1. Territory War Gaming Potatoes Skins
2. Territory War Gaming Potatoes Tots

Home > 2020 > Confronting Major Crisis, Two International visions | Noam Chomsky

• © 2021 Gambling-History.com.
• An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon.
• View Grant Morrow’s profile on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional community. Grant has 4 jobs listed on their profile. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover Grant’s connections and jobs at similar companies.
• Browse the newest, top selling and discounted Strategy products on Steam.

This Blog is for players and collectors of traditional War Games. It provides information and commentary about older board games from publishers such as TAHGC, SPI, and GDW. Most of the titles discussed here are out of print and available only in the resale market. Still, I hope that the various posts, game descriptions, book reviews, critiques, and other hobby-related material that I present.

Mainstream, VOL LVIII No 42, New Delhi, October 3, 2020

Keynote speech at Progressive International inaugural summit, 18 Sept 2020

Friday 2 October 2020

by Noam Chomsky

We are meeting at a remarkable moment, a moment that is, in fact, unique in human history, a moment both ominous in portent and bright with hopes for a better future. The Progressive International has a crucial role to play in determining which course history will follow.

We are meeting at a moment of confluence of crises of extraordinary severity, with the fate of the human experiment quite literally at stake. The issues are coming to a head in the next few weeks in the two great imperial powers of the modern era.

Fading Britain, having publicly declared that it rejects international law, is on the verge of a sharp break from Europe, on the path to becoming even more of a US satellite that it already is. But of course what is of the greatest significance for the future is what happens in the global hegemon, diminished by Trump’s wrecking ball, but still with overwhelming power and incomparable advantages. Its fate, and with it the fate of the world, may well be determined in November.

Not surprisingly, the rest of the world is concerned, if not appalled. It would be difficult to find a more sober and respected commentator than Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times. He writes that the West is facing a serious crisis, and if Trump is re-elected, “this will be terminal.” Strong words, and he is not even referring to the major crises humanity faces.

Wolf is referring to the global order, a critical matter though not on the scale of the crises that threaten vastly more serious consequences, the crises that are driving the hands of the famous Doomsday Clock towards midnight – towards termination.

Wolf’s concept “terminal” is not a new entry into public discourse. We have been living under its shadow for 75 years, ever since we learned, on an unforgettable August day, that human intelligence had devised the means that would soon yield the capacity for terminal destruction. That was shattering enough, but there was more. It was not then understood that humanity was entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which human activities are despoiling the environment in a manner that is now also approaching terminal destruction.

The hands of the Doomsday Clock were first set shortly after atomic bombs were used in a paroxysm of needless slaughter. The hands have oscillated since, as global circumstances have evolved. Every year that Trump has been in office, the hands have been moved closer to midnight. Two years ago they reached the closest they had ever been. Last January, the analysts abandoned minutes, turning to seconds: 100 seconds to midnight. They cited the same crises as before: the growing threats of nuclear war and of environmental catastrophe, and the deterioration of democracy.

The last might at first seem out of place, but it is not. Declining democracy is a fitting member of the grim trio. The only hope of escaping the two threats of termination is vibrant democracy in which concerned and informed citizens are fully engaged in deliberation, policy formation, and direct action.

That was last January. Since then, President Trump has amplified all three threats, not a mean accomplishment. He has continued his demolition of the arms control regime that has offered some protection against the threat of nuclear war, while also pursuing development of new and even more dangerous weapons, much to the delight of military industry. In his dedicated commitment to destroy the environment that sustains life, Trump has opened up vast new areas for drilling, including the last great nature reserve. Meanwhile his minions are systematically dismantling the regulatory system that somewhat mitigates the destructive impact of fossil fuel use, and that protects the population from toxic chemicals and from pollution, a curse that is now doubly murderous in the course of a severe respiratory epidemic.

Trump has also carried forward his campaign to undermine democracy. By law, presidential appointments are subject to Senate confirmation. Trump avoids this inconvenience by leaving the positions open and filling the offices with “temporary appointments” who answer to his will – and if they do not do so with sufficient fealty to the lord, are fired. He has purged the executive of any independent voice. Only sycophants remain. Congress had long ago established Inspectors General to monitor the performance of the executive branch. They began to look into the swamp of corruption that Trump has created in Washington. He took care of that quickly by firing them. There was scarcely a peep from the Republican Senate, firmly in Trump’s pocket, with hardly a flicker of integrity remaining, terrified by the popular base Trump has mobilized.

This onslaught against democracy is only the bare beginning. Trump’s latest step is to warn that he may not leave office if he is not satisfied with the outcome of the November election. The threat is taken very seriously in high places. To mention just a few examples, two highly respected retired senior military commanders released an open letter to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, reviewing his constitutional responsibility to send the army to remove by force a “lawless president” who refuses to leave office after electoral defeat, summoning in his defense the kinds of paramilitary units he dispatched to Portland Oregon to terrorize the population over the strong objection of elected officials.

Many establishment figures regard the warning as realistic, among them the high-level Transition Integrity Project, which has just reported the results of the “war gaming” it has been conducting on possible outcomes of the November election. The project members are “some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around,” the Project co-director explains, including prominent figures in both Parties. Under any plausible scenario apart from a clear Trump victory, the games led to something like civil war, with Trump choosing to end “the American experiment.”

Again, strong words, never before heard from sober mainstream voices. The very fact that such thoughts arise is ominous enough. They are not alone. And given incomparable US power, far more than the “American experiment” is at risk.

Nothing like this has happened in the often troubled history of parliamentary democracy. Keeping to recent years, Richard Nixon – not the most delightful person in presidential history — had good reason to believe that he had lost the 1960 election only because of criminal manipulation by Democratic operatives. He did not contest the results, putting the welfare of the country ahead of personal ambition. Albert Gore did the same in 2000. Not today.

Forging new paths in contempt for the welfare of the country does not suffice for the megalomaniac who dominates the world. Trump has also announced once again that he may disregard the Constitution and “negotiate” for a third term if he decides he is entitled to it.

Some choose to laugh all this off as the playfulness of a buffoon. To their peril, as history shows.

The survival of liberty is not guaranteed by “parchment barriers,” James Madison warned. Words on paper are not enough. It is founded on the expectation of good faith and common decency. That has been torn to shreds by Trump along with his co-conspirator Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has turned the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” as it calls itself, into a pathetic joke. McConnell’s Senate refuses even to consider legislative proposals. Its concern is largesse to the rich and stacking the judiciary, top to bottom with far right young lawyers who should be able to safeguard the reactionary Trump-McConnell agenda for a generation, whatever the public wants, whatever the world needs for survival.

The abject service to the rich of the Trump-McConnell Republican party is quite remarkable, even by the neoliberal standards of exaltation of greed. One illustration is provided by the leading specialists on tax policy, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. They show that in 2018, following the tax scam that was the one legislative Trump-McConnell achievement, “for the first time in the last hundred years, billionaires have paid less [in taxes] than steelworkers, school teachers, and retirees,” erasing “a century of fiscal history.” “In 2018, for the first time in the modern history of the United States, capital has been taxed less than labor” – a truly impressive victory of class war, called “liberty” in hegemonic doctrine.

The Doomsday Clock was set last January before the scale of the pandemic was understood. Humanity will sooner or later recover from the pandemic, at terrible cost. It is needless cost. We see that clearly from the experience of countries that took decisive action when China provided the world with the relevant information about the virus on January 10. Primary among them were East-Southeast Asia and Oceania, with others trailing along, and bringing up the rear a few utter disasters, notably the US, followed by Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Modi’s India.

Despite the malfeasance or indifference of some political leaders, there will ultimately be some kind of recovery from the pandemic. We will not, however, recover from the melting of the polar icecaps, or the exploding rate of arctic fires that are releasing enormous amounts of greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere, or other steps on our march to catastrophe.

When the most prominent climate scientists warn us to “Panic Now,” they are not being alarmist. There is no time to waste. Few are doing enough, and even worse, the world is cursed by leaders who are not only refusing to take sufficient action but are deliberately accelerating the race to disaster. The malignancy in the White House is far in the lead in this monstrous criminality.

It is not only governments. The same is true of fossil fuel industries, the big banks that finance them, and other industries that profit from actions that put the “survival of humanity” at serious risk, in the words of a leaked internal memo of America’s largest bank.

Humanity will not long survive this institutional malignancy. The means to manage the crisis are available. But not for long. One primary task of the Progressive International is to ensure that we all panic now – and act accordingly.

The crises we face in this unique moment of human history are of course international. Environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, and the pandemic have no borders. And in a less transparent way, the same is true of the third of the demons that stalk the earth and drive the second hand of the Doomsday clock towards midnight: the deterioration of democracy. The international character of this plague becomes evident when we examine its origins.

Circumstances vary, but there are some common roots. Much of the malignancy traces back to the neoliberal assault on the world’s population launched in force 40 years ago.

The basic character of the assault was captured in the opening pronouncements of its most prominent figures. Ronald Reagan declared in his inaugural address that government is the problem, not the solution – meaning that decisions should be removed from governments, which are at least partially under public control, to private power, which is completely unaccountable to the public, and whose sole responsibility is self-enrichment, as chief economist Milton Friedman proclaimed. The other was Margaret Thatcher, who instructed us that there is no society, only a market in which people are cast to survive as best they can, with no organizations that enable them to defend themselves against its ravages.

Unwittingly no doubt, Thatcher was paraphrasing Marx, who condemned the autocratic rulers of his day for turning the population into a “sack of potatoes,” defenseless against concentrated power.

With admirable consistency, the Reagan and Thatcher administrations moved at once to destroy the labor movement, the primary impediment to harsh class rule by the masters of the economy. In doing so, they were adopting the leading principles of neoliberalism from its early days in interwar Vienna, where the founder and patron saint of the movement, Ludwig von Mises, could scarcely control his joy when the proto-fascist government violently destroyed Austria’s vibrant social democracy and the despicable trade unions that were interfering with sound economics by defending the rights of working people. As von Mises explained in his 1927 neoliberal classic Liberalism, five years after Mussolini initiated his brutal rule, “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history” – though it will be only temporary, he assured us. The Blackshirts will go home after having accomplished their good work.

The same principles inspired enthusiastic neoliberal support for the hideous Pinochet dictatorship. A few years later, they were put into operation in a different form in the global arena under the leadership of the US and UK.

The consequences were predictable. One was sharp concentration of wealth alongside of stagnation for much of the population, reflected in the political realm by undermining of democracy. The impact in the United States brings out very clearly what one would expect when business rule is virtually uncontested. After 40 years, 0.1% of the population have 20% of the wealth, twice what they had when Reagan was elected. CEO remuneration has skyrocketed, drawing general management wealth along with it. Real wages for non-supervisory male workers have declined. A majority of the population survives from paycheck to paycheck, with almost no reserves. Financial institutions, largely predatory, have exploded in scale. There have been repeated crashes, increasing in severity, the perpetrators bailed out by the friendly taxpayer, though that is the least of the implicit state subsidy they receive. “Free markets” led to monopolization, with reduced competition and innovation, as the strong swallowed the weak. Neoliberal globalization has deindustrialized the country within the framework of the investor rights agreements mislabeled as “free trade pacts.” Adopting the neoliberal doctrine that “taxation is robbery,” Reagan opened the door to tax havens and shell companies – previously banned and barred by effective enforcement. That led at once to a huge tax evasion industry to expedite massive robbery of the general population by the very rich and the corporate sector. Not small change. The scale is estimated in tens of trillions of dollars.

And so it continues as neoliberal doctrine took hold.

As the assault was just beginning to take shape, in 1978, the president of the United Auto Workers, Doug Fraser, resigned from a labor-management committee that was set up by the Carter Administration, expressing his shock that business leaders had “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country — a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society,” and had “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress” – during the period of class collaboration under regimented capitalism.

His recognition of how the world works was somewhat belated, in fact too late to fend off the bitter class war launched by business leaders who were soon granted free rein by compliant governments. The consequences over much of the world come as little surprise: widespread anger, resentment, contempt for political institutions while the primary economic ones are hidden from view by effective propaganda. All of this provides fertile territory for demagogues who can pretend to be your savior while stabbing you in the back, meanwhile deflecting the blame for your conditions to scapegoats: immigrants, blacks, China, whoever fits long-standing prejudices.

Returning to the major crises we face at this historic moment, all are international, and two internationals are forming to confront them. One is opening today: the Progressive International. The other has been taking shape under the leadership of Trump’s White House, a Reactionary International comprising the world’s most reactionary states.

In the Western Hemisphere, the International includes Bolsonaro’s Brazil and a few others. In the Middle East, prime members are the family dictatorships of the Gulf; al-Sisi’s Egyptian dictatorship, perhaps the harshest in Egypt’s bitter history; and Israel, which long ago discarded its social democratic origins and shifted far to the right, the predicted effect of the prolonged and brutal occupation. The current agreements between Israel and Arab dictatorships, formalizing long-standing tacit relations, are a significant step towards solidifying the Middle East base of the Reactionary International. The Palestinians are kicked in the face, the proper fate of those who lack power and do not grovel properly at the feet of the natural masters.

To the East, a natural candidate is India, where Prime Minister Modi is destroying India’s secular democracy and turning the country into a racist Hindu nationalist state, while crushing Kashmir. The European contingent includes Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary and similar elements elsewhere. The International also has powerful backing in the dominant global economic institutions.

The two internationals comprise a good part of the world, one at the level of states, the other popular movements. Each is a prominent representative of much broader social forces, which have sharply contending images of the world that should emerge from the current pandemic. One force is working relentlessly to construct a harsher version of the neoliberal global system from which they have greatly benefited, with more intensive surveillance and control. The other looks forward to a world of justice and peace, with energies and resources directed to serving human needs rather than the demands of a tiny minority. It is a kind of class struggle on a global scale, with many complex facets and interactions.

It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the human experiment depends on the outcome of this struggle.

Territory War Gaming Potatoes Skins

Berserk Games, creators of TableTop Simulator, have a pretty succinct description of what the platform is and is intended to do:

Create your own original games, import custom assets, automate games with scripting, set up complete RPG dungeons, manipulate the physics, create hinges & joints, and of course flip the table when you are losing the game. All with an easy to use system integrated with Steam Workshop. You can do anything you want in Tabletop Simulator. The possibilities are endless!

What it gives you is the power to have your own table, your own chits, your own terrain, your own models, all digital, all multiplayer, and available all day every day, in VR if you swing that way. If you’re fond of complex wargames, the kind that you need to leave on the table all weekend while you and your friends bang away at the front lines – this will keep the cat from disrupting your defensive forces. If you’re looking to play some solo wargaming titles, this will be your best friend as you can pull it out whenever you have time to sit down and play and it’ll be there when you come back after your next shift.

Berserk Games have been no chumps when it comes to updates. They’ve gone out aggressively over the past few years and has become significantly more optimized. Some sort of update, often involving the announcement of some new DLC as well as core engine improvements, has been rolling out every couple of weeks. The developers continue to be keen on making the product best of class.

What’s In the Basket?

When I say there is a wide array of content available for TTS, I’m not kidding. As of the writing of this article in mid April 2019, there are 37 pieces of paid DLC available (and that's not counting the excellent free stuff), each one of them representing a full game within TTS, with all the supporting art, a fully designed table, and some mechanical support.

Lock ‘N Load Starter Kit Tabletop Edition

An easy first example: Do you love Lock’n Load hex-based wargames? There is an official but lightly supported module which provides all the tools that you might need to play your favorite LNL game right inside TS.

Twilight Imperium IV

If you’re willing to step off of the domain of the officially licensed, you can play Twilight Imperium 4th Edition with the errata in a virtual space.

Is it sanctioned? No. Is it available? Oh yes. And frankly I can’t think of a better gateway drug to playing complex space wargames on the tabletop than actually getting to play TI4 with other people in a shared space. Plus, you don’t have to shell out all that money for the physical box.

Advanced Squad Leader

Nothing beats the classics – and when we talk about classic tabletop wargames, we absolutely have to talk about what gave rise to Vassal in the first place: The granddaddy of complicated tabletop wargaming, Advanced Squad Leader.

Dice, maps, introductory scenarios – you have everything in the first Starter Kit, and in the description they give a link to where you can buy the actual ASL rules and expansions for yourself.

Scythe

It is a time of unrest in 1920s Europa. The ashes from the first great war still darken the snow. The capitalistic city-state known simply as “The Factory,” which fueled the war with heavily armored mechs, has closed its doors, drawing the attention of several nearby countries.
In Scythe, each player represents a fallen leader attempting to restore their honor and lead their faction to power in Eastern Europa. Players conquer territory, enlist new recruits, reap resources, gain villagers, build structures, and activate monstrous mechs.

Speaking of tactical hex-based battle with some pretty significant crunch, Scythe brings both of them together at high speed with what I consider to be some of the best art available in official TTS DLC. The fact that you get to use giant stompy mechs in 1920s Europe is just gravy.

The designers say that you can play a game of Scythe in 115 minutes – and that might be true if you have all of the relatively complex mechanics committed to memory and your group likes to use chess timers. For the rest of us, gameplay is going to take a bit longer but on the positive side you are going to enjoy it even as you're frustrated by the actions of other players.

This is another one of those games which is playable solo. If you’re curious about this kind of tabletop tactical/4X game, it’s definitely worth picking up and getting into.

Warfighter

Warfighter is a card game for 1 to 6 players. You play cooperatively with your friends against the system to complete present day squad-level combat missions. At the start of each mission, you each select a soldier, equip him/her with skills, weapons, and combat gear within the mission’s Resource limit.

You then fight your way through hostile territory, engaging hostiles, as you attempt to reach and complete your mission objective. Every mission is a stand-alone game. You build your Soldiers, select your Gear, and then run your mission. Within 30 to 60 minutes you will have succeeded or failed.

Warfighter uses a new combat system that takes into account the fire mode you select for your weapon, range, running out of ammo, suppression, and cover - all in the same dice roll! This system creates an incredibly deep narrative with every attack.

It just wouldn’t do to round this off without talking about some kind of modern combat, and luckily TTS doesn’t leave us hanging. One of the things that the system does extremely well, far better than actual physical games, it is deal with decks of cards. If a game uses a lot of different cards, it can be very difficult to manage them in a box, keep them separated, and clean them up when you’re done.

Not so here.

Warfighter gives you the base game and nine expansions for well under $20 US. Only the host needs to have a copy of the game, so playing with your friends is no great burden; it’s just like buying a new game to play with them. It’s another game that has a solo combat mode, so on those days you can’t get together with them, you can still play.

Fans of games like 5150 and Nuts! will find this sort of thing definitely playing to their particular tastes. Actually getting to play this in VR through TTS would be amazing. Gameplay is extremely complex and while the instructions are right there on the table, they are literally right there on the table modeled as books so reading and referencing while figuring out exactly what you need to do can be a little challenging.

X-Wing

This is probably one of miniature gaming’s great successes, looking at the penetration of the market well beyond the usual grognard tabletop crew. For good reason; X-Wing is a mechanically light, fast-moving game design with an IP that nearly everyone knows.

Being able to throw a game together in short order online is impressive. The models that this DLC comes with are likewise.

Renegade Legion: Interceptor

One of the great things about digital versions of games is that it doesn’t matter if the original game has gone the way of the dodo, as long as someone loves it enough to make the playing pieces available, the game can be played. Old-school tabletop spacemen undoubtedly remember Interceptor as “that game with the weird damage system,” and they are absolutely correct.

Renegade Legion may be a game series which doesn’t have the following it once did, but there’s no reason it couldn’t see a flourishing Renaissance should its community embrace digital play.

Bits and Bobs

But what if there’s nothing out right now for your favourite wargame? What if all you really want to do is throw some terrain on a table, whip out some dice, and play whatever game that you want with your friends, old-school?

You don’t need mechanical support, you don’t need integration, you just want to play a game. Well…

Terrain

Because the engine provides the ability for you to upload and use your own terrain, your own models, your own maps, you have effectively infinite options for putting your wargaming table together.

Dice

You can’t play most games without a good set of dice. Again, the ability to upload your own models means that you (and everybody else) are limited only by your imagination.

Need a 30 sided die with one through three replaced with pictures of giant flaming eyeballs? No problem. There are even tools which will help you create those images and get them onto the model for play.

What does it look like in motion?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been burned by tools in the past. Lots of things have excellent descriptions but when you sit down to use them, they just don’t work, or they work in a way that isn’t comfortable for you or they simply don’t live up to the hype. It happens all the time.

We don’t recommend you buy anything without having seen someone else actually playing it or actually using the tool. You want to know TS works, how it feels, and how it can be part of the experience for wargaming on the digital tabletop.

Luckily, YouTube is surprisingly busy with TS content.

Warhammer 40k - Kill Team

While writing this article, I took a few moments to simply go search the Tube to see what people were playing and streaming, and immediately was struck by a live demo of the new Warhammer 40k — Kill Team skirmish game, and it served as both a demo of TS and exposure to Games Workshop’s new product. That’s a solid win no matter which side of that you’re interested in.

5150: Hammer & Anvil

Video isn’t the only way to see how TS can be used, because we don’t always play wargames with friends. Sometimes the solo experience is really what you want. In those situations, it can be just as helpful or useful to see the digital tabletop used for illustrative purposes as well as the game platform that you use to play the game.

If you’ve ever wanted to blog about your favorite tabletop wargame and really kind of fretted about how you can make the illustrations look good for the audience you’re trying to reach, TS can help you out. It’s easy to make your own tokens and chits, terrain is available everywhere, you can draw your own maps, and if you’re a blogger who’s writing about tabletop wargames a tool that can make it easier to present turn by turn gaming is absolutely invaluable.

Vassalized?

Some people have been using an online platform called VASSAL for years to play board and card-based games with their friends online. Using it, you can play both live and via email and it’s both free and open source. You can probably run it on a potato if you gently push the potato downstairs.

However, it is limited by being programmed in a very old style of Java with a user interface to match. It doesn’t do 3D visualization and any terrain that you might put on the table is simply top-down imagery.

TTS is fully 3D with a limited physics engine and playable both on the desktop and via VR. It has models, textures, animation, and a certain level of available scripting (in Lua). While it is necessary that you pay for the core, it’s frequently on sale at significant discounts. You can’t quite run it on a potato but you could probably run it on two potatoes strapped together as long as one pretended to be a graphics card.

Hot or Not

If you’re looking for a game platform that you can play games you already own and don’t mind doing a little work to get the assets in, TTS is your huckleberry. If you’re looking for a platform with a lot of already created games that you don’t have to do any work to start playing, look through the pile of available DLC for TTS and make your decision on that basis. The available game content is great, but the possibility of bringing your own game into the space and inviting other people to play with you is as important if not more so.

Whether you want to play board games, tactical wargames, or even grand strategy games like Twilight Imperium, TTS can provide a shared space for you and your friends to come together around the table and play.

Do you have a favourite game you play on TableTop Simulator with your friends? Tell us about it down below!

Comments

Related Posts from Wargamer

Featured

Top Articles

Territory War Gaming Potatoes Tots