Kwakigra

I have been thinking about this issue a lot considering the context of my life and the present political situation and have been planning to write my own essay, only to find that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had written exactly was I was thinking decades ago just before he was murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. I think it's an important thought to spread and I'm curious as to what y'all think. This is the essay:

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.

Against stupidity we are defenseless.

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.

We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.

We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.

It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.

It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity.

Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.

This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.

But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.

Source

I was a huge fan of Breath of the Wild when it came out and played the hell out of it. At a certain point, it felt like I hit the logical end point and there wasn't much else to do. When I started playing Tears of the Kingdom, I got exactly what I wanted which was more Breath of the Wild. I'm still playing ToTK and really enjoying it.

Tears of the Kingdom is more of a lot of things. The expansive world of BoTW was expanded even further upward to the sky and downward to the depths, the combat is better, the annoying mechanics are remedied, there is far more to experience, there are many more missions and things to collect, and there is far more customization and sophisticated use of the systems invented by Breath of the Wild. As I've been playing it (many more hours now than I played BoTW), I've been thinking about why I don't love it like I loved BoTW despite it me having more fun with it.

It's not uncommon to be disappointed by ToTK, and I've listened to many negative reviews. Oddly, I agree with most of what they say short of believing the game is bad or really failed in any way. I think ToTK is doing a different thing than BoTW. While ToTK fixed many mechanical issues from BoTW and added so much that BoTW might as well be obsolete from a gameplay perspective, ToTK completely lost the vibe that BoTW had which was that game's primary strength.

Breath of the Wild is mysterious, melancholy, and beautiful. It's a game about exploration in every way. Through the experience Link learns where he is, who he is, and the context of what is happening in real time with the player. The world feels especially dangerous because you start with literally nothing and you don't really know what's going on. The intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to the game are all to do with exploration. Seeing a century-old battlefield littered with the weapons of fallen soldiers amidst the ruins of a village totally reclaimed by nature is a particular kind of emotional experience, and there are many such experiences throughout the game. Unfortunately, there is only so much to discover and once the map is filled out, the cutscenes are seen, and Ganon is defeated, there isn't much to do after that but poke around the world for its own sake or test your patience with the annoyingly difficult DLC.

Tears of the Kingdom, a continuation of the story, is not so much focused on exploration. In ToTK, exploration is one of the many fun activities the player can do. The overworld is the same with some minor differences such as a network of caves, and the skyworld and underworld are filled with treasure and beauty but not much in the way of themes or emotional resonance. Far more so than in BoTW, the world of ToTK feels like the player's personal playground to experiment with and relax in. It's just not that serious.

Unlike in BoTW, it's easy to forget the main antagonist is even a problem in ToTK. The game is more interested in world building for its own sake. For example, the people of Kakariko village are far more concerned with local archaeology than the potential doom of the world. Most characters in the game are more concerned with their low-stakes slices of life than Ganondorf politely sitting in the castle and not threatening them at all. No one is in any real danger. Groups of villagers attack monster camps with ladles and pot lids and not one bad thing can ever happen to them. The tone from the previous game is obliterated, but it's fun, and I don't think this is a bad thing. I am ok with the focus shifting from discovering the world to greatly expand the capability to goof around in that same world.

I would say that BoTW is the meal and ToTK is the dessert. Many people were disappointed that ToTK wasn't another meal of the same quality as BoTW, but personally I'm ok with having dessert.

I think stealing is highly underrated in the writing community. Everyone loves a good thief but the bad thieves get all the attention, spoiling the reputation of all. I honestly think that being a good thief makes for a better writer and encourage everyone to steal prodigiously but tactfully.

Bad thieves belong in literary jail. Aside from the obvious consequence of potentially getting sued for copyright infringement, the far worse crime of bad thievery is against art itself. Bad thieves steal without even understanding the value of what it is they stole, so their attempt to fence it for their own profit is fraud and often makes the reader feel defrauded. No one likes a cheap counterfeit of something they actually value. Worse still, the inferior knockoff could become more popular than the original, diluting and perverting it into a commodity to be kicked around rather than an honest expression of humanity that it was originally. Stealing incompetently is harmful to the writer, the reader, and to literature. A good thief, on the other hand, gets away clean and is even lauded for their efforts.

There are two ways to get away with stealing ideas for your story:

1. The reader couldn’t know you stole the idea unless you told them.
2. The reader suspects or knows that you stole the idea and are pleased that you did.

The key to getting away with ideas you don’t want people to know you stole is to launder them. A dirty idea sticks out like a sore thumb in a different story. It’s jarring to read about a character or event which was written for another story and airdropped into yours. A whole dirty story just sucks because it can only ever be an inferior counterfeit of the original.

To launder stolen ideas, you have to make it look like you came up with it yourself and it was something you would have come up with. If you want to steal an idea for your story in the first place, it probably actually is something you would have come up with but didn’t. You have to strip away everything that attaches that idea to its original source and replace it with your own context.

Let’s say I wanted to steal Jack Sparrow for my story. That’s a pretty high stakes gambit, being one of the most recognizable characters in pop fiction and also owned by one of the most litigious companies in the world. I could drop a thinly veiled Jack Sparrow in my story and get my shit wrecked legally and critically, or I could keep what I need from the idea and get rid of the hard evidence. I want a character like Jack Sparrow in my story to serve a similar purpose that he served in the movies. I don’t need his name, his appearance, his gender, his profession, his style of dress, his dialect, any of his actions, or other dead weight. What I need of this character for my story is a swaggering liar who appears fully incompetent but is oddly successful. The reason I want a character like this in my story is because I believe he would make a good foil for my characters and could take my story in interesting directions because of the kinds of decisions I think he would make.

For the sake of this example, I’m taking him for my high fantasy setting. My Jaithe Arrow is an elven woman working as a mercenary captain who behaves a lot like Jack Sparrow. I don’t know what the movie writers were thinking about why Jack did what he did, but I do know why my Jaithe behaves the way she does. My interpretation of that character, as all audience interpretations of that character, is unique to my experience and personality and I can build on what appealed to me about the character. My story is not The Pirates of the Caribbean, so my Jaithe Arrow is going to be involved in and reacting to an entirely different set of circumstances. Ultimately, the character may remind the reader of Jack Sparrow, but the character is clearly not Jack Sparrow just inserted into a story he wasn’t made for.

This could bleed over into the second category. I’ve often heard “Firefly” referred to as “The Han Solo Show” with total fondness. There is probably a lot of Han Solo in the character of Malcolm Reynolds, and fans of one character are likely fans of the other. When fans make this connection, it’s because they liked that someone made a show about a character like Han Solo even if it wasn’t produced by Lucasfilm. Anything that may have been stolen is totally clean. Firefly is not like Star Wars and although the two characters are similar in many ways they each fit uniquely into their own respective stories.

The thing that I like most about the second way to get away with stealing is that most ideas you can steal are actually free. Anything that actually happened we have record of is free from earliest history to current events. Anything you experienced or heard about happening is free. Science is free. Philosophy is free. Esoterica is free. Any creative works in the public domain are free. With some possible stipulations, much open source content is free for you to use. The thing about taking all these free ideas is that readers often like learning about real things. I don’t think a single person was upset that much of what occurred in the Song of Ice and Fire series was stolen from actual history. I do know many people who really appreciate that he stole those events from the pages of history books, in fact. Even if you cobble your whole story together with these kinds of stolen ideas, it will probably read as more deep than cheap.

There is nothing ethically wrong about adapting ideas of other people to your own work. In fact, it’s basically impossible to create anything completely original. Even if you did, it would be at best an interesting novelty rather than something readers would find relatable. The originality of a given writer is how their mind processes their experience and presents it to readers. The same idea presented by two different people in completely different ways can appeal to vastly different audiences. Oftentimes, an idea will never reach an audience unless a writer uses their creativity to bridge the gap from a different audience to the next, and that’s almost always a good thing.

Many writers would not consider what I advocated for here to be stealing. I wrote this for anyone who might have. Writers appropriate ideas like this constantly whether consciously or not because we are human creatures in communication with one another. If you come across any idea that you would like in your writing, you can actually have it. Take it and make it yours. By the time you’re done adjusting it for your own purposes it’ll be as original as anything else. Get stealing!

In this music video, the US military attempts to intercept a UAP. A pilot, ordered to make a killing shot, refuses his commands and instead engages the enemy in a dance off. The alien defeats the pilot, causing central command to mobilize all branches of the US military to outdance the alien threat. Since the full military might of the world's sole superpower is engaged in the largest theater of war ever, the shadow government neutralizes everyone involved to maintain the status quo. This causes the alien to "throw it back" to the beginning of the loop.

I can't exactly explain but this is exactly my sense of humor.

With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child. While working in Gaza we saw widespread malnutrition in our patients and our Palestinian healthcare colleagues. Every one of us lost weight rapidly in Gaza despite having privileged access to food and having taken our own supplementary nutrient-dense food with us. We have photographic evidence of life-threatening malnutrition in our patients, especially children, that we are eager to share with you.

Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhea. We found cases of jaundice (indicating hepatitis A infection under such conditions) in nearly every room of the hospitals in which we served, and in many of our healthcare colleagues in Gaza. An astonishingly high percentage of our surgical incisions became infected from the combination of malnutrition, impossible operating conditions, lack of basic sanitation supplies such as soap, and lack of surgical supplies and medications, including antibiotics.

Malnutrition led to widespread spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns, and an inability of new mothers to breastfeed. This left their newborns at high risk of death given the lack of access to potable water anywhere in Gaza. Many of those infants died. In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.

We urge you to realize that epidemics are raging in Gaza. Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas without running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking. It was and remains guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five. Indeed, even the dreaded polio virus has reemerged in Gaza due to a combination of systematic destruction of the sanitation infrastructure, widespread malnutrition weakening immune systems, and young children having missed routine vaccinations for nearly an entire year. We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.

Intro

For reasons this subject has recently become very relevant to me. I would like to discuss the nature of parental abuse through the lens of Dnd so that… our dnd games will be more realistic and emotionally cathartic. It's a pretty thin veil over what I'm actually talking about so those unfamiliar with Dnd will find this perfectly understandable. As your cptsd buddy who gets it, this is your literal trigger warning before choosing to continue and I don’t want to hear any crap about it from anyone who doesn’t know why it’s necessary to include this sentence. Without further ado, these are my tips and guidelines for understanding how to run a player character who has an evil-aligned parent who left them with cptsd:

Terms

Abuse, neglect, and exploitation are the tools of evil-aligned parents, but there are differences in manifestation of these tools whether the parent is chaotic evil, a demon, or lawful evil, a devil. The evil carried out by demon or devil parents has similar effects on the victim (feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, unresolved latent rage, depression, unrelenting stress, suicidality, etc.).

• Abuse is inappropriate treatment of an individual. It includes physical, psychological, emotional and sexual abuse.

• Neglect is the refusal or failure of a caregiver to provide for the needs of a child or vulnerable adult.

• Exploitation is taking improper advantage of an individual. It can involve finances, material, labor or activity.

Demon Parents

The destruction of the demon parent is obvious to most people and this is the kind of parent who is commonly described as a “monster.” The demon parent behaves like an unpredictable greedy animal who takes what they wish from their family as they please, including the satisfaction of their suffering. They disregard all ethics and morality in the pursuit of physical pleasure that they can never quite satisfy. The anger of feeling this lacking is relieved by using family members for target practice. Everyone in the family is consciously afraid of the demon parent because the demon parent will do whatever they want to vulnerable people to fulfill their sick desires without reservations or justification. The needs of others can not be conceived of by individuals depraved in this way and they use threats to coerce others into behaviors which benefit the demon. Demon parents, when discovered, receive deserved universal condemnation and in many cases criminal punishment.

• Abuse: Physically harm family members at any time for any reason.

• Neglect: Family focused on keeping demon parent placid, wouldn’t dream of provoking the demon-parent with expressions of need.

• Exploitation: Demon parent makes demands and use violence or the threat of violence to coerce their victims into performing services for them.

Devil Parents

Devil parents are most interested in conducting their evil within the bounds of established rules or through the arbitrary interpretation of those sometimes recently invented rules. Although their methods are different than the demon parent’s, the desire to exert control and be served is the same regardless of the kind of evil methods the parents employ. While demon parents’ chaotic nature prevents them from fully integrating into society or holding any kind of wealth or power therein, devil parents are experts in manipulation and exploitation who often find themselves in positions of leadership in society, equipping them with servants to use against their victims. They can convince a person who they are abusing and exploiting to be thankful for being tolerated. Their specialty is for their victims and onlookers to view their abuse as fair, justified, or mundane because individual incidents appear, especially to the victim, to be non-abuse as the abuse isn’t demonic in nature. The devil makes their victims feel indebted to them so that they continue to serve. Family members are used up until they are totally consumed, which frustrates the devil parent because they demand to be served regardless of the mental or physical condition of their victims, so they shame their victims to work through any amount of pain or disability. Their victims, conditioned by their own parent to believe that this is a natural parent-child relationship, is ashamed of the anger and frustration they feel and learn to suppress their ideas, their desires, and their emotions because all could be used as tools by the devil parent to demean and shame. Devil parents, when discovered, become attractive to potential victims and repulsive but acceptable to most healthy people who do not understand the nature of psychological torment as they have never experienced it, who don’t believe in psychology altogether, or are themselves openly practicing devil-parents as the techniques of devil parents are often celebrated in conservative circles. Shame and plausible deniability keeps victims from admitting that they could have been abused.

• Abuse: Devil parent will systematically deconstruct the egos of their victims so that they believe they are less than human therefore needing to work to earn their place in the family which is framed as a refuge from a society which is even less accepting (which appears to the victim to be true because cptsd victims of any kind of evil-aligned parent were deprived of the skills they needed to be taught to have healthy relationships of any kind). They will punish failure and accept any amount of success neutrally as if it were the minimum possible standard. Demean and shame family members to enforce hierarchy that children exist to serve their parents and be thankful their parents allow them to live. Anything to shatter confidence and self-respect is on the table unless some rule forbids it.

• Neglect: React to expressions of need or emotions with shaming and condemnation. Make victims feel embarrassed for having physical and emotional needs from their parent. Criticize the lacking nature of the child’s self-taught attempts to take care of themselves so that they feel incompetent and worthless. Ignore health problems caused by neglect, convince victims they are not having health problems since they weren’t neglected. Tell the victim they are not experiencing the emotions they are experiencing and by faking them are not living up to their obligations to the devil parent. Children of devil parents view death as a welcome retirement from the required service of their devil parent’s domain which would be selfish to indulge in while the parent “needs them”, and feel guilty for wanting to die despite having a such an extraordinary and “loving” devil-parent.

• Exploitation: The Devil’s primary purpose is to enthrall their victims, family and beyond. They believe others to be opportunities or obstacles. They will use systemic psychological torment techniques (which they likely learned from their own devil parents and chose to perpetuate) to make their victims feel that their only purpose is to serve the devil parent and be ashamed by any thought that is not oriented to benefiting the devil parent.

Neutrally Evil Parents

It is also possible for a parent to be aligned neutral-evil and have a mix of the above distinguishing characteristics, as a parent my PC is familiar with. The neutral evil parent is a resentful ticking timebomb who will perform their evil lawfully when calm and chaotically when enraged.

Roll a d4

• Evens the neutral evil parent is calm and practices evil lawfully, use devil guidelines.

• Odds the neutral evil parent is enraged and practices evil chaotically, use demon guidelines.

PC Background Skills

PCs with cptsd, while debuffed from a panicked and disorderly survival mind, do have some unique abilities. PCs with Cptsd have an inflated perception skill because for their own safety they learned to never stop scanning their environment for potential threats ever. They tend to be excellent at identifying others by the sound of their footsteps and are themselves gifted at stealth and deception. They have skill in insight due to constantly monitoring the emotional state of the evil parent so they can hide when they identify the evil parent is becoming dangerous. PCs may have some skill in nature, survival, and medicine due to the practical experience of having to figure out how to care for themselves as children.

Depending on the nature of the abuse and the personality of the Player character, the PC could attain the Narcissist or Sociopath attributes. Unlimited ego from oneself and a disregard for all others may allow one to survive a chaotic and deprived environment, however applying this solution will shift the PC's alignment to evil.

Conclusion

Hopefully someone will get some use out of this… for their Dnd game. For anyone who has a player character who feels nothing but pain and knows their loving parents are related to that somehow but feel too guilty to explore that emotion, have your player character explore and radically accept the validity of that emotion in a controlled environment. The character will feel more acute emotional pain than they ever had before because it had accumulated over a lifetime and the body keeps the score, but the character will feel some relief from the constant ambient pain which had to be suppressed before. When they accept their own emotions and their own inherent worth, they can re-contextualize their experiences, learn the skills they were deprived of, and go on to lead a happy and fulfilling life at any age. That’s what I’m hoping for my PC. I'd like to hear from anyone who has a personal interest in this topic. For characterization purposes, do you think a PC in these circumstances might forgive their evil parent since they came from an evil background they are incapable of overcoming or condemn their evil parent for never being critical about how their behavior affects themselves and others in their entire life?

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time,” Harris said. “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”