine ones.

Does Christianity emasculate men? It seems to me as though Christianity grants all masculine power to God, and men are to act towards God as women traditionally acted towards men.

I think he's a disaster, and I think he's not really a conservative, at least not in the sense that we've understood that word to mean since after WWII. I'm curious to see how he's going to be received once he has to try and take the party reigns away from Trump.

James Lindsay is someone who's done a lot of good work in the past, but I feel like he's kind of gone off the deep end lately. I first noticed it during the Massie primary, but Lindsay has basically become a huge party loyalist who calls everyone who doesn't fall in lockstep with what the party is doing part of the "woke right." For someone who claims to be a Classical Liberal, James Lindsay goes after an awful lot of people who are disagreeing with Trump on more Classical Liberal (or Classical Liberal-adjacent, such as Libertarian) grounds. It seems as though as of late he evaluates ideas according to whether they help the party, rather than evaluating the party according to a consistent set of ideas. He constantly goes after people who are advocating for Classical Liberal positions such as non-interventionism, and for someone who has "Anti-Communist" in his Twitter handle, he sure likes to advocate for party loyalty and state intervention. His engagement style is also super insufferable (and honestly kind of lefitist coded), be basically just smugly misrepresents whatever his opponent is saying and then tries to associate them with Groypers or wignats.

A lot of people like to make jokes about how Sith lords during the rule of two were always shocked at their apprentice's betrayal, even though the rule of two made that inevitable.

But, that was already how the sith worked for thousands of years.

As a Sith pre-rule of two, you would have masters above you, apprentices below you, and rivals beside you, all of whom have reasons to want to kill you. What the rule of two did that was smart was get rid off all the threats above and adjacent to you. Under the rule of two, you don't have to worry about rival Sith lords trying to absorb your power base, because you're the only Sith lord. Yes, you still have to worry about your apprentice betraying you, but now that's the only other Sith you have to worry about.

Palpatine actually got it even more right with his rule of one. If you can find a way to extend your life indefinitely, then the logical conclusion of sith philosophy is to cut out the final threat that is the apprentice.

Two things:

1. I'm like 150 days and 20ish hours in, and I for the life of me cannot find a battle hammer. This usually spawns pretty early for me and it's my favorite weapon in the game. Idk what's going on, idk if it's a glitch, but I'm honestly considering just buying it in the cheat menu at this point.

2. I've never seen rogue blackheart knights mentioned as a powerful unit, but I've been using a good amount of them in my army and getting some insane results. I'm running with about 50 troops. I've got 5 companions, 2 hero adventurers, ~8 adventurers, and all the rest are blackheart knights, and I'm taking out 100 troop Sarleon lords with almost no losses. The blackheart knights are also super easy to replenish because you can just go capture and recruit them from roving bandit units. Are these guys slept on?

I posted this to the Andor sub, and I don't think people really got what I was saying, and for whatever reason, it got removed from the man sub as soon as I posted it, so hopefully there will be a little better discussion here.

It's fine to find Andor compelling as a political drama, but we need to be careful about going back and analyzing past Star Wars through the lens of Andor. It's not that Andor is "too good" for Star Wars or that Star Wars doesn't hold up against it. It's that Andor is a different dramatic medium altogether. One is political tragedy, the other is heroic myth. Confusing them risks mistaking moral sincerity for childishness and cynicism for maturity. Likewise, I also think we should be careful about asking for more Star Wars "like Andor." It's fine to want more Star Wars similar to Andor in quality, but I think that people are conflating Andor's specific theme and tone with higher quality.

Star Wars has its roots in pulp, which does not require its protagonists be perfect moral beacons, but it does require that the spectrum be legible. The hero, whatever his flaws may be, is undeniably on the side of good, the villain is ultimately defeated, and victory is celebrated in earnest. Andor not only abandons these roots, but sometimes kind of seems like it has contempt for them. Sometimes it feels like Andor thinks that the presentation of good in the original trilogy is, quite frankly, stupid and childish.

For example, in Andor, the rebels, who in the OT only ever use violence against the Imperial military or people acting on behalf of the Imperial military, are presented as borderline terrorists. This isn't necessarily a contradiction in theme so long as the rebels doing this are presented as wrong, but they're not. In fact, they're kind of romanticized. The narrative does not present Luthen, for example, as a man who dies regretful, it presents him as a martyr. For whatever flaws the show gives Rael, it does not present him as incorrect. This makes Luke's later moral clarity feel naive, shallow, or even unearned. Luke is able to whoop and holler in an X-wing blowing up bad guys because the dirty work was outsourced to morally compromised actors working in the background. I think that when you have a character say "I burn my decency for someone else's future," in a franchise where the message is precisely that you shouldn't do that, you're getting things a little confused. Again, if Luthen was presented as incorrect, it would be one thing. Instead, Andor seems to take the stance that what Luke did later was only possible because of someone like Luthen Rael, which makes it feel like the series is arguing with itself.

Andor also has a tendency to present the Empire as self-destructive and almost doomed to fail. In A New Hope, the Empire was presented as nearly invincible up until they run into the heroes. They had recently completed the Death Star; Palpatine had just dissolved the senate and now ruled by executive decree alone; this was an empire that had been winning and looked as though it was going to continue winning were it not for the exceptional heroism and capability of the protagonists. The only chink in their armor was the leak of the Death Star plans, and even then, the Empire would have handled that were it not for the quick thinking and courage of Leia. The Empire does have flaws in the OT, but the flaws are much more like something you'd see in mythology: hubris, lack of imagination, contempt for the weak. Andor presents the Empire's flaws as largely being bureaucratic and political. The Empire in the original trilogy was a metaphysical evil. Their oppressive nature was a symptom of the spiritual disease infecting the galaxy. In Andor, it feels more like the Empire is evil merely because they have bad politics.

Later on in the OT, you would have moments like Admiral Ozzel leaving hyperspace too early, but those were the exception, rather than the rule. For the most part, when the heroes escaped or achieved a victory it was due to their own exceptional capability, not institutional flaws in the Imperial system. When you present the Empire the way Andor does, it harms the myth presented in the OT. The Empire in Andor is no longer an existential evil that must be overcome by heroic virtue, it is now a brittle regime held together by brute force whose contradictions can be systemically exploited. This dilutes the achievements of Luke, Han, and Leia. It lowers the pedestal we can reasonably put them on. They didn't change the course of history, they just knocked down the last few dominos that had already been set up for them.

With Thomas Massie's ousting last week, there's been a lot of friction between the more traditional conservatives and the libertarians in the coalition that Trump built. As someone who's on the more libertarian end of the spectrum, I feel like the conservatives don't really seem to understand what libertarians want from them, and seem to think libertarians just expert conservatives to act like libertarians.

Libertarians understand that conservatives disagree with us on issues like immigration, we put up with that because they're better on economics than the liberals. The problem is that conservatives never seem to want to actually implement those policies.

Why is Trump not going after social security? Why is Trump not going after medicare? I saw a post on r/Conservative the other day talking about how Trump just kicked a bunch of illegal immigrants out of taxpayer funded housing. Ok. Fine. Deport the illegals. But while were there, why not do something about the fact that there's taxpayer funded housing?

I've seen conservatives say that libertarians expect concessions when we're only a small part of the party, but none of the things I just listed would be concessions to libertarians, because they're things that conservatives, at least ostensibly, want to do as well.

I always thought surgeons were the "elite" of doctors, but I've seen some people imply that apparently surgeons have a reputation among doctors for being not smart, is this true?

In the United States at least, it seems as though the way we prioritize history goes something like this:

Greece -> Rome -> France and the HRE for the medieval period -> back to Italy for the renaissance -> Britain up until the revolution -> America

Why does Italy tend to get pushed aside from the fall of Rome up until the renaissance? My understanding is that Italy was actually more advanced and wealthier than much of the rest of Europe, despite the fall of their empire, but if you didn't know any better, you'd think they just collapsed.