LazyLongposter
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User ID: 2993
LazyLongposter
1d ago
Them getting into a cold war with Iran might not be the worst thing in the world, there.
I don't deny this, but it's nonetheless an insane risk that risks global consequences. If you presented me a button of "these countries may nuke each other but you can guarantee it will never affect the world outside the middle east", I'd probably press it. But such an eventuality is no more a guarantee than some zealot in Tehran sees the Israeli missiles on the way and goes "fuck it, I'll take Europe/America out with me".
The conquest of the Taliban was undone in a heartbeat as soon as the US withdrew, and the US invasion of Iraq prepared the ground for daesh.
I mention this in another post but I think the prolonged nation-building stuff doesn't work if you don't a. rout the actual supporters (which would include a lot of collateral damage and questionable arrests where Afghanistan was concerned) and b. Don't work with the surviving establishment to make something new. In Iraq, this would have meant letting at least some Ba'ath party members be involved in the reorganization of the party, rather than completely ousting them and making them and all their supporters de facto enemies (hence the insurgency) while propping up a bunch of previously uninvolved Sunnis (hence ISIS). In Afghanistan, this likely never would have worked, because the only existing mass establishment they had was the Taliban. There were no mid level bureaucrats who were going "I'm just in the Taliban to do city planning", the Taliban was it. You can't replace them with tribal, sometimes boy raping farmers, and declare victory.
Point being, as I said in another post, you can just gut a country's military and leave, a la Gulf War 1. There's a reason we had an even easier time rolling over their conventional army in Gulf War 2, which is that they were never able to recover to the level they were at pre-Gulf War 1. I would be fine with the same thing happening to Iran.
LazyLongposter
1d ago
Russia – the world's nuclear power – has been subjected to a conventional land invasion and have been struck within their borders innumerable times by Ukraine.
I mention in my reply that strikes within a border are different than a conventional land invasion. Secondly, said Ukrainian land invasion barely penetrated the Russian borders before they were expelled. It was also a retaliation in an active conflict - likely to pull Russian forces off the front line - which colors it differently than, say, an unprovoked mass invasion of Russia. Put differently: If Ukraine was magically and decisively winning this war, and pushed the Russians back to the border, I seriously doubt they'd get much further than there, out of a very founded fear that Russia would use nuclear weapons against them. Russia has said they would use nuclear weapons if their sovereignty was threatened. While this was a veiled threat along the lines of "Ukraine and the occupied portions of it are part of Russia, so don't you dare take them back", I don't doubt it would ring very true if Russia proper was legitimately under threat of losing territory.
You opened your original post saying that you were arguing in opposition to the "let the two parties sort it out" position, but it seems to me that you're happy to let Israel sort it out and your main concern is that they will be unable to "finish the job." What exactly do you think the US can do that Israel cannot?
A very large army (but you don't want ground occupation)
You can invade a country without a prolonged occupation. Once again, see the first Gulf War. We rolled over then-one-of-the-largest armies in the world in a month and then immediately pulled out. I mentioned I wouldn't be explicitly against killing their leaders and leaving, but thoroughly gutting the military and their nuclear stores/bunkers (very easy to do if you've conquered them and can walk right up!) and leaving the leadership humiliated would even be fine by me. It would leave a very credible threat in the Iranian government's mind that we could do it again, because we already did it when they had years to build up their defenses. I don't want to be involved in nation building because (this is a separate thesis of mine) modern militaries, at least the United States', seem to be incapable of totally subduing an enemy via mass bombardment (i.e. killing a shitload of civilians), or nation-building. I don't think the former is necessarily "what it would take", as I am against civilians dying, so blowing up all their major military and nuclear assets and making them toothless for a good long time would be as good a solution as any.
On this note, a large army would likely not be the primary thing we'd need to fight China if they up and decided a US invasion of Iran was the perfect time to strike. In the short term, it would be primarily a naval and air defense, with the biggest land target I can think of being Taiwan (who has their own army - and ideally we'd want to keep the Chinese marines from ever making a landing, making them secondary). I'm not saying an army couldn't or wouldn't become necessary in the long term, only that a land component would not necessarily be a huge limiting factor. A CSG? Maybe, but we do famously have many more than only one CSG. And as you mention below, Israeli air support may prove mostly sufficient in such a circumstance.
More air power of the sort Israel essentially already has (which seems relatively pointless right now if the Israeli air campaign is as effective as is currently believed, doesn't it?)
Obviously this is a developing situation. Since I made the original post, Iran has apparently come crawling back to the bargaining table since the Israeli air campaign so completely dominated them. I genuinely hope this puts a bow on the whole situation, and the US never needs to lift a finger to change this. As I said, I have skin in the game when it comes to American conflicts, and one less is fine by me.
You opened your original post saying that you were arguing in opposition to the "let the two parties sort it out" position
The attitude was "let the two parties sort it out regardless of the outcome". The second part is what I take issue with. I have no need for an American flag to be on the wikipedia page for this conflict, I just explicitly and powerfully do not want a nuclear Iran - or any new nuclear country that has even a chance in hell of using them.
LazyLongposter
2d ago
Two caveats. Firstly, my thesis was not "the US should strike NOW", but that Israel succeeding here is undoubtedly very very good for us, and if they needed help to succeed, I'd want to do so. I say that as someone with skin in the game.
It seems to me that obviously either nations with nuclear warheads can be threatened, in which case they can be deterred. Or they can't be, in which case the United States (and Israel) has nothing to worry about. But you seem to be trying to have it both ways!
Secondly, allow me to rephrase: Nuclear weapons make you functionally immune to a conventional invasion and will make anyone think twice about even striking within your borders. At any point during a real conventional invasion you can consider (or declare) your existence threatened and use them to great effect, either wiping out entire armies or the invaders' home front. They do not make you immune to internal rot, discord, economic decline, or anything else, as the USSR will gladly tell you. That this is your opening argument is disheartening, because I find it quite intellectually dishonest to feign ignorance of that distinction.
As such, I don't worry about someone invading the United States. If decades of discord and hostile messaging (bolstered by adversaries who are quite happy to watch us tear ourselves apart without firing a single shot) leads to the United States to cease to exist as a political entity, then we would be quite susceptible to invasion, be it by a hostile force or something more covert. A "North American" continent with dozens of individual nation states that are likely at each others' throats would present a foreign actor many potential inroads into allying with, occupying, subverting, or otherwise controlling part of the landmass. As I live on that landmass, I'd like the huge boon that "two massive oceans and only two continental neighbors" to stay that way. We already have Chinese and other agents coming through our weak border to the south. Imagine that ten or a hundred fold. That is why we can be both a nuclear power and vulnerable.
Nuclear powers can also be defeated abroad, as in within other people's borders, without really having the right (in international eyes) to use the nuclear option. We have failed to achieve many military objectives, as has Russia, and neither have deployed nuclear weapons. But it also means no one can ever go to the source. As for Iran, yes, they have weapons that can reach us, but they are not yet nuclear capable. Once they are, you essentially waive all your chances to military deterrence. And from there stems the problem. A nuclear Iran can proxy war to their hearts' content. A nuclear Iran can threaten to retaliate to conventional Israeli strikes with nuclear weapons (whereas now only Israel can), leading both to consider a nuclear first strike necessary to preserve their existence/secure their victory, depending on perspective. A nuclear Iran can lock up within its borders when its armaments are exhausted and refill its stockpiles and have a credible threat against anyone trying to stop them. They go from being a regional power to a fact of life unless some sort of unconventional method deters them or causes their regime to collapse. Once again, see America. I am reasonably hopeful that we won't collapse in the near future, and I am also reasonably sure that a nuclear Iran would also last quite a while. Even if they didn't, those nukes would have to go somewhere once they collapse, and that's a huge security risk. All you need is one powerful higher up or base deciding they wanted to get massively rich, or being insanely anti-Israeli/American/whatever to sell or use them.
These were all real arguments up to the end of the Cold War, and they ring true now. Every single nation that develops its own nuclear weapons increases the risk of some sort of horrible outcome, be it an entrenched regime, accident, or sale to/use by crazies within or without the government. I don't want it to happen.
FIRST, the United States does not have infinite capacity to do things. If we actually want to fight China, which we've said we want to be able to do publicly, that means very specifically that we cannot write blank checks where ballistic missile interceptors, smart munitions, etc. are involved. We are already arguably under-equipped to deal with the very real Chinese threat, which will likely be a more serious threat to American hegemony than anything that Iran can do. And part of the reason we are under-equipped to fight China is because we canceled procurement and research programs throughout the Global War on Terror to fund the Global War on Terror – effectively eating our own seed corn.
I agree with this. I admittedly did not make this clear enough in my post, but I must say I am aware of the looming threat of China to American interests and I don't want to be bogged down in this. I really hope that Israel succeeds or Iran comes back to the negotiating table, as you said. However, there are two issues here. Firstly, Iran has been "at the negotiating table" several times, including with previous administrations, leading to billions of funds going into their pockets in return for them only pursuing civil nuclear reactors... which they then proceeded to ignore completely. Secondly, the inverse of your statement is true as well: Iran does not have infinite capacity to do things either. They have already used a huge amount of missiles in the current exchange, and their IADS seems to be in shambles. They may already be close to their limit as far as projecting power is concerned, and dealing with them now is a lot more appealing than waiting for an armistice where they are able to refill their reserves. If they actually nuclearize, or perhaps state their intent to use those weapons against the US, and we suddenly have to divert resources back to them to stop an imminent threat, it will be a lot costlier, and likely bloodier.
And the only reliable way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is regime change.
I don't know that this is true. There was a lot of fear about Iraq getting one, and after we utterly demolished their ability to make war in the first Gulf War, they were never a credible threat. That's why the "they're making WMDs" justification for Gulf War 2 is a persistent joke.
Second (another commenter posted in response to this but I'm going to put my reply here, as it's relevant and I've received a number of replies) I think the biggest issue with Gulf War 2 (other than doing it) was that we picked the worst middle ground imaginable. We banned every single Ba'ath party member from ever being in government, which is not even a thing we did with the Nazis or Japanese. This essentially left a fledgling government in the middle of a war zone filled with the unqualified, malcontents, and sometimes literal terrorists in power. That Iraq even exists after ISIS is kind of a miracle to me, not that they're somehow doing great. I think we should have either:
- Completely obliterated their military again, ousted their leaders that time, and left.
- Actually worked with the remaining government to allow for some kind of legitimate regime change.
Both of these things are something I would accept, at least on the home front. "Don't fuck with the US or they'll show up, kill all your leaders, and break all your stuff" is at least something we can credibly do multiple countries. We cannot get continuously bogged down in a 20 year nation building/peacekeeping quagmire.
SECONDLY
I somewhat responded to these points above, but I agree partially. I'll explain below.
If Israel conducts the war successfully, they may reduce the cost of a limited US intervention (destroying the buried nuclear facilities with bunker busters – although it's possible that some of them are buried even too deeply for oversized US ordinance!) to near-zero.
As I said above, I want this to happen. As with Ukraine, I like the idea of adversaries blunting themselves against our allies at zero cost to American lives and (relatively) low cost with materiel. As it is, if we're going to have to strike, I want to strike while the iron is hot and their munitions and defenses are depleted. If we're not going to take our hands off the steering wheel of the entire region and withdraw entirely (which I think is a bad idea outside the scope of this already long-winded discussion), then I want it done now when it's going to be the easiest for us to do.
The Iranian regime may not last forever.
I hope it doesn't. The average Iranian is not a lover of their regime, which is why we see regular protests despite the authoritarian nature of their government. While I've mentioned I prioritize American interests over others, I don't want a single life to be lost. But I have to be realistic and consider the fact that their nation will be able to do damage as long as they're in power, even more if they nuclearize.
I recently got into an argument regarding Israel vs Iran with a staunch "America First Isolationism Now" type. It cemented my views on the issue, not from an "Israel is righteous and Iran is not" angle but a practical weighing of the facts. The other party's opinion was "I don't want another war, and that region is bloodthirsty anyway. Let them sort it out." My thesis is simply: I cannot understand anyone who has Western or even strictly American interests in mind could think that the strikes on Iran are none of our business.
Mind you, I don't mean "United States Government" interests. I mean the interests of every single living American.
To recap the history: The current Iranian regime rose from a revolution overthrowing a US-backed monarchy, which we had previously supported economically and supplied with military technology (The F-4 and F-14 being the big examples you can still see today). Said regime hates the US with a burning passion, both for backing the monarchy and for getting in the way of a regional Islamic revolution in the entire region. This is why they back the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hamas and Hezbollah are strictly against Israel, but the Houthis were explicitly anti-American and attempted to strike us, luckily with no loss of life (RIP drones). I can't say the same for the militias in Iraq, which successfully killed several US service members in 2023. Nowadays that's mostly directed at Israel, but I cannot imagine these groups and their funders suddenly had a change in heart towards Americans themselves.
Even putting that all aside, even when you think the whole region is a backwater shithole that can sort itself out, a hands-off position on Iran makes no sense when they're developing nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a complete game changer, making your nation functionally immune to any threat to its sovereignty. It was bad enough when North Korea developed them, but I can at least understand the hesitancy there due to its Chinese backing and already-existing existential threat to South Korea (thousands of artillery pieces would reduce Seoul to rubble regardless of NK's nuclear program). More than that, North Korea is an extremely poor country which has continuously struggled to develop a missile program. I don't think that it's outside the realm of possibility that they do, but again, at least there's some reason as to why we all sat around on it.
This is not true of Iran. Iran has ties with Russia and China, but they've never made so bold a defense pact as China did with North Korea. They are geographically separated from their backers as well. This makes them assailable. However, they are not geographically separated from the west. Iran already has MRBMs that could be converted to take a nuclear payload right now. Those threaten our bases and our allies. They have a functional space program, and if you have put a satellite in orbit you can build an ICBM. Those threaten the continental US. Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time. They will be incapable of being invaded lest you risk nuclear hellfire for the region, at absolute best. The only time you can strike them is now, before their nuclear program yields results.
I was genuinely shocked when I saw the posts from Rubio and the like denying our involvement in the Israeli strikes and implying that they were unwarranted aggression. Personally, it makes me understand why some people think Israel is simply America's attack dog, doing the dirty work we don't want to be involved in directly. Perhaps it is will be a fortuitous outcome for us simply because Israel would be in even more danger, and felt they had to attack no matter what. I wouldn't mind Iran buckling without a single American life lost.
I mentioned this in another post long ago, but it seems to me that echoes of the bygone neolib/neocon 90s and early 2000s world order have been crystallized in a really stupid way. An aversion to quagmires and wars of questionable outcome seems to make a lot of people (including Rubio - a bad indicator of the administration's position) think that any American intervention is some kind of ill fated, possibly bloodthirsty action. In the opinion of the person that spawned this post, it would be a war to continue some kind of dominion in the Middle East, which would hurt individual Americans to benefit the rich and powerful. While I don't think the US can magically fix countries in the area (see: Iraq), there is a middle zone between "Try to prop up an unwanted regime after removing the previous one" and "do nothing". Applying Iraq's sample size of one reeks of an embarrassing application of prior results to me.
At the end of the day, I can say that Israel's righteousness in this matter does not have a bit of sway as to whether or not I think these strikes are justified (or whether or not American involvement is a good thing). I do not want another nuclear power in the world, especially one so blatantly aggressive toward the West. I will admit that the odds of them cementing their own destruction via a nuclear strike against another nuclear power is low, but I worry about the insurgents they fund or political instability within leading to a device going "missing". That these are even possibilities makes my skin crawl. I find it ignorant and borderline cowardly that there are so many purportedly in favor of American interests who can plug their ears and say "let it sort itself out".
As an aside, to illustrate where I'm coming from: In political terms I am completely disinterested in the outcomes of the world apart from America. Not that I consider them lesser, or that any disasters anywhere else are unimportant; but I still must practically value my home, my life, and those of my loved ones first. As such, I strongly empathize with the "America First" sentiment. What I don't empathize with is the completely unrealistic expectation that we can simply close our borders, give people the middle finger, and not wake up to a vastly worse world for us in twenty years. The world is connected, and a collapse in one place will have follow on effects in others. See: Syria, Haiti, Somalia. You'd have to be crazy to think that every administration in every coming year would be able to or even want to hold the borders that tight and move all manufacturing to be domestic (the only way to be truly isolationist in my eyes). That's just a pipe dream. Thus America taking its hands of the reins would not be truly isolationist, and the soft power we'd be subjected to by countries filling in the void we leave would affect us at home. We already have adversaries fanning the flames of social unrest in the country (and useful idiots that play into their hands), and that's bad enough. A United States is impossible to invade. A broken one is anything but. So global affairs are our business, and if America can project its power to mitigate much worse threats downstream then I am on board with that.
This doesn't mean I blindly want a war, or to bomb every single potential threat all the time everywhere. But nuclear weapons make this entirely a different question.
LazyLongposter
9mo ago
Do you have some trustworthy - and by that I mean palatable to the average democrat voter - sources to back this up? The whole January 6th debacle is a poison pill in discussions with anyone who has an opinion on it. And unfortunately, anyone with whom I end up discussing it already has an opinion on it! Trump offering National Guard assistance completely changes the dynamic of the event, so it would be nice to have some fact-check-proof evidence I can throw at people who loudly proclaim he wanted an insurrection to happen.
LazyLongposter
1yr ago
Wow, I just read that debate, and it's truly fascinating and somewhat distressing. A lot of the anxiety I have about culture at large comes from the idea of post-modernism, something only truly accessible and enjoyable to a select few, but forced on the many. And somehow it has come to prominence due to the fact that the aforementioned select few are often in places of prestige and power. And more than that, it's self-sustaining; not, as is said in the notes on that debate, simply within the circles, but in society at large. A lot of people are swept up in liking, or at least defending, these inexplicably ugly tastes, which is much more offensive than those styles merely existing.
Just an anecdote that I think is a good little microcosm of your point (with which I agree): I had a friend who once said that he could choose not to be angry about anything if it made sense to him. He argued that if the situation made sense, he would simply not be angry about it. He also, generally speaking, postured his entire life as if he had made only logical decisions, and held logical positions. He considered himself so immune to illogical positions that he began to block anyone who ever disagreed with him, even in passing. So much so that he broke reddit's block list.
Such a logical creature, naturally, regularly threw his controller across the room playing video games, or shattered his keyboard in rage. He would start out mad about something and then start an argument to explain why you were wrong. He was good at avoiding name-calling, and his brinksmanship over any accusation of him acting irrationally (his logic was that it was just going "u mad bro?") caused an extreme chilling effect on anyone actually taking him to task over being so vitriolic about what were either pet peeves or flavor-of-the-day political grievances.
I am no longer friends with this person, but my point in bringing him up is that he's the perfect exaggerated example of what you're talking about. I don't think he was so atypical mentally that he had an entirely different way of processing information and making decisions - he just built an elaborate justification around his instinctive reactions. For someone who claimed to control every aspect of his life so much, it is remarkable how little in control of himself he was. But then, that's how we all are. We're products of our environments and genetics. I consider myself to be well-regulated emotionally, but I owe the vast majority of my developed qualities to growing up in a supportive household, with parenting, education, and friends that nurtured such qualities in me. My development was quite literally determined by these things. I, as you say, react to stimuli in a very naturalistic way, before I've given it any deep thought. And very rarely will such deep thought contradict my initial decisions (unless we're talking about dietary choices!), which implies to me that my decision making is a streamlined biological process to which I do not have access. It's just patterns mapped onto my neurons over the course of my life, even if they're logical ones. I find it hard to believe some essence of logic, some soul lives separate from this and makes decisions contrary to the animal decisions I make on a much more numerous and much quicker scale. One would think they'd differ more.
I think an answer that is both Americentric and true is that the culture war is waged first and foremost in English, and only can perfectly fit to America and countries more like it. The (dominant left wing angle of the) CW is something I've decried as being an extremely insidious corruption of many ideas that most people would agree with - at least they'd agree with the motte. Then the bailey gets snuck in and your average person is neither equipped nor inclined to work to decouple those from each other. As I specified that these are mostly left wing "arguments" - by which I mean streamers, ad campaigns, astroturfing on reddit, twitter, youtube, ecelebs in general inundating the general public with some toxic corruption of a more palatable left wing idea - you can make those receptive to them extremely resilient to dissent, but only if the arguments are constantly modulated to fit the current zeitgeist. Otherwise you fail to resonate with the general population at all, and the spell is broken. Not cleanly or instantly, but the absolute stranglehold can't last.
I think this only can truly happen in the US and our closest countries culturally (the UK and Canada), not only due to the above but also the fact that the vast majority of worldwide media is either from or related to America. My favorite example is the thought-terminating cliche "donate to black trans women". That makes no sense in the vast majority of European countries, because black people are just a tiny fraction of the population, especially integrated ones, and you can't make an appeal to someone's sense of fairness when none of those black people were slaves, or historically discriminated against in any way. Contrast that with the US context where guilt over all of that most certainly has a place in the public's consciousness, and it's much more likely to land.
Now, certainly there are wider schools of left wing thought that are more generally applicable, and have arguably been more popular in Western Europe; but those are less likely to be extreme or have that stranglehold over your terminally online population. Consequently, those downstream of any of the media the terminally online influence are not fed this riveting and completely relevant culture war. What remains in the public consciousness is this weird distorted holdover of 90s neoliberal thought (I've often lamented that something seems to have completely frozen the political elites, but this is not the central point of my response): Immigration good, world police kinda bad, health care good, guns bad, violence is not endemic to our society, number must go up at all costs, etc. None of this is really all that compelling except health care and being against the world police idea. It certainly doesn't hold the vitriol that American politics does.
So, when you combine those geriatric neoliberal policies with the consequences they bring (e.g. wow these migrants really seem to be causing a lot of problems), and the messaging is not able to sustain it, what do you get? Genuine grassroots support for something, anything different. Wow, there's a part called "Alternative for Germany" that's talking about these exact issues the establishment is ignoring? Sign me up!
Contrast this with America, which is much larger in scale, and arguably a lot more atomized due to its multicultural nature. This compounds with the effects of the terminally online world, meaning a lot of people's perceptions of issues that are not right next to them are completely detached from reality. It's just some streamer, or tiktoker, or AI generated youtube video that even tells them about these things. A young leftist from a hip neighborhood is likely never to see actual race crime, or when it does - as was the case when Ryan Carson was stabbed to death - the feed of content is so strong that they are completely immunized against looking at what happened critically. The hold on them is just too strong.
I will say that I disagree somewhat with the idea that America's young are overwhelmingly democrat. Everything I've seen has indicated that they are splitting along gender lines, with democrats still having an advantage, but only in the aggregate. I can also, emotionally and with no evidence, say that I've felt an extreme rupture in our society between the messaging and reality. I think things like the migrant bussing and ever-expanding nature of activist thought (a self preservation measure - if they don't have something to fight for, do they have jobs anymore?) have soured a lot of people on assumptions they've made. Will it be enough to change the zeitgeist? I don't know. I do know that the American right wing has utterly failed in having unifying figures that are anything short of embarrassing. I don't have a solution for that.
LazyLongposter
1yr ago
It got better (both in ports and native games) in the early 2000s, but then got vastly worse after (ironically) the switch to Intel chips. Once you lost backwards compatibility, and it became clear that Apple had no wish to continue supporting devs, the entire market fell off a cliff. Now there's nothing.
My working theory is that the ability of western writers to model other human beings seems stunted. The current crop are narcissists, incompetent, or incapable of basic human empathy.
This feels Too Good To Check. It would be convenient if we could write off the people who produce bad entertainment as moral mutants, but is it likely?
My comment here mentions Dead Space, which I find to be possibly the best example of the bizarre shit coming out of writing teams now. To reiterate, the people making the Dead Space Remake clearly loved the original game and endeavored to remake it in about as respectful-to-the-source-content a way they could, and I think that it was a resounding success - except for the writing. Not only did they make significant additions to the story that dilute the original formula and make it feel not nearly as tight, they started radically changing what was already there, to wit: One of the characters you see in game has been made a hypergamous bisexual, evidenced by the fact that he refers to several of the necromorphs (monsters born from the crew of this ship that's only been together a few months at most) as "old boyfriends". None of this existed in the original game. Many characters are changed in how they look to the point where they're unrecognizable. Furthermore, many of their styles look like they belong on people from Los Angeles marketing firms. I will note it's not literally everyone - the main character, Isaac Clarke, is completely changed in his appearance from the original series, apparently to match the face of the voice actor, and he looks like a more generic looking white guy. That aside, his characterization is still different (rather than being aware of his breaking sanity and fighting it, he's instead rewritten as a deranged lunatic).
Given the fact that these changes were made across the board for everyone except the most central characters, I actually don't find a Sweet Baby-esque motive to making these changes - namely, an ulterior pandering or cover-your-ass angle to it. I don't think they're people who hate the hobby, and want to destroy it because it didn't appeal to them, as is often the indictment of culture warriors talking about video games. The passion exuded from this project in every other aspect, and the way they changed the characters so universally, makes me think they're "true believers" of the fact that their way of viewing the world right now is objectively correct and would simply be a boring fact of the future.
In a way, it makes me hate it a lot less, because it feels like I'm seeing how these people genuinely view the world. In another, it's a lot worse than it simply being a grift, because how myopic do you have to be to think everyone in the future will hold your exact belief system, straight down to the hair styles that are so often correlated with it? Pair that with most of the new voice actors really really sucking, and sounding like mid-20s kids, and it really makes me think something has gone very very wrong with creatives, insulating them from having a realistic sampling of the world. This, I think, was my deeper thesis, and my original comment sort of obfuscated it while trying to control for other changes in the gaming landscape that have affected game writing. Contrast that with the original Dead Space character designs, which I think are a lot more timeless (maybe Kendra Daniels's hair looks a bit early 2000s, but everyone else has very utilitarian, timeless styles that are certainly not indicative of the subset of "creatives" of the time).
Then definitely agreed. I lump the Black Ops series in with post CoD4 Modern Warfare. Very fun games, completely nonsensical if you apply even the most basic thought to them. And it's sort of indicative of my larger point - the second these games got big and intricate it seemed almost impossible to put a compelling, interesting, logically consistent story in them. Only the lightning in a bottle original game managed to do so, even though MW2 was made by the exact same people (up until the original studio leads quit, which was after its release).
LazyLongposter
1yr ago
Are you talking about the series as a whole or Call of Duty 4 (also known as "Modern Warfare 1, The First One from 2007 and not 2019, No I'm Not Playing The New One")? Because I felt Call of Duty 4 was mostly "realistic" in that I could see
- A Middle Eastern Country undergoing a violent revolution
- A tinpot dictator using nukes if he got his hands on them
- Russia falling apart if it ever had a power vacuum
Obviously not all of it is realistic, but the broad strokes feel pretty plausible. Meanwhile, Modern Warfare 2 has James Bond level contrivances and Red Dawn-esque fantasies of Russian military prowess.
The weirdification of Nolan's films has always astounded me. How could someone who started so competently and strongly, and was given so much due to that success, essentially only go downward with regards to his portrayal of human beings on screen? You can even see it as early as The Dark Knight, where things happen for the convenience of the plot, and not because they make sense. Actually, as I detailed in one of my comments, I can forgive that as long as it's effective, and it was. However, by The Dark Knight Rises it really became a mess when you asked even one question about how things worked.
I will slightly disagree, in that a good few of the characters in Inception Interstellar feel very real, but it still does have that undercurrent of "Nolan thinks he's deeper than he is". I also, as my OP indicated, have a very strong space/sci-fi bias. Even with that, I think Memento and The Prestige are by far Nolan's best. What a triumph The Prestige is.
I found Skyrim to be an impressive game in all aspects when it was new, but the charm wore off within a few months and I don't have a very positive perception of it. The music and art design have aged more gracefully than, say, Oblivion, however, and I still appreciate those. GTA V is a flashy game that had even less staying power to me. The graphics are a step up, but the gameplay and story was a huge step down from GTA IV.
Both those games are fine, but they're just fine.
LazyLongposter
1yr ago
I have to completely disagree with the assertion that Halo was viewed as purely a multiplayer game - for myself and many, many others it was viewed as a story game first and foremost, with multiplayer as a (very welcome) secondary feature. I'd also say your coloring of Call of Duty, especially 4, being primarily a multiplayer game, is completely false. Call of Duty was essentially only known for being a single player game until after Call of Duty 4, which was a surprise hit. Destiny was supposed to be a negative example of story (minus the text-based entries). Dead Space is an example that I had to bring up because its story was decently (DS1) to very well (DS2) regarded, and it's an indicator of how much it fell that a modern, well-made Dead Space game fell so far short of these.
As a preemptive response to discussions on multiplayer in games, I will concede the multiplayer is going to have longer legs but that's because you're always going to get much more playtime out of multiplayer than out of single player. I don't want the discussion to devolve into talking about "which people played more", because in any game with a functional multiplayer it's very likely its overall playtime is higher than the campaign's. But that should not be an indicator of the importance of a campaign. It's also pretty biased toward what we know of the series now, given than both Call of Duty and Halo started out as pretty much exclusively single player affairs. They became popular on that merit first and foremost long before Xbox Live or matchmaking even existed.
LazyLongposter
1yr ago
Scale both of the amount of games and of the games themselves is certainly a large part of it. What's specifically interesting to me is how the largest games can't seem to get it together, whereas before they were pretty good at it. Or rather, games now are so big there's no way a reasonable decision can be made about it. Halo has always been one of the biggest games with the biggest teams around. In 2007 that was around 110 full time Bungie employees, with no outsourcing. In 2021 that was around 450, and that's not counting the outsourced employees, which one source (read: a twitter post) said totaled about 1200. I'm assuming that's including random managerial staff, so let's go with the smaller number. That's still a fantastically large amount, and I imagine it's hard to steer a ship like that, even just on story.
I won't even get into the political angle, but I'm sure it's fun.
LazyLongposter
1yr ago
Realistically, how am I to extract any sort of statistical average from the games released in a single year? The amount of games released is staggering, and even if I played them full-time I could not hit all of them - and if you're getting genuinely mathematical, you'd have to include all of them.
I could play all the AAA titles. Maybe all the AA titles, too (even though that's a shrinking category of games - something I'll get into another time). But once you drop to studios of 10 or fewer people, the amount of games published each year numbers in the thousands. As I mentioned with music, the signal to noise ratio is just huge (which also precludes me simply taking a random sample and then extrapolating - because at this point the amount of shovelware games is, once again, staggering). To your question, I have never even heard of Disco Elysium before reading your message. That's the perfect example of what I'm talking about. I'm not as avid a gamer now that I'm older, but I still do play games from time to time, so it's not like I haven't heard of any new games.
And even then, how am I to give something that can quantitatively measure their quality in a way that I can compare it? I can only give my opinions on games that I have played, and see how the newer ones compare to the old ones.
As I noted in my original post, I posited a modified thesis, that it's "seemingly impossible for games at the highest level of production and scale to have quality stories". Such a thesis, as I said, is theoretically something I could explore, if I were retired and had endless funds. Neither is true, so I can only cherry pick the games which have caught my eye in one way or another. To compare apples to apples:
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Halo is a series that is widely regarded to have fallen completely apart with every installment after Bungie stopped working on it, or even before (Reach sucks, sorry). The original Halo games had serviceable at worst and damn interesting at best stories, which were elevated by slick gameplay and unique music and sound design.* Whereas the following games (4, 5, and Infinite) all had serious narrative problems. These, of course, come after Halo had been elevated to a legendary status, and Microsoft could easily afford to hire damn near anyone they wanted. Of these, 4 is actually my favorite, because it at least has a personal attachment to the lead writer. It unfortunately still lands flat. Infinite had Joe Staten (Halo's original lead writer) attached, but had so much chaff that apart from one or two very good cutscenes it was even less compelling. 5 is universally considered awful.
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Destiny is actually an interesting example to me, because it's an example of what I mentioned earlier: that text-based writing seems to be easier to execute on than voiced dialogue or cutscenes. That or the people used for both were separate (which is true in this case; the Books of Sorrow from Destiny's Taken King expansion are widely considered some of the story's best, and it's never put in game, and funnily enough, the people who wrote it were let go shortly after). Moreover, I found every time a character from the Grimoire (the written story) was realized in game, I simply hated them. They were awful with marvel-like lines and no reference to the interesting ideas raised in some of their written dialogue. Note that this also got worse as the series went on. It went from having a barebones story that I could forgive (because I could fill it in with the written lore) to one that was constantly undermining its own tension and breaking the tone with awful jokes.
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Call of Duty isn't even on a bell curve with its quality - it's more like a sine wave. The first three games are just direct ripoffs of famous WWII properties like Band of Brothers and Enemy at the Gates. Then you get to Call of Duty 4 and you suddenly have a game that feels like a 90s war thriller, tying two separate plotlines together cohesively and effectively. Then you have the two sequels, which make no sense at all but are still kind of fun. Then you get to something like Call of Duty Vanguard, ham-fistedly inserting very modern political perspectives into World War II. I'll honestly write this off because it's so inconsistent, but in my eyes the series peaked long ago.
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Dead Space may actually be the best example. It's the newest IP that had quality (Destiny was essentially never good). The first two games are excellent to me, giving compelling explorations of the worlds they're set in and the people that inhabit them. The third I skipped due to its universally negative response, and I feel justified having watched some clips of the story online. Then you get to Dead Space: Remake. A game I could write a whole post on, because it is so fascinating in that the people who made it very obviously love and care for making a Dead Space game. This stands in contrast with Halo, where 343 Industries was very vocal about wanting to change and make their own mark on the series. For Dead Space, they executed just about perfectly in its atmosphere, art, and gameplay, but genuinely could not write the characters. The voice acting is bad; the lines are needlessly made worse; the characterizations are butchered; several people have their races swapped or are made openly bisexual (note that having gay or bisexual characters isn't a problem to me, but they rewrote established characters lamenting old boyfriends coming back to life - a strangely hypersexual comment given that this crew was only established for this mission and had only been there for a few weeks). These people were creative and to my eyes had to subversive agenda. I genuinely think they saw it as a more natural story to have everyone look like southern Californian hip creatives. That aside, someone like Isaac Clarke is just written completely differently from how he was in the other games. EA put a lot of work into this game, and yet the story was consistently weaker, even though it was supposed to be exactly the same as the original game but expanded.
These are my off the cuff examples of games that I have played. A couple videos that make similar points to what I've talked about today, that may illustrate some of my qualms, are the one on millennial writing (https://youtube.com/watch?v=FyHG8EfcA5c) and one breaking down some specifically bad examples of newer Destiny (https://youtube.com/watch?v=NKYlL6ZGvBQ). This definitely doesn't encompass all of my thoughts on this, but most of it is also in the OP and other responses. I could get into more but this comment is long enough and it would require extensive editing, so I'll leave it at that.
*Note that I do consider how I "feel" about a game to be a complement or detriment to its writing. I'm a proponent of the sentiment that plenty of plots have holes - it's only once you're so disengaged that you notice them that it becomes a problem. I will use an art game like Limbo as an extreme example. The story of that game is essentially incomprehensible and almost inconsequential apart from the fact that it is a backdrop for the imagery and atmosphere it conjures. To dial it back, a simply serviceable story presented well (which I consider something like Halo 1 to be) is more than palatable to me, though I will always applaud depth if it works.
I think this expands on the cultural issue that I mentioned. I think there is some severe form of cultural myopia, with an additional dash of political activism that is all-but-mandatory in large creative industries, that has made writing fall apart. I will admit to avoiding talking about the political angle, due to the fact that I find it so emotionally charged that it's hard for me to actually detail what specifically is the problem without feeling like I'm just inserting comments to justify my own beliefs. That said, it is very real. One of the writers I brought up in my post had started violently talking about those critical of COVID measures. He fell in line with the specific blue tribe bias that's in the video game industry despite the fact that he'd been out of it for over 20 years at that point. This indicates that it goes beyond simply "the industry".
I've often lamented that the internet has made everyone sound the same, everywhere. The same references, patterns of speech, opinions - it feels like a Dead Internet even if I know for a fact I'm interacting with real people. Sometimes I'm interacting with people in real life and hear exact patterns of speech I've seen on left-leaning reddit communities.
My point in bringing that up is that seeing this writer whom I really respect fall into such a thought-terminating cliche (I believe he said "Just get the fucking vax") made me wonder how many potentially brilliant writers are out there right now, unknowingly stunted by the political climate and their obedience to it. Given someone who predated the time of mandatory political views for creative work failed to avoid that pitfall, how could someone raised in it fare better? How many various ways of thinking have been culled and brought into line by the mandatory participation in the culture war modern society has cultivated? And how many completely untalented writers have been propelled into prominence by adherence to the "correct" politics? The answer to both those questions is definitely over zero, and even at that level I think that's a disaster. I genuinely fear we're heading for a dark age creatively. My only hope is that it's looked back on as a very brief period of time.
LazyLongposter
1yr ago
That was sort of my point bringing up the original writers of Marathon and my grandfather. The well they drew on for everything they did was vast. Those downstream of it have very little that they effectively draw on.
I think it's unfortunately gone beyond nerd culture. The internet, in bringing everything together, has made the whole world very much smaller, and the lifespan of unique aspects get ever shorter. I remember that when the internet was new(er), contemporary memes would call on references 30-40 years in the past (Khaaaaaaan!). Not only that, but they'd be in vogue for literal years. Now you're lucky if they call back on something 6 months old, and last even less than that. Imagine a We Are Number One meme today. It would be cringe-inducingly out of style. More than memes, media everywhere is only referential, and only to a certain point.
As you've said, it's all upstream to a very certain point. The water is stagnant.
LazyLongposter
1yr ago
This is based off a comment I made to a group of friends, and it was suggested I post it here; I've edited it to be more approachable but please forgive any poorly explained references.
I am continuously boggled by how bad the drop off in video game writing has been. Inversely, it’s shocking how passable and even good it is coming from (mostly text based) games in the 90s and early 2000s. The people making those stories were often programmers with no creative history, so it’s surprising to me that they were able to put out such quality writing with any level of consistency.
Take the Mac game Marathon. There are definitely duds in the writing, mostly Durandal (a recently gone-insane AI) being wacky, but the majority of the writing is pretty good. Even the “computer being crazy” was a somewhat fresher concept, so I’ll excuse the missteps. More than that, the writers Jason Jones and Greg Kirkpatrick were still in/barely out of college when they made Marathon. That’s just astounding to me given the quality of some of the terminals.
The other example is Ares, another 90s Mac game (guess when and how I grew up). It's a much smaller game, with a less sprawling story, but what is there is pretty good quality. It’s not Marathon level writing, but its development was even smaller scale - basically a one man show. One guy was able to code an entire game, write the music, and write the story, and it’s all passable at absolute worst. Even more than the overall story, the quality of the writing on a basal level is quite good.
My question is how did this happen? Thinking on it has given me three main possibilities:
The first is just that the people making games - and particularly their stories - have changed. As the coding and graphics and scale get more complex, you can’t juggle everything as the project lead and reasonably be able to produce anything above indie level. I definitely think this is the majority of it. But I also think culture has an effect on this, and my second and third theories touch on that.
Second is that I think it’s an indicator of the quality of education, and especially higher education, falling significantly. I have no evidence for this, but the amount of knowledge the creators of old had in their back pockets to make their stories feel genuinely vast and deep, not entirely myopic.
That leads me into my third theory, which is nerd culture at large falling apart completely. This isn’t a new idea, but it used to be that being a nerd required you to be immersed in whatever passion you had, often alone. Greg Kirkpatrick admitted he read a ton of sci-fi and played a ton of DnD, and he drew on both of those for Marathon. As a personal anecdote, my recently deceased grandfather is universally considered to have had Asperger’s. The breadth of how he lived is astounding, though. He built a house, engineered rockets, became computer literate on his own (well past when he'd have been expected to do so), raced bikes, and played music. Absolutely a renaissance man in every way. In all I don’t see nerds and the autistic (they’re correlated) having near as comprehensive an upbringing. Maybe it’s the death of reading, maybe it’s being terminally online. It's all just sadly lacking. I don't think I have to illustrate that the barrier of entry to "being a nerd" is basically just saying you are. On that note, there's a trend of “nerds” that are just English majors who played games, which might explain how a lot of dedicated professional AAA video game writers are so bad.
As a counterpoint, Prey 2017 had its story written by its lead developer, as well as some of the music. I think the fact that it’s so good is a testament to the need for a game to have its own solid vision, even as the scale increases. Maybe that’s the root cause more than anything else.
Some additional considerations (and my responses to them):
- Video games have exploded in popularity. The amount of quality writing (and writers themselves) may have actually increased, but the signal-to-noise ratio has increased exponentially. I often find myself completely blindsided by games that I find quality, in that I've never heard of them before either being told via word-of-mouth or essentially stumbling upon them. I find this very much to be like music. If you look at the most popular music, I'd argue that it's in an awful spot, being borderline unlistenable while also being more popular than ever before. However, if you take the time to look for a niche, you can find some amazing stuff, even today, and it's all at your fingertips on YouTube. This of course torpedoes a bit of my thesis that quality has gone down, but I'll similarly pivot it as I do with music: Why is it impossible for games at the highest level of production and scale to have quality stories?
- I've noticed that sci-fi games are far more likely to qualify as "quality writing" for me. Even my contemporary examples (such as Prey) are sci-fi as well. That's not to say I can't enjoy other types, but I'm wondering if I either have a bias; if sci-fi lends itself to deeper writing, or attracts writers who can do so; or both. Note that I can give some very bad sci-fi examples of games (I am outspoken in how much I find Mass Effect completely awful in almost every way).
- I mentioned that my best examples are games with text-based dialogue and story. Perhaps those are easier to write, given that the player can mentally fill in lines in a way that makes sense to him. If you've ever looked up videos about Marathon, you have most definitely run into people reading the lines from the story out loud. I've yet to find a reading that hasn't made me cringe. I'm wondering if voice acted dialogue is just harder to write (and harder to fill with competent performances). But even then, a game I really love called Alpha Centauri has both written and voiced dialogue, and the voice lines are so good that they are literally chilling at times. That's a game from a group of about eight people, so that's an indicator that they just had to have the direction, wherewithal, and talent to see through their stories properly.
A quick response, as I'm mostly on board with your response (and I'm burning my night!):
This was because Iraq capitulated. The regular army had surrendered by the tens of thousands and only the Republican Guard remained. I don't mean they would walk right up or go unopposed - but had they chosen to do so, they could have. It was a common criticism of the war at the time that we did not go far enough (not even Saddam, just allowing the Republican Guard to escape/continue).
In this case, as we've agreed, the Israelis are doing quite alright in that regard (RIP F-14s). Not that I think we'd need no air support - despite anti-Israel concerns, neither the US or Israel is at the other's beck and call, and only a fool would assume there is no situation where US forces would need support - but the cost would be greatly diminished due to Israel's exceptionally successful air campaign.
I actually somewhat agree with your overall assessment. Rational actors will likely never use them unless pushed to the brink. And they contribute to a lasting peace. But my worry is that an increasing number of countries with nuclear arsenals greatly increases the odds that an irrational actor gets into power, or that poor safeguards are implemented. To separate my feelings from my (theoretical) policy suggestions: I am against any country nuclearizing. I am not in favor of world policing literally any country nuclearizing. But Iran, or as worse hypotheticals, Syria, or Sudan - those are problems. With the African continent in mind, I am counting my lucky stars that South Africa denuclearized before going through its current continually corrupt and often hostile decline. That would be another situation where the world (i.e. the US because no one else has power projection) would need to step in and make sure nothing went missing. That is my concern.
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