Fallout: New Vegas

"There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –"

 

Emily Dickinson

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Y'know, they had a saying back in the old days:

- but I don't remember it because we don't really remember all that much from back then. Who wants a history of plenty and gleaming safety when you're dodging shivs and stingers around every corner and hoping you haven't inhaled enough radioactive dust to make your skin slough off? But they also say Vegas was a big deal before the war. Still is. Money-pit back then. Still is. Crooked and run by crime families? Well, yeah. And maybe that's what everyone likes about the place. For all the monsters looking to chew our limbs off, for all the poisoned landscape and contaminated water, the xenophobic cults and sadistic tyrants looking to enslave us, for all the world's changes and our own mutations, everyone, and I mean everyone, can look to that idiotic cap-trap burning pointless electricity through every night and feel reassured, yes, reassured in this universal kinship, that we're all still the same dumbfucks that blew up the world in a pissing contest.

 

This message brought to you by Cram!

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After bashing my head against Bannerlord's Artificial Stupidity a couple of posts ago, I decided to switch to some other looting, roving, first-person RPG, and methought instead of Cyberpunkin', it's been a while since I've fallen out. Or in. Next stop: 2010's New Vegas, farmed out to Obsidian as soon as Fallout 3 demonstrated the 3D adaptation could turn a profit, presumably so Bethesda could focus on the then upcoming Skyrim instead. Could it be anything more than a cheesy cash-grab sequel easily tossed aside after a few hundred rat kills?

I initially started an early level play-by-play as I'd kept for #3, but soon realized their shared technology and interaction would force me to repeat myself on too many minor details. Then I kept expecting to suss out some through-line of incompetence in mechanics, atmosphere or writing which I could mock from beginning to end. To my dismay, then delight, I discovered I couldn't. The more I dove in, the more it drew me in. Though hampered a bit by bugs, clunky motion, industry-standard grindy resource stockpiling and a few terrible decisions (e.g. damage threshold, STR as must-have stat, Bethesda-standard terrible inventory timesink interface) overall New Vegas proves an impressively well-executed game.

 

Avoiding abusing the paid cheat items from the DLCs I heft my varmint rifle and stumble my way through the first few levels in my own ass-backward way, hitting Sloan's easier quests and then Primm (leaving the robot in charge, though, truth be tol', I got no time for any man (or bot) named Slim, 'less 'is last name be Pickens) and even the border outpost (where I have the dubious honor of being sent to kill ten rats or six ants, whichever comes first) before returning to newbietown's newbiequest. Then I spin out for some exploration and random violence: geckos, ghouls, goats, scorpions, coyote dens, a cave here, an irradiated valley there, a ridiculous ghoul rocketeer cult jetted off to anywhere-but-here.

 

By the time I sight the solar farm I find myself pausing every once in a while to admire the windblown dust. Something about this game is beginning to feel very... right. After the random nonsense of #s 2 and 3, the atmosphere seems to have found its footing again. The entire wasteland's not immediately crawling with super mutants. Characters stay in character, which doesn't exclude the occasional bit of in-character humor.

Desperate for desperados

Sure, sure, the theft/morality mechanics still make no sense even within the... let's say lax, limits of video game logic. While Powdering that gang at the hoosegow, how the hell is it still stealing to take any of the convicts' junk? I'm their sworn enemy, I've betrayed their trust and doomed them all, declared open war on them and I outright gain karma by hacking them to ribbons with my machete while they wail in agony, but taking a bottle of beer still costs me karma? Then you've got poor Boxcars who will never again kick a tumbleweed. My condolences. And also my morphine. Apparently feeding dope to a murderous bandit counts as a karmic gold mine. Hurray morals. Even the big supposedly two-sided conflict between Republic and Legion is played much too shallowly, but I'll have to revisit Caesar's Legion when I discuss villains.
 

A few little absurd moments had me rolling my eyes right from the opening cinematic. Headshots do not work that way, the couple of times my dialogue read "I'm not a delivery boy" had me wondering how else you define "courier" and I'm hoping the bottlecap quest won't wax Pythonish in its silliness. I've also been skipping any card/gambling minigames in the interest of time. Then you've got the more severe stumbling.

 

The overly-narrow inventory margin forces me into abusing teleportation just as in Fallout 3 despite having piled on three more strength points - sure, I could avoid picking up trash loot but look, I just assume I'll need thirty pounds of dog meat, four hundred empty bottles and fifteen toasters at some point in this campaign; this is an RPG after all. And, if anything, even my thirty years' worth of metagaming experience underestimated old Obsidian's dedication to making you pick up every piece of litter you run across. I've spent half my time checking the wiki for fear a junk item might have some obscure use, which it usually does. With a better interface, this could've been very entertaining. With Bethesda's gigantic linear list-scrolling timesink and zero tooltips, I'm leaning more toward annoyed. On a related note, as in Fallout 3 interior spaces often feel too "realistically" large and repetitive, but I'll spin that off into a separate topic.

 

It also has its share of more technical issues. The mottled dustbowl aesthetic's a mixed blessing. It allowed them to camouflage a large number of tripwires, land mines and other nasty surprises managing to reintegrate trap-disarming as an RPG staple after moving to FPS. On the flip-side it also turns many quests into pixel-hunting nightmares.

I don't care if you're Hawkeye himself, I simply will not believe you hunted those pixels without cheating and looking up the location on a wiki.
 

Also, entirely too many quests or rewards become unavailable if you clear a location before getting the corresponding marching order from some mook you never knew existed. Quest markers glitch out and mislead you, save files refuse to overwrite and the game still crashes and locks up on zone transitions. So I couldn't explain why none of those very real flaws put a dent in my drive to advance through Fallout: New Vegas' world and encounters until I finally set my mind to enter the city proper. I climbed a rise overlooking the Colorado River. Up ahead was a friendly camp. Might meet a giant mutant fly or two on the way. Farther in the distance was the dam. Nice detour on my way north, and a chance to skirt the bandit-infested ruins. My pack was still fairly light, so I might make it all the way to the city and advance the main quest. By a step, just a step. Plenty of mysteries to uncover on the way. Some dangerous, to be avoided. Others tantalizing. Progress to be made, but not an infinite power trip. Wealth to be gained, but not constantly. Colorful characters, but with interesting motivations.

 

Only then did I consciously articulate NewVegas' charm: it's honest work. Not the more cynically pandering, low-brow, condescending fluff like Fallout 3, Wasteland 2 or BG3, not focus-grouped to death; neither is it the self-indulgent posturing of fresh college graduates imagining themselves "disruptors" upending an entire industry by some sophomoric big idea. It neither strains to keep you mindlessly busy with constant action nor denies the necessity for same in moderation. It neither drags you everywhere by your nose-ring like a domesticated beast executing fixed orders, as Skyrim did, nor purposely punishes you with "rocks fall, everybody dies" GM omnipotence abuse. Nor did it outright settle for mediocrity.

It built on its premise.

 

Where in, say, Wrath of the Righteous or BG3 most NPC companions outright infuriated me by their infantilism, in this game from a decade prior I couldn't find even one I outright disliked. (Though their idiot combat AI had me gnashing my rotten fangs.) I'm enjoying the added immersion of the survival elements, chugging Nuka-Cola and irradiated water, stocking up on doctor's bags, planning on visiting the Doc for an anti-rad treatment, taking time for a good night's sleep. Persistent but not insistent implementation. Vegetation and resource spawns follow different biomes with smoother gradations than Skyrim. Even more importantly, NV downplays the MMO grind mechanics which plagued TES 4&5 and Fallout 3. It throws out level scaling (aside from a noticeable mid-game bump in mob types) in favor of reasonably tiered challenges, renewing that impression of monomythic escalation and distinct transition between the mundane and mystical which the original Fallout so perfectly captured, and which 2&3 threw out. It even dares to weaken the loot&scoot core loop. In contrast to Fallout 3 or Skyrim, you might spend highly variable durations away from Goodboing (or wherever you keep your stash) and some of the most interesting locations, like Vault 22, might not offer much in the way of loot at all.

 

But most important, it prizes its immersion and does not sell it out for cheap gags. NPCs learn your name and reward your past efforts. The wilds feel spot-on bleak and vaults perversely claustrophobic. Mobs cluster around dens and hideouts and other likely spots, not just interspersed statically over the landscape, and occasionally mount half-hearted attacks on civilization - and civilization responds in kind!

I made a lucrative scavenger trade early on when discovering I could follow caravans around and loot their targets as they defend themselves during travel. (Makes me wonder who's running around after my comitatus in Vagrus.) There's even a coherent sense of marching history to the collapse of tribal/raider culture in the face of larger, organized factions like the NCR and Legion, of civilization very gradually rebuilding after a now long-past nuclear war.

 

But I can't help noting all of NV's best features were Obsidian's departures from Bethesda's strict formula. Slight ones. Working within the series' limits. Eventually you feel that formula dragging you down again. I'd post a screenshot of my character's progress, but by level 31 you probably know how that goes. Most skills already at 80 points, a mountain of loot, a brewery's worth of bottle caps even after maxing out my implant quota. Grandmaster of every guild, as usual. Every quest pushing you toward a golden ending. Simplistic good vs. evil conflicts with obvious correct choices. Not much role to play.

 

Yet still. It's a world you don't want to leave. Boots scraping the sun-baked clay, an objective on the horizon, a glance between the foothills for interposed threats, a chug of sarsaparilla, a nod to your companion. Onward. NV falls into that second tier of classic games. It lacks the real oomph of a trendsetting Fallout 1, Morrowind, Starcraft or Half-Life, the artistic flair of a Bloodlines, Tyranny or Torment to fuel roleplaying memories. But, like Dragon Age: Origins or the first Pillars of Eternity, it stands out as a rare, self-respecting, dedicated project all around.

 

I grudgingly admitted Fallout 3 was less of a shit-show than it could've been. I'm wholeheartedly enjoying New Vegas.

 

 

 

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P.S.: Kicking tumbleweeds around is weirdly fun...

Various bumblers

On goldenrod:

On a... what the hell are those white inflorescences anyway? I used to know. They're everywhere. 

Queen Anne's lace?

Eh, let's stick with thistles.

"Bumble on a thistle" is probably an entire photographic genre in itself. Worthy of a dramatic lens flare.

 

A Measure of Mud

Hey, guess what game I'll be talking about in a few days!

Trudging through that dust-bowl brought to mind an old Sylvester Stallone movie titled Lock Up that I caught a couple of times way back when, and which has seemingly faded from everyone's memory. Not unjustifiably, either. Ostensibly a prison movie, but without much to say about justice or prison life, but nonetheless overstating everything it didn't have to say, every damn minute of every damn scene. Dialogue sounds like placeholder for an actual script. It belabored each and every shot and even the soundtrack somehow managed to consistently mismatch its mood. Aside from that it's Stallone flexing his way through a litany of manly cliches in quintessential '80s fashion: power tools, car, tossing a ball, body-slamming, punching, protecting his mate, squaring off against a standard-issue less-manly-therefore-bad villain. If you want a highlights reel, keep in mind they're not lying when they say those are the movie's best scenes. The flick seems to have flopped, badly.

 

Yet somehow I always held a modest soft spot for it. Maybe just because I saw it when I was twelve or something and didn't know better. Maybe its the pretty decent fights with lots of unsophisticated, grunting violence, the sort of which you've seen too little in the post-Matrix decades. But looking at those few scenes now, I think Stallone got upstaged by the real star of the show: that muddy prison yard! It squelches. It stretches across the frame. It encompasses the men's own drab inmate duds and the dun concrete walls. Characters slip and fall in it. It spatters and clings and sits heavy and implacable. This is your world, creature of mud.

Such drab beigeness can be doubly fraught in an interactive medium. Where a movie director can force action in the mud, a game designer risks the player stopping and looking around to ask 'what the hell am I doing here' every minute of gameplay. Indeed, I've bashed a few titles here on the blog for just such hollow environments. But I've more often praised the ones than manage to pull it off. A good designer always has an answer in mind for what the hell you're doing there. As above, he dangles a monument off in the distance to grab your attention and let you get your bearings. Or slopes and sweeps the terrain to make you wonder what's over the next rise. Or supplies suggestive wind/water/traffic motion carrying your attention across the landscape. Even if your immediate surroundings feel empty, you are made to think of something beyond the nothing, made to value the steps you take.

 

The Shawshank Redemption for instance had opera and a library to offset the mud. Lock Up lacked them.

AoW4 Factions, 18

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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I had a dragon aspect left over and wanted more nature/chaos interplay, so a bunch of happy-go-lucky halflings seemed about right. In practice though they ended up more brute-force oriented than I'd expected, getting a lot of use out of their Primal stacks. Elusiveness and quick reflexes combined with materium defense buffs but little nuking let fights drag out long enough for those stacks to come into play repeatedly. First-turn draconic vitality then runesmiths piling on the enchanments instead of nuking just drive the strat further in that direction. Strategically, a nice middle ground faction with a bit of everything, steady as she goes. Kinda love the concept too, can really picture the moment of wonder, glimpsing their new overlord through the brush, skittish little savages marveling at the possibilities.

Bah, NerdLord: From Seonon, an Empire!

"Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren doch
Gewinnen könnt ihr viel"

KMFDM - Hau Ruck

 

Dateline: Calradia, 1091. Beaten, bottled in, batty Battania battens down its bottom bastion!

Stalwart Battania, high-flung Battania, Mother Earth's favored flaxen-tressed daughter, land of a thousand pigs and several little ponies, land of... clay... hath been broughte lowe by its fowes. Yet (as such stories go) in the eleventh hour a hale and determined hero named Werwolfe rides to the gates of Marunath to pledge his service to his homeland; then discovers he can't because king Caladog himself languishes in a Vlandian dungeon and thus cannot accept an oath - though he's probably shouting quite a few.

 

Still you can get a fair bit done as a mere mercenary in Bannerlord, even if it mostly relies on Artificial Stupidity. The computer tends to operate with horse blinders on, so even though it'll run from stronger armies, the Battanian plateau's narrow terrain makes it easy to purposely let an enemy army advance past you then chase it into your other allies. Since all my side's remaining lords were concentrated around a single city, this became depressingly repetitive. The same vulnerability which probably dooms Battania when it's just algorithms against each other makes it easily defensible for a human player. Ath Cafal, the village just SW of Marunath, also happens to lie in a cul-de-sac, so enemies would repeatedly trap themselves either trying to raid it or chasing weaker armies in. Lather, rinse, repeat, and thus passed my first year of Battanian military service. All well and good until the king of the Norhern Empire himself parked a larger army than I could handle right outside the town gates.

Note than even though our combined forces (my 170 plus all the parties in Marunath) would easily have trounced King Lucon, they won't coordinate such an attack unless already in the field, and won't step onto the field because they're each individually programmed to stay safe indoors if outnumbered. Catch-22. Not only that, but even when they do the interface is endlessly vague as to which armies will help you or not based on proximity. Laddies and gentlegamers, I don't mind admitting I cheated my ass off at this point, crashing and reloading the game twenty times over until finally managing to bait Lucon away so my idiots would venture out, then looping back to hit him when enough were in range.

 

This would've been easier if I were a lord and could form armies, I thought, until discovering that even after Caladog's return and lordy-looing myself up, none of my peers can recruit enough troops from our meager remaining population to accept an army invitation. Realizing that if Battania is to have an army I must supply it myself, I spend the next year continuing to trap and imprison Vlandians until after grabbing Llanoc Hen Castle we agree to a hefty tribute for peace in Summer of 1092. Building my own Imperial Legion from the Western Empire and splitting it off to a couple of my own underlings, finally I throw my accumulated influence (in part from surrendering prisoners to my King's dungeon) into a desperate gambit to mass our entire force and recapture Seonon from the Northern Empire. It works!

I even have enough influence left over after the victory to squeak through on a 1% margin and claim it for myself. The politics, kid, that's what'll kill ya. 

Home sweet ramshackle, muddy home.

We manage to fight off the inevitable recapture attempt. By winter, with our raiders descending the plateau eastward into the lands about Epic Scrotea, the Northern Empire agrees to a truce. Thus, with a moment's peace and a homestead secured, a middle-aged man's fancy turns from battle-lust to booty-lust. Cue the romantic bagpipes, we're goin' a-courtin'!

 

Now, I'd originally found myself in a meet-cute with one lady Gawen, saving her a couple of times on the battlefield... but as she turned me down turned out to be a lesbian, I decided meet-cutes are dumb and fixed my eyes on a politically convenient marriage to Corein, daughter of king Caladog.

We look cute together. Regal too.

The real clincher was when I saw the good princess' flawless taste in battle-garb.

I'm in love!

We can borrow each other's wardrobe and wolf-whistle in both directions. Though during the war she'd turned me down as beneath her station, after the capture of Seonon it wasn't long before (a quick reload during a failed dialogue aside) she approved her father's approval of my approval of her fine lupine ass.

One wife, please. An' make 'er shaggy.

Technically she only rates 8295 denars, but what the hell, keep the fiver old man, my treat. *wink*

 

While courting and then while we busy ourselves cranking out a couple of heirs, I convince my incipient father-in-law to re-open hostilities with our Vlandian oppressors, having maxed out my underlings' armies until I start to lose money on upkeep. The war drags slowly over the next few years, with gradual, hard-won victories in castle sieges, and a welcome alliance with the Western Empire, the Vlandians' other major enemy. The biggest stroke of luck comes after the recapture of Pen Cannoc, Dunglanys having rebelled against Vlandian rule. Not only does it split their armies for easy field skirmishes, but sets up easy, predictable ambushes when they try to siege it.

Then, when they do retake it, a quick pounce to grab it on the rebound. Thus, seven and a half years after Battania's near-defeat, the latest peace treaty leaves us with far more hopeful borders.

Tho' Car Banseth yet languishes under accursed Vlandian misrule, much of our ancestral realm has now been reclaimed. We set our eyes beyond our borders, where glory and riches (surely) await.

 

So, how was this for an RPG plot? A wealthy merchant returns to save his homeland, outmaneuvers his foes by devious military tactics, seduces a princess (while wearing the same outfit as her (hey, some chicks are into it!)) and claims a title and fiefdom by hiring foreign legionnaires. It's got a plucky underdog angle, patriotic last stands and glorious marches, a courtroom drama scene, the comic relief that your new city's a little bit boggy, one town's heroic rebellion to join its free brethren, and even a love triangle! I've said before (and I'm far from the only one) that Bannerlord has suffered by losing the companion dialogue and small-party adventuring of M&B: Warband, lost some of its monomythic escalation, and sadly, that remains true. Nevertheless it remains a prime example of computer games' potential as creative medium.

 

When the topic is discussed, it's almost always in terms of writing quality, visuals, moral/sociopolitical themes or a really bangin' soundtrack. But all that, while certainly relevant, is unfair if it only treats a game as if it were a movie or a storybook. It's supposed to be interactive, this new electronic medium of the past half-century, it's supposed to be about what you, the player, can actually do. Lay out your own story. An often touted ideal, rarely achieved, yet still the medium's great claim to validity. This? Some AI incompetence aside, this was good roleplaying and good gaming.

 

Health and long life to The Swain of Seonon!

Shrooms

Come on, you can do it, you can do it!

You did it!

 

Bring the fam.

 

We have attained verticality! ...in a drunken sort of jumble.

 

More mycelium means more power.

The little ones are a different species... aren't they? I really don't know nearly enough about fungi but they do shapeshift between growth stages.
 

Tiny cups above tired caps:

Trumpeting their success 

...I have... ZERO freakin' clue here.

Some type of Auricularia?

What Is It Good for Me Lately?

"Death seed, blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs"

 

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

 

 

I'd always meant to comment more on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but consistently found I could add nothing. The Russians themselves were expecting the two-week war I had originally predicted, demonstrated by their failure to arrange functional supply lines at the outset. Subsequent years' shift from traditional warfare toward automation and teleoperation is a historic landmark (and just one more apocalyptic nail in our species' coffin) but many, many others have commented more cogently on drone warfare.

 

But whatever its strategic, humanitarian and technological details, Russian expansionism is on a conceptual level so... boring. It lacks the ideological spice of faith and progress and subversion and societal goals colouring our discussion of, say, Middle-Eastern or African conflicts, or the old Cold War debate on economics. A sadistic, strutting strongman whipping a horde of frothing thugs and unwilling conscripts into throwing themselves into the meatgrinder for a naked land-grab is too redundantly medieval. Even Putin's sycophants claiming "de-nazification" or somesuch gave up on their transparent excuses several years ago and appear to have simply embraced the dictator's troglodytic aggression for its own sake. Same old routine.

 

Israel's expansionism on the other hand does offer ideological facets in spades, tribal/territorial, religious, humanitarian, utopian, you name it. But there's every reason to believe that Israel before October '23 took a page from the U.S. preceding 9/11 and deliberately ignored the oncoming raid, willfully let a couple thousand of its citizens be butchered to provide a pretext for invasion and solidifying domestic power for its current aspiring junta.

 

So is it ensuring safety, is it humanitarianism, is it religious fanaticism or is it a land grab? Did anyone bother keeping up the facade of being motivated by repatriating hostages, any more than Putin's "de-nazification", or is the point to secure some profitable real estate for Netanyahu's cronies to sell at a cozy profit margin to the very families of those of their own constituents whom they so cheerfully sacrificed to Judaic manifest destiny? Self-defense is one thing, social progress would be another if you did it honestly, but if you've been putting a hundred thousand now thoroughly de-fanged brainwashed primitives up against the wall 'cause it's a good gesheft? Whole other conversation.

 

Then there's the Israeli/U.S. bombing campaign against Iran, where issues of ideology, public good, terrorism, warmongering, what-have-you, all seem to fade before the sheer Stoogely, tragicomic farce of the whole affair. At least one of the supposed motivations goes beyond mere ideology to existential threat. If religious fanatics get nukes (or any other weapons of mass destruction) they will use them, some sooner than others and jihadists soonest of all. It's also true that a massive proportion of Iran's population is not only living under miserable theocratic oppression but in this case desperately wants out from under such rule, and has for decades.

 

But you can't honestly believe these pretexts are truly being followed by our leadership, that the sputtering clown car of drunks, ditzes and gutter swindlers that is the current U.S. government has either the intent or IQ to pursue any goal beyond extorting bribes for themselves as they've been doing for the past year and a half. From the start the war was greeted with utter confusion, by the public, by the press, by even the military ordered to prosecute a constantly shifting and nonsensical list of demands while their commander-in-chimp screeches random scatological street urchin threats across social media. If you'd like the key to the whole snafu though, pay attention to one particular sound bite constantly repeated from the start: the fear that the U.S. may be running out of bombs or interceptor missiles or drones or ships or planes or... something. Something requiring a heavily tax-subsidized, unscrutinized investment. Something explained ninety years ago:

"The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear.
[...]
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way.
[...]
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits.
[...]
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
[...]
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance —- something the employer pays for in an enlightened state — and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left. Then, the most crowning insolence of all — he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days. We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back - when they came back from the war and couldn't find work — at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!"

 

That's from General Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket, published as an insider's retrospective on WWI and U.S. incursions into Central America in the early 20th century, over a decade before the phrase "military-industrial complex" rattled the airwaves. Those few commentators not driven by nationalist/religious fanaticism, capable of objective analysis, are always tempted to say that motivation does not matter so long as an objective goal is achieved. So what if a few profiteers wet their beaks, so long as a threat to the rest of us gets removed? But the point is exactly that motive shifts goals. Once Daddy Warbucks becomes your hero instead of a criminal to be eliminated from polite society, every war is a war against one's own populace, a pretext for enriching the rich at the sacrifice of the wage slaves and cannon fodder. Or does anyone imagine Russians in general are benefiting from the destruction of Ukraine? Or that the wasteful confusion of the Iranian war is not so by design, meant to destroy American property that the richest investors may justify further tax-subsidized replacement of military assets, with any destruction abroad merely an afterthought?

 

And has anyone noticed that even Trump's detractors in the media are mouthing the same ad copy about bomb shortages (no matter how the bombs are wasted, and no matter Trumpists refused expending those same bombs in defense of Ukraine) terrified of angering investors in military contractors?