For all of you who think Europe is better educated, more sophisticated and tolerant, here’s a racist rant on a London tram, complete with classic British vocabulary. Who said Americans were stupid?

This scene is being played out daily in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, German, Italian and Greek.

Oh well, at least she’s got healthcare … for the moment.

Media doesn’t tell you what to think; media decides what you should think about. If you’ve wondered why Americans are so dumb about the world, the side-by-side comparison of TIME Magazine covers explains a big part of our problem. Original here; click to embiggen. 

Europe’s financial crisis isn’t staying in Europe; demand for American goods and services is declining. This is why I don’t understand people who root for Europe to fail:

It’s affecting companies like Marlin Steel Wire Products, a 34-employee business based in Baltimore that’s been seeking a $4 million contract from a German manufacturer for an industrial steel wire project.

Marlin’s CEO, Drew Greenblatt, says the German firm is in “pause mode” because of Europe’s turmoil. The German company had promised the order by early November.

Marlin’s overall sales are growing briskly. But sales to Europe have been sinking.

“If they were ordering like they customarily do, we would have hired more guys,” Greenblatt said.

The global economy isn’t just something bankers cooked up in a back room. The EU, for instance, was created right out in the open over a series of decades by multiple generations of policymakers who were determined to integrate their economies so that no one could set off another European war ever again. The downside was always that major European states, however peaceful in their relations, might not be run by people with larger European interests at heart — indeed, they might be easily distracted, or incompetent.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions.

Hegelian determinism and the power dialectic cannot accurately describe the reality of, but merely offer an easy story to explain the existence of, global power structures. Like Biblical creation myths, these stories can capture our imaginations without informing us of the science or helping us determine a practical course of action. “Tear it all down and start over” is not a practical course of action, while “regulate and tax” is. I’ll be accused of ‘neoliberalism’ for saying that, but then liberalism has traditionally been science- and reality-based instead of ideological.

No, Egypt and America are not the same country. But it doesn’t matter; today’s young, progressive generation is reaching adulthood and finding it a far heavier burden than their parents. Their demands are as recognizably American as red, white, and blue, but they echo those of an educated, anxious Egyptian youth bulge. The comparisons of Occupy Wall Street to Tahrir Square are not without foundation.

By Magic Love Hose

(This post was written entirely whilst playing a game of Civilization 5. If it seems more scattershot than usual – that’s why.)

A recent post as Kotaku mused a great deal about Infamous 2 – specifically the section where the player, controlling an electrically-powered superhero traverses a flooded analogue of New Orleans:

It’s not that Infamous 2 has much to say about Katrina or the politics that surrounded an American tragedy. It doesn’t. The post-Katrina game does something else, something important, something that it performs arguably more effectively than post-Katrina documentaries and TV dramas. In a way only a video game can, it puts you there, on the roofs above the drowning waters.

Infamous 2 is an argument that games can perform a valuable enough service. They can be virtual reality, or, really, virtual tragedy, simulators. That may excuse them for having so little to say about our modern world.

(Emphasis mine.) I’ve played through both Infamous games, as a straight arrow hesitant to unleash his most powerful abilities until the streets are cleared of innocent civilians.  I know exactly what section Stephen Totlio is talking about – and, left unmentioned, the large chunk of real estate in the first game smashed to rubble by the explosion that gave Cole McGrath the ability to control electricity. I admit to feeling much like he did – a kind of impotent rage at watching a huge chunk of city lying dead in a pool of sludge.

But I question the notion that video games can’t say anything profound about the world. Yes, most video games have little to say other than “look how the bullets kill people realistically.” When the hashtag #carmageddon tore up Twitter my first thought was towards the creepy running-over-people PC game from the late ’90s. I’ll take a shot and say that said PC game had little to say on the subject of vehicular manslaughter and urban planning. Even Infamous, fun as it is as a “Grand Theft Superhero” kind of game, is ultimately a pulpy story of a superhero who shoots lightning running around a city.

But video games are a very broad medium. So broad many of them have little in common beyond “controlled by player input on an electronic device.” Angry Birds has little in common with Final Fantasy. Halo is not that much like Super Mario. And Infamous 2′s approach to interaction with a city isn’t a patch on actual civilization sims – like Sim City and Civilization.

Both games are most popular on the PC, and the PC’s always been the art house of the gaming scene – not that popular, but capable of occasional profundity. Games like Civilization can be seen as both an entertaining virtual boardgame, sucking the player in by having multiple systems developing simultaneously, turn by turn – and when viewed from a bit further back they can tell us a lot about how people, and society, work.

War is not inevitable in Civilization 5 – but it can start to look very appealing, as you look at a drained treasury and an unhappy populace and see the solution to both problems within your neighbor’s borders. Sure, you can choose not to go to war – and watch as the unhappy populace drains your population growth to the point you can’t produce goods quickly, and as the treasury dwindles and units are disbanded and your science becomes a joke. And then war becomes inevitable anyways, if the person running the other empire sees how vulnerable you’ve left yourself and decides to roll a dozen or so units into your borders with technology superior to yours, and sack your cities and take them over. Civilization lets the player experience firsthand the saddest truism of statecraft: that it takes two to want peace for there to be peace, but only one to want war for there to be war.

Of course, as I wrote, war isn’t inevitable – it’s possible to make it so that no one wants to go to war with you, since the second they do their resources will be cut off and they’ll run into the same problems I just described. This would be victory through superior trade – a vision of a world that may yet be coming, as an extensive global network of trade makes it less and less desirable to sack a country when the blowback outweighs the benefits.  There are many wars to ‘win’ in Civilization - diplomatically, culturally, scientifically, and yes, through open war. The chief truism that runs through all of these is the need for relentless scientific development – any civilization, no matter how they choose to play the game, has to keep pushing the wheel of progress forth or they will fall behind.

As I watch the various peoples of Civilization press against each other, some peacefully, some not so – it’s given me a rudimentary insight into how the need for growth is the driver of so many problems, and that the need for growth comes out of competition, and that above all else, those who fail to innovate will be lost. I’m not saying I agree with the decisions of our geopolitical leaders – but I can see what drives them to make them.

Of course – in the end it is a game, and not a perfect reality simulator. The part that is least like modern society is this: you tell your civilization to do something and it pretty much gets done. When you ask to build a granary, the project isn’t delayed five months because the money disappeared up the construction company CEO’s nose. When you put an army together they don’t have one of the units refuse to serve because they think you weren’t born in the civilization they’re fighting for. There aren’t ten straight turns of negotiation with your advisers over the debt ceiling either.

Most importantly of all – unlike real world governments, you see all of the consequences, negative and positive, of all your decisions, spanning thousands of years. How neglecting science several turns back has now diminished your leverage over the world. How maybe you shouldn’t have chopped down that jungle now that you can get extra Science out of it. Governments are sadly terrible at projects that exceed their own lifespan. In this respect, some of our world leaders could do with a two-week vacation spent in front of the computer, saying “just one more turn.”

Magic Love Hose is not a professional politician. You can trust him because of in spite of that. He has a website and a Twitter and is 60% sure how to use them.