I was a gamer in my teens. One younger member of the group was probably being given a hard time by his religious family for being a gamer. He was often absent from gaming sessions.
The weekends he was absent consistently included stories like a drunken car wreck, and now he has a broken leg, or a wild party where some gal says he is the daddy and he has no idea if he even slept with her.
I never could fathom why his family didn't just tell him to go gaming every weekend. We fed him free food, used no drugs or alcohol and drove him home safe.
But we were Satan worshippers, I guess, because we gamed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Meanwhile, every single gamer who left Germany came to my apartment to tearfully say goodbye because gaming at my apartment was an escape from eating at the mess hall and getting drunk at bars. It was the only thing that kept them sane and not an alcoholic.
I don't know about most gaming groups, but where I have been, it's a bastion of civilization in an otherwise cold, cruel world.
Gaming has much to offer, as does the social scene at a bar. Where I’ve been these two aren’t at odds. I wonder why they have been in your experiences - maybe it’s the military scene (referencing where you said mess hall).
In the US, soldiers are mostly not locals and spouses have a hard time getting a job because everyone knows you will move again in two or three years. But they want your money.
At our first duty station, the landlords were raising rent every three months until a General threatened to build enough on base housing to kill the local rental market. Suddenly, they had an agreement with the local landlords and the active gouging stopped.
Another story I heard: They paid all the soldiers in cash in two dollar bills, then had a meeting with local merchants and suggested they count what percentage in their tills was in two dollar bills and rethink their approach to some things or get blacklisted by the base.
In a foreign country, the degree to which a soldier is met with open animosity while everyone wants their money is typically more bald faced than in the US, where it is bad enough. These guys could not trust that local women were really interested in dating them for any reason other than their money or a green card. Going to a bar was not a very good means to establish social contacts.
Or so I gather from what I was told.
Local German women interested in a green card? Sounds unlikely.
Marrying a soldier was a fast and surefire way to get one, so I can quite well imagine that.
Where in the US are soldiers met with open animosity? The military and soldiers are glorified to an extreme, in my experience.
That's illegal. Maybe it wasn't back then, since I have no idea what timeframe you're talking about, but it has been for some time.
It's more common than you think.
Nothing in that comment surprised me and made me wonder if that kid was raised in a JW household before finally getting out of the house and turning hard into the party life. It's way too common of a story, kids raised under the thumb of the Watchtower Bible and Tract society going off to college, not having the church on their backs constantly, and practically cannonball into the party lifestyle that they'd been sheltered and repressed from their entire teenage years.
I know because I was one of those kids.
This was in Georgia, deep in The Bible Belt. Hellfire and Brimstone types seem to vastly outnumber the Christians who read the parts of the Bible about love thy neighbor and judge not lest ye be judged.
I've known sincere Christians that I respected. I have known a lot more that make me think of the passage about someone telling Jesus "Someday, people will do things in your name" and he replies "And I will say I never knew them."
Yes, known some even.
> Ever hear how people who managed to pull themselves out of that looney bin talk about the way they view the outside world and especially games like DnD?
I've seen mixed reactions, from participating, to seeing it as time wasting, to seeing it as prohibited because of the use of dice (some JWs view the gambling prohibition to extend to all dice), to seeing it as undesirable because of content (specifically fantasy occultism), to stronger negative reactions based on the same kind of myths that originated and were, AFAICT, more popular in fundamentalist / evangelical mainstream American Christianity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATUpSPj0x-c
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...
Thank you.
There's no functional difference between "sincerely" believing something that isn't true, and just plain old normal "insincere" believing something that isn't true.
What I found abhorrent is that the people interviewed in that book, ended up being prescribed meds by good professional Christian Doctors using all means to change their paths from evil. To avoid D&D as it was the devils work.
I would say that those parent's were mentally ill and/or uneducated and that the doctor's were mentally ill and/or uneducated.
Alas, religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeon_Master[1] https://archive.org/stream/DragonMagazine260_201801/DragonMa...
One devout partner implored me to stop meditating (during my Zen & Buddha kick) because she didn't want me to succumb to Satan. Another believer partner educated me about ghosts (tl;dr: they're every where). A coworker told me my cancer was caused by negative thoughts and that germ theory was a conspiracy.
Whaddya gonna do?
My fear is that I'm unknowingly harboring some wildly irrational beliefs.
The beauty is, that makes you uniquely able to identify and eradicate them.
I've said some bullshit things before, people have called me out on them. I usually defend them for way too long. That's called being human.
When people keep calling me out, with facts, I don't always immediately concede but I do think about it, and sometimes I realize I'm being an idiot.
It would be nice if I was constantly afraid my beliefs were stupid. Conviction requires additional convincing.
A friend once told me that meditation allows demons to take over your mind and make you crazy. This guy has a physics PhD, and not only believes this but also that global warming is an evil communist conspiracy designed to steal our freedoms. Not precisely his words, but close enough.
A good friend was told by his girlfriend that she couldn't marry him unless he converted and joined her church. Another of my friends was a member of that church, and won't talk about his time there (he's really messed up, and if you touch him accidentally he almost loses it) but tells me that it's all about control and power.
> My fear is that I'm unknowingly harboring some wildly irrational beliefs.
I have very much the same fear. I know I have held stupid beliefs ("depression isn't real, harden up!" was particularly ironic, as I was depressed, didn't know it, and that attitude was a result).
They sorta have. If you want to send a book to an inmate, it must be paperback, must be brand new, and shipped from the retailer.
The books cannot have "controversial" material. I've heard of some tech books getting rejected because of "hacking".
I know all of this because I have participated in my local Anarchist Black Cross events which is a prison abolition group. Often times, we would hear about some of the prisoners we wrote to having to undergo solitary confinement for some amount of time for minor rule violations.
The US prison system as a form of rehabilitation is a cruel joke. Prisoners are treated as scum the moment they enter with no rights. Worse, when prisoners leave, they expect the inmates to adjust back to life normally while employers can discriminate against the former inmates, and the government still treats them like scum. Often times, former inmates can't even rent housing anymore and political/social elites act so surprised that homelessness is on the rise.
So if the objective was to re-create slavery, they did a very poor job out of it.
No, our prison system hurts all races: white, black, Asian, native, etc. And sadly -- because of the racism prevalent in US society -- if we want true prison reform, we have to educate people that prison affects all communities, and not just communities of color.
Because there will never be reform as long as around 30% of America's white population believes that prison mainly hurts black people.
Just like it took heroin to finally wake white Americans up to the fact that the drug war is hurting us all, so we must find a way to wake people up to the fact that the prison system is terrible burden to us all. Repeating the false claim that prison is primarily a black problem only prolongs the problem.
The elite need their lower class.
But it should not, and can not, not be divorced from the abstract concept of what slavery is. Slavery is about power, and slaves come in many forms and fashions. And if you forget that, you'll be made a slave yourself. You don't have to be in chains to be one. This is what OP is referring to -- not that prisons and their systems seek to reintroduce "black american slavery", but to reintroduce, and normalize, the abstract concept of 'slavery' in society, all on its own. That's much more dangerous.
You see it in a lot of places where people talk about the lives prisoners lived, during and after release -- go check the comments on any news article. You'll see how many people think it is "just" that said convict has their entire being and life crushed. That it's good, good that they're a slave, in return for the crimes they committed.
This isn't really very different from what you're saying, in a sense -- that everyone is set back when we lose track of these things. But the difference between "slave" meaning "black american slaves" and "slave as a concept" is an important distinction to draw. There's an important ontological gap, there.
Frederick Douglass took note of this well over 150 years ago:
> The power of the antebellum slaveholding class, after all, resided not only in its direct domination of black slaves, but in its ability to divide and exploit an even larger multiracial working class. Douglass knew how well this system worked from bitter personal experience: As a hired slave in Baltimore, he was assaulted by white dockworkers with bricks and handspikes. Yet he remained clearheaded about who benefited from this racial violence. As he wrote in 1855: “The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself…. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers.”
He used the term "recreate slavery", which in this context would mean to re-establish the chattel slavery of people of African ancestry that existed previously in US. And the article he referenced very specifically discussed African-American slavery. So that's what I responded to.
As an aside, Americans of Scotch-Irish [1] ancestry (which includes my own background) are a very vengeful people. This culture, which also has some positive traits (bravery, loyalty, etc), had a huge impact on the general culture United States and its attitudes toward criminal justice.
But if you've never been around rural people of Scotch-Irish ancestry, you'd probably find their beliefs on justice fairly shocking. These are the people who often believe that if someone who goes to prison for a relatively minor, non-violent offense, and is raped in prison -- even if they're a family member! -- that this person "had it coming" or "deserved it". Prison is for suffering, not redemption.
Ironically, these same people are frequently very overt Christians, often evangelicals (they converted en masse from Calvinism--typically Presbyterianism--to Baptist during the great awakenings of the 19th century). But they're definitely Old Testament Christians, with not much use for most of the New Testament (except perhaps Revelations).
Anyway, combine that kind of culture with some of the other factors you describe, and you end up with the prison culture we have today in the United States.
1. And no, for us it's not "Scots-Irish". "Scotch-Irish" was in common usage when they immigrated to the US in the 18th century, and that's what's been passed down over the years (and it's how my grandparents described our ancestry, which after careful genealogical study was indeed Ulster Scots with a bit of German thrown in): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
I'll add a couple of common arguments that at least get you thinking, even if they aren't as powerful as evidence.
First, note that mass incarceration began after segregation and other civil rights abuses were outlawed. One ramped down and the other ramped up. Many believe that one tool of oppression merely replaced another.
Second, the legal and prison system have always been used, since the Civil War, to oppress black Americans. Mass incarceration wasn't a new tool, but an expansion of an old one. And it extends into today, as has been well-publicized recently. Or I'm sure everyone has heard the phrase, 'driving while black'. I've personally witnessed that kind of abuse.
There are a heck of a lot of people who would do it, and nearly every potential victim has a family member who would insist on doing the dirty work.
I was rather incredulous at the time because
a) they thought it was the case that spells in D&D work in our reality
and
b) there didn't appear to be a Mind Bondage spell.....unless perhaps they meant Charm Person?
What's their take on Stranger Things?
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
If it were only for the former reason, capital punishment wouldn't exist.
As it turns out, they're not particularly effective. The people who go and hold up a convenience store aren't doing it because of a reasoned cost-benefit analysis based on risk of capture, differential value of prison vs freedom, and future discount rates. They're doing it because they don't do those things.
That leaves three real reasons: 1) Reform 2) Reducing society's exposure to criminal elements 3) Punishment as a moral good in itself, as a way to rectify injustice.
Conversely, at least some percentage of the people who don't have made that cost-benefit analysis.
Plus some part of the people who go and commit felonies, mainly the young and naive, have made at least some basic cost-benefit analysis; they mistakenly think they'll be the leaders/tough ones in prison and it'll be okay.
I'm not a fan of the punitive prison model, but fear of consequences is a good deterrent.
(I sound like an uptight prick, but I'm speaking from experience. Then again, I've never been in a US prison, so I can't say much about them and I don't like what little I know)
It's only a "complete" solution if you actually have the right person.
The term recidivism means "the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend."
Thus it only applies to the already convicted. If they weren't caught and convicted, and they reoffend, it's not recidivism.
..In the US.[0]
Everything you say after that needs to be filtered through the same lens. You seem to be making a global statement about why people commit crimes without a lot of support for it.
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-...
At least some proportion of the population are deterred by the possibility of being caught and punished.
I said nothing about adding ten years to sentence lengths. I don’t know, and don’t claim to know what the optimal length of sentence (or other punishment) is, except that it is not zero.
This seems weird to you because it's not how your mind works, but it's what the data indicates.
Whether it works for deterrence is an empirical question, but the purpose and emphasis of the criminal justice system is changing constantly and is determined by the pressure of movements.
Characterizing rehabilitation as the overwhelming objective of human justice ignores very significant other objectives.
One of the things that really struck me is that when the prison stopped offering programs to occupy the inmates time, they tended to fill it themselves. By getting into fights. So aside from the punishment aspect, there seems to be real value to the system to have pastimes that keep a lid on things, be they work programs, classes, or a cheap board game.
My guess is that a lot of problems stem from gambling debts -- you can allow cards and stem gambling a bit by preventing chips from being introduced (in whatever form). With DnD tracking across the game is important so it's not as easy to prevent a ledger from forming.
As May wrote in the article, DnD was banned much as gambling was banned on premises at my high school, but as long as nothing bad happened and the participants were good people the ban was not enforced. The situation they're trying to avoid is inmate A shanks inmate B because B stole his heroin, and in the investigation, he's not dumb enough to mention H but is smart enough to ramble about B's chaotic evil necromancer screwing over the team (and what would you expect, anyway?). Likewise I grew up before Columbine when it was "normal" to build levels in FPS matching your school blueprint because, hey, we all know our school layout and there ARE some good camping points, and this is number 311613 on the list of fun things to do when I was young that would get you swatted or at least arrested today, back then if you weren't a screw up they complimented your obvious skill at possibly getting into CAD drafting. Anyway in a similar manner if players run the Rise of the Runelords campaign they're almost certainly in the clear, but if they make something up where the characters kill the wife or kid of castle guard X and then gloat about it and have a big laugh, then real world corrections officer coincidentally also named X is inevitably going to flip the table when he finds out regardless if its permitted or not and a documented policy that RPGs is prohibited is just the usual thin blue line stuff.
Pariahdog119's advice about simply play any RPG except the famous DnD, was also helpful in 80s public school. The more rules lawyerly kids who signed a pledge at church to never play DnD to prevent the devil from stealing their soul or whatever, were chill about the zillions of almost-clones of DnD that existed. The only name I remember from that era was "Castle Perilous" and it had a yellow cover with a pretty amazing ink drawing on the cover. And via the magic of google I found a link to a picture. I probably haven't seen that book in 35 years or so. Pretty wild. Oddly enough I don't remember any of my public school textbooks but I remember "Castle Perilous" LOL. In that book there is a dungeon raid and I DMed it with some friends and my now long since deceased grandfather, insisted on playing with us to make sure I wasn't up to anything inappropriate as he had heard of the DnD controversy, and he ended up enjoying the RPG experience greatly, and in retrospect I wish I had invited him to other RPG games. That was probably about 1982 or so.
http://tomeoftreasures.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=18708&sid=3...
We used a cardboard spinner with a push tack for the pivot.