u/Particular_Dot_4041

I doubt this accusation because I don't exactly see how it gives men more power over women. For one thing, no pro-lifer has proposed a loophole where the abortion can happen if the husband or father of the woman gives his permission. That would be putting control in the hands of men. And often the man in the woman's life wants the abortion too. If you come from a highly conservative family and your daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock, you might want her to abort in order to save face. If your wife gets pregnant at an inconvenient point in your career, you might want her to abort. Pro-lifers do not care, they seem pretty earnest when they claim abortion is baby murder. Nobody has figured out at what point a fetus becomes a human, so it seems to me that pro-lifers want to play it safe whereas feminists want to take the benefit of the doubt.

Some soldiers would hold the magazine of the Sten while firing, using it as a foregrop, and caused feeding problems. A solution could have been to lengthen the magazine well so that it can be used as a grip, like how the Uzi's grip is also the magazine well. Why wasn't this done?

The barrel shroud of the Sten was rather short, so it was not a great grip.

In games such as Baldur's Gate 3, I tend to play some kind of spellcaster because they get new spells to play with as they level up, which changes how I fight and interact with the world. I avoid warrior types because all they get is a +1 bonus to attack rolls every level. I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 now and while I think it's a good game overall, the character progression system is dull because few of the upgrades I can unlock change how I play the game. Faster reloads, faster health regen, better armor — they make me stronger but not different. What makes it worse is that the enemies at all levels feel the same. In Dungeons and Dragons games, I fight different monsters at every level because DnD has a huge catalogue of monsters for every level, from goblins to umber hulks to beholders to elder dragons. In Cyberpunk 2077, all the enemies are humans and I wonder why this human is a pushover and this other human is like fighting Superman. I feel like I am the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass: I do a lot of running but stay in the same place somehow. They should have made this game like Grand Theft Auto V, which doesn't have a character progression system.

I read in a book that samurai would often disguise themselves as commoners to enjoy forbidden pleasures such as prostitutes and kabuki theater. They would leave their swords at the dntrance and wear a hat to hide their distinctive hairdo. So this makes me think the point of these sumptuary laws were to make it illegal for a samurai to disguise himself to avoid getting caught. Everyone would recognize the samurai and know not to help him break class redtrictions.

Is there any direct evidence of this? Like, did Tokugawa ever write that samurai had to be marked at all times so that the rest of society could keep them in their place?

Before the Edo period, samurai often carried swords in public to display their status, but this was not mandatory. Samurai in the medieval period were freer. In the Edo period, the Tokugawa shogunate took away some of their liberty. They could own no land and had to live on stipends from their daimyos, so they could not rebel.

Jews in Europe often were required to wear special clothing so that everybody would know their status and they could therefore not circumvent their restrictions by pretending to be a non-Jew.

This was in the Edo period, not required in previous centuries. Before the Edo period, samurai often carried swords anyway to display their elite status, but it was entirely voluntary. So why did the Tokugawas make it mandatory?

I have a hunch it was because samurai had fewer liberties during the Edo period and therefore everybody needed to know who was a samurai so as not to accidentally help a samurai circumvent his caste restrictions. Like perhaps a samurai wanted to work as a craftsman on the sly so as to make some extra cash. He would have to disguise himself to do that. By requiring a samurai to carry swords and wear the chonmage all the time, he was legally barred from disguising himself. Am I correct?

This is something I found on a website (source):

> Samurai were not supposed to engage in urban pursuits like attending kabuki theater and carousing at geisha houses. These were activities associated with low class merchants. Sometimes they dressed in disguise and indulged in urban pleasures that were forbidden to them.

The shows haven't explained much why the Prime Directive exists and why it could be so bad. In fact it more often shows exceptional situations where breaking the Prime Directive was the right thing to do. So I want to propose some reasons:

1. It prevents primitive races from becoming competitors too soon. History shows that when a primitive society starts interacting with a more advanced society, the primitive society can absorb technologies and develop very quickly, and could eventually become a problem for the more advanced one. Japan was stuck in the middle ages in the early 19th century, but after the United States forced it to open up, it progressed very rapidly. 50 years after opening up, it defeated the Russians in a naval battle. Then it started conquering swathes of Asia. And in 1941 it took on the United States and put up a hell of a fight. So the Federation member worlds think it's best to leave primitive races alone because they're harmless in that state.
2. It forces the Federation to either treat every race as equals or not interact at all. If the Federation developed close economic ties with less advanced race, that race might effectively become of second-class status in the Federation's sphere of influence. It's kind of like the British Empire which controlled many colonial territories but did not treat the natives as British citizens.
3. If the Federation interacts with a race and this leads to some destructive outcome, the Federation could in some way be held responsible. Like if you teach a race how to build nuclear power plants, they go on to build nuclear weapons and destroy their own civilization in a war. That might be a questionable argument to a human but other Federation member races might have different ways of thinking. Those same races might feel that if a primitive race languishes in a miserable condition when the Federation could have helped, the Federation is not responsible. It's sort of like Spider-Man vs the Watcher. The Watcher avoids all interference so as to avoid responsibility, whereas Spider-Man thinks he's responsible for disasters he could have prevented but refused to. The Federation is like the Watcher.

The samurai were part of an elite warrior class (the bushi), and were servants to some master. The gokenin and the daimyo were bushi but not samurai. Ashigaru were not bushi.

So what's the general word for any kind of warrior? Were foreign warriors referred to as bushi? Were Mongol warriors bushi? What does "senshi" mean?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kyod%C5%8D_risshi_no_motoi,_Kusunoki_Masatsura.jpg

This file comes from the Wikimedia Commons and I would be very happy if somebody could translate the caption in the upper left corner. This was made in 1888 so it should be in intelligible to modern Japanese speaker.

Nintendo has recently been shutting down a lot of emulators for its consoles, especially the more recent ones. But these emulators are all open-source and so gamers will always be able to find them if they search around a bit. I think Nintendo ought to give up and just port some of its older titles to PC. Then at least it can make some money. But maybe I'm wrong. What is the rationale at Nintendo for stubbornly keeping its games, even the old ones, exclusive to Nintendo consoles?

In most games, magic spells typically are just damage, heals, and buffs. You have lightning bolts, healing spells, and armor spells. I don't want that clichéd stuff, I want spells that do weird things and change the way you play. For instance, in Dishonored you had a blink spell that would teleport you about 15m and another spell that would summon a swarm of aggressive rats. In Morrowind you had a levitation spell and a mark/recall teleport spell. In Baldur's Gate 3 you get a spell that allows you to interrogate corpses. I'm looking for weird stuff like that. Any recommendations?

I'm told there is this scene where a character in Atlas Shrugged burned his own oil field to prevent it being seized and Ryan burning down his own forest was meant to parallel that. But the writers of Bioshock forgot that forest fires happen naturally from time to time and the forest always regrows, which means Ryan's act of arson was a meaningless gesture.

In the episode "Pegasus", Riker tells Pressman he regrets not joining the mutiny because it was profoundly immoral for Pressman to test a cloaking device in violation of a peace treaty. Even as a kid, I found Riker's position a little iffy. Pressman wasn't torturing anyone, he was just testing a weapon. Starfleet should have cloaking devices on hand in case a war with the Romulans kicks off and they need to equip their ships fast. But most importantly, the Romulans had committed a number of acts of war prior to that episode, such as when they tried to invade Vulcan. The Treaty of Algeron isn't working anymore.

Edit: What also is unsatisfying about the treaty is that it doesn't explain why other powers like the Cardassians don't use cloaks. Don't tell me everyoneis scared of pissing off the Romulans.

Gene Roddenberry said cloaking devices were unbecoming of the Federation because good guys " don't sneak around". It's stupid because in the show the good guys do sneak around from time to time and when they have to do that, the writers contrive some other way like hiding in a nebula or switching off non-essential systems. Just give the cloaks.

The Grey Knights are supposed to be a secret chapter but pictures of their ships show them bearing their secret chapter emblem. There's no point in displaying an emblem nobody is even supposed to recognize. They should instead bear the emblem of the Inquisition. If anyone sees a Grey Knight ship and asks, they are simply told it's an Inquisition ship, and the ship will transmit the proper electronic credentials. Most people will not ask further questions. Displaying the Grey Knights emblem will reveal more information than necessary.

Quebec north of Montreal is cold, there's lots of water, and few people live there because there is little arable land. It sounds like a good place for a data center. Why not put them there instead of Utah, which is hot and short on water?

One thing that has always bugged me about Space Marines is their pauldrons. You can't realistically articulate your arms with those things. They're not segmented like real pauldrons. If you've painted Space Marine minis, you've probably known how tricky it is to stick pauldrons if the figurine has a raised arm pointing at something. And this is also a problem in cosplays I've seen.

So I propose that we re-invent the Space Marine armor such that those pauldrons are actually cloth shoulder covers. The real pauldrons are underneath and they're segmented just like in real medieval armor. The cloth covers are made from some thick heavy material such as nylon or leather, which can be molded into a dome shape. When the cosplayer is standing still with his arms at his side, the shoulder covers will look just like the pauldrons in 40K art.

In the 1980s, Vince McMahon began lobbying various state governments to re-define pro wrestling as a non-sport to avoid taxes. He also testified in the 1985 Stossel lawsuit that pro wrestling is routinely rigged. In 1989, he testified before the New Jersey government that pro wrestling is rigged. McMahon was preparing to end kayfabe or at least relax it because if the government de-regulated wrestling and McMahon's fingerprints were all over it, he'd be unable to deny it. So when did he actually start doing it?

For instance, when did he start allowing his faces and heels to freely socialize when they were not on the job? When did he allow them to give honest interviews to the press?

I have been listening to a lot of songs from the '80s and '90s and notice that a lot of them have only two verses (not counting the chorus). Examples include Word Up by Cameo and Born to Be Alive by Patrick Hernandez. The second half of these songs is pretty much just instrumental music. Why was that the case? Was it so that the song could be cut for radio?

It would make sense for his character. He used to be a surgeon and the reason he studied magic in the first place was to heal his hands. Healing is one of the oldest and most common magical practices. And in video games, we're used to sorcerers having healing powers.