The figures I've seen indicate Who has massively lost viewership.
Also, don't start on red pilling.
Considering what I've seen happen to the comic book world, I feel like I have at least a minot dog in that fight. I don't resist representation, I resent tokenization and the vast majority of characters are written skin deep and have no challenge. There's a reason "stunning and brave" is used as an insult.

Most of that isn't actually moral stances, but financial.
It's difficult to track taxation on an occupation like prostitute and pot was a threat to several industries a century ago so they ran a smear campaign. It's also REALLY easy to grow, which, again, threatens industries.

The problem is that what is financially good informs what is morally allowable. And the PC* attitude is what allows that.

*I mean Politically Correct in the real sense of the word- saying, doing or thinking whatever is politically advantageous to say do or think instead of what is accurate. I'm of the opinion the term needs reclaiming. It shouldn't be a byword for "but I wanna use disparaging words!"

To call the financially good as the influence is a bit misleading. It's really inertia that's the influence. People bend morals to justify what they're doing or wanting to do. It's why people power grab in spheres where money isn't really a factor. Blaming financial incentive is a bit of a misdirection, since the problem is more weak formation of morals and adherence to said formed morals.

It's impossible to disentangle drug laws from the political goals those laws serve. To quote Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman:



Our country has the largest incarceration rate in the world. States make extensive use of prison labor that's paid pennies on the dollar, and felons who get out of prison aren't allowed to vote. Drug laws disproportionately target ethnic minorities and the poor, who statistically use drugs at the same rates as everyone else, but are massively more likely to be arrested, be convicted, and get longer sentences. The criminalization approach to drug use has been an abject failure in terms of reducing addiction rates, but a resounding success in terms of the political agenda for which it was created.

Why is Duskfang Mentor a cleric? And what does that say about how WOTC hands out creature types?
To me, she does not look like a cleric. THere's nothing there that even hints to me that she is in anyway clericy. Sadly, all humans seem to need a class. I guess being in a support role makes it a cleric? I know Ikoria is kind of a RPG/JRPG set, but ehhh, still a real stretch.

Lifelink makes her a cleric. If it does life-gain, it gets the cleric hat. That's my guess.

Lots of mono- clerics in Ikoria it seems. Maybe they just worship their Pokemon TemTem monsters.

I just wish that being a cleric involved something like religion. You know, the thing that defines a cleric. Instead we seem to be going for the definition you might get from a JRPG developer who encountered the term in an old Player's Handbook and lacked the background to parse what it actually was. "Cleric" has come to mean, "like those guys from those games" instead of the actual thing the cleric class was modeled off of.
Maybe we're heading that way because WOTC's skittish about invoking religion and offending the main stream? Do they want to keep clerics in the game even without featuring worlds with any discernible religion? Are they just having a hard time filling out class types on cards?

Unrelatedly, what was that cookie clicker-type game everybody on these forums was playing some years back? Candy something I think? It was ASCII graphics and you started out by planting a candy in the ground to grow more candy. I want to show a friend.

Her art was excellent and beautiful. I will miss it, whatever kind of person the artist was.

They're not even going to reprint any of her old art? That just strikes me as dumb. If they just didn't want to send her any more money I could call it a values-based decision. But Nielsen wasn't making any money off reprints (Ok, I realize as I'm typing this that I'm making an assumption) so the only real benefit was to WOTC's image.

It's probably more efficient for them to use a different art every year or 2 when they do a reprint than it is to risk losing customers because their artist is some racist kook raving about "Ziocons" on twitter.

The reasons for letting her go are extremely weak and border on thought policing. She followed some kooks and liked a slightly racist post. I understand why they did it but it's still not a great reason. But she's a great artist so hopefully she can find more work.

idk man I feel like "endorsing conspiracy theories about The Jews secretly running the government" is kinda maybe not something you should do if you want to keep your job?

My opinion on such things is pretty basic: if it doesn't interfere with your work, it shouldn't interfere with your eligibility to work.

Let's think about this in the context of a normal job for a minute, not the circus that is playing the commission game with WotC. And you get someone in a job who's a conspiracy nutter; they go online, and they're reading all up on the Committee of 300, the Elders of Zion, the Lizard People, whatever the heck. Maybe they even believe Time Cube. But if this person is on the clock, they're a good little drone. They complete their tasks, and don't cause a fuss in the office.

Now, in our hypothetical situation, a third party enters. Whatever the motivation, the Third Party has followed the nutter employee online, uncovered what they're into when they're off the clock, and has chosen to publicize this information with the demand that this "crazy person" be dismissed from employment without regard to the quality of their work.

Maybe the employer does it; after all, only some unverifiable beliefs (those that get tax exempt status as "religions") are considered protected classes; you can, legally, be let go for any other stupid thing you believe or don't believe, like saying the Earth is Flat or Aliens built the Pyramids or Toilet Paper should roll down the back rather than the front. Or no reason at all, "At-will" being fairly standard. And you could say this was the logical thing for the employer to do, since that fact being "out" could now have an effect on the bottom line (which reminds me of other things one could be "outed" for that are now protected classes) But on a moral and ethical stand, I for one don't feel much sympathy for the Third Party in this scenario. I think they did a pretty rotten thing.

Naturally, there are some different ways it could go down. If there's no third party and the nutter was canned because they themselves, on the clock, made customers and/or their coworkers uncomfortable, that's another story: they're being disciplined for work relevant behavior.

But what really makes this thorny as barbed wire, and not just for Terese (especially beyond just Terese), is the nature of the internet, and how the emergence of real-name social media has changed the societal equation. Unless you fully opt out of the real-name internet -- which is increasingly difficult for average citizens to do because you're expected to have a facebook, a twitter, whatever the hell -- you have both zero privacy AND a permanent record. In analog, if someone believed crazy **** things but was smart about it, you know who would hear it? Probably some mailing list for whatever the crazy **** thing was, and maybe close friends when the Loon was a few drinks in. And if they shot themselves in the foot and had to move on, they could try again, and learn to keep their opinions to themselves: leave others alone, and be left alone in peace.

That option has been removed. Those small, insular circles are now generally exposed by the nature of social media, and even if someone tries to move on, their record remains. If you think someone can't be crucified for a ten-year-old post, you haven't been paying attention. Not that anything like that was what happened here, but it's something worth considering. When you say someone should lose their job for beliefs they've revealed on the internet, apart from doing their job, you are saying that this person, Terese or otherwise deserves to be rendered not just unemployed, but unemployable not for their actions related to anything but, essentially, for their beliefs. Because your logic holds: if "You believed bad thing" was enough reason to sack somebody once, and that flag doesn't go away, then it stands to reason that it remains a reason to Sack/Not Hire again, and again, and again.

This person did not attack people. They did not commit crimes. They admitted to believing something that You, whether that refers to a loud minority or even a majority, find to be bad. And you suggest that it is fair and proper to see them dismissed from unrelated gainful employment, presumably unless they sufficiently recant their views.

That's a bloody inquisition. Mob punishment for thought crime. And even if I don't agree with what a person believes, even if I feel with every fiber of my being that what they think is wrong, unclean, unfit, and the product of an unhealthy mind, I will never consider it OK to punish someone in one sphere for speaking or thinking in another. Perhaps the current status is the product of societal growing pains, and reality poorly coping with the nature of a digital age, but I won't stand in favor of an inquisition leading to ostracism.

Terese herself, I suspect, will not really suffer a quality of life hit from this. She is, after all, a supremely skilled artist whose commissions from WotC are probably small potatoes. And while I'm not terribly pleased with WotC's course as a whole right now, I won't say that their reasoning in this particular instance isn't mercenary at worst, and logical at best. What really makes my gorge rise, though, is the third party, or are the third parties. Terese's art did not touch, did not represent, the posts she 'liked' online. And because of that, I can hold a fair portion of scorn for the decision of individuals to dig up dirt and out it, calling for the termination of a job whose actions were not related to it. And, especially, it galls me that such actions, the hunting out and publicizing not of functional deeds but of the expression of thoughts, seems to be increasingly accepted, expected, celebrated.

I don't think it's fair to compare racism and antisemitism to theories about Lizard People. Nobody's ever shot up a place of lizard worship because they believed in lizard people, or elected a political party to put the lizard people in camps.

You say that, but people HAVE committed mass suicide because they believed in aliens. And in any case, what other people do or have done with a belief does not apply their guilt to one who has the belief, but not the action. Large groups have murdered wantonly in the name of Jesus Christ, and for no other reason, but we do not paint all Christians with their brush. Their beliefs are the same, have the same foundation. That these beliefs drove some to criminality and atrocity does not give us the right to judge others who hold them to be the same.

You can't police thoughts. In my opinion, a society that wishes to remain free cannot allow the policing of thoughts. To quote an ACLU statement on the matter: those who do wrong are responsible for what they do; those who speak about it are not.

It's easy to defend free speech when that speech is uncontroversial. It's critical to do so when it's something most people would reject.

The idea of killing for Jesus doesn't follow naturally from Christianity. The idea of anti-semitic political action flows pretty naturally from the idea that the Jews are secretly controlling the government and are killing, enslaving, and exploiting everyone else. That's why trying to propagate the idea is deliberate and dangerous.

I've never really cared much for her art pieces because her more trademark works always felt like nonsense to me, and the SDCC promos are imo really ugly, but looking through scryfall I didn't know she had done some more grounded works like Life from the Loam or Kird Ape.
Ditching one of the iconic magic artists because she liked some conspiratorial tweets doesn't sit well with me, assuming that is what happened (and I'm not about to give wotc the benefit of the doubt), even if I don't think it was very intelligent of her to do so.

Humming to Studio Killer's "Party Like It's Your Birthday". You know why.