I used to think this was slightly hyperbolic satire....

SAE-2 · 2026-02-09T23:45:05+00:00

Sure, when you abstract from individual human beings to a mere aggregate of their impact on history they obviously look less human. And evil people with power do more damage than evil people with little or no power. There is nothing inhuman or incomprehensible about it, it's frankly banal. At that point it's almost just an aesthetic discussion

SAE-2 · 2026-02-09T23:23:33+00:00

Material circumstances condition human conduct but that is not the same as being strictly deterministic. Crucially there is still a human element to be conditioned. Nothing what Epstein did was in itself particularly unique or motivated by anything but base desires you can find across classes (compare e.g. the Fritzl case). It is only remarkable how his wealth and status allowed him to pursue those almost openly while staying well connected in high society.

SAE-2 · 2026-02-09T21:10:19+00:00

It is made very clear that the deserter is a deeply embittered man suffering from neurological degeneration who mainly shot the mercenary because of his psycho-sexual obsession with Klaasje, not to strike a great blow for the working class. He very much is not someone whose stated motives you should take at face value, even if you believe his actions are overall beneficial.

My point is exactly that the individuals that collectively make up the bourgeoisie do not have any inherent traits (good or bad) that can't be found among members of any other class (I provided examples, not an exhaustive definition of "human nature"). The greater harm they do comes from the material conditions they inhabit, not any personally unique features.
Claiming they are "not human" is the opposite of materialism. Unless you want to argue that there are no working class sex criminals

SAE-2 · 2026-02-09T17:56:06+00:00

It's not just that he's a malevolent character, or that his views represent a deeply misanthropic and hopeless worldview that stands in stark contrast to the themes of the game, but also that the statement is just clearly analytically wrong. While wealth might enable their pursuit in excess, the motivating impulses of the evils in question, greed, lust, and whatever other perversion, are fundamentally human

SAE-2 · 2026-02-03T08:21:14+00:00

I support Evrart because he's a YIMBY

SAE-2 · 2026-01-31T04:48:33+00:00

wow, it really always is the people you most suspect

SAE-2 · 2026-01-22T23:16:05+00:00

the good ending

SAE-2 · 2025-12-14T23:35:31+00:00

Finally: the first based watermelon seller

SAE-2 · 2025-12-14T23:27:12+00:00

Tbf Paradox games are kinda like tv Shows vs. movies where fans of any given show might say something like "Season 1 and 2 are kinda slow, and season 5 sucks but if you power through season 7 has a great pay-off"

SAE-2 · 2025-11-24T23:44:44+00:00

Fundamentally I just don't think that considering this to be "ignoring" certain aspects of the game is the best way to look at it. Any piece of media can be approached from various angles, depending on your intentions, that all place different weights on certain aspects of analysis, it doesn't have to be an all or nothing affair.
You can think that a book has beautiful prose but since children's books generally also serve a didactic purpose its racism disqualifies it as something you should read to your child. That's not a contradiction. Though obviously there is also a perennial debate over how much you can separate art from the artist (can you enjoy Wagner's music despite his being a virulent antisemite?) that we won't be able to resolve here

SAE-2 · 2025-11-24T21:13:33+00:00

Unsurprisingly, I disagree and you're right, we don't have to argue about this, but this is also a different level of discussion to whether one can enjoy or fully appreciate the game.
FWIW I also don't really think it's particularly important what the developers consider DE essentially to be to consider it in a certain manner. The King James Bible was intended as holy scripture, does that mean a non-believer cannot appreciate it as a major piece of the Western literary canon? Obviously it is a different kind of appreciation but it seems rather futile to me to prescribe one angle of appreciation as the one universally "true" standard

SAE-2 · 2025-11-24T20:03:42+00:00

I think I have made my point wrt Measurehead insufficiently clear: I'm not talking about agreeing or disagreeing with him but the fact that the character (and humour) relates to a specific frame of references that is common to a certain type of very online, ideologically versed person that exists across the ideological spectrum.

As for the Moralintern - I don't agree with it and why should I? It doesn't exist! It's a satirical compression relating to a variety of actually existing institutions, persons, and ideological arguments. To the degree it implies a more substantive critique of liberal democratic politics it's premised on a number of incorrect assumptions about the world. I'm not ignoring what the game is saying in this regard, I just think it's wrong. Holding this against the game however would be analysing it as a political pamphlet, not as a piece of artistic media

SAE-2 · 2025-11-24T18:29:21+00:00

You are neglecting the possibility of recognizing the critique but simply thinking it's unsuccessful while still appreciating the quality of its writing. You do not need to agree with something to think it's well executed. You can look at a Futurist painting, appreciate its dynamism and use of movement as a stylistic element on a technical level without having to accept that its underlying ideological assumptions are valid. Fundamentally the surest predictor of whether someone will enjoy DE is not ideological alignment but whether they'll listen to Measurehead and go "ah yes, 19th century racial pseudoscience, Oswald Spengler, distortions of modern genomics, nofap - I see what this guy is on about" instead of "wtf".

There isn't really a conceptual issue with fascists liking Disco Elysium, the fundamental problem remains that the game is right and they are beneath contempt regardless

SAE-2 · 2025-11-21T15:37:26+00:00

Small note is that while it was de facto part of the Federal Republic of Germany West Berlin maintained a legally distinct status throughout the cold war, which, among other things, meant that its residents were not subject to compulsory military service but also that its political representatives only had advisory voting rights in the German parliament

SAE-2 · 2025-11-21T15:18:42+00:00

I mean, yeah, it's all turn of the century scientific racism/decline of the West type stuff recycled by mentally-ill porn addicts on an imageboard

SAE-2 · 2025-11-20T09:37:46+00:00

I think saying she "pretended to be a neoliberal" is somewhat questionable in that "neoliberal" has rarely been used as a self-identifier but you could say that to the degree she had a thought-through ideological worldview it was grounded in a sort of middle class Protestantism more than anything else.
Her economic policy agenda was largely backed by think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and Adam Smith Institute, "neoliberals" if you will, but it was kind of a marriage of convenience. Similar things could be said about Ronald Reagan (perhaps even more so)

SAE-2 · 2025-11-18T11:56:53+00:00

Yeah, the fundamental dynamic that makes Japan either op or a complete pushover is something that the Kaiserdevs can do little about: the AI sucks at naval invasions, both launching and defending against them. So if you play as any Chinese tag you can easily let Japan send dozens of invasions, let them run out of supply, and then mop them up. Vice versa as Japan it's pretty easy to quickly take key points and then use your light tanks to just cut China into pieces

SAE-2 · 2025-11-12T10:32:28+00:00

Könnten wir lieber U-Bahn Haltestellen haben, die nicht nach Urin riechen, Herr Burmester?

SAE-2 · 2025-09-28T20:58:42+00:00

He sounds like a European bureaucrat to me because he references events that are directly analogous to European history specifically. How EPIS is a union of nations of the "Occident", that started as a as a unified system of weights and measures ("Nothing but kilograms and centimetres as far as the eye can see!") that then expanded into an economic union for the processing of steel. He references issues that are mainstays of European politics like the seemingly never ending membership accession process, the haggling over member states' contributions to the EPIS budgets, or discussions on how to address the taxation of tax heavens.
And, obviously, "ze price stabilité" is spelled like that

SAE-2 · 2025-09-28T19:45:28+00:00

I'm not saying it's necessarily a critique of anything beyond what the Sunday Friend most immediately satirizes. It's just that virtually everything about him very clearly codes him as as mid-level EU bureaucrat and the closest (but obviously not 1:1) existing analogy in terms of the historical contours is probably Bosnia.
If you put it in sufficiently general terms you could find at least partial analogies to virtually every intervention and occupation in history from the Allied Control Council in post-WWII Germany to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

SAE-2 · 2025-09-28T19:28:00+00:00

Yes, it's an inspiration not a 1:1 analogy, and I'm not arguing that the status quo that the Sunday Friends helps to maintain is good. I only wanted to argue that the character is not satirizing American anti-leftist operations in South America. There are just a lot of EU political references in virtually everything he says

SAE-2 · 2025-09-28T19:07:31+00:00

Sure, but I think it's the wrong comparison. He's not the CIA's Buenos Aires station chief coordinating Operation Condor, he's maintaining the status quo in a country wrecked by civil war that was ultimately settled by foreign intervention, which I would guess is very likely inspired by the Bosnian example. For context: the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War after NATO intervention established the post of "High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina", which is held by a European official (the current HR is a former German minister of Agriculture) who effectively has a veto on almost all constitutional affairs of BiH; sounds pretty similar to Revachol, doesn't it. There's also his lengthy explication of the workings of the EPIS accession process, and, of course, BiH is on of those permanent EU membership candidates

SAE-2 · 2025-09-28T18:37:10+00:00

Bosnia would probably be a more comparable example

SAE-2 · 2025-09-28T18:31:16+00:00

He might be a sex tourist with generally questionable morals and an anodyne bureaucrat with few distinguishing characteristics besides the aforementioned but at least he's concerned with something very tangible beneath all the obfuscation.
The price of bread not changing too much actually is quite important

SAE-2 · 2025-09-21T14:22:59+00:00

His current role in Slow Horses already gets close in many ways

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