FunkyStuff

The way things usually go, if there was no campaigning, Israel gets a lower credit rating and local governments would be looking to give Israel more money just to support our greatest ally.

Sorry, sweetie, looks like we're privatizing the local library so Israel can get more interceptors that don't work!

100% agree and I like to think that way about the art too, but I guess where I still take issue with it is that it makes people ask the wrong questions. In some ways, you provided the right answers to those questions, but I don't know that people are generally gonna arrive at those same conclusions, more likely they're gonna get stuck in the reactionary sort of framing. We only arrived at the right answers because we already have the ideology.

If anything, I feel like I prefer cyberpunk as an aesthetic, because the questions it makes people ask are questions that naturally lead them to better conclusions even if they aren't equipped with ideology yet. Where solarpunk makes people wonder about how they're gonna live like they're running back Manifest Destiny in the future, cyberpunk makes them wonder how they're gonna resist surveillance technology.

Yeah I see it the same way too, but the reason I take so much issue with it (and I've even spoken about it here before IIRC) is that it's exceedingly common for all sorts of reactionary and ahistorical ideologies to fester when people start fantasizing about going back to primitive societies or some other form of pre-modern life.

Yeah, the game is divided into stages that more or less reset certain kinds of progression and give you completely different win conditions and goals. Beyond stopping snowballing, it also structures the game more so you aren't coasting without much purpose like what sometimes happens in other civ games.

I think I generally have more fun in the last 35% of a Civ game than a Stellaris game. Also, I only played one Civ 7 game, but it felt a lot more interesting in the endgame than Civ 6.

I think to that point, if we want to figure out how you get from solarpunk to fascism, you need to consider what it implies by its analysis (or lack thereof) of the actual material reality that's necessary to make the solarpunk vision come true and how that analysis/blind spots coincide with ecofascism.

What's going on that made dilapidated buildings get overrun by plantlife? Is it massive depopulation? Are we idealizing that?

What's the whole idea about self sufficient communities using technology to live in some kind of frontier? Is this class-conscious, or is it just repackaging settler mythology about frontiersmen and Lebensraum?

And maybe the problem with it "just" being an aesthetic is that it leaves the audience to fill in the blanks for those questions, and I think the default answers aren't great.

I donated 17 dollars less than you!

Not if they exterminate enough Palestinians to make them a small enough minority first. That's how settler colonialism went in America, make the indigenous population small enough that giving them "equal rights" on paper is no longer a threat. So I honestly believe, if the current struggle for the end of the Zionist entity is not successful, the next generation of liberal Zionists might get to implement equal voting rights for the remaining Palestinians and have it still work out in the settlers' favor. That's the nature of the good cop/bad cop routine.

Bernie "the power" Sanders being asked about giving Palestinians equal rights and citizenship: "... that would be the end of the state of Israel, and I support Israel's right to exist"

Not European. They stand in unwavering solidarity with Canada, which is a monarchy.

I think the canonical way to make this meme would be to put racial caricatures on the left, then the soyjak reacting to them with the speech bubble saying "my food supply!!" then the chad wojak with hate symbol tattoo saying something else, like "I don't know how to square the contradictions here but maybe Epstein was just a lonely guy? Oh wait wrong culture war"