On semantics, and the poor use of movable goalposts

I have three daughters, and one of my least favourite things about this is a recurring argument which goes (at least in form) thusly:

Me: "[Daughter] - stop using that crayon to draw on the wallpaper!"
[Daughter]: "It's a felt pen, dad!"

or

Me: "[Daughter] - stop poking your sister with that fork!"
[Daughter]: "It's a knife!"

or

Me: "[Daughter], have you been sneaking non-uniform shorts to school?"
[Daughter]: "They're track pants! Ugh!"

It's pretty clear why those responses make no sense, and what conversational purpose they serve. My kids don't have good reasons for the stupid things they're doing, and want to deflect attention onto arguing about pointless minutiae. Fortunately, none of them is sufficiently good at this for it to be anything more than irritating - and after all, these are arguments from a trio whose ages range from 3 to 11.

It's a bit weird when you see people attempting this same (and similarly pointless) goalpost shift as grownups, though.

The first and most egregious example came from a group I'm a member of on G+. The group is called "Suppressed Transmissions" and specialises in weird news, art, and images that suggest hidden Dark Secrets behind ordinary reality. It's supposed to be a setting-mine for weirdness-in-real-life roleplaying games and fiction.

I shared a feature on an issue of Look magazine from 1972, because it had Anton LaVey on the cover and the concept of a reasonably mainstream magazine doing a feature on the Church of Satan amused me. The comment thread got hijacked by someone with strong antisemitic views, who viewed LaVey as part of some grand Jewish plot too complex and stupid to go into right now. The person got banned fairly promptly, but not before responding to being called on his antisemitism like this (sic):

"Semite means middle eastern people.  Just cause some kazhars converted to judisim doesnt mean they are all middle eastern, does it? Or is it a race Not sure which jewish lie you are gonna use to back the "anti semite" claim"

There's this weird kernel-idea embedded in there that somehow by redefining the terms on us, he can prove that by some anthropological-dictionary magic he's not an antisemite (he's anti-Jew, there's a difference, Dad. Ugh!) and that that will make his hatred of Jewish people somehow OK. Or possibly he's a not-especially-clever troll who maintains that particular profile just for Jew-hatin'.

The more subtle (and thus more troubling) example I've been seeing lately revolves around Ahmed Mohamed. Just quick, if you've been under a rock and missed the whole thing, here's the teal deer version: Ahmed is a 14 year old Muslim boy of Sudanese parents, who lives in Texas. He took a home-built* clock to school. There was an unarguably racist** and utterly disproportionate reaction which led to Ahmed being treated as a suspected terrorist, and led to the school authorities and the police in the state of Texas looking pretty bloody stupid.

The official response to this has all been pretty good (Ahmed got an invitation to the White House among other things) and my personal internet filter bubble means I haven't seen any overtly-racist nonsense. What I have seen, is a lot of people (Richard Dawkins' view is here, and links to more of the same) questioning a) whether Ahmed really built his clock or just de-shelled a commercial alarm clock, and b) what his motives were for doing so.

This is transparently the same debating tactic that my 3 year old uses. To answer the second part of the question first, there's nothing suspect about Ahmed's stated aim, which was to impress one of his teachers - and that motivation still makes sense if we assume he didn't build the clock himself from scratch. The first part is the kicker though - because the hidden assumption there is that somehow Ahmed's fear, suffering, and humiliation would be OK if we can just prove that he's not really gifted with electronics. Because the outpouring of support for him wasn't because he built a clock - that's very clear - it's because he was detained and harassed on the basis of his name and the colour of his skin.

I'm pretty clear on what my three year old wants when she tries to distinguish moral shades in drawing on walls with pens versus with crayons - she wants to avoid a discussion about drawing on walls. What is it that the "Clock Is A FRAUD!" people want, do you suppose?


*Or home-assembled, or maybe not - we'll get to that in a second.

** You can say "Islam is not a race" until the cows come home, but most people when they think "Muslim" don't think of someone who looks like this guy, or even (if they're honest) this guy.

On dying under things

First off, if you're interested in such, Love and Pop has my review of HP Lovecraft's The Thing On The Doorstep. It's mostly good but an unfortunate shade of murky green.

***

As you're probably aware, even if you're not a New Zealander, we're currently going through a process of referenda on the way to possibly changing our flag. I'm not super keen on this, for reasons that can be tidily summed up by Toby Morris (tl;dr, I think changing the flag eventually is a) inevitable and b) a good idea but I'm suspicious of the current timing, and I'm pretty uninspired by the process).

However, there's one particular argument I hear from people in favour of keeping the current flag, which I think needs to be disposed of - the idea that you can't change the flag, because New Zealand soldiers died under it*.

I'm loath to Godwin myself so easily, but here's a flag people died under:

and here's another:

here's one people are dying under right now:

It is entirely possible for people to commit themselves sincerely to a cause, and its symbols, and be wrong. It is equally possible for people to be misled as to the actual purpose of their actions - this is my view of soldiers who died in WWI in particular. Enshrining symbols and the causes they represent, just because people were willing to die for them is a terrible idea.

*Lest you think I'm overstating this, the NZ RSA wants people to spoil their flag ballots for this specific reason.

Well, fuck.

So the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill went through under urgency last week. For those not in NZ, that means a) all the synthetic cannabis products excluded from the previous version of this legislation (about 40 products from the previous about-a-gazillion) are now banned until they can be proved to be of "very low risk" and b) the government might well have shot a giant gaping hole in what could have been the first thing to approach sensible drug legislation in this country.

Russell Brown has a good post about this over at Public Address, but here's my take on what happened. There are two "official" narratives, one from the government and one from grassroots anti-drugs people which are both wrong, or at least, they're quite selective in the ways that they're right.

The anti-drugs crowd seem to believe that the passing of the original Psychoactive Substances Act put a bunch of synthetic cannabis products on the market as "safe". These products were anything but, and caused massive problems, with addiction and emergency visits becoming rife (see the horrifying photos of queues around the block from legal high stores for evidence). Eventually, in response to public outcry, the government finally acted (after too long) and put a stop to it. The moral tenor of the marketers of these drugs can easily be determined by the fact that they proposed to test this stuff on innocent animals.

The government contend that they were on the right track, but overlooked the risk posed by the synthetic cannabinomimetics that they allowed to remain on sale. They have now rightly removed these products from shelves, and put the burden of proof back where it belongs - with the manufacturers.

Actually, these drugs have been around for a long time. Ten years at the very minimum. The first ones appeared all over the place in little metal single-smoke cylinders, and seem to have been pretty close to inactive. The recipe quickly got refined and they started to sell by the packet. The attraction at this point was pretty clear - these products seemed to fairly closely mirror actual weed (which has a strong social niche in New Zealand culture) and were all legal to buy. It's important to note that all through this story, legality has been the main drawcard with these drugs - along with the ability to get high and still pass drug tests for pot.

Four or five years in, there was the first surge of media attention addressed at these specific "legal highs". I talked about that here. As a result of that, a large number of these products (if you're a New Zealander you'll probably recall the brand names "Spice" and "Kronic") were banned, along with their active ingredient. Because we were still operating under our original drug legislation which required the government to ban individual chemicals one by one, a raft of new products sprang up to take the place of the banned ones.

It's probably at this point that the real damage starts to get done. The evidence suggests that it's at this point that the chemicals on the market start to be seriously habit-forming and people start having panic attacks, heart palpitations and the like. However, these things are available everywhere - corner dairies all over the country stock this stuff, so if you're an addict it's fairly easy to stay under the radar.

When the government passed the Psychoactive Substances Act, they did two things. They gave councils the power to control where these substances could be sold, and they reduced the products available from hundreds to around 40 (considered to be "low-risk") which were allowed as an interim measure until councils finished deciding where their OK zones for legal high sale were going to be. Unfortunately at this point councils decided more or less en masse to throw all their toys out of the cot at once. Many protested at not just being able to ban the sale of non old-white-men drugs entirely and refused to zone, while others zoned as punitively as they could get away with.

As a result, the number of outlets selling these new more habit-forming drugs dropped dramatically. Can you imagine the queues that would appear if, tomorrow, all supermarkets and dairies were banned from selling alcohol and liquor stores were cut down to 2 or 3 per hundred thousand people? Do you think that it might look as though there was a sudden plague of alcoholism all around the country?

I must stress that this is not to claim that this newest batch of cannabis substitutes were good drugs. They appear to be very bad for their users both mentally and physically, and the people who sold them are probably not nice people.

The issue is that we're now back in blanket-ban territory, and these drugs have probably been bought up cheap by people who intend to stockpile them and sell them for vastly inflated prices on the street (they still get around drug tests for pot, and there are still addicts out there - money to be made...) Why? Because we had a media panic. I also want to restate that the reason we have this particularly vicious and addictive batch on our hands in the first place is because the previous safer generation were also banned as the result of a media panic. And we got that generation because we swallowed someone else's media panic about cannabis way back in the '50s. This is not a sensible way to make laws - look at the Sex Offender Registry in the US, and its many many abuses if you want a stunning example.

There are two consolations here. The first is that we do have the Psychoactive Substances Act, which has probably got the government out of playing whack-a-mole with drug designers for the time being. It's been mauled (the government is now in the bizarre position of being legally forced to ignore all data from animal tests, conducted anywhere in the world unless they prove a drug is unfit for sale) and drugs are going to be inhumanly hard to pass through it in the short term, but it's still around - so that's something.

The second is that this whole debacle does seem to have reopened the debate on which drugs should be legal and why. Let's hope we can actually talk about that this time, eh?

On picking and choosing your traditions

We had a pretty uneventful Hallowe'en Chez Wolfboy. A couple of kids came by, we gave them some toffees and they went away neither us or them any the richer for the experience (unless you account for enrichment by toffee, I suppose).

Earlier in the evening we'd taken the childer to some church's alternative un-Hallowe'en do in order to satisfy my wife's curiosity. It was all right, well attended by a wide sampling of the local community and obviously entertaining for the children if their parents could afford the variety of rides and bouncy castles etc. on offer. The insistence on ignoring Hallowe'en even as it filled the streets around us was a bit strange though.

I don't hold with the idea that Hallowe'en is in some way an "evil" festival. It makes more sense to consider it a shadow of Easter - the acknowledgement of death and decay that mirrors the celebration of life and rebirth. I do think that there are some problems with the way it's observed here in New Zealand though.

Firstly (and most obviously) it's the wrong time of year. This is a problem it shares with all our church-derived holidays. They began life as pagan seasonal holidays before being co-opted by Christianity, but since the church ignores their seasonal nature in favour of having a unified calendar around the world we antipodeans end up celebrating all our seasonal festivals in anti-sync. Hallowe'en has a logical psychic resonance as an autumnal festival - acknowledging the decay that is necessary for renewal and honouring Death as a mirror to Easter's birth-feast in the spring.

Secondly, I think we've picked up the wrong tradition. In Scotland, where I spent my childhood between the ages of 6 and 13, there's a tradition known as guising. Guising is almost the same as trick-or-treating - you still dress up and go call on the neighbours - but with a crucial difference. In order to get a treat, a guiser needs to do a "turn" - sing a song, tell some jokes, recite a poem, whatever. This turns the festival into a real community event - you spend time in neighbours' homes, entertaining them (often badly, but still).

It's kind of a mystery to me why (given the mass settlement of NZ from the UK) we ended up with the somewhat thuggish and extortionist American version instead.

I want to bring it back - who's with me?

What's the matter with White Wolf?

First off - the point is that this is a rant with a title stolen from an essay called "What's the matter with Kansas?" where the point was to demonstrate that everyone who lived in Kansas was crazy and every mad thing the US did as a matter of policy happens in Kansas first. The point of this rant is not to defend White Wolf, but to figure out precisely what it is about them that pisses me off, and why I thought they were so good (because I did) in the first place.

The primary reason White Wolf piss me off is the same as the reason I would cheerfully gut George Lucas - they made something I once loved into something utterly crappy. But, as is clear on a re-watching of Star Wars or a re-reading of old WoD books, they weren't that great to start with. So what was the appeal in the first place?

The first factor, I suspect is age. I started playing Vampire when I was 14, having played nought but MERP and one astoundingly shoddy game of Shadowrun beforehand. Being particularly vulnerable to wangst at that point, Vampire seemed like pretty much the best thing since sliced bread, and expansion into Changeling, Mage and eventually Werewolf from there on out only maintained my massive adolescent WW-hardon.

The other factor is book-ownership. I never owned a single source or splatbook for the entirety of my WW-honeymoon period - I just had the (blessedly simple compared to MERP or Shadowrun) rules and setting explained to me by the ST and other players. In retrospect, this is the best possible way to play a WW game, as it means all WW metafiction is filtered through sane human minds first, and setting info is given out on a relevance-level and need-to-know basis.

Unfortunately, I have since realised that what I really liked about WW was the groups I played with. Every one of them had two things in common I had never experienced before: a maximum of one really annoying layer (as opposed to a minimum of 3) and a really good ST. The STs are probably the most crucial factor here, as they all had ideas of their own which were utterly unrelated to the metaplot of WoD and were pretty tolerant (even encouraging) of genuine inventiveness in character-creation and roleplaying (something totally alien to MERP).

The only truly shite WW game I had heard of was totally excusable on WW's part, as it was run by a notorious local gamer who has a bad rep for setting and metaplot obsession, railroading, and being an incredibly whiny bitch all the time. Seriously. The man plays in every local LARP and is always killed by other players for the crime of being too annoying to live, within the first three sessions.

Since those halcyon days, I have been involved in a couple of Vampire LARPS (which all suffered from the same fatal STing flaws - run by aforementioned notorious gamer or one of his cohorts) but otherwise had only tangential contact with WoD in either incarnation.

Last year I played in a long-term Vampire LARP which (though generally well-run and pretty entertaining) threw into sharp relief everything that had historically rankled with me about WoD. Since joining this forum and reading some pretty savage reviews of WW books, it's becoming clearer and clearer to me that almost none of the things that I liked about WW's games had anything to do with them. I like the promise the WW gave me, but not the way they tried to fulfil them.

So, in no particular order, here are the things I personally think White Wolf consistently do wrong:

1. A game system that is less intuitive than it looks. Example - my last WW character was a Malkavian (crazy vampire) obsessed with occultism. In order to mirror this, I took a real hodgepodge of Disciplines to reflect his patchwork-magpie approach to magic and academia. What this did was to make him incredibly ineffective in terms of game mechanics.
   Because: White Wolf superpowers never have anything to do with your rank in the superpower - it's always tied to some other dumbarse stat. Why won't you let me have someone who's no good at stealth but awesome at being invisible you dicks? Or a werewolf who can knock people over without having to know surgery? From what I've read about Exalted it appears to be the apotheosis of this principle. Being railroaded into a particular min-max-y line of character creation doesn't actually piss me off that much unless you lie to me about it.
   
   
2. A back-story and meta-plot that is almost entirely a detriment to the game world. All five of the original WoD games are (Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling, Mage, Wraith) are awesome ideas which only begin to blow really hard when you read the background fiction and splatbooks. On the subject of Vampire splatbooks, it has been my observation that there is usually one sentence (not counting specialised extra superpowers which may or may not be any good, depending) that is worth reading.
   
   
3. The stupid urge to have all WoD games inhabit the exact same WoD. It was actually OK to have inconsistencies between the various worlds - it fit with their whole "reality is subjective" angle. Every attempt to gel the settings into a coherent world turned the suck up a notch.
   
   
4. The assumption that they are in fact the apex of the gaming industry, rather than an (admittedly notable) piece of divergent evolution. People are currently doing what White Wolf originally set out to do better than they do it. People are also realising that being a bit limited in scope is actually OK, so long as you take everything at its face value and don't try to force it into being anything else. D&D is good at being D&D, and that's OK guys. We acknowledge that you're over it, but you have to realise that some people (even intelligent people who realise its limitations) find it entertaining.

Still and all, I'm glad I went through a WW phase. I kind of owe them my continual interest in roleplaying games. So, despite all the shit, thanks for that guys.