#what if there were a catchall reference handbook thing

[powdermelonkeg]

Apologies in advance for the wall of text but I love lore debates!

So, I'm going to take issue with those counterpoints because the first quote in particular is missing a significant piece of context, including the last sentence of the paragraph which was left out in your post:

"Their appearance and their nature are not their fault, but the result of an ancient sin, for which they and their children, and their children's children will always be held accountable."

The player's handbook is referring to the ritual done by the Toril thirteen prior to the Spellplague and Asmodeus' ascent to godhood. The long and short of it is that the ritual took the majority of pre-existing tiefling lineages - not just of other devils, but also demons and creatures like hags and rakshasas - and made them ALL fall under Asmodeus' bloodline instead. This was done in advance of his ascent to godhood following the Spellplague, allowing him to have increased powers from his followers as a "racial god" since the ritual made it so that every tiefling had his bloodline, and thus contributed to his godly power. This is important to the quote, because one of the biggest side-effects to the ritual was that it had a major impact on how the infernal heritage showed itself.

Once Asmodeus became a god, the ritual took affect and most all tieflings born in from the 15th century onwards were Asmodeus tieflings, regardless of if their bloodline started with him from the start, or was obtained during the ritual, and by extension, took on the devilish physical traits. It also made it impossible to dilute the infernal blood through intermarriage, and ensured it would always take priority over other racial traits.

If grandma warlock swore her blood, she'd look like a tiefling, her child would look like one, and her child's child, and so on and so forth. If your argument is that the deal grandma made specifically came with the stipulation that the blood wouldn't be claimed for multiple generations, I don't think the poll question applies since at that point the elvish heritage is no longer relevant - the kid's basically been an infernal since before they were born. Any combination of parents and races could have been involved, at the end of the day, the bloodline's infernal and it'll show.

No apologies necessary! This is my favorite thing too.

So you're right in that I omitted that part of the quote, but that's because I thought it was referring to a different part of D&D mechanics, that being wanting to standardize tiefling appearance into the "humanoid, horned, stereotypical-devil-colored" for mechanical simplicity, and was therefore irrelevant. So now it doesn't matter if your bloodline had an orthon for a dad or an erinyes for a mom, you're still going to come out looking like a wingless cambion.

I will concede that grandma warlock likely DOES take on the transformation, based on how the lore's worded. I don't know that this retcons entirely the whole "skipping generations" bit from counterpoint 2 (it might be one of those "DM's discretion" things), but it does line up well with the whole pact deal.

However: Fey'ri.

Lore-wise, as far as I've researched for this, fey'ri are the result of sun elves trying to strengthen their bloodline by intermixing with tanar'ri (succubi specifically). That's a very specific origin, BUT, explicitly stated, they are to elves what tieflings are to humans. Ignoring splitting hairs over terminology ("tiefs are human-based, fey'ri are elf-based" tiefs are a catchall for everybody for the sake of argument), it's clear that the base bloodline at least has SOME impact as to the form of the child.

So back to my original question. Pact made so it doesn't show up for a few bloodlines. Devil spawn born to elves. Elven lifespan?

[rolandfontana]

How to Avoid China Employment Law Problems, Part 1: An Employee Handbook That Works

With China’s economy in decline and with so many foreign companies in China laying off employees, it should come as no surprise that the Chinese government is cracking down harder than ever before on foreigner employers that do not comply with China’s employment laws and the number of employee lawsuits is correspondingly on the rise. We previously discussed this need for strict compliance in Want to Keep Your Business in China? Do These Things NOW:

If past performance is any indicator of future performance — and I firmly believe it is — we know well what foreign companies must do to avoid China problems going forward and we set out those things below. Before anyone panic (too much), let me just say that for the past decade or so, China has consistently gotten tougher on foreign businesses in China that are not operating legally there and though this announcement is a really big deal, it is more a change in scope than it is in kind.

In fact, two days ago, in How to React to a China Economy in Decline: The China Lawyer Edition, I listed out 8 things our international lawyers were seeing that were telling us that China’s economy is in decline. Item number one was the following:

The number of foreign companies getting into legal trouble in China. Whenever China’s economy slows, its government starts looking for foreign companies out of compliance with Chinese laws. It does this both to show its citizens that it is working on their behalf and to raise money by collecting on unpaid taxes, with interest and oftentimes steep penalties. In particular we are seeing yet another increase in China going after foreign companies doing business in China without a WFOE. See Doing Business in China Without a WFOE: Will the Defendant Please Rise and China’s Tax Authorities Want You.

Correspondingly it has become more important than ever for foreign employers to make sure they are complying with all of China’s national and local employment laws See China Employment Law: Local and Not So Simple. This post is part One in what will be a new series of roughly weekly posts laying out what foreign employers need to do to avoid the proverbial Chinese government knock on the door/employee lawsuit for failing to comply with Chinese employment law.

I start this series by discussing what you as a China employer should be doing with your Employer Rules and Regulations (commonly referred to as an Employee Handbook). I start this series with Employee Handbooks because these are such important documents under Chinese law and because their neglect so often causes major foreign employer problems.

Since China ramped up its employment compliance enforcement of foreign employers our China employment lawyers have been hit with just a ton of complex employment law matters for foreign companies fighting off China employment problems. Two “common themes” jump out at us from these projects as the most-frequently-needed services by China employers these days: employee terminations (especially of high-paid employees) and Employer Rules and Regulations/Employee Handbooks. The first should be obvious and not terribly surprising given what has been going on in China the last six or so months. The second is because many employers have now realized that to better manage their China workforce (or what is left of it), they need a clear and relevant and appropriate Employee Handbook that actually works for them and not against them, both for their existing employees and for their employee terminations. They need an Employee Handbook that lays the groundwork for how to make their employment decisions and that makes those decisions work under China’s employment laws.

For your Employee Handbook to satisfy these criteria, it must comply with today’s laws (not last year’s or a prior year’s laws) and it must comply with the laws of the locale in which your employees are based. In other words, using an Employee Handbook written for Shanghai four years ago when you now have employees in both Shanghai and Shenzhen is a recipe for disaster. Using an Employee Handbook for Shenzhen that is nothing more than a Chinese translation of your U.S. (or any other non-PRC jurisdiction) employee manual is another disaster waiting to happen. Oh, and one more disaster we keep seeing: Employee Handbooks created from a Chinese-language template that is not customized for the city or the industry or the employer and then is badly translated into English so nobody making the decisions really even knows what it says.

When our China employment law team is tasked with writing an Employee Handbook, the first thing we do is review our client’s existing employee rules/policies (if any) soo as to better understand the client’s HR program and to better be able to consider and account for our client’s HR goals. Drafting any Employee Handbook involves our balancing our client’s HR goals with the realities and the laws and other requirements of the client’s particular industry and locale. That is the proactive side of our Employee Handbook work.

The reactive side of our Employee Handbook work comes in when we are retained by a foreign employer in China with an employee dispute or a merger or a terminations or a mass layoff or a government compliance problem. It is from those instances where we have learned how so many foreign employers in China have Employee Handbooks that are either useless or affirmatively harmful for them.

We have handled countless China employment law matters where a bad Employee Handbook has cost the foreign companies months of hassle and tens of thousands of dollars — sometimes considerably more than that. On the flip side, we have handled countless employment law matters where a well-crafted and enforceable Employee Handbook has meant that all we employment lawyers needed to do was to confirm and slightly guide an employer’s previously made decision based on an applicable provision(s) in their Employee Handbook. By way of an example, we have handled situations where employers have wanted to terminate an employee for “not being a team player.” This is not a terminable offense under Chinese law, per se. But after we had gathered up all the facts regarding the employer/employee situation and reviewed the Employee Handbook, we found several instances of employee misconduct which would permit a unilateral termination without severance. Because it was obvious the employees had breached enforceable provisions of the Employee Handbook, their terminations went off without a hitch.

No Employee Handbook can cover everything, but it should be written to cover enough bases and to include enough appropriate and enforceable catchall language to allow you the flexibility to act on most employee problems. A good Employee Handbook also sends a strong signal to your employees that you understand and respect how China’s employment laws work and this alone goes a long way towards preventing employee and government problems in the first place.

Avoiding China employment law problems requires you have a relevant and timely and well-crafted China employee handbook. This should be your Step 1.

How to Avoid China Employment Law Problems, Part 1: An Employee Handbook That Works syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

[cymbrevon-blog]

Security and the Police of Souls: An Interview with Mark Neocleous, Part II

Read Part I here.

Nicholas: Article Twenty-four in Fundamentals of Pacification Theory mentions Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiatives and the state's urging citizens to partake in shared responsibility (i.e. If You See Something, Say Something neighborhood watch programs). As you write, these initiatives inform and empower a broader range of people and institutions to become part of the architecture of security and serve as intelligencers of the modern world. Relatedly, these programs have been challenged by the Skid Row-based Stop LAPD Spying Coalition in Los Angeles, amongst others, who instead frame them as part of the security state's architecture of surveillance. Would you explicate upon the role surveillance and intelligence play with regards to security?

Mark: The choice of the term 'surveillance' is yours. I don't use it in that Article in the Chapter. Indeed, I tend not to use it very much at all. My argument is about security, not surveillance, and I tend to avoid using the term where I can.

Nicholas: Why?

Mark: Because it would begin to look like too much like it's trying to be part of surveillance studies, when in fact it is pitched at a large and critical distance from surveillance studies.

Nicholas: Can I push you to say a little bit more about that?

Mark: The problem with the concept of surveillance, and thus in a sense the big problem with surveillance studies, is that the concept works in a catchall way. It's taken for granted that the state wishes to engage in surveillance, and once surveillance is taken for granted there is not much more to be said or done other than to point to the fact of surveillance. This means in turn that any new technology, any new policy, any new institution can be read as part and parcel of the process of surveillance. As a consequence, the concept of 'surveillance' ends up explaining not very much at all, and no meaningful analysis ever really emerges. This produces what is, for me at least, a major incoherence at the heart of surveillance studies. What this means is that the extensive empirical work that takes place in surveillance studies some of which is very good indeed fails to do little more than repeat the mantra 'surveillance', in a kind of desperate attempt to find yet more evidence of surveillance, again and again.

Have you noticed that one never gets the articulation of a theory of surveillance within surveillance studies? Look at the titles of the books in the field: Surveillance Studies: An Overview, Surveillance Studies: A Reader, Surveillance Studies: A Handbook, and Surveillance Studies: Monitoring Everyday Life. And then one gets a whole host of 'Surveillance and x'-type books: Surveillance and Space, Surveillance and Film, Surveillance and Security, and so on. Is there a book called, say, Surveillance: A General Theory? Or Theory of Surveillance? My point is that 'surveillance' is in many ways a concept in search of a theory. What is that theory? Well, the first thing we know for sure is that Marxism is certainly not that theory and Marxism should certainly never aspire to be it. It is not at all clear what role the concept of 'surveillance' might play in a materialist analysis. How do we integrate surveillance with a concept such as class, or state and civil society, or commodity, or exploitation, or primitive accumulation? Maybe the sociological background and orientation of 'surveillance' renders it essentially incompatible with materialist theory, and maybe that is also why so much of surveillance studies is inflected with a kind of muted Foucauldianism, despite the fact that the word 'surveille' in the title of the book that gets translated into English as Discipline and Punish is one of the most problematic terms in Foucault's oeuvre. And I guess the muted Foucauldianism of surveillance studies might then also explain why it relies so heavily on the Panopticon and panopticism, terms which again do very little to enhance our understanding.

On a different point entirely, my phrase 'architecture of security' wasn't intended as any kind of reference to Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's phrase 'architecture of surveillance.' Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's use of 'surveillance' makes perfect sense given what it is trying to capture under the term 'architecture,' namely a conglomeration of technologies and institutions and the way in which these act as a unity. It's perfectly reasonable to use the term in this way. But it's important not to try and structure a whole discourse or movement [solely] around it.

Nicholas: Even accepting your point about surveillance, my broader question still stands concerning intelligence and things such as suspicious activities reporting. In particular, I was interested in asking you about them as regards to security. Much of your work has argued that part of the challenge with lodging a critique against security not grounded in critical theory and a broad conception of police/police power, as well an understanding of (bourgeois) order, is that one ends up reinforcing security discourse by speaking in its terms (i.e. food security, housing security, social security, and so forth). The question I was building to concerns how the idea of pacification provides an entry point into lodging a critique against security (an anti-security) when, as you've argued, the latter effectively presents an analytical blockage for those seeking to challenge it? I was going to get to that question by first asking you about intelligence and actions such as the suspicious activities reporting.

Mark: The analytical blockage you mention is one way in which we can think about the difference between the critique of security and something like surveillance studies because the critique of security is a critique of something that we are told we all somehow desire. This means the critique has to consider not only the various practices carried out in the name of 'security' but also the fact that security has been presented to us as a fundamental human right ever since security appeared in the original declarations of rights in the eighteenth century. Rather than take this historical fact for granted, which would mean uncritically accepting that security is a human right and leaving it at that, the critique of security instead asks why security came to figure so strongly in those documents of the bourgeois revolutions. The critique of security asks after the connection between security and bourgeois thought in general. In other words, the key question to ask is why security is such a dominant concept in bourgeois ideology.

The overwhelming power of security as an idea and an ideal is precisely why it is an analytical blockage. This is why so-called 'critical security studies' within academia has held back from developing an actual critique of security in a sense, critical security studies is part of the blockage. But security is also now becoming a blockage for much of the Left which is too quickly and easily adopting the language of security. Take one of the examples you mention, 'food security.' There are few needs more fundamental, more sensuous, and more sociable than food which is one reason why food has historically been an incredible mobilizing force from eighteenth century bread riots through to twentieth century salt marches. The radicalism of the Panthers' attempt to actually ensure that children have a good breakfast lies in this very idea of food as a basic need from which other needs can then be satisfied and human capabilities realized and I say this regardless of the important debates between the Panthers about whether this detracted from other kinds of action. So we have food as a fundamental human need and a powerful foundation for political action precisely because it is such a fundamental need but all of that is now being subsumed under the idea of 'food security.' This subsumption is its nullification. It kills the radical potential in an idea such as hunger. It subsumes food into an object of political administration by the security state. To put it another way, socialism isn't about 'food security,' it's about satisfying human needs. The same applies to all the other things that are now having 'security' attached to them. The point is, the more we succumb to the discourse of security, the less we talk about the things we really need to talk about. The more we talk about security, the less we say about exploitation. The more we talk about security, the less we talk about human needs. The more we talk about security, the less we talk about the actual material foundations of emancipation.

Thinking of this blockage is one way of thinking about developments such as the suspicious activities reporting. What is of interest to me about suspicious activity reporting is less its operation as, say, a form of surveillance, and much more the means by which it interpellates us as the agents of security to the point where we are expected to constantly think security and to experience ourselves and others in security terms. This is not something new but is inherent in the logic of security, and we can learn a lot by thinking about this history. Let me get at this in a roundabout way.

For reasons which I won't go into now but which are to do with the book I am currently writing, I have been working my way through the transcripts of the hearing in 1954 of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had been director of the Los Alamos project and a leading figure behind the development of the thermonuclear bomb he is often described as the 'father of the atomic bomb.' At some point in the early 1950s, he gradually came under suspicion of being disloyal to the American state. This was a period in which millions of people had to undergo 'loyalty tests' to show that they were patriotic and nationalistic enough not to be considered a security risk. The loyalty tests that ensued were a kind of charade, part of the theatre of security. People were asked questions about their reading habits, sexual preferences, membership of clubs, choice of friends, and so on. This is what Oppenheimer faced, including questions about the fact that, for example, his brother's wife was in the Communist Party and that he had been a member of the Consumers Union. The Hearing also called a series of witnesses to answer questions about Oppenheimer's character and habits, and many of them declared that they didn't think Oppenheimer was disloyal in any way. Regardless, the Hearing eventually decided that Oppenheimer was a security risk.

Now, we might note in passing that despite the ridiculously flimsy nature of the accusations against Oppenheimer and the fact that more than enough witnesses said they did not see him as disloyal, the fact that he was nonetheless still regarded as a security risk is a reminder that the security system will always find security risks if only to prove that the security system is working as a system. Once you have the concept of a witch, you are surely going to find some witches. But that's not why I am mentioning the Hearings here. Rather, I want to pick up on a comment made by the Board at the Hearing, which is the Board's suggestion that every person must in their own way be a 'guardian of the national security' that's their phrase and that because everyone should be a guardian of national security it is right that the state 'searches the soul' of any individual whose loyalty is in question. This is such a lovely phrase that we should really think about what it means. One obvious interpretation, which was made at the time by The Economist, hardly the most radical of journals, is that this constitutes a claim to divine prescience beyond that attempted by totalitarian states. True as this might be, we can make a different point which is the idea that in the mind of the state, security should be in our very souls. Security should be part of the work of the good soul. Security is soul-craft. What might this mean? Well, it means that we can and should expect our souls to be constantly examined by a security state that seeks omniscience. It also means that in searching our souls the state might find something that we ourselves did not know was there. It also suggests that people should constantly search their own souls for any doubts about security. Security is not just a technology of the self, to use Foucault's phrase, but part of the government of the soul.

Maybe this is where we need to situate the suspicious activities reporting for it is part of a world in which intelligence-gathering is to be conducted not just by the intelligence services but by the people themselves, on each other. This is how security comes to make each and every one of us a suspicious person. 'If you see something, say something' is a slogan which also needs to be understood as 'if you do something someone will be watching you.' On the one hand, this is how security separates us from our fellow human beings. Security doesn't bind us to others it alienates us. On the other hand, and as regards soul-craft, security is increasingly central to our own loss of self to the extent that in the name of security we might at some point have to start suspecting ourselves of having suspicious thoughts, desires, or intentions. And what then should we do? Turn ourselves in, of course. Security demands it. And, to go back to the discussion from just a moment ago, this seems to me to be a more powerful, more pressing and far more troubling idea than simply labeling it surveillance.

Read the full interview in the Anti-Security Issue of The Socialist.

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