daezor
5d ago
What are we supposed to do when foreign governments target us with professional seductresses?
The obvious solution is to prefer gay men for sensitive intelligence roles. It's not that they're immune to seduction, but it's like a left-handed pitcher - they start off with an advantage because the usual tricks don't work. And their partners tend not to care that much about infidelity anyway, so that form of blackmail is off the table. The only problem is that they're now vulnerable to blackmail on the basis of homosexuality itself being condemned by the wider society. This can be solved by doing a top-down domestic propaganda campaign to make homosexuality acceptable in the home country. They're intelligence operatives, so it's all in a day's work.
daezor
5d ago
the great filter arguments people(mainly liberals)
When was the last time you heard liberals talking about the Great Filter? Isn't this a pre-Woke, pre-AtheismPlus type of argument?
(This, perhaps, is a question the commenters here may actually be qualified to weigh in on, unlike the Great Filter itself!)
daezor
17d ago
Article is login-walled so I'll just free-associate with the bit that's visible.
Never heard of this concept of "diaspora literature" before. Is this just an Asian thing, or can any "foreign" group write it? The reference to mangoes makes me think of The House on Mango Street, which is about Hispanics in Chicago. This was one of a number of such books that they made us read in high school, although I don't remember any about Asians.
Even then my classmates and I made fun of the fact that we had to read all these stories about "growing up [ethnic]" when hardly anyone in our class was of the ethnicity in question. In fact I think there would've been more Asians than Hispanics in that class.
Then again, a growing-up story focused on our lives would have made for a very boring book. "Got home from school, procrastinated by playing video games, had dinner while parents watched TV, got picked up by friend who just got his driver's license and likes to brag about it by driving everybody around, hung out and shot the shit, went home, realized it's almost midnight and I still haven't started my 10-page essay on The House on Mango Street due tomorrow...." Or maybe this is more a guy/girl difference than an ethnic thing.
Is this what diaspora literature is about?:
Bro us [ETHNIC IDENTITY]’s we do things a bit different, we love food, we respect our grandmas, and family is everything!
Although it sounds like these Asian authors are not particularly fond of their families.
daezor
23d ago
Then we'd come to another application with X, and that very same someone would say "let's toss this one out because X." Then I would say, "I thought you didn't think X was a problem though" and I would get kind of a nasty look, followed by vague irrelevant platitudes--not even hair splitting, just straight up gobbledygook.
This sort of thing endlessly frustrates me, and I guess I'm glad I'm not the only one. If we're gonna be like that, why do we have to waste so much time pretending that words have meanings, or that we have reasons for doing things other than "I like it because I like it, because I said so"? I believe Nietzsche complains about this also.
HEMA is associated with the whole Renfaire/LARPing/fantasy circuit, which is, like, woke ground-zero.
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