CarmineCatboy2

people might say that half in jest but planescape torment does randomly have jrpg inspirations

I don't think anything's ever really held them back but BG3's success and Sven's monarchical authority really does mean they'll do whatever the fuck they feel like doing. Which is probably for the best. If this is another Dragon Guy Action Game it will probably turn out better than if they churned D:OS3 out of obligation.

there goes my theory that the nobel foundation is principled. after all you can't get the peace prize if you don't actually deliver on a war beforehand

I understand that Germany starting WW3 4 times in a row was getting a bit stale but Iran destroying USEA is kinda on the nose lmao.

I think the open question is more towards to what extent the US will demand exclusivity. The Chinese and the Russians have complimentary spheres of influence in Central Asia in no small part because the Russians do not have the heft to be an economic guarantor and the Chinese do not have the desire to be a security guarantor in the region.

The US is a financialized oligarchy. The system of banking and finance which powers Chinese and Latin American investment and trade is theirs to destroy. They can't help themselves when it comes to, say, Venezuela's shitty oil reserves because stuff like that is easy to pillage and dole out in a centralized manner but I don't think anyone would dispute that China injecting US denominated capital into the continent to increase trade in US denominated debts, assets and goods makes the US stronger. And yet sanctions are issued anyways because at the end of the day the american oligarchy is not monolithic and the american state isn't supposed to plan or actually control anything.

People will say that the current deindustrialization of the US is untenable to the military caste and the working classes of the US so its politically unsustainable for the US to go on to remaining the asset manager of a world centralized on East Asian manufacturing. But, well, this whole Trump America First onshoring plan is turning out to be just another financial scheme to pillage the american commons and centralize assets in the hands of a sector of the ruling class. Much ado was spoken about grand plans to turn the world economy on its head but at this point if you only disregard personalized schemes like Lutnick's tariff deal it does genuinely seem like the US oligarchy just wants to use import taxes to ensure lower taxes on the wealthy which, incidentally, is the latin american way of doing things.

It's useful to draw a distinction here. American Liberal-Conservatives will always disapprove of Conservative-Liberal leadership and vice-versa. It's like how in the Obama era the Liberal caucus summoned incredible bloodlust towards Libya and Syria - their guy was warchief at the time so war was gucci.

Europeans on the other hand need this as a coping mechanism. The Reactionaries among them will rally against stupid shit like The Globalists because they can't reckon with the fact that Thatcherite and Reaganite Conservative World they live in economically hollowed out Europe together with Britain and the US. The Liberals meanwhile are married to the ongoing war in Ukraine in a way that the Reactionaries aren't, so they have less room for maneuver. Cue a discourse of European Nationalism of ambiguous strength and purchase outside of reddit adjacent spaces. Europeans by and large like the EU and european integration. Nationalist and Fascist politicians always turn flacid towards Brussels for a reason and that reason isn't just the will of the capitalist oligarchy that they are a part of.

I think the most we can imagine is the idea of a plan for a new security council. Meaning that Russia, China, India and the US would recognize each other as 'Great Powers' with their own 'Spheres of Influence'. Why this is being discussed is more or less purely ideological. It's not part of a grand strategy to extract more from Europe, secure Latin America or seek cooperation with China, India and Russia as traditional channels already exist to do all of that. They are just not being leveraged properly or being disregarded, again, due to ideological reasons.

Its a reflexive harkening towards old american isolationism, which was not isolationist at all and entailed the US 'retreating' to an already globe spanning empire that included the entire Western Hemisphere as well as the Phillipines and islands in the Pacific. The thing is though that just like with Britain before it, the people talking about pivots or downscaling or focusing forces away from being a global American Empire don't actually mean it.

The funny thing about this is that if you go to hyper liberal, atlanticist or pan european spaces you have this enduring discourse about Putin's Russia and Trump's America being a anti-european conspiracy. But this sort of mask off moment does actually create an imperative for european elites to get their shit together and actually do something akin to federalizing Europe.

This 'C5' has one American vassal in the form of Japan but no stakeholders from Africa or Latin America. It's like having one's cake and eating it too. The US gets to claim that 'the big boys all have spheres of influence' but then bring in a vassal state of theirs into the discussion. The Europeans aren't being discarded, they are just not relevant since the front for imperial competition should be anywhere but Europe.

all it took to kill intellectual property was for the US to bet literally all of its capital on a boondoggle

the comics were modelled after him too

so what you're saying is we need an ai bob ross

Filmmaking is a labor of reiteration too. So it's not just getting the slop machine to finally get something workable. The problem arrives when you need to make a minute adjustment for the Nth time that week and of course the slop machine can't help but re-make the whole thing again, introducing new minute changes that you don't want made.