Trolley Problems and Protest Votes - The Lagrange Point Vol. I, Iss. 16

Welcome to issue #16 of The Lagrange Point! Big welcome to the latest subscribers. Thank you for signing on, and please, continue to spread the word to others!

Apologies again for the half-issue last week. I'm feeling a lot better after my e.coli adventure, and will hopefully be full steam ahead into the winter season. That said, the rantable I had planned for this week still can't quite come to fruition as B.C.'s election results are still not completely confirmed. So it's a bit of a filler this week as I reluctantly turn my gaze southward...

In This Issue

Distant Early Warnings

• More comics, more games, more fun!

Crafter's Corner

• Making your own Chaos Dwarves

Rantables

• Trolley problems and protest votes

It's a quiet time of year for new releases, so things are a little Kickstarter heavy, but there's lots of neat projects here!

Calgary-based game studio Zugalu is putting their first AA game, Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown, into Early Access on November 6. A medieval-fantasy city-builder, the game sees you take on the role of a refugee king, fleeing to a faraway land to lead your people as you create a new settlement. There are lots of challenges in your way, including the Waelgrim, a mysterious entity that can curse or plague your land but could also be your kingdom's salvation, as well as the indigenous people of the land you've settled in. The game has been in development for years, so it's exciting to see Zugalu moving towards a finished product.

Over in the meatspace of gaming, first-time game maker Iorahkwano Gabriel has launched a Kickstarter for his debut, Kanata: The First Sacrament. Gabriel hails from the Mohawk Nation of Kahnawake and is a recent graduate of Lasalle College's Game Design program. His game is a horror survival co-op for up to four players, and pulls from Indigenous myth and legend for some of its spooky content. The Kickstarter closes on November 21!

Shuster-winning comic creator Elaine M. Will is crowdfunding her third graphic novel, The Last Band on Earth. The Saskatoon-based artist's latest work sees noise rock band The Dead Layaways desperately trying to escape a city ruled by demons in a post-apocalyptic wasteland (or at least, that's what the demons tell them...maybe there is something else out there?). It's intended as a metaphor for being a creative person trying to survive in a world openly hostile to your existence.

And lastly, another Kickstarter comic worth a look comes to us from Toronto-based animation artist Rob Sales, who's delving into the world of graphic novels with The Shoehorn Tales, a Victorian-era horror-advanture. Sales' Kickstarter is actually for the first in what he hopes will be a series of books starring Thomas Shoehorn, his semi-heroic layman-turned adventurer. The first book is subtitled "The Tale of the Lost Pyramidion" and sees Shoehorn thrust into a world of werewolves, imps, ghosts and all manner of supernatural entities as he investigates his father's disappearance.

I'm a big fan of conversion work with miniatures, not least because it's a great money-saving way to craft your way around some of the more expensive models out there. In this case, I found an excellent series of tutorials on how you can make some pretty sick Chaos Dwarves out of nothing more than the old Battle for Skull Pass dwarves and a few bits and bobs. Full credit to Xander's Arcane Study for his Youtube tutorials!

I modified his techniques slightly to make use of things I had on hand. For starters, my Chaos Dwarf masks were repurposed Night Goblin shield emblems, with the fangy-bits cut off. I also made use of Militia and Empire bits for some of the weapons. From there, it was an easy matter of locating some muscly Chaos Marauder bits on eBay for an affordable rate, then snipping off the old dwarf arms and fitting these in place. The first two photos show that pretty well.

The hardest part by far was cutting away the "good" dwarf beards and replacing them with the "Babylonian braid" style that the Chaos Dwarfs are known for. A trusty exacto knife and some persistence saw to the task. As you can see from the little group, they look pretty decent en masse!

For some Hobgoblin wolf riders, I took some vintage night goblins I had on hand, cut away their legs, and swapped in some multi-part wolf rider legs instead. Because the vintage night goblins had a naturally slimmer build than the current crop, I actually felt I didn't have to make any further alterations, aside from giving the fanatic a bell in place of his ball-and-chain to make him into the musician.

Alongside an official Hobgoblin, they actually look pretty similar!

The more ambitious conversion was transforming my Skull Pass night goblins into Sneaky Gits. This involved snipping them in half at the waist, cutting away their feet, then pinning them together to give them added height and bare feet, all of which came from more wolf rider legs.

You can see an unfinished one on the right there, with his pinned legs exposed. I used big globs of putty for their bellies and limbs, and I think it works pretty well. For the extra daggers I snipped off the pickaxes from the dwarven miners, which worked handily as stabby tools.

And lastly, I transformed the Dwarven Engineer into a Demonsmith with a little facial work and a new hat:

He is my evil Santa, and I love him. I'm hoping with a decent paint job these guys will come out looking great. Chaos Dwarves have low-key been my favourite army in Warhammer for a while, but the miniatures have always been exorbitant to purchase, so this low-cost alternative was right up my alley!

There's a very basic morality problem that has become so well-known it has transformed into a part of internet meme culture.

You're standing beside a rail track and you see there's a runaway trolley coming your way. Ahead on the track, there are five people who are unaware of the danger and they will definitely be killed by the runaway trolley on its current path.

Beside you is a switch, which can put the trolley onto another track, where there is only one person. You can choose to engage the switch put the runaway trolley onto this other track, but the single person will definitely be killed instead of the five.

Do you pull the switch?

The reason this is considered a very basic level of ethics is it comes down to a simple numbers game: in a totally neutral position, without knowing anything about the five people or the one person, you SHOULD pull the switch, right? The needs of the many, as Mr. Spock poignantly observed, outweigh the needs of the few.

But what happens when, say, the five people are all Nazis? And the one person is a life-saving cancer doctor? Obviously, we should kill the Nazis, right?

Or suppose we change the mechanics of the conditions. What if it's a single healthy transplant patient, and their organs could save five people, but we'd have to kill the healthy person? Does the ethical situation change because we're substituting medical ethics for a runaway trolley?

I imagine that American voters are facing down these kinds of questions right now as they head for what promises to be an election of no small consequence. There are people who are saying, quite rightly, that this could well be the moment where America goes full fascist dictatorship, electing a criminally convicted, misogynistic racist to its highest office even as he promises to effectively eliminate democratic freedoms, drawing up enemy lists that include opposition politicians, judges, lawyers and journalists, among many others.

But at the same time, I know there are voters in the States who are justifiably pissed off at how, yet again, they are being forced into a binary choice where neither option is promising any kind of monumental change to a status quo capitalist oligarchy which is completely unsustainable. Kamala Harris may promise taxing the rich, or eliminating tuition, or what have you, but it won't matter a tin shilling if it does nothing to address the rot at the heart of American democracy that landed them here to begin with.

That would mean tackling the military industrial complex, throwing out the electoral college, wrangling the Supreme Court into submission, re-enshrining Roe v. Wade, and a host of other things, not least of which includes the Americans' staunch refusal to eliminate arming Israel, a country which has fully embraced far-right politics as it embarks on a genocidal campaign that shows little signs of stopping.

Under those conditions, it's not a terribly compelling message to get out and vote, even with the ominous threat of an orange-faced tyrant and a Christian Nationalist movement fully empowered to eliminate liberal thinking. Yet when one lodges a "protest" vote, and does not come out against the literal fascists, is one not simply choosing to let the trolley crush the larger share of innocents?

In other words, American voters have been forced into a veritable trolley problem on a massive scale. Do they pull the lever and divert the runaway trolley, knowing Palestinians occupy some kind of nightmarish Moebius Strip super-position, strapped down on BOTH sides of the rail, and will be killed either way? Do they do the LESSER of harm, knowing that it's still not enough, and people are going to suffer nevertheless?

I think you kind of have to, right? It's basic ethics to choose, at minimum, the lesser of two harms. But how often can one be called on to do that, as the situation becomes more and more untenable, and the tracks become harder and harder to tell apart? How many times can you crush one person to save five, before it becomes morally reprehensible?

There's a very funny setup in The Good Place, a show entirely about morality and ethics, where a character renowned for his anxiety is forced over and over again into the trolley problem. We laugh at his discomfort, but at the same time, it's acknowledged that this is literal torture.

I feel the torture of Americans who have been forced, yet again, into a trolley problem. Because I remember four years ago, when they were called on for that same lever, and they pulled it, grudgingly crushing the people who have suffered under Biden's years (and there are many; let's not pretend that he ended deportations or arming Israel or any number of sins). And they've pulled it before. And will be called on to do it again.

That is torture. And it's unfair.

If all the Harris administration has to offer, after another four years, is another trolley problem? They shouldn't be surprised if more and more people simply refuse to take part.

That wraps up issue #16 of The Lagrange Point! If you enjoyed this little e-newsletter, please consider subscribing, or, if you're already subscribed, sharing it with a friend or family member!

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Until next Monday, thank you for reading!

-Tim