View source for Thoughts on geopolitics

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[[./memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=4616|Visions1]] wrote: [[./viewtopic.php?p=345379#p345379|'''']]<span class="responsive-hide">2025-07-23T17:12:17+00:00</span>
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Ideas:

&quot;Look at how females make up the clergy! The females monopolize power! If you join us,&quot; say the Partisans to rambunctious, hopeless males, &quot;you'll be free!&quot; And then the church is banned and now almost all females and males are equally powerless. Except for the military, which is male, and has to hate Claravian-led things. So they're chauvinist.

&quot;Yih and Hearthside rule everything. But declare your loyalty to our way, and you are saved!&quot; Leads to partisan Hearthsiders being accused of double loyalty, even if they actually agree with the Partisans. Blue membranes are a sign of world control apparently.

&quot;Gambling is a tool of the wealthy and powerful!&quot; So if you're from Sweetwater, you probably got fat on the hard work of others, and not because your ancestors lived on a seaweed raft facing storms without sugar in their diets. Discrimination against chunky-foxes and Sweetwaterers for no reason, yeah!

&quot;We keep a close eye on the clergy here! And unless they choose to get a non-parasitic job, no wages for them!&quot; And so the people who know how to run servers tend to get killed off, or at least starve unemployed, ruining infosec and communications.

&quot;The Claravians failed to control the addiction crises! We will do so by seizing the means of production!&quot; And hence, profiting finely from them, now on a planetary scale.

(Plenty of this happened way too many times to way too many groups in 1900s Russian history, and I think in other places.)
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I was going to correct you on Hearthside being geopolitically relevant enough for the Partisans to care by the time of First Contact, but then I realized that's probably your point. The Partisans, or at least certain segments of Partisan society, hold conspiracy theories about Hearthsiders secretly controlling the system. Makes sense. Your average Partisan citizen isn't going to interact with a lot of Hearthsiders, so they're not going to know enough about Hearthsider culture to form the kind of stereotypes that the AW has about them, namely that they're lazy. (They're not lazy, they're just less schedule-driven than most parts of the AW.) So all your average Fourpaws from Partisan Territory knows about Hearthside is that it's where the Bright Way is headquartered, and &quot;Bright Way Bad!&quot; sums up all they know about that.

I originally made the Partisans space commies casually, but the fact that the ideological core of the Partisans formed from people who were enslaved by an entity that was both a capitalist enterprise and (if only nominally at the time) a religious institution makes communism a good parallel for them. I'm not sure how far they would go with it, if they ever even claimed to be founding communes etc, or what exactly their elevator pitch was in the beginning. Perhaps they themselves really didn't know other than the current system had to go, and totalitarianism swooped in to fill the resulting power vacuum.

I'm also trying to flesh out the partisans as a group, make them more 3-dimensional, as can be seen in the 2038 problem with the durian-loving Partisan grunt.

Ironically I've barely touched the Allied Worlds even though their language is the most fleshed-out. I came up with them when I had to give Tod a military to serve under, and I was too lazy to make Sweetwater, Yih, Newhome, and Welkinstead all their own separate polities (to say nothing of having sovereign countries smaller than a planet). This whole time I've thought of them generically as the yinrih equivalent to The Western World, and the AW has consequently accrued some of the positive and negative traits I associate with the Anglosphere along with Europe and its more powerful former colonies, without developing the alliance much beyont that.

I don't think I've touched Newhome at all. I've thought of it sort of as a center of Neoshamanism since Sweetwater has Atavists and Hearthside has the Bright Way. Also fits with Newhome's history as being founded by Neoshamanist groups.


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