no amount of heat tolerance will change that.
Conservatives: “Climate change will be fine. Actually all this extra heat and carbon in the air will be good for the plants. You’ll see.”
Also Conservatives: “MAKE MORE BABIES! ONLY THE FITTEST WILL SURVIVE!”
Also Also Conservatives: “We need to conquer Canada and Greenland for… uh… reasons.”
The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.
BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.
Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.
The Dakota War came out of a strategic starvation campaign imposed by the Union Army over Sioux Territory. The original tribes had been forced off the productive soil around the Minnesota River and displaced into barren wasteland. Subsequent crop failure and long winter made trading for foodstuffs from their home territories the only means of survival. And the settlers took maximum advantage, deliberately scamming and price gouging the Sioux for the remains of their family wealth. This, after a series of treaties had been casually violated from administration to administration.
The war was quite literally a fight for survival by the Sioux. Lincoln’s largess in hanging only the young men directly involved in the raid did nothing to prevent the Sioux population from continuing its rapid decline, as the surviving elders were left to starve to death in the wilderness and the children were forced into Christian schools notorious for brutalizing and killing the kidnapped youths.
The Republican Party was predicated on continuous western expansion. It was the successor to the Free Soil Party in the west and what was left of the Whigs in the East.
That necessarily meant seizing more land from American Natives and distributing it to Settlers. Much of the Union Army, before and after the Civil War, was focused on decimating the Native population and securing new tracks of free land for settlers. Lincoln inherited that mandate when he took office and pursued it as zealously as any Republican before or since.
My biggest complaint about Lincoln was the people he didn’t hang.
Tech itself is not the issue. How it’s applied is the issue.
At this point, I would argue that technology is the issue. Or, at least, the current iteration of it.
Internal Combustion Engines, always-on internet connections, and digital financial systems are generating real physical hazards that stretch beyond their benefits. This isn’t just an issue of use. There is no “proper” method of employing - for instance - cryptocurrency or single-use plastics or a statewide surveillance network that doesn’t result in a degradation of quality of life for the population at large. To take a more dramatic angle, there’s no safe application of a nuclear bomb.
When the iEye app notifies you that the enzyme is running low, simply crack open an ice cold, refreshing can of Tesla Cola Zero to refuel your device for another two hours. Need to sleep? We got you.
Except this isn’t a technological innovation, its a Science Fantasy. iEye isn’t a real thing. Tesla Cola Zero isn’t a real thing. Not needing sleep isn’t a real thing. You’re not a cyborg and you will never be a cyborg.
But the science fantasy is still having its own cost. People are making real material nationally-transformative (or de-transformative) decisions based on the fantastic promises we’ve been sold about Tomorrow. We’re underdeveloping our mass transit infrastructure and relying entirely too much on unregulated air travel to speed up travel. At the same time, we’re clinging to old bunker-fuel laden container ships and decimating the aquatic ecology, because we refuse to adapt proven nuclear powered shipping that’s over 60 years old at this point. We’re investing more and more and more money in digital surveillance and personal tracking. We’re off-loading our ability to collect and process information to unreliable digital tools (LLMs being only the latest in overhyped AI as a replacement for professionalized human labor). And then we’re trying to justify the bad decisions we make as a result by claiming secret wisdom inherent in machines.
We’re eating our seed corn after being told technologists will eliminate our need to eat ever again.
This is a direct result of technological developments we have made (or promised to make and failed to deliver) over the last twenty years. Revolutions in racial profiling, viral marketing, planned obsolescence, military expansionism, and genocide have not improved our quality of life in any material sense.
The cow has not benefited from industrial agriculture. And the prole has not benefited from de-skilling of labor.
Ditched Netflix this month and Max is going out the window when I get off AT&T Fiber next month.
The future is looking pirate-y.
Americans will live through the most prosperous, most happy, and liberal period in human history, elect a single piece of shit to the Presidency, and decide it’s time for the world to end.
When are people going to learn to stop trusting the Americans? You only ever get stabbed in the back.
This is Berkshire Hathaway Erasure.
Going from 100 middle class people buying and selling 100 homes amongst each other to 2 extremely wealthy people 100 homes amongst each other and 98 people renting. The rich guys will price the assets out of reach of everyone else and make up the difference in rental profits.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
While the criticism is on point, I think you’re underselling the legitimate dire fear modern leftists have when they see the brutality of the periphery returning home. We have to recognize that - individually - we’re incredibly weak in the face of a mobilized police state. And we have every reason to be horrified of The Jakarta Method being visited on LA or Atlanta or Houston, particularly if we’re members of that domestic political underclass so often targeted for abuse.
Any opposition must be a unified and organized resistance. But we are also plagued by mass surveillance, structural alienation, and a profound sense of vulnerability cultivated over decades of “War On” maximalist state propaganda. So we’re feeling weak, we don’t know who we can trust, and we see this horrifying inevitability cresting over our heads like a tsunami.
This isn’t a betrayal of comrades abroad but a reflection of our own dismal moral, disunity, and despair. It represents one more hurdle for a modern western left to overcome and should be received as such, rather than used as a bludgeon to degrade left-wing moral even further.
Far better to be awake and aware and justifiably afraid of the threat of fascism than blind to it as the unaligned, compromised by it as the liberals, or enthusiastically participatory as the conservatives.
The British spent the entire 1930s claiming that Britain and Nazi Germany will be a bulwark against communism and signed three pacts with Hitler which were all directly against the Soviet Union: the Four Powers Pact meant to exclude and isolate the Soviets, the Naval Agreement meant Germany could have a navy up 35% of the British navy meaning it wouldn’t threaten British empire but every country on the Baltic sea… i.e. the Soviet Union, and finally the Munich Betrayal which was understood to be a gesture of a “free hand” (British diplomat’s words not mine) for Hitler to go east.
In spite of these difficulties Lord Halifax and other members of the British Government were fully aware that the Fuhrer had not only achieved a great deal inside Germany herself, but that, by destroying Communism in his country, he had barred its road to Western Europe, and that Germany therefore could rightly be regarded as a bulwark of the West against Bolshevism
In spite of these difficulties Lord Halifax recognized that the Chancellor had not only performed great services in Germany, but also, as he would no doubt feel, had been able by preventing the entry of Communism into his own country, to bar Its passage further West. The Prime Minister held the view that it should be possible to find a solution of out differences by an open exchange of views
When the Soviets liberated Germany they were able to get a huge cache of British diplomatic documents. The Soviets released the above book and Documents And Materials Relating To The Eve Of The Second World War Vol. 2 full to the brim of diplomats praising Nazi Germany as a twin pillar alongside Britain stopping communism.
The Russians did a much better job of lining Nazis up against a wall, immediately after the war.
But over the long term, both occupying forces took the easy road over the revolutionary road. Propping the old fascists back up into positions of power was easier than rebuilding the industrial state from scratch in a western-liberal or eastern-socialist model. Perhaps you can argue that the looming Cold War forced their hands. If FDR and Stalin had survived to shake hands at Potsdam and Camp David, maybe things would have been different. If the Korean Peninsula hadn’t collapsed into Civil War, maybe we’d have had a global alliance focused on economic modernization instead of an Iron Curtain and knives in the dark for the next 50 years.
But FDR’s brain popped. Stalin turned inward in paranoia and fumbled the USSR into Khruschev’s hands. Churchill was run out on a rail for being a conniving reactionary little shit. And the Nazis crawled in through the open wounds of the dying post-war alliance to infect both the East and the West for generations to come.
The Stasi had it’s share of fascist turncoats.
Don’t care, I’d rather live under the neolib European governments any day than a fascist Russian shithole.
I’ve got some horrible news for you.
Had to protect the surplus profits of Capitalism at all costs. A century of wealth needed to be consolidated in the hands of the ubermensch. You know, Mohammed Bin Salmen and Amancio Ortega and Elon Musk.
That’s very much the Neville Chamberlain approach …
That’s such revisionist history. Chamberlain wasn’t appeasing Germany, he was aligning with Germany against Communist Russia.
He wasn’t surrendering, he was allying with fascism.
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