domain:nature.com
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
4hr ago
What we instead got is this monstrous inversion where our successful people generally act conservative in their personal lives while encouraging self-destructive libertinism and emotional disregulation in the rest of the population.
Indeed; and while invoking Cain and Abel may flatter my personal biases, there's another one right next to it that very certainly does not: you can perhaps view [those humans given to be] traditionalists as Adam, progressives as Eve, and liberals as the Snake (and the sexes in that story are that way for good reason).
The liberals lie to the progressives so they'd take accept something that was too advanced for them and [that the liberal knew] the only reason they [progressive] wanted it was to be turbo-selfish with it.
The progressives in turn lie to the traditionalists, saying the thing was perfectly fine and good for everyone, don't think about it, just enjoy it.
And now everything's fucked up because beings that weren't supposed to have to deal with knowing [thing] now just have to deal with the consequences of knowing you can do [thing].
That, combined with the separation from God that comes from not being perfect with it, is how the knowledge from the fruit kills you!
Actually, both the Garden of Eden and Cain vs. Abel contrapose when read this way, but then the difference between the snake and Abel was that Abel acted faithfully and the snake faithlessly (and the siren call of the liberal t'was ever thus: did God truly say?)
It's strange that I've never heard anyone explain this in this way. Or maybe not, considering it's quite embarrassing, and especially to those "closer" to the fault (though there is ultimately no degree of "closer" in sin, and the traditionalists are too busy abusing it to shit-talk the progressives anyway in the "hurr Eve ate it first that means I'm better" sense anyway).
And maybe it's wrong, maybe I'm reading too hard into these... but if you're trying to explain how human nature and sin works to a prehistoric people then I'd say it describes the major players/impulses/excuses of the classes of humankind very well.
Of course, it doesn't say what each should do in response; the fact people can be bucketed this way is [and quite importantly] not part of the curse, but "the people more ready to accept 'did God truly say?'-type questions when they're posed in faith will instead desire and be ruled over by that class of people who are not so willing, and they will not be willing because they're cursed with having to work for a living until they die" sure is!
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4hr ago
Maybe it's cruel, morally, but I fail to see the connection with patriotism at all.
To steal a turn of phrase from someone I spoke to several years ago who was probably quoting someone else without attribution, "the truest form of patriotism is a desire to see your countrymen prosper." A political program which constantly castigates your fellows as parasites, regards their welfare with indifference, incites hate against them, or treats them as means to an end is not, in this paradigm, at all patriotic.
As evidenced by the whole patriotism thing: a Republican is quite literally less likely to listen to you, because they will get the impression that you hate the country and hate their values.
I think this is backwards: American conservatives want to define patriotism as equivalent to conservativism. Patriots must be conservative; conservatives cannot be unpatriotic; liberals are unpatriotic by dint of their politics. This is fundamentally unworkable because it is a paradigm that demands ideological submission as price of entry.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4hr ago
I appreciate the thorough response, but I think you're painting an unnecessarily bleak picture that doesn't account for several key factors.
You're right that my argument depends on relatively stable economic institutions, but this isn't as unrealistic as you suggest. We already have financial instruments that span centuries - perpetual bonds, endowments, trusts. The Vatican has maintained financial continuity for over 500 years.
Improving technology makes it at least theoretically possible to have such systems become even more robust, spanning into the indefinite, if not infinite future.
So this argument seems to depend on an eternally-stable investment market where you can put in value today and withdraw value in, say, five thousand years. No expropriation by government, no debasement of currency, no economic collapse, no massive fraud or theft, no pillage by hostile armies, every one of which we have numerous examples of throughout human history.
The precise details of how a post Singularity society might function are beyond me. Yet I expect that they would have far more robust solutions to such problems. What exactly is the currency to debase, when we might trade entirely in units of energy or in crypto currency?
The estimate I've heard recently is that the UK grooming gangs may have raped as many as a million girls. The cops looked the other way. The government looked the other way. My understanding is that the large majority of the perpetrators got away with it, and the few that got caught received minimal sentences for the amount of harm they caused.
Where on Earth did you come across this claim???
Does it not strike you as prima facie absurd? The population of the UK is about 68 million, if around 1.5% of the entire population, or 3% of the women, had been raped by organized "rape gangs", I think we'd have noticed. I live here, for Christ's sake. That's the kind of figure you'd expect in a country under occupation or literally in the midst of a civil war.
The confirmed numbers, which are definitely an understatement, are about 5k girls total. I don't see how you can stretch that another 3 orders of magnitude no matter how hard you try.
Putting aside those absurd figures:
The grooming gangs are indeed horrific, but they're not representative of how most vulnerable populations are treated in developed societies. For every Rotherham, there are thousands of care homes, hospitals, and institutions that function reasonably well. The vast majority of elderly people in care facilities, despite being physically vulnerable and economically dependent, aren't systematically abused.
Your examples of state collapse and genocide are real risks, but they're risks that already exist for biological humans. The question isn't whether bad things can happen, but whether the additional risks of uploading outweigh the benefits. A world capable of supporting uploaded minds is likely one with sophisticated technology and institutions - probably more stable than historical examples, not less.
To sum up: you are counting on money to protect you, on the understanding that you will be economically useless, and the assumption that you will have meaningful investments and that nothing bad will ever happen to them. You are counting on people who own you to be trustworthy, and to only transfer possession of you to trustworthy people. And you are counting on the government to protect you, and never turn hostile toward you, nor be defeated by any other hostile government, forever.
You're describing the experience of a retiree.
The "ownable commodity" framing assumes a particular legal framework that need not exist. We already have legal protections against slavery, even of non-standard persons (corporations have rights, as do some animals in certain jurisdictions). There's no reason uploaded minds couldn't have robust legal protections - potentially stronger than biological humans, since their substrate makes certain forms of evidence and monitoring easier.
You mention trust extending through infinite chains, but this misunderstands how modern systems work. I don't need to trust every person my bank trusts, or every person my government trusts. Institutional structures, legal frameworks, and distributed systems can provide security without requiring universal interpersonal trust.
As Einstein, potentially apocryphally, said- Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. A post-Singularity economy has hordes of Von Neumann swarms turning all the matter in grasp to something useful, with a rate of growth only hard capped by the speed of light. It's not a big deal to expect even a small investment to compound, that's how retirement funds work today.
Further, you assume that I'll be entirely helpless throughout the whole process. Far from it. I want to be a posthuman intelligence that can function as a peer to any ASI, and plain biology won't cut it. Uploading my mind allows for enhancements that mere flesh and blood don't allow.
I could also strive to self-host my own hardware, or form a trusted community. There are other technological solutions to the issue of trust-
-
Substrates running on homomorphic encryption, where the provider can run your consciousness without ever being able to "read" it.
-
Decentralized hosting, where no single entity controls your file, but a distributed network does, governed by a smart contract you agreed to.
-
I could send trillions of copies of myself into interstellar space.
They really can't get all of me.
At the end of the day, you're arguing that because a totalitarian government could create digital hells, I should choose the certainty of annihilation. That's like refusing to board an airplane because of the risk of a crash, and instead choosing to walk off a cliff. Yes, the crash is horrific, but the cliff is a 100% guarantee of the same outcome: death.
Your argument is that because a system can fail, it will fail in the worst way imaginable, and therefore I should choose oblivion. My argument is that the choice is between certain death and a future with manageable risks. The economic incentives will be for security, not slavery. The technology will co-evolve with its own safeguards. And the societal risks, while real, are ones we already face and must mitigate regardless. If the rule of law collapses, we all lose.
The ultimate omnipotent god in this scenario is Death, and I'll take my chances with human fallibility over its perfect, inescapable certainty any day.
The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism
From time to time I read movie screenplays for movies I've already seen to help me fall asleep at night.
I read The Matrix screenplay right after a close friend of mine came out as trans and talked to me about it so it was top of mind and let me tell you the script is suspiciously full of trans messaging.
The police let their guard down in the beginning when arresting Trinity, not expecting a girl to be all that dangerous. Except she kills them
Then there's this
SCREEN
JACKON: I heard Morpheus has been
on this board.
SUPERASTIC: Morpheus doesn't even
exist and the Matrix is nothing
but an advertising gimmick 4 a new
game.
TIMAXE: All I want to know is
Trinity really a girl?
LODIII: 87% of all women on line
are really men.
Tee hee.
Then, Neo specifically says to Trinity when she confronts him at a party that he thought she was a guy. She replies that most guys do.
This all seems very Hollywood girlboss by today's standards but in 1999 I think they were playing with something deeper.
TRINITY
They're watching you. Something
happened and they found out about
you.
You're out of the closet buddy.
She continues, talking about Morpheus helping her wake up from the Matrix
He told me that no one should look
for the answer unless they have to
because once you see it,
everything changes. Your life and
the world you live in will never
be the same. It's as if you wake
up one morning and the sky is
falling.
I've spoken to a few trans people now and a recurring story is the collapse of their denial.They wake up and realize their whole life is a lie. It's really upsetting. They can't go back but they're also scared to go ahead.
Neo attempts to follow Morpheus' plan at work but he chickens out when he has to go out the window. Maybe he can go on without finding out? Then he's arrested.
AGENT SMITH
It seems that you have been living
two lives.
The pill to wake up being like the first time you take hormones, etc.
Uhh anyway there's more of this stuff. Might need to make a fun thread post.
GBRK
4hr ago
I'm writing a book where the main character wants to turn herself into a cannibalism-powered surveillance state, her best friend belongs to a tribe of matriarchal-eugenicist-fascists that can reasonably described as feminazis, the "good guys" are the IEEE if it was also simultaneously the illuminati, and the "bad guys" are a mix of UN blue helmets and the Knights Templar. I am balls deep in moral dissonance dissonance and nobody is going to stop me.
On the Decline of Democratic Patriotism
Some of you probably saw the patriotism poll floating around recently, and though I won't specifically talk about the decline of the "extreme" and "very" categories among both Democrats and Independents as a general trend, I do want to talk a little bit about one example from, well, today, that illustrates one source of anti-patriotic feeling. But first:
Local action is more patriotic than fireworks
Let me preface this by saying my own piece on what the most truly patriotic display would be tomorrow: Google, right now, what kind of local elections are happening in November (emphasis on LOCAL) and volunteer for the person you find to be most worthy of support. Email them now. Politics is over-nationalized, and people are forgetting that they can make a difference. Laws are more powerful than people give them credit! There's almost literally nothing we can't actually change. Hell, we can change the freaking Constitution itself if we want to! The entire House gets re-elected fresh every two years! More locally, is there a parking ordinance you hate? A requirement or tax you dislike? Want to enable some houses to be built, or the roads to be changed? You can change those. It starts with electing someone trustworthy and receptive.
People are forgetting, too, that participation in democracy isn't actually so much a matter of a contract or trade (you give X, receive Y) but rather a duty innate to all. Put another way, even if your national vote makes no mathematical difference, you have a moral duty to vote. Furthermore, your attitude towards the vote (and civic participation more generally) rubs off on the people around you to an extent that's underappreciated. In that light, if you don't bother to do any self-reflection of any kind tomorrow, what a missed opportunity, but also, how unfortunate. Yes, the biggest difference would probably be volunteering, but introspection surely is a close second (in terms of opportunity).
Medicare cuts as anti-patriotism?
On a more culture war note, as July 4th approaches, recently I've seen a number of expressions like this tweet, emphasis mine:
Anyone who voted for this should be voted out. 17M lose health care. Kids lose lunch. Vets lose help. All so billionaires get tax breaks and ICE gets a raise.
You gutted Medicaid and blew a $3.5T hole in the debt, and want a medal?
This ain’t patriotism. It’s cruelty. Shame on you.
Thoughts like this are common, and are often accompanied by a declaration that they themselves don't want to celebrate. Or, that waving flags and being a loud USA-chanter is massive hypocrisy. We've all heard some variant of this from parts of the left or disaffected neutrals as well.
Increasingly a lot of people seem to feel that healthcare is a human right. I'm... almost there, but not quite? But even proponents can admit it's not traditionally something seen as something fundamental Americans should be entitled to, so to me it seems a little strange to bring a policy and values dispute over modern healthcare into the conversation about if it's good to wave a flag, or if it's patriotic. Healthcare isn't something so quintessentially American as all that. Maybe it's cruel, morally, but I fail to see the connection with patriotism at all.
Celebrating and promoting patriotism in general is, to me, focusing on, being grateful for, and continuing to promote a specific set of values and traits unique and special to America. I think that's a serviceable definition. Specific values and traits means especially some of the freedoms originally emphasized in the constitution and declaration of independence. Life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness, freedom from government oppression, voting rights, power proceeding from the people themselves, that people are created equal, things like that are the values patriotism celebrates.
"How many people do we cover with national healthcare subsidies" and if we raise or lower that number compared to what it recently happened to be is ultimately a policy dispute. A serious one! Don't get me wrong! Even so, the fact that it results in some harm to people doesn't change the scope of the dispute - it's something where reasonable people can disagree within the same democratic framework. Deciding what level of taxes are appropriate is likewise a policy dispute. Obviously "taking care of our citizens" is a more universal thing, but it's not like that's never in tension with other priorities. It's not, like, an existential threat to America. (Trump possibly being a threat like that, which I think he partially is, is a reason to be more vigorous and loud about promoting the freedom he threatens, not a reason to be quieter and give up at any rate).
To use an analogy: some parents have different opinions on how strict to be with their kids, or how interventionist to be with them. Obviously extremes are bad (being a helicopter parent inhibits agency or is even toxic, while being too hands-off is callous or even abuse) but I don't look at a parent who favors a hands-off approach and say "oh you must not WANT your kid to be healthy and educated and fed, or else you would do X Y Z things". That's unfair. And is somewhat cultural/historical/circumstantial too, rather than purely a matter of eternal unchanging principle (e.g. whether parents should be required to pay part or all of their kids' college tuition or not is a good example of being both cultural, and something that's changed over time).
Republicans, charitably and writ large, aren't evil boogeymen. Most all of them also want people to be healthy and educated and fed and sheltered. But they have differing ideas of how to do it, and how much of a burden to take upon themselves. Remember that taxation levels, famously, apply to everyone, so everyone should get a say in how we set them. That's like... literally and famously the MOST American thing ever?
So, what you do if you're a Democrat is you go: "all right, I think being a [hands-on parent/Democrat] is the better choice, and I will push fellow [parents/voters] to also be [hands-on/Democrat], but at the end of the day I recognize that this is just a different of opinion and/or values, and that's fine". The fact that some [parents/Republicans] are also [abusive/even evil] doesn't change the core paradigm!
I don't accuse parents who don't want to pay for their kids' college of hating their kids, because I realize they are likely coming from a place of highly valuing financial independence, or simply don't have the budget for it, etc. I can still disagree, and think withholding tuition harms their kids, but that's a different level of disagreement.
Similarly, I don't accuse voters who don't want to pay for massive Medicare programs as hating poor people and being unpatriotic, because I realize that they are likely coming from a place of highly valuing individual choice, or feeling we don't have the budget for it, etc. I can still disagree, and think more Medicare saves cost, is a moral duty, etc. but that's still a different level of disagreement.
Is anti-celebration really anti-patriotism?
Like all things in life, there are times for celebration and times for mourning and times for action. It's nonsensical to forbid or look down on all expressions of joy or pride just because some negative event happened, especially on a holiday, the literal definition of a time where you have an excuse to be joyful even if times are tough?
To make another analogy, it seems to me the proper approach to patriotism is similar to that of self-worth. Psychologically speaking, you need some degree of self-respect, acknowledging your talents, and gratitude to be a good and functional human. Obviously there's a such thing as too much pride, which can be caustic, but that doesn't mean being a total humble doormat is the ideal alternative. When viewing your own mistakes and errors, you can own them and move forward with desire to do better. That's healthy. Patriotism is the same. You look at the good, you take some pride in your individuality/uniqueness, you re-affirm your desire to be even better.
By strongly demonstrating patriotism - it could be waving a flag or loud chants but let's not trivialize it, there are other ways too - we are emphasizing the importance of those more fundamental traits and values in a civic ritual. These are not purely performative, but have actual power, much in the same way that taking time to display deliberate gratitude in your personal life is also healthy and empowering. If you yourself for example choose to display patriotism even in a time when things feel like they aren't going your way, you also empower yourself and encourage positive change. It's not that complicated, there's no need to Scrooge it up. We don't cancel Christmas because X bad event happens, whether self-inflicted or not, because the values of Christmas (secular or religious) are still positive and the celebration is often valuable. You know, 'true meaning of Christmas' basics.
Moreover on a practical level, shaming a Republican by telling them they have a moral duty to provide healthcare to poor people might be a great point (that I agree with personally at least in a broad sense, not the specifics), but even so the shame is not only ineffective (misunderstands why the disagreement exists) but counterproductive. As evidenced by the whole patriotism thing: a Republican is quite literally less likely to listen to you, because they will get the impression that you hate the country and hate their values. Maybe a liberal might even think that, but they'd be foolish to say it. Thus, even disillusioned people should be demonstrating patriotism, if for no other reason than naked self-interest (though as I write, it's empowering too). Not to encourage lying or bad faith, I guess, which I do usually hate, but maybe this is one case where I wouldn't mind so much?
Some people think being patriotic is some kind of duty, but I'm not one of those people. Your truest and highest duty as a citizen is to make a thoughtful vote at every given election opportunity. For patriotism, I merely think it's a great idea that everyone should adopt, and I think that opinion is factually supported. It also, I should add, has the nice side-effect of aligning the values of the population over time; failing to be patriotic weakens that alignment, and even the values within.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
I think 1) left wing posters should be given more leash but also 2) Turok’s seething 2005 leftist contempt has used it up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
GDP is a number that correlates pretty directly with the ability of the state to purchase goods and services, such as military equipment
Someone should remind the North Koreans their 'GDP' is small, so they can't provide more shells to Russia than Europe (huge GDP!)
In any case, I'm not sure this is any more evidence of Israel controlling the US government than Ukraine does
Israel gets the most advanced US weapons to fight a few Arabs, while Ukraine gets second-rate equipment, F-16s rather than F-35s, in a war with Russia.
it’s no different to what the US would do if missiles were fired towards Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or any of their other middle eastern allies
The distinction is that all other US allies bring something to the table. Saudi Arabia brings oil and money. Turkey controls a key strait and sends troops to help the US occasionally, though they're not a great ally. Britain, Australia, Canada will send troops to help America too.
Israel only takes. They create enemies for America, they harm collaboration with the Islamic world, they sell military technology to China and frustrate US diplomatic efforts to pull out of the Middle East and focus on Asia. They never send troops to help America, they send shoddy intelligence and suck up aid like a leech. They even got the US to pay off their neighbours too, Egypt and to a lesser extent Jordan get billions in aid for being nice to Israel, the aid started as soon as they signed a peace treaty with Israel.
given how unlikely the claim that the US went into Iraq primarily for Israel’s sake, just a bailey and a slightly less rickety bailey
Go tell that to the neocons, generals, and officials who were there when decisions were made and describe their reasoning perfectly clearly. Did the US go into Iraq to seize the oil, which ended up mostly in the hands of Chinese companies? Or did they go in to fight the Islamist terrorists, mostly of Saudi background and who Saddam was suppressing anyway? Clearly not, instead there's silly discourse about aluminium tubes and other shoddy intelligence, much of which came from Mossad or was used to justify a pre-determined decision. If it weren't for Israeli influence, the war wouldn't have happened.
hasn’t deployed ground troops to take out any the modern threats facing Israel in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza or Iran
The US has bombed Yemen and Iran, given Israel munitions to bomb Gaza and Lebanon. US troops were infamously on the ground in Lebanon before getting blown up and departing. Just because the Israel lobby doesn't get everything they want all of the time, it doesn't mean their influence isn't excessive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
You're the one who used Lena to illustrate your point. That story specifically centers around the conceit that there's profit to be made through mass reproduction and enslavement of mind uploads.
We disagree. I would say it centers around the conceit that the act of uploading surrenders the innate protections of existence within baseline reality. Why people treat the upload cruelly is irrelevant. They can, because he made himself into a thing to be used.
In a more general case? Bad things can always happen. It's a question of risks and benefits.
Worse things can happen to you as an upload that could ever happen to you as a human, and by a very wide margin. You seem to understand this, but on the one hand think that the better things that can happen are very good, and also that the bad things happening are unlikely. But your arguments as to why they are unlikely seem deeply unsound to me.
You claim that businesses will compete to offer security to uploads. You expect these uploads to produce zero economic value. You expect the business to secure them forever. You expect this to be financed by accrued value from "investments" generating compound interest. So this argument seems to depend on an eternally-stable investment market where you can put in value today and withdraw value in, say, five thousand years. No expropriation by government, no debasement of currency, no economic collapse, no massive fraud or theft, no pillage by hostile armies, every one of which we have numerous examples of throughout human history.
So you assume this God Market comes into being. And you assume that you somehow get a big enough nut in it that you can pay for your uploading and pay for your security and maintenance, forever.
This sequence of events seems quite unlikely.
Well, maybe law-enforcement now has the ability to enforce a quadrillion life sentences as punishment for such crimes. Seriously. We do have law enforcement, and I expect that in most future timelines, we'll have some equivalent.
I will as well. The Authorities potentially using a quadrillion years in super-hell as punishment for crimes was explicitly part of my argument why uploading is a bad idea.
Don't upload your mind to parties you don't trust.
It's not enough to only upload to parties you trust. The degree of trust needed is much higher than any peer-to-peer relationship any human has ever had with any other human, and also that trust needs to extend to every party the trusted party trusts, and every party those parties trust, and so on infinitely. You are making yourself into an ownable commodity, and giving ownership of you to a person. But you have no way of withdrawing ownership, and who owns you can change.
Given the stakes, my position is that there is no party you can trust.
There is such a thing as over-updating on a given amount of evidence.
The estimate I've heard recently is that the UK grooming gangs may have raped as many as a million girls. The cops looked the other way. The government looked the other way. My understanding is that the large majority of the perpetrators got away with it, and the few that got caught received minimal sentences for the amount of harm they caused. Those who allowed them to get away with it, the cops and social workers and government employees and elected officials who all steadfastly turned a blind eye, nothing of significance happened to them at all, to my understanding. And here, the downside isn't getting raped, beaten, drugged and pimped for a few years, but rather free access and complete control to everything you are for an indefinite and quite possibly prolonged future.
The grooming gangs are a relevant example, because they show that widespread horror is possible with no breakdown in law enforcement or civilization collapse, simply through ideological corruption of an otherwise reasonable, stable system. They are not remotely the worst that can happen when law does break down, as it did in Communist revolutions all over the world in the last century, or in the numerous examples of invasion, warfare, and systematic genocide over the same time period. There are no shortage of examples of failed states.
To sum up: you are counting on money to protect you, on the understanding that you will be economically useless, and the assumption that you will have meaningful investments and that nothing bad will ever happen to them. You are counting on people who own you to be trustworthy, and to only transfer possession of you to trustworthy people. And you are counting on the government to protect you, and never turn hostile toward you, nor be defeated by any other hostile government, forever.
And if any one of these assumptions goes wrong, you will find yourself an impotent object in the hands of an omnipotent god.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
This is even more complicated because ‘cruelty free’ sometimes gets used as a label for animal products produced in more humane conditions eg free range eggs. It’s just a bad term for expressing anything in particular.
Pigeon
coo coo
5hr ago
*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750?
Didn’t kaczynsci think that we should return to pre-civilisation?
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
I don’t think you’re quite understanding mandatory reporter laws. Everyone is technically required to report, absent specific circumstances(confessor/lawyer privilege, 5th amendment grounds, etc). Mandatory reporters are further subject to time and formatting requirements.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
No, resurrection is thé resurrection of the old body in glorified form. I could link pages upon pages of Catholic autistic esoterica about the exact properties of these bodies but they are the same bodies.
gattsuru
5hr ago
The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.
Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.
Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Woke is all about Catharism. Thé Cathari can save you by association- at terrible cost to themselves. The queer black women grace us with their presence, bringing us enlightenment, despite their suffering. Any sexual practice is good, as long as it doesn’t make a baby. There are those who are enlightened by the cathari and those who are stuck in the false consciousness of prevailing religion. There are those who are awakened to the reality of structural oppression(this is the literal meaning of woke) and those who are stuck in the mainstream mode of society. Christianity is imperfect but a great vehicle for the true faith.
Corvos
6hr ago
I think you construct your sentence as, “Peter Dinkle, an actor who famously suffers from dwarfism, commented today…”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7hr ago
I regret clicking that link. But I generally agree that the ideas are so entrenched that most people don’t even think about them. It’s in almost every scifi at some point that highly evolved aliens will transcend the need for physical-matter bodies and become pure spirit or mind. Or in speculation about aliens you find the same reports (in ufo stuff) or speculation in general— the aliens are so advanced they no longer have or need physical bodies. I don’t have personal strong feelings about cremation, as I think God can resurrect anything so it’s not like if I happen to be turned into powder that God cannot resurrect me. On the other hand, I think it’s a crime against human dignity to throw ashes around in any place. Just like bury the urn and respect that these are the remnants of your relative. Also, Disney people are just plain weird.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
7hr ago
Same here. Do you know why the reorgs happen so often? It's exhausting.
I think it's largely manueverings associated with the corporate game-of-thrones.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
7hr ago
I mean, that's a bog-standard way to look like Important Things are being done. In my far too many years at $current_employer, I have seen it countless times and when my previous boss said that we were no longer playing musical offices reorganizing our workspaces my reaction was ROFLMFAO, GLWT and also to make sure to give him shit every time he brought up the next move we had to do after a several month grace period as well, which I know he appreciated. In fact, I have watched said employer literally move different offices to the other side of the building and then back again less than two years later and that has happened two separate times with different sets of offices even! And it's not just my employer. Behold, Azure has become Entra! Azure Purview and Compliance have merged into the new Purview! Use the new-and-improved Exchange Online Admin (except for all of these things that live in the old Exchange Online Admin that still lives several years later). It never ceases. SMDH.
TheDemonRazgriz
7hr ago
I think you might be right about this one, at least in a broad way. Interestingly I think “midget rights” is/was catching on more in Britain than in the U.S., although it may have died down. As a specific example I recall watching the last season of Derry Girls with my girlfriend a few years ago and there was a midget reporter (or news anchor, or something like that, I think) whose midget-ness went completely unremarked upon by the characters, to a really implausible extent that took us out of the episode in a sort of “are we really not going to address this?” kind of way. I’m certain there were at least one or two other British TV shows from that period that did a similar thing but I can’t recall them off my head. I don’t think this particular version of woke casting ever caught on at all in American media and I suspect it died down in Britain as well, although I’m not sufficiently keyed in to the British media scene to say that for sure. I hadn’t thought about this in some time so I’m curious if any Brits (or anglophiles) here can weigh in.
As an aside, did “we”, so to speak, ever settle on a politically correct word for “midget”? I’m positive midget is considered rude but it frankly feels like the least bad way to say it, and is what I would probably choose in most cases in real life. “Little person” is ridiculously patronizing… maybe “dwarf”? That still feels weird to me, but introspecting maybe it’s what I would choose in woke company.
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
Reminds me of Umberto Eco's Cult of the Imperfect. He applies the idea even to acknowledged masterpieces - one of the reasons why Hamlet, for instance, has been so compelling is because it is in some ways badly written. Lakes of ink have been spilled on trying to interpret Hamlet's motives because they are not clear in the play - because they are actually rather arbitrary and inconsistent, in a way that would probably strike us as bad writing, if Shakespeare did not have the reputation that he does. And while you could just conclude it's because Shakespeare was rushed or made some bad calls, it's so much more interesting to treat the text as whole, the arbitrariness as intentional, and dive into psychoanalysing the hero.
Star Wars is also in that golden zone of imperfection, I think. Even in the OT, the films are frequently disjointed, and characterisation changes wildly without explanation. It's pretty obvious that ANH is written for a universe in which Luke's father and Darth Vader were different people, and Luke and Leia are not related, for instance. In ESB, Luke hates and fears Vader and wants to kill him, and Vader disloyally seeks an ally to stage a coup against the Emperor; in RotJ, without any explanation, Luke now regards Vader with this self-sacrificial love, and Vader is so broken upon the Emperor's will as to consider revolt impossible. It's not inconceivable that something happened in between the films to cause both of them to change their minds (maybe Luke struggled long and hard with the revelation that Vader was his father and eventually came to the painful conclusion that he must love him the same way he thought he loved Anakin; maybe the Emperor discovered Vader's plot and tortured him into submission), but there is no hint of either of these processes in RotJ. The characters are just... different.
And yet I can't make himself dislike Star Wars because of this, or view the OT as lesser. I even like the PT. I still love those films, all six of them. (There are only six Star Wars films.) In many ways I love Star Wars because of its flaws, not only because of its strengths.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
7hr ago
Administrators and organizers need to generate bullet points for when the boss asks what they accomplished this quarter.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
7hr ago
Doesn't resurrection entail a new body being created? The old one seems pretty irrelevant.
DTulpa
7hr ago
I was reading a blog post on ACX some time in the last year - can't remember what about. Something contentious, I reckon. Probably election-related.
I'm scrolling through the comments, names not even registering as I skim through. I find myself reading a particular one and feel a tingle in my brain. "Boy, this guy sure does sound like Darwin" I thought to myself, assuming he was just a 'type', after all.
I scroll up to see who made the post, and Oh - I'll be damned.
We'll never have proof of anybody's identities even when self-admitted. But sometimes a poster is so singular in their style that you can smell the person behind the comment four sentences in. Darwin was such a poster. Too weird to live, too rare to die. God bless.
Yes and no. The GFC left a lot of college grads with a mountain of debt, short-circuited career prospects, and a sense that they'd been sold a bill of goods. But this sentiment is not limited to middle class dropouts. It is also widespread among the professionally successful. As has been noted, Mamdani did his best with upper middle class white people. These are not just career NGO types anxious to keep the taps open. They are lawyers, engineers, doctors, etc... They are the sorts of people you would expect to be most "pro-system", but they're not. They're increasingly skeptical of it.
Economic precarity is a factor - most are acutely aware of what falling off the white collar wagon would mean for their lifestyle - but the points of highest contention don't fit this pattern. Rather, you have a collapse of faith in the ability of US political systems to solve important problems in a just manner (if at all).
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