syntheticgirlunit.online
herald of death and grief’s attendant, 2nd class
4,025 posts
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Thinking of my HS classmates who read 1984 and thought “if I were Winston Smith I would join the resistance” without realizing that the point being made is that such action gets made nearly impossible, such that one requires heroic courage.
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In Severance, capture of the political by corporation is implied strongly by the point I’m at in the show.
It’s very interesting and weird to me that both Andor and Severance are both corporate-blessed stories of dystopias which indict our current reality and show us how we compromise ourselves.
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3BP written and Stalker and filmed inside authoritarian systems where information is controlled, fictional realities are constructed by those with power. Our own system, freer in some ways but where information is also highly controlled and manipulated.
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The Three Body Problem trilogy also had these things, and the abstraction of what you’re doing & saying feels like a particular characteristic of fiction within certain systems, science fiction a way of talking about what can’t be otherwise said clearly.
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This is such a cool mod and it’s been on my todo list for while, I should really get to it!
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The water drop in the logo of Lumen, the water tower out front, the water cooler in the soundproofed interview room, and the water glass “dinner” — something in the water? Who is affected?
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PKD stories usually have two reveals: the twist you see coming and the twist you don’t.
From the first episode, it feels clear that the town outside is part of whatever is going on inside. His boss at least is not severed.
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*swap the : and first comma
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When did you apply?
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That being said, it could have been reverted *from* F but this is one of those things where the article doesn’t list a bunch of relevant details.
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This doesn’t sound like it has much to do with the new admin? Her passport got stolen last year, according to the article, and she just received her new one. Her BC lists M, and it sounds like her only F was a marker on the application? Accordingly, State Dept set her passport gender to F.
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- Their reign is deeply irrational. While there are rational and long-term forces pushing in a direction, this is not the way the government is operating. WWIII, economic collapse, pandemic, or some as-yet-unseen force will challenge them in a way that they won’t be able to effectively manage.
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- Somewhere in the next two years, the SAVE act and a loss of independence of election watchdogs will ensure a deep red sweep. No governmental counter will be possible past this point.
- Then, for some indeterminate amount of time, they will reign.
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- In no small part due to the economic crisis, riots start, and these initiate two things: mass repression and up the escalation ladder we go.
- From here on out, specifics are really hard to nail down but it’s clear that they never want 2026 to turn the legislature against them.
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I think more likely than not is this:
- Nothing stops Trump. He continues his destruction of the Federal bureaucracy and fills the Feds with loyalists.
- An economic crisis kicks off, and I’m guessing it may be truly catastrophic.
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Another redline I’ve often considered is whether the military would stop Trump if he wanted to nuke somebody. I feel that given enough time, he will. Possibly Iran. I wonder if they would actually stop him, though.
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I’ve been trying to guess what that redline might be, if it exists.
One might be a clear breakdown in separation of powers — e.g. Trump refusing to comply with a SC decision. Another might be an order from Trump for the military to go after political enemies / to kill protestors, to bomb cities.
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omfg
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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_YR4
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Someday, perhaps, some people will show up and try to change things for the better, will capture the imaginations and hearts of the population, and slowly demonstrate in word and act alike that it is possible.
Some of those people might be us.
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A new golden rule should be found, one that emphasizes that I may find myself in your position someday, and emphasizes a deep compassion over innate knowledge: I don’t know what you need or want unless we connect, we ask questions, we try to figure it out together.
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Everyone is taught the golden rule, but it’s always felt really incomplete because it fails to account for differences between people and circumstance.
It doesn’t sufficiently destabilize the notion that I know what’s best for you.
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Likewise, we all grow old. All of us experience some loss of ability. No old person or disabled person should ever be left to die on the streets. We should care for the old or disabled, with respect to their autonomy, their perspectives, their personhood.
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Children are not always correct, they have much to learn, but they are not beaten into submission yet, they have not given up to mundanity yet. That spark should help guide our ideals.
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Children are weak in our society, but they should not be. Their knowledge and perspectives should be valued, they should be given the understanding of consent, they should be protected against their ignorance by supplying them with their own power and respect.
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On matters of economy, the outcomes of those who lose out should be deeply weighted. Economic distributions should be transformed into steep (albeit probably asymmetrical) bell curve, not an inverse exponential one. Our society as a whole should be raised, not only the wealthiest.
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War will never be eliminated, but no person or nation should have the power to end life on this planet. We saw that Japan and Germany engaged in increasingly suicidal attacks as they lost WWII. There is every reason to believe this is a tendency also of nuclear powers.
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Nuclear stockpiles are reduced to sub-MAD levels through continuous mutual deescalation and monitored by international watchdogs. Ideally, they are utterly eliminated. This one really is a dream, but unless we do this we continue to roll the dice on utter annihilation.
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Political parties are multiple, ranked choice voting is implemented, Congress is changed such that minority opinion is not overweighed and cooperation is encouraged. Game theory & a cross-sectional analysis of parliaments and long-term democratic welfare/outcomes informs the structure.
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(This is all assuming a world not entirely unlike our own, a US possible future, not a *fundamental change.* Caveats apply, the dream is not the best, just a better.)
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Campaigns for office are managed by public funds, not private ones, and distributed evenly. Distortions of fact are eviscerated in the media, placed within cultural and historical context. Truth is a virtue, nuance is valued.
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In this world, politicians are required to divest from all their business interests. Tax shelters are entirely eliminated. All lobbying and political messaging are required to list their sponsors directly and publically, and such sponsorship is severely limited in financial scope.
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Technical fields are taught with caution: just as a mechanical or civil engineering student is repeatedly told the stories of negligence and arrogance that led to mass loss of life, computer science is instilled with a sense of professional responsibility.
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Damn.
There’s a consistent but small right roll, and an initially decreasing then wobbling pitch.
It looks like a combination of adverse atmospheric factors caused a sudden loss of lift, possibly exacerbated by pilot error. It wouldn’t surprise me if their airspeed got too low due to high drag.
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This is, after all, the point I think Herbert was making.
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the cursed airport codes y’all use
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The US really seems to be in the preliminary stages of exiting NATO. I suspect the rest of NATO would probably stick together, but it might involve the institution of a new organization.
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One of the things I love about Buddhism is that, without reducing the importance of persons, it is not centrally human. The fundamental mechanics of human scale also happens at ant scale and below, civilization scale and above.
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The 3 body problem trilogy is so interesting because it’s thinking at massive scales. Populations, the boundaries of physics, history over centuries and millennia, light years, stars.
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Oh shit lists literally lets me do this gdi lol