Xhieron @ xhieron @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It's not necessarily racist or sexist. It does, however, discriminate on the basis of sex and race, and I assume that's what you mean. That would be a problem in some circumstances--for example, housing, employment, or college admissions.

But this is--as I understand it--a private grant. If you're giving away your own money, you should be able to give it away to whomever you want on whatever basis you want. And that's the crux of the litigation. If the court decides the thing is actually a contract, the discrimination would be a big problem. But as a gift, it's a different animal.

Good of you to ask. It's entirely possible to play D&D without buying any official materials (and you should play it without buying anything Hasbro currently sells, but that's just my opinion).

In fact, you can find a more or less complete set of rules for most versions of D&D just by searching combinations of the version you want and terms like "SRD" or "wiki". Some of these will lead you to officially hosted sources, and some not, but the great thing about D&D is that Hasbro can't ever sell it away from players.

I'm not going to provide any links to anything because someone will accuse me of breaking the rules, but D&D isn't Hasbro, and it wasn't even really TSR. It's just collections of rules, and game rules are not patentable. Hasbro owns a copyright in the 5e PHB's written content, for example (and some trademarks on trade dress and some terms), but crucially it does not own the way people play D&D. Ergo, in a matter of speaking, Dungeons and Dragons is already open source. If you've got a pen, some paper, and a fistful of dice, you can play. Less is more.

Having said that, many folks believe that the best versions of D&D aren't in print anymore anyway, but even if 5e is your version of choice (and to its credit, it has a few marks in its favor), I'd recommend checking a used book store before getting worried about whether this rumor ever amounts to anything. Hasbro can sell D&D, or not, and millions of people will happily keep right on playing D&D every week without ever giving them a dime.

Can't drink all day if you don't start in the morning!

This is good news. But you know, just to be on the safe side, let's all go vote for Joe anyway.

Aww. You sound mad. Don't be mad. Sorry if I got under your skin. Have a Coke and a smile.

Hi, lawyer here.

Everyone's opinion about the law matters, including what it covers, whether it's vague, whether it applies, etc. This is Lemmy--not court. We're in the town square here. Drinking yourself through three years of law school doesn't imbue you with magical abilities to interpret laws as though they were religious texts. It's just an education--not a miracle. If lawyers always knew what the law meant and laypeople always didn't, no one would be fretting over hotly anticipated SCOTUS opinions, because everyone would already know the outcome.

But wouldn't you know it, reasonable people sometimes disagree, and among those reasonable people, quite often, are non-lawyers.

As it turns out, non-lawyers often have an outsized influence on the law. Did you know that Donald Trump has never been to law school? Unbelievable, right? But hard to fathom though it may be, the big orange idiot hasn't sat in on a single hour of L1 Torts. In fact he may have never even have seen the inside of a law library. Yet his opinion about the law has a tremendous impact, bigger even than Dr. Moose's, because checking the "went to law school" box really doesn't mean a hell of a lot outside of very limited situations.

Personally, I'm much more interested in Dr. Moose's opinion on this law than I am Rudy Giuliani's, or even Clarence Thomas's (and both those guys went to law school), and it's no bother to me that he's not a lawyer. In fact, it's probably a mark in his favor.

If you're not interested in his opinion because he's not a lawyer, well hey, that's totally allowed, but you can easily ignore his comments without being pedantic. Or maybe you could just concede that there's probably a bunch of strong opinions you also hold on subjects on which you're not an expert. In fact, the whole lot of omg-not-a-lawyer! non-lawyers pitching little fits in this comment thread probably have strong feelings about war even though many of them have probably never put on a uniform. They might have strong feelings about healthcare despite never having darkened the door of a medical school. Shit, we might all even have strong feelings about politics despite never having gotten a single vote in a single election, ever. Can you believe it?!

Yeah. It's just an opinion. If you're gatekeeping 'having an unqualified opinion' you should probably just lock yourself in your house and bar the windows, 'cause it's gonna be an uphill battle for you.

Crime. I'd do crime. I'm too old to join the Navy, too poor to get some debt. So I'd do the same thing the overwhelming majority of Americans who find themselves in the situation do: Crime.

Which crime? Well, the likelihood of this actually happening to many people who are currently gainfully employed and financially stable is uncomfortably high, so some cards I just have to keep close, and you should too.

No war but the class war.

You really have to admire the brilliance of Reagan's writing staff. Compared to modern political bullshit it's practically subtle.

Something will happen, and that's the point of Biden's remarks on Friday: If they pass the bill, they give him a victory on immigration he can campaign on. If they bend to the cheeto, he has an answer for the rest of the campaign every time they bring up immigration: You all voted against empowering me to close the border. Because the bill is already all over the news, Johnson's House doesn't have the option to do nothing. [And frankly I don't think it matters that much what Abbott does right this second.]

I half expect to see a repeat of what Biden did at last year's State of the Union re Social Security and Medicare, boxing the GOP in on an issue that's extremely important to them by making them choose between supporting him or taking an unpopular position that abandons their core constituents. If they don't pass this bill, the DNC should be shouting from the rooftops that the Republicans want Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe and open borders in Texas. If they pass it, then it's the biggest border security bill in a decade.

Biden is getting well up in years (and he's not alone in that), and he's no LBJ, but he's still a very capable politician. He's certainly got other campaign problems (ahem, the Israel albatross around his neck), but for the last few days, Joe Biden has basically done everything right on immigration.

Don't catch you slippin' now

... Yes. Yes it does. It's literally his job. It doesn't make the opinion invalid, but it absolutely makes it less valid than the opinion of a neutral observer. That's just what bias is.

Look. Execution is inhumane. You can't make it gentle, peaceful, or nice. All you can do is make it quick, which it sounds like they failed to do here. But if the good people of Alabama aren't comfortable with someone struggling for half an hour and then dying, they shouldn't execute people at all.

That said, the person quoted in this article is the executed's spiritual advisor. If I was Smith's spiritual advisor, I'd also be claiming the method was inhumane, violent, and awful. The reality is that it's a lot more cruel that Smith went back into the execution chamber despite them botching the job the first time than that they half-assed the nitrogen asphyxiation. It was an untested method, but every method of execution has a first person to be executed with it.

If your society is bickering over which way it should kill the condemned, you've already ceded the moral high ground. We have already solved execution, and we've had it solved for decades, even centuries arguably. Hanging, firing squad, electrocution, beheading, lethal injection--every method has its proponents and detractors, but every method is to the same end. If you're too squeamish for what happened in Alabama, an alternative method of killing people isn't going to fix that for you. The solution is staring you right in the face, and it's life without parole.

Captive audience, maybe, but they absolutely have the option to stay seated. West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).

Compelled speech is a hill any American patriot should be willing to die on, literally if necessary.

"You start nailing one white banker per week to a big wooden cross, you’re going to see that drug traffic begin to slow down pretty fucking quick."

Except that a hypothetical seceded Texas isn't just a neutral state. It's a hostile state that is immediately subject to financial (and other) sanctions by the US government. Sure, the US can't physically stop two people from using a dollar as currency if they physically possess one, but it can absolutely unhook Texas from international banking.

I mean, sure, this is a propaganda piece by a not-at-all-trustworthy rag that might as well be an extension of the IDF in this context.

But anyone who thinks women aren't getting raped in war has never studied history. Are Oct 7 captives being sexually assaulted? Of course they are. Are Gazans also being sexually assaulted? Again, yes. Are female Ukrainian POWs being sexually assaulted? Almost certainly. Russian female POWs? Also yes. Anywhere there's regular violence, sexual violence doesn't follow far behind.

Every state, paramilitary, terrorist organization, and militia that has ever fired a shot in anger wants to be seen as honorable fighters with a righteous cause who respect the rules of war, and yet there's not a single one of the same groups who hasn't also been shown to torture and kill children, civilians, and POWs, and rape and sexually abuse women, both combatants and civilians.

No war but the class war.

Lucid is a strong word. ...

My money says this guy can't even close his closet door anymore for all the skeletons.

Maybe not, but you know, just to be on the safe side, better vote against him just in case.

Man, that sounds pretty awful. I guess everybody should just stay home in November then, huh, comrade?