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self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8m ago
I think 2013 is a fair shout in my case, that was probably when I was in high school and accidentally stumbled onto LW or SSC. Can't recall which one came first, but the other must have followed shortly thereafter.
I imagine my initial encounter with The Motte would have been after 2015, since I don't seem to recall engaging in the Culture War threads on the SSC subreddit. I'm confident that I was a regular participant by 2017 when I was a few years into med school.
The greatest melancholy I feel is when I see the upvote or comment counts in the old CWR threads: you can tell we had a lot more people around. To this day, I'm not sure if the migration off of Reddit was entirely warranted, or if we could have managed to avoid the gaze of the Reddit Admins till the political climate changed. While the Motte is definitely in a healthy state, and the fears that we'd collapse to an unsustainably low population didn't materialize, Reddit did make it easier. We had plenty of people stumble across us following a link, or by checking someone's profile.
FistfullOfCrows
54m ago
The roofing guys are insane, I've seen a roofer dismantle and rebuild a wooden rooftop freehand just balancing on a wall walking around with NO harness or anything, they seemed to just not care.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
54m ago
Yes.
Governments, or states, are superorganisms that wish to grow. Always. There is never a state that moves to curtail or even reduce its power. Some are perhaps more aggressively expansionist (vertically moreso than horizontally, nowadays) than others, but there isn't a single one that exists to shrink. Any that did would create a power vacuum and quickly find itself replaced by another that had no qualms about expansion. We humans are simply the substrate on which these organisms grow, and what we believe or pretend to believe matters to the states only in so far as it helps or hinders their drive for greater reach and power. Wokism is an attractive belief system for states to support on multiple axes: Firstly it is popular, and so it is easy to get humans on board with your agenda by claiming that you, that state, are the enforcement mechanism for that belief system. Secondly its goals align decently with that of the state, there is nothing in there that demands limits to the state's reach and power (as you would find in libertarianism or luddism, or power-sharing arrangements like with the catholic church in the middle ages), there is much in there that synergizes with greater state reach and power (the ability to control the thoughts and actions of others), and it isn't outright self-destructive to the state (like fascism and communism ended up being).
Which isn't to say that states wouldn't expand as much as they can if only it weren't for those dan SJWs. States always expand as far and as fast as they can. Always have, always will, and any deviation form that is an anomaly that is quickly scrubbed out by the arch of history bending towards ever greater superorganisms. PC / Wokism / SJWs / Leftism are simply the latest method or technique for keeping the substrate in line with the bigger organism's agenda.
There are about a hundred chapters of Reverend Insanity left. A man could weep.
Once it's done, I have a copy of Mid World sitting in my epub reader. A gentleman on /r/scifi told me that there was a non-zero chance that some of the theories I'd floated about how Pandora (from Avatar) was artificial might have even been intended. He claimed that Cameron had mentioned taking inspiration from that novel. The obvious similarities are that a group of humans visit an alien world covered in jungles, but this planet makes Pandora look like an actual theme park, no PG-13 deaths if you piss off the local wildlife I'm afraid.
It seems interesting enough, and I feel like I've exhausted the well of science fiction I'm inclined to read, so there's no harm in giving it a go.
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