Simulated City, Real Propaganda

I was looking forward to the new Simcity. Tilted Mill did a decent job on its first title, Children of the Nile. Their follow-up, Caesar IV, was lackluster, especially considering its pedigree.

They really seemed to have an interesting take on the overly-familiar Simcity formula. The focus would be on developing a city's "energy," its overall feel - whether authoritarian, liberal, etc. It definitely sounds cool, dealing not so much with micromanaging spreadsheet numbers but shifting the emotional aura of districts.

But now I'm not so sure.

See, it turns out that BP, the energy giant, was so fascinated by the social implications of the title, that they generously offered to consult with the publisher. How we deal with pollution is very important, you see.

That's why, in the game, all the environmentally-sound forms of energy are branded with BP's logo. Gas stations, too, but automobiles miraculously don't cause pollution.* All of the high-polluters are unbranded; I guess we're lucky they aren't marked with BP's competition.

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“We want people to understand the climate issue a bit better and understand that there are twice as many greenhouse emissions from generating electricity than from all forms of transport combined."

Holy fucking shit. I know that EA has been spreading their legs for in-game advertisements for a few years now. This, though, goes beyond product placement. They are now presenting industry propaganda completely unchecked. I really cannot support this game in any way. In fact, I would encourage people to buy completely legal copies and destroy them.

Here are a few of my own ideas for the game:

-When you build a BP headquarters, they will spend millions buying off your city officials in order to deregulate the publicly-owned energy utilities. Once that happens, they monopolize the energy industry. Then they start manipulating the reserve power in order to artificially inflate supply and thereby raise prices. You can actually zoom in and watch your old Sims freeze to death in the winter because they can't afford heat (alternately, you can watch as they pay for heat but neglect their prescription medication).

-As your city fills with automobiles, your oil demand skyrockets. The pollution they generate causes a high incidence of respiratory disorders. The BP board surreptitiously fixes prices at gas stations, causing ill will. You are forced to pay huge subsidies to BP in order to replace their oil rigs destroyed by tsunamis (an unfortunate side effect of global warming). A war in the Middle East causes gas prices to triple, business suffers, the crime rate skyrockets. Billions of dollars in oil is lost to the black market; BP is of course completely innocent.

-You have to levy huge taxes on your middle class citizens because, for some reason, you can't tax the upper class above 4% (the slider won't go higher).

Maybe I'm being too harsh. Not all energy companies are the same. They just all collaborate behind closed doors with the Vice President for some reason.**


*I recall Buckminster Fuller's take on the LA smog - a rebuttal to oil companies who denied that automobiles contributed a significant amount of pollution - and how Sunday mornings had mysteriously clear skies along with little traffic, surely a coincidence.

**For those who think I'm being unnecessarily conspiratorial:
"The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated."

Doomed

Jared Diamond's Collapse is an interesting read, in an absolutely chilling way.

I am always reminded of its lessons whenever I hear how a social organization designed to make human life better ends up creating the opposite situation.

Consider this firedoglake post about the California fires.

To sum up:

People form communities so they can collectively achieve more than they could alone. These communities pool resources in order to effectively deal with disasters. Then some of the people in the community become so wealthy that they don't have to worry about disasters, because they can insure their property for more than its worth and they can always move to their summer home. So they form another organization of other wealthy people who pitch a fit that their taxes are too high.

They use their wealth to gain influence, and use their influence to buy politicians. The politicians cut taxes to please these shitheels. Children starve. People walk around sick and dying. Food is contaminated. Toys leak poison. Cities are swept off the map because the levees weren't maintained.

And in California, fires destroy lots of property and kill lots of people.

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The signs of our collapse are pretty clear. They are in the headlines every day. Not just America, but we're already in the disintegration process. We can shamble on for a couple hundred years as a husk - the Roman Empire did.

But we're at the point where we are squandering our resources at such a fantastic rate and lack the political will to take care of anyone but the superrich.

Our President, phony huckster fuckstick that he is, demands billions for his imperial ambitions and then threatens to veto a bill that gives health care to children. He should've choked to death on that pretzel. Too bad the opposition party can't muster enough courage to pluck a lame duck.

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California burns. The budgets were cut more and more every year. Unchecked global warming increased the fire risk year after year. The National Guard is busy being overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan. FEMA was gutted by the Department of Homeland Security, who are too busy selecting targets to be kidnapped and sent to Syria for CIA torture to do a goddamn thing to save people.

It's not that things haven't been this bad before.

It's that I've got to fucking live in it.

Experts

Look, I have the greatest respect for Freeman Dyson.

But just because you know very much about a certain thing does not mean that you know very much about certain other things. Just because you are fairly certain about the things you know very much about doesn't mean your certainty is automatically transferred to things of which you know very little.

To put it simply: You know about as much as I do about climate science. You even admit your lack of knowledge.

But then you rationalize your bullshit contrary opinion with the notion of climate scientists who never go outside, never take real measurements, and somehow work only with computer models. Climate science is not wholly done by simulation-only shut-ins. Even fucking weathermen look out the window and use barometers and thermometers and all kinds of real world science.

Climate scientists correlate much more data on a much larger scale. This isn't rocket science or advanced physics. It's basic knowledge about a very general field of scientists studying our actual physical world using actual physical data. They don't sit around and say, "Hey, it's warm out, must be global warming."

That kind of sloppy thinking is pretty much confined to mush-headed corporate apologists and disingenuous fundamentalists: "If there's global warming then how come it's so cold outside right now?"

In other words, Freeman Dyson is very intelligent, but that doesn't mean he isn't acting like a moron.