Notes on Fallout TV (Return to the Nolanverse complete, Review notes complete)

Sure, it's better to just cynically accept everything as it is and continue circling the drain of the liberal historical cycle, constantly repeating massacre after massacre as the franchise of the "free" constantly expands and contracts. These anticommunist platitudes are as stale as a box of instamash. Right now China is the world's foremost burgeoning capitalist power because they're Marxist, while Europe and the United States continue trying to sit on old arrangements made during the Cold War for sucking up the material wealth of the Global South. We've recreated the wars of the 20th century in Ukraine and Gaza for the same reasons that the world wars were fought a century ago.

Whether it's through resource shortages, ecological disaster, imperial rivalries, or petty nationalist grudges, we're still well on the way to apocalypse. We learned nothing from the failures of modernity.
 
Post-War Tribal said:
Ehmm.. When did this turn into the Pol thread?
Click to expand...
The political content of the show is where it ultimately falls flat, so it's an unavoidable issue. The showrunners present a kind of liberal anti-politics which they consider non-ideological, which is the most ideological you can be.
 
Bradylama said:
Right now China is the world's foremost burgeoning capitalist power because they're Marxist, .
Click to expand...
Because they're Marxist. What a cope. Deng's reforms were Marxist? Mmkay. We get it, you found your old time religion.

And China has their share of problems the same as everyone else. Aging population potential, gender imbalance , etc.
 
Hawkwing74 said:
Because they're Marxist. What a cope. Deng's reforms were Marxist? Mmkay. We get it, you found your old time religion.

And China has their share of problems the same as everyone else. Aging population potential, gender imbalance , etc.
Click to expand...

Deng's reforms WERE Marxist. Deng Xiaoping Thought is rooted in Marxist-Leninism and Maoism, with an eye to reforming China to meet the world context rather than maintaining the anemic growth rates of an internally driven socialist economy. Market reforms aren't liberal ipso facto of there being markets. That was the delusion western speculators had when they thought the reforms would liberalize China, and they moved all of their physical capital over to be worked by cheap Chinese labor.

The CCP navigated its position in the world market to make China the indispensable core of the global economy, following Marxist principles and practical experimentation.

If you want to argue that these reforms aren't "communist" then you'd be right. Even Xi Jinping Thought estimates that Chinese socialism can't be constructed until 2050. Nonetheless they're on track for it, and they're meeting their development goals.
 
Funny how the one Chinese person on this forum wants to emigrate. Maybe you'd like to immigrate there?

I see the word Maoist, I see dead people. But you have freedom of religion in the US so you are free to follow yours.
 
Hawkwing74 said:
Funny how the one Chinese person on this forum wants to emigrate. Maybe you'd like to immigrate there?

I see the word Maoist, I see dead people. But you have freedom of religion in the US so you are free to follow yours.
Click to expand...
Got any more platitudes for us?
 
There's no reasoning with people who capitalize the spoutings of dictators as if they're profound.

If I went around referring to Joe Biden Thought or Donald Trump Thought I'd be rightly pilloried. You would have been lucky to avoid a reeducation camp in the "Cultural Revolution". Good luck with your Utopian dreams, they'll always be somewhere down the road.

If China is "The Future" and you don't actively want to move there, you're just a poseur, reciting college textbook bullshit.
 
Hawkwing74 said:
When are we getting our proletarian revolution followed by classless society? Seems always some distance out just like the end of the world from climate change.

As if any humans could ever have a classless society.
Click to expand...
Probably never, but I welcome the next communist revolution. Nothing is more efficient at killing communists than a communist revolution.
 
Hawkwing74 said:
There's no reasoning with people who capitalize the spoutings of dictators as if they're profound.
Click to expand...

Bud you haven't said anything reasonable so far, all you've said is how much you hate Marxism and communism without speaking to the actual topic at hand. This whole tangent got started on the insistence that because capitalists act consistently in their own individual interests they're in direct competition with each other. Do you disagree with that or not? It's relevant to the conspiracy.

Don't act haughty out of ignorance.
 
On a Youtube comment I enjoyed:

"Fiduciary Responsibility is actually a legal requirement for joint stock companies - LLCs, PLCs, Societe Anonymes etc. They have to provide their shareholders with a return on their investment, which means always prioritising profit maximisation over all other considerations, subject only to laws compelling them to ensure employee safety and not poison customers etc., and then only as far as those laws are enforced.

It's a function of private property law in general, and has been the case since joint stock companies were invented in the 17th century, starting with famously bad guys like the Dutch East India Company. Since they are owned by shareholders, their only true loyalty and obedience is towards those shareholders and creditors; not God, not morality, not common sense, nor patriotism nor justice."

I mean, there's a reason the British East India Company had to have their whole occupied country taken away from them because they'd committed so many atrocities that the British government felt they'd lose it otherwise (and proceeded to fuck it up in their own way).

But the problem is for fiduciary responsibility in the show, we have to believe there's a reason to believe Vault-Tec thinks a nuclear war would be good for business which I admit I don't think the show properly sold, at least for a reason that doesn't require a lot of buy in from the viewer.

I can believe people want to nuke the world to rule the ashes but you can't just dismiss it at, "There's money to be made in the end of the world."
 
R.Graves said:
the water traders were vault tec the entire time. so were the uh brahman barons.
Click to expand...

I want the option to join Vault-Tec. It was a mistake leaving that option out in Fallout 3.

I'm also of the mind the Institute was the only sensible answer.
 
Bradylama said:
Bud you haven't said anything reasonable so far, all you've said is how much you hate Marxism and communism without speaking to the actual topic at hand. This whole tangent got started on the insistence that because capitalists act consistently in their own individual interests they're in direct competition with each other. Do you disagree with that or not? It's relevant to the conspiracy.

Don't act haughty out of ignorance.
Click to expand...
Competition is a fundamental property of any market economy. I wouldn't paint it in such absolute terms since competition and cooperation can coexist, even if only temporary and suiting the self-interest of each participants, and not all capitalists are always in competition with each other since they can serve different market niches.
But it's fundamentally true enough.
 
Hassknecht said:
Competition is a fundamental property of any market economy. I wouldn't paint it in such absolute terms since competition and cooperation can coexist, even if only temporary and suiting the self-interest of each participants, and not all capitalists are always in competition with each other since they can serve different market niches.
But it's fundamentally true enough.
Click to expand...

Part of the issue I have with Marxism is the fact that it seems to assume end-states that don't necessarily exist or absolute crushing of the competition as well as partnerships with the state. These include Marx's failure to account for the ability of the state to prop up capitalism and stave off the conditions needed for its self-destruction, the lack of a declining tendency in country-wide rate of profit (or perception thereof) once people figured rampant overspeculation out, and the indefinability of labor's value which prevents broad cohesion among what we'd determine as the working class and broader class consciousness.

The determinalism that Marx predicts among economic models is central to Marxism and yet always ends up going in wildly different ways, in part because Marx really tries to paint everyone as having the same fundamental concerns on a material level when at a basic one people care about a lot of shit differently (cultural, ethnically, or religious). Marx is very much a product of the Industrial Revolution and his attitudes should remain there.

My own view on the subject is corporate identity inevitably takes on its own value that subsumes individuals like a nation-state and this is why I act like the mega-rich inevitably turn into psychopaths. The system becomes self-perpetuating in a way that only rarely is actually under the control of individuals at all. What is best for the individual business must be done to maintain market value and prices even if its insane on a larger society level as well as repulsive on an individual level with those unwilling to make that choice edited out of the economic process.

What is good for Boeing is not good for the consumer and they can develop enough money to insulate themselves from any consequences that would harm them in the marketplace because their competition can't outpace them or are as embedded in the bedrock of the foundations of an industry as themselves. So they pay whatever fines necessary and trudge along. Marxism didn't really reckon with "too big to fail."
 
In the end, pretty much all economic theories are wrong to varying degrees because none take human group dynamics into account properly. Which is pretty much impossible. So all the theories that predict "inevitable outcomes" tend to be utter bullshit. It doesn't help that economists are only marginally smarter than philosophers, so they are even applying and teaching their own theories wrong for the most part.
Marxism is on the wrongest end of the spectrum, since it's the inane ramblings of a guy too stupid to be even a regular philosopher, basing his crap on observations he made on Engel's couch 200 years ago. To use the words of Wolfgang Pauli, it's not only not correct, it's not even wrong.
 
Hassknecht said:
Competition is a fundamental property of any market economy. I wouldn't paint it in such absolute terms since competition and cooperation can coexist, even if only temporary and suiting the self-interest of each participants, and not all capitalists are always in competition with each other since they can serve different market niches.
But it's fundamentally true enough.
Click to expand...
Finance guys used to talk about Index Funds in the 80s like they were worse than communism, and that's mostly because when index funds take over a sector of the economy they start making corrections for externalities that hurt their other assets - like say, chemical runoff damaging a private water utility - just for example. The problem with correcting for all those economically harmful externalities is that it reduces uncertainty in finance and makes it harder to speculate on radical market shifts. Index funds want to see guaranteed and steady returns on investment while speculators want to be able to make excessive capital gains on market fluctuations. The other problem is, if an index fund can effectively manage whole sectors of the economy and overrule company leadership at the local level, then why maintain private ownership structures at all? A government bureaucrat could do the same basic job as an index fund manager.

Market actors trend towards seeking monopoly power, and they are willing to collude in order to make it happen, but once you've achieved monopoly power then you're not really operating under a capitalist framework anymore - the market is effectively controlled by a cartel that accumulates all gains to itself. So you need anti-trust laws and enforcement just to maintain a competitive environment. The big question then becomes, at what threshold do you determine that an index fund has achieved monopoly power through its acquisitions? Why not merge all the index funds into one big super fund that everyone is invested into? Contradictions like these just keep piling up because local and aggregate interests are inherently at odds with each other.


I was thinking while on the job about how the shareholders factor in to the whole Vault-Tec conspiracy. When Sinclair goes back to Big Mountain and has to tell the shareholders about Vault-Tec's brilliant plan to do Nazi experiments in the apocalypse, what do they think about that? Big Mountain's whole business model was doing Nazi experimentation for the government already. What does Barb tell the Vault-Tec shareholders at their annual meetup?

Hassknecht said:
In the end, pretty much all economic theories are wrong to varying degrees because none take human group dynamics into account properly. Which is pretty much impossible. So all the theories that predict "inevitable outcomes" tend to be utter bullshit. It doesn't help that economists are only marginally smarter than philosophers, so they are even applying and teaching their own theories wrong for the most part.
Marxism is on the wrongest end of the spectrum, since it's the inane ramblings of a guy too stupid to be even a regular philosopher, basing his crap on observations he made on Engel's couch 200 years ago. To use the words of Wolfgang Pauli, it's not only not correct, it's not even wrong.
Click to expand...

Marx and Engels both participated in the revolutions of 1848. Marx's observations weren't made on Engel's couch, he spent day after day doing research in libraries and directly observing the conditions of the proletariat in Germany and England. Marx even has a line about how during a royal funeral, the denizens of London were dwarfed by the royal grenadiers because their growth had been stunted by the sheer scale of industrial filth that permeated the city. This kind of dismissiveness is an ignorant and ahistorical anticommunist canard.
"Here, the image of Karl Marx is fully appreciated from a nationalist point of view and examined from a distance that avoids enthusiasm and hatred. To dismiss a doctrine that had such influence with sentimental arguments would be as ridiculous as making patriotic proofs for the failure of Napoleon." -Ernst Jünger
Click to expand...

This is the same kind of ideological blindness and chauvinism that informs the worldview of Fallout TV. IMO.
 
Last edited:
I mean, for fuck's sake, Rebel Moon has a better understanding of political economy than Fallout TV. And that's a movie about the 40k imperial guard coming to steal grain from a Skyrim village.
 
Bradylama said:
Marx even has a line about how during a royal funeral, the denizens of London were dwarfed by the royal grenadiers because their growth had been stunted by the sheer scale of industrial filth that permeated the city. This kind of dismissiveness is an ignorant and ahistorical anticommunist canard.
Click to expand...
Were the city dwellers stunted, or were the grenadiers particularly tall? It was and still is common that particularly representative guard soliders are selected for height. While today the King's Guard grenadiers' height requirement is down to 5'10, it used to be 6'2. Can't just take a correlation and pick the direction of causality the way you like.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top