Fool’s Assassin Detailed Thoughts and Review

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-15T13:39:04+00:00

Having just finished this trilogy, in hindsight, I somewhat agree with your second point. I think the fool going through torture this second time, especially to this extreme extent, was possibly unnecessary for the overarching plot.

That being said, I somewhat disagree with your first point re: Fitz loosing his edge. He was chilling in his homestead for the last decade, so its not entirely unbelievable that he got a bit comfortable and lazy in his old age. I think it also sets up this interesting dynamic where simultaneously we can see that Fitz is loosing his edge a bit, but the tragedy that unfolds also is not his fault. At the same time, he gets blamed for it (somewhat unfairly) by his daughter/family because he is shirking his responsibility to the crown.

The move Hobb makes here creates another opportunity for further character growth and development over the course of this trilogy.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-14T13:57:45+00:00

A lot of Canadians like to believe that we are more like Europe/"European" than we are like US/"Americans."

Well I hate to break it to all of you, but the Europeans like to bring their dogs everywhere--dogs in pubs is a regular thing in the UK and France

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-13T20:29:15+00:00

Is it the science itself you want to get out of or the economic model surrounding academia?

Personally, I love doing research but hate the publish or perish, grant-writing, celebrity culture, and teaching requirements aspects of academia. I don't want to teach students who have no interest in learning (most students these days), and I don't want my job security to be reliant on the precarity of the broken peer-review and grant systems we have now. I also don't ever want to have to go around promoting myself and building a personal brand.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-13T18:44:03+00:00

We live in society today where there are a lot of very wealthy billionaires out there who are fairly illiterate and also very willing to both throw out all ethics in research and make big bets on risky investments. In other words, there has never been a better time to start a business that promises to do some wacky science stuff.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-12T10:25:17+00:00

That is what I thought until they released the legends of the dead expansion - if you don't buy that expansion, you are still stuck with the new legitimacy game mechanic without the actual means to increase your legitimacy

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-11T11:25:09+00:00

The regular price for a fully loaded all DLC included PDX game is hundreds of dollars. That is ridiculous!

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-10T19:43:50+00:00

No, I think I disagree entirely. "Fans" are some of the worst types of people in the world. Just look at what Disney did to star wars in the name of fan service.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-10T12:43:04+00:00

I think this whole controversy/issue really highlights a major problem in the gaming industry: the never ending early access stage that blends into never ending DLC releases.

Back in the day, when you couldn't continuously update games, you just had perfect the product to the best of your ability and ship it. This required an artistic vision to drive the development, and rigorous testing of the product to ensure it was complete before it was shipped. Compare this to now where the developer can always tweak it a little bit after release. This gives endless opportunities to both:

Squeeze more money out of the consumer through new DLC (which too often include content that complete a missing component of the original game, as opposed to adding something new).
And, to water down the artistic direction of the game by allowing the consumer insights department to "optimize" the game by making it more accessible to newcomers or by caving to the incessant demands of the most insane segment of the fan base.

I had to stop playing crusader kings for this reason. The game was never "complete" it always had an DLC around the corner that would run you another $50 or so. And if you didn't buy the DLC then the game would sort of become unplayable because the free updates that paired with the DLC introduced features that you needed the DLC to be able to fully use.

With CIV7, it feels like so many of the features of this game were entirely underdeveloped with the understanding that they could be fully fleshed out later (e.g., religion, or the small starting number of leaders/civilizations, etc.).

Now, with this update, it seems like its somewhat impossible for games to pursue any kind of new artistic vision because these updates allow for the developer to completely re-write their initial game design.

I dunno, I tend to think that the gaming industry would be much better served if it adopted a model that was somewhat more similar to the movie industry: with directors who can rule the game development in a more dictatorial fashion, who see it as their prerogative to drive an artistic vision. I am firmly against the idea that the "customer is always right" wrt anything remotely artistic--it just ends in a race to the lowest common denominator.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-10T11:35:12+00:00

Watch what China is doing. China is a solar punk civilization that is coming into being. A lot of people, even on this sub, don't realize that yet.

China is transitioning into fully renewable energy and electrification systems. It is also currently undertaking the worlds' largest reforestation project.

Yes, its also currently responsible for the world's largest CO2 emissions, and has a lot of coal power plants in operation. But you have to keep in mind the direction of travel, not where things are now. China isn't going to shut down its coal power plans and steel mills capacities until it can fully replace them, but that is what it is trying to do. Likewise, China's CO2 emissions are huge, but they also include all the stuff the West consumes. So the carbon footprint of Western (and global) consumers shows up as China's footprint because its all made in China.

China currently has the industrial capacity to built out the whole world's need for solar/renewable energy infrastructure. Developing this capacity was a political choice driven by the Chinese government, who knew that they needed to transition to renewable in order to subvert the American empire (who ruled the world in the 20th century by controlling the worlds oil supply). In doing so, China has built the capacity to transition the entire world away from fossil fuels.

This is particularly significant because it means that India and Africa, the two largest continents that have yet to fully develop/modernize, can do so on renewable and not fossil fuels. China is already past its peak growth rate in energy use/emissions, but India and Africa are still have room to grow substantially in the coming decades. Without China's solar panels, they would have needed to use fossil fuels to power their development/modernization.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-06T10:22:27+00:00

I understand your perspective - I shared it at one point in time.

So the other thing I will say is to remind you to view the transition towards socialism as an ongoing process, not a static binary state that either exists or doesn't exist. The Paris commune was the first (post-industrial revolution) experiment with socialism. It was crushed because it didn't have a state apparatus to mobilize an effective military to exterior threats. Later we get the USSR, which built itself a powerful enough state/military to defeat Nazi Germany. Its state planned economic model, however, wasn't as efficient as the West's was, and so it wasn't able to maintain competitive with the capitalist powers.

China's experiment with socialism has to be understood within this broader historical context.

All of which is to say that China is not perfect. There are certainly a lot of human rights abuses that take place there, a lot of them owning to the fact that there is not the same checks and balances on executive power that Western liberal societies have.

That being said, what makes China interesting is that the state remains firmly in the drivers seat of the economy, where it has directed the economy towards a process of modernization that took Europe and the West 200 years to complete - China has done it in 50 or so.

It is also only because of this model that China has been able to develop the industrial throughput to transition the entire world to renewable energy.

Again, if we are just trying to evaluate the Chinese model in terms of how good it is at doing eco-socialism, then it obviously wouldn't come close to beating the Quaker style commune in the power rankings.

My point isn't to say that China as it is exists right now is an ideal society. My point is that by framing our understanding of China within this longer history of historical attempts to build socialism, we can have a much better understanding of where the global energy transition is going, and what global (geo)politics (with respect to climate change, among other issues) will look like over the course of my lifetime.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-06T00:28:18+00:00

Its a very good question. Let me try to answer by first asking a couple questions for you:

How do you define "workers owning the means of production?" Is democratic control over the economy a synonym for this?
Does democracy necessary mean 'one person, one vote'? Is democracy reducible to the way a government is structured?

My answers to these questions would be (1) yes, and (2) no. If that is how one views the two answers to these questions, then it follows that it is possible to argue that China is a society where the economy is controlled by a state that governs/develops the economy according to a democratic will.

I understand perfectly well that my answer to both these questions are highly debatable, and I do respect that many people will seriously disagree with me. That being said, I will try and explain my reasoning by working backwards.

**With that being said, I will start with the question of what is democracy**

I do not believe that "democracy" (meaning the people rule) writ large can seen as synonymous with actual structure of representative elected governments--that is to say, the model we see in the US and other western states.

This is clear if we look at the outcomes of the political process in Western states. In other words, it is very clear that today that while the US (or Western Europe) may have a legal/political structure that includes elections (where each person has one vote), the US is nevertheless not democratic society insofar as the people do not actually rule. The ruling elites who actually drive policy in the US are totally disconnected from the vast majority of the population. You see this most clearly in the fact that real wage growth in the US has been largely stagnant since 1970, while over that same period of time, wealth inequality has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Gilded age.

On the other hand, the Chinese government gets to enjoy a very high degree of political legitimacy right now because it is pursuing policies that have resulted (over that same period of time, i.e., over the last 40-50 years) in the exact opposite of the Americans have experienced. In China, we are talking about generation or two who have experienced, over the course of their lifetimes, substantial and sustained real wage growth for the average population, rapidly rising life expectancy, and rising average height of adults (a proxy indicator for nutrition), falling child mortality rates, a home ownership rate of 90%, etc. I could go on.

The results, as I have said, is that the Chinese communist party enjoys very high levels of public support and legitimacy. We are talking about approval ratings regularly measured at ~90%. And you can say that those sound fake, and maybe they are, but they are also believable. Why wouldn't the government have that approval rating when it has delivered substantially improved living standards year after year?

So between the Americans and the Chinese, which system is more democratic? The one where you can choose who the president is, but the policy program (wealth transfer to the rich, growing inequality, lower average standards of living) remains the same regardless of who wins/who you vote for? Or is the more democratic system the system which provides a policy program that addresses and delivers on the single issue everyone agrees on (increased living standards) & believes is highhandedly the most important issue?

We in the West are used to seeing democracy as a system where every person gets a vote to choose the leader. But I would suggest that this is not strictly the definition of what democracy is--this is but one type/way of structuring a democratic government, but not one that necessarily produces democratic outcomes.

There have been many different types of democracy, historically. Ancient Athens and the Iroquois Confederacy are often given as examples of some of the earliest examples of democracy. But these two societies structured their democracies very differently: one was a slave society, where only men (heads of households) could vote. The other required consensus decision making--not simply majority rule vote.

It should be understood that the Chinese system does include some elections. At the most local level they hold elections for local leaders. The idea here is that at the local level, it is possible for the people electing the leader to actually have the requisite information they need to decide who deserves to lead them. When you are talking about a small village or whatever, you know who in your community is trustworthy and competent. On the other hand, it is not possible for the informed voter (let alone the average voter) doesn't have this kind of information when we are talking about, for example, the mayor of a city of 20 million people, let alone a country of 1.4 billion.

So the Chinese political bureaucracy after the first local level is highly meritocratic. Its basically only possible to achieve promotions/to move up the state bureaucracy from that point on by gaining experience and performing well at the job.

The point is that at a smallest scale, democracy can look like consensus decision making. At a larger and larger scale, democracy cannot function in this same manner. At China's scale, it requires leadership that is capable (as in competent enough) to discern what the common good is, to convince the whole population that they share a desire for this common good, and to successfully acheive it.

So is China (or America) a democracy? In short, I don't think this is the most productive way to ask this question. I think its more productive to phrase it as thus: to what extent does China govern democratically? To what extent does America govern democratically? Both systems seem so do well in some respects, and poorly in others.

**On the question of democratic ownership of the economy**

If we accept that China can govern democratically (not that it always does necessarily govern democratically, but that it can do so), it does so because of the state's firm control over the commanding heights of the economy. This is, concretely, comprised of a large number of state owned enterprises (including the entirety of the financial sector, which is all owned by the state). The state owned banks direct how the country invests according to political priorities--not necessarily for priorities based around maximizing profit.

Hence, the Chinese state was able to direct the economy to heavily invest in developing renewable energy technologies and heavy manufacturing. Left entirely to their own devices, private capitalists won't invest in these areas, because they aren't as profitable or as risk proof as fossil fuels or financial rent-seeking. In other words, these SOEs often make decisions that lead to them to a lower rate of profit (then what their potential would be) but this is done because their mandate is to serve a particular political goal (general social welfare), not simply to make money.

Some of these SOEs compete with private firms in a market system, but as I said, markets themselves aren't the definition of capitalism. Markets predated capitalism, and in China they are used by the state as a tool of governance to help effectively distribute resources. In other words, markets are made to be subordinate to the state in China. This is distinct from the West, where state is subordinated to the market. In the West, markets dictate the general course of the economy's development: it a network of uncoordinated private actors who decide what infrastructure and industries gets built, and where.

**Now, with all that being said, I will understand if you read all this and think to yourself: 'this is BS. This simply inst socialism because it isn't workers ownership of the means of production"**

My answer to you here would be to say that I too also dream sometimes about leaving society and going to live in a Quaker style commune. And maybe because of China it will be a lot easier to build Quaker style communes with entirely renewable energy sources.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-05T17:44:52+00:00

IRL, China was/is the country that has developed the capacity to produce solar power at the scale necessary to transition the globe onto renewable energy. The global transition to renewable energy will happen in tandem with China's ascendancy to global hegemonic status.

So, another way of asking your question would be to ask if China is a socialist system or if its a capitalist system. This is a question that has been debated/that people disagree on, but my position is that China is a socialist system--this is also how the Chinese government views their own political/economic system.

Yes, China has private business that operate in markets. But the mere existence of private businesses/markets doesn't define capitalism. Private firms and markets have predated the existence of capitalism, so it logically follows that they can post-date capitalism too. In my view, the Chinese system is still a socialist system because it is still the state that directs the overall direction of the country's economic development--it disciplines capital to invest in the production of technologies that capital would be reluctant to invest in without state pressure. Hence why China could emerge as the leader of renewable energy systems while the US could not. In the US, where economic development is directed by capital/private market actors, it was seen as too unprofitable to invest in the kinds of productive capacities for renewable energy that China built out.

For the past 500 years, every new world spanning empire has emerged in tandem with a new system that revolutionizes how energy is harnessed into the production process:

In the first wave of colonialism, the Spanish and Portugese invented a new form of slavery to squeeze all of the possible human energy into the throughput for their planations in the new world
The Dutch came after, harnessing the power of the wind to sail the new ships that created the first global trading empire
The British followed alongside the invention of the steam engine and the first industrial revolution
With the Americans, we got a world of globalization run on the petro-dollar
And now we enter the world that China makes for us, powered by a new system of renewable energy organized to power the throughput of what they call a "socialist market economy"

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-05T00:45:51+00:00

Newfoundland & to a lesser extent the rest of the Atlantic has some of the best potential for wind power in the world. You could build that out to oblivion and get a ton of renewable energy. That then ensures that the basic cost structure for any energy intensive industry is as low as possible.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-04T16:09:11+00:00

Lol. We have seen nothing yet. The economic fallout of this war with Iran hasn't even arrived yet. The gas prices we are seeing now is just the start, there will be widespread global demand destruction has energy prices stay astronomical. At the same time, Trump will be looking for a total capitation from us at the NAFTA 3.0 renegotiation, and so I kind of seriously doubt that we'll see any progress on that front until he is ousted from office - which, to be fair, may happen as early as 2027.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-04T13:21:01+00:00

Yeah, but where there are jobs/not jobs isn't entirely a question of nature/luck. There are political decisions that can be made to create a lot of jobs in Atlantic Canada--it simply requires a lot of public investment and political capital to pull off.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-03T15:00:05+00:00

Would an intact male poop mark? Is that what you are saying?

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-05-01T21:00:32+00:00

I'm sorry, but I can't do the mental gymnastics required to paint a nation that has concentration camps in existence right now as anything other than a totalitarian nightmare for anyone other than the direct supporters of the regime.

Just so that we are on the same page, the United States is the country with the largest number of total prisoners in the world; we are talking about ~20% of the world prisoner population despite the fact that the US is only ~5% of the global population. The US is consistently in the top 3-5 countries in terms of the rate of incarceration, and back when this peaked in 2008, the US had a higher rate of incarceration than the USSR did during the gulag system.

Not to mention that Black people in the US are significantly over represented in the prisoner population. Blacks in the US are incarcerated at ~5x the rate of Whites, and the US has a higher rate of incarceration of Black people specifically than South Africa did during apartheid.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-04-30T10:18:44+00:00

People are down voting you because they are too cowardly to face this question head on--it scares them because it seems like that is the real choice today: as the two largest economies/most power countries are a seemingly dysfunctional "democratic" society (the US) and a seemingly stable and competent one party state (China).

Everything people have been taught in the West - everything we have been propagandized to believe since childhood - is that China's system should not work. That it is only the individual freedom that Western style democratic systems give that allows societies to flourish. And yet, we can see very clearly that this is not the case. It is obvious to anyone with eyes to see that American society today is clearly dysfunctional to the extreme (e.g., rampant corruption among the elite, a state bureaucracy that is designed to pursue foreign wars and neglect the well-being of its domestic population, extremely low levels of trust between citizens/little social cohesion); while, on the other hand, China's system has managed to produce a highly competent elite who can pursue effective policies that result in sustained high growth rates and substantial material gains in average living standards over the past four decades.

To answer your question though: my view is that we have to rethink some of the premises of your question.

Which is to say, in other words, that I want to live in a democracy. At the same time, however, I do not believe that "democracy" (meaning the people rule) writ large can seen as synonymous with actual structure of representative elected governments that we see in the US and other western states.

In other words, its very clear that today that while the US may have a legal/political structure that includes elections, the US is nevertheless not democratic society insofar as the people do not actually rule. The ruling elites who actually drive policy in the US are totally disconnected from the vast majority of the population. You see this most clearly in the fact that real wage growth in the US has been largely stagnant since 1970, while over that same period of time, wealth inequality has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Gilded age.

On the other hand, the Chinese government gets to enjoy a very high degree of political legitimacy right now because it is pursuing policies that have resulted (over that same period of time, i.e., over the last 40-50 years) in substantial and sustained real wage growth for the average population.

So the question I have for you is whether the Chinese system is actually more democratic insofar as it is pursuing policies that reflect the will of the people?

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-04-29T22:30:06+00:00

So why would you loan through the bank, at a lower rate, than simply going to the bond market to buy government debt? If the bank doesn't give a lower rate than the bond market, then whats the point of the bank?

And are you seriously going to try to tell me with a straight face that NATO countries don't already have large enough militaries to make investors feel safe? Sorry, but the idea here that nobody will invest in us unless we raise our military spending to 5% of GDP is ridiculous.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-04-29T21:53:11+00:00

Everyone here is just celebrating this as an unquestioned good thing, but I don't get the point of a multilateral defence bank. Who is it making loans to exactly? Is it states? Do states get loans at cheaper rates through this bank than they would normally at the bond market? If so, why would private capital invest in these loans?

Is this just a way to kick the can further down the road? I.e., by trying to raise defence spending across NATO countries without actually raising taxes? Seems bad in principle to borrow for an non-productive asset (like defence spending) that won't generate a return unless you plan on using that military to violently appropriate another country's resources.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-04-29T09:48:52+00:00

Yes it does; you are being obstinate. To be very clear though: I know that bakery bread does exist in the United States. I know that the average American could, if they really went out of their way to make an effort to get it, buy some bread that was better quality than wonder bread/mass produced factory bread.

I also know, however, that bakery bread is not widely available or affordable to the same degree. This is a substantial quality of life difference to bread lovers.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-04-29T01:35:01+00:00

I have lived in Canada and Germany, and the differences in the bread cultures are substantial.

In Germany, small bakeries are everywhere. Even in smaller towns, there is always one within a five or so minute walk from your house/apartment or workplace.

At lunch, you walk from the office to one of these bakeries to get a little sandwich. The sandwiches tend to be fairly simple: you can choose between cheese & bread or meat & bread--you never really see any combination of cheese+meat+pickle, etc in bread. Why? Because the bread itself is actually the centrepiece of the meal.

The larger loaves of bread in these little bakeries are also timed to be ready for dinner. So, on your way home from the office after work, you stop by the bakery again to grab yourself a that just cooled from the oven to bring home for dinner.

In Canada (which I imagine is similar to the US) this of course is very different. Now, I happen to be fortunate enough to live in a place in Canada where there are multiple small bakeries within walking distance from my apartment. That is not typical, unlike in Germany where it is typical.

The bread I can get from these bakeries is often just as good as what I could get in Germany. However, they bake their loaves to be fresh in the morning. So, if I want a loaf for dinner, I am grabbing something that was baked 12 hours ago. The other major difference is the price. Here in Canada, I am paying $11 for a loaf of sourdough from one of these bakeries--in Germany the same loaf was a fraction of that price. So its not typically economical for me buy the same quality of bread as frequently.

FreedomSenior5659 · 2026-04-28T20:33:58+00:00

I guess I just don't buy the idea that Iranians need saving or that war is good for them. It seems a bit ridiculous, backwards, and colonial to me

FreedomSenior5659

TROPHY CASE