blarth

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy ruined sci-fi for me for quite a while. I couldn’t read anything else for months.

Hipsters trying their hardest to differentiate themselves from the plebeians, even to their own detriment:

California is awesome.

I wish that these two were the presidential candidates. They’re both coherent and seem to actually care about the things affecting us. The presidential candidates are playing partisan politics and parroting the same talking points on repeat.

No shit, had seen only one weird trailer for this movie before it came out.

Right? After he got shot at, he went on some spiel about how the rhetoric needs to be reigned in because the democrats saying he’s a threat to democracy is inciting violence. As usual, whatever suits Trump in the moment is the way forward!

Being able to feel controls instead of having to look at them while driving is key, but some of you take this to Luddite levels.

Holy shit, what dirt does Putin have on Elon?

Why isn’t this system air gapped from the internet?

Their values are aligned, theirs strategies are aligned, and so their efforts are aligned.

Ender’s Game was prescient text, regardless of Orson Scott Card’s personal beliefs.

Locke and Demosthenes are now armies of manipulative bots (but often real humans), shaping political discourse throughout the world. The Internet gave mind control powers to people with money, ambition, or both. We saw it with the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements in 2016 on Reddit, all too clearly for those who lived through an era where bullshit detection was a critical skill.

I was once fairly defeatist on this subject: the bad guys won, got Trump elected, and kicked off a new era of 80s conservatism that demonized progressive values like environmental conservation, freedom of choice in a number of matters, and equality.

But now, I’m starting to see young people stand up to their boomer relatives at Thanksgiving and bring facts and logic to social media discussions. And I have regained some hope that we will once again find a way to make the progressive “line go up“. Our society seems to swing like a pendulum between the right and left, over decades, and it feels like the Trump era was a swing too violent for most of us. It’s time to swing back.