Well, european elites are loyal. They just are. The US led world exists partially to their benefit. We talk a lot about how Europe is being squeezed right now, but a) those elites profit from the squeeze; and b) the squeeze pales in comparison to what the US does in Latin America or Africa. It’s like Japan’s Plaza Accords. Most countries could only wish they stagnated like that.

On the other hand I’d say that future of the EU is uncertain and there are pulls in multiple directions. The Germans were More Loyal than the King when the war started. The French wanted to play themselves up as mediators. Neither really got anything from their moves, but if Russia had been weak those wouldn’t have been bad decisions. Ultimately Europe acted under bad intel and is now married to their course of action. According to the principle of letting no crisis go to waste, the French went back to talking nonsense about a unified european army under them. But who knows what will happen 20 years from now? What if that army come into being?

Let’s also not underestimate the media stranglehold that Europe is under. Even outright fascists can’t really oppose EU or US policy. Imagine a social democrat or a socialist standing against poor underdog Ukraine. That’s a death sentence.

We should remove all tax credits that benefit the homeless, thereby introducing a market incentive for them to get a house.

she’s got the chops

The way I see it the singular problem of nuclear weapons is what makes a Second American Civil War unworkable. It would immediately involve half of the world’s armies cooperating with the US Army to secure those nukes.

We are, after all, talking about a region of the world where a) security is guaranteed by Russia; b) economic development is lead by China; and c) which is landlocked due to NATO destabilization efforts from Afghanistan to West Asia. The US empire is a maritime empire. How is it going to access the region? Pakistan? They tried to reach the 'stans, and the US was in the way together with India. Iran? I don’t think even India can convince NATO to just let that happen. Iraq? Azerbaijan? Involves Armenia and Iran, which is prickly at best. Every other force for stability in West Asia was or is currently being NATO’d to death.

you forgot refusing royal assent for laws that cut into their earnings

this is how my crusader kings games always go. 5 octogenarians until one 16 yo takes the throne. repeat.

What’s astounding is that it’s not very good gaslighting even.

look its the same strategy i used in the ‘name cities in europe’ game. santa maria lighted up the whole map.

i’ll just write maria 100 times and get it done in record time.

Now you know the power of having a monopoly over all the eggs in China.

Never heard of this term before, but I like how it goes out of it’s way of avoiding populism. Probably because ‘populism’ is tied to Donald Trump in the US and the center left south of Texas.

Yes. MAD is why governments exert extreme controls on their own nuclear protocols and the whole point of MAD is that China, Russia and the US would retaliate and kill the entire population of the aggressive nuclear power. Of course China ‘should’ retaliate, because that is what prevents the scenario from happening in the first place.

What is irrational is the french nuclear doctrine of ‘if you sink one of our ships, we’ll nuke you’.

I’m not turkish, no.

The final decades of the Ottoman Empire have a lot to do with it, but it’s more of a feature of the turkish republic’s own history. The Balkan Wars meant that the Ottomans went from a multi-confessional empire to an empire with multiple nationalities but one majority faith in one fell swoop. This put the Ottoman elites into a nationalist hyperdrive where they believed that anything less than total unity across their country meant that european powers with many times their population would just continue to do what they had done for a century: slowly partition the empire by encouraging ethnic sectarianism and rebellion. The ethnic cleansing of the balkans and the circassian genocide would eventually fuel the armenian genocide and Turkey’s ongoing issue with the kurds.

That paranoia did not end after the Turkish War of Independence. On the contrary, the kemalist state sought to take this country of refugees and mold it into a single nation, to varying results. Turkey is a multi-racial country and the turkish identity is not really ethnocentric. On the other hand, that same state reacted very strongly against the groups which it perceived as a threat. Namely the religious conservative peasantry and the kurds.

The Turkish Republic was a francophile project and a project of top down secularization which was enforced by a series of juntas. The elites behind this project however proved rather brittle. Their wealth and power did not come from industry or land but the state apparatus itself. The kemalist middle classes of half a century ago were the literati elites of a state which, all things considered, is poor in most ever resource. Anatolia is not even good for fishing, not that great for agriculture, and poorer in mineral resources compared to pretty much everyone in the region. In what way Turkey is an industrial middle power today, it is because of state policy and the ability to be a middle man in the world supply chain. And soon enough, that industrial success lead onto the rising middle classes of a religious conservative majority, which entirely displaced the only francophile elites.

This is the fundamental conflict in Turkey today. A fractured opposition, each with their own idea of what kemalism is, and a strong government capable of bridging gaps created by the old juntas - both for good and for ill. That is why you have this demographic of turks who insist they are european for all the wrong reasons: ‘no, we aren’t like the arabs, no we aren’t like the kurds, we like classical music and we believe in laicité!’. It’s the same as iranian diasporas who are diehard Pahlavists.

Ukraine has done a lot of hopeless attacks in Russian territory with no real military aim, but with a stated purpose of maybe destabilizing society. So it’s not a surprise that islamists turned ukrainian citizens and soldiers would carry out a terror attack in Moscow, if for no other reason than the fact that this isn’t even the first time it happened. In the past, Zelensky has gone so far as to claim that the russians of Ukraine and Donetsk are so shook that Ukraine is already winning the psychological war. This was before the big offensive though.

Even if it can be obtained in-game without purchasing it separately, why is it available for purchase?

If I were to guess, developers keep trying to let capcom’s execs understand normalized way to set up a cash shop but they won’t pick up the fax.

What you are saying is the usual pay-2-win scenario.

Not at all. The usual pay2win scenario involves two things. First you actually get something. Second, that something takes a wild amount of time to acquire through normal means. When I said ‘what if the first, shittiest health potion was also on a cash shop for some reason’ I was not exaggerating in any way.

Cash shops have been normalized in an infinite number of ways. There are entire games built around selling cosmetic skins or characters. Capcom has consistently chosen the worst of all worlds with every single one of their games, selling nigh useless things that (rightfully) draw people’s ire.