Gormongous

I mean, Nazis are probably underserved as a demographic. If you ignore the reasons for that, a few swastikas here and there is probably not outside the realm of possibility, especially for a movement like #GamerGate that's hemorrhaging reasonable people left and right...

Bertrand II: 1094-1102 As the learned Bishop Evrard of Aix tells me, it is spoken among the learned heathens of a man named Sisyphus, who was cursed by the devils that the ancients called "gods" before the revelation of Christ. For rebuke of his cleverness, which leads even the wise astray, Sisyphus had to push a boulder up a hill, in the full knowledge that it would roll down the other side once he had reached its crest. He was bound thus for all eternity, until we shall all made whole again with the Second Coming. Evrard is fond of offering to me this tale, when I meditate on the path that the line of Boso has taken down through history. He is a wise man, I know, because I appointed him myself. I see now the boulder in front of me for the past thirty years, shaped like a great fish, and I turn my face from it. I think not that I will ever hold the title of Dauphin, which would make known to all my family's rightful claim to Lower Burgundy as kings. It is not within the Lord's merciful plan to make it so. As a devout Christian, living near to the end of times, it is not my place to question the fate that has been set for me. And yet... my son's fate is not set, as far as can be told. If I can, in my remaining years, I will set it for my beautiful boy and smile down upon the fruits from heaven. Acfred will marry the eldest daughter of the current dauphin's only son. Berchte is a fine girl, with a pride and kindness well suited to her noble blood, although I have already begun to find at times that she is a bit too proud of how kind she is to her maids. No matter, the doddering dauphin, Artau de Forez, agrees to the match, perhaps thinking that I am the doddering one, given that a match between our houses finally legitimizes his illegal control over Lyon and Forez. Woe to him. My beautiful boy is already shaping up to be a genius at handling people. I will connive with him and his wife, once Artau dies, to dispossess the new duke of Dauphiné, by death if necessary, and see our houses united in the third generation, borne by a new Aeneas and Lavinia. When the snows melt in the first months of 1094, they are made one in matrimony and the first step is taken. To be honest, I hate that it has come to this. The dauphin's son Wilhelm is a pious man, which makes him dear to God but not to men. I had saved up a great deal of money to rally conspirators to my cause, but I spend very little of it. Eight nobles swear an oath to me, with my spymaster as proxy, and begin to plot. I turn my mind, not a little thankfully, to other things. Indeed, my beautiful boy has taken well to his wife and to the business of the court. Less than three months after his majority, Acfred succeeded in proving long-lost claims to Savoy that I did not know were ever even held by the Bosonids. That fat idiot from Vienne, Guiges d'Albon, could not do the same in Lyon after three decades of work, good riddance! With our first claim happily in hand, we press it against Duke Pierre. The second War of Burgundian Restoration is underway! Grand though its name may be, the war is relatively bloodless affair and ends in the summer of 1096 after only thirteen months of hostilities. The intercession of the newly-crowned king of Bohemia, brother to the husband of my oft-forgotten bastard daughter Cecilia, is a great factor in the peacemaking, which leaves the Savoyads with their holdings around Turin and the loose dependency of the bishop of Valais. The only rival of equal power to my own is now the Neuenburger dukes of Upper Burgundy, who are distracted from the matters of the Middle Kingdom by their many vassals and their marriage ties to the distant duchies of Lombardy and Brandenburg. Time passes. I still wait for word from my oathsworn brethren in the Dauphiné. My daughter and friend Faidida comes of age, so after several months of deliberation, I give her hand to Duke Hughes of Aquitaine, a powerful ally to counterbalance the dukes of Toulouse if the kingdom of France continues to disintegrate as the Robertian line of the Capets lose the power they inherited from the now-extinct Heinrican line. I soon decide that this was a mistake. King Hughes II of France is a pneumoniac weakling married to a spinster, but his brother and heir Eudes is an able warrior with at least four sons to his name. I have sent my closest friend to live on the Bay of Biscay for naught. A match to the king of the Bavarians, just crowned on February 12, 1097 in Munich, would have been a far wiser choice, but... ah, whatever. I cannot even focus on the frustration of a bad marriage because I have heard word again of that blessed fool Wilhelm. Did you know that he has survived nine attempts on his life? That is why I call him blessed. I call him fool because he is not yet alive to any murderous intent against him. He has even fathered a son in the intervening months. With this sign, I try to draw the reins of my conspiracy, but it is too late. He drinks poisoned wine at the feast of his son's christening and is dead by the morrow. Even in death, I have never seen a man more beloved by God. After half a decade of near-constant bloodshed, I found myself inclined to wait a few years to see if young Hans, the new duke of Dauphiné, is meant for a life on this earth, but I am soon confronted in this by my daughter-in-law Berchte. Still proud and still fond of women, she is now also prone to lies and troublemaking. Her father died before Hans' christening, she says. If anything is a sign from on high that the succession should not pass from father to son, it is an untimely death of such a sort. While she speaks such obvious nonsense, she looks at me too long and too deep for my comfort, before returning to her chambers. I wonder... Then, after I am done with that — though it took the entire night without sleep to do so — I call my council and tell them to prepare for war. Let her be called a usurper, I care not. I am defending the rights of a future generation, though I will miss my beautiful boy when he is far away in Lyon. The war is short and my heart is heavy. With that accomplished, assuring the providential future of the Bosonid kings of Burgundy, I — Gack. Iah harrubah nauf. Shifh mah wabbuh naruh. Guh, auh whish nauh gah grabbuh leth nah. Hahuh! Naugah nun wah. Tug nug grabbuh iah nauf. Wallah nah wah. Nun, nun. Gah! Hanuh, hanuh, hanuh. Wag auf ish duh nah wah? Puh wallah nauf auh? Iah nagguh auf wah... Buh awah! Ah! Ah!

Ironic Nazism is baffling because it is predicated on the existence of actual Nazis being impossibly absurd, so it's like this weird logic puzzle where ironic Nazis can't exist because their existence makes them not ironic.

I have yet to find a good medieval podcast. The History of Byzantium is fine, the British History Podcast is not, and I lost interest in finding a good one after those two. Way too many Anglocentric podcasts, anyway, like this one, which really doesn't look terribly bad other than focusing way too much on the least important part of western and central Europe except maybe Spain. When I get back in town tomorrow night, I'll try Medieval Archives, which seems a little late but broad enough to be potentially not terrible. I am also sad because these lectures look great but are tied to an over-expensive membership in an association of no repute. I've desperately wanted to record my own for years, but I don't want to do it alone and no one else in my department is interested... EDIT: Having listened to a couple episodes of each, Norman Centuries is competent enough, but marred by an uncritical retelling of events and some creeping Byzantinophilia, which is unsurprising from the author of 12 Byzantine Rulers. Medieval Archives is quite accurate, although overfond of its own punchy delivery, to the point that I found it impossible to listen to any episode all the way through. I'm honestly surprised that there's no "History of Germany from Charlemagne to the Golden Bull" podcast, but then again there's not even a good book in English about that region and period. The best that comes to my mind is Germany in the High Middle Ages, c.1050-1200 by Horst Fuhrmann, and that's a thirty-five year old volume in translation!

A no-no mouse!

I'm surprised no one posted 8chan's horrific ad that it made for itself. Not that the ad itself is surprising to anyone who's been reading this thread, but...

Yeah, you're playing as Acfred, diplomatic genius and duke-consort of Dauphiné. Spoilers! I don't remember your wife's name, because her only value to me is dead now that she's given you two sons.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish my final post, which won't get touched until Sunday night now, but I love the idea of this. Honestly, I have great expectations for my heir, because I've left him with genius levels in the game's most important stat, a ton of money for a one-title duke, and a one-generation wait until the kingdom can be made, so I'll be interested to see how you take it.

I love those, too, especially when I (very rarely) recognize them. When this gets licensed (hahahahaha, this will never get picked up anywhere outside of Japan) I would kill for a companion booklet explaining most of the expies, analogues, and cameos.

I mean, "dumb" also refers to people who are mute and/or deaf, although it's hardly remembered in that meaning except through stock phrases. I'm also not sure why "stupid" and "idiot" are okay, either, because discrimination by intelligence is ableism, albeit an ableism that's still functionally necessary in some areas of society. One of my favorite things is that "idiot" comes from the Greek word idiotes, meaning "layperson" in practice but literally meaning "someone who does not participate in public life," as in someone who isn't a functioning part of the community and therefore contributes nothing. The Greeks, or at least the Athenians, valued their civil society so much that to abstain from it was to reveal yourself to be worthless and stupid.

The refutation that I have been seeing the most, which Tycho has repeatedly rejected, boils down to this. There is a room with two containers, each connected to a button in front of you, with a third button connected to both. One container holds a human being, maybe twenty years old. The other holds a mosquito, one day old. You must press a button. Pressing the button connected to a single container will cause the creature in that container to suffer horribly and then die, while setting the other free. Pressing the button connected to both will select a container by an entirely random process for the aforesaid effect. In a vacuum, the argument against speciesism is that it's a straightforward decision to press the randomized button, content in the knowledge that there's a fifty-percent chance that the human being will suffer and die, while the mosquito is freed to live out its remaining thirty-six hours. I just can't buy that. If it were a black person and a white person or a man and a woman, the moral choice is obviously to leave it to chance when context is lacking. They are both people. However, I have yet to be presented with a logical argument demanding that I embrace the possibility of torturing and killing a human being, in order to save a mosquito. I have only been told, repeatedly, that it is the same thing as racism, because mosquitos can also suffer, which I do not find compelling on its own, for the reasons in my post above. Therefore, the lives of a human being and a mosquito, while both carrying moral worth, do not share complete moral equivalence to me. If that's speciesism and not a refutation of it, I'm okay with that and I'll own it, because I will never be swerving my car into a pedestrian's path to avoid running over an ant (or into a cat's path, for that matter, because I'm not all about human beings). I'm sure that makes me just like an antebellum slave owner or something, whatever. More generally, I agree that suffering is bad and killing is wrong for all life, even plants and fungi, but I do not see by what principle condemnation of intra-species distinctions invariably remains valid when generalized between species, especially when not all species apparently count. While equally regrettable, not all systems of bias and discrimination are morally interchangeable, and acting like they are, especially just to score rhetorical points, ignores and erases the historical and societal structures that brought the systems into being and give them their power. It's a creepy kind of moral equivalency to say that racism and speciesism are functionally the same on the sole basis that both involve discrimination based on arbitrary biological differences. It brings to mind a professor for whom I worked, who loved comparing the "infant genocide" of abortion to the Holocaust. Things can be similar while not being the same. We got the professor to stop eventually, by the way. It was, thus far, the longest and most awkward meeting of my professional career.

Tycho, the problem is that you haven't proven anti-speciesism to be a compelling or totalizing philosophy. Whenever someone points out that your central criterion of physical suffering is arbitrary, especially since it excludes plants, or when someone points out that the experience of humans is quantitatively or qualitatively different from the vast majority of animals, you immediately resort to analogies to racism. You might think that this is an effective means of debate, but I assure you that it is not, because: Whatever else, you are implying that people who disagree with you are effectively racists. It might be true, in your eyes, but it is almost certainly not true in their eyes, of which you have to be aware by now. Therefore, you are making the comparisons to distress people who disagree with you, because there is no other possible effect in these circumstances. In that case, I am not thrilled by your putative motives for having this conversation. You have been consistently unable to establish, on a moral level, why being a different species of animal is no different from being a different gender or race within the same species of animal, but totally different from being a different kingdom of life or from being an inanimate object or a intangible concept. When people ask these questions, you caricature them, ridicule them, and then reiterate your analogies to racism and sexism. See my first point. Inventing a hypothetical racist person that you insist other people in the conversation ought to interrogate, without owning the beliefs you put forth through him, is extremely problematic for discourse in good faith, not least because it is textbook deflection. You are not presenting things you believe or even things you used to believe. You are quite blatantly erecting a strawman of a person who may or may not exist, but whom you are free to define, and it is up to everyone else to avoid resembling the arguments of that strawman. Again, see my first point. Defending or attacking a set of beliefs because it has similarities or differences with other sets of beliefs generally agreed to be immoral or unethical does not make an effective case that the first set of beliefs is or is not immoral or unethical. Continuing to force the conversation back toward analogies with those other sets, rather than evaluating the first set on its own merits, is derailing behavior, in addition to ensuring that people who disagree with you must continually confront the immorality and unethicality of those sets. Again, see my first point. Overall, you keep using racism and sexism to shut down dissenting viewpoints within this thread. You are taking advantage of the Thumbs here as liberals with tendencies towards social justice in order to herd them in the direction of your conclusions without doing the actual legwork of convincing them. As you've said repeatedly, no one wants to be called a racist or a sexist, but you're the only one who keeps doing it. When you dismissed my questions about plant suffering out of hand, I could easily have started calling you a sentientist and making comparisons to MRAs who have no overt problem with other races but who harp on "biotruths" about how women (plants) have important biological differences from men (animals) that make discriminating against them (eating them) okay, but I didn't, because I didn't want to waste your time obliging you to debunk my pointless and inflammatory analogy before getting to how you actually feel. You seem to have zero interest in that from the vast majority of people in this thread, which makes me wonder why you're even here, unless it's just to call people out and make them feel bad for believing what they do. Again, see my first point. I'm also just incredibly disappointed by your response to Bjorn's latest post, which was incredibly thorough and thoughtful. Your response was effectively, "Either I'm right or my entire morality is unworkable. Therefore, I'm going to act on the assumption that I'm right until it's proven otherwise." Why are you allowed to have this attitude about what you believe but everyone else is not? Why is talking to you about this topic even worth my time, when you repeatedly do the above things over more than a half-dozen pages?

Okay, I'm going to pound down the rest of Shirobako right now, because they just had a cameo by an obvious Hideaki Anno expy, the director of Neon Locomotive Aviangarden, acting as spirit guide to the protagonist in episode 12! This is the second anime I've watched in the past year that has made such blatant and bizarre statements about Anno's personal life, namely that he wears the same tracksuit every day while lounging around an apartment with tons of otaku shit but no furniture. The previous was Insufficient Direction, which was really funny if you're really curious about his personal life or if you love Kamen Rider. Ooh! Looking up these pictures informed me that a former college classmate of Anno made a manga about going to school with him (and other incredibly important people in 1990s anime). It looks... worth downloading, at least.

Yeah, like a year ago, and I still find myself calling stuff "lame" and then immediately going "Shit!" in my head. Old dogs and new tricks, etc.

Bertrand II: 1072-1093 Count no man happy until he is dead. If that is the case, my child Garcia is now happier than I have ever been, after only six months of life. I am unsure if the infants of Purgatory are Catholic doctrine yet, but if they are, I wish him a swift passage through the darkness and to the throne of glory. Amen. Five years and almost nothing accomplished. I am slothful, as well as a little bit shy now, but this is ridiculous. Bringing a recalcitrant bishop to heel is barely a drop in the bucket that must be filled. Despite my retiring nature, I need to steel myself for greater things if I am going to seize a crown of my own! First step, marry a second wife — rather, a third wife according to history, but whatever. Since I have royal pretensions, only the kinswoman of an emperor is suitable for me. My cherished liege, Henry IV Salian, does not see my stature sufficient to marry even his sisters or nieces, so I turn to the other Rome, ruled by Constantine X Doukas. I marry his daughter Anna, a genius by all accounts and well enthused at the prospect of being a future queen, at least once the bride price arrives. To cement the bond between the Bosonids and the Doukas, I marry my other sister to Anna's brother Andronikos, who is a typical Greek insofar as he is very skilled with money. A dual wedding, the best way to ensure eternal friendship between two houses! It almost salves the wound of Andronikos' prompt lynching when the peasants were terrified of his strange words and ways. Oh well. In what is quickly becoming our house motto, whatever! I have the marriage, I have the money, so now it is time to make clear to all my ambitions. From now on, Bertrand of Provence will style himself King Bertrand of Provence. Surely recognition will follow. As if blessed by God Himself, Anna and I fall deeply in love and soon have a son. I name him Acfred, a familial name of the counts of Carcassonne, as a small atonement for the murder of my sister near those mountains. He is my beautiful boy and I will treasure him for all time. He is also born sickly, though not quite so much as the pneumonia of the dearly departed Garcia, so I began a strict regimen of fasting and chastity to speed his health. The priests of my court, especially the bishop of Nice with his powerful sacral knowledge, tell me that this is pleasing to the Lord, who does not want to see us become too closely tied to earthly things. I can see what they mean, for my son is manifestly a gift from heaven! The rewards are quick in coming. My first daughter by Anna is a bright and loving child. We quickly become best friends, despite over three decades separating us. Children really are a joy! I am beginning to wonder whether the unlucky years of my first marriage, especially her childlessness and then death in childbirth, were a result of Mathilde's sin. Certainly, there is nothing like that between Anna and me! We even have a second boy, which I name Jaufret after my cousin, just recently departed from this earth. Of course, having him leaves me with some disquiet. To be sure, Provence is wealthier than the lands of southern France and eastern Spain and it is safer than the war-torn lands of northern Italy and southern Germany, but it is nonetheless impoverished and threatened by the scourge of a partible inheritance. It pleased my forefathers to see their lands divided equally among their children, regardless of merit, but when I look north to Forcalquier, where my listless cousins rule, I think fearfully of what enmity could arise between Acfred and Jaufret after I return to the Lord. My fruit will not be a kingdom scattered to the winds. For now, I will choose Acfred as my heir in toto, but I will make it clear as I raise him that his brother is his charge just like he is mine. After all, that is the nature of lordship. A man might be elected to it, but he cannot elect which parts of it he wants for his own. Meanwhile, the world around me is falling apart. Some years ago, early in my reign, the Holy Roman Emperor raised an antipope, Theodore III of Aquileia, in opposition to the reform papacy that denied the supremacy of a lay emperor under heaven. It was of no notice to us in Provence at the time, but in 1093 the death of Pope Alexander II and the election of Pope Hormisdas II inspired Guzelin I Salian, the new Holy Roman Emperor, to install his candidate in Rome and end the schism. The war was not even a year in length. The might of the most Christian emperor was on display for all, and even the pleas of the beleaguered Hormisdas to turn it against the Saracens desecrating the birthplace of Christ beyond the sea fell on deaf ears. I doubt this brief controversy over investiture will even be remembered, a generation from now. The writings of the church fathers were just so clearly in favor of the emperor's position. Render unto Caesar what is of Caesar... The earthly sword is the rule of law... Anyway. Hormisdas fled and gave his blessing to an antipope in the frontier kingdom of Castile before dying, but that fraud is of no account. The universal Christian empire is whole once more and forevermore. Of greater concern to me and mine is the duchy of Dauphiné. I finally have a plan that will unite it forever under the Bosonids, and it won't take any work at all...

Well, as far as I know about the Black Sox angle, the league brought in the commissioner equivalent of Judge Dredd, who ruined dozens of careers in order to root out anyone even reminiscent of corruption. I'm not nearly so familiar with the Pete Rose thing, besides characters in sitcoms occasionally having very strong reactions to his banning, but I'm wondering if there'd be the will and the ability to break down and rebuild an entire sport today. I'd hope so, but I doubt it. Say one thing about a massive cheating scandal, I'd probably watch at least a few games after a rigged World Series, out of sheer rubbernecking interest. It wouldn't be good for the sport long-term, but the idea of a conspiracy of that scale in today's media-compromised landscape? Tantalizing.

I've decided for a while, with the help of many others, that "lame" is offensive, but I'm having such difficulty cutting it from my speech. It's a fun word to say and seems innocuous, so it's gotten under my skin in a way that I'm having trouble removing completely. Replacing it with something like "dumb" feels like I'm just trading a problematic word for a slightly less but still problematic word, too.

Don't worry about it. I've crushed CK2 to death so many times that "winning" it doesn't really do anything for me anymore. I finished my life around 1:30 today and it went pretty well, so I think I have you in a strong position to stay the course, at least. I'll have some brief pieces of advice, if you want them, after I finish all my recap posts.

I don't have it considered, but my gut instinct is that biological complexity forms a rubric for the relative morality of causing pain, with it all being bad but some of it being worse than the rest. I'll chew on it some more, but I'm just very skeptical that you have a single standard, based in a biological feature, that is absolute in determining the morality of an action towards another living thing, when you are so incredibly unforgiving towards other people's standards based on other biological features. Quite frankly, I do not see how pain is not just as arbitrary a standard of morality as skin color, gender, or sapience. "It's okay to kill it, it can't feel pain" and "It's okay to kill it, it can't talk" seem effectively like they're the same sentence to me, and your response doesn't really articulate to me why the latter is speciesism and the former is a solid moral position, except that pain "feels bad" to us, which is true enough but hardly the basis of an entire philosophy.

How about discriminating against organisms that cannot feel pain, or at least organisms that do not express it in anthropomorphic ways? Obviously there's a line you're willing to draw and I'd really like to know where it is, especially since you've just said that all biological differences are effectively arbitrary. Why is the ability to feel pain (or, again, to express it in ways that we as humans recognize) such a meaningful distinction if every other ability is not a valid basis for discrimination? Why does pain have a moral dimension that's unable to be generalized to life itself?

Race is overwhelmingly a social construct. Gender is overwhelmingly a social construct. Right now, I'm trying to figure out how much of a social construct biological complexity is.

Bertrand II: 1066-1071 Immediately I am already disappointed with my prospects. Nothing about my living situation says "royal" right now. I am married to Mathilde de Provence, a local noblewoman of no account either to me or to anyone else. The truth is, though I love my natural daughter, she was conceived out of wedlock and I married dear Mathilde, the most boring person under heaven, to preserve the honor of us all. Some years later, I am less than thrilled with my decision. Naturally, we are childless, as God does not smile on a loveless union, but I will be patient and tend my garden in the meantime. Getting an annulment is just too much work, anyway. In the first months of 1067, Genoa and Pisa start squabbling over rights and goods. I think it high time to remind the bishop of Nice that his de jure liege dwells not on the shore of the Ligurian Sea. In preparation, I dump my useless cousin, who had begun arguing that swords were the only siege engines we needed, and replace him with my mother's new husband, a scion of the house of d'Este in Lombardy. He, at least, does not talk so much, and thereby we get results. The bishop bends knee, although the local mayor and baron do not do the same until Duchess Matilda of Toscana annexes Genoa in a brief and bloody war a decade later. Unfortunately, mother is not nearly as happy with Uncle Oberto d'Este as I am, so I have him beaten and locked up for a bit after he strays from her. Everyone wins! Actually, I'm having problems with every part of my family. My once-beloved sister, married to the dukes of Toulouse, conspires with them for my throne. I heard, from a little bird, that she meant to make me fly from the parapet. I spend almost a year praying for the proper action, but receive no action, and therefore decide to repay like with like. I send several envoys west, carrying money I have earned from the two bishops now loyal to me, to make sure it is Adalaïda who takes the fall, literally! The act aggrieves me, not just because killing is a sin even if you do not draw the blade yourself, but also because I still have no heir from the womb of my boring disappointment of a wife. Adalaïda may have been filled with Toulousain poison, but she was blood of my blood and well fit to sit on my throne. With her regrettably dead, I have one less pillar to lean on. And then, in late 1069, my wife becomes pregnant and soon bears me a son! Mirabile dictu, a son for me! His name is Garcia, after a great hero of the Spaniards, and though he is a bit small and quiet insofar as I have come to expect infants to be, he is beloved to me and my line. Did I mention that Mathilde died in childbirth? Yeah... It is a tragedy, for sure, but no doubt she sits in heaven right now, at the right hand of the Son, smiling at me and my boy. I will raise him well and make our ancestors proud. The Bosonids are on the up and up!

I continue to be incredibly frustrated by Yuri Kuma Arashi. An allegory doesn't work if it makes no effort to be an actual story. Even Penguindrum, for all its many flaws, had interesting and funny things happening with Ringo's creepy crush and sundry penguin antics. Nevertheless, I watch the show every Tuesday night, the moment that AnimeSenshi releases the subs. I continue to be thrilled by Shirobako. After killing myself watching all of Hakuouki, which was shockingly bad even for an anime based on an otome game, I am thrilled to watch an anime with strong female characters who actually do things, even apart from my general love of media that lets me see an extremely competent person do their job. Nevertheless, because I love the show so much, I'm rationing myself to a couple episodes, every few nights. I continue to have really unhealthy viewing patterns for anime. Nevertheless, it's nothing a little tutturu can't fix.

"I don't think there's a way to come back from the early days of your sport being rife with a bunch of childish cheaters, and expecting anyone to ever take it seriously." I get what Sean's saying here, but I immediately thought of the Black Sox. That hardly killed baseball, even at the peak of the dead-ball era, and from what we can tell once baseball became better documented, it was only the tip of an iceberg of cheating, almost too widespread ever to be called out. People kept watching and the culture slowly changed, that's all. I know e-sports are different, but I also think society is remarkably forgiving of any competitive activity wherein cheaters are able to prosper, so long as there is punishment when they are caught and there are legitimate players with which to juxtapose them. EDIT: Okay, Jake talks later about institutions "getting burned" before they understand the public trust of viewership, if that's the idea then I agree with the rest being said.

Man, you can keep those french fries, then. Cold fries are the worst form of food.