LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
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User ID: 657
Are Pets Replacing Kids?
I have noticed a growing trend of people talking about their pets like children, and pet owners being increasing referred to as parents, mother or fathers of their pets, and the pets as children. Often this goes as far as to referring to multiple pets being referred to as siblings, or even pets referred to siblings of actual children. For examples on social media, you can look at asinine "feel good" animal related YouTube channels like "The Dodo". I'm hardly the first to comment on the phenomenon, a quick internet search for "furbabies" turns up countless articles. However, while most media coverage on this phenomena is playful and positive, my intuition has long been that this isn't just a harmless, fun phenomenon, but rather these 'parents' are really using these pets as a substitute for children. Perhaps attempting to fulfil an unrealised, subconscious need to raise offspring in a social environment hostile to the raising of actual, real human children.
Like any good researcher, I set out to find information to support my prior assumptions. I looked at U.S. data mostly for its abundance, however the overall quality of data is pretty poor, it's particularly hard to find reliable data on the historic rates of pet ownership and data relating to the pet industry going back further than 30 years or so ago.
Based on the APPA's APPA National Pet Owners Survey, the percentage of households with a pet has increased from 56% in 1988 to 70% in 2020. In absolute numbers, the number of pet cats and dogs increased from 108 million in 1996 to 188 million in 2022. But it is not simply the number of pets that are relevant, but the relationship owners have with the pet. Perhaps the most shocking statistic I saw was the growth of the pet industry. The US pet industry has grown from $53 billion in 2012 (~$68 billion adjusted for inflation), to $124 billion in 2021, the industry doubling in size in just a decade! A near doubling also occurred in the prior decade too. The growth has been driven in large part by the increased demand for luxury pet products. The US fertility rate dropped from 1.91 to 1.66 from 2012 to 2020 during this time. By comparison, the US baby products industry was worth $29 billion in 2022. Some (unreliable) survey data says that three-quarters of US pet owners consider their pets 'furbabies'. It should be noted that Millennials slightly overrepresented in many of these pet statistics. US pet owners are also more likely to be female (60%).
Now onto my speculation on the issue. Despite a lot of hand-wringing over the economic costs being the major driver behind young adults not having kids, those same young adults seem to be willing buy a pet and spend significant sums on them, treating them as a pseudo-child. Perhaps a pet is still a cheaper alternative than a child, but in my opinion the economic argument still doesn't hold up. As I like to point out, the fertility rate of the US was higher during the Great Depression, the worst economic period in modern history, than it is today. So the social factors must be playing a greater role, something that has been discussed quite extensively on theMotte in the past so I won't go into detail here. To summarise briefly, but technology, contraception, sexual liberation, feminism, the two-income trap and modernity generally may all have played some role. But humans are still ultimately biological and social creatures, and I think there is likely some innate driver to engage in parental (maternalistic/paternalistic), childrearing behaviours, for both men and women, but particularly women. When social pressure and event stigma prevent people from having children, they have substituted in the closest available, non-stigmatised alternative, pets. What I think is troubling is what will be the long-term consequences of using pets as surrogate children, because pets are not, in fact, children. Using pets as surrogate children is possibly contributing to the fertility crisis, providing a band-aid solution to the unrealised desire of childrearing. Children, as actual thinking humans, can form meaningful relationships with their parents and others, and contribute to community in ways that pets can obviously not provide. Thus furbabies may be accelerating the atomisation of society. When parents enter their elder years, they can rely on the support of their adult children to help. Children will also ultimately provide net economic utility to society, where as pets, as much people might love them, do not.
I personally find the whole phenomenon of pets as surrogate children disgusting or fundamentally morally wrong on a deep, visceral level. It feels so unnatural and perverse to me. I do love animals, including pets I have had in the past, but I would never dream of treating them remotely as people or children. As pessimistic as this is, my instinct that the rise of furbabies is hyper-representative of the cultural, social and moral decline of the West, and is strongly associated with the fertility crisis and the demographic collapse many Western or developed states are or will experience.
Unfortunately it's just extremely difficult to reconcile modern scientific knowledge with old religious worldviews. I think what many religious people, especially on this forum, miss is that for many agnostics or athiests it's not that they don't want to believe, rather that they find it practically impossible to believe in a religion which demands they lay down the rules of science and empiricism.
Only because of an implicit scientism that is pervasive in our society, which is particularly popular among liberal atheistic/agnostic types. I can't speak for every religion but the Catholic Church believes that there is no conflict between (Catholic Christian) religion and science, a belief I share.
The issue with this scientism is really quite obvious when you ask a straight-forward question: is all knowledge (or all truths) discernable via science or the scientific method? The answer to this question to me is clearly no, and that some truths (e.g. moral truths) cannot be discerned through science, and this enters the realm of philosophy and ultimately religion or faith. Many a philosopher has attempted derive moral truths through scientific/materialist means (including atheist star Sam Harris, if we want to call him a philosopher), but these projects inevitably end up as failures trying to square the circle. The alternative is moral nihilism and a completely materialist outlook, but very few atheists seem to actually want to bite that bullet.
Many philosophers have identified religion has giving rise to science in the first place. Because at the most basic, fundamental level, believe in natural science assumes a priori that that reality is ordered and knowable, a proposition one must take on faith.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
I mean, I agree with your point about Putin but I'm not sure why people are insistent or implying that the US has been actively seeking peace in contrast. The foreign policy of the US for the last thirty or so years (at the very least in this region) has be pursing unreleting, antagonistic hegemony.
So sure, maybe the US was not actively seeking war, but at best they weren't really taking efforts to ensure peaceble relations either.
Articles like this infuriate me. I am a pretty mellow individual and it usually takes a lot to get me riled up, but feminist articles, particular those about "masculinity" (God I hate that word and how it's used to pathologise men) I just find so rage-inducing.
Like all feminist piece about masculinity, it's doomed to fail because they cannot contradict the core beliefs and assumptions of feminist theory, which is a major, if not core contributor to the problem the article is trying to address in the first place.
When the author talks about the protector and provider role, and fatherhood being the base for developing a new positive "masculinity", my immediate response is "just what the fuck do they think they think masculinity has been about for millennia?" The feminist answer of course, is that masculinity has historically and currently been about oppressing women. "Hegemonic" masculinity and related terms. Before feminists turned "patriarch" into a dirty word, it actually reflected the reality that historically family life has always formed a key part of male identity, and it wasn't oppressive!
Of course, the author can in no way put any responsibility on to women for the social breakdown - and if they do it admit it, it's a good thing! In fact the article tacitly admits to this by singing the praises of the working woman, but the solution is never an adjustment on the part of women, oh no no no, the solution is always that men have to do more, "be better", and remake themselves into the New Soviet Feminist Man if necessary. How can you expect to build or maintain a masculinity around fatherhood and family when feminism has spend the last 60 years demolishing the family and cheering on its demise? How can you expect men to put family and fatherhood first when women clearly aren't putting family and motherhood first. Someone reneged on the social arrangements around family, and it wasn't men. But apparently men are expected to build a new "masculinity" to try and plug the gaps that weren't created by them.
The end of the article had me rolling my eyes incredibly hard.
It is harder to be a man today, and in many ways, that is a good thing: Finally, the freer sex is being held to a higher standard.
Yeah, because men totally haven't been held to high standards in the past and have been "free" to do whatever they want throughout history. I'm not sure how we the readers are meant to square the circle with the claim that men are protectors and providers but are also "free".
The old script for masculinity might be on its way out. It’s time we replaced it with something better.
"Hey men, you know how masculinity has traditionally been built on men being protectors and providers? Well we feminists decided that actually didn't happen and you were all oppressive bastards who have to pay for the sins of your ancestors. But we now going to give you the opportunity to build a new "positive" masculinity that built upon being protectors and providers in a feminist friendly way! What does feminist friendly way mean? Well, it's kind of the same as before but this time women are under no obligation to reciprocate in any way! Hope you join us with building something better!"
There's something so insidiously evil about selling the cause of the problem as the solution. If only we had more feminism and men embraced it the problem will be solved. True feminism has never been tried! Gotta keep digging ourselves in that hole I guess.
The vast majority of 'dating advice' young men are given (by the mainstream liberal feminist zeitgeist) is absolutely terrible and only land them in situations like this if they follow through with it.
I can guarantee at some point someone told OP 'just be honest, straightforward and upfront with women and nothing bad will happen, the worst the woman will do is reject you but respect you for being honest.' And he completely understandably took that advice at face value.
This is combined with the fact we have a sexually liberal, if not libertine culture. The young man probably though that offering some girl to be FwB directly - despite being a literal virgin - was perfectly fine cause media and social media told him that's just how things are. And besides, men and women are the same, so women must think about this hypothetical arrangement the same way he does.
OP is also an actual idiot for thinking his proposal would end in anyway but horribly badly for him and being stupid enough to think going from virgin to FwB playa is in anyway feasible or a good idea. But the problem is that young men aren't allowed to fuck up in a healthy way and learn from the experience anymore, if young men fuck up they're 'literally incels' and a danger to young women who must be ostracised and exiled.
This is what happens when you have a social environmental where the social rules are poorly defined if they exist at all, the advice the young men get is terrible and contradictory, and the consequences for men are astronomical and completely at women's mercy.
A neologism (or a new meaning for the word?) that I have begun to see everywhere and has really started to annoy me is 'anti-racism'.
The annoyance began when I noticed the term being used in places where it was anachronistic. Two instances that I remember were the Wikipedia pages of "Pepsi" and "J.R.R Tolkien". Pepsi's article describes Pepsi's early attempts to advertise to black people as an untapped market as an "anti-racism stance". Tolkien's article states that "scholars have noted... he was anti-racist." After some digging around in the edit history of Pepsi's article, I found that the term 'anti-racist' was only added to the Pepsi article in mid-2018, and to Tolkien's article in early 2021.
"Anti-racism" is a term popular within Critical Race Theory. It was particularly popularised and entered the public consciousness in large part due to Ibram X. Kendi's 2019 book How to be an Anti-Racist. Kendi defines "anti-racism" in that book as follows:
The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “anti-racist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism.
According to Kendi, any racial inequity, or anything that results in a racial inequity is by definition racist, and in order to be an "anti-racist" you must support racial equity (i.e. forcing equal outcomes) for everything. A similar quote is from Angela Davis: "In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”
"Anti-racism" is a classic example of linguistic laundering/doubling, or linguistic motte-and-bailey, that is rife within woke/Critical Social Justice circles. The pattern is to take a word that has a plain meaning to the layman (anti-racist simply means against racism), and create a second specific, academic and ideological meaning for it. This second meaning is then smuggled into conversations and policy when the public naturally just assume the first, plain meaning. Ultimately, this is done for political and ideological ends. Manipulate people to get on board through the plain meaning (you're not a racist are you? You want to be an anti-racist!), then implement the ideological agenda, while maintain it is nothing usual because the word is the same. Other common words doubled in this way are the trio of diversity, equity, inclusion.
Critical Social Justice is the amalgamation of Neo-Marxism/Critical Theory, and Post-modernism/Post-Structuralism. Michel Foucault is the most cited scholar in history, and many other post-modernists, and Neo-Marxists top the list of most cited humanities scholars. It's hard to overstate how influential these ideas are currently in the humanities. Both Neo-Marxism but particularly post-modernism have an extreme focus on language. Language is the medium of power, and therefore, of oppression. It should not be surprising then that Critical Social Justice deliberately engages in such language manipulation as part of their political project, including engaging in historical revisionism to legitimise themselves.
I saw some news articles online about this in Australia earlier today.
What I found really conspicious was that in virtually all the articles there was absolutely no description of the perpetrator of the stabbing other than 'man' or at best 'older man', which was the spark that cause the protest/riot (depending on your political persuasion). There was also no mention that I can recall of the perpetrator being tackled and restrained by a member of the public, and certainly not that he was Brazilian. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the crime was committed by an Irish native.
Except, of course, the second half of all these articles all quote a bunch of Irish politicians and other public figures condemning the riot as the actions of a hateful, far-right mob, or similar words to that effect. Which kind of gives the game away. Do they think by merely mentioning the background of the stabbing perpetrator they will give credance to the 'hateful far-right riot', like invoking a spirit?
It's one of many cases where the news media (at least here in Australia), technically report the story factually accurately, but but omits some details and is framed in such a way to only lead you to one conclusion. They can avoid claims of editorialising by claiming they are merely quoting and reporting on statements made by politicians, which is also true.
Australia’s Voice to Parliament (1/2)
The Voice to Parliament is one of Australia’s largest active culture and political wars, and I think encapsulates the whole macro global culture war on a (relatively) micro scale.
What is the Voice to Parliament? Well, half the problem is that no one seems to know what it is, as we will soon find out. The Voice to Parliament (the Voice) is a proposed government body of some kind intended to consist of and represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous Australians) enshrined into the Constitution of Australia via referendum. The Voice would have some kind of involvement with the Australian Parliament and the legislative process. The referendum to enshrine the Voice is expected to take place at some point this later this year, and would also enshrine ‘recognition’ of Indigenous Australians in the Australian Constitution. This marks the end of the consensus on what the Voice even is (or would be). Details about what powers the Voice have or how it would function have been incredibly vague and hotly debated.
The Voice is the latest in a long line of attempts to get constitutional recognition (of the special status of) of Indigenous Australians. This is by far the boldest attempt too, attempting include a permanent constitutional body with some legislative power as part of it. The Voice most directly originates from the 2017 ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, which keeping in with the theme was/is an attempt to get some kind of unspecified constitutional recognition (and power) for Indigenous people. The Statement directly called for “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution” and “a Makarrata [Treaty] Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.”
After a bunch of government activity looking into the Voice that is honestly not worth getting into, the National Indigenous Australian Agency published the Indigenous Voice Co-Design Process final report in 2021. While this does contain a lot of detail how a potential Voice might work, this is merely a suggestion and is in no sense binding. Mostly charitably (but still concerning), my understanding is that this suggested version of the Voice’s powers would be not dissimilar to the current Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (something I am also sceptical of), which has the authority to review every piece of legislation and legislative instrument and make reports on whether they are ‘compatible with human rights’. The Voice would seeming operate in the same way, except it would be constitutionally enshrined (and therefore virtually impossible to remove in the future), and its member will be made of completely unelected and unrepresentative Indigenous representatives. And I must reiterate, this report is in no way necessarily what the Voice will end up being, and even the report is uncertain what the internal structure of the Voice would look like, offering a number of hypothetical examples.
So what do the major political parties have to say about the Voice? The current Labor (left to centre-left) government, the ones who will be ultimately responsible for putting forward the question and implementing the outcome, obviously support the Voice (or at least their version of it), having previously supported the Uluru Statement and making a referendum on the Voice part of their election promises. But they have been alarmingly sparse on details of what it is exactly they are supporting. The only message they have been clear on is that the Voice won’t have veto powers over Parliament (something that is of genuine concern). Pretty much the only detail is now-Prime Minister Albanese’s draft referendum question he proposed back in 2022 in the lead up to the election “Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?” along with some draft words to add to the constitution which are similarly vague.
The Liberal Party (right to centre-right), the major opposition party, has yet to openly state their position on the Voice referendum, instead repeatedly asking for more detail about how the Voice would function before they state their position. While it’s hard to say with certainty, my feeling is that the Liberal Party generally doesn’t want to support the Voice but can’t state that position openly for whatever reason (internal party politics, don’t want to give left-dominated media ammo) and is instead engaging on this (effective?) strategy of ‘asking questions’ to undermine public support for the Voice.
The National Party (right rural based), the minor party in the Liberal-National Coalition, is the only major party to actually outright oppose the Voice, although it should be noted that their stated justification is not anything along the lines opposing it as an undemocratic, illiberal body or the privileged status it would grant Indigenous Australians over other Australians, but rather for being “another layer of bureaucratic tape” and that the Voice “will not advance the primary aim of Closing the Gap [term used to describe the difference in life outcomes between Indigenous Australians and white non-Indigenous Australians] and dealing with the real issues faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.
Then of course, there’s the Greens, Australia’s progressive party. They whole-heartedly support the Voice to the fullest possible extent, and while they are similarly vague as Labor on details, my impression is that they would support the Voice having veto power or similar powers to Parliament. The Greens also support ‘Truth and Treaty’ which is a whole other can of worms I would rather not get into right now (it’s all the highly woke stuff about ‘Truth-Telling’ and ‘Justice’ and give more privileges to Indigenous Australians). The Green’s position is actually really important, because Labor does not currently have a majority in the Senate, and they need Green crossbench support to pass any legislation relevant to the Voice if it reaches the point.
As a slight aside, Senator Lidia Thorpe, an extremely woke Indigenous woman and Indigenous activist whose actions I previously discussed in an old Motte comment recently broke ties with the Greens over the Green’s support for the Voice referendum (and now is fully committed to representing ‘Blak Soverignity’). This is essentially because she believes the Greens are not radical enough, and she refuses to support the Voice while a Treaty doesn’t exist yet. It says a lot about someone when they think the Greens aren’t radical enough.
As part of the referendum process in Australia, the Government is required to provide a brochure/flyer/information explaining the arguments both for and against the given referendum proposal (including related funding and research, essentially the Government is required to provide support/funding to both sides of the referendum). The Labor Government took steps towards removing this requirement through legislation, claiming such a requirement “out of step with today’s electoral laws and does not reflect modern delivery and communications methods.” Many opposing politicians and commentators quite rightly pointed out that this as a pretty blatant and undemocratic attempt to suppress the ‘no’ campaign, counting on left dominated media to overwhelmingly support the ‘yes’ vote. The Labor government ultimately backtracked in the face of criticism. One more thing of note is that in Senate Estimates the Shadow Minister for Education (Liberal) recently raised the issue of schools only promoting the ‘yes’ case and likening it to ‘indoctrination’. Which absolutely is what is happening, I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty there are approximately zero teachers in public schools opening advocating for the ‘no’ vote and plenty openly advocating for the ‘yes’ vote. As far as I can tell, nothing has come of this event as of yet.
Australia’s Voice to Parliament (2/2)
And where does the public stand on this issue? Well public polling seems to indicate that the ‘yes’ has a slight majority, though notably this percentage has been steadily falling over the last year (the Liberal Party strategy working?). Importantly, the people supporting yes (between yes, no and not sure) dropped below 50% recently. In my opinion, much of the support for the Voice in the public is mostly driven by white-guilt-ridden Australians who automatically support any proposal in favour of Indigenous Australians, regardless of practicality or principle. As some critical thought goes into it, the support has dropped. Add in social desirability bias/Shy Tory phenomenon (the gay marriage plebiscite won by a much small margin than was predicted), it seems uncertain if the referendum would pass if it were held tomorrow.
I guess now is a good time to segue to a commentary on the state of Indigenous/woke politics more generally. As you can probably tell, I do not support the Voice on principle, as it is incompatible with liberal and democratic ideals (and even if you aren’t liberal or democratic, then you wouldn’t support it for other philosophical/tribal reasons). It’s also not the first time a body or institution like this has even been tried. Mostly recently there was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission(1990–2005) which more or less basically tried to do what the Voice wants to do, albeit no constitutionally enshrined. The Commission had to be shut down in 2005 after years of corruption (although in fairness, this was partially driven by the final Chairman in particular). The Voice being constitutionally enshrined as well as having the increasing immunity to scrutiny that woke politics will inevitably grant it is just a shitshow waiting to happen even worse that ATSIC.
For Americans, it might be hard to explain just how (pardon my French, but there’s really no other words to adequately express this sentiment) cucked Australia has become on Indigenous representation/recognition/reconciliation or whatever the buzzword is now. Canadian and New Zealand readers will understand (I feels sorry for our Kiwi brothers who have it worse). The analogy I offer you many American readers is like it’s all the black liberationism woke political stuff has become institutionalised in every institution with official statements. The difference between Australian and America here I think is that America has way more variance, the crazy can be crazier, but in Australia this stuff gets institutionalised scarily fast. Literally every meeting, event or document starts now with a ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ which is basically a statement like a mantra or prayer that ‘recognises’ that the area of wherever you are belongs (in some form, the exact words can and do change) to a given Indigenous group. I’m not sure if I’m even being facetious – in Parliament the sitting day starts with an Acknowledgement of Country and then is followed by prayers. Even worse is ‘Welcome to Country’ which is now omni-present at every major event, is performed by an Indigenous person, who basically “invites” (I would say ‘gives permission’) non-Indigenous people onto ‘their land’ and does some shamanistic ritual. Again, I’m not being facetious, one Welcome I had to sit through included the Indigenous representative doing a ritual to invite the ancestors to come and remove the bad spirits from the audience (my God, how is this allowed in government but a Christian blessing would be the scandal of a century). The Acknowledgement and Welcomes are also becoming increasingly radical too, and it’s becoming increasing common to state that ‘Sovereignty was never ceded’. This was amusingly and frustratingly said in one Acknowledgement by a government employee in a very important government building. It’s honestly hard to describe – look up some (recent) examples for yourself. You get increasingly deluded and discriminatory policies too, for example the Minister for Public Service wanting to increase Indigenous representation in the Australian Public Service to 5%, including executive management, despite Indigenous people making up only 3% of the population and most of them live in remote Northern Territory, Queensland or Western Australia. You get government bodies now who must explicitly have an Indigenous representative as part of their board, even if the organisation has nothing particularly to do with Indigenous issues. I could go on.
The tone of Indigenous activism and Australian society's response has also changed over the years, becoming more radical. Increasing 'blood-and-soil' type rhetoric is being adopted by Indigenous activists (and their naïve supporters). Whereas in the past it was common to refer to an Indigenous group being 'custodians' of an area of land (being semi-nomadic peoples who did not have a concept of land ownership prior to the arrival of Westerners), it's now increasingly common to hear language like 'this is [Indigenous group] Country' and the aforementioned 'sovereignty was never ceded', and some more general claims of the unique and unassailable right that that group to the land that the white man could never possess or truly understand. Similarly, Australian society's attitude towards Indigenous practices and knowledge has gone from liberal paternal 'yeah let them do their own thing and maybe humour them' and 'yeah maybe there is some useful tidbits of information we can glean from Indigenous fire management practices once we get past all the superstitious rubbish' to now being 'we must incorporate Indigenous culture and people into literally everything we do and give it privileged attention' and 'Indigenous knowledge and superstitions ways of knowing have some special quality that makes it them literally True and superior to Western™ knowledge, stupid Westerners have been ruining this sacred Country'.
I want to know where the Liberal Party, and conservative politicians more generally, are in all this. This stuff has completely infected government, in addition to all the usual suspects like education and academia. I’m not sure how they allowed to this to happen. Are they just somehow completely ignorant of how un-impartial and politically woke the government bureaucracy has become? Are they grossly incompetent or powerless to do anything? Have they also fallen victim to this in their own ranks, and lack the ability or backbone to purge it from their own party? Or do they also just support it, if less radically so, being naïve small-l liberals buying into the motte-and-bailey? I have no idea, but from my perspective it feels like they have their head in the sand. It’s been discussed here before about how the Republicans seem to be completely unaware about what they’re up against in the US, still acting like it’s 2008. It very much feels the same way here, if not even more so.
Terra Invicta Review
This was initially going to be a shorter post but it turned into an unedited, error filled rant about all the things that annoy me about a game that the vast majority of you haven’t and won’t play. But maybe you’ll enjoy it away.
Overview
Terra Invicta is a 4X grand strategy game that was recently released into early access recently, and I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time playing recently. The game is the first original release from Pavonis Interactive, the team who made the Long War mods for the modern XCOM games. The premise of the game is that you take control of one of seven factions/organisations/ideologies following the discovery of a crashed UFO, the beginning of an arrival/invasion of aliens in the Sol System. Each of the factions responds to the aliens in their own way and have their own win condition, with some factions even being ‘pro-alien’. The gameplay of Terra Invicta is hard to explain. It’s kind of two game separate games stitched together, the first being a escape/grand strategy (Paradox) like game where you fight with other factions (and aliens) for control of Earth’s nations, which provide you resources, and the second being control of space that plays like more a traditional space 4X, where you have to build space stations (‘habs’), mine resources and build ships, and fight in real time space battles.
Thematically, Terra Invicta is most directly inspired by XCOM (duh!) in the setting of the game (but not that much in gameplay). Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (and Civilization) is also a heavy influence, particularly in the writing. There are also similarities to Paradox-style grand strategy and the Total War franchises. Yes, I’m aware that sounds confusing! Terra Invictia is a very ambitious strategy game that attempts to really capture the grand scope of how humans might respond to an alien invasion. In this ambition, it mostly succeeds, however, it is quite rough around the edges, and not just a way that can be fixed in early access. The writing in the game is pretty mediocre, some of the Earth grand strategy elements are shallow, and the space combat is pretty horrible that a significant rework looks likely. Despite all this, I strongly recommend Terra Invicta if you enjoy the above games, and it a great first release for a development studio. Even though it is early access, the game is feature complete and mostly bug free.
Gameplay
I won’t spend too long describing gameplay, it’s easy enough to search for footage online, it’s time better spent on specific critique but a brief summary: You take the role of one seven factions with their own goals. You play as the omnipotent disembodied leader of one of seven factions each with their own ideologies. The seven factions are:
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The Resistance – default ‘XCOM’ defend the Earth from aliens faction
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Humanity First – a violent militaristic xenophobic faction willing to use extreme methods to kill the aliens
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The Academy – a idealistic faction that wishes to prove humanity the alien’s equal and enter peaceful relations
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Project Exodus – a faction that wants to GTFO and abandon Earth and escape to a new star system
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The Initiative – a kleptocratic faction only concerned with using chaos to increase their own wealth and power
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The Protectorate – a faction who wishes to appease the aliens to avoid bloodshed and preserve some degree human autonomy
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The Servants – a religious cult faction that sees the aliens as humanity’s saviours and will outright support the aliens (and the aliens them)
I will discuss the factions, their leaders, and how they are written later on (it’s not good).
Each faction has up to 6 ‘councillors’ which is your primary way of interacting with Earth and the nations of the world. These councillors all have a range of different missions which interact with the nations of Earth and other factions in different ways, ranging from taking control of a nation and its armies, raising or reducing civil unrest in those nations, assassinating enemy councillors, or steal enemy research. This all takes place on a Paradox-style globe. Each nation has stats like population, GDP, education level, unrest etc. Control over a nation is dictated by control of a nation’s ‘control points’, which allow you to control how it invests its ‘economy’ (investment points), and its foreign policy and armies. The primary reason to control nations is that they are the primary source of money, research (to unlock new technologies like any 4X), and ‘boost’ (abstracted resource representing ability to send thing into space). All these are needed to launch build space stations to mine resources (metal, gases) to design and build spaceships which constitutes the second ‘half’ of the game. Space combat is a 3D real time with pause – think Homeworld without the base management or spaceship Total War (there’s probably better comparisons). It also uses Newtonian mechanics for movement, and pretty fleshed out orbital mechanics to move around the Solar system. To win the game you need to complete a specific victory condition for your chosen faction that will be discovered as you play, which often but not always involves blowing up a lot of the alien’s shit.
Now to the more interesting ‘critique’ (read: rant filled criticism about stuff that annoys me about the game):
The spaceship combat is quite bad in its current state. There are two primary issues – first, the waypoint system. You control all your ships in combat via ‘waypoints’, a line that shows your ship’s current trajectory (Newtonian mechanics), which has several points on it which represents points on which your ship can adjust its course (orientation and thrust). This sounds good on paper, but quickly becomes micromanagement hell. It’s actually pretty fun for like 2v2 skirmishes, but when you’re trying to manage 20+ ships it’s just tedious. The alternative is almost as bad though - setting the ships to AI control. The AI control is both hilariously bad and lacking in options. You have no control how the AI ship actually acts. You can’t for example, assign your smaller corvettes only defend and screen for your capital ships. It’s either AI or it isn’t. And the preferred strategy of the AI seems to be rushing full speed ahead into the enemy and getting itself killed. So your choice in ship combat is either tedious micromanagement, or braindead AI. Fortunately, the developers are aware of this problem and there’s probably going to be a substantial overhaul of space combat at some point.
Bad AI also extends to the enemy factions too. The humanity faction AI mismanages the nations it controls really badly, and this results in them stagnating in the midgame, causing the player the surpass them very quickly and leave only the aliens as the real opposition.
The game is incredibly long. Some people might think this is a positive, but even as a veteran of Paradox grand strategy who is used to hundred-hour campaigns, Terra Invicta is just too long. I’ve got over a hundred hours in the game and have not come close to actually finishing a campaign. A big culprit of this is the bloated and overly engineered and complicated technology system (much of the early ship technology is useless anyway), which has hundreds of technologies and engineering projects. There are significant stretches of time where you’ll be nothing but waiting for tech to complete. But can’t just completely zone out and go full speed, because the requires you to micro your councillors constantly. There’s also a significant bottleneck for research in the midgame and if you don’t go down certain paths before than others you can waste a lot of time, despite the apparent gameplay freedom that is the design intent of the developers.
The grand strategy/geoscape parts are surprisingly shallow and feel very boardgamey. A major reason for this is that there is nothing really unique about any given country. They are all just the same pile of numbers that happen to start at different points of a scale. There’s actually no mechanical difference between China and the USA, China just happens to have lower education and democracy score but more population than the USA. If you democratize and education China using the same relatively shallow mechanics available to all countries, then you just end up with bigger USA. Things like migration, religion, sectarian or ethnic divides in a country aren’t modelled at all. And things that are modelled like democracy/government score or education are just simply points on a scale. You can pretty easily make Israel and Iran allies for example. It’s all just completely abstracted game mechanics that are the almost exactly same for all countries. It’s a board game where there’s a square that happens to be called India, but there’s nothing uniquely Indian about it, only abstracted gamified statistics of India. This is part of both the strength and weakness of Terra Invicta – it is an ambitious game with enormous scope, but any given specific mechanics is poorly developed.
I think a major problem with the game design as it stands, is despite the freedom in how you approach the game’s many mechanics, you’re ultimately pigeonholed into a rough playstyle and a predetermined victory condition. Many of the games I mentioned in the summary either are sandbox oriented and don’t have true win conditions (Paradox), or have multiple win conditions (Alpha Centauri/Civilization). In Terra Invicta, this means you can’t adjust adapt your plan to win based on the circumstances of the game or what you find the most enjoyable. In Civilization, sure you might be incentivised to go for a certain win condition based on which civilization you pick, but you always have the freedom to change. This I think really hurts the enjoyment of the game through limiting player options.
Continued below....
Culture War Update on my previous post on Australia's Voice to Parliament.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has finally released the wording of the question that will be proposed in the referendum as follows:
“A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
He has also release the proposed provisions being added:
Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:
There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.
Parliament is expected to vote on the wording of the referendum question in June.
Some brief comments:
The proposed question is a leading question, by implying that the recognition of the 'First Peoples' necessarily requires the establishment of the Voice. There could easily be two separate questions here:
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One for a constitution recognising Indigenous people in the Australia Constitution, a symbolic gesture, something that has been suggested many times in the past (which I still don't support but is still far less contentious that setting up a new government body).
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One question for the establishment of the Voice itself.
The proposed amended provisions don't actually outline the structure or powers the Voice will have, which is still a major concern of many Australians. Instead, it allows for the Australian Parliament to define it through regular legislation. While this is being touted by Labor as a smart or good or effective way to go about it (perhaps disingeniously) because it allows the Voice to be adjusted with regular legislation, I see this as concerning for two reasons:
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Firstly, in order to pass any legislation in the Senate, Labor needs the support of the Greens. Supposing this referendum does pass, and the Labor government tries to pass the first legislation to establish the Voice, they would need to negotiate with the Greens who have an even more radical and woke conception of what the Voice would be
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Secondly, I can easily see how these provisions can be abused by woke legal activists through the High Court, getting them to extend the Voice through implied powers. The wording 'make make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government' could easily be made to mean any number of things, 'representations' is a pretty malleable word (you could quite sensibly, if disingenuously interpret this to mean they should have representation in the House of Representatives, for example). The ability to 'make representations' being in the Constitution could easily overrule any regular legislation made by judicial activism to give certain de facto powers to the Voice (perhaps this is the point). The other provision is 'relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples', which given that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are in fact Australian citizens and are affected by literally everything in Australian politics from taxes to trade, one can easily see how this provision means 'everything'.
I strongly oppose the term 'First Peoples', which would bake a woke/progressive terminology and worldview into the Constitution.
And the thing that perhaps annoys me the most of all this, is when the Voice turns out to be a disaster in one form or another, which I'm nearly certain it will, there will be no way to actually get rid of it, now being constitutionally enshrined. This will be ATSIC 2.0 but there is no actual way to get rid of it and the corruption, even assuming the culture and media is actually conducive to it. There is no way that another referendum will occur in my lifetime to repeal this amendment. This is what annoys me so much, that this is a social 'Tesla valve' (or Cthulhu only swims left, or the slippery slope), if this does pass there is no reversing it. Reversing it would require a mass genuinely reactionary popular sentiment (on the level of Orban at least) to happen in Australia, which won't happen, and even if it did happen would introduce new different problems of its own.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
4mo ago
Easter is the most important Christian holiday. The secular perception that Christmas is more important than Easter is an artifact of secular society widely celebrating (a secular and commericalised version of) Christmas.
Civilian casualty figures for the invasion of Gaza are on par with other urban assaults by western militaries. You can contrast this with the battles in the Ukraine war, which are a lot a lot worse, and Assad’s reconquests of major Syrian cities, which are also way way worse.
This is not true. The civilian casualities in Gaza are significantly higher than that in Ukraine, the invasion of which by Russia people have been rushing to call genocide, including many people here. For simplicity I will just takes about deaths specifically and not casualities.
As already posted below the OHCHR estimates 9,701 civilian deaths in Ukraine between 24 Feb 2022 and 24 September 2023.
Reliable estimates for Gaza are hard to find but OHCHR estimates the deaths to be over 11,000 between 7 October 2023 and 16 November 2023 (some of whom would not strictly speaking be Gazans as there are also casualities outside of Gaza). So Gaza has roughly the same number of deaths in a month than Ukraine had in a year and a half. More recent numbers from early January suggest this number could be over 22,000 for Gaza. This would put the percentage of Gazans killed somewhere around 1% of the total population.
Now, Gaza is more densely populated and urbanised where the fighting is taking place, but this is also offset by the fact that Ukraine has a much larger population than Gaza and the operations are larger scale.
Regardless, no matter how you cut it, the civilian casualties in Gaza are extremely high and people would not be hesitating to call it genocide if it were any other country.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
I don’t think the US can be exhausted.
I would just say Iraq and Afghanistan.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
What they were supposed to do?
Not fuck up Russia in the first place with the Clinton administration's disasterious attempt to 'reform' a post-Soviet Russia and seek partnership instead of hegemony? Agree to a healthy buffer zone in Eastern Europe? Not create and amplify the various revolutions in Eastern Europe, including the various 'Color Revolutions', and more recently and relevantly the heavy American involvement in Euromaidan and Ukrainian politics generally? Not deliberately antagonize Russia by constantly demanding Ukraine and Georgia should be admitted into NATO (despite their questionable strategic value) the same way the US would never tolerate a country in their immediate sphere (Monroe Doctrine) to ally with a hostile power (e.g. China or Russia) let alone one on their border?
The general atrociousness and wordsaladness of the piece aside - the complete strawmanning of Romanticism is infuriating -it's unclear to me what the position being put forward even is. The author says that basically humans have a responsibility to reduce the suffering of wild animals, but then she also says that humans basicially have no right to violate the autonomy of said animals? The solution (?) seems to be that the entirety of nature (which doesn't exist anyway according to the author) should basically be turned into a giant zoo, where humans are meant to be an invisible guiding hand for all animals. It has some pretty hilarious implications, like presumably we'd have to give all rabbits birth control drugs or something (in a way that doesn't violate their supposed autonomy?) so they don't... well... breed like rabbits. But honestly the whole exercise reads to me just as an excuse to berate humanity because the author hates humanity.
It's articles like this that really make me embrace Idealism and express outright pro-anthroprocentrism. That humanity is distinct and apart from nature, and that humans are more than mere animals, but are capable of Reason which is what seperates and makes us superior to animals. Animals are stupid and much less important than humans. I don't care how much people make appeals to animals' supposed sentience. They are not sapient and not capable of Reason. It's not clear if they have any conciousness (and they probably don't, save for maybe our closest primate cousins). Animals do not deserve the same rights as humans, they are stupid beasts. I don't think anyone has ever said that to the author. We humans have decided that we want to preverse nature because we believe it has value - economic, aesthetic, moral etc value. But that value is ultimately derived from our human Reason something those animals are completely incapable of doing.
It's been said it's much harder to refute a really stupid argument than a smart argument because the really stupid argument has such stupid prepositions and poor logic that it's hard to know even where to begin or how to formulate a counter argument, the whole thing is just rubbish. This article seems to be one of those really stupid arguments. There's some hilariously stupid lines in this article such as:
when what we ought to do is respect animals’ choice of a way of life
As if animals have the capacity to make such choices!
Continued
I’ve been very critical and to say something positive because I actually do enjoy the game, one of the things the game does very well is dynamic difficulty. While there are actual difficulty settings, the game has mechanics to dynamically adjust the difficulty as the aliens’ activity is in part driven by your own activity. The more aggressive you are, the more aggressive the aliens will be in response. It’s also hard to outright lose the game, and there’s almost always an opportunity to recover and claw back victory, even if it might be slow and tedious. XCOM’s Long War indeed!
Factions and Writing
In Terra Invicta, you a playing as one of seven competing factions. However, it’s never exactly made quite clear what the factions/organisations even are. The presentation really lacks the context to make it clear, it’s all completely abstracted to the point where it diminishes the experience. The game aesthetically presents the factions as Illuminati like clandestine organisations pulling the strings of government from the behind the curtain. But much of the gameplay doesn’t reflect that at all, and in practice it seems like you’re more like a inter or pseudo governmental body that unites a bunch of nations under a geopolitical bloc. But this is also undermined by the fact it’s relatively easy to oust a faction from a country and seize control yourself. Some of the mechanics of the game imply you’re not exactly secret to the public. But it’s never quite clear what you are. The game is this weird halfway position between the two positions. This is made worse by the fact the origins of the factions are just handwaved way. Apparently, there were seven secret organisations who all just happened waiting around for aliens to appear so they start taking over countries. The predetermined victory condition/ideology of the factions is also adding to this issue because the factions, even the non-fanatical ones, already have their set-in-stone attitude to the aliens before even knowing anything about them, that doesn’t change after learning anything about them. It all feels a bit artificial and ‘teleological’ I guess. Also, all the factions are mechanically identical despite their organisations presumably differing significantly, like the Servants being a weird religious cult and the Initiative being some dog-eat-dog corporate Illuminati.
Terra Invicta is most directly influenced by Alpha Centauri by its writing and faction leaders. Like AC, each faction is represented by a leader, who is explored whose perspective, background and ideology is slowly explored through a voiced acted quote that appear after researching each technology from one of the leaders. However, unlike Alpha Centauri which has some fantastic writing, touches on complex ideas and provides believable ideological justifications for each of the factions, the writing in Terra Invicta is mediocre and shallow. The vast majority of quotes from the factions leaders are just bad, mostly in the asinine ‘I’m a teenager and think this is a deep observation about humanity’ kind. They never really say anything that meaningful. All the leaders are ultimately boring caricatures. Unfortunately, I can’t find any list of quotes from the game at this stage. I’m going to list the faction leaders from roughly most annoying to least annoying and describe them and their issues.
The Resistance – Commander Fiona Ayouade, a black Bri’ish woman with an extremely annoying (north?) London accent. She is apparently an experienced counterterrorist expert, although you wouldn’t know it because she has the most asinine comments imaginable mostly about ‘why can’t humans just work together’. Sounds more like a young arts school undergraduate student.
The Protectorate – Commissioner Kiran Banerjee, an Indian human rights lawyer/politician who is like an unintentional caricature of what a conservative imagines a bleeding-heart liberal to be. All his quotes are asinine quotes about people being selfish or shallow environmentalism and everything is dangerous and could be used to abuse people. He’s also gay, which I guess the game doesn’t make a big deal out of, but he also happens to be the only character in the game whose relationship is ever mentioned in quotes.
The Servants – Superior Judith Howell, an American who is an odd amalgamation of new age mystic and cultish Evangalical Christian. Seems woefully underqualified for leading whatever the faction organisation is meant to be. Her quotes are mostly boring attempts for the writer to sound religious or spiritual. A lot of meaningless and repetitive quotes about cleansing and purification that don’t say anything.
The Initiative – Chairman Soren Van Wyk, an extremely unethical Afrikaner businessman (arms, diamonds), who is almost comically evil (very original). Literally every quote from him is some variation of “Fuck [ethical thing], just make me more money or give me more power”. No depth, completely one note and boring.
The Academy – Chancellor Li Qingzhao, female Chinese extremely influential scientist. Her quotes are relatively inoffensive, mostly just quotes about science and how technology is awesome and great but not saying anything substantial. Sometimes comments on society but it’s all bland liberal technocrat stuff about we can overcome division through knowledge and understanding.
Humanity First - Colonel Hanse Castille, an Argentinian military officer turned commando after alleged war crimes. Mostly just waxes about how there’s danger everywhere, some military strategy themed quotes that’s probably not even true (‘sometimes it’s not about who has the bigger gun but can shoot faster’ or some bs like that), and sometimes comments about how humans must be hard asses. Cliché and uninspired but not offensively bad.
Project Exodus – Director Khalid Al-Ashgar. Oxford educated Emirati space tech mogul. Idealist who wants to leave Earth and explore space. Has the most inoffensive quotes of the lot mostly about how we must dream big and leave the cradle of Earth, and a few quotes about sciencey stuff.
Just to give a taste here’s a couple of quotes from my least favourite leader Fiona Ayouade (imagine an annoying female northern London accent):
“Together, we’re stronger. Apart, we’re weaker, yeah? Sounds great on paper, love, but the trouble is there’s always some bloke with a loud voice who wants to keep as apart – and a whole lot of someone elses bankrolling him”
“When I was a kid, the threat of nuclear Armageddon was on every front page, every day. So forgive me if I get just a tiny bit anxious when you tell me that our best hope of sailing the stars is staging nuclear explosions inside our spacecraft!” - (She's a professional logical mature counterterrrorist operative btw)
By comparison, here’s some quotes from the game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Sure, there are some duds there (the expansion factions suck ass) but the quality of the writing is just so much higher. With all respect to the Terra Invicta writer(s), it seems like they just didn’t have the philosophical chops to emulate what Alpha Centauri did. Alpha Centauri was also smart enough to use some real world quotes too (like all Civilization games do), rather than trying to come up with some witty original insight to say about everything.
Even the names of the factions suck and are so generic. They're literally just called the Resistance or the Academy or whatever. They could have at least called them like 'United Earth Defense Organisation' or something, and have Resistance be a nickname.
Also a quick note on the Aliens, who I haven’t commented much on. I want to avoid spoiling their motivations for invading Earth and who they are because discovering it is a major part of the experience. My opinion is that the answer to that question is meh, and like a lot of the other writing it’s superficially deep.
Real World Politics
To go on a tangent and to veer briefly into the culture war a bit in the end, what I always find interesting about games like Terra Invicta that have a grand, contemporary, and somewhat realistic setting is how the mechanics and initial game state of the game reflects the ideological biases of the developers and perhaps maybe wider society in general. The previous section on the factions and how they’re written might provide some insights. The game starts on 1 October, 2022. It includes contemporary geopolitical events, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Taiwan has a special relationship with China (which is also used as a generic mechanic for breakaway states. You can look at things like how democratic the devs rate a given country at game start (perhaps they used some democracy index). But more interesting things might be what they chose to affect population growth (i.e. fertility) – low GDP per capita and education have high birth rates, but in developed countries increasing GDP per capita increases population growth.
Migration is completely absent from the game, something you might think there would be a lot of if there were alien invasions of Earth, or even just extreme ideologies taking over nations. I don’t know if this was a conscious social decision not to include it or just because the developers thought it would be too complex to introduce.
Interestingly, Palestine is completely absent from the game. They don’t even have a claim to the region that Israel has. Civil wars and sectarian conflict in general are modelled extremely poorly. Because Israel has high democracy score and relatively high GDP per capita and education, most of the unrest Israel starts the game with that presumably represents Palestinian conflict disappears by itself pretty quickly because of how the game mechanics work. In fairness to the developers, I suspect that there might be a legitimate mechanical issue in having two countries have exact sam
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
It's almost always framed in how it's bad for women though, typically 'college graduated women can't find husbands (because they will never marry down).'
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
I would like to bring attention to a small but significant culture war kerfuffle that occurred on Monday, during the Australian Parliament Senate Estimates.
For those of you who are not aware, Senate Estimates is a series of hearings held by the Senate standing committees originally meant to scrutinise the budget and spending of the executive government and its agencies (budget estimates), but in practice is used to scrutinise all activities of the executive government, not just budget and financing.
The exchange I want to discuss occurred on Monday 22 May earlier this week, when the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts (it's a weird combination I know) was being question by the Rural, Regional Affairs and Transport Committee.
In the exchange, Senator McKenzie and Senator Canavan (both Nationals) question Mr Jim Betts, the Secretary of the Department (i.e. the most senior (non-ministerial/partisan) public servant and head of the Department). The Senators question Mr Betts over an alleged event where Mr Betts wore a Black Power t-shirt during an official address to departmental staff. The exchange is too lengthy to quote the whole thing here, so I recommend everyone read the Hansard (transcript) of the exchange.
To summarise the exchange briefly, Mr Betts is questioned on whether he wore a Black Power t-shirt during an official department briefing, Mr Betts is evasive with his answers before it is revealed that the t-shirt in question contained an Aboriginal flag in clenched fist, he claims that the symbol is merely a symbol of "solidarity" with Aboriginal staff and that it has no relevance to Black Power, and continues to be evasive when pressed by the Senators on whether this constitutes a political statement breaching the standards of impartiality of the Australian Public Service. The exchange ends with Mr Betts essentially challenging the Senators to report him to the Australian Public Service Commission for breaching the code of conduct.
It's also difficult to convey the tone of the conversation (unfortunately, I don't believe the video recording of the hearing is yet online), but I have to point out that Mr Betts is dressed in a very casual short sleeve shirt and not a business suit (as would be appropriate for this event, as is sarcastically mentioned by Senator McKenzie), and is wearing a rainbow lanyard (as he will mention). Mr Betts talks in a very condescending but hushed and rushed tone, showing no respect for the Senators, and the Senators, for their part, talked in a generally aggressive, and particularly in Senator McKenzie's case, sarcastic tone.
The reason I wanted to highlight this exchange is because it highlights the woke institutional capture of Australian government institutions, though I suspect this is representative of countries in the Anglosphere. To make it abundantly clear, the clenched fist in Australia is absolutely a symbol of Black Power imported into Australia from America, and used by the "Black/Indigenous sovereignty" movement within Australia. Mr Betts would absolutely know this, and I feel fairly confident in saying he is outright lying here. In fact, the fist was prominently used last year when Senator Lidia Thorpe (radical left Indigenous activist) made the fist and called the Queen a coloniser during her swearing in ceremony, an event I discussed back on the old subreddit.
So the head of a major Australian Government Department (who is allegedly an anarcho-communist, an allegation he doesn't explicitly deny but merely sidesteps) wears t-shirt with a radically left-wing/woke symbol while addressing staff, and he feels reasonably confident that he is going to suffer no consequences for it. If this does not represent a capturing of an institution by woke ideology, I don't know what does. What I also find really interesting is how Mr Betts attempts to argue his way out the questioning by equating his black power t-shirt with his rainbow LGBT lanyard as just symbols of support and solidarity - a false equivalency because the black power symbol remains far more explicitly political in the way LGBT rainbow is not - but this attempted defence does seem to have some strength. But the conservative Nationals Senators were unable or unwilling to make the affirmative case that yes, LGBT lanyards and flags also do constitute a political statement. Even they had to dance around this issue. They have become so normalised and part of the 'new sensibility' that LGBT flags hanging in government offices is perfectly fine, and desirable even, it's simply about promoting a safe and inclusive culture and it is in no way political! (unless you oppose it then you're the one being political).
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Fertility is a wicked problem, and I'm not sure what you're asking is even possible, as I think the underlying social/cultural issue can't really be solved by a lone conservative head of state/government in an otherwise hostile liberal democratic global culture though executive political action. But I will attempt to answer the question as a thought experiment nonetheless.
Firstly, I'm going to constrain any potential actions to something that is 1) practical 2) politically feasible and 3) sustainable (so it can't just be easily overturned/revoked as so as you're out of office).
It's easier to highlight incorrect or misguided ideas than it is to identify correct ones so I'll do that first. Economic solutions and incentives do not work. This is not to say they don't have any impact (it can slightly increases it), but they are not going to remedy what is a long term social and cultural issue. As I've pointed out before, the fertility rate of the US was higher under the worst period of the Great Depression than it is today.
Specifically, child care support/subsidies is a complete red herring. While I have no hard evidence to support this (it's not something anyone has ever bothered to study), but I strongly suspect child care support might counter-intuitively have negative effect of fertility rate. I believe that child care support actually encourages women who already have children to start or restart working, and thus lower their long term fertility (have one or two kids, go back to work), rather than the often stated goal of encouraging or helping working women to have kids. In other words, child care support is more aimed at getting young mothers to work (and become 'economically productive') rather helping working women become mothers.
Okay, now for policies that improve fertility and are feasible
- An aggressive campaign remove any form of female affirmative action and similar policies, particularly in education and employment.
This is potentially politically feasible because it's theoretically possible by using the liberal ideology against itself. The most obvious example of this is Title XI lawsuits in the USA used by men to stop women-biased policies and affirmative action (though I must say this is an extremely uphill battle). It's sustainable because it exists within the liberal legal framework already. It's not trivial to overturn a Supreme Court ruling. Though this will heavily depend on the given country's political system. Also, while I say it's feasible, that doesn't mean it's easy or likely. Fighting against gamma bias is extremely difficult. Going any further than this (e.g. actively discriminating against women) is completely unfeasible and any suggestions about this are pointless.
An even more aggressive approach would be to somehow take back control of the education system and academia from woke stranglehold, but I'm not even sure how you would go about it, short of burning the whole thing to the ground and rebuilding, but I don't think that's feasible.
- Destroy and disrupt social media as much as possible, especially dating apps.
This is less about improving the fertility rate, but actively halting what I think is a massive compounding factor to its decline. Social media, especially dating apps, are not at all conducive to the formation of traditional family life, no matter how many people say they found the love of their life on Tinder. Social media more generally is also a vector for political and social ideas that are not at all helpful to the goal, to put it lightly.
The most practical way to go about it would probably be to invoke anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws and attempt to break up the social media/tech companies and extremely weaken their networking effects that way. But this would be a huge effort. It could probably would be possible through playing on existing left-liberal fears of social media and tech companies. The best bit is that there is already a push to regulate dating apps to 'protect women' but this mostly just means to put more burden on to men (usually wanting men to have to provide id to sign up to dating apps), because who would actually want to stop the meaningless casual sex? It would be possible to turn this into just straight destroying the dating apps though in the name of protecting women.
- For certain parts of the world, actively promote religious organizations (especially Catholic Church) and weaken the separation of church and state.
This is only feasible certain parts of the world (for example, Latin America and some parts of Eastern Europe), and presents a double edge sword (or even a Faustian bargain if you're so inclined). Weakening the separation of church and state will result in a whole host of other non-fertility related problems, but is a potential strategy for the question being asked. Churches remain some of the only prominent conservative cultural institutions left, so obviously promoting their influence and status would work towards the goal. The big caveat is that even churches are not immune left-liberal cultural take over, and that includes even the Catholic Church. Not sure about long term sustainability.
I might think of some more ideas later.
Ultimately, I think what's needed is a new traditionalist-conservative vision that leads to a new conservative movement, one that isn't tied to right-liberation ideology (thanks America). I have some vague sense about what it might include, and I think it will happen at some point, but I think it's impossible to know it until it happens. I think it will necessarily have to acknowledge and rebuke both all the liberal and post-modern leftist arguments (post-post-modernism?). In essence, something along the lines of 'yes, we have heard all your arguments about how society should be and found them lacking. The stable traditional family and lifestyle remains the contested champion of the basis to build a functioning, just, prosperous society'.
As someone who has previously argued that the situation leading up to the invasion Ukraine is far more complicated that most pro-Ukrainian warhawks would like you to believe, and you do make a few valid points I still strongly disagree with your post, and more specifically your responses in this thread.
While I previously defended Russia's actions in a realist sense (and still stand by that post), that doesn't make Russia's actions moral. Make no mistake, invading another country and causing death and destruction is still an immoral act, even if one wants to argue it's the least worst option for Russia's future geopolitical prospects even when counting the risk of failure. Ukraine is of course going to defend itself and it has a right to do so, regardless of questionable geopolitical circumstances leading up to the invasion.
If you want to critique the uncritical pro-Ukrainian warhawkish-ness, you are far better of criticising American foreign policy in Eastern Europe for the last three decades. While Russia obviously bares primarily responsibility for the invasion, the US also bares responsibility for creating an extremely hostile geopolitical environment, and has pursued policy that has not at all been conducive to peace and prosperity to everyone involved (certainly not the Ukrainians), to provide dubious geopolitical benefit to themselves (and when you consider the impacts to the global economy and the US itself is probably a net loss, to say nothing of the billions of dollars spent actually funding the war). Additionally it seems that that much of the 'international community', especially the US, seems more interested in prolonging the war than actually finding a path to peace. Lip-service to peace may be given, but it seems like that there is always a more 'favourable position' to achieve before peace should be negotiated. There is also a certain subsection of ultra-warhawks who seem more motivated by wanting to completely destroy Russia, as if that would be any way moral, and of course only good things have ever come out of failed states, right?
Anyway, the point is that Russia isn't the 'good guy' in this situation, even if there are genuine criticisms to make against the US and the pro-Ukrainian warhawks. You made a few good criticisms in the original post, some of which I echoed above. You should stick to those core criticism and stop with the more blatant Russia apologia.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
The impression I got from playing Disco Elysium was that they are some kind of post-Marxists, or disillusioned Marxists. They are still support the Marxist project, but they see Marxism more like the lesser evil than a grand utopian vision. It's a begrudging kind of support for Marxism.
I always felt that that Disco Elysium was went easiest on its criticism of Marxism of all the ideologies the game critiques and satirises - I thought this even before I knew the background of the developers. Much of the criticism of Marxism within the game itself isn't actually levelled at the philosophy of Marxism, but rather how Marxism is (in)effectively implemented. The union boss is less a critique of Marxist or socialist organising, but more about how self-serving people will abuse the idea of Marxism/socialism to enrich or empower themselves. It occasionally veers dangerously close to 'Marxism doesn't fail people, people fail Marxism' territory. Not to say it the game doesn't have any substantial critique of Marxism, but I definitely felt it was less substantive than some of the other critiques.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
This is frankly untrue. The upper castes of India existed (and in many cases thrived) under British rule, under prior Mughal rule and beyond, and it still exist today. There is continuity. The elites of India were still mostly Indian, even if there was an obviously very powerful British minority at the political top. There wasn't millions of British people to wholesale replace the upper castes in India.
Wasteland 3 Review/Critique
I guess this is becoming somewhat of a series now, my previous reviews on the Motte are:
I finally got around to finishing Wasteland 3 after playing it off-and-on for months, some of you may have remembered that it inspired me to make this post when I first started playing it.
Overview
Wasteland 3 is a tactical (think modern XCOM) RPG set in the post-post-apocalyptic Colorado, where you control a group of Arizona Rangers, a kinda-military organization who arrive in Colorado from Arizona after making a deal with the 'Patriarch', the leader of Colorado Springs, the only really civilized and stable polity in Colorado to aid him in exchange for supplies. The Rangers are ambushed and nearly wiped out en route, which kickstarts the game.
Disclosure - I have never played either the ancient original Wasteland, or its modern prequel Wasteland 2, though I never felt I really needed to, the game is a bit of a fresh start.
Overall, I found Wasteland 3 to be solid, fairly competent game. It does have some notable issues, is surprisingly short and feels rushed at the end, but is enjoyable enough. The gameplay is decent, the writing and RPG-elements are passable. It's nothing remarkable. I would only recommend the game if you are a fan of tactical style, turn-based RPG.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Wasteland 3 is nothing revolutionary. The gameplay is most directly similar to the Shadowrun series. Like many CRPGs, you have a party of customized Rangers and/or companions who you run around the world with, completing missions, have skills to interact with the world (lockpicking, 'nerd stuff' (hacking) etc), or use for dialogue choices (speech checks). You find new weapons and armour as you progress. There is also an overworld map to travel between city/combat hubs. The combat is basically extremely similar to the Shadowrun games, or to XCOM:EU/XCOM2 if you haven't played it. Now to focus on the actual criticism:
I didn't like the progression system in this game. You get perk points every few level ups, but there are so little perk choices available that never used most of them because it never felt worth it, entered the endgame with most of my perk points unspent before finally just using most of them on minor perks I didn't care about. Similarly, I rarely used any special abilities (not counting the Strike Meter) outside of a couple that were pretty broken. It never really a reason to use anything than basic attack 90% of the time. But that might just be laziness on my part. I think I might have screwed myself over too, because I played the game without any melee characters which I think the game really wants you to have, as melee damage and health are tied to the same stat. I tried to make my heavy gunner my tank and it didn't quite work. The time to kill on my characters even with moderate health investment was extremely low. Enemies would often have anywhere from 4x-20x my characters HP, and my characters would die in one or two hits. As such, fights were usually feast or famine, as if more than one of your characters go down at once it's highly likely you will lose. I think they had to have this low time to kill on player characters because healing items are functionally unlimited. I wished they would have balanced it better, limit healing, lower damage have have slower, more deliberate and methodical fights.
One of the more fun parts of the combat/gameplay is amassing a large group of NPC followers (animals, robots and others) who will proceed to maul and absolutely destroy the enemy (they also usually have 3x-10x amount the HP of your characters). But this is pretty blatantly overpowered and gets boring pretty quickly. It also reduces the amount of actions you can take, because it becomes hard to use any kind of AoE weapon.
Choosing skills seem really superficial and isn't really a meaningful choice. Realistically, you want and can easily have at least one member of your team max out every skill, combat and non-combat. While the game has some pretense of the being able to play anyway you want, with any skill combination, it quickly becomes apparent that maxing out skills like lockpicking, explosives (defusing) etc becomes pretty much mandatory. There are a couple of exceptions like Toaster Repair and Survival, which just add additional funny content and reducing tedium respectively. The worst part of the skills is the armor modding and weapon modding (crafting) skills - you can just have a separate Ranger not in the main party who you just swap in and out whenever you want to craft something, making the whole crafting skill check redundant. Wasteland 3 suffers the extremely common issue in RPGs where speech checks are almost always strictly better than other options, meaning picking them is a no-brainer.
Equipment is also an issue. You find new equipment fairly quickly, and higher level gear quickly outclasses old gear. This means whenever you find a piece of equipment you really like, you might be tossing it away after a couple of levels, no way to upgrade its level. Wasteland 3 isn't the worst game in this regard, but it is annoying.
The game is deceptively short. The game honestly feels like it's missing the last quarter of the game, and was rushed to completion (I have no idea if this was actually the case). The game builds up to the final confrontation, finally a meeting of all the major characters... and it goes nowhere. It all resolves itself incredibly quickly, game ends. More on this later.
Story, Writing and Themes
MAJOR SPOILERS
I have a lot to say about the story, but I first have to briefly summarize the story to provide context to those who haven't played (but don't mind being spoiled!).
The Arizona Rangers are in desperate need of supplies after they had to blow up their own base to destroy the Cochise AI, the antagonist of Wasteland 2. The Patriarch of Colorado contacts the Rangers and promises them long-term supplies if they send a contingent to Colorado to help him find his wayward children who are destabilizing Colorado in various ways. Along the way the Rangers are ambushed and nearly wiped out by the Dorseys, one of the various wasteland raider gangs destabilizing Colorado. Despite this, the remaining Rangers establish themselves and proceed with their mission foil the Patriarch's kids and return them to him. The Patriarch's youngest son Valor is a snivelling insecure genius who is aiding a Ronald Reagan cult who want to overthrow the Patriarch, the oldest son Victory is a crazy, brutal psychopath who enjoy torturing and brutalizing his victims and is holding members of Colorado Spring's elite hostage in a skiing retreat. The whereabouts of the middle daughter Liberty, ostensibly the primary antagonist of the game, is unknown but you eventually find out she's uniting all the various raider tribes into one war party to overthrow her father, destroy Colorado Springs and theoretically set up a despotic raider empire in Colorado and beyond. Along the way you come across Angela Deth, one of the original Rangers (she was companion in WL1 and WL2), who was part of a forward part towards Colorado, who went AWOL after she learnt that the Patriarch isn't the exactly heroic saviour of Colorado he portrays himself as, refused to help him and is now trying to overthrow him. At the end of the game, the main endings are either to side with the Patriarch and fight Deth and some of your fellow Rangers, or to side with Deth and overthrow the Patriarch (either violently or peacefully if you got the support of some factions) and rule Colorado yourself. There's also an ending where you side with one of the raider gangs and help them raid and destroy/rule Colorado but I don't really consider it a 'real' ending, because it's so inconsistent with the whole ethos of the Rangers. It's the comically evil for evil's sake ending. Okay, now to the actual critique about the story:
Sadly, I strongly suspect this will end up as an extremely extended case of sunken cost fallacy. It will drag on and on with both sides refusing to make any concessions towards peace until it's years later, countless lives lost, billions of dollars spent, destruction everywhere. Only then will both sides be so exhausted that they will be forced into negotiating a peace that makes no one happy, when they could have negotiated a similiar diplomatic postion prior to the invasion with far less cost to everyone.
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