I couldn’t get them to load. I think because I messed up the download and installed them part way through my game. So I’ve not played them yet. But I do have a key, so I should be able to play if I started again. Unless… do you need to complete the main game first? Maybe it’ll let me because I do have a complete save.
Sorry for the delay. You picked a difficult topic. I’ve been thinking about how to tackle it. I’ll see what I can do. I say something like the following in some conversations now and again. Dialectics gives me a broader perspective and helps me to explain why things are the way they are.
Interest rates increase and house prices decrease while monthly mortgage payments shoot up. Imagine you agreed to a mortgage to buy a house at 3% interest. Your fixed rate agreement comes to an end.
The central bank puts up interest rates to 4%. The bank, in turn, adds this to it’s standard mortgage rate of e.g. 3.9%. Now your interest goes from 3% to 7.9% (4%+3.9%). Your monthly payment grows from $700 to $1200. Interest is the same as rent. If you have a mortgage, the bank is your landlord. The law obscures this relationship.
You could afford $700 but you can’t afford $1200. You decide to sell and buy something cheaper. Unfortunately, you’re among thousands of others doing the same thing. Every property under $300k gets sold rapidly. You either put an offer in on the day that is advertised or someone else will. Properties priced under $300k increase towards that limit.
Others can afford the properties between $300k and $450k. They sell their house, take the equity, and add it to what they can borrow. The bank says it will lend $250k. A year before, it would have lent $300k. Fewer people can afford the properties nearer to $450k. The sellers lower the price. Again, towards the $300k mark.
The composition of the housing market and homeowners changes. The poorest of those who can afford to ‘own’ their home are forced to spend more on the privilege. They have less money to spend on consumables. Moneylenders, however, are making the same or more than before on mortgages, even though they are lending less.
But it’s uneven and contradictory. The poorer consumers stop spending so much at the coffee shop, pub, and takeaway. They spend less on clothes. These shops, etc, lose income. They can’t pay off their credit card debt. Some close down. They stop paying the rent on their commercial property. Some landlords default on their commercial mortgages. The banks lose some income.
To stay open, the remaining shops raise their prices to cover the increase in their own rent or mortgage. Customers (the same people in the verge of repossession proceedings) pay the difference. The bank is now lending money to fewer businesses, but it’s income stays the same or increases because those who continue to pay, pay more.
The customers in the coffee shop now expects a lot more. They’re paying $8 for a coffee, they feel entitled to the best service and less inclined to tip. They fight each other for a table and chair in the restaurant. Animosity prevails. The customer-workers struggle against each other and the barista. Social life just became a lot more alienated. Try building solidarity among this lot.
To get any income back that the bank does lose from defaults, they raise interest rates, further driving the cycle of impoverishing the workers and enriching/impoverishing the moneylenders. But whereas the banks win and lose, the workers only lose. Some cannot afford to move or remortgage. They default and their home is repossessed. The bank sells it and recoups it’s loan (most of the time – but things were especially uneven after the 2008 financial crash). If it can’t and goes bankrupt, the state bails out the bank.
When the state hands out money to banks, or like during COVID, people begin to spend more (there is more money on circulation) it will later raise interest rates to slow down spending. But when interest rates increase and spending slows down, the above cycle starts again.
The bank and the customer are dialectically related. The bank doesn’t exist without the customer. In late capitalism, the customer can’t exist without a bank account and some form of borrowing (even if it’s just the promise of an unarranged overdraft). But the bank is constantly trying to take everything from the customer. It is their reason for existing. The bank is the face of the imperialist, the customer of the worker.
Interest rates, as a relation, are a mechanism of and they reveal the transfer of wealth from poor to rich. Anything not taken by your employer is in one way or another taken by the bank. You can’t see this without dialectics; you feel the pinch, you see the holes in your shoes, but you don’t make the connection.
And some of what your employer takes from you, is only taken because they themselves have to pay the bank or they have to pay suppliers who also need to charge more because they are owned by the bank.
By unfolding interest rates as a relation, rather than as a simple number that goes up and down linearly, we can see that it is a microcosm of capitalism.
I kinda want to play through again now. It maybe complete some of the post game/expansions
Liberal can be a synonym for bourgeois. But maybe it’s like this:
Your English is good, btw. It’s definitely good enough to explain what you mean about liberal/bourgeois. The fact that you have been misunderstood is not because of your English. I think it is because of the exact problem that you have identified—the confusion between liberal/bourgeois.
Would ‘liberal’ not be the umbrella term for all other types of liberalism? That would make it accurate to refer to a neoliberal as a liberal.
I’d also use bourgeois to refer to the ideology of capitalism. Whereas I agree that bourgeoisie would refer to the capitalist class.
It’s a strange choice, isn’t it, leaving all the ‘post-game’ material for after the ending. I found the whole thing unsatisfying because of the structure. The story itself was decent. The atmosphere throughout—wow; very ffvii disc one!
Is it the metadata or because people will be able to recognise you from you art?
Why shouldn’t you? Because you might get doxed?
Not embarrassing at all. I’d be interested in hearing others’ answers. Would you ask this in a post in [email protected]?
Good question. But very broad! Sounds like you’ve got the essentials sorted. What do mean by ‘broader analysis of society’? If you give me something a little more specific I might be able to run through an analysis with you to show you how I’d do it. (Depending on the topic!) I could give you some quotes relating to what I interpret as ‘broader … society’ but it’ll be very abstract.
It’s the oldest trick in the book. It means that people look at what you want them to see rather than what you don’t want them to see.
Not to mention that disgruntled and/or naive employees will leak things that their employer doesn’t actually want leaked.
R. Edward Terence. Ed for short and the R stands for Rupert but I don’t really use that name except on government forms. Hence redtea, a play on R. Ed T.
I see. I don’t know, though. That seems to externalise gravity as something beyond, as universal. As if gravity and the rest of physical matter are not internally related. It seems to assume (a) an epistemology that puts some knowledge beyond human comprehension just because we can’t know for sure that our models are correct – like an epistemological scepticism – and (b) that something is unchanging just because we can’t (yet or necessarily) perceive it’s changes.
It seems incorrect to (i) need dialectics to explain a phenomena but (ii) deny that dialectics governs that phenomena on the basis that humans might one day transcend dialectics to arrive at a more accurate or deeper understanding of matter.
The notion that our understanding of nature is only an idea rather than our best approximation of the material seems anti-materialist. Dialectics doesn’t necessarily exclude unchanging laws; it posits that development happens according to such laws, which are dialectical.
I don’t think we conceive of ‘changes’ or of dialectics in the same way. But maybe we’re saying the same thing in different words or talking past one another. That or I’m misunderstanding you.
I thought you meant that. Just so you know, ‘I can see an argument for that’ usually suggests that you agree with the initial statement. It’s like saying, ‘I could also make an argument in support of that statement’.
This is so the Brits can send their new conscripts over to fight Russia to protect their heritage rather than because NATO is getting directly involved.
What do you mean? Beside the OP text, does not the notion that internal contradiction drives change explain a lot in physics?
The same with the unity of opposites?
And the insistence that all subject matter is relational?
I have some questions, which are not intended to be rhetorical or sarcastic. My questions stem from this assertion:
Well gravity itself is not a dialectic since gravity itself remains unchanging.
I’m struggling to see how you can say all that and begin with saying that gravity is ‘not a dialectic’. Doesn’t this framing imply that gravity can mean something/anything in the abstract, as an isolated thing that exists outside of relations. No one thing can be a dialectic because a dialectic is a relation.
The questions, which may be the same question worded in different ways:
Dialectics is the study of change. Does that presuppose (measurable) change in everything?
That is, if gravity is a relation, if it (partly) explains why matter is in constant motion, is it true that gravity is not dialectical just because it appears (and may be) unchanging in the abstract?
How can you/we be sure that gravity is unchanging?
How can gravity not be dialectical and yet only be explained as a relation/process?
Does “Well gravity itself is not a dialectic since gravity itself remains unchanging” treat ‘gravity’ as a thing in itself? I.e. rather than a part/property of certain material relations?
There seems to be quite some confusion as to what dialectics is in this thread. I wonder if it comes down to those who accept that everything is contradiction and those who say that dialectics is just a good heuristic. I’m with you in the first group, I think.
In that case, I think I messed up the install. I’ll try going straight to the store through the game. Might take me a while because I don’t have a monitor/screen at the moment.