faceh
12hr ago
The interesting question isn’t “why do MBAs adopt social justice?” It’s “why doesn’t social justice have a credible competitor?”
I do like that framing.
Seems like it gets towards the issue of Whites being the only racial group that doesn't have a massive ingroup preference on average.
Whatever the reasons for that, the White customers will not abandon a product in droves just because the marketing becomes apathetic to or maybe directly hostile to their identity, so they are simply 'safe' to treat as a pariah.
Personally, I'd ask one more question:
Is social justice is slowly capturing and subverting woke capital to their ends such that these companies will simply follow that ideology by default?
Or is Capital subverting and assimilating the wokies to worship the almighty god of profits and loss, such that they'll push the company line with just as much blind enthusiasm as they do every other cause?
Or are we seeing some unholy combination arise, where large companies continue to operate with impunity but also spend billions of dollars on social justice causes and keep a stable of activists around who help shield and absolve them of sins?
Sometimes it feels like profit-driven companies inevitably roll over when facing down a controversy that might lead to lost sales, and thus official policy is to keep moving left when pushed.
But then I remember that most companies don't celebrate pride month at their branches in Middle Eastern countries.
So there is some somewhat more complex calculus occurring under the hood, even if we are correct on their intrinsic motivations.
faceh
15hr ago
A fun game would be to get the woke upset that Ubisoft thinks so little of black civilization that they insert black characters into other civs instead of doing a game based on black history.
The slightly humorous explanation for that is it would entail a black character running around incessantly killing other exclusively black characters.
Maybe they could get away with setting it during the "Scramble for Africa" colonialism period. But they'd have to pull some explanation out of their butt for why Africa was so fundamentally undeveloped BEFORE the Europeans arrived, i.e. why did the magical illuminati people ignore it until then?
faceh
15hr ago
Yes, lack of accountability does end up gelling with my other theory on institutional failure
As I hinted at above, I would hope that the end of an era of low interest rates enabling all kinds of corporate shenanigans would meant that financial performance again becomes the dominant metric by which decisions to fire are made.
faceh
15hr ago
My working theory which I don't (yet) endorse is that MBA grads and SJWs actually have a lot of aligned incentives.
MBAs come into a company and try to figure out how to broaden their target market beyond whatever core demographic they have established. Regardless of what your company sells, the MBA wants to find a way to sell it to EVERYBODY.
SJWs also have a 'product' they want to sell to 'everybody.' That is, their ideology.
And SJWs can claim to be the ones who can tell the MBAs how to sell beyond their core demo. "If your product isn't selling well to women, it is probably too sexist. If your product isn't selling well to minorities, its probably too racist. If you can't get LGBT folks to buy, your product is too heteronormative. If you denounce the patriarchy and white supremacy and become known as a queer ally, you can reach out to those otherwise unattainable groups who will then buy your product."
An MBA presumably doesn't bother to comprehend the ideology or its goals, but thinks "Ah, we hire extra women, we run some ads that uplift black people, and we start openly celebrating pride and that will kick open new, untapped markets. Lets do it!"
And because SJWs have indeed done the groundwork in prepping the larger society to accept more diversity, this strategy might even pay off in the short term.
In this sense, MBAs and SJWs form a symbiotic team, with both having the similar end goal of achieving 100% market saturation for their product even if it means 'sacrificing' those things that made the product successful to begin with.
faceh
16hr ago
Being faiiiirrrr the entire job of CEO is to try to optimize for exactly how much you can get away with in the name of maximizing profits before people will balk. Forced diversity is not the only way that media products are getting worse.
I find myself waffling between the position of "CEOs are usually coldly logical sociopaths who are pushing the woke ideology because it appears to be profitable and will change up if it ceases to be so" and
"CEOs are just as brainwormed as other lefties and are genuinely trying to push the message where-ever they think they can get away with it."
In full reality, could be a little from column A and a little from Column B, plus unnoticed variables C, D, and E, too.
Ironically I feel like we are already past the peak of that particular tactic (I could be wrong). I think that time period where we got a Watchmen sequel series with a Black Dr. Manhattan, and a Lovecraft series specifically about his racism, and Amazon's Rings of Power LOTR adaptation adding in Black elves, dwarves, and Hobbits would be hard to surpass, without straight up becoming comedies.
There's also some funny irony in how Disney's Marvel fumbled (nearly) every move made post-Endgame, such as trying to replace Captain America with a black dude (no hate at Anthony Mackie, mind), to introduce a black supervillain to supplant Thanos as the big bad (maybe a little hate towards Jonathan Majors), and of course their attempt to get audiences engaged with three female heroes almost nobody cares about which was not Black Girl Magic at the box office. I can't even muster up enough interest in that to even attempt to hate it.
It is not working. Maybe they got the message after shareholders attempted a coup.
I would vaguely expect to see a bit less of this particular brand of culture warring in a period where interests rates are higher and thus projects actually have to justify their existence on the basis of short-term profitability.
On the other hand, pretty much every commercial or ad these days still does the Interracial couple thing, almost always black male, white female.
So not sure if I'm looking at the wrong bellwether.
faceh
17hr ago
It surprises me that we don't see more robot mowers for this exact reason. "Roomba for your lawn" seems like it should sell itself.
I guess hiring a service is still the overall cheaper move.
faceh
17hr ago
Injecting your stupid racial politics into 16th century Japan and then hiding behind "actually, there was a black samurai, and you weren't even upset about a golden apple, so I've gotcha you racist".
Especially when it would be approximately as valid to have some random European dude instead, if they were merely looking to inject diversity into a Japanese setting. (They'll probably still have this guy in there as a side character or something, they love doing that).
And this coming up with a background of an extremely well-received show, Shogun, which tries its damndest to keep things realistic as to the demographics of the time and not shy away from the brutality of Japanese culture during the era.
There's clear demand for a straightforward historically accurate dramatization of feudal Japan, the extra step of adding the culture war issues of today into it is just hilariously tone deaf.
Man, the Assassin's Creed series. My take can be succinctly summarized. Disclaimer, I haven't played any in the series since Black Flag, which to my mind is as damn near perfect as a game can get.
-
The series has prided itself on broad historical accuracy. The events it depicts as historical actually happened, the historical figures actually existed and are mostly true to their recorded personas.
-
Even so, the whole premise is that a secret order of Illuminati-like villains has been both guiding history AND rewriting the historical record as part of a propaganda war.
-
Even even so, the magical technology that enables the plot to happen is 'genetic memory' or whatever, which holds that the historical periods being experienced by the players actually happened and thus are telling a 'true story.'
-
So they can just say that Yasuke's history was rewritten by the Villains to downplay his role, and the story in the game is the accurate retelling in the game universe even if 'real world' events are different.
-
YET, this starts to undermine the general premise that you're a stealthy assassin who kills, then blends in with the crowd. The ONE black dude in Japan is not going to be able to just break line of sight and evade detection by pulling on a mask and sitting on a bench.
-
But who cares, the gameplay is optimized for fun, not realism.
-
But but... one point someone made is that the playable protagonist of EVERY game before this has been a fictional character made up specifically for the series, with no historical parallel, which is perhaps in order to give the player the 'blank slate' avatar and avoid any major historical inaccuracies by having some well-known historical figure being an extremely dangerous assassin in their spare time.
So, to the extent Ubisoft has broken a longstanding convention in the series in order to create a playable black character in Japan of all places it bodes ill because it is clear evidence of a point I've made before: If they are specifically advertising their game on grounds of how diverse it is, and they're taking pains to enforce that diversity, it betrays that their priority is not on quality of writing or game design, they're counting on something else to sell the product or, at least, to mask criticism.
But then again, Ubi's whole model is to spit out iterations of a specific formula with small innovations on a regular schedule. Hence there's a new Ghost Recon game, Far Cry, or AC game on the schedule for release just about every year. And while admittedly the AC games tend to be a cut above in terms of average quality, one can understand that Ubisoft isn't in it for the art, it is just another franchise they can milk indefinitely, as long as they don't alienate the fanbase too much with any one entry.
faceh
1d ago
Yeah, seemed obvious that the impacts in one sector would eventually propagate out (AA in school admissions would impact who had relevant degrees when applying for jobs, duh?) and that the INTENT was to finally ensure some kind of 'equality of outcome' across the entire economy.
You'd hope that there was SOME place where rubber meets road and performance/competence HAS to matter, and thus underperformers would actually get fired because millions of dollars or actual human lives are at stake, but man if nothing else really encapsulates the current era, it is that nobody has to take responsibilities for fuckups.
faceh
1d ago
It does seem like there will come a point when the Ukrainian command realizes it is close to running out of warm bodies to throw at the front(s) and then the only sound strategic option is to withdraw to defend key positions, but doing so is what might alert the soldiers that they're now fighting a losing action and cause a general breach of morale.
I cannot wait to move into a house without a beautiful, feature-rich backyard. I just want carpet of grass, a patio to keep grill implements, and that's it.
One think I'm very appreciative of on my land is that the lot behind me is completely undeveloped and forested, so I let the last ~40 feet of my property as it approaches the boundary of the parcel just fall to nature. It is chaos, but it is beautiful in its own way and I don't have to do hardly anything to maintain the appearance.
There's an approximately a 1200 sq foot patch of actual landscaped area that I put effort into maintaining, and even that is basically just killing weeds and pruning back errant branches, I'm not trying to win any contests, I just want a nice space to host friends on occasion.
Feeling that today.
Its a combination of the repetitiousness and the fact that if you slip behind a just a little bit, the difficulty of the task seems to grow at a slightly exponential rate. Its manifestly unfair that if you don't devote X hours per week to keeping up, tasks will accumulate at the rate of X + Y², where Y is some variable representing the amount of additional complexity added by undone tasks feeding into each other.
I do have symptoms of ADD, but I assume "doing chores is boring" is the way every right-thinking person feels. I would prefer to be bored by boring things than to 'cope' by taking drugs that make you not care about the drudgery.
I'm not saying Mary Poppins lied to us but when I sit there folding/hanging up clothes that I know for a fact I'll be folding and hanging up again in about a week it doesn't feel like I'm building towards anything. Cleaning out gutters at least feels like I'm maintaining a system that will provide benefits down the line. Laundry in particular feels like a directly sisyphean task. And its also the one that is hardest to justify hiring someone else to perform. There's no special tools or skill needed, just time. I wish Elon Musk wasn't 70% hype and 30% delivery about most of his companys' products.
In contrast, mowing the lawn is one of the easiest to farm out to a specialist, but I actually enjoy it (4 times out of 5, anyway) because the act of wielding mechanical blades to beat back nature is pretty satisfying, and the act of pushing a mower isn't particularly stressful if I have an audiobook to listen to.
Finally, it is annoying to try to prioritize chores because there's several different metrics that have to be 'optimized.' There are chores you need to do in order to facilitate other chores, there are chores you do because it is necessary to keep a functional schedule/routine, and then there are chores that don't achieve much other than improve the aesthetics and comfort of your local environment. If you are running short on time, you can really only do the chores that are necessary, and those that are prerequisites to the necessary. But as the 'aesthetic' chores pile up, your general comfort level decreases which is particularly distressing, and hard to ignore.
And these can be combined in various ways. If I want to cook food for the week, I usually need to have clean dishes and utensils, which requires emptying the sink of all dirty dishes and running a load through the washer. Which sometimes requires manually soaking and scrubbing out pans and such. THEN I can make sure I have sustenance.
Hence why I am not surprised that tons of younger Millenials and Zoomers opt to doordash more often.
I want to clean my windows because I hate seeing streaks and stains but find it hard to justify bothering with that when the floor that I'm walking on is covered with light filth and dog hair, but oops turns out the vacuum cleaner filter needs to be changed and there's a clog to clear out, so maybe I'll just ignore that for another week and instead work on removing the rust spots on my bedframe, which is a completely aesthetic matter but not having to look at them will take a certain load off my mind.
Anyhow, last week work took up all my time and energy so I didn't complete a few daily tasks that I normally do during the week and its all coming due at once, so frustrated that the more time I put in at work the less time I have to keep my home in order, and have to come home to a reminder of my empire's slow decay every day. And I can spend some of the money from working longer to offload some of the chores if I wanted, but dammit the *WHOLE REASON * I worked extra was to take home more money to do or buy fun stuff (and pay down debt). Spending it on getting menial chores done is a betrayal of my past self.
faceh
3d ago
I think the main thing that boomers and even elder Millenials might be missing is that literally EVERYTHING in Zoomer culture is in a constant state of molochian hypercompetition/red queen races thanks to the influence of social media and algorithmic ranking of every aspect of their performance in life.
I mean this literally. If you grew up playing video games, you probably remember online multiplayer as a casual fun thing to do, where the level of competition varied depending on the server you loaded into.
At some point in the past 15 years, the concept of RANKED MODE was introduced, and now every single player can be aware of their skill level relative to every other player at all times. So if you care about skill level at all, you have to play your hardest at all times to keep your rating up. Casual play is still allowed but you don't get the luxury of just hopping to a different server that's more your speed. People will judge you for your ranking constantly.
Or if you're a streamer, you are fully aware of how many viewers you're attracting at all times. So is everyone else. Only the top 1% break more than a hundred at a time.
Dating with the Apps makes things easy for that top 10-20% of males, and throws challenges to the rest of the men. A man now is judged against every male in a 20 mile radius rather than just the guys in his high school.
Top paying jobs draw applicants from across the entire planet, which means they get Extremely selective and have every more stringent criteria in terms of the degrees, experience, and candidates they accept.
These are sometimes gated by degree requirements, which brings me to the competition to get into these schools.
And of course the rampant cheating and adderal abuse that occurs for those trying to maintain high ranks.
If you go to a good school and get good grades you can walk into one of those top-tier jobs, but this is only applicable to the tippy-top, and everyone is generally aware of their status well before they graduate. If they get the right degree or know the right people they can be basically guaranteed access to elite social circles. Otherwise... may as well resign yourself to lifelong mediocrity.
Power law distributions rule EVERYTHING around you if you're younger and haven't had decades of time to cement your status and build a pile of wealth. And yes, this has almost always been true, but now its simply a known fact of life for the Zoomers. Its the air they breathe, the water they swim in. Every activity they could possibly participate in is subject to a panopticon of algorithms that will rank their performance and often publish it for easy observation, and they are surrounded by peers who are competing as hard as possible to not be left behind.
So perhaps the reason they decline to throw themselves at jobs or dating or developing GRIT is because the entire social environment is simply not conducive to chasing these endeavors unless you are one of those PSYCHOPATHS who doesn't mind abusing stimulants, exploiting every social loophole you can find, committing light fraud, and otherwise sacrificing health and happiness to actually compete for the most desirable positions out there.
faceh
3d ago
Could have some of the daughter's share of income from her offspring flow to her mother. Should be some mathematical way to make this work out.
Interesting to have wealth flowing in 'reverse' down the Matrilineal line.
And, frankly, I would be surprised if a large number of men would be that resentful of a formalized way to discharge their financial obligations to their parents.
Well, we can imagine some that are upset that their parents were abusive or neglectful growing up yet get to share in their wealth. Perhaps there would need to be a process for cutting off parents for cause.
faceh
3d ago
Worst case, if we accept that males are likely to make more money over their lifetime than females, there's a bias towards having male children.
It certainly places the children in a situation where they may decide to earn less salary since some portion of it is being taken away from them with no promise of return.
faceh
4d ago
How many people die in hospitals normally?
Why would retail activity halt? Isn't a huge portion of such shopping done online?
How much "disposable" income is really being lost, exactly?
My model of modern western women™ is basically this:
They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:
- High-powered career woman (Girlboss).
- Freespirited, cultured, 'independent' woman. That is, one who travels everywhere, has a fun and carefree life, and flits from party to party.
- Devoted and effective mother.
They may re-order the priority and emphasis they put on it (or if its a triangular graph, they may land on some different space on it), but its the rare woman who doesn't have one of these three as their primary concern when it comes to status-seeking. You watch Tiktok, these are effectively the three 'genres' of women you'll find, if you ignore the e-prostitutes (which are technically a subset of 2). They want to project the image that they have an important, powerful job, or that they're constantly traveling, partying, and 'living life,' or that they're supermom, handling everything in life with grace and wisdom.
Modern Western Culture heavily emphasizes 1) and 2) as desirable options, heavily de-emphasizes 3). So women naturally start clumping more towards those two points on the graph. Once they've moved too far along towards that side of the graph (i.e. they've spent their twenties girlbossing, partying, travelling, etc.) it becomes VERY HARD to move out of that section of the graph to the one where they can become a devoted mother... and so they declare 1) and 2) are high status, and 3) is low status, and claim high status for themselves, accordingly.
If we limit ourselves to strictly social explanations, I think this one sounds pretty good. As you say, cultures that emphasize 3) will confer more status on motherhood, so it'll draw more women towards that point on the graph, and thus you'll have more attraction towards that section.
Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her endeavours in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed. But the subtext of the current culture is that women should be able to do all three WITHOUT male support, somehow.
Ding ding.
There seems to be a situation where a corporate job is, dare I say, a substitute good for a committed husband. A woman getting a corporate job is given healthcare, a retirement account, oftentimes food and transport are subsidized, she gets a social life and maybe some travel attached to work, and is REWARDED for giving up her prime childbearing years to produce extra value for the shareholders. Many of the reasons women have 'settled down' with men in the past are satisfied by a decent job that provides baseline benefits as part of the package.
But a corporate job can't provide her with a kid. So while all the above 'benefits' are legible, the opportunity cost of NOT having a kid is not concrete until, say, 15 years down the line where she's got a career but she's still single and childless and her bio clock is punishing her for not reproducing.
Looking at it that way, males are in direct competition with megacorps to attract mates who will want to raise kids. They have to offer a 'better deal', which is to say they have to make enough money to provide shelter, healthcare, retirement, food, transport, etc. And if the female isn't explicitly incorporating 'bear and raise children' into her calculation then the corporate job looks like a solid choice.
So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?
Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?
ALMOST making my point here.
Who would notice if nurses and physicians disappeared? People with doctor's appointments, or the elderly and infirm who depend on nursing care.
Most people wouldn't notice right away because most aren't going to see a nurse or doctor very often.
Compare that to say, if your local power plant shut down because all the staff left. Who would notice? Literally every person whose electricity just switched off.
In the case of physicians, the economic impact wouldn't be immediate because economic activity could still continue even as the healthcare system suffered from a huge backlog. We kinda 'proved' this during Covid. Work continues even if the hospitals are overwhelmed.
In the case of energy production, or internet infrastructure, tons of economic activity would INSTANTLY cease because those inputs are NECESSARY to said activity. So we'd "notice" immediately.
10% of construction workers would indeed be a hit, but with some reshuffling construction would continue.
Also, it is of course likely that just because they make up some significant portion of the workforce, it does NOT imply they're actually responsible for the same share of actual productivity.
If the female 36% of all farmers are only producing 10% of the food, the actual felt impact is less severe than the first number would imply.
And that's a good distillation of my point. Its likely that 80% of economic productivity is the result of the efforts of 20% of the people. And I'd bet my left testicle that the most productive members of the economy are mostly male.
So if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce, I would guess we'd lose closer to 10% of economic productivity. Which is to say... we'd survive.
And if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce but actually devoted themselves to raising kids such that all childcare costs were internalized, the actual hit would probably be negligible.
If she quits working outside the home to raise a child very little of that value comes back to her in a form that can be spent to sustain herself. If the state wants more women to choose raising children then more of the value that action produces needs to come to them in a form they can use to sustain themselves.
I think to make this proposal make sense, it would be simpler to say that the male whose sperm produced the child she's caring for is on the hook to pay her for her work caring for the child. Rather than the government taking the male's money via taxes and distributing it to women as some kind of subsidy just give her a direct claim to the guy's money as compensation.
I think it is, more specifically, technological development. It reduces the amount of labor needed to perform household tasks, freeing that labor up for other uses, and increases economic productivity at various tasks outside the home. Technological development simultaneously increases the benefits and reduces the opportunity cost of working outside the home.
The huge glaring irony, though, is that almost any female-centric industry can be to some extent 'replaced' by technology (I will grant that this is NOT the case for Nursing)... except bearing and raising kids.
Like, any job that a female can do, a male with the right tools, automation, and basic support can presumably also do. EXCEPT THE PRECISE JOB THAT FEMALES EVOLVED OVER MILLENNIA TO PERFORM, which men still struggle with despite better tech. In the case of bearing children, men are literally incapable of doing it.
So it seems like steps toward a solution require us to 'un-taboo' the idea that females bearing children is in fact a good social priority and women should be encouraged to become mothers.
faceh
4d ago
There is a complex formula which determines how much of that is allocated to the HSA "pot" (Medisave) but the effect is that most people end up with $1 less in their retirement pot for each $1 they spend on healthcare. This is backstopped by a government-subsidized catastrophic insurance fund (Medishield) and an indigent fund which is made deliberately unpleasant to claim from (Medifund).
There is also a very deliberate class system - if a Singapore citizen stays in a class C ward (nightingale wards with no facilities and deliberately inferior food) the government picks up 65-80% of the bill and if they use a class B2 ward (similar but with 6-bed bays) the government picks up 50-65%. Class A patients get a private room and pay full freight.
These seem like facially reasonable approaches that nonetheless would be politically untenable in the U.S.
Assuming quality of care was comparable, it shouldn't be controversial for the government to maintain lower standards for amenities at the facilities they're paying more for, and people willing to pay for the nicer stay are in contrast agreeing to foot more of the bill.
Now, in practice this is basically how Medicaid works for long term care, and I think we're going to see some massive birfurcation in end-of-life treatment between people who are reliant on Medicaid and people who actually saved up enough to cover cushier facilities. But it seems likely that U.S. citizens would flip their lid if the government declared that was exactly how the system was supposed to work, right on the tin.
faceh
4d ago
Yep.
The temptation is to assume its multicausal and there are several inputs all interacting at once to produce the outcome, and some countries have a different mix than others but on net it all puts downward pressure on fertility.
Even so, I FEEL as though there's probably some singular root cause that could be discovered. Discovering still doesn't mean we can address it effectively, though.
The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value.
Well, SOME women's work.
It would absolutely fair to study and figure out if there are areas where female-dominated industries (and/or certain departments within an industry/company) are in fact creating an economic net negative. I am specifically thinking of the massive increase in bureaucracy and administrative costs which are endemic to certain sectors of the economy, such as education, healthcare, and, increasingly, finance. A whole lot of what females produce for the economy is actually designed to slow down some other sector of it.
We could slice these sectors out of the economy tomorrow and immediately see increased productivity and less waste. And we'd also see hundreds of thousands of women unemployed.
You're making a sweeping claim that isn't inherently backed up by data. I think that generally speaking creating tons of economic productivity is what frees up women from household tasks so they can in fact find full-time employment, it is NOT necessarily more women working which frees up tons of economic productivity.
This is especially obvious if you look at the gender makeup of those jobs that are either fundamental to society (energy production, mining, farming, construction, heavy industry) or that are producing the most marginal value (designing computer chips, computer programming, maintaining the tech stack that enables the internet to continue existing).
If females by and large aren't doing the work that enables society to exist at all (childbearing/rearing notably being the exception), and aren't doing the work that produces the most excess wealth, then how productive are they, really?
I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')
The real question is how much excess value a given female produces for the economy over and above the value she would produce if she were instead raising kids and maintaining the household. Childcare costs are 'internalized' if she takes over this role, but it still counts.
That is, if a given family is paying $3000/month on average for childcare tasks that could be handled by the mother (or, to be fair, the father), then she would have to be producing $3001/month in value on average to actually be producing a net economic value.
I'm not convinced that >50% of women currently in the workforce are in fact producing more value than they would produce if they were instead taking on the childcare role themselves.
People do occasionally bitch about the leader selection, but I don't think there's ever been a point where a given leader was race or gender-swapped. Easy to avoid critiques from either side about 'inclusion' when the whole point is to represent the entire gamut of global civilizations and to faithfully represent each one as its own unique racial, social, and technological mix of traits.
Leaving aside the running gag about Ghandi being a nuclear-armed terror.
Some complaints about picking lesser-known leaders from a given nation's history in order to prevent a complete sausage-fest.
Hell, STALIN was a playable leader back in Civ 4 (also my favorite to play as incidentally), I dunno if they'd be able to get away with that today, even though he is probably the one leader most Americans could name from Russian history (okay, they COULD name Putin but lol that's not getting included) Note they also completely removed reference to "slavery" as a mechanic post Civ 4.
Probably also a reason that South Africa has never and will never be implemented in the base game.
More options
Context Copy link