This lady [the Caesar] likes cleanliness too much… As a result, there is no shortage of ammunition for the Caesar. But these are not his concerns.

Gender-bending artillery

An underrated (to me) issue is how over time they’ve written in more and more justifications for the horrors of the Imperium. They’ve made it “yeah this is dark but you kind of see why they do it, right?” instead of the classic “this is the cruelest and most tyrannical system imaginable.”

In reality, fascism is horrific and unjustifiable, so fascists have to invent terrible consequences (immigrants! you know how many bajillions commies will kill if we don’t murder them now! the Gay Agenda!) that make a fascist regime, however terrible, look “justified” in comparison. 40k has done the same thing, except in-universe those terrible consequences are actually real.

Might end the Yellowstone expanded universe

Nuking any nuclear power has an unacceptably high chance of touching off a life-ending war, too.

I imagine actual NATO members are wondering the same thing, which doesn’t bode well for NATO.

full NATO backing didn’t make a lick of difference

We’re seeing what “full NATO backing” really means: we’ll sell you weapons, but we’re not dying for you or risking a wider war. That’s a lot less valuable than what NATO was sold as.

boot up my Windows ME PC, and start swearing every time it crashes (twenty minute intervals are what I remember).

The scale and refinement of those practices by European colonial powers adds to the gravity of the crimes

I’m agreeing with you.

are not unique to the western world and can also be found, sometimes in even worse form, among the oriental savages

I think it’s important not to get too contrarian when countering this. Those things did exist in various forms outside of Europe; to say they didn’t is to fall into the “noble savage” trope.

The reasons why that doesn’t matter are:

1. Whether some people enslaved (for instance) other people in the distant past under a now-defunct political system is an academic question. What matters to people living today is ongoing injustices and the effects of past injustices that can still be felt.
2. We should be trying to do less horrific things today, not looking to past horrors and saying “well that’s how it’s always been.”
3. The scale and refinement of those practices by European colonial powers adds to the gravity of the crimes (much like a methodical serial killer is worse than someone who shoots two people in a robbery).
4. While these practices did occur outside of the imperial core, they were not universal – just like modern governments commit varying degrees of crimes and are better or worse because of it, pre-colonial governments were not all guilty of the crimes of the worst pre-colonial governments.

We’re in about late October of 2001, yeah

Yeah, it kind of makes sense if magic is rare, difficult to obtain, but not entirely foreign. Basically a luxury good.

To use an example luxury good, we all know what a private jet is. We couldn’t build one or buy one, but we know there are people who can. It’d be cool to be in one but not some unimaginable experience.

This is a good point, but the space created there can be used to educate people on a subject they’d otherwise tune out. I don’t care (to an extent) why people are suddenly willing to oppose colonialism; once they’re actually engaging in that conversation there’s potential for them to change their mind in a way that will stick.

Commitment to the bit

Nazis will try to shut down your freedom to speak while protesting that they are being silenced. Then when they take power they’ll just shoot you.

You don’t disagree with your government; you didn’t know what your government’s position was until right now.

You still don’t really know what your government’s position is, otherwise you’d understand that here, as in many cases, there’s an official stance for diplomatic relations and then a bunch of propaganda (for both domestic and foreign consumption) that undermines that official stance.

Gal Godot’s Wonder Woman canonically did nothing while the Holocaust happened

China is such an excellent test for how gullible someone is. So many people will believe any bad thing they read on the internet about it, no matter how absurd, and no matter how easy it is to disprove.

https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/entertainment/theme-park/characters-meet-pooh/

So there’s a whole fucking Hundred Acre Wood exhibit, Pooh and all, but I guess if you text someone about it Xi appears from under your bed and black bags you?