:alex-aware:

It’s very strange, you can tell the writing for this game is all-timer level great because people can have wildly divergent interpretations of the game’s ultimate tone. It’s either one of the most depressing and defeatist games ever made, or one of the most optimistic and hopeful. And both interpretations are equally valid.

(I’m more in the optimism camp, for the record).

Thats kind of the point, they’re so (deliberately) underfunded they have to farm out jobs to subcontractors which boil down to “vigilante goes to place, murders a bunch of people”.

Yeah my first run (Reformist but lost the war) I funded Health and Education thinking I would get prompted for a new budget annually and initial investments there would pay off Keynesian-style.

But funding Law Enforcement is actually extremely important if you intend to

Which I did to a maximalist extent in my second, successful run.

No details but

However it does genuinely have one of my favorite moments in the entire game.

It isn’t that nuanced in its portrayal of fascism (or for that matter hustlegrind Ultra mindset or pretentious ironic detachment cynicism for that matter) but in my personal subjective opinion that’s fairly accurate because those lines of thinking don’t require much thinking to maintain and analysis of those beliefs threatens them fundamentally, so it’s rarely done.

If you pursue the fascist path in dedicated fashion it actually does get quite nuanced. I won’t elaborate more on what I mean by any of that.

As far as I know though Ultraliberal is only ever a caricature because that’s exactly what it is and what it deserves.

Lmao you went Dictator, defunded the military, joined CSP, didnt promote Lucian, and didn’t form the Anti-Corruption Police, didn’t you?

I’m pretty sure thats the route you have to take to alienate literally everyone in the cabinet and have every possible bid to overthrow you go off.

You mean the police procedural, right?

Because classic mystery stories focus way more on what actually solves murders - detective grunt work like alibis, motives, timelines, etc

Picture after this was told to the Coal Mining Enjoyer:gigachad:

Literally no one here is arguing that Ukraine is good, but the actual leftists (as opposed to national chauvinists) here are arguing that this is unmistakably an inter-imperialist war and not some convoluted “the invasion of Ukraine is anti-imperialist because Russia is on the imperial periphery of a super-imperialist bloc” bullshit argument.

I’m someone who can absolutely advance arguments that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was caused by outside imperialist circumstances. But now that it has happened, and is actual fact? There is zero “critical support” of Russian aggression here. The only legitimate communist position in this scenario is for Ukrainian and Russian soldiers alike to turn their guns on their own generals. Will that happen? No. But that’s the fucking position the Bolsheviks themselves took from the start, not some ridiculous stance about how actually the Kaiser was right to resist all along and criticizing the German war effort is bad.

Anyone on this site who genuinely believes Vladimir Putin does “anti-imperialism” out of any motive other than supremely cynical, convenient, competing imperialist interest seriously needs to re-evaluate their stances and sources. Or, otherwise, go join the fucking Maupinite/Hazite clowns who are basically doing the most cringe reactionary shit imaginable, because they are your people.

I say this as someone who has for a while tried to stay out of the dogmatic factionalist bullshit in favor of just shitposting when it comes to this site. If you’ve been suckered into believing a siloviki-dominated hyper-capitalist kleptocracy like Russia is a genuine force for “anti-imperialism”, you’ve been fucking had in the worst way possible. Even the most mindless simping for modern Dengist China has a more rational basis.

CPRF stop being shit ass nationalists debasing a corpse challenge (Difficulty: Impossible)

“Turn your actual prayers to a deity that may not exist into commodities to buy and sell.”

:jesus-cleanse:

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. — Matthew 21:12–13

He might do extensive research for each season of the podcast but in this one there is very much a gaping hole that could have been filled by reading Red Petrograd.

He at least did a good job of emphasizing how every non-Bolshevik faction completely fucked up their position in between February and October 1917, thus throwing support to the Bolsheviks. But he pretty firmly turned against the Bolsheviks in his narrative after October in a very Orlando Figes kind of way. Thankfully he is covering how the Whites continue to be so incompetent and reactionary that everyone else has no choice but to support the Bolsheviks as the lesser evil. But a major tell is that he puts a lot of emphasis on the Bolsheviks dissolving the Constituent Assembly, ignoring how if the Constituent Assembly was even remotely relevant to the interests of the masses it would not have been so trivial to dissolve it.

I’m a dude playing another dude disguised as another dude

And of course his daughters friend is fucking dead. Why? Because she’s a whore. She’s not as pure as his daughter. She deserved it. I mean it’s sickening. The whole narration, it’s psycho-sexual undertones. His daughter is alive because she’s precious on the human trafficking market, because she’s a virgin. There are no virgins in Europe you know, only God blessed Americans are pure.

Taken literally uses staple tropes ripped straight from 80s slasher films. The virginal Final Girl survived because she started following her dad’s rules.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO YOU CAN’T JUST ENACT STRICT QUARANTINE AND PREVENT THE RAPID MASS SPREADING OF PLAGUE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The Nazis had to continuously pursue their revanchist aims and win in order to maintain popular legitimacy. The German economy was also disastrously overheated and on the precipice of catastrophic collapse, which was only prevented by going to war, getting insanely lucky against France, and then plundering continental Europe for needed raw materials and wealth. The Nazis had maneuvered into a position where they had to go to war for their regime to survive, by design.

They also, like all fascists, were ideologically incapable of objectively evaluating the perceived strength of their enemies. Hitler gambled that Britain and France would back down again, and gambled again that the Wehrmacht had the capability to defeat them quickly.

How Hitler could have won:

Don’t start an unwinnable war