Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
Like anyone, I'm sure they don't mind getting burned a bit... so long as their opponent is the one actually tied to the stake.
A New York Times article currently entitled “The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky” (modern NYT headlines tend to shift with the winds of likes and comments) discusses the innovative corporations and world governments looking to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for profit. On its surface, this is a potentially radical net-positive accelerant for humanity driven by its financial upside, in the same tradition as asteroid mining, child tax credits, and electric vehicle subsidies.
The comment section gives us a valuable insight into how the online progressive retiree set (many of them early architects and evangelists of the modern Left) see this news within the context of their worldview… and here it’s particularly interesting. I want to highlight one comment that’s emblematic of the general tenor there:
People want this to work because they don’t want to do the hard work of changing. That’s a mistake. Aside from the elusiveness of the technology itself, the current fossil fuels system is literally destroying our planet. We have to have the willpower to stop doing that.
Here we see plainly spoken a bedrock concept underlying many political ideologies that rarely breaches the surface: apocalyptic socio-political shibboleths cannot be resolved without the perceived antichrist(s) paying the cost. The motte: “There is a crisis all humanity should unite in resolving…” The bailey: “… only insofar as it upsets people I dislike.”
This response also seems to chalk up another point in favor of the “modern-politics-as-religion” thesis, with a (literally) puritanical association (even causation) between hard work and salvation. Those who circumvent this process are perceived with the equivalent spite of their ancestors imagining a sinner who never feels the fires of hell (or Salem, as it were). As a great Mottizen (@CrispyFriedBarnacles - thanks @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola) once reminded us, “Massachusetts was founded by, functionally, the Taliban.”
Soccer management game Football Manager 26 released this week after two years of anticipation.
No installment was released last year following complications from the transition to Unity; the two releases before that (2023 and 2024) were announced as half-developed games because of parent studio Sports Interactive's purported all-in focus on this year's release (well, last year's, as it was then). FM26 was to be the ultimate Football Manager: enhanced match graphics, a tile-based UI no longer evocative of a spreadsheet, improved "newgen" (game-generated future player) faces, and... women's football.
Then came the leaks and reluctant announcements from the studio as the clock ticked down to what should have been the release date of FM25. Despite years of insistence that neither the engine transfer nor the addition of women's football would cause any complications, the game was in trouble. International management, a poorly developed (and therefore rarely touched) aspect of previous games, had been entirely removed rather than improved. In-game manager-player interactions (known as "shouts") had been entirely removed rather than improved. Most controversially, player weights had been removed for obtuse reasons pertaining to "women's body types" being "very different from men's" with their weight fluctuating "a lot more, often weekly." This, of course, somehow resulted in all players having their weight measurements removed, including male players.
Cue this week's release... a calamitous, bug-filled, poorly-optimized catastrophe. Sure, the bedrock is there in Unity for a game that will eventually surpass its predecessors, and patches over the last 48 hours have taken Steam reviews from "Overwhelmingly Negative" to "Mostly Negative", but it's simply unclear what the SI team was working on for the last five years of claimed development on this game. User mods slapped together in a week's time have outdone in-game graphics and processing times; the two most recent patches included hundreds of fundamental basic features and fixes that... somehow no one thought to include in the base game upon release? The whole saga has been a fascinating public showcase of mismanagement, procrastination, incompetence, and a bizarre hierarchy of priorities.
That last component is most interesting to me as an observer: who is benefitting from all these video games devoting time and money toward the implementation of women's sports? EA Sports, 2K Sports, and now Sports Interactive chose to limit development elsewhere so they could include slapdash, poorly-planned women's leagues. Are their marketing departments manufacturing idealistic projections of future female fanbases? Have they all been Pied-Piper'd (or Don-Corleone'd) by Sweet Baby Inc.?
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