Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
And you, dear reader, just spent two minutes reading about the completely unimportant opinions of a stranger on the internet.
My dear strange German, if I didn't want to read about your opinion, I would not be on the Motte. Not only am I on the Motte, but you are one of the posters I enjoy. Keep sharing your opinions, my southern kraut who is north of me.
My sense of snark obliges me to note that transgender affirmation surgery of minors was the policy of the government medical establishment barely more than a year ago, and the administration before that had to knowingly lie about its own healthcare proposals to get them past the public at which point many of the promised benefits that weren't deliberate lies still failed.
'Incredibly stupid and incorrect beliefs on medical care' has been more or less the public health policy of the United States for longer than many Mottizans have been cognizant of US politics.
Dean
Flairless
22d ago
I'd say no. It's less about fuck-you RNG, and more about being very unforgiving if you make mistakes like 'I think I'll try running a glass cannon mass infantry build against a faction with literal artillery and laser designators' or 'they couldn't hit an elephant at that distance' without actually investing in the appropriate enablers. However, there is always a counter or three to any given threat, it will just come with tradeoffs (opportunity costs annd otherwise).
(I will note that for now you should only play on the lower two difficulties- the highest difficulty is pretty unbalanced, basically giving you something like 60% supply and giving the AI 140% supply and breaking a lot of the ammo economy logic. This isn't RNG though, just list economy.)
The game's RNG is low in tactical shenanigans, typically following a law of averages approach, but high in mission framings like map setup. Tactically, the game follows a per-bullet-accuracy salvo, in which each bullet in a 10 shot salvo has its own accuracy and armor penetration roles, as opposed to XCOM's all-or-nothing salvos. This does mean your high-power/single-shot anti-armor weapons are swingy, but there are ways to get literal guaranteed hits with certain weapons.
The game's start-of-mission map settup is procedural generation, however, so it's quite possible to have particularly hard/brutal maps, like enemies with artillery who have spotters hidden in high-concealment forests or who can start killing units before most of your units can reach. There are absolutely tools to mitigate this, but until you learn what and how...
The game is actually pretty low-lethality for your irreplaceable investments. MENACE is a platoon-level tactics game, and your named/controlled characters are squad leaders. Squaddies are the members of your squads, and they act as both an increase to your primary squad-weapon damage output (1 more guy holds 1 more gun to shoot with) and as HP gates. The squad leaders- who are what you invest promotions and gear investments into- will never go down until all the other squaddies do, and when you do you have 4 turns to stabilize them to save them, and there are medevac assets you can invest / find in operations. Squaddies in turn are a relatively fragile-but-replaceable strategic resource. It doesn't take much to kill a squaddie, but you can invest in a base upgrade to recruit 2 a mission, and start with a medical center that will save 1 from death and has a 15% chance to save each subsequent casualty.
The game can be quite punishing if you ignore various threats and make bad investments at a list-building level. Every faction has its unique strengths, and good lessons learned against some factions become very bad against others. This also applies to specific mission formats, where sometimes a concentration of forces is all you need, and other times it's bad. I enjoy this in the sense that you need to not be complacent or try to build an all-rounder build, but constantly re-adjust your list. Other people hate it, and do things like call defense missions impossible (because they invest all their points in a few super squads who can't maintain enough map control).
The key system that helps mitigate/tie all of this together is the intel system. Intel is a campaign stat that indicates how much insight into the enemy you'll have. At the starting level 0, you'll only have a blip that there is something in a general area, at levels 2 you might generally know if it's infantry or vehicles with some units specifically identified, but at levels 5-6 you'll know exactly what type of unit is where. This system comes at the opportunity cost of other investments, but lets you align the right units and the right gear the right way. This basically removes most of the 'surprise!' elements that are technically RNG from you not knowing the full enemy list in advance.
Dean
Flairless
23d ago
The fixed characters are a real problem in my opinion. With BB's proc-gen brothers, there was always room for buildcrafting, and trying to make the misshapen mongrels you got as recruits work nicely with your company. But in MENACE, the characters are utterly fixed, so the room for buildcrafting collapses into one or two meta builds per character, and that's it. Very sad. I really hope the devs have plans to shake this up, or else it's stale before it even leaves Early Access.
I don't intend to disagree about pre-defined characters in a characterization sense, but I find MENACE's mechanical build-sets far more flexible than BB's. BB was pretty much as fixed in meta terms once you started building for specific roles, which any meta-optimizer did. Even if you try to fit MENACE leaders into two each- and I think it's pretty clear/consistent that there is a big-squad route and a smaller squad route for most characters- that's still 2x [size of cast] variations to play with. Even if you insist on always every character-unique perk, there are certainly ways to justify your spread of the remainder on repeat games. And that's if you even have the same characters, given how the recruit new leaders system works.
I particularly think part of MENACE's build-composition flexibility is because of how the point-buy, promotion cost-scaling systems, and weariness systems work together to encourage you to take different, and worse/cheaper, units into the field. This is such a contrast to the XCOM-like model of hyper-scaling your best members repeatedly, with only a backup team as necessary, and it invites all sorts of compromises and adjustments in the process.
Like, don't get me wrong. I like my attack dog Rewa. But I learned to love Bog in his battle bus, and then make up for his poor accuracy by taking the sort of weapons that don't need accuracy. Or Ivory, who has a floor of 1/3rd hits, and can get a massive increase to lethality if she has a partner to designate targets (or self-designates).
Other than that, I like it. The point-buy system is right up my alley. Trade-offs, trade-offs everywhere. And the enemy plays by the same rules (though with a bigger budget to compensate for the mediocre AI). The tactical combat is also pretty good. Moment-to-moment, it's engaging and nicely punishes dumb mistakes. It gets a little samey, but that's probably down to this being the minimum viable product they were willing to go into EA with. More content will help.
Tradeoffs is a big thing I'm loving. One of my favorite dynamics of a point-buy system versus a traditional progression system is that there is an incentive to take worse weapons, just because they are cheaper. Trying to make those work, and finding the synergies that can, has been fun.
For example- there's a specific enemy in the [spoiler] faction that is notoriously tanky. Absurdly so. It typically takes a whole lot of concentrated fire to grind it down, and a lot of discussion focuses on late/end-game weapons to brute force it.
Unless... you find out that 25% in damage modifiers from any source can make one of the 'worst' anti-tank weapons one-shot each model. And now it's a challenge of who in the crew can pull that off.
Figuring out who can make the cheap-o options work is such a treat, and even if it will be a 'solved problem' at some point it can allow for a fair bit more build diversity beyond 'get the next tier of weapon.'
But I digress. (And hope you have enough fun.)
Dean
Flairless
23d ago
If anyone plays turn-based strategy games, MENACE went into early access last Thursday. If that is your genre, I do recommend, but with caveats.
While social media types have characterized it as a new XCOM-like, since it is sci-fi with aliens, it's really more like a tabletop wargame. Specifically, it uses a points-buy list-building format, where your company-scale force is built with every model and equipment costing points to field, as opposed to capping you to a maximum of X characters of most squad-scale tactics game. It also has an alternating-activation system more akin to chess as opposed to you-go-I-go turn order of moving all your pieces at once ala XCOM. Add in some of its own systems, and it's proving to be more of a (de)buff meta, as opposed to the XCOM alpha-strike meta that most XCOM-likes fall into. Plus, no overwatch, so no glacial-but-optimal defensive turtle crawl across the map.
Instead, MENACE uses a suppression system of heavy debuffs to suppressed unit actions and accuracy that promote a find-fix-flank-finish combat loop. This combines with the point-buy system because every weapon, manpower body, and even promotions increases the cost to field a unit. Every point you spend on fielding or upgrading one asset is a point that can't buy another capability or upgrade. Specialization is the cost-efficient name of the game, but over-specialization can make you brittle. It's a combination of systems that can be rough to learn or pick up, but a very high skill ceiling means that when you do, battles can transition from brutal grinds to practically dancing.
There are rogue-like progression elements to the system, meaning no two campaigns will be quite the same in terms of character recruitment, gear progression, or mission format. The game breaks missions into operations of 3-5 missions each, with more rogue-like progression for selecting between different rewards or modifiers for the mission. There is no tech/R&D/manufacturing system, but instead a barter-economy market where you trade in (RNG) salvaged enemy gear towards a (RNG) selection of items, with a rotating selection of offers that means you can't just save for good things that may not come. Since the gear system under point-buy means sidegrades are often preferrable to upgrades, you get get different sorts of tensions as its rarely 'what's best' but 'what is best for what,' which in turn depends on character builds and promotions.
All the same, the game is very clearly in early access, and not complete. This is normal for the developer, who did the cult-hit Battle Brothers which was in early access for a year. Here it means the story and character writing is only at the introductory level, there are clearly unfinished assets, and various balance aspects will doubtless be revisited. There is also the inevitable jank that comes from RNG maps and, meaning sometimes RNJesus will bless you and sometimes you will feel abandoned. It is still an excellent tactical combat system, but you can be forgiven for holding off.
Price-wise, MENACE will probably maintain a $40 base price. However, Steam has a 25% discount for the next week and a half, so $30 thru 19 Feb.
I do recommend, and if it seems like I'll be posting less for a while, well, yeah.
Dean
Flairless
26d ago
So the US government is dancing with shutdown politics again, this time using funding over the Department of Homeland Security to try and enforce new measures over ICE. The Atlantic has an article covering 10 key demands, pushed forward by a joint press statement by the Democratic House and Senate leaders Jeffries and Schumer.
The 10 demands, which may be higher in the culture war discussion for the near term, are-
1. Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
2. No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
3. Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
5. Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
6. Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
7. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
8. Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
9. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
10. No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
The Atlantic, as an establishment-Democrat aligned media outlet, adopts the general framing that these are reforms,.
Alternatively, it would be fair to say that some of these are not exactly subtle poison pills in order to prevent DHS from actually conducting immigration enforcement. 'Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations' is a notable one, given the sanctuary state policies in many Democratic-dominated states and cities. Others can write to other aspects as well, I am sure.
Does this mean the entire list of demands is dead on arrival? Not necessarily. The brief article briefly notes an area with alleged traction-
Congress has until the February 13 deadline to fund DHS, and negotiators have signaled that elements like body camera expansion and training could be areas of agreement, while warrant rules and mask policies remain unresolved.
Which leads to a slight transition of topic- the role of police body cameras as a part of standard policing equipment.
Different countries, or cultures if you prefer, have different viewpoints on police cameras that are constantly recording. That is, after all, a form of public surveillance, and once you allow the government to do so, or even require the government to do so, that footage can be used in so many different ways.
I've seen a variety of views towards police body cams. I remember arguments opposing it on civil liberty grounds that were concerned about police state tactics of public monitoring. I know plenty of people who believe they provide a tool to prove cop bad behavior. I have lived in the sort of countries where police body cams would not be used precisely because the government does not want records of such cob misbehavior, which is the sort of thing the previous sort of advocates want to curtail.
What has been low-key interesting to observe over the last few decades is how the arguments for and against body cameras has changed over the years, as the expectations versus payoffs of increased body cameras have become clearer. From my perspective, a lot of the predicted effects failed to materialize, or materialized in ways other than expected.
For example, the civil liberty argument died with the advent of known, and accepted, mass surveillance as a matter of course as leads exposed, but did not reverse, domestic security practices across the west. But more police cameras also did not expose a (non-existent) pandemic of police-of-minority killings, which was one of the basis for the American police reform efforts in the BLM period. It did, apparently, reveal an untapped market for police body cam videos on youtube or tiktok, to a degree that there's now a genre of fake police bodycam channels.
But more than fake videos, what police body cam reforms seem to have done is standardize the release of a lot of videos showing police, if not in the right, at least more sympathetically. Ugly arrest narratives which take the innocent victim narrative apart, perspectives (and sometimes audio) that can sell panic, and so on. It can practically be a chinese robbers fallacy published daily. All the more so because traditional media tends to not be interested in publishing ugly arrest dynamics that work against intended coverage theme, but counter-veiling police footage is relatively easy, authoritative, and- thanks to reformers- available.
If anything, at least in the american culture war body cameras seem on net to have... kind of vindicated the pro-law-enforcement side by surprise.
Not validated their arguments- many of the arguments against police body cams simply fell flat. And not disproven reformist fears of bad actors. But the pro-police coalition seem to have largely been happy enough for bad eggs to be subject to the appropriate processes, which is part of how institutions cultivate/sustain popular legitimacy over time. Meanwhile footage of Actual Incidents (TM) can paint a lot of pictures of a lot of other bad eggs on the other sides that polite company, and media, often downplayed or ignored.
On a narrative/framing/symbolism level, it's practically a format made for, well, copaganda. You have the self-insert protagonist dynamic of being 'your' point of vision, you have a nominally just cause of enforcing presumptively legitimate laws, and you have the antagonist of the episode of varying degrees of sympathy... and the selection bias is generally going to select for the unsympathetic.
It can also, and returning back to the culture war, cut down some attempted narrative efforts before it reaches a critical chain reaction. The fact that the police shooting of young black girl Khia Bryant in 2021 didn't erupt into a BLM-derivative mass protest wave has a good deal to do with the fact that she was trying to stab another girl, but also with the fact that police footage was quickly released, which rather dispelled early BLM-associated reporting at the time that didn't think that the stabbing was worth noting.
Rather than police body cams provide the evidence police misbehavior, it may not be as partisanally-useful as believed. And if that were true, you'd expect to be progressively more pushback from partisans who are less good-faith reformers and were advancing policy arguments as soldiers.
Which is why I've been a bit interest in... not a vibe shift, but efforts to push for a vibe shift, on who in the culture war is for and against police body cameras. As the opening article noted, establishment republicans are at least open to the prospect. But what's more interesting is the rise of skepticism, or even levels of hostility, from within the Progressive coalition.
ProPublica, an American left journalist group, has an article from late 2023 about how police have undermined the promise of body cameras, with a general thesis that police departments have too much autonomy / influence / differences across jurisdictions in terms of what gets to be shared.
Jacobin, the American socialist magazine with a deliberate party line, last month condemned police body cameras as a giveaway to weapons makers, claimed that the evidence of cameras efficacy was thin... but spent more words upset that DHS/ICE wasn't being forced to spend its current funding on cameras instead of operations, as opposed to more funding for the cameras.
But I think the characterization that best captures that not-quite-vibe shift I'm gesturing to comes from a November 2025 article from last year by Vox, which tries to establish itself as the US left vibe-setter and explainer, in its critique article "How routine police stops are becoming viral social media fodder: Police body cameras were supposed to ensure justice. They’ve turned into YouTube content."
But whatever the aggregate statistics show, there clearly are individual cases of misconduct being uncovered via open records requests. Traditional media use the same public records laws in their reporting, which certainly does uncover misconduct and generally inform the public.
Cases of county sheriffs drinking and driving, questionable shootings by officers, and other cases of potential misconduct appear on some of these body cam channels.
Yet on these channels, videos of possible police misconduct are dwarfed by lurid arrests for often minor charges. Police departments won’t resist public records requests that merely show ordinary citizens being embarrassed and officers in a sympathetic light. And an average YouTube viewer probably prefers to be titillated rather than depressed by police violence. So while you wait for videos of abusive police behavior, in the meantime, you can get footage for videos like “Karen Trashes Dollar General When She Doesn’t Get Hired” or “Drunk 18-Year-Old Girl Completely Loses It During Arrest” or “Woman Sets Porta Potty On Fire Because She Doesn’t Like It.”
This is, if the subtext was not a clear, a problem to be resolved. The article then weighs considerations on how to keep the police body camera footage they want, that of potential misconduct to be exposed by traditional media, while reducing/removing the rest of the unflattering-for-captured-on-tape cases that get more public interest.
Or, in other words, in the words of their own special-attention quotation-
“This tool that was sold to us as a police accountability tool should not be turned into a shaming-random-civilians tool.”
Which could open questions of whether it is random civilians, or when shaming is or is not appropriate... not least because shaming the misbehaving cops caught on tape is the intent of these police cameras in the first place.
But to bring it around back to the origin, what the ICE tactics may turn to when they are fiscally able, nay required, to video tape the sort of anti-ICE tactics recently employed in Minnesota.
The Congressional Democrat demand includes caveats to "prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities."
Well, there are two ways that an administration could easily work around that.
One would be to use body cameras to track, create, and maintain a database of individuals not participating in First Amendment activities, but obstructing law enforcement activities. This is a legal case that would certainly be litigated through hostile justices, but it could be done.
But the other way would be to simply use body cameras to publicize, publicize, and publicize non-random individuals who insist they are participating in First Amendment activities, and let their words, and videos, speak for themselves.
So the US Supreme Court struck down most (all?) of Trump's tariffs in a 6-3 ruling, ruling that its use exceeded the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This appears to have largely been done under the major questions doctrine, the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. The majority ruling is that Trump's attempt to claim and leverage emergency powers overstepped this, plus doubtless other nuances I'm not noting. The Court also opened an entirely different set of worms, as it did not adjudicate if the tariff revenue that had been collected has to be refunded, or even who a refund would go to. I predict great long !lawyer bills~ debates over how, if tariffs are taxes on Americans, which Americans are owed the tax refunds.
(Do I predict the Trump administration will try to use this as a basis to give money to the electorate in a totally-not-buying-votes-before-mid-terms scheme? No, but I think it would be funny if political bedfellows put Democrats on the side of big business importers who will make claims on the refunds even if they passed on costs to American consumers.)
Trump will reportedly make comments soon. While this will be a major policy loss for the Trump administration, and promises to make the next many months 'interesting,' part of my curiosity is what this ruling might hold (or have held) for other court cases in the dockets, there will also be significant geopolitical reflections on this for months and years to come. This ruling wasn't entirely a surprise, and various countries (and the European trade block) had been hedging in part to let the court case play out. We'll see where things go from here, particularly since not all Trump tariff threats were derived from the IEEPA, and so there will probably be some conflation/confusion/ambiguity over various issues.
While I will defer to others for the legalese analysis, I am also interested in what sorts of quid-pro-quos the internal court politics might have had for Roberts to have led the majority here. There are a host of cases on the docket this term, with politically-relevant issues ranging from mail-in ballots to redistricting. While I think the tariffs case was outside any typical 'we accept this case in exchange for accepting that case' deal over which cases get heard, I will be interested if the administration gets any 'surprise' wins.
For longer commentary from Amy Howe of the SCOTUS Blog-
(And apologies to @Gillitrut, who posted while I was drafting this.)
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