funnily enough, the imperialism games, especially imperialism 2, are very fun and much more honest about what they are

but yeah the civ games certainly work as ruling class sims and i do still love them, especially when they embrace their board-gamey origins and dont try too hard for rEaLiSm

and in the first one, a 50% chance that your declaration of war would be overruled by congress, to represent the peaceful nature of dEmOcRaCy

ive always kinda wanted to write a bit of an essay on the intense liberal ideology baked into almost every facet of the civ series (and not just its laughable ‘government types’), but never quite got around to it. theres so much, down to how nomadic and non-urban peoples are ‘barbarians’ to be destroyed so their land can be properly tamed, to the linear flow of technological and social progress as represented by government-allocated beakers or whatever, to even just the conception of the city as the atomic unit of human societal organisation, etc etc etc. and of course the complete lack of any vision of the future or ‘victory’ beyond either military or soft-power conquest of the globe, or liberal democracy in space for no discernible reason, like it cant even conceive of any greater goal for humanity, like it might as well be francis fukuyamas civilization

the sid meiers civilization series - the flow of world history as filtered through the mind of an apolitical 90s american nerd right at the ‘end of history’, with terminal western highschool textbook brain

and dont even get me started on sid meiers colonization…

perhaps an obvious one but im gonna say black panther, not just for killmonger being based and them having to make him kill his girlfriend for no reason to make him look like the bad guy, but for its portrayal of the international rules-based order

borrowing from an old comment, the thing that i found most interesting about that movie is that killmonger completely plays by all the countrys rules to come into power - he comes from the appropriate royal bloodline, he gets the backing of one of the major feudal lords, he comes in openly and challenges the sitting monarch who accepts the challenge without coercion (and as we saw earlier in the movie, challenge to personal combat is a normal and accepted means of transfer of power), and then he wins decisively and kills the sitting monarch (as far as anyone knows). all of this is ludicrous crusader kings shit and an absurd way to run an enlightened modern country, but he plays by the rules.

and the very second that somebody they dont like gets into power, what is the rules-based “liberal” response? pro-royalist military coup, openly backed by literally the cia. they only find out the black panther guy is alive later, so they still think hes dead when they throw it all into motion but that doesnt stop them. and the movie is written in a way that makes this seem like the obviously logical and honourable and correct thing to do, and that these are the good guys that you should support. and at the end stability is restored, and even though hes a hereditary monarch without even the figleaf of parliamentary oversight, hes pro-western and he says nice things in speeches so thats basically the same as democracy right?

like even in the most woke lib “pro-black” blockbuster movie, cia-backed coup is just seen as the obvious response to any thorny political questions.

but hey, they did open one (1) community centre at the end so the injustice faced by black people worldwide was pretty much solved :liberalism:

I hate to say it but similarities between broken, desolate cities in most zombie apocalypse movies just can’t be dismissed

on a picture of a cityscape that would look completely normal in most of the world

You are looking across into South Korea. This open space is the Joint Security Area which straddles the political border within the Demilitarized Zone. The physical border is where the light gravel turns dark denoted by the raised concrete line. Cross that line and you’ll be shot. The blue buildings are halfway in each Korea and by entering them, one can theoretically cross to the South. The large building ahead is the ‘Freedom House’, ironically housing a dozen surveillance cameras.

whoops when you forget that the scary orwellian building youre talking about is actually on the south korean side

some lib on r*ddit the other day was using an article from this place as a source for uyghur genocide, with the whole line of “oh the victims of communism foundation is too nazi a source for you is it, hows this for a non-nazi source checkmate hur hur”

and it turned out the article in question had no sources, but it did have a whole personal sob story repeated uncritically (with sad pictures) from rushan abbas, the lady who did the famous ama on reddit and it turned out she just happened to be a cia spook who worked at guantanamo

anyway im sure its just a coincidence

We share no blood but he is my life. He came from Cuba (legally, of course) six years ago and lives with me in Florida.

I am so proud of him and raising him has been the best, most rewarding thing I’ve done in my life.

I particularly like the ones where they go through and spend millions on the redesign and millions more updating all their stationary and signage etc etc and it goes through hundreds of internal people and nobody says anything, and then the first person from the public sees it and says “that looks like a dick lol”

Given that so many logo redesigns cost huge amounts of money and end up being some minor change like this, I do wonder whether this isn’t just kinda a standard thing to have pages of grandiose nonsense to justify paying millions for a change of font or whatever, and this was just the unfortunate one that got leaked

But yeah, absolutely phenomenal grift, it’s hard not to be a little impressed

o7 to all involved