The Gaming Den

Judging__Eagle wrote:...where does matriarchy stand? What are it's goals and what does it advocate? At least, from the way you see it.

K wrote:Ok, I read this New York Times article about this badass conservative thinker. He literally has people in power asking him to come to their smoky room and tell them how to win the hearts and minds of the people. Here is the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/magaz ... nas&st=cse

Now, if you read the article you find his big philosophical technique is to use Aquinas's "natural law" to justify religious positions. In an eggshell, he takes a religous standpoint, and tries to come up with a logical reason to accept it based on some a priori sense. Always, they rebrand the idea with a new name.

Anyone who keeps an eye on things see that this is the same technique used with Intelligent Design (ID). We know that it's creationism, we even have actual legally sufficient evidence that the major ID handbooks used to be creationist handbooks, but still people take it as if it were some logical position because it has a new name that sounds almost like science.

But it is a lie. Fundamentally, and whole cloth.

And this works as a technique. Bush's Clean Air Act lowers standards and allows more pollutants into the air. The Patriot Act takes away a pile of constitutional freedoms. The Healthy Forests Act allows for clearcutting of forests on Federal land.

And so that takes us to 4e DnD. In a very basic sense, 4e DnD is not DnD when you look at the guts of it. Like, in a fundamental and clear way. We see this when they try to convert old brands to the new ruleset, when not just vast tracks of things are suddenly not even possible under the new ruleset, but whole settings are suddenly not possible. Just look at what they are doing with Darksun and tell me you disagree.

And I blame the conservatives. They pushed a movement of lies. Like magicians of old, they knew the power of names and choose to exploit it, and now everyone thinks they can just misleadingly label their actions and have no one call foul.

And maybe they can. Maybe we are in the middle of a vast social movement like an Age of Un-Enlightenment[/b] where the progress of the last 300 years will be swallowed by the archaic ideas of 1000 years ago. That it is felt in something as fringe and marginal as DnD only shows how pervasive it is.

But I expect the conservatives will have a different name for it. Maybe the Awakening, or the Age of Light, or even the New Age of Enlightenment, because we all know that people would never name it that if it wasn't correct and accurate, right?