I have a work colleague who's really into pokemon and he told me that Nintendo's copyright is absolutely ridiculous. Like, they not only copyrighted pokeballs, but the exact number of times that they shake when used. It's insane. And as everyone could have predicted, they're using their power to crush the competition over insignificant things.
President Eisenhower was a very smart man, and absolutely correct in this case. He was right about the military-industrial complex too.
It's a shame that future generations of politicians learned absolutely nothing from him and only allowed things to get worse.
To quote Mel Gibson's character from The Patriot "Why would I trade one tyrant 2000 miles away for 2000 tyrants one mile away?"
Exactly, that's another good point. Let's say you live in a corrupt monarchy where the king keeps using the treasury as his personal debit card. After a certain point he's going to reach a limit where he simply has no more luxuries that he can buy, and things don't deteriorate further.
2000 tyrants are capable of far more evil and corruption than 1 tyrant ever would by himself while being much harder to deal with.
Democracy in the long term will always devolve into what we have now. It cannot work in a modern context, perhaps in ancient times but even then it has failed and been replaced by other, more autocratic systems.
The problem is simple, how do you keep the oligarhical elites from gaining power and influence over democracy? The answer is that you can't. Simple things like campaign donations pave the way for a lot of oligarhical control. And no, banning things like campaign donations and lobbying is not only impractical, but such bans can be rescinded when the winds change.
Autocrats like Putin are more respectful of their countrymen's wishes due to a simple factor: psychological ownership.
To use an analogy, a house given to a bunch of illegals for free will be trashed while a different house purchased by a hardworking family will be well taken care of for generations. Why is this? The illegals do not see the house as something that they own and are invested in. Even if they own it legally, they do not see it that way in their minds.
The same applies to the democracies vs. autocracies. An autocrat sees the country as "theirs". It's something that they "own" and must take responsibility and care for, just like they would for their house.
A democratic politician on the other hand makes their promises, gets elected and then coasts along while trying to gather as much money as possible. They do not actually feel any responsibility towards their country or fellow countrymen, while at the same time facing no accountability whatsoever.
Western democratic countries represent the globalists and moneyed elites, not the people. That's why we keep seeing all these unpopular policies being forced through no matter which party happens to be in charge today.
Unfortunately removing woke elements doesn't fix shit writing, rushed arcs and a whole load of other dumb bullshit.
Like no joke, they have major character defining stuff happen in quick flashbacks or even offscreen because they're trying to squeeze several arcs in a single season.
I would argue that democracy doesn't work anywhere for one simple reason: democracy produces politicians, not leaders. These politicians are not accountable to anyone and what inevitably happens is that the democratic country turns into a mafia state that's in bed with corporate and globalist interests.
A dictator or king is far more likely to respect their country's traditions and sovereignty than an elected politician who is only ever interested in political theater while lining their own pockets.
Sure, you could argue that you risk getting a tyrant in autocratic systems. But is avoiding the risk of tyrants worth the risk of almost never getting a true leader that cares for their country?
Even then, it's a lot easier to deal with one tyrant than an entire class of politicians and the bureaucrats under them, and you can mitigate the risk of tyranny by using a monarchical system with family succession. The son of the king can be raised to rule the country wisely, you can't do that with a politician.
And like you said, the public is gullible and unwilling to make any hard decisions or sacrifices most of the time. Closing the border is a hard decision but one that must be made and yet we aren't any closer to it being done because a significant number of Westerners object, despite the obvious damage being done by uncontrolled immigration.
I'm actually curious, why do you hate Putin?
Personally I have mixed feelings about him. On one hand yes he's definitely a patriot and a strong leader. On the other hand he's clearly trying to rebuild the Russian empire at the West's expense.
But at the same time the West is so horrible that Putinist Russia is an infinitely more appealing option.
I think it's a bit more complicated. Romania has always been a poor country and highly reliant on EU money, and cutting off that money would have been bad for everyone. And back then most people didn't truly understand the devastating effects of mass migration from third world countries.
I believe we will see a lot more people taking a hard stance against migration this time, even if it affects the money they get from the EU. While Romania has been much less affected by migration since they're all going to West Europe it's very easy to see proof of its negative effects on the internet.
The closest proof they have is that Georgescu praised Putin as a "patriot and a leader" which... is based as hell, and doesn't mean that he's a Russian puppet. Now I'm not an expert on social interactions but I'm sure complimenting and praising people is a good way to make friends with them, and it is a good idea to be friends with Putin rather than his enemy.
In a lib's mind anyone trying to make friends with Russia is a Russian puppet.
And one other thing that probably really pisses them off is that Georgescu said that he opposes the war in Ukraine and wants to focus on his country's people first. Which is also really based. That war has been nothing except a money laundering scheme for Western governments.
Honestly they probably would. They're blatantly trying to steal the election when Georgescu was on track for winning the election, and they can't have that. Romania also has recent history dealing with authoritarian bullshit during the commie regime and people still remember that.
Yep. And we also knew well in advance what kind of changes she'd make ever since she started posting retarded things on Twitter like turning Hermione black or that Dumbledore is gay.
But ultimately she got what she deserved lol, she disagreed with the libs on ONE thing (the trans issue) and they now consider her to be IRL Voldemort. I saw articles and posts where libs were pretending that Daniel Radcliffe wrote Harry Potter or something like that, not Rowling. It was so cringe.
Remember folks, it's only real democracy when you vote for the correct candidate. If you vote for the obvious Russian puppet it doesn't count. (/s)
But yeah, this is disgraceful and corrupt on so many levels. Even if a candidate is a Russian puppet does it matter if he gets majority votes? If the people want a Russian puppet then they want a Russian puppet, and you should respect the people's wishes if you truly believe in democracy.
But we all know libs and globalists don't really believe in democracy or individual choice. See Klaus Schwab talking about needing to infiltrate ze cabinets and force changes upon people.
And right now they really really hate Russia and want to force WW3 to happen before they start losing power. Then they can just declare states of emergency and suspend elections forever.
That shouldn't really have anything to do with the artifacts. Let me give you some background lore on why the Zone exists.
After the Chernobyl NPP melted down and the exclusion zone was set up, scientists set up secret labs in the Zone to do secret research.
Part of this research is the C-Consciousness project, which attempted to fix humanity's flaws (eliminating greed, cruelty, anger, etc) by attempting to alter the noosphere (an invisible field affected by and affecting human cognition).
They did an experiment to attempt to alter the noosphere which backfired horribly and ended up damaging it, and that is what resulted in the creation of the Zone and the anomalies within it.
Even after C-Con is destroyed due to Strelok's actions in SoC the Zone remains as the damage to the noosphere appears to be permanent.
The Wish Granter is not directly related to the anomalous phenomena inside the Zone, it's a trap built by C-Con to deal with intruders.
Maybe it's not the main selling point but it is what's keeping the series from being Generic Post-Apocalyptic Shooter #532.
If you removed all the story and worldbuilding and just left in the environments and core gameplay would you have something interesting? I'd say it wouldn't be near as interesting.
I might be biased though since I'm very interested in media writing and worldbuilding which is also how I notice the kind of ridiculous changes they make.
Modern writers don't seem to be able to really look at the big picture and understand why things are the way they are. They have to retcon story and worldbuilding aspects to insert their own ideas even if it ruins what came before.
The worst part is that none of this was even necessary. The writers wanted protagonist man to get a special artifact outside the Zone and go into it to uncover its mysteries (which is pretty much what happens in the current story) and they could have kept this story with some minor alterations to avoid damaging the worldbuilding.
I thought I was going crazy because no one was talking about this. Not even the negative reviews on Steam mentioned it, even though story and worldbuilding is a core part of the Stalker series. And it's stuff you learn in the first couple of hours of gameplay too.
Some reviewers even praised the story as being great which I can't understand in any capacity. Did these people even play the previous Stalker games or are they just tourists? Or are people just willing to accept slop so long as it has the right brand?
If the story and worldbuilding wasn't there then the Stalker series would have been nothing more than fancy boomer shooters with environmental hazards and no one would have gotten so invested in the series.
I watched a friend stream it (my PC can't run it lol) and what really bothered me is how they fucked with the story.
In the prologue they establish that the anomalous artifacts found in the zone lose their anomalous energy if taken outside the zone, and that basically means that stalkers shouldn't exist, period.
The entire reason that stalkers exist is because of the artifacts, people try to sneak past the military cordon to get into the zone to retrieve the artifacts to sell to the outside because the artifacts have all kinds of extremely useful properties. Just think of how useful an item that purges radiation from the body or heals wounds rapidly might be.
If artifacts become useless outside the zone then they would have rapidly depreciating value and there would be very few stalkers going into the zone outside of government, scientific and military stalkers. It undermines the entire setting on a fundamental level.
And to make things even more absurd, Stalker 2 establishes that scientists were trying to figure out how to recharge artifacts and the project got canned due to safety reasons, despite the massive benefits of such a project.
The game opens up after you get through the prologue, the presentation is great and I could accept the game's flaws and lack of A-Life (devs said it isn't working yet) but I can't forgive the bad writing and worldbuilding.
It's pretty clear that the game was made by a different team with different ideas and their ideas are not better than their predecessors.
Some of them have actually said this. In some cases when a right winger said to a lib that colleges are lib indoctrination centers they said that's not true. But they will also hold the view that they want to challenge students' views like you said.
Libs have no self-awareness and they're more than capable and willing to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time.
Their ideology is an incoherent mess filled with contradictions and whatever is the current year NPC programming.
Vague vs. not vague patents don't seem to matter much anyway since they were still able to go after Palworld even though their version of pokeballs were different.