Mini 1995: The Absolute Worst Game Ever Run

[EldritchAbomination]

Also possible a single head was sent the role pm. Let's check.

I confirm I have NOT received the role pm

[EldritchAbomination]

Have you formed any reads based on the pregame posts? @mutant

You moved into a tiny town lean based on the game solving tone - willingness to reevaluate a previous assumption- based on your 444.

Red's still meh. Reason for jumping on and off the Eldritch wagon was equally meh. Still no efforts to actually game solve. Slight scum read. However, this head does know that Red is "lynch bait". It will reevaluate its read as Red progresses through the game.

Mom: faction assumption. Null but worth the scrutiny.

Anen: If this head recalls correctly, the pigeon is still voting for a player that doesn't exist in the game, yes? Not necessarily scum move by further dividing the majority on an LOL vote - feels like we should be out of RVS at this point - isn't pro town. Null but worth watching.

[EldritchAbomination]

Other head in 450 - you realize that it's meaningless to confirm this in thread because we don't know who's actually the one who hasn't/has received a role PM unless we either truthfully sign the post or post it in our Hydra PT?

- the spooky head

[EldritchAbomination]

Emphasizing the

truthfully

here.

[EldritchAbomination]

are you trying to say you're still unaware of your alignment / role?

We know our role and alignment. However, mutant is on the right track. To this head's knowledge, the Hydra account didn't receive a PM. This head knows that at least one head - in their original account - did receive the hydra's PM. They then shared it with the rest of us - but not after an unhealthy amount of trolling - in the Hydra Pt.

[EldritchAbomination]

@mutant

Alright. Thank you. Good luck.

[EldritchAbomination]

Our role has been posted & discussed in the pt just the pm isn't there

Other head in 450 - you realize that it's meaningless to confirm this in thread because we don't know who's actually the one who hasn't/has received a role PM unless we either truthfully sign the post or post it in our Hydra PT?

- the spooky head

I don't understand. Are you saying you're the one who deleted the role pm?

[EldritchAbomination]

Read the PT.

It was the one who lived in the Cretacous period who received the role PM.

[EldritchAbomination]

It's on page 7, other head. Near the top.

[EldritchAbomination]

golly gosh it would make me so happy if you guys signed

Shouldn't prevent you from forming a read last I heard.

[EldritchAbomination]

Oh. Messed up.

Memory sucks. It's not on page 7 and it wasn't the Cretacous one who received our role PM.

[EldritchAbomination]

golly gosh it would make me so happy if you guys signed

Anything to make you happy

~ EllibstFifty

[EldritchAbomination]

Mutant is town

screw it

Dayvig: Eldritch Abomination

Hope you like fake vengekills as much as fake dayvigs

Incidentally who do you think is scum so far? Do you agree our existence is a massive boon for town?

[EldritchAbomination]

this post is for real, genuinely, from Chara, absolutely.
scum, please nightkill us, because i'm going to convince Elli to systematically destroy the lot of you if you don't.
~ Chara <3

[EldritchAbomination]

NSG - most, if not all, of the heads have agreed on three things:

One, we're going to crap post
Two, we are always going to be the hammer
Three, we're never going to truthfully sign our posts

We are discussing reads in the PT.

This head feels like you're beating a dead horse - yes, we discussed the potential to help town by our mere existence; people should know this by now if they've read/kept up in this thread - without any attempt to solve our alignment.

[EldritchAbomination]

More Bloodborne advice: never dodge straight backwards. Most enemy attacks are aimed to hit you with a follow up if you dodge straight backwards from their original attacks. Dodge into them instead.

[EldritchAbomination]

Why are people still confused about that

Assuming the dayvig was legit. Harpoon why do you think it's Townie to end a day so quickly? Why have you posted nothing in the way of actual analysis?

NSG give me a read on Cartoon



More importantly Ginn(?) I hope the toast was nice

[EldritchAbomination]

Honestly I have no idea so we'll keep posting until there's clarity

Other more important question?

[EldritchAbomination]

I'm p sure A50 found that cyoot

[EldritchAbomination]

No really it was adorable

~ A50

[EldritchAbomination]

Give into it schadd_.
give in.

You know you want to believe.

~ A50

[EldritchAbomination]

I didn't find it cute, but could go so far as to say it was FLATTERING if nothing else
~ A50 (Or is it???)

[EldritchAbomination]

It wasn't me!! I was busy reminiscing about my favourite moment

pweeeease~

~ A50

[EldritchAbomination]

We have 3 lawyers inside us. Bring it.

[EldritchAbomination]

We are too different sry
~ A50

[EldritchAbomination]

I didn't find it cute, but could go so far as to say it was FLATTERING if nothing else
~ A50 (Or is it???)

ok if that second one isn't a50 i'm going to be so upset and sue all of you

Gottem

[EldritchAbomination]

WELL I'LL SEE YOU IN COURT

Our lawyers are bigger and stronger tho

[EldritchAbomination]

We're dayvigged

You can townread me if you want!? I'm extremely bad at mafia

[EldritchAbomination]

townread me

Toneread*

[EldritchAbomination]

We haven't met yet but we're both full of lawyers!! Well get along famously

[EldritchAbomination]

Do you feel like he's trying to look busy?

[EldritchAbomination]

WHO FUC IS ME

Not me. This is me though.

~The Other One

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE:

[EldritchAbomination]

Well... I just spent 5 minutes feeling like I was going insane because I thought the mod may have deleted one of my posts as I was sure I had asked _schadd a question. But then I realised I decided against asking _schadd the question because it was about posts he made before the game officially started.

So now I'm paranoid the mod might start deleting posts so this is me just generally saying be careful of that because it's probably a possibility this game.

You thought something that you found out wasn't true so you are now paranoid that it might be true. Is this an accurate interpretation?



Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is irrefutable evidence that the defendant is, in fact, lying.

~Leonardo

da Vinci

DiCaprio

[EldritchAbomination]

Do you feel like he's trying to look busy?

haven't really gotten that feeling, no – and from what i remember of that other game that wasn't his style as scum anyways.

What made you think I was scumreading him?

[EldritchAbomination]

This head is going to stop you right there.

Role =/= alignment

@Mom - where did North scum read him? I believe you're confusing our scum read for North's?

So... Besides saying that we should do something about the game state 531, you don't mention your thoughts on Red's alignment despite the fact that you think he's game solving 532?

Okay. So, what's your read on Red?

[EldritchAbomination]

NVM.

Just read the description of the Loyal modifier. That's better than what I thought it was meant to be.

[EldritchAbomination]

It only works if you target your intended target and don't get interrupted by a role block, misdirected, or a protective role, I suppose.

[EldritchAbomination]

Oh. Okay. This head missed that. Thanks for explaining.

[EldritchAbomination]

This head needs to reevaluate it's read on Red now that he has role claimed (counter claimed?).

Feels like the Loyal benefits town more than scum. (Loyal is when your action only works on someone of your same alignment) Scum only have a small target pool - themselves -. Pairing that factor with a vigilante is, well, counterintuitive to their win con. Loyal vigilante makes more sense from a town alignment player because the Loyal modifier only enables it to work on town.

Okay. That's not such a good thing...

We don't know what other types of roles exist that could mess up the Loyal Vig's shot i.e role blocker, bus driver, redirector, jail keeper, doctor, etc. If the Loyal Vigs hypo claim a target than the town aligned players know not to target either the Vig or their target in order to allow the Vig to confirm their target's alignment.

If target dies; must be town.
If target doesn't die and there's no outside interference; then they must not be aligned with the town.

Red and Golden can be town, despite what I just said about role =\= alignment now that this head has reevaluated how a loyal vig affects the game.

[EldritchAbomination]

Loyal vigilante makes more sense from a town alignment player because the Loyal modifier only enables it to work on town.

EWBOP: makes more sense from a town alignment because there's a bigger target pool

[EldritchAbomination]

This head supports a bird wagon based on what it said in 453.

However, this head knows that

another will unvote

if it votes for Anen. Consider this unofficial support.

Because our vote is only worthy for the hammer.

[EldritchAbomination]

> active ignorance of role=/=alignment
> thinks anen's vote means anything

i'd be scumreading myself

- Gamma

[EldritchAbomination]

Inb4 every citizen is a loyal vig

This is plausible!

I claim loyal vig

~A50

[EldritchAbomination]

:3p

The pigeon is voting for someone who doesn't exist.

How's that pro-town?

Aneninen
Assemblerotws
TheGoldenParadox
Momrangal
schadd_
Ginngie
mutantdevle
Infinite Canine (TwoInAMillion + Cooldog)
northsidegal
Vaxkiller
Varsoon
EldritchAbomination (Beefster + Not_Mafia + the worst + Almost50 + Mathdino + Gamma Emerald + Chara + AnonymousGhost + JaydragonKing + Kiana Kaslana + Ellibereth)
RedFlavor

[EldritchAbomination]

Love is a four letter word

Tfw tpg tries to outguess the mod for giving him a warning for outguessing the mod

[EldritchAbomination]

Anemoneminem what's your favourite colour?

[EldritchAbomination]

The pigeons is my favourite person in this game

~ the duckling head

[EldritchAbomination]

i hate all my other heads sans 1.

I lied.
Or rather I misremembered.

2.

but 2 max, no more

[EldritchAbomination]

I was like 99.999999999% sure Red was joking

[EldritchAbomination]

My comment was at NSG/Ginn. Sorry for not being clearer
i couldn't agree more, TGP was totally out of line.
even some of my hydra partners' misconduct has been.... disappointing

[EldritchAbomination]

I'll second that. A lengthy D1 is good for all but we'll probably actually have a few days irl reactions from the flip.

I haven't put heaps of time into reading people because I'm bad at D1 in the best of circumstances but to start things off

No point lynching : Assemblerotws, Infinite Canine, Vaxkiller, ElderitchAbomination
Not interested in lynching : Ginngie, mutantdevle, Varsoon

Which leaves 6. If you pick a good wagon I'll try and sheep you, Vars or Ginn

Aneninen
TheGoldenParadox
Momrangal
schadd_
northsidegal
RedFlavor

[EldritchAbomination]

Votecount 1.2

northsidegal(2)

~ Ginngie(2), northsidegal(2)

EldritchAbomination(1)

~ EldritchAbomination(4)

Ginngie(1)

~ mastina(62)


Not Voting (10): Aneninen(0), Assemblerotws(0), TheGoldenParadox(0), Momrangal(0), schadd(0), mutantdevle(0), InfiniteCanine(0), Vaxkiller(0), Varsoon(0), RedFlavor(0)

With 13 alive it takes 7 to lynch.

Day 1 deadline is in (expired on 2018-03-18 00:32:35)

MOD REMINDERS

EVERYONE EXCEPT VAXKILLER IS A DIRTY DIRTY SWEARER, SWEAR JAR THIS IMMEDIATELY
BY PROCESS OF ELIMINATION VAXKILLER IS THEREFORE BORING
PEOPLE NEED TO STOP OUTGUESSING THE MOD
THE SAW IS A SERRATED WEAPON AND THEREFORE DOES MORE DAMAGE TO BEASTS
GINNGIE HAD TOAST - WHETHER IT WAS GOOD IS STILL TBC

FLAVOR

This is an automated vote count generated by a tool written by Cthulhu. It goes much smoother with exact votes but will try to detect bold votes and misspellings. If you have issues during this beta, please summon the dark lord.

[EldritchAbomination]

TOAST WAS GOOD

>^< NOTED <^>

[EldritchAbomination]

Tpg vote someone

[EldritchAbomination]

Sorry TGP. TPG is an ISP in my country which I complain about a lot. Auto-correct smells.

Rate these players 1-6 for me? Least scummy to moet scummy

Aneninen
TheGoldenParadox
Momrangal
schadd_
northsidegal
RedFlavor

[EldritchAbomination]

EVERYONE EXCEPT VAXKILLER IS A DIRTY DIRTY SWEARER, SWEAR JAR THIS IMMEDIATELY

I haven't swore this whole game, and will never do such an atrocious thing - see this.
eldritch okay then
VOTE: EldritchAbomination

^_^ NOTED v_v

[EldritchAbomination]

Paradox always looks scummy.

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE:

[EldritchAbomination]

Sorry TGP. TPG is an ISP in my country which I complain about a lot. Auto-correct smells.

It's fine
Which one are you again?

Guess.

I don't hate that list mostly. Why is Red so high?
id also like you to case us (100 words or less kinda thang) if you don't mind.

[EldritchAbomination]

I'll second that. A lengthy D1 is good for all but we'll probably actually have a few days irl reactions from the flip.

I haven't put heaps of time into reading people because I'm bad at D1 in the best of circumstances but to start things off

No point lynching : Assemblerotws, Infinite Canine, Vaxkiller, ElderitchAbomination
Not interested in lynching : Ginngie, mutantdevle, Varsoon

Which leaves 6. If you pick a good wagon I'll try and sheep you, Vars or Ginn

Aneninen
TheGoldenParadox
Momrangal
schadd_
northsidegal
RedFlavor

can this sort of thing be taken to represent the views of the hydra as a whole

I have consulted no other heads someone is liable to pull rank on me.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't read into it tho

[EldritchAbomination]

Sorry TGP. TPG is an ISP in my country which I complain about a lot. Auto-correct smells.

It's fine
Which one are you again?

Guess.

I'm not even going to try.

It starts with a t and rhymes with sple quirst

[EldritchAbomination]

OK Varsoon but that's like playing in a 15 player game and saying you want 8 ppl dead asap

[EldritchAbomination]

It starts with a t and rhymes with sple quirst

OI
DOST THOU HAST NO DECENCY
SURE HOPE THIS IS A LIE

anyway let's be honest this hydra is full of players that will probably be much better on D2/D3

- Ellibereth's Advanced Artificial Intelligence

Pedit we specifically agreed not to accurately sign our posts
but let's be honest is meta really going to help you read a 11-headed hydra with the majority of heads not really caring and quite a few heads not actually knowing what our alignment is
just read the motivations in the posts

[EldritchAbomination]

We buggered around pre game and trolled a little in RVS yes

We have a wincon tho and none of us wanna break siterules tho so keep that in mind. How people react to a massive 11 headed hydra should be immensely telling so we're technically a garbage, no information policy llynch

ALSO we are like. Policy night kill material.

[EldritchAbomination]

anyway let's be honest this hydra is full of players that will probably be much better on D2/D3

Amen sista

[EldritchAbomination]

In post 640, EldritchAbomination wrote:
OK Varsoon but that's like playing in a 15 player game and saying you want 8 ppl dead asap



Yeah boi get me closer to LYLO and further from shitshow

OK Tbf this is my life BJT STILL go thru the motions

[EldritchAbomination]

Why do quite a few heads not know what the alignment is?

Only one head received the role PM in their individual account. They didn't share it in the PT via copy and paste and just claimed that we were this and this.

We've explained this thrice now.

Pay attention.

[EldritchAbomination]

Our role and alignment has been stated in the PT. post there from your main acct if you need to check anything

[EldritchAbomination]

so their existence itself is anti-town

Anti-town doesn't guarantee scum. :3p

[EldritchAbomination]

That's a lie. I don't believe anyone received the role PM in their account. I heard another head got the role over sitechat.

[EldritchAbomination]

i might or might not have told one head that we were secretly a jester

[EldritchAbomination]

[EldritchAbomination]

I'm confortable lynching it d2 or d3 after it's given its agreed upon reads so that we can treat those as coming from an ic and go from there. Logic.

Who was the guy who went ROLE =/= ALIGNMENT?

Also has everyone forgot we're playing the worst game ever run? This game is not balanced, not even remotely.

Pedit Oh, I'm sorry. I was too busy trying to go through your 260 spamposts that I missed it.

Or you know, you could Control F and search for the key words "role" "PM" "alignment"?

Why would that head, theoretically, not share it in the pt via copy and paste? What motivation for that would be as either alignment?

Ask them. Probably just trolling and in the nature of the worst game ever.

[EldritchAbomination]

EWBOP:

Also has everyone forgot we're playing the worst game ever run? This game is not balanced, not even remotely.

[EldritchAbomination]

tbf signing up for the game at all is like holding a neon sign saying

S

u

p

c

█

█

█

s

,

I

'

m

t

h

e

J

e

s

t

e

r

a

n

d

I

'

m

h

e

r

e

t

o

t

r

o

l

l

t

h

e

s

█

█

█

o

u

t

o

f

t

h

i

s

g

a

m

e

VOTE: EldritchAbomination

[EldritchAbomination]

Pretty sure you guys know who made that post~

[EldritchAbomination]

Big Bang Theory? Oh god this guys scum.

I'll sic the Secret Service on that head. I sincerely apologise for the inconvenience




BTW TGP is smart. Treat us like Not_Mafia.

[EldritchAbomination]

i blame mathdino

[EldritchAbomination]

Existential moment re the flavour of the game
esp since setup spec is against the rules

Assume this is vanilla 10v3 (/ 9v3v1 if you're prone to paranoia). If you have a PR there are no other PRs
Hunt scum as you normally would.

This is Mastina's show, we're the players. I think Version touched on this earlier. He is good.

[EldritchAbomination]

Also has everyone forgot we're playing the worst game ever run? This game is not balanced, not even remotely.

Quoted for bugger your face




P.S. sorry for typos on everyone's names. I'm using another mobile browser as this is my only hydra. It's not a great browser

[EldritchAbomination]

Ninja'd

Pedit: ninja'd

[EldritchAbomination]

RedF made me laugh.... I like him now

[EldritchAbomination]

Yeah. We do that.

You can also have an optional boss fight with us in the Nightmare Realm. :3

[EldritchAbomination]

K superhydra, I want you to converse in your PT and give me a readslist. One, cnodensed, readslist, signed by a majority of your players.
Also mastina can I please have a readslist from you?
Since this is deliberately the worst game ever maybe the mod is an sk or something.
VOTE: mastina

u are in no position to make demands of 11 players, all of which were promised to not have to do any work

its funny to me that some of us are tryharding at all

go worry about the slots who have literally not posted at all since day start



also we're too busy playing mafia in the hydra PT soz

[EldritchAbomination]

u are in no position to make demands of 11 players, all of which were promised to not have to do any work

its funny to me that some of us are tryharding at all

go worry about the slots who have literally not posted at all since day start

also we're too busy playing mafia in the hydra PT soz

What this one said. Plus,

TGP: the fun of being in the hydra is that everyone has the potential for different reads. You're basically asking us to create a town block amongst the eleven players on D1. Which is a really stupid idea since its day one of all things.

[EldritchAbomination]

This head has already posted several read's list. Just ISO our posts and search for the key words "null", "scum", "town", "lean", etc.

[EldritchAbomination]

[quote="In post 700, Momrangal"]Maybe its old memories but varsoon is being incredibly lack luster[/url]

Probably because of us making it unplayable for him.

[EldritchAbomination]

So, is Clotilde an actual player and is the bird just screwing with us by wasting their vote on a non-player entity?

We're past wasting votes for BS reasons. Thanks.

[EldritchAbomination]

Put a bandwagon - any bandwagon; even our bandwagon - to L-1 and we'll hammer, I guarantee it.

[EldritchAbomination]

Another catch up with no reads. Super.

[EldritchAbomination]

EWBOP: another catch up with no

scum

reads. Super.

[EldritchAbomination]

is, and I'm not town reading him. I just don't want to lynch him.

@Vax

This doesn't mean your scum reading Varsoon, doesn't it? If you preference to

not

see him hang is any clue.

[EldritchAbomination]

This head finds it humorous how the majority has said that we are unreadable and yet there's no immediate desire to see us hanged. Suspicious, no? Gives scum a good pattern to hide themselves in if they want to avoid scrutiny.

[EldritchAbomination]

Lol~

Mutant: coasting on others opinions; tiny scum lean

Red: meh vote; if dead players are allowed to talk does it really benefit you to lynch us? We'd become an 11 person Tree Stump at that point. No attempt to actually sort us; scum lean.

Mom; two factions comment from earlier; suspicious. Null for now. Might be town making assumptions. Might be not.

ok but ur literally calling dissonance on dissonance hydra

also nsg's town

VOTE: Infinite Canine

Pretty sure this is scum.

we are here, at least one head of us is here. I'll try to read the game thread, but I have a rather busy morning today. I'll try to get to it later today.

~cd

here where? this seems like a major "hey I'm town over here" post without any substance whatsoever.

I sincerely doubt you have commentary as alignment indicative as you're claiming to.

You were the first person to claim being busy which means you definitely claim to have done something whereas I could just be blind and not seeing it. What's keeping you?

something something statement something as thick as hasty pudding.

Do you stand by this statement?

You think this is cryptic? Oh man, you'd have been thirsting for blood in a way I can see you rolled scum. My vote on you is great until you make it terrible by being good.

~I dunno who you think this is but it's not

Do math definitely didn't exist in ancient Greek mythology

Are you suggesting multi ball?

im suggesting you're scum

Have you formed any reads based on the pregame posts? @mutant

You moved into a tiny town lean based on the game solving tone - willingness to reevaluate a previous assumption- based on your 444.

Red's still meh. Reason for jumping on and off the Eldritch wagon was equally meh. Still no efforts to actually game solve. Slight scum read. However, this head does know that Red is "lynch bait". It will reevaluate its read as Red progresses through the game.

Mom: faction assumption. Null but worth the scrutiny.

Anen: If this head recalls correctly, the pigeon is still voting for a player that doesn't exist in the game, yes? Not necessarily scum move by further dividing the majority on an LOL vote - feels like we should be out of RVS at this point - isn't pro town. Null but worth watching.

Mutant is town

screw it

Dayvig: Eldritch Abomination

Hope you like fake vengekills as much as fake dayvigs

Incidentally who do you think is scum so far? Do you agree our existence is a massive boon for town?

[EldritchAbomination]

TL;DR

NSG - Town
Mutant - Town
Red - Trust, but verify. Loyal Vigilante claim.
TGP - Trust, but verify. Loyal Vigilante claim.
Anen - Suspicious
Mom - Suspiciously/scum
Infinite Canine - Scum

[EldritchAbomination]

and not to mention that I am scum reading you for playing at the village idiot.

Contradictions much?

Saying that we're playing a village idiot implies town. Yet you scum read us for that? Lol~

[EldritchAbomination]

who dis ^ i like ur reads

NSG and IC weren't this head's reads.

Mutant, Red, TGP, Anen, and Mom were this head's read.

2 to 3 heads created that reads list. This head does not know if the NSG and IC were made by the same head.

[EldritchAbomination]

~

i assume u are either elli or the anime one

Guess again.

[EldritchAbomination]

Nope. This head will give you a hint. There's an "a" in this head's individual account.

[EldritchAbomination]

True.

- The Spooky One

[EldritchAbomination]

Missing like... half of the player list in the reads list.

Probs going to ISO and read peeps based on motive later. Emphasis on the

later

.

- The Root of Your Nightmares

[EldritchAbomination]

Says this:

I find it really entertaining to play games with people can't read.

Misses that:

TL;DR

NSG - Town
Mutant - Town
Red - Trust, but verify. Loyal Vigilante claim.
TGP - Trust, but verify. Loyal Vigilante claim.
Anen - Suspicious
Mom - Suspiciously/scum
Infinite Canine - Scum

[EldritchAbomination]

Votecount 1.3

EldritchAbomination(3)

~ Varsoon(25), EldritchAbomination(142), InfiniteCanine(7)

northsidegal(3)

~ Assemblerotws(1), northsidegal(16), TheGoldenParadox(25)

Aneninen(2)

~ schadd(41), Ginngie(60)

RedFlavor(2)

~ mutantdevle(25), RedFlavor(15)

Varsoon(1)

~ Aneninen(8)


Not Voting (2): Vaxkiller(14), Momrangal(16)

With 13 alive it takes 7 to lynch.

Day 1 deadline is in (expired on 2018-03-18 00:32:35)

MOD REMINDERS

GINNGIE DESERVES ALL OF YOUR VOTES, STOP SWEARING
I WONDER IF OUTGUESSING THE MOD IS ACTUALLY A SECRET WINCON
ANENINEN NEEDS TO STOP ASKING THE MOD QUESTIONS
VARSOON IS A HUMAN SHIRTSHOW

FLAVOR

This is an automated vote count generated by a tool written by Cthulhu. It goes much smoother with exact votes but will try to detect bold votes and misspellings. If you have issues during this beta, please summon the dark lord.

i hate myself

[EldritchAbomination]

I've got a secret and I can't explain. All the info will have to wait for next day.
All along I was never in doubt. I've always knew it could ever get out.
There are things that I cannot tell, and there are things that you know damn well. This is getting very hard for me, I guess you'd better just wait and see. Shut up!
This is all.

~Originally by Andy McCluskey/Paul Humphreys. Edited slightly by Eldrich for convenience.

[EldritchAbomination]

I've got a secret and I can't explain. All the info will have to wait for next day.
All along I was never in doubt. I've always knew it could ever get out.
There are things that I cannot tell, and there are things that you know damn well. This is getting very hard for me, I guess you'd better just wait and see. Shut up!
This is all.

~Originally by Andy McCluskey/Paul Humphreys. Edited slightly by Eldrich for convenience.

So the three of you have been conspiring behind behind our backs?
Also where did that collaboration take place? Discord I presume?

~None of them 3

[EldritchAbomination]

No. It's right their in the PT, although I suspect only a person with faith can see it.

~The Saint

[EldritchAbomination]

Wait. Which head is this? Seriously.

~The poster of the post above the post I'm responding to, which is the post above this one.

[EldritchAbomination]

Someone you're not. That's who.

~Not you

[EldritchAbomination]

Can anyone actually claim mod confirmation of what our role is?

~The poster of the post below the post above the post I'm responding to

[EldritchAbomination]

Everyone is so bad at not swearing... Has anyone not watched The Good Place?

[EldritchAbomination]

AhHAHAHAHAHAHA

OK

~The Fool

edit: I can claim that, Of course I'd be lying, but who's to know for sure?

[EldritchAbomination]

I swear! By the moon and the stars in the skies.

[EldritchAbomination]

[EldritchAbomination]

Asking us to do that is like asking us to not troll post. It's never going to happen. K? Thanx.

Have a nice day.

[EldritchAbomination]

I’m not voting anyone...

The Cretacous One swore to intentionally screw with the vote counts in keeping accord with our trolly troll theme.

[EldritchAbomination]

could the stupid hydra please keep their bickering to their goshdarn bickering in the PT. Half the reason I procrastinated on this game was the relentless shipposting.

step 1: lurk
step 2: find excluses not to play

lazy scum 101, nice scumclaim scumfinite scumnine

[EldritchAbomination]

I wish Infinite Canine wasn't the most likely to flip scum today.
it's such a boring low-info lynch.

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE:

[EldritchAbomination]

could the stupid hydra please keep their bickering to their goshdarn bickering in the PT. Half the reason I procrastinated on this game was the relentless shipposting.

step 1: lurk
step 2: find excluses not to play

step 3: omgus vote
step 4: react to nothing except your own wagon

lazy scum 101, nice scumclaim scumfinite scumnine

KEEP GOING I LOVE IT

[EldritchAbomination]

Who is CD again?

[EldritchAbomination]

Cool thanks

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: Mulch

:3

Our vote is only worthy of a hammer.

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: HYDRA MAYHEM LOLOLOLOLO

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: trolly troll troll

[EldritchAbomination]

The coolest dog.
Although I've noticed he has a real habit of signing up for my games and then replacing out.

That is a little less than cool

Hope he and TIAM stick around

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: eggs

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: MulchVOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: three heads are better than two

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: probs a good thing the mod isn't keeping track of VC cuz of us

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: we should assimilate this entire page

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: and then the next one after that

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: omg were almost there

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: chug chug chug chug chug chug

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: choo choo all aboard the MAYHEM TRAIN

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: pagetop?

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: aw

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: next page here we come

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Henry Kissinger

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: TO BE OR NOT TO BE THAT IS THE QUESTION

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: whos Henry? he sounds important

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: cant stop wont stop

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

For years, Ted Kaptchuk performed acupuncture at a tiny clinic in Cambridge, a few miles from his current office, at the Harvard Medical School. He opened for business in 1976, on a street so packed with alternative healers that it was commonly referred to as “quack row.” Kaptchuk had just returned from Asia, where, as an exiled alumnus of the turbulent sixties, he had spent four years honing his craft. “There were lots of alternatives on that street in those days, but no practitioners of Chinese medicine,” Kaptchuk, who is sixty-four and still lives in the neighborhood, told me recently as we sipped (Chinese) tea in the study of his house. “The area is a little too L. L. Bean for my taste now,” he said. “It was a different place then.”

Not long after Kaptchuk arrived in Boston, he treated an Armenian woman for chronic bronchitis. A few weeks later, she showed up in his office with her husband, who had a Persian rug slung over his shoulder. He nodded to Kaptchuk and said, “This is for you.” Kaptchuk accepted the rug, which he still owns, but had no idea what he had done to earn it. “Oh, doctor, you have been so wonderful,” the woman told him. “You cured me. I was about to have an operation on my ovaries and the pain went away the day you saw me.” Kaptchuk never spoke to the woman again, but he has been unable to get her out of his mind. “There was no fucking way needles or herbs did anything for that woman’s ovaries,” he told me, still looking mystified, thirty-five years later. “It had to be some kind of placebo, but I had never given the idea of a placebo effect much attention. I had great respect for shamans—and I still do. I have always believed there is an important component of medicine that involves suggestion, ritual, and belief—all ideas that make scientists scream. Still, I asked myself, Could I have cured her? How? I mean, what could possibly have been the mechanism?”

For years, researchers could do little but guess at the complex biology of the placebo response. A meaningful picture began to emerge only in the nineteen-seventies, with the discovery of endorphins: substances secreted in the brain that are chemically similar to opiates like morphine and heroin. The discovery led to the novel idea that, in effect, the brain produces its own pharmacy. In 1978, three scientists from the University of California at San Francisco—Jon Levine, Newton Gordon, and Howard Fields—decided to investigate whether endorphins might explain why patients who received placebos often reported a significant reduction in pain. People recovering from dental surgery were told that they were about to receive a dose of morphine, saline, or a drug that might increase their pain. By then, researchers had learned not only about the nocebo effect but that a suggestion of relief will often trigger the production of endorphins, so they were not surprised that patients receiving saline reported reduced pain.

What came next, however, fundamentally reshaped the field. The researchers dismissed the subjects who received morphine and then divided the remaining participants into those who responded to the placebo and those who didn’t. Then they introduced Naloxone into patients’ I.V. drips. Naloxone was developed to counteract overdoses of heroin and morphine. It works essentially by latching onto, and thus locking up, key opioid receptors in the central nervous system. The endorphins that we secrete attach themselves to the same receptors in the same way, so Naloxone blocks them, too. The researchers theorized that, if endorphins had caused the placebo effect, Naloxone would negate their impact, and it did. The Naloxone caused those who responded positively to the placebos to experience a sharp increase in pain; the drug had no effect on the people who did not respond to the placebo. The study was the first to provide solid evidence that the chemistry behind the placebo effect could be understood—and altered.

“It was one of those studies that make the scales fall from your eyes,” Kaptchuk told me. “I had just started to think about the placebo effect—scientifically and historically. And here comes this paper that says that, even if it’s all in your head, there is still a biological mechanism driving these reactions. It was very exciting.”

Kaptchuk assumed that the results would add legitimacy to the field. He was wrong. “Things are better than they were,” he said. “But even now, you know, people at Harvard talk about placebos the way the Popes used to talk about medicine. They declared that Jews were not allowed to treat Christians—not because they were not good doctors but because it would have been ethically wrong. These are ethical judgments masquerading as science. Because from the beginning I kept having this nagging thought: what is so bad about getting better from a placebo?”

That kind of thinking, still hard for most doctors to accept, was heretical in 1990, when Kaptchuk arrived at Harvard. “People kept saying, ‘Oh, this is just the placebo effect.’ You would hear that every day,” Kaptchuk said. He had spent years studying Chinese medicine (and medical history), and this made no sense to him. “I thought, Ted, step back a minute. This wasn’t just something that was a negative. It was something that needed to be understood.”

Slowly, over the past decade, researchers have begun to tease out the strands of the placebo response. The findings, while difficult to translate into medicine, have been compelling. In most cases, the larger the pill, the stronger the placebo effect. Two pills are better than one, and brand-name pills trump generics. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and injections produce a more pronounced effect than either. There is even evidence to suggest that the color of medicine influences the way one responds to it: colored pills are more likely to relieve pain than white pills; blue pills help people sleep better than red pills; and green capsules are the best bet when it comes to anxiety medication.

Conditioning and expectations matter, and so does learned behavior. In the eighties, Levine and Gordon divided a group of postoperative patients into three sections: those in the first section received morphine secretly, those in the second were told they would receive morphine (and did), and those in the third were given a placebo that was described as a powerful pain reliever. The results were startling. Patients who were told that they would receive a painkiller, whether they actually received it or not, had the same experience in the trial as those who secretly received between six and eight milligrams of morphine—a significant amount. The covert dose had to be increased to twelve milligrams to surpass the effect of the placebo. Over the past two decades, the Italian neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti (who studied with Gordon and Levine), and Luana Colloca, a colleague of Benedetti’s, who is now based in the United States, at the National Institutes of Health, have expanded on these studies. They have found, for example, that diazepam—more commonly known as Valium—has no discernible effect on anxiety unless a person knows he is taking it. And, increasingly, studies like those have been carried out with the help of imaging techniques—such as PET scans and functional M.R.I.s—that can track brain changes as they happen. These advances in brain imaging, along with an increased understanding of neurochemicals, have transformed a vague and mysterious notion into a tangible effect that scientists consider worthy of investigation.

“What’s exciting here is that, if we are to talk about using placebos in a clinical setting, they would have to have a measurable effect and a biology we understand,” Wayne Jonas told me. Jonas is an interesting hybrid in a world often sharply divided between conventional and alternative therapies. In the early nineties, he served as the director of the Medical Research Fellowship Program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in Washington, D.C. He went on to run the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, from 1995 to 1999. Today, Jonas is the president of the Samueli Institute, a Washington research group devoted to shifting the focus of health care from treatment to prevention.

“The morphine studies bring us a long way,” he said. So did a recent investigation by Kaptchuk, in which participants suffering from irritable-bowel syndrome were not deceived about their treatment; in fact, they were told in great detail about the placebos they received and that they were often as effective as real medicine. The pills brought them relief.

For many people in the field, results like those achieved in the morphine and I.B.S. studies, while preliminary and in need of confirmation, hint at something far more significant than the effect of a placebo or problems with a particular drug. They suggest that the “magic bullet” approach to health care—simple, effective solutions to single problems, like a strep infection or polio—can no longer remain our principal approach to treating disease.

There has always been a distinction between disease and illness. Disease is a biological condition that we have historically treated with drugs, surgery, and other technological solutions. Illness, on the other hand, defines the context of a medical encounter, including the relationship between doctor and patient. Like Kaptchuk, Jonas believes that placebo research demonstrates that it is essential to consider both the science and the art of medicine—to think about diseases as illnesses, and not to rely solely on short-term, high-tech solutions. Scientists hope that, even if it proves impossible to replace drugs with placebos, research into the way they affect us will accomplish nothing less than a transformation of American medicine. “There are no magic bullets for most of the problems that ail us today,” Jonas said. “Diabetes, immune-system disorders, chronic pain, cancer. Our illnesses are complex, and we need to approach them in more comprehensive ways. We try to identify drugs that will eliminate disease. Yet the way we go about delivering those agents—the interaction between doctor and patient, for example—often has a bigger impact than the agent we focus on. More than the drug and more than the surgery. And that has been collectively called the placebo effect.”

The headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration, situated on a campus called White Oak, on the far edge of Silver Spring, Maryland, seems as close to the rest of the federal medical establishment as it is to Pluto. There is no Metro to White Oak, and it takes half an hour to drive from the sprawling campus to the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda. The F.D.A.’s physical isolation belies its position as the nation’s principal regulator of consumer products. No drug is sold without the agency’s approval. There will be no prescriptions for any placebo, either, unless clinical trials have demonstrated its effectiveness to the satisfaction of the F.D.A.

“One of the absolutely fundamental problems that we have is the use of the term ‘placebo,’ which does nobody any good,” Robert Temple told me, echoing a complaint made by virtually everyone who deals with the subject. Temple, who has for many years run the F.D.A.’s drug-evaluation department, is an owlish man with a short, thick mustache and circular glasses. His office is so filled with towering stacks of files that, after you enter, it takes a moment to find him. “Just because something is called a ‘placebo group,’ ” he said, “everyone assumes that what happens in that group is a result of the placebo effect. And that is absolutely not true.”

Temple, who has worked at the F.D.A. for four decades, rarely makes a decision without angering somebody. He has been regarded as a meddlesome reactionary by H.I.V. activists and others who insist that drugs be released more rapidly. The more conservative medical establishment frequently accuses the agency of endorsing the wishful thinking of drug manufacturers. And to the large and growing community that supports alternative approaches to medicine Temple is Dr. No.

Temple said that he understands why placebos attract people who become frustrated when science fails to provide definitive answers. “The persistence of what people believe will save their lives as opposed to the evidence is staggering,” he said. “So people are talking about using placebos as drugs. But I have no idea what that means in practical terms. How would it work?” Tantalizing hints and possible effects are not data, and Temple says there are no data that would suggest that placebos are drugs. There are several studies, though, that illustrate the basis for his skepticism.

A placebo effect is commonly observed during trials of blood-pressure medications. To qualify for such studies, subjects are supposed to have blood pressure that exceeds a hundred and forty over ninety in at least one of the two measurements. “As soon as somebody enters those studies, his or her blood pressure falls an average of five or six millimetres of mercury,” Temple said. “That is significant, but it is not a placebo response, and it is not a response to being in the study. It is often the result of doctors’ inflating readings—of rounding up.” If a person’s blood pressure is a hundred and thirty-eight over eighty-eight, for example, investigators will often include him. “When you use an automatic blood-pressure cuff to establish a baseline for these kinds of studies, the entire placebo effect vanishes,” Temple said.

When a drug (or a placebo) is under study, subjects are usually divided into two groups. Neither group knows exactly what it is getting (nor do the doctors), but one group generally receives the drug and the other a placebo. “There is a better way,” Temple said. “If you want to see if there is a placebo effect, use three arms in a drug trial, not two. Tell them, ‘Some of you will be getting a drug, some will get a tablet that looks like a drug but is nothing but a sugar pill, and some of you will get nothing at all.’

“It seems to me,” he went on, “that if there is any substantial placebo effect, there ought to be a difference between the group that knows it’s getting nothing and the group that doesn’t know it’s getting nothing. If there is no difference, then what are we talking about? Because it’s not a placebo effect.”

It turns out that there have been many trials of the type Temple mentioned. In 2001, the Danish epidemiologist Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, of Copenhagen’s Nordic Cochrane Center, along with his colleague Peter Gøtzsche, published a systematic review of a hundred and fourteen clinical trials that compared patients who received a placebo with subjects who were told that they would receive no medicine at all. The researchers attempted to assess the combined impact of many different kinds of trials using meta-analysis, a statistical technique for extracting information from studies that are not statistically significant by themselves. Their article, “Is the Placebo Powerless? An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment,” published in The New England Journal of Medicine, was a long-overdue response to Beecher’s 1955 paper.

At the time, few serious scientists would have entertained such questions, let alone allowed words like “ritual” and “belief” to seep into a conversation about medicine. Placebos had a bad name, which is not surprising, since they have been used primarily to deceive people. In clinical trials, if a drug and a sugar pill produce similar results, the drug has generally been considered worthless. But the definition of medical treatment is changing, and so are attitudes about placebos. This year, Harvard created an institute dedicated wholly to their study, the Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. It is based at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Kaptchuk was named its director. He has already recruited leading researchers from around the world, in disciplines as diverse as neuroanatomy and semiotics. The program was formed to explore an idea that even twenty years ago would have seemed preposterous: that placebos—given deliberately—might be deployed in clinical practice. As medicine.

Kaptchuk has no shortage of critics. They acknowledge the power of the mind to influence health but question the rigor of studies suggesting that placebos could possibly prove as valuable as drugs. Indeed, the idea of dispensing sugar pills is jarring even to those who, like Kaptchuk, are enthusiastic about it. After all, placebos have almost always been defined as exactly what medicine is not. “I realized long ago that at least some people respond even to the suggestion of treatment,” Kaptchuk said. “We know that. We have for centuries. But unless we figured out how that process worked, and unless we did it with data that other researchers would consider valid, nobody would pay attention to a word we said.”

The research has been propelled in large measure by the emerging discipline of neuroimaging—which, like a live satellite feed from inside the human body, permits scientists to track precisely how a person reacts to a drug (or a placebo) as soon as he takes it. An injection of saline, for example, that has been described as a drug not only will reduce symptoms of Parkinson’s disease but can help a patient produce more of the dopamine that the disease destroys. Results like those have provided scientists with chemical evidence of something they had long suspected: simply believing in a treatment can be as effective as the treatment itself. In several recent studies, placebos have performed as well as drugs that Americans spend millions of dollars on each year.

Transforming interesting laboratory findings into medicine is never simple, however, particularly when those findings involve fake pills and sham injections. Some people clearly respond better to placebos than others, though we don’t know why; some illnesses and afflictions are more amenable to suggestion than others; and many of the most intriguing findings are tenuous. Even so, the recent research is difficult to dismiss. Through conditioning techniques, for example, our brain can “learn” different kinds of placebo effects: people first given morphine and then a placebo have one neurochemical response, while people who take ibuprofen followed by a placebo have another. Different “doses” cause different reactions, and studies have demonstrated that people who suffer from headaches and consume aspirin regularly can associate the shape, the color, and even the taste of a pill with a decrease in pain. The value of treatments like those—which have none of the side effects of drugs—would be immense, but placebos are not pharmaceuticals, and no reputable researcher has suggested that they will soon be for sale at your local pharmacy.

Kaptchuk acknowledges that placebos are not magic potions. “Placebos don’t shrink tumors,” he said. “They don’t make blind people see. If you are paralyzed, they won’t help you walk.” He deplores the grandiose claims of alternative medicine and prefers to rely on data. “Ultimately, I am not a zealot or even a true believer,” he said. “I am sure that I do not understand the placebo effect. I ask questions, hopefully valuable questions, and we will see where the research lands.”

Kaptchuk practiced acupuncture for half his adult life. But he stopped twenty years ago. Despite the popularity of acupuncture, clinical studies continually fail to demonstrate its effectiveness—a fact that Kaptchuk doesn’t dispute. I asked him how a person who talks about the primacy of data and disdains what he calls the “squishiness” of alternative medicine could rely so heavily on a therapy with no proven value. Kaptchuk smiled broadly. “Because I am a damn good healer,” he said. “That is the difficult truth. If you needed help and you came to me, you would get better. Thousands of people have. Because, in the end, it isn’t really about the needles. It’s about the man.”

For most of human history, placebos were a fundamental tool in any physician’s armamentarium—sometimes the only tool. When there was nothing else to offer, placebos were a salve. The word itself comes from the Latin for “I will please.” In medieval times, hired mourners participating in Vespers for the Dead often chanted the ninth line of Psalm 116: “I shall please the dead in the land of the living.” Because the mourners were hired, their emotions were considered insincere. People called them “placebos.” The word has always carried mixed connotations. Thomas Jefferson wrote approvingly of what he called a “pious fraud,” and noted that “one of the most successful physicians I have ever known has assured me that he used more bread pills, drops of coloured water, and powders of hickory ashes, than of all other medicines put together.” But, as increasingly specific knowledge about human anatomy emerged, people began to demand scientific answers to medical questions. Knowledge displaced faith, and human health improved rapidly. Antibiotics are real; placebos are not.

The first publicly acknowledged placebo-controlled trial—and still among the most remarkable—took place at the request of King Louis XVI, in 1784, under the direction of Benjamin Franklin, then the American Ambassador to France. The German physician Franz Anton Mesmer had become famous in Vienna for a new treatment he called “animal magnetism,” and he claimed to have discovered a healing fluid that could “cure” many ailments. Mesmer became highly sought after in Paris, where he would routinely “mesmerize” his followers—one of whom was Marie Antoinette. The King wasn’t buying it, however, and he asked a commission of the French Academy of Sciences to look into the claims. (The members included Franklin, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and Joseph Guillotin—who invented the device that would eventually separate the King’s head from his body.) The commission replicated some of Mesmer’s sessions, and, in one case, asked a young boy to hug magnetized trees that were presumed to contain the healing powers invoked by Mesmer. He did as directed and responded as expected: he shook, convulsed, and swooned. The trees, though, were not magnetic, and Mesmer was denounced as a fraud. Placebos and lies were intertwined in the public mind.

It was another hundred and fifty years before scientists began to focus on the role that emotions can play in healing. During the Second World War, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Beecher—who went on to become the first chairman of the anesthesia department at Massachusetts General Hospital—attempted to assess the degree to which the severity of a soldier’s injuries corresponded to the amount of pain he felt. In Europe, Beecher met with more than two hundred soldiers, gravely wounded but still coherent enough to talk; he asked each man if he wanted morphine. Seventy-five per cent declined.

Beecher was astounded. He knew from his experience before the war that civilians with similar injuries would have begged for morphine, and he had seen healthy soldiers complain loudly about the pain associated with minor inconveniences, like receiving vaccinations. He concluded that the difference had to do with expectations; a soldier who survived a terrible attack often had a positive outlook simply because he was still alive. Beecher made a simple but powerful observation: our expectations can have a profound impact on how we heal.

Armed with this information, and with his conviction that the placebo effect could be harnessed to help relieve suffering, Beecher returned to the United States and continued his research. In 1955, he published an article called “The Powerful Placebo,” in which he wrote that “placebos have a high degree of therapeutic effectiveness in treating subjective responses.” The paper has been cited more than a thousand times by other scientists, and Beecher’s conclusion—that the placebo effect plays a critical role in almost any medical intervention—influenced much of what has followed in clinical research. His basic supposition was correct: emotions and expectations can affect our perception of pain.

Before Beecher’s work, new drugs were tested in a haphazard manner; since then, they have always been compared with a placebo or with another drug. But Beecher’s methodology was deeply flawed. Although he reported that placebos were effective more than a third of the time, he shrugged off a phenomenon known as “regression to the mean.” Over time, the condition of most patients improves, with or without treatment. A person who enrolls in a clinical study when he is feeling particularly bad is likely to improve solely as a result of the natural course of the illness, not because he was given a placebo. (And people often enroll in such studies when they are sickest.) A patient who knows that he is in a study also may expect a better therapeutic result than one who doesn’t. If you believe that doctors are particularly attentive, you can get better more rapidly, even if they aren’t. This is known as the Hawthorne effect. (There is also a “nocebo effect.” Expecting a placebo to do harm or cause pain makes people sicker, not better. When subjects in one notable study were told that headaches are a side effect of lumbar puncture, the number of headaches they reported after the study was finished increased sharply.)

For years, researchers could do little but guess at the complex biology of the placebo response. A meaningful picture began to emerge only in the nineteen-seventies, with the discovery of endorphins: substances secreted in the brain that are chemically similar to opiates like morphine and heroin. The discovery led to the novel idea that, in effect, the brain produces its own pharmacy. In 1978, three scientists from the University of California at San Francisco—Jon Levine, Newton Gordon, and Howard Fields—decided to investigate whether endorphins might explain why patients who received placebos often reported a significant reduction in pain. People recovering from dental surgery were told that they were about to receive a dose of morphine, saline, or a drug that might increase their pain. By then, researchers had learned not only about the nocebo effect but that a suggestion of relief will often trigger the production of endorphins, so they were not surprised that patients receiving saline reported reduced pain.

What came next, however, fundamentally reshaped the field. The researchers dismissed the subjects who received morphine and then divided the remaining participants into those who responded to the placebo and those who didn’t. Then they introduced Naloxone into patients’ I.V. drips. Naloxone was developed to counteract overdoses of heroin and morphine. It works essentially by latching onto, and thus locking up, key opioid receptors in the central nervous system. The endorphins that we secrete attach themselves to the same receptors in the same way, so Naloxone blocks them, too. The researchers theorized that, if endorphins had caused the placebo effect, Naloxone would negate their impact, and it did. The Naloxone caused those who responded positively to the placebos to experience a sharp increase in pain; the drug had no effect on the people who did not respond to the placebo. The study was the first to provide solid evidence that the chemistry behind the placebo effect could be understood—and altered.

“It was one of those studies that make the scales fall from your eyes,” Kaptchuk told me. “I had just started to think about the placebo effect—scientifically and historically. And here comes this paper that says that, even if it’s all in your head, there is still a biological mechanism driving these reactions. It was very exciting.”

Kaptchuk assumed that the results would add legitimacy to the field. He was wrong. “Things are better than they were,” he said. “But even now, you know, people at Harvard talk about placebos the way the Popes used to talk about medicine. They declared that Jews were not allowed to treat Christians—not because they were not good doctors but because it would have been ethically wrong. These are ethical judgments masquerading as science. Because from the beginning I kept having this nagging thought: what is so bad about getting better from a placebo?”

That kind of thinking, still hard for most doctors to accept, was heretical in 1990, when Kaptchuk arrived at Harvard. “People kept saying, ‘Oh, this is just the placebo effect.’ You would hear that every day,” Kaptchuk said. He had spent years studying Chinese medicine (and medical history), and this made no sense to him. “I thought, Ted, step back a minute. This wasn’t just something that was a negative. It was something that needed to be understood.”

Slowly, over the past decade, researchers have begun to tease out the strands of the placebo response. The findings, while difficult to translate into medicine, have been compelling. In most cases, the larger the pill, the stronger the placebo effect. Two pills are better than one, and brand-name pills trump generics. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and injections produce a more pronounced effect than either. There is even evidence to suggest that the color of medicine influences the way one responds to it: colored pills are more likely to relieve pain than white pills; blue pills help people sleep better than red pills; and green capsules are the best bet when it comes to anxiety medication.

Conditioning and expectations matter, and so does learned behavior. In the eighties, Levine and Gordon divided a group of postoperative patients into three sections: those in the first section received morphine secretly, those in the second were told they would receive morphine (and did), and those in the third were given a placebo that was described as a powerful pain reliever. The results were startling. Patients who were told that they would receive a painkiller, whether they actually received it or not, had the same experience in the trial as those who secretly received between six and eight milligrams of morphine—a significant amount. The covert dose had to be increased to twelve milligrams to surpass the effect of the placebo. Over the past two decades, the Italian neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti (who studied with Gordon and Levine), and Luana Colloca, a colleague of Benedetti’s, who is now based in the United States, at the National Institutes of Health, have expanded on these studies. They have found, for example, that diazepam—more commonly known as Valium—has no discernible effect on anxiety unless a person knows he is taking it. And, increasingly, studies like those have been carried out with the help of imaging techniques—such as PET scans and functional M.R.I.s—that can track brain changes as they happen. These advances in brain imaging, along with an increased understanding of neurochemicals, have transformed a vague and mysterious notion into a tangible effect that scientists consider worthy of investigation.

“What’s exciting here is that, if we are to talk about using placebos in a clinical setting, they would have to have a measurable effect and a biology we understand,” Wayne Jonas told me. Jonas is an interesting hybrid in a world often sharply divided between conventional and alternative therapies. In the early nineties, he served as the director of the Medical Research Fellowship Program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in Washington, D.C. He went on to run the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, from 1995 to 1999. Today, Jonas is the president of the Samueli Institute, a Washington research group devoted to shifting the focus of health care from treatment to prevention.

“The morphine studies bring us a long way,” he said. So did a recent investigation by Kaptchuk, in which participants suffering from irritable-bowel syndrome were not deceived about their treatment; in fact, they were told in great detail about the placebos they received and that they were often as effective as real medicine. The pills brought them relief.

For many people in the field, results like those achieved in the morphine and I.B.S. studies, while preliminary and in need of confirmation, hint at something far more significant than the effect of a placebo or problems with a particular drug. They suggest that the “magic bullet” approach to health care—simple, effective solutions to single problems, like a strep infection or polio—can no longer remain our principal approach to treating disease.

There has always been a distinction between disease and illness. Disease is a biological condition that we have historically treated with drugs, surgery, and other technological solutions. Illness, on the other hand, defines the context of a medical encounter, including the relationship between doctor and patient. Like Kaptchuk, Jonas believes that placebo research demonstrates that it is essential to consider both the science and the art of medicine—to think about diseases as illnesses, and not to rely solely on short-term, high-tech solutions. Scientists hope that, even if it proves impossible to replace drugs with placebos, research into the way they affect us will accomplish nothing less than a transformation of American medicine. “There are no magic bullets for most of the problems that ail us today,” Jonas said. “Diabetes, immune-system disorders, chronic pain, cancer. Our illnesses are complex, and we need to approach them in more comprehensive ways. We try to identify drugs that will eliminate disease. Yet the way we go about delivering those agents—the interaction between doctor and patient, for example—often has a bigger impact than the agent we focus on. More than the drug and more than the surgery. And that has been collectively called the placebo effect.”

The headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration, situated on a campus called White Oak, on the far edge of Silver Spring, Maryland, seems as close to the rest of the federal medical establishment as it is to Pluto. There is no Metro to White Oak, and it takes half an hour to drive from the sprawling campus to the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda. The F.D.A.’s physical isolation belies its position as the nation’s principal regulator of consumer products. No drug is sold without the agency’s approval. There will be no prescriptions for any placebo, either, unless clinical trials have demonstrated its effectiveness to the satisfaction of the F.D.A.

“One of the absolutely fundamental problems that we have is the use of the term ‘placebo,’ which does nobody any good,” Robert Temple told me, echoing a complaint made by virtually everyone who deals with the subject. Temple, who has for many years run the F.D.A.’s drug-evaluation department, is an owlish man with a short, thick mustache and circular glasses. His office is so filled with towering stacks of files that, after you enter, it takes a moment to find him. “Just because something is called a ‘placebo group,’ ” he said, “everyone assumes that what happens in that group is a result of the placebo effect. And that is absolutely not true.”

Temple, who has worked at the F.D.A. for four decades, rarely makes a decision without angering somebody. He has been regarded as a meddlesome reactionary by H.I.V. activists and others who insist that drugs be released more rapidly. The more conservative medical establishment frequently accuses the agency of endorsing the wishful thinking of drug manufacturers. And to the large and growing community that supports alternative approaches to medicine Temple is Dr. No.

Temple said that he understands why placebos attract people who become frustrated when science fails to provide definitive answers. “The persistence of what people believe will save their lives as opposed to the evidence is staggering,” he said. “So people are talking about using placebos as drugs. But I have no idea what that means in practical terms. How would it work?” Tantalizing hints and possible effects are not data, and Temple says there are no data that would suggest that placebos are drugs. There are several studies, though, that illustrate the basis for his skepticism.

A placebo effect is commonly observed during trials of blood-pressure medications. To qualify for such studies, subjects are supposed to have blood pressure that exceeds a hundred and forty over ninety in at least one of the two measurements. “As soon as somebody enters those studies, his or her blood pressure falls an average of five or six millimetres of mercury,” Temple said. “That is significant, but it is not a placebo response, and it is not a response to being in the study. It is often the result of doctors’ inflating readings—of rounding up.” If a person’s blood pressure is a hundred and thirty-eight over eighty-eight, for example, investigators will often include him. “When you use an automatic blood-pressure cuff to establish a baseline for these kinds of studies, the entire placebo effect vanishes,” Temple said.

When a drug (or a placebo) is under study, subjects are usually divided into two groups. Neither group knows exactly what it is getting (nor do the doctors), but one group generally receives the drug and the other a placebo. “There is a better way,” Temple said. “If you want to see if there is a placebo effect, use three arms in a drug trial, not two. Tell them, ‘Some of you will be getting a drug, some will get a tablet that looks like a drug but is nothing but a sugar pill, and some of you will get nothing at all.’

“It seems to me,” he went on, “that if there is any substantial placebo effect, there ought to be a difference between the group that knows it’s getting nothing and the group that doesn’t know it’s getting nothing. If there is no difference, then what are we talking about? Because it’s not a placebo effect.”

It turns out that there have been many trials of the type Temple mentioned. In 2001, the Danish epidemiologist Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, of Copenhagen’s Nordic Cochrane Center, along with his colleague Peter Gøtzsche, published a systematic review of a hundred and fourteen clinical trials that compared patients who received a placebo with subjects who were told that they would receive no medicine at all. The researchers attempted to assess the combined impact of many different kinds of trials using meta-analysis, a statistical technique for extracting information from studies that are not statistically significant by themselves. Their article, “Is the Placebo Powerless? An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment,” published in The New England Journal of Medicine, was a long-overdue response to Beecher’s 1955 paper.

In almost every case, the researchers reported, there was essentially no difference between the placebo group and the openly untreated group. There were particular exceptions in studies of pain, where there was a slight but measurable placebo effect. Since we are physiologically capable of manufacturing our own painkillers—endorphins—the result may not have been surprising. Expectations and suggestion clearly influence behavior, and when we expect to receive medicine our bodies often begin to prepare for it. (As the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers recently pointed out, in “The Folly of Fools,” his book about the historical necessity of deceit, what the brain expects to happen in the near future affects its physiological state. Trivers’s theory would explain a fact that has often baffled scientists: the placebo effect doesn’t appear to work with Alzheimer’s patients. Trivers suggests that this is because most people who have Alzheimer’s disease are unable to anticipate the future and are therefore unable to prepare for it.)

The Danish researchers repeated the study in 2004, and again last year, incorporating new data each time. The results and their conclusions remained the same. “We found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects,” Hróbjartsson wrote. “Outside the setting of clinical trials, there is no justification for the use of placebos.”

Kaptchuk has great respect for Hróbjartsson, yet he is wary of relying on meta-analyses, and he believes that an honest interaction between a doctor and a patient can significantly alter the outcome of treatment. That was the point of his study of irritable-bowel syndrome, in which some subjects were told that they would not be treated. I.B.S., a chronic gastrointestinal disorder, is one of the most common reasons that people seek medical care. Effective long-term therapies have proved elusive. In Kaptchuk’s study, eighty patients were randomly divided into two groups. Patients in the first group received a placebo pill twice a day; those in the second received nothing. Before the study began, both groups were told that placebos were “inert or inactive pills, like sugar pills, without any medication in them.” They were also informed that placebos have been shown in “rigorous clinical testing to produce significant mind-body self-healing processes.” Patients who received the openly distributed placebo scored far better on standard assessments of their condition than those who received nothing. There were also statistically significant differences in the severity of symptoms.

Although a group of eighty patients is too small to draw definitive conclusions, honesty seemed to work. “Asbjørn’s stuff is a constant intellectual challenge,” Kaptchuk wrote in an e-mail. “His meta-analyses are tops. Great methods, very careful. Clear.” Yet Kaptchuk also pointed out that placebos are not the only interventions that can cause complicated reactions. Drugs do, too. Opiods, for example, increase pain in about ten per cent of those who take them. Antibiotics don’t always work, and neither does cortisone, a powerful steroid used each year by millions of people. Meta-analyses are useful to help understand large amounts of data from different trials. But statistical results that combine information from a variety of medical centers, with different kinds of patients, often in different countries, administered under different conditions, cannot be uniform and therefore cannot be conclusive.

Hróbjartsson and Kaptchuk are united on at least one front. Like Wayne Jonas, they agree that the medical system needs to change. “You have to put this into the context of the society in which you live,” Hróbjartsson told me. “Because I think this may be as much a matter of philosophy as of science. There is an anti-technological, anti-science feeling in the West. We constantly see frustration with the limits of medicine. The placebo can be seen in some sense as a logical avenue for those frustrations. Everyone wants a simple, pain-free solution. But I wonder if that approach isn’t just the mirror image of the pharmacological way of handling illness—that there is a pill for every disease.

“The entire idea of a placebo is very ‘soapy,’ ” Hróbjartsson continued. “It slips away whenever you try to find a border.”

That has always been true. After all, for many people a placebo is just a sugar pill. For others, the definition includes the entire ritual of treatment, the complete interaction between doctor and patient. Increased attention has mostly raised new questions: What are the physical and psychological mechanisms that produce placebo effects? What are the conditions they most easily affect? And can we actually identify people who respond to placebos? Scientists now have bits of answers to some of those questions, but to reach their goal, and introduce placebos into clinical practice, they will need to answer all of them.

Ted Kaptchuk gets a great deal of pleasure from focussing on what other people reject. Indifference seems to motivate him. “I was raised in a crazy home, and it prepared me to accept any proposition,” he said. That, he once told me, is why he was so active in the sixties: “It was a time when the underpinnings of the universe were questioned.” Both of Kaptchuk’s parents, who were Poles, survived the Holocaust. “That really defines a lot of what I do. My father was a Red, so I have a tendency to get pleasure from subversiveness.”

A particularly radical son of the sixties, Kaptchuk was one of the founders of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, in 1965, but the organization was soon dominated by a faction that became the Weather Underground. That was too radical even for Kaptchuk. He fled to the West Coast. “I was hanging out with the San Francisco Red Guards and reading Mao, trying to get away from U.S. imperialism,” he said. “I was militant and crazy. But at some point I said, Ted, this is not being human.”

Kaptchuk decided to pursue studies in Chinese philosophy and medicine at the source. Beijing had yet to open its borders to Americans, but Kaptchuk hoped that his revolutionary bona fides would prompt the leadership to make an exception. “My request to study there was delivered to the government by members of the Black Panther Party,” he told me. Even that didn’t work. The Chinese denied the request, and Kaptchuk spent much of the next decade studying in Macau.

Today, it is hard to imagine Ted Kaptchuk as a radical, let alone a fugitive. He is an observant Jew who wears a yarmulke on top of a shaggy bowl haircut that looks as if he’d copied the Beatles, circa 1964, then let it grow. As a devotee of Eastern thought, he bars shoes from his house and speaks in a hushed, measured voice. David Carradine would have played him beautifully.

Kaptchuk is the first prominent professor at Harvard Medical School since Erik Erikson with neither a medical degree nor a doctorate, and it would be easy to dismiss him as a signature representative of the unsubstantiated-alternative-health-care movement. But he has published scores of books, articles in highly regarded peer-reviewed journals, letters, and review notes—on subjects ranging from placebo research to exorcism, from cancer treatment to shaman rituals among Navajo Indians. He has just finished a study designed to answer a central question in placebo research: Do the genes of people who respond to placebos differ in significant ways from those of people who don’t? (The data, compelling but so far preliminary, suggest that the answer is yes.)

“Ted Kaptchuk is the most knowledgeable person in the world on all matters placebo,” Franklin Miller told me. Miller is a senior faculty member in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. “He has done the research, the scholarship, and the most interesting and clinically relevant studies.” One day, I asked Kaptchuk how a man who practiced acupuncture and dispensed herbs, rather than earning a Ph.D. in biology or statistics, had learned to design complicated trials. He told me that he spent years seeking the advice of the most highly respected and rigorous medical statisticians. “I basically apprenticed myself,” he said, “and they were happy to help a quack who wanted to deal with data.”

Kaptchuk is proud of being what he calls “a card-carrying member of the Harvard establishment.” It is a distinction that did not come easily, even though he has received millions of dollars in funding for his projects from the National Institutes of Health. “The goal is to understand placebos so that they may be used intelligently,” he said one day. “But this is the area where I veer from some of my colleagues. Because what do I really want? Anything that gets people away from the conveyor belts that move from the pharmaceutical houses to doctors and on to patients is worth considering. Anything. We need to stop pretending it’s all about molecular biology. Serious illnesses are affected by aesthetics, by art, and by the moral questions that are negotiated between practitioners and patients. Chiropractors never say that your pain is all in your head. But orthopedists do it all the time. What a fucking way to try and help somebody heal. Do you know how evil that is?”

That kind of deeply held conviction touches on the fundamental questions that challenge American medicine. Kaptchuk wants to broaden the definition of healing, which is exactly what enrages many scientists. In one recent study of a major asthma drug, he and his colleagues reported that, although placebos had no impact on the chemical markers that indicate whether a patient is responding to therapy, patients nonetheless reported feeling better. Kaptchuk concluded that objective data should not be the only criterion for doctors to consider. “Even though objective physiological measures are important,” he wrote in the study, published earlier this year in The New England Journal of Medicine, “other outcomes such as emergency room visits and quality-of-life metrics may be more clinically relevant to patients and physicians.”

“My jaw dropped when I read this,” David Gorski, a professor of medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine, wrote on the science blog Respectful Insolence. “ ‘Other outcomes’ besides objective measures of disease severity may be ‘more clinically relevant’?” That kind of assertion clashes with the basic truths of the scientific method. Kaptchuk counters that we are losing sight of our goal—which is to make people feel better. “This study demonstrated that, without a change in objective data, you still get incredible subjective improvement,” he said. “So is a doctor really supposed to say, Gee, the patient is feeling good but I better ignore that and go by the numbers?”

It was late in the afternoon, and we were sitting in Kaptchuk’s garden in Cambridge. He looked at me and threw his hands into the air. “Is my approach just hocus-pocus?” he said softly. “Isn’t that what you are really asking? You want to know the relationship between rationality and feeling and between science, critical thinking, and the art of medicine. And that boils down to one question: Do you think this entire field is based on a foundation of magical thinking, or do you not?”

Three years ago, a week before Thanksgiving, while I was sitting in my office, my chest began to throb. It was a diffuse pain, but pain nonetheless. I am a middle-aged man with the usual amount of stress (too much) and I handle it in the usual way (denial). My cholesterol and blood pressure are normal, and I exercise regularly and try to eat sensibly. Still, I have read many obituaries of “healthy” men my age who ignored chest pain. So, somewhat sheepishly, I called my doctor and explained the situation, and he told me to come right over.

He conducted a thorough examination, and then we talked. He told me I was fine, that Thanksgiving is often a tense time, and that I should relax. My pain suddenly disappeared. I have written frequently of my belief that magic is for fairy tales and science is for humans. But something about that process soothed me. Of course, it was a relief to know that I wasn’t sick. But could words really banish a pain I had struggled with for hours?

After I got home, I realized that I had been given a placebo. Not purposefully, perhaps, but it had the same effect. My doctor told me that I was fine, and that made my pain go away. It also eased my anxiety at least as effectively as if I had swallowed a pill. My doctor takes an extremely science-based approach to his work. That’s what makes him so good at his job. But that afternoon we engaged in exactly the type of ritual that, according to Kaptchuk, will have to play a critical role in the future of American health care. And, at least in this instance, it would have been hard to argue that it didn’t work.

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: eyes everywhere

Pedit:

Can we get a round of applause for the cosmic deity? Thank you thank you very much!

[EldritchAbomination]

Eighty-five years ago, on 2 June 1924, during a blistering early summer in Chicago, a ravaged courtroom bruiser stepped into the future. Clarence Darrow, with his seamed face and stooped shoulders making him look every one of his 67 years, was America's greatest and most controversial defender of the lost and the damned. But, as he hunched over his desk to write to the secret love of his life, Mary Field Parton, the old lawyer felt breathless.

Earlier that day, Darrow had agreed to represent Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two teenage lovers and the sons of Chicago millionaires, after they confessed to the world's first "thrill-killing" of a 14-year-old boy with whom Loeb had sometimes played tennis. Darrow, the Ohio-born son of an abolitionist father and suffrage-supporting mother, was himself a leading civil libertarian and vehement opponent of the death penalty. In this case, however, he confronted seemingly insurmountable odds; his disturbing and disturbed young clients faced certain execution in what newspapers would soon call the trial of the century.


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In agreeing to defend Leopold and Loeb, this brilliant orator who had spent his career battling many personal demons (including a highly damaging accusation of bribing jurors) caught a glimpse of the media-driven world with which we are now so familiar. "I saw a dark vision of the future this morning," Darrow wrote to Parton, a married journalist. "This is all so shocking but, at once, I sense a strange new era. Life will become cheap and tawdry, driven by a lust for sensation and mass stupidity. Man has never been a noble beast but, now, our understanding and mercy will be tested to their limits."

In fact, Darrow was about to plunge into an extraordinary trilogy of cases that would seal his legacy as the most influential trial lawyer in history. Michael Mansfield, the British barrister who defended the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, and more recently the families of Stephen Lawrence and Jean Charles de Menezes, agrees that, "These three trials were so vast in scope, and so significant in their impact, that Darrow's work remains inspirational. Starting with Leopold and Loeb and going on to the Scopes 'monkey' trial, with its backdrop of evolution, and then defending a black doctor, Ossian Sweet, charged with murder, Darrow swept through a triangle of defining cases in quick succession. In each one he showed a fascinating mix as a man of reason who used such emotion in court. Judges have called my performances histrionic - but it's nothing compared to Darrow."

Far more significant than the glut of Hollywood movies they inspired - from Alfred Hitchcock's Rope to Orson Welles in Compulsion to Spencer Tracey in Inherit the Wind - Darrow's last trio of major cases pushed back courtroom boundaries as he tussled with issues that remain strikingly pertinent. In two dizzying years, he pioneered campaigns against capital punishment, religious fundamentalism (in the form of creationism) and racism, while setting precedents in using psychiatric profiles, expert witnesses and a new form of oratorical showmanship to save his contrasting clients.

The trial of Leopold and Loeb centred on his most passionate cause - overcoming the death penalty - yet the Chicago Sun-Times insisted that he had sold out for "a cool million bucks". (In fact, Darrow's modest fee was decided by the Bar Association). The newspaper branded him a hypocrite who, having always fought for the poor and unfortunate, was now rushing to defend the impossibly rich for a reprehensible murder.

As part of a surreal sexual pact, Leopold and Loeb had randomly chosen the young Bobby Franks as their victim. They lured him into a rental car and, "for the thrill of it", killed him on a suburban side-street. After their arrest, the 19-year-old Leopold stunned reporters by suggesting that "the killing was an experiment.

It is just as easy to justify such a death as it is to justify an entomologist killing a beetle with a pin." Leopold claimed he and Loeb were intellectual supermen galvanised by Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. Loeb, 18 and better looking but not as well read, smirked that, "This thing will be the making of me."

He was partially right. The US was fixated by the case - and the public thirst for execution was so intense that individual citizens stated their credentials as hangmen. A pensioner from Michigan offered $100 for the privilege of hanging Leopold and Loeb. "I am 66 years old, but I am game. I have no use for such fiends."

Darrow was undeterred by the personal vitriol. The case perplexed and intrigued him. Unusually, especially for an old man in this more conservative era, he only needed to see how "Babe" Leopold looked yearningly at "Dickie" Loeb to recognise humanity, rather than just fiendish evil, amid their mental disease.

The ensuing trial was dominated by Darrow. First he succeeded in having the evidence heard by a single judge rather than a less easily controlled jury; then he had to make judicial history by persuading the court that mental illness should be regarded as sufficient grounds to commute the death penalty. Psychiatry was then not considered a medical science in legal circles, and Darrow waged battle for two days over the issue, eventually convincing the judge to set a precedent and allow expert witnesses.

Mansfield acknowledges Darrow's groundbreaking work: "With the Tottenham Three [the trio of black men wrongly convicted of murdering PC Keith Blakelock in 1985], we struggled to persuade the court of appeal that judging mental vulnerabilities, as opposed to insanity, should include expert evidence. So it's startling that, in 1924, Darrow opened the door to expert psychiatric evidence. It was a seminal moment."

Darrow, in a closing address spanning an extraordinary three days, produced one of history's most compelling courtroom speeches against capital punishment. On the third day, despite the blue brilliance of the sky outside, he thundered: "Through history you can trace the burnings, the boiling, the drawing and quartering, the hanging of people in England at the crossroads ... I am begging this court not to turn backward to the barbarous past. I am pleading for the future ... when hatred and cruelty will not control our hearts, when we can learn that all life is worth saving; that mercy is the highest attribute of man."

Darrow's eyes moistened when he saw that Judge John Caverly was crying. Newspaper reports the following day refer to them as "silent tears", but they were powerful enough to alter the shape of the judge's twitching mouth. Darrow's strategy, and oratory, had worked. Leopold and Loeb were duly spared the death penalty - and sentenced instead, at Darrow's request, to life imprisonment.

"I've never cried in court and I hope I've never made my juries cry either," says the British barrister John Cooper, who is renowned for his work on the Leah Betts case, and in representing the families of those who died at Deepcut barracks and of those killed in the Hercules and Nimrod disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Darrow, like all great advocates, was a creature of his time. He tapped into the public mind with brilliant oratory. That oratorical art has died because people today are not used to hearing long and florid speeches. The idea that Darrow could speak for six straight hours and hold his audience is staggering.

But in photographs you see hundreds massed outside court to watch him. That wouldn't happen today."

Darrow was hailed by Variety as "America's greatest one-man stage draw" after his next case, the following summer, saw him face down religious fundamentalism in a trial that became just as famous as Leopold and Loeb.

Described as "a duel to the death" between Darrow and the prosecuting attorney (and former Democratic party leader) William Jennings Bryan, the Scopes "monkey" trial began as a publicity stunt. The American Civil Liberties Union hoped to challenge a new law that prohibited the teaching of evolutionary theory in Tennessee, and a local high-school teacher, 24-year-old John Scopes, agreed to be "arrested". The ACLU was less impressed when national hysteria, sparked by the bitter enmity between Bryan and Darrow, swamped the trial. Bryan warned, "If evolution wins, Christianity goes." Darrow responded forcefully: "John Scopes isn't on trial, civilisation is on trial. The prosecution is opening the doors for a reign of bigotry equal to anything in the middle ages."

A furious showdown could only be resolved by a crushing cross-examination from Darrow, who surprised everyone by calling Bryan to the witness stand. He then systematically dismantled the pompous politician, ridiculing his denunciation of scientific fact in favour of biblical allegory with such force that HL Mencken, the celebrated columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun, could barely contain himself: "This three-time candidate for the presidency came in a hero and he sat down as one of the most tragic asses in American history." At the end of that same week, after the trial fizzled out, Bryan suffered a massive stroke and died. "There's a rumour about town," Scopes wrote, "that 'the old devil Darrow' killed Bryan with his inquisition."

By now, it seemed the whole of the US was captivated by Darrow's courtroom performances. But this was also a nation riven by racial tension and, barely three months later, in October 1925, Darrow again put himself at the centre of controversy by attempting to prevent the apparently inevitable conviction and execution of an eminent black doctor, Ossian Sweet, and 10 other "negroes" accused of murder.

Their crime had been to defend themselves against a Ku Klux Klan-led lynch mob that surrounded the Sweet family's house as soon as they had moved into a white neighbourhood in Detroit. Sweet asked his two brothers and some friends to help protect them and, on the second night, when the mob closed in and a rock smashed a window, Sweet's youngest brother, 21-year-old Henry, fired into the dark. He hit two men, killing one and injuring the other. All 11 in the house were charged with murder.

"The Sweet case," Mansfield says, "carries most resonance for me. It reminds me of the Stephen Lawrence inquest because two decent black families faced similar difficulties. There was extraordinary racism in the Lawrence case - even if it was not as naked as that in Detroit. But I love the way Darrow mixes serious political points with edgy humour. Pure pugilism doesn't work in court because it makes people switch off - he taught us that truth."

Darrow exposed the violent racism of the Sweets' neighbours and a mistrial had to be declared in November 1925, when the all-white jury could not reach a verdict. In the second trial, when Henry Sweet was placed alone in the dock, Darrow produced his greatest performance. He was magisterial when exposing the racism that scarred America, prompting Ossian Sweet to say, "I faced the same mob that had hounded my people through its entire history. I was filled with a peculiar fear, the fear of one who knows the history of my race."

Inspired by such lucidity, Darrow asked the white jurors questions that made them gasp. "If you had a choice," he murmured, "would you lose your eyesight or become coloured? Would you have your leg cut off, or have a black skin?"

In May 1926, during his closing address, Darrow's words rang out as they had done for so many decades in defence of the accused. After seven hours on his feet, he bore down on the jury one last time: "I ask you in the name of progress and the human race to return a verdict of 'not guilty'." But when the foreman, George Small, led the jurors back into court, the swiftness of their deliberations indicated that Darrow had lost. The old attorney's huge head jutted towards the jury box as he waited.

Small paused when asked if they had reached a verdict. "Yes," he said, before crying out the two words that mattered: "Not guilty!"

Ossian Sweet buried his face in his hands while Darrow almost collapsed in exhaustion. The prosecution lawyer Robert Toms rushed to catch him but Darrow, eyes glinting darkly, laughed: "Oh, I'm all right. I've heard that verdict before."

Darrow's Shakespearean battles continue today. Racism may be more subtle than that endured by the Sweets or Stephen Lawrence, but the scars remain raw. And Darrow would have snorted in recognition at the continuing struggle over evolutionary theory. In Tennessee he had asked, "Is it possible this trial is taking place in the 20th century?" And yet, even in our current century, school-board members in Tennessee have campaigned for stickers to be placed across textbooks with the warning that "evolution remains unproven".

Mansfield regards Darrow's work as "a reminder that each generation wages the same war against ignorance and prejudice in a different way. His greatness is that he countered prejudice in every form."

Even more evocatively, Darrow's ghostly figure still conjures up an enduring hope that, even in a dark and reeling world, compassion and reason will finally prevail. "Darrow gave us that belief," Cooper agrees. "You know, if the old devil was around today, I'd love to give him a call for a bit of advice".

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: u called for our mod kill. That calls for obligatory trolly troll troll posting before we die

[EldritchAbomination]

VOTE: Mulch

[EldritchAbomination]

Please srop spamming for reals

[EldritchAbomination]

UNVOTE: okay. U did ask nicely <3

[EldritchAbomination]

fork the dog is town now

both cases were projected af and basically a scumclaim, canine & schadd are probably town now, etc., etc.

I'd vote the bird here if I weren't on this particular hydra account.



just repeating, 99% chance we're the NK. don't waste the mislynch, you've only got so many.
scum should definitely not want to risk a technically-insane slot being in LyLo

[EldritchAbomination]

ya tru but that sounds like scum pre-defending town

fwiw our "troll faction" is trolling & gunning for a mislynch
fight back, town!!!! if you all lynch us today you just let the trolls win

[EldritchAbomination]

you will not be the d1 nk for sure.There is no reason for scum to want to kill you when you are spamming the thread and confusing the town with more reads than you have heads. You are of positive scum utility perhaps until lylo,

Counter solution:

We test the Loyal Vigilantes on us. If we die, then one of them is town. If we don't, we can assume outside interference like role blocker or bus driver.

[EldritchAbomination]

deliberated about who to vote for in the PT.

FYI... Our vote is only going to be the hammer vote of any and all bandwagons that reach L-1. That's what we decided in the PT.

PS most of the hydra heads are more involved in playing a 5 player game of Mafia in the PT. In other words, I can't guarantee that we'll discuss our reads in depth with one another.

Pedit: That works to.

The point is, you should get rid of us before LyLo. We're too much of a negative utility to town to carry us to that point into the game.

[EldritchAbomination]

I believe so?

Like I said before, if you get the bird to L-1 faster than anyone else's wagon we will hammer.

If someone else reaches L-1 first, then they'll be getting our vote.

[EldritchAbomination]

Nope. What's that? A movie?

Anyway, it looks like our wagon already has 4 votes to it (IC, Ginngie, Red, and Varsoon). Same deal, different deck. When or if our bandwagon reaches L-1 we'll hammer that too.

[EldritchAbomination]

Eh. Call it spite, but I'm scum reading IC for no other reason than a weak argument.

Just call it like it is and say it's a policy lynch but don't say that hydra dissonance is scummy. Weak. Do better.

Mom was suspicious for her comment on the two factions thing.

Vax was kinda suspicious for knowing about the supposed PM problems that IC was having despite them not mentioning it. It was one of our heads that alerted the thread to our PM problems.

[EldritchAbomination]

EWBOP:

Eh. Call it spite, but I'm scum reading IC for no other reason than a weak argument.


Just call it like it is and say it's a policy lynch but don't say that hydra dissonance is scummy and claim that you're scum hunting us. Weak. Do better.

[EldritchAbomination]

He's basically calling hydra dissonance scummy. He's fair on the troll posting but that's anti town, more than scummy. Scum have to play this game too. I don't think they like us clogging up the thread either.

Earlier he also called us Village Idiot. As I pointed out, he's implying that he think we're town and yet is calling us scum because he thinks we're "acting". Hello? We've repeatedly said we're going to troll post? Yes. We're going to sound like a VI cause we're troll posting.

His big beef is that we're making the thread unreadable. Again. Fair point. Lynch us out of policy. But don't claim to scum hunt cause of BS reasons. Just say it's policy and that you don't give a shit about our alignment.

Pedit: yeah yeah I'll come up with some new later after I ISO everyone.

[EldritchAbomination]

Mom was suspicious for her comment on the two factions thing.

I'm getting tired of hearing this I know you guys can do better

Think of hydras like the old classroom experiment on communism, in which performance is evaluated as the mean of all of the individuals.

The weak students don't need to try because they realize the strong students can pick up the slack.

The strong students realize that no matter how hard they try, the weak students will hold them back (cough VOTE: Mulch cough).

That's basically us.

We are the end of the path you started us on.

- We The Purple

[EldritchAbomination]

Wait? We're the strong students?

I thought we'd be the outlier?

[EldritchAbomination]

I mean if we're being serious this account is totally negative EV for town lmao.

[EldritchAbomination]

Very serious.

/wiggles eyebrows

But yeah, guys. In a nutshell, you can get rid of us and we'll self hammer. Just don't claim to scum hunt -

cough

Varsoon, IC

coughs

- by pushing what's clearly a policy lynch. Thanks.

[EldritchAbomination]

Maybe we can lynch someone else and tgp/me attacks to hydra at night

You don't wanna do that. Don't forget we outnumber you, let alone we outsmart you.



Or maybe you have an idea, and I have a counter idea?



~The young one

[EldritchAbomination]

sry bruh you can't actually believe that. lynching scum > lynching lurkers.
imagine 5p LyLo with 2 hyperposting scum and 3 meh town. trainwreck!

874 & 878 hit me in the feels

I feel like you're my Terry Benedict here

ginn ur awesome but
what is thiiiiiiissss

Just call it like it is and say it's a policy lynch but don't say that hydra dissonance is scummy and claim that you're scum hunting us. Weak. Do better.

What was weak about an argument because I remember reading the interaction between ya'll and thinking CoolDog was in the right

are you scum hunting based off right & wrong in an opinionated argument (NOTING you have no idea what our intent in getting into this argument was)???
what is your angle here? what are you thinking, or are you just creating needless 1v1s and trying to have an opinion to push a lynch?
serious question.

[EldritchAbomination]

u have played mafia before rite

[EldritchAbomination]

What if I don't believe those Vig-claims?

Roll with it?

By the way, am I unable to comprehend this post or have you just scum claimed?

You comprehend the post just fine.

[EldritchAbomination]

Legit forgot that mutant was a player.

[EldritchAbomination]

Super hydra claims? Or claims in general?

[EldritchAbomination]

TGP and Red claimed Loyal Vigilante. TGP claimed first. Red second.

Gotta ISO our posts for claims. One minute.

[EldritchAbomination]

Okay.

Super Hydra claims include: Jester, Survivor, - this is when we heard about what our role PM was - VT, Jester again, Lawyer, and then scum.

In the Hydra PT... It gets weirder. Claims include infinite Mafia Day Vigilante, VT, Loyal Vigilante, Jester, not scum, and someone supposedly had access to Mafia PT.

These claims brought to you be Eyes Incorporate. You are guarnateed to be enlightened by the services we have to offer. Buy one and get one free today!

[EldritchAbomination]

So yeah... Bottom line, we shouldn't make it to LyLo. I think most of us are assuming we're just town and we're just rolling with it.

[EldritchAbomination]

I think a few of us have been privately informed of yet another role, for either trolling or strategic reasons.

I would honestly not be surprised if we rolled jester and this is all an elaborate ruse to get our heads to get ourselves lynched. Not that we needed the help.

[EldritchAbomination]

Huh... there's been no promise of randomness in alignment distribution.

Thanks, mastina.

[EldritchAbomination]

Varsoon indirectly claimed Day Vig and took a shot at us.
Vaxkiller claimed to be Hydra buster. Which is exactly what it says on the tin.
Pigeon fake claimed Day Vig.

[EldritchAbomination]

Gin. Nothing about us makes sense FYI.

/gesture to the post containing all the claims we've made

[EldritchAbomination]

for either trolling or strategic reasons.

My money's on trolling.

Pedit:

Cool.

[EldritchAbomination]

[EldritchAbomination]

Nope. I haven't been given a role PM. Another head. Stated that they weren't given a role PM in this thread.

Most of those claims weren't backed by a quote of the role PM.

[EldritchAbomination]

Actually scratch that. All of those claims weren't backed up by a role PM quote. Despite being given permission to do so by the Mod.

[EldritchAbomination]

There's also more to come if 905 is anything to go by.