Doubledee

"I cannot conceive of the idea that people can dislike my preferred political choice for any valid reason. Not picking my preferred choice would mean a thing I don't prefer would happen. Nobody could possibly want that."

I love that this is how libs are going to deal with their deeply unpopular genocidaire, just pretend he's actually popular and fine. Real winning strategy there, I hope democracy isn't on the line.

Well I sure hope democracy isn't on the line. It would be pretty irresponsible to run your campaign this poorly if that was the case.

I'm not sure how that deals with the problem? Joe is deeply unpopular, people don't like him and whether you think it's fair or not people are not enjoying the way things are going right now. Doubling down on "voters feel wrong about how things are going and should vote for this unpopular old man" is not actually pursuing an electoral strategy.

You suggested they were hoping the law would solve this problem, which is more coherent than suggesting that they're trying to campaign by calling everybody who dislikes their candidate (almost 2/3 of voters, last count) wrong over and over.

Given the sclerotic and partisan nature of the US "rule of law" isn't it irresponsible of them to hope that the courts solve the problem for them instead of trying to run a convincing campaign for their side?

In my Comrades campaign we are playing a revolutionary cell in a WWI type society premised on the idea that LOTR is war propaganda made to dehumanize orcs, goblins, dark elves and wildfolk. Gotta overthrow the dark lord without falling prey to the other imperialists somehow.

Meanwhile my pathfinder DM was very skeptical of my request to play a goblin John Brown who believes Hadregush is a god of liberation and wants to create a free society for oppressed peoples. Maybe that's a lot to ask mechanically or something but I'm pushing back as hard as I can against the racial mechanics built into this system.

That means a lot. Thanks. I'm glad it made sense.

It can help, but I would argue that cities don't cause this sort of change on their own. After all, many of the largest most dense cities in the world were in India, China and Central Asia/North Africa for a lot of the time that Europe took off.

What's required to produce those things at a scale that matters is a transformation of social relations that frees up a bunch of people and forces them to do new, alienating work. It's not enough to have good techniques, you need to fill a nasty city with people who have to be there using them to make a hundred new ships a year.

As with your katana example, technology was not unique to Europe. Many of the things they ended up using to dominate the world came from China, the Arab world, etc. But they had incentives to escalate the use of expensive technology and a social base that was suddenly uprooted by a new form of market relations that killed the previous ways people met their needs.

Economies are, at their core, a social phenomenon, not a technological or resource system. So I wouldn't discount technology and such as contributors but I don't think they are the main cause of the transformation Europe experienced.

I mean compared to some places, sure. But agricultural products aren't gonna buy you a fancy ivory cane from a merchant who sailed here from Istanbul with exotic wares. They want something they can get valuable goods with, not grain. The Arab traders in Istanbul can get grain from the next village. You need something they want, or precious metals if you don't have anything else.

Which isn't to say you can't build a good population off of good land, it's just that "a nice place to live" isn't necessarily "a rich place in international trade".

A theme that keeps seeming to come up is luxury goods. Do you think it would be fair to say Europe is rich in useful goods (iron, wood) and poor in everything else? If Europe was truly that poor it wouldn’t be able to actually conquer anyone. Unless I’m mistaken on how poor is meant.

Well in the context of international trade it was poor. Iron is all over the place, trees are pretty common. Europe had nothing other places couldn't get for themselves, and a strong incentive to develop a method for getting things it wanted by a means other than exchanging precious metals for them.

I think Debt is the first of his books I read, I think it's a good one, approachable and also concrete. Would recommend.