The IMF and World Bank are single, centralized institutions that (from my perspective right now) are making an unforced error.

As much as neoliberals can be cynical, calculated, and cruel, it’s easy to forget that their economic system is a dogmatic cult that’s irrational, flawed, and built on materially false tenets. They’re not magic robots doing paperclip optimization, they’re cruel people dogmatically following an earnest belief in a deeply flawed school of economic thought written by cranks with ulterior motives.

I also learned that the color red wasn’t strongly associated with them until 2000.

This is the weirdest and most infuriating of all the empty little symbol stuff. Historically election maps just kind of used random colors in the US because none of the parties had traditional color associations, but because one newscaster talked about “the red states” when pointing at a map where Bush was represented with red and the states in question were literally just colored red on the map, now the GOP has the left’s color and the Democrats have the traditional color of elite reactionaries and as stupid and meaningless as this is it’s just so annoying especially because the Democrats really do just want to be snooty aristocratic elites and they do insufferable left punching based on associating their even-more-reactionary liberal counterparts in the GOP with the left to smear them.

It’d be like if American political parties somehow adopted the hammer and sickle through some galaxy brain “hammer=judge’s gavel=law and order” and “sickle=agricorp subsidies” logic: meaningless and empty, but offensive appropriation all the same.

looking for good guys in WW1 is probably not going to end well

The Red Army fighting the invasion by the Entente who wanted the Whites back in power so Russia would return to the war. That’s technically not in WWI but it was both contemporaneous to it, related to it, and involved powers currently fighting in it.

I find myself describing it as a cold and crystalized rage - icy, sharp, and still, lying beneath the surface. We have far since passed the point where frantic anger became appropriate, since any sort of moral event horizon was passed, but it all has to be frozen and put away, still present and painful but constrained enough that we can still function.

I assume if there’s a massive volcanic eruption and the average is 1.7 - they’ll [cough] cook the books and say there’s no breach because the eruption was a natural fluctuation in the climate.

Not that it affects your overall point, but a large volcanic eruption would generally lower the temperature because the ash and chemicals it puts out increase the amount of light reflected back out of the atmosphere instead of being absorbed. It’s basically the natural equivalent of the sorts of hairbrained geoengineering schemes techbros like to promise as a miracle cure. AFAIK there have even been what are basically miniature ice ages because of volcanic activity in recorded history.

So if, say, the Yellowstone volcano blew that would drop the global temperature back down for a year or two, as well as decreasing carbon emissions by shutting down the US and its coal mines and oil fields.

I read it when I was a depressed ball of repression and anxiety in my early 20s, and in retrospect I’m half convinced that the book was an elaborate shitpost to get the sort of person who wants to read a book on manipulating people to instead read a bunch of old arabic parables and ultimately get indirectly called a dumbass in the final chapter for thinking they could learn how to manipulate people and wield power from a book, which also praises Mao and the CPC’s strategic ability during the revolution.

It will never not be funny/infuriating that literally everyone resorted to human wave tactics except for the army that’s racistly stereotyped as using them.

As an aside, it is genuinely fucked how things like ad-hoc militias in the early days of the war deciding to fight doomed holding actions to buy their families and neighbors time to evacuate despite not being able to source enough guns to arm everyone who was willing to actively and knowingly sacrifice their own lives in the hopes of saving everyone they know and care about gets spun into racist tales about an entire army throwing unarmed men into a meatgrinder, and how this seeps into portrayals of successful attacks carried out by well equipped veteran units who’d spent days training for it ahead of time like the river crossing in Enemy at the Gates (which IRL was an unopposed action from a well equipped and extremely prepared veteran unit).

Oh shit, it’s that game. I remember seeing a trailer for it posted here several years ago and I was just thinking about it the other day, wondering if that ever released or what its deal was.

Yeah, he’s Khajiit CIA with all the propaganda-driven “super cool Adult In The Room that pragmatically murders enemies of the regime” vibes that entails.

It does help that most of the people he’s killing are aristocratic elf nazis.

The expansion packs gave us some decent characters, including some Altmer that didn’t like the Altmer nazis to the point of making their entire island disappear from them (but now cooperating with them in the present because fucking liberalism again).

On that note, the Psijics kind of embody both what I love and hate about ESO’s writing: it actually gets to go to and use all the cool, weird places and things from the lore that are seemingly banned from mainline games because they step outside Todd Howard’s unseasoned mashed potato vision, which is really cool and an actually good use of the setting, but then they also tend to have really underwhelming writing and story design because it’s an MMO. Like just walking around Vvardenfell or the Morrowind mainland or Valenwood or Elsweyr is really cool, but then the actual storylines there are just kind of shit. There are flashes of good character design and some writing that actually grapples with how fucked up and weird the TES setting is supposed to be, and they definitely do this better than the mainline Bethesda studio, but overall the writing and stories are just kind of bland slop spread over really cool and nice looking places.

It also doesn’t help that the way they split their expansions up means if you just buy the latest major expansion you miss the first story beat of every arc, then get about 60% of its story, then miss the remaining ~35% or so because it’s all sliced up into dungeon stories and minor DLCs that suck and are also very short but contain the ending of their respective arc’s story.

if she was just incompetent or uncaring enough to delegate to genocide-enjoying generals

Something like half the quests involving Altmer are basically “the hitlerite elves have such enlarged racism lobes they cannot help but plot to rebel against the liberal Ayrenn and do pogroms, genocide, or attempted omnicide.” Ayrenn is a tepid liberal reformer whose hegemony relies on the willing violence of a bunch of self-defeatingly racist elven fancy lads, and any possibility of making the AD less ontologically evil died the second she decided to try to coexist with the omnicidal aristocrats as long as they agreed to let a few bosmer and khajit into their paramilitary country club, instead of purging the entire noble class and replacing them with bosmer and khajit loyalists.

That’s right, she’s basically elf Jimmy Carter: charismatic, affable, seemingly well meaning and empathic on a personal level, but entirely unwilling to wield power against entrenched blocs of ontologically evil racist monsters in the state’s ranks and supporting institutions, and still ultimately willing to collaborate with maintaining the empire’s hegemony abroad with the most grotesque violence including turning a blind eye to or rubber stamping genocide.

My hot take is that most of the community love for the AD comes entirely from Razum-dar being such a charismatic and memorable character and other factions just not having any recurring characters as memorable or enjoyable as Raz. Players like Raz and Raz worships the ground Ayrenn walks on, so some of that rubs off on the players too. I couldn’t even give you a description of the equivalent recurring secret agent quest giver for the Ebonheart Pact, and I couldn’t get into the Daggerfall Covenant storyline at all because Daggerfall is such a painfully generic and dull place that I rushed through a little of it then just got demoralized by how much all of it was bland and boring and went to do something else instead, so I don’t know if they got any decent characters at any point but I’ve never heard of any whereas everyone knows and loves Raz.

Stanning any of the ontologically evil factions and their idle dipshit monarchs is bad and dumb, but if someone’s going to do it the funny cat man secret agent has gotta tip the scales a fair bit.