Having seen a documentary about the production the designers wanted the game to be about “letting go of Old World Blues”. All the factions cling to the past, to systems that led them to where they are today. I take it they were a bit better than regular US radlibs, which is why there isn’t any left-bashing, but they probably see communism as part of that old world blues too. It would also go against their goal if there was an obvious “good” ending.

That said it would have done wonders for the political awakening of a bunch of people if there was one. Or, at least, if it was made clear the courier was likewise constrained by their environment, so the reason a post-post-apocalyptic spartacist movement isn’t possible is because the courier and like individuals can’t think like that. The red scare has long tendrils.
Or at least a yes-man ending that wasn’t going all “great man” theory about the courier, where everything revolves around them and their presence.

Look the only critique I can leverage at new Vegas is that there isn’t a communist or anarchist ending where the courier unites the disparate communities and makes something that lasts until after the courier dies. I want to be the Stalin of the wasteland.

Edit: After getting the Lee Kuan Yew speeches on my Instagram reels I also realise Houses “give me 20 years” speech is taken from there. The people behind the game were very politically aware.
Also apparently fallout 1, 2 and new Vegas are based on a tabletop game the designers played? Arcade Gannon was Josh Sawyer’s character

Though, I don’t blame the writer.

I’m convinced they did it in purpose to highlight what a dumbass Caesar is. He verbatim says dialectics makes it inevitable that the NCR is destroyed by him, which is just so incredibly stupid. If you read enough of Hegel to write Caesar talking about Hegel as he does, then you’ve read enough to know that would be about the dumbest you could say.

Crowley managed to pull it off too

If I’m a sex wizard then I want to be remembered

I wish. He was apparently pretty good at stopping Alexei from dying from hemophilia, so he must have had something going.
I’d say he’s the real world Skarsnik

He did tell the doctors not to give Alexei aspirin, so he did stop that bleeding out a bunch

Sisyphus but it’s the laundy

This “250 year thing” makes me feel the same way as when I play new Vegas and Caesar say he will destroy the NCR because of dialectics. THATS NOT HOW IT WORKS YOU FUCK

The 250 year timeframe is made up and even if it wasn’t the US couldn’t realistically be described as an empire until some time in the 1900’s. Until then it was “just” a genocidal colonial power like the others. I guess you could make an argument that it became an empire around the time of Teddy or the monroe doctrine, but I wouldnt

The Watchmen series was pretty good

No it’s a meme

Probably not half as exhausting as being as obtuse as you

What an odd thing to write

Libs 12-year old maladjusted kids

Resorting to chauvinism whenever someone disagrees with them.

Read a book

Also Taiwan is a staging ground for a US invasion, claims sovereignty over China, has it’s airspace go far over mainland China, and so much more. Somehow China not being a fan of this is the same as when the United States coups another country because it elected someone that doesn’t align 100% with us policy.

Is it possible for more than two things being true at once? Is it in fact possible that reducing everything to “both sides bad” isn’t some supreme insight, but instead just a mantra that allows libs to support the status quo of us imperialism?

Are two things true at once in this thread by the way? I looked for someone saying it yesterday, but no one ever said so.
I’ve got a liberal bingo I am trying to fill out.
I’m also looking for someone writing in speech affectations a la “ummm… Wo-wow did you just say that? Haha that’s uhh crazy” and if you’ve got an checks notes then that’s nice too

And Taiwan is very vocal about having airspace that goes several hundred miles over mainland China. Taiwan is also very vocal about being a part of china, so what are you gonna do?

Also, why would I be against a full incorporation of Taiwan into China, if it has popular support? The island was occupied by the fascist Kuomintang, the party carried out a genocide on the native population and it’s only around to day because it can function as a military launching ground for the US.

What’s the actual rational explanation for why Taiwan should become an independent nation when that’s not what Taiwan wants nor what China wants and doing so would only be in the interest of the imperialist US?

If this is the kind of stuff you actually care about, then why not start with all the national sovereignty that whatever place you’re from doesn’t respect? You know, something you can actually influence, instead of doing something that just so happens to further imperialist interests?

Authoritarian is a nothing-word used to describe enemy-nations. It’s like calling their government a “regime” or their intelligence agencies “secret police” or the vice-president the “hand picked successor”.
I’ve never seen a definition - neither academic or by some farthuffing Redditor - that wasn’t so broad as to just be describing a state or so specific it wasn’t just a longer way of spelling “China”.

Every state is authoritarian. Reducing political analysis to wether a state does stuff and not what it does, why it does it, or with what amount of popular support, is top-tier liberal winecave apparatchik intelligentsia thought. No actual insights, but it makes you seem like you know stuff, if you don’t think about it at all. And going against the concept makes you seem like a villain because who wants to defend “authoritarianism”?

The definition came out in the fucking 60’s while the US was busy beating the shit out every protestor it could, yet somehow that wasn’t authoritarian.^[1]
Running around with HUAC screaming about authoritarian communism. Funding death squads, secretly approving money to royal families, forcibly relocating the poor and marginalised, all the shit the west did in Africa, all the crackdowns in west Germany, the ongoing colonialism, Robert Moses and his European copycats, shit like the syphilis and LSD experiments; all this occuring in the nations decrying the USSR - and now China - for being “authoritarian”.
Britain is a police state today; the US is a modern Prussia, but the army is replaced with 17 different types of cops; the EU is funding concentration camps for refugees abroad and I can tell you from experience the cops have pretty free reign here too. We’re all surveilled up the ass and out again, but somehow China is an authoritarian danger? I’m supposed to be afraid that TikTok tells Xi Jinping knows when It take a shit, but its completely fine that my own overlords get the same info from the billion other trackers that are everywhere? People say “two wrongs don’t make a right” in response to this, but it seems like they think one of the wrongs is pretty right, and it’s the wrong that’s hanging over our heads - while the one around the globe is something to worry about^[2]

Its the same shit as totalitarianism - incidentally both concepts popularized by Hannah Arendt - which was just a fuckass way for dumbasses to sound smart when they uniquely observed that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used state power to do stuff - What stuff they did apparently having no matter at all, what percentage of approval from the populace or involvement mattering neither. No, what was important was that both states Did Stuff and that meant they were the same.
Now what if you pointed out that the US Did Stuff too? Well that’s whataboutism, a clever Russian ploy to make you want to have a consistent ideological throughline in your geopolitical critique.
What if you pointed out how old colonial powers like France were still Doing Stuff?^[3] Well that’s Old Stuff so it doesn’t matter. Or it doesn’t matter because they aren’t superpowers or whatever.

Here’s someone else shitting on her better than I could https://mirror.explodie.org/Losurdo___Critique_of_Totalitarianism_(2004).pdf

If you’re not a commited anarchist then I will not hear you utter a word in favour of Authoritarianism as an academic concept.
If you claim to be one then I am going to need to see some serious dissertation on leftist theory from you, as well as proof that you actually organise in the real world, because I know there’s enough larping lemmitors who don’t want to admit they’re just libs, because they can’t stand the thought of not being a special smart little kid.
Even then I am going to shit in your mouth if you’re an anarchist and you’re more concerned or preoccupied with what china is doing rather than whatever hellhole of a nation you live in yourself.

@[email protected] who I can’t respond to for some reason: good point! Wish I’d mentioned that

Alternatively if you’re trying to dunk on someone have the basic respect for the audience and be either effective or original, which “two things can be true at once” is, ironically, neither.

Whoops. Read the rest of the text next time buddy.