Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

It makes discussions kind of difficult. I mean, they're coming from a totally different place, so...

"Let me get this straight. Your planet has to let people die alone and terrified in the wilderness because a basic lifesaving technology would be routinely and pervasively abused to persecute people by your government. That is popularly elected."

"What. With all due respect. The shit."

Universal surveillance would be a good example. I mean, we'd use it to persecute the shit out of people, no question, have you met the US government recently?

*There*, they think of it as the thing that ensures no sparrow shall fall even in the remote wilderness without paramedical assistance being deployed before it hits the ground, or why there've been no street robberies on the homeworld since 2784.

(It's 7298 as of last writing.)

But as such, their response to people suffering from we might think of as technological dystopias is not going to be about the technology. It's going to be about whatever bloody awful things they chose to do with it.

Or, for short, "Gods below, _you are living in barbarian hell!_"

To expand on things previously said, I am of the opinion that "there can't be technological solutions to social problems" and "technology can *cause* social problems" are beliefs that can coexist in a coherent worldview.

My fictive peeps are even more skeptical on that point, and would generally claim technology to be value-neutral even though its _telos_ is to be an integral part of a philosophy of sophont aspiration.

#eldraeverse

Okay, here's one, seeing as I just started a thread on my Discourse on little strange things that you'd have to be reading awfully closely to notice:

You never have to log in to anything. Every 'weave site and device smart enough to have any brains at all (so, y’know, park benches, plant pots, that sort of thing) already knows who you are and what your personal preferences are. At most, you might have to click a button confirming that you wish to upgrade from “visitor” to “site user”.

#WritingWonders July 24: What is a common occurrence in your story that would be odd here?

I write science fiction. So, basically everything, in one way or another, but that's kind of cheating.

Er. Competence? Decency?

...sorry, I seem to be stuck on "cynical with a side order of bitter" today.

#eldraeverse

Controversial movie opinion: _A Good Day to Die Hard_ was better in the original Klingon.

(I mean, say what you will about the Romulan Star Empire, but getting their entire homeworld blown up didn't make them start committing casual genocides left and right and keeping skulls in trophy rooms.)

...I now want to see a plotline in which the villain(?) has noticed this pattern and concluded that while they may be nice NOW, these humans are just too dangerous to keep around.

Inasmuch as any time things stop going their way, they turn into complete assholes.

Enter fortuitous rock, stage right.

So, if you have assiduously followed _Star Trek_, you will note that any perturbations in the constant drip-feed of exceptional hopeful events into human history (most recent example: _Picard_ S2) invariably lead to humanity becoming a xenophobic fascist dystopian nightmare that slaughters its way across the galaxy.

#StarTrek

A note:

If, on perusing your profile, I should observe that your comments on fascist belief in the cleansing, redemptive power of violence are nonetheless accompanied by a bunch of raised-fist logos and guillotine memes, etsim., then I believe it is not unfair of me to conclude that your distaste for poncing about in jackboots is entirely situational rather than principled.

The Antisocial Model of Disability -

https://noiseinmysignal.substack.com/p/the-antisocial-model-of-disability?sd=pf

(Some species developed submission instincts to get along with each other, pro-survival-wise. For various reasons, eldrae developed MURDER TO DEATH THE INTERLOPER THAT DARED TRESPASS UPON YOUR SELFNESS instincts instead.

Which made civilization rather harder to attain, but possibly more civilized - in the "we have learned to walk carefully, not presume, and reach out with gentle hands" sense - once attained. Or so it is argued.)

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 23: Have you ever wanted to smack the MC? Why?

Everyone: "We don't do that here."

You: "What, never?"

Everyone: "No, never."

You: "What, *never*?"

Everyone: "Hardly - well, no, okay? For our species, this is the sort of thing that - outside controlled and formalized circumstances - tends to escalate with terrifying speed to 'now everyone's dead and I've lost my hat'. So you DO NOT get into physical altercations unless you're happy with that outcome."

#eldraeverse

Without intending to diminish the significance of any of these events, dear Wikipedia, I would like to challenge the notion that anything involving a single-digit number of fatalities can qualify as a _massacre_,

One of the defining qualities of a massacre is, well, _mass_ .

If you're going to throw all ethics aside and try to recreate the glory of some historical culture complete with the nasty bits, at least pick one that *succeeded*.

We may still have to fight the neo-Mongols or the Tamerlane Recreationists, but at least it won't be so embarrassing that our nemeses are a pale imitation of what was a shitpile to begin with.

I'm still going to take a moment to observe that something that pisses me off is that a certain type of people always stan the cultures that were complete and utter losers at what they tried to do. Confederate apologists, neo-Nazis, tankies, you name it, these fuckers just love cultures that were complete and utter failures from failtown riding the failroad to fail city.

Incidentally, yes, obviously it is also an ethical abomination. But you know that, I know that, and everyone reading this knows that, so there's no point in repeating it.

(If you don't know that, please stop reading immediately, unsubscribe, go home, and rethink your everything.)