91625:

arriving-at-new-equilibrium:

The #1 reason I start wars in Victoria 3 is “look buddy, I have done exhausting diplomatic and political legwork to give your country unfettered trade access to my huge, technologically advanced economy that’s desperate to pay you handsomely for raw materials, but still you refuse to develop your iron/rubber/heroin/whatever deposits to sell the stuff to me. I am sending a team of management consultants (roughly 200,000 of them) to help you with business development.”

#neoliberalism

Thinking about how the episode of Simpsons that best clocked the coming of neoliberalism wasn’t the dental plan clawback/strike one, or the one where Germans buy the plant and look for efficiencies, but the Frank Grimes one, where Homer having a charmed life despite his incompetence is revealed as a miscarriage of justice against anyone with more merit

hot take: Star Wars has always been an elaboration on the 70s idea of the “gifted child”

Thinking about the parallelism between the Depression liberals like “you fools, we used democracy to save capitalism from itself” and the Mont Pelerin neoliberals like “you fools, we used capitalism to save democracy from itself”

One of the things that’s going to stay with me til I die was reading the Shadowrun backstory to corporate sovereignty

(during some one-off urban crisis involving food riots a mob attacked a megacorp trailer truck they thought might have supplies but actually carried infectious medical waste [possibly from an AIDS-analogue, that woulda been a theme at the time], the corp security defended with deadly force and when the city government answerable to those mobs tried to prosecute them for it the Supreme Court used that hard case to make bad law and immunize them, this metastisized)

and in the end it’s like “but the megacorps left the remnant nations in place to take care of petty shit, like who really wants to be in charge of garbage collection?!?”

and I nodded sagely to this at age like 14, and then years later was like THE MAFIA. THE MAFIA WANTS TO BE IN CHARGE OF GARBAGE COLLECTION, THE NEW YORK AND SEVERAL ITALIAN MAFIAS HAVE ATTAINED GREAT POWER BY CONTROLLING THAT NECESSARY BOTTLENECK

Innovate - Innovate

Another entry in my “happycore is distilled ‘90s” argument. Seriously, try to tell me these lyrics aren’t a straight paean to neoliberal creative-class enthusiasm:

innovate, redefine
recreate what’s in your mind
it isn’t fate
you decide
only you can cross that line
innovate, redefine
change is what will come in time
make or break, redesign
what it takes, you will find
innovate, redefine
innovate, redesign
innovate, redefine
innovate, redesign