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[Bumber]

We have actually been talking about dwarven social lives all along.

Haha, what?

[SixOfSpades]

That question was not addressed to you.

So what? It's a public forum, I'm allowed to have opinions, especially when it's considering an idea (cruelty-dependent goblins) that I came up with.

Each goblin knows that every goblin is going to try to hurt him and therefore he avoids all the other goblins, except when he is seeking to hurt another goblin.  . . . There is no goblin society is there?

I'm going to be direct here, and just flat-out ask you if you have ANY intention at all of ever supporting this thesis in any way, besides simply stating it over and over. And over. And over and over and over and over. I keep coming up with alternate possibilities, modifiers, workarounds, completely plausible snapshots of a working goblin society, and you just keep sticking your fingers in your ears & saying "Nuh-uh, can't happen, 'cause I said so." Repetition and persistence are remarkably poor substitutes for a competent line of argument.

Not so, the cruelty-quota goblins hate each-other more than they hate all other creatures, that is because all the other goblins have to hurt each-other but the other creatures don't need to hurt goblins.  The necessary basis for cruelty-quota goblin society . . .

Again with the gross and unfounded assumptions about how the entire goblin population must behave in a certain way, and that they could never behave in any other way.

the goblins agree to refrain from being cruel to each-other and meet out their cruelty on their hapless victims

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mete

The victims however cannot be goblins, since they would themselves have to be cruel to a third party, but they don't have any outlets except each-other or their masters, both of which results in their self-destruction.

So, you're saying that goblins cannot be very cruel to one another . . .

Everbody knows there *has* to be a whipping boy

Except, of course, when they can? I guess?

I was operating on the assumption that animal suffering does not count, in order to avoid opening a huge can of worms and derailing the thread into a discussion of animal rights.

While your deep and abiding concern for thread derails is duly noted, for our purposes it doesn't matter if animals suffer pain or not--what matters is that goblins think they do, making animals valid targets for cruelty.

You solution of isolation was assumed to imply either that animal suffering does not work for goblins, or the isolation is from animals also.

False. The situation of isolation first came up only in terms of civ-level interactions with other civs . . . or lack thereof, necessitating some form of internal conflict within the goblin civ itself. The discussion didn't even mention animals in any context, as you should know because you took part in it:

. . . is genocide against goblins acceptable because if goblins are allowed to survive they will necessarily have to hurt other beings in order to survive and stay sane?

Other beings, yes, but not necessarily other races. An isolated goblin civ could happily keep itself occupied with gang wars and other forms of infighting. Even if it wasn't isolated, this civ could still keep its cruelty directed inwards if it was consciously trying to restrain its evil tendencies, or (more likely) to avoid pissing off a far more powerful neighbor.

Only really nasty forms of torture can overcome this rational comprehension.

Pardon my bluntness, but are you speaking from experience, or from out of your ass?

Do not make the fundamental intellectual error of the racist and ethno-nationalist, that of confusing groups with classifications.

Do not make the fundamental assumption that the tigerman has spent 20 credits in night school taking courses in Understanding Racial Differences 101 and Avoiding Hate Speech.

This is why goblin-groups are a bad idea for goblins.  Goblin Bob does better if instead of fighting along with his fellow goblins, he defects to join the tigermen group and fight against the other goblins.

Yeah, because that doesn't go directly against literally every single depiction of goblins and orcs ever made.

Joining that group means he has a huge number of victims to choose from, enough that the tigermen will not realise the classification-level conflict that exists.  It gets better in that if the tigerman group expands and grows, there are an ever greater number of victims for Goblin Bob and an even lower risk of exposure.

Wait, what? "The tigermen will not realize the conflict"? "Lower risk of exposure"? I can't quite work out what you think you're saying here, but you seem to be suggesting that Goblin Bob is frequently being cruel to his tigermen "friends" . . . and somehow they don't know it's him?

People can basically be sure for two reasons.  One is they are clever enough to know why everything they are saying is true and you are not yet clever enough to prove them wrong.  The second is that they are what I call intellectual authoritarians, they are sure because their authorities have told them such is so and all truth comes from those authorities.

And the third obvious possibility, which I am sure has occurred you but which you have omitted for most mysterious reasons, is that they are too stubborn to recognize the viability of any possibility but the one which they have already decided must be true--especially when this new possibility is suggested by someone they dislike.

. . . should I take that to mean that you do indeed actively disagree with the idea of inalienable human rights?

I cannot really decide whether I disagree or disagree unless I know whether I am dealing fundamentally with a moral concept or a legal one.  Since a great deal of war and chaos is the product of such a confusion I am forced to reject the concept of human rights.

If you really feel that your tortuous grasp of semantics is sufficient reason to disregard basic moral compassion . . . Well then, you are lost!

You can argue that they are wrong, but you don't have the 'right' to liberate their slaves because your morality gives them inalienable human rights not to be enslaved.

I already stated that "it's morally wrong to seek to forcibly impose one's own values upon another culture," four pages back, I'll thank you not to take this discussion back to where it was a week ago. Circular reasoning is bad enough, without an actual time loop.



I'm too bored to bother with knocking down the rest of your claims. GoblinCookie, this post of yours was largely a train wreck, jumping from one disjointed argument or incongruous digression to the next, with only repetition to hold it into some form of coherence. I'll just be happy that you will almost certainly never be in a position to impose your own ideas of morality, punishment, and evil upon others.

[Starver]

We have actually been talking about dwarven social lives all along.

Haha, what?

I'll be frank (...and you can be dean...) and say that I'm entirely ignoring those walls of text.

Yes, me. Walls of text. Ignoring.

I'm glad to know I needn't read them.

[GoblinCookie]

We have actually been talking about dwarven social lives all along.

Haha, what?

It really goes like this.  Dwarven Social Gatherings > Effect of oxygen on dwarven society > Need of humans for sunlight > Societal Effect of Goblins needing to be cruel.  So at no point did we ever stop talking about society.

So what? It's a public forum, I'm allowed to have opinions, especially when it's considering an idea (cruelty-dependent goblins) that I came up with.

In a thread that has already over-centralised onto ourselves, directing more discussion towards the black-hole of Six-Of-SpadesVSGoblinCookie is hardly a good idea. 

I'm going to be direct here, and just flat-out ask you if you have ANY intention at all of ever supporting this thesis in any way, besides simply stating it over and over. And over. And over and over and over and over. I keep coming up with alternate possibilities, modifiers, workarounds, completely plausible snapshots of a working goblin society, and you just keep sticking your fingers in your ears & saying "Nuh-uh, can't happen, 'cause I said so." Repetition and persistence are remarkably poor substitutes for a competent line of argument.

I have already supported the thesis with a wall of text, perhaps you could reread it?   

Again with the gross and unfounded assumptions about how the entire goblin population must behave in a certain way, and that they could never behave in any other way.

They are not gross and unfounded assumptions, they are the logical consequences of the cruelty-quota.  If all folks have to inflict a given amount of cruelty every month, this is a very big change and we cannot just assume things will go on as they would otherwise.

So, you're saying that goblins cannot be very cruel to one another . . .

Everbody knows there *has* to be a whipping boy

Except, of course, when they can? I guess?

No, I am saying goblins cannot be required to inflict actual suffering on other beings to meet a quota, or rather that this being so has consequences you are stubbornly refusing to accept.  Goblins can certainly be cruel in an ordinary sense, that is a different ballpark because that can be constrained by social context and societal regulations.  A cruelty quota cannot really be constrained, it can only be sated at the expense of some outside group. 

While your deep and abiding concern for thread derails is duly noted, for our purposes it doesn't matter if animals suffer pain or not--what matters is that goblins think they do, making animals valid targets for cruelty.

We are talking about a situation where the suffering has to be real.  If imaginary suffering works, then we can simply have our goblins pretend to hurt dummies can't we?   

False. The situation of isolation first came up only in terms of civ-level interactions with other civs . . . or lack thereof, necessitating some form of internal conflict within the goblin civ itself. The discussion didn't even mention animals in any context, as you should know because you took part in it:

. . . is genocide against goblins acceptable because if goblins are allowed to survive they will necessarily have to hurt other beings in order to survive and stay sane?

Other beings, yes, but not necessarily other races. An isolated goblin civ could happily keep itself occupied with gang wars and other forms of infighting. Even if it wasn't isolated, this civ could still keep its cruelty directed inwards if it was consciously trying to restrain its evil tendencies, or (more likely) to avoid pissing off a far more powerful neighbor.

  .  Restraining your evil tendancies makes no sense at all in the situation you are referring too, the goblins must hurt other beings, it has nothing to do with their personal evilness. 

Pardon my bluntness, but are you speaking from experience, or from out of your ass?

I prefer to call it common sense rather than speaking out of my ass.  If a person insults you unexpectedly then that will hurt you more than if a person tells you "hey I am going to insult you are 3.30 pm tommorow".  But if it was being roasted over a fire, then I doubt that foreknowledge would really make much difference; although it is difficult to test for ethical reasons.  Cruelty-quota goblin society tends towards a situation where everyone knows that everyone is going to have to hurt someone today, undermining the whole premise. 

Do not make the fundamental assumption that the tigerman has spent 20 credits in night school taking courses in Understanding Racial Differences 101 and Avoiding Hate Speech.

I was not talking to fictional tigermen, I was talking to you.  Things don't work that way objectively, what the tigerman subjectively believes is not what we are discussing. 

Yeah, because that doesn't go directly against literally every single depiction of goblins and orcs ever made.

Obviously, you made a major innovation to DF goblins and that innovation has consequences.  In all the other depictions goblins and orcs are cruel because that is what they are like, not because they have some quota for cruelty to meet for the month. 

Wait, what? "The tigermen will not realize the conflict"? "Lower risk of exposure"? I can't quite work out what you think you're saying here, but you seem to be suggesting that Goblin Bob is frequently being cruel to his tigermen "friends" . . . and somehow they don't know it's him?

Exposure here is the exposure that Goblin Bob is operating according to a cruelty-quota.  Also the more tigermen friends he has, the less often he has to mean to any of them, which means they are more likely to forgive him, provided he is lovely the rest of the time.

And the third obvious possibility, which I am sure has occurred you but which you have omitted for most mysterious reasons, is that they are too stubborn to recognize the viability of any possibility but the one which they have already decided must be true--especially when this new possibility is suggested by someone they dislike.

No, I am ommited it because they are the same thing!  You are no less an intellectual authoritarian if you declare *yourself* to be the authority and refuse to take notice of what anyone says because they are beneath you. 

In any case there is also a big problem in the world with "can't know, so I'm right".  This is where you start from a negative premise and then attack someone who positively knows something, relying upon the fact that they cannot be 100% sure in order to triumphantly declare "you don't actually *know* that", which allows you to then assert that actually the other side's position is really nonsense and actually you are right to dismiss.  When I said it was a big problem in the world, I meant it because that is basically how a global warming denier operates, they have no evidence or reasoning but instead pick holes in the position of the only people in a position to actually know (the climate scientists), to great effect in popular opinion unfortunately. 

If you really feel that your tortuous grasp of semantics is sufficient reason to disregard basic moral compassion . . . Well then, you are lost!

Human rights is not basic moral compassion, though a great deal of propaganda has gone into convincing you that.  Hear how often we have some bloody tyranny and we say it's got "bad human rights" instead of just saying they are bloody tyranny.  It is just a creed and one that is fundamentally flawed because none of it's proponents are ever willing to address the fundamental flaw in it, the conflation of law and morality, the "is so" and the "should be so".  Someone has in fact written a whole book on this problem. 

Human rights as a established thing basically go back to the French Revolution's, Rights of Man.  The consequence of their adoption was a huge self-destructive war which the French revolutionaries started because human rights de-legitimized all other sovereignties not based upon them, hence they were basically required to liberate the world by force.  The human rights concept tries to have it's cake and eat it, if it were to declare itself morality then it can be universal but it has no need for the whole paraphernalia of law that it aspires to have while if it were to declare itself law then it can no longer be considered universal.

Declaring a universal moral concept to be a law is practically tantamount to declaring yourself the Emperor of the Universe, which is why I am against the concept of human rights, it is not that I lack "moral compassion" but because I know what the logical consequences of such ideas are and have been in the past.

I already stated that "it's morally wrong to seek to forcibly impose one's own values upon another culture," four pages back, I'll thank you not to take this discussion back to where it was a week ago. Circular reasoning is bad enough, without an actual time loop.

I was saying your position is inconsistent.  In saying that other cultures have the legal right to violate human rights, you are in effect either denying their universality, or you denying that they are in fact law. 

I'm too bored to bother with knocking down the rest of your claims. GoblinCookie, this post of yours was largely a train wreck, jumping from one disjointed argument or incongruous digression to the next, with only repetition to hold it into some form of coherence. I'll just be happy that you will almost certainly never be in a position to impose your own ideas of morality, punishment, and evil upon others.

I am afraid you are out of luck; human rights are not only a dangerous concept, but they are also entirely a hypocritical dead-letter.  That means that figuratively speaking not only do I presently rule, but I have always ruled.  The reason why they are a dead-letter is that no government can actually adhere to them, all governments committed to such ideas are in fact lying and the reason for that is the factual basis of stable government is the very lack of any inherent legal rights pertaining to yourself simply by right of your humanity. 

It is like a pair of scales.  The government has no inherent right to rule and the citizen has no inherent right not be massacred.  Based upon this primeval balance a stable government can exist, the citizens agree to give the government the right to rule over them and the government grants the citizens the right not to be massacred.  All is well provided that everyone keeps their side of the bargain and the fact that both sides value their rights keeps them from violating the agreement, as with the termination of the agreement both sides would lose their respective rights.  Enter a hypothetical government that actually believes in human rights, now it has nothing to offer anyone since it is in effect inherently indebted to it's citizens to protect their rights to life.  Now there is no reason for the citizens to respect their right to rule, since regardless of how they behave they are still owed the right to live on account of being human. 

[Dorsidwarf]

I’ve never seen someone argue that all governments exist only by the constant threat of massacring their citizens. Sounds like it would make elections awkward since the old governments right to rule is being revoked in favour of the new government whoops they’re now mandated to kill everyone.

[GoblinCookie]

I’ve never seen someone argue that all governments exist only by the constant threat of massacring their citizens. Sounds like it would make elections awkward since the old governments right to rule is being revoked in favour of the new government whoops they’re now mandated to kill everyone.

It's not so much a threat as a promise or a contract; nobody get's massacred in return for nobody getting overthrown, the 'threat' is mutual as it were, it is the development of a mutually undesirable state.  The citizens are generally threatened with various bad stuff, being massacred by the government but one of them, but the government is also threatened with being overthrown either by the citizens or by rival foreign governments.  It does not matter at all here whether the government is elected by the citizens or not, since rival governments exist and also there are citizens who would disrespect the election results.  If the government is bound by it's own principles to grant everyone certain rights, then whatever rights are granted 'on the basis of being human' creates a debt which the government is then bound to pay. 

Since you are owed them, you do not have to offer the government anything in order to demand the government give it to you, which means the government essentially does not have any basis to demand the citizens uphold it's authority; since any other government is also bound to give them the same rights, on the basis of being human.  So the government falls and the cycle continues until a government comes to power that violates enough rights to destroy the presumption of the citizenry.  Once the citizenry comes to believe that they have no inherent rights, it becomes possible for a stable and enduring government to emerge. 

Anything I owe you I cannot offer to you.  Granted the government can grant minimal rights like the right to live as human rights and withhold the 'right to live a life worth living' to those that respect it's authority.

[Bumber]

The USA's Constitution establishes a government by the People, for the People. It's supposed to exist as a shield for the citizens to wield, not as a separate entity that will massacre you if you try to vote them out. A democratic government's authority is upheld because it's useful. Would you have us believe that a government ruled by martial law is inherently more stable because it has more rights to bargain with?

We have actually been talking about dwarven social lives all along.

Haha, what?

It really goes like this.  Dwarven Social Gatherings > Effect of oxygen on dwarven society > Need of humans for sunlight > Societal Effect of Goblins needing to be cruel.  So at no point did we ever stop talking about society.

The last two are only tangentially related to dwarven society.

Also, in practice, very little was actually discussed of the effects of oxygen as it pertains to their social lives. Either they give up being dwarves and live on the surface, or they have a way negate the issue and go on as usual.

[FantasticDorf]

I’ve never seen someone argue that all governments exist only by the constant threat of massacring their citizens. Sounds like it would make elections awkward since the old governments right to rule is being revoked in favour of the new government whoops they’re now mandated to kill everyone.

Um what? I think this thread should be wound to a close now or least compiled into a number of key points, im usually pretty competent handling walls of texts but i have no idea what the last few pages were about.

[SixOfSpades]

Yes, me. Walls of text. Ignoring.
I'm glad to know I needn't read them.

I think this thread should be wound to a close now or least compiled into a number of key points, im usually pretty competent handling walls of texts but i have no idea what the last few pages were about.

I would like to apologize, on behalf of GoblinCookie and myself, for this seemingly omnipresent scar on the front page of the forum. I wish it was more easily avoidable, but I just cannot abide deliberate attempts to stifle creativity just because somebody doesn't think the game should be played that way. At least I'll keep the remainder of this brief, and you have my word that our running disagreement will never again trouble another productive thread.

We have actually been talking about dwarven social lives all along.

Dwarven Social Gatherings > Effect of oxygen on dwarven society > Need of humans for sunlight > Societal Effect of Goblins needing to be cruel.  So at no point did we ever stop talking about society.

You list the thread's major changes of subject . . . to show that the thread stayed on the same subject?! Are you even trying to make sense?

I have already supported the thesis [cruel goblin society can't exist] with a wall of text, perhaps you could reread it?

In the words of Truman Capote, "This isn't writing, this is typing."

They are not gross and unfounded assumptions, they are the logical consequences of the cruelty-quota.

You have already shown yourself to be largely incapable of distinguishing between a logical argument and a gut reaction. I would ask you to provide a full breakdown of the logic process that you describe as a certainty, but it would only prolong the discussion and I know you couldn't do it anyway.

We are talking about a situation where the suffering has to be real.  If imaginary suffering works, then we can simply have our goblins pretend to hurt dummies can't we?

As has been previously stated (again with the time loops), a dummy is unlikely to convince the goblin that he is actually inflicting pain. It is probably the perception of cruelty that's most important.

Even if it wasn't isolated, this civ could still keep its cruelty directed inwards if it was consciously trying to restrain its evil tendencies, or (more likely) to avoid pissing off a far more powerful neighbor.

.  Restraining your evil tendancies makes no sense at all in the situation you are referring too . . .

It makes no sense to avoid a war?? Especially one you'd be sure to lose? And you say you studied History??

If a person insults you unexpectedly then that will hurt you more than if a person tells you "hey I am going to insult you are 3.30 pm tommorow".

Come on, you're making this too easy for me. If the school bully randomly sucker-punches you in the hall between classes, does that somehow hurt more than when he says, "I'm gonna kick your ass under the bleachers after school," & then follows through on that threat? Or is the delayed beating worse, because a) more people are gathered to watch you get creamed, b) he wants to put on a good show for them, so he's hardly likely to hit you only once, c) you've got the rest of the school day to waste on worry and dread, and even d) his status goes up even more because he showed enough confidence and style to warn you beforehand. If anything, spontaneous cruelty is the gentler of the two.

Things don't work that way objectively, what the tigerman subjectively believes is not what we are discussing.

Too bad. If the tigerman sees a group of 10 goblins kidnap his nephew, he's not going to memorize the physical description of the one particular goblin carrying the sack, he's far more likely to just hate goblins in general. Particularly since the tigerman knows that this is standard goblin behavior.

Obviously, you made a major innovation to DF goblins and that innovation has consequences.  In all the other depictions goblins and orcs are cruel because that is what they are like, not because they have some quota for cruelty to meet for the month.

It's an exact parallel to the innovation that Toady made when he decided that dwarves should have an alcohol quota. Hopefully you recognize the inherent futility in trying to explain precisely why he was right to do so, while I am wrong to suggest the counterpart.

This is where you start from a negative premise . . . relying upon the fact that they cannot be 100% sure . . . which allows you to then assert that actually the other side's position is really nonsense

Finally, you acknowledge the difficulty I indicated to you back on page 7: "You're placing yourself at a disadvantage arguing in this way: You imagine one situation and assume that that's the only way it could be, while all I have to do is provide one plausible counterexample."
But if you're going to try to stretch that to put me in the same boat as climate-change deniers? Good--I was waiting for the False Equivalence fallacy to turn up. The difference is that the evidence put forward by the climatologists outweighs that of the deniers to such a degree, the opposition isn't even statistically significant. But yours doesn't outweigh mine by any account: I'm just refuting your gut feeling, that a cruelty-dependent goblin society could never exist, with my credible stories, which illustrate how just such a society could exist just fine.

. . . which is why I am against the concept of human rights, it is not that I lack "moral compassion" but because I know what the logical consequences of such ideas are and have been in the past.

Are you still on about that? It's over, GoblinCookie! I have the moral high ground! You first lost it when you trivialized slavery, dug yourself deeper when you let your Lawful Evil self deliberately obfuscate the difference between legality with morality, and now you're putting the final(?) nail in your coffin by calling human rights a "dangerous concept".

In saying that other cultures have the legal right to violate human rights, you are in effect either denying their universality, or you denying that they are in fact law.

Wrong again! I know you won't listen, but here it is: The fact that members of certain other states have the legal right to infringe on other members' human rights, does not change the fact that they have no moral right to infringe on those same rights. And that's my final word on the matter.

That means that figuratively speaking not only do I presently rule, but I have always ruled.

Again with the hilarious choice of words. I'm not even going to respond to the substance of this, it's more fun to simply gaze in awe upon your ego.

No, I am ommited it because they are the same thing!

Oh! I was not under the impression that "I am sure because [my authoritative source] disagrees with you" and "I am sure because [I] disagree with you" were the same thing. But hey, if that's how you see it, thanks for going there.

You are no less an intellectual authoritarian if you declare *yourself* to be the authority and refuse to take notice of what anyone says because they are beneath you.

Hey, remember this?

You represent the ignorance of the unthinking mob and nothing else, sadly.  Your ideas are bad ideas, ignorance is where they come from and you act as the spokesmen for others like yourself; lesser men to myself might regard your words as worth something but I have no interest in what the unthinking mob has to say.

As I said, you wish to place yourself at the head of the ignorant mob.  The more stupid you are, the less you understand and the more things other people say seem 'ridiculous' to you.  I don't care if people think what I say is ridiculous, that is because they so much beneath my level they cannot comprehend anything being said.  They are also too ignorant to ask me to clarify what they don't understand.

Thanks for the lulz.

[MCreeper]

Many lulz was had while reading this.

[Egan_BW]

[shitpost]to be fair one does require a very high iq to properly understand and appreciate goblincookie's posts[/shitpost]

[Ninjabread]

FantasticDorf, I have been compiling key points in the OP, provided they are actually relevant to social lives by my judgement, so people new to the thread should be able to skip through all the tangents, and the tangents of those tangents, and still be able to provide useful, non-repeating contributions to the thread. It's all in the spoiler at the bottom if you wanna check it out, which reminds me I should probably add in the stuff for the possible effects of games/sports on relationships and stuff, provided nobody else has anything to add on that subject.

Haven't really been reading the walls of text myself either, but I tried to un-derail the thread ages ago and that didn't seem to work, or at least not for long. I've just been skimming through looking for quotes that aren't SixOfSpades and GoblinCookie quoting each other, since if it isn't those two there's a slightly higher chance of things being on-topic. If anyone can let me know if I've missed anything that I should put into the OP due to this, please do, and thanks in advance.

[GoblinCookie]

The USA's Constitution establishes a government by the People, for the People. It's supposed to exist as a shield for the citizens to wield, not as a separate entity that will massacre you if you try to vote them out. A democratic government's authority is upheld because it's useful. Would you have us believe that a government ruled by martial law is inherently more stable because it has more rights to bargain with?

I already said that whether the government is democratic or not is not relevant to my point.  If you decide to disregard the election results and try to overthrow the democratically elected government, that government will end up taking your rights away, just as surely as a dictatorship will.  This situation is actually becoming something of a tradition in certain countries I find. 

Yes, the US Constitution gives the citizens certain rights, the whole thing works along the lines I was describing.  The citizens know that if they overthrow the US government, they overthrow the constitution and they will therefore lose their rights.  This works precisely because they are *not* human rights but rights accruing to the members of an organisation on account of membership; if the organisation falls then so do the rights.

Human rights on the other hand create an unbalanced situation.  I am owed (by everyone) the right to live simply on account of being human, then it follows that the government is in trouble.  It cannot offer me the right to live in return for their rule because it owes me that already.  If I decide I don't like the government and would rather take over myself, I can freely make a bid to seize power and then one of two things happens.  Either I win in which case I am the government or I lose in which case I can hide behind my human rights and try again later. 

Obviously from the incumbent government POV, it is not acceptable to simply have the losers able to try again indefinitely and therefore no government actually operates on human rights. 

You list the thread's major changes of subject . . . to show that the thread stayed on the same subject?! Are you even trying to make sense?

They are all about the in-game social behaviour.  I did not list any topics that were not, though there are such topics. 

You have already shown yourself to be largely incapable of distinguishing between a logical argument and a gut reaction. I would ask you to provide a full breakdown of the logic process that you describe as a certainty, but it would only prolong the discussion and I know you couldn't do it anyway.

We have already done that. 

As has been previously stated (again with the time loops), a dummy is unlikely to convince the goblin that he is actually inflicting pain. It is probably the perception of cruelty that's most important.

Dummies stands-in for theatrics in general. 

The goblin is pretending the dummy is a real being he is inflicting pain on.  Maybe some other goblin is sitting behind him screaming in order to make the situation more realistic.  If the problem is only the lack of realism, then better theatrics can solve the problem without anyone actually getting hurt. 

It makes no sense to avoid a war?? Especially one you'd be sure to lose? And you say you studied History??

Potentially they do not have any choice, they have to find other beings to hurt and the only way for their society to avoid self-destruction is if those beings are from other societies.

Come on, you're making this too easy for me. If the school bully randomly sucker-punches you in the hall between classes, does that somehow hurt more than when he says, "I'm gonna kick your ass under the bleachers after school," & then follows through on that threat? Or is the delayed beating worse, because a) more people are gathered to watch you get creamed, b) he wants to put on a good show for them, so he's hardly likely to hit you only once, c) you've got the rest of the school day to waste on worry and dread, and even d) his status goes up even more because he showed enough confidence and style to warn you beforehand. If anything, spontaneous cruelty is the gentler of the two.

Yes, surprise cruelty hurts more than expected cruelty.  If people you think are your friends hurt you, that causes you to suffer more than if you enemies do; everything else being equal. 

Too bad. If the tigerman sees a group of 10 goblins kidnap his nephew, he's not going to memorize the physical description of the one particular goblin carrying the sack, he's far more likely to just hate goblins in general. Particularly since the tigerman knows that this is standard goblin behavior.

Not unless the tigerman is a racist.  Why are we assuming that that is the case by default?

It's an exact parallel to the innovation that Toady made when he decided that dwarves should have an alcohol quota. Hopefully you recognize the inherent futility in trying to explain precisely why he was right to do so, while I am wrong to suggest the counterpart.

I never said you were wrong, in fact I agree with you.  The only problem is that you are stubbornly refusing to comprehend the societal consequences of the idea you proposed. 

Finally, you acknowledge the difficulty I indicated to you back on page 7: "You're placing yourself at a disadvantage arguing in this way: You imagine one situation and assume that that's the only way it could be, while all I have to do is provide one plausible counterexample."
But if you're going to try to stretch that to put me in the same boat as climate-change deniers? Good--I was waiting for the False Equivalence fallacy to turn up. The difference is that the evidence put forward by the climatologists outweighs that of the deniers to such a degree, the opposition isn't even statistically significant. But yours doesn't outweigh mine by any account: I'm just refuting your gut feeling, that a cruelty-dependent goblin society could never exist, with my credible stories, which illustrate how just such a society could exist just fine.

You do love to disagree SixOfSpades.  That is pretty much what I am saying, the people who are in a position to know and hence actually have the ability to provide evidence claim that climate change in happening.  The deniers on the other hand, rather than being able to counter them in effect argue by stating that "you can't be 100% absolutely sure that climate change is happening and that we are responsible, therefore I can deny global warming all I wish". 

Firstly it was not my claim that cruelty-dependant goblin societies could not exist.  The only thing I was ever saying is that such a society cannot exist in isolation from suitable non-cruelty dependant creatures. 

Are you still on about that? It's over, GoblinCookie! I have the moral high ground! You first lost it when you trivialized slavery, dug yourself deeper when you let your Lawful Evil self deliberately obfuscate the difference between legality with morality, and now you're putting the final(?) nail in your coffin by calling human rights a "dangerous concept".

I was against the human rights concept precisely because it presently obfuscates legality and morality.  So how then am I the one doing that?

Wrong again! I know you won't listen, but here it is: The fact that members of certain other states have the legal right to infringe on other members' human rights, does not change the fact that they have no moral right to infringe on those same rights. And that's my final word on the matter.

How am I wrong when you are agreeing with me? 

[SixOfSpades]

No, GoblinCookie. It's over. It's perfectly understandable that you would want to salvage some dignity, but we're done here. You are intellectually disarmed, and ethically without a leg to stand on. And what's more, everyone knows it. It's time for you to accept it, and move on. This forum is not for debating the niceties of governmental overthrow, or for teaching the fundamentals of logical argument, or for exploring what "racism" means in a fantasy setting, or for discussing human rights. I was willing to humor you for a while, true--but the forum's patience, along with my own, has officially worn thin. That's why my last post was so punishing, and this one is so dismissive. Because not even I am listening to you any more.

[KittyTac]

Jeez. This was a long one.