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a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-m

There are plenty of details one may quibble with (“that’s not real technepraxic!”), most obviously that he’s dead wrong about the virtue of labor and the proper function of a UBI, but this is nonetheless immeasurably better than the offerings of doom, terror, and downsizing from the pessiphiles and the authoritarian masturbation of the polits.

Scifi idea: an alien fleet shows up and says they're taking over or they'll zap us from orbit. Says this is at risk of turning into a holy war... Because see, Earth is a garden planet, specifically chosen for their former God-Emperor to retire to, and in the last couple thousand years we've suddenly gotten all spicy and he's worried about his survival.
When we ask where this alien God-Emperor is, they react in shock. We can't have missed him, he's only the biggest organism on the planet!

Besides, everyone with even a basic grasp of ethics and philosophy (pr who has read my books) knows that consensualist agoric-annealing group-mind transghiblian art-deco ecotopic benevolently-hegemonic technothéarchy (with elvish characteristics) is OBVIOUSLY CORRECT.

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Should writers be honest about their politics online or keep quiet to avoid controversy?

Man, if I could order a sandwich without dripping sheer contempt for politics in its every form and aspect from every syllable, maybe I would have that latter option, but as it is, a controversy-constrained market is mine.

The IDC would like to emphasize that the intended meaning of this motto refers to their function of substituting courteous words for bloody warfare in interpolitan relations, rather than any possible alternate implications.

(The distinctly unofficial translation "Be nice or we'll fuckin' kill you." is strongly deprecated.)

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trivia"

The official motto of the Imperial Diplomatic Corps (presented here in Latin for the benefit of Terran readers) is *Aut Civilitam Aut Mortem* ("Either [Civilization|Civility] Or Death").

ethnocide needs to:

(a) be a word
(b) not be a thing

Today in bad medical takes:

"If you don't have sugar in your body, cancer cells can die naturally or naturally."

...well, they're npt *wrong*, strictly speaking.

But much like my plan to kill all these damn mosquitos by replacing the Earth's atmosphere with FOOF, the side effects are kind of a bugger.

In today's seen-on-the-bad-place well-that's-a-take-of-the-day:

"All fictional sex is rape because the characters are being forced to participate by the author."

My brain hurts now.

On a much lighter note, today's hot take is that everyone should love what they do as much as the guy who runs the Chunks on New Homestead.

(You do you, and go on making us all believe that every chunk really _is_ your favorite chunk, not just corporate policy.)

"Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “Woo the muse of the odd.” You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them...

You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish."

- Bruce Sterling

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As a general statement of policy, or rather, reality:

Contra nihilists, Marxists, and the most basic bitch of basic bitch materialists, systems and conditions aren't responsible for a goddamn thing. Only things that are capable of making choices are, or can be, responsible for things, and can never *escape* their responsibility for things, no matter how explanations they concoct of how they couldn't possibly have done anything else.

Those things would include you.

Try not to fuck it up.

But that could just be a typical product of ignorance or stupidity.

More amazing is that those who say things like this have absolutely no clue that they have gone beyond the greatest paternalistic condescension ever mustered at the height of colonialism, by shooting right past "they're such children, really" and declaring that the people in question are basically fucking automata who are going to do what they're going to do, tick-tock.

Only Western shitposters have free will, don'ch'know?

Well, okay, first I am amazed at either the chutzpah or the intellectual deficiency involved in saying "it doesn't excuse it".

Of course it excuses it. Things that are inevitable, if you actually meant that, have no ethical significance because _they're fucking inevitable_ . It's like trying to make moral claims about the actions of gravity or the electroweak interaction. They are what they are and it is literally impossible for them to be anything different.

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