LWDT V: Completing the Five Thread Plan

[Cekoviu]

Ah. Climate change implies the first, though I think carbon capture and storage technology may be our savior. If we can get past that obstacle, there are other potential dangers -- if the last remaining humans are on Mars, a mass extinction event like an asteroid could occur and end our species; if we continue on our scientific path and create an AI too powerful, it could choose to annihilate humanity; etc.
As for the second, it's taking the simplest solution when evidence cannot prove or disprove whether humans can actually completely escape the laws of physics through technology.

Okay, I get it

but you're assuming the laws of physics are absolute and not something we assume to be true because of our limited understanding

i think i've been reading too much sci-fi

That is a whole can of worms that I try not to open because it ends up causing an existential crisis.

[Liriena]

Okay, I get it

but you're assuming the laws of physics are absolute and not something we assume to be true because of our limited understanding

i think i've been reading too much sci-fi

That is a whole can of worms that I try not to open because it ends up causing an existential crisis.

Welcome to my life. I have an existential crisis scheduled for every night at 2 a.m.

[New Emeline]

Okay, I get it

but you're assuming the laws of physics are absolute and not something we assume to be true because of our limited understanding

i think i've been reading too much sci-fi

That is a whole can of worms that I try not to open because it ends up causing an existential crisis.

But i love those :^)

i also love science fiction
i don't know why the genre appeals to me, but i've been drawn to it recently much more so than any other genre, especially the "weird unexplainable stuff happens" subgenre and space operas. i think there's something i can find out about myself because of that but i don't know what it is...

[Irou]

That is a whole can of worms that I try not to open because it ends up causing an existential crisis.

Welcome to my life. I have an existential crisis scheduled for every night at 2 a.m.

The Virgin Existential Crisis V.S. The Chad Fundamental Nausea

[New Emeline]

wonder if there's any good socialist/communist sci-fi books...

[Irou]

wonder if there's any good socialist/communist sci-fi books...

http://theweeklyansible.tumblr.com/post ... hould-read

[New Emeline]

wonder if there's any good socialist/communist sci-fi books...

http://theweeklyansible.tumblr.com/post ... hould-read

Huh, I actually just bought a China Mieville novel yesterday.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

wonder if there's any good socialist/communist sci-fi books...

Arguably, the entire Star Trek universe would fit under this category. Of course, there are the counterrevolutionaries, the Ferengis.

[Jelmatt]

That is a whole can of worms that I try not to open because it ends up causing an existential crisis.

Welcome to my life. I have an existential crisis scheduled for every night at 2 a.m.

I mean, if you aren't having an existential crisis constantly then I'm not sure you really exist.

[MERIZoC]

wonder if there's any good socialist/communist sci-fi books...

I'm not personally an Ursula Le Guin fan, but many are, might be worth checking out

[New Emeline]

wonder if there's any good socialist/communist sci-fi books...

I'm not personally an Ursula Le Guin fan, but many are, might be worth checking out

She's been on my reading list for awhile.

[Dumb Ideologies]

wonder if there's any good socialist/communist sci-fi books...

This guy called Trotsky wrote some excellent utopian fiction and there was this whole genre of writing on "scientific socialism".

[The Xenopolis Confederation]

wonder if there's any good socialist/communist sci-fi books...

Arguably, the entire Star Trek universe would fit under this category. Of course, there are the counterrevolutionaries, the Ferengis.

Real talk, why are the Ferengi always portrayed as completely evil? The Ferengi are always like "I want to exploit people and be extremely greedy." This goes for the Klingons, the Cardassians and others, too. They're too one-dimensionally evil. DS9 was a breath of fresh air in its addition of shades of grey, but even it wasn't perfect. Societies that are one-dimensionally evil don't tend to pop up in reality, and it's unrealistic to have them be so evil.

[Caracasus]

Arguably, the entire Star Trek universe would fit under this category. Of course, there are the counterrevolutionaries, the Ferengis.

Real talk, why are the Ferengi always portrayed as completely evil? The Ferengi are always like "I want to exploit people and be extremely greedy." This goes for the Klingons, the Cardassians and others, too. They're too one-dimensionally evil. DS9 was a breath of fresh air in its addition of shades of grey, but even it wasn't perfect. Societies that are one-dimensionally evil don't tend to pop up in reality, and it's unrealistic to have them be so evil.

Because Star Trek falls into the same trap as a lot of sci fi with aliens. Alien races are given one dimensional characteristics that are usually a reflection of one of the more troubling parts of humanity. So you have the cunning and manipulative Cardassians, the angry warrior Klingons, greedy Ferrengi and ultra totalitarian Romulans.

I agree, it would be really interesting to have an anarchocommunist Ferrengi movement, or whatever but I guess that would detract from the purpose they serve in the show maybe.

[The Xenopolis Confederation]

Real talk, why are the Ferengi always portrayed as completely evil? The Ferengi are always like "I want to exploit people and be extremely greedy." This goes for the Klingons, the Cardassians and others, too. They're too one-dimensionally evil. DS9 was a breath of fresh air in its addition of shades of grey, but even it wasn't perfect. Societies that are one-dimensionally evil don't tend to pop up in reality, and it's unrealistic to have them be so evil.

Because Star Trek falls into the same trap as a lot of sci fi with aliens. Alien races are given one dimensional characteristics that are usually a reflection of one of the more troubling parts of humanity. So you have the cunning and manipulative Cardassians, the angry warrior Klingons, greedy Ferrengi and ultra totalitarian Romulans.

I agree, it would be really interesting to have an anarchocommunist Ferrengi movement, or whatever but I guess that would detract from the purpose they serve in the show maybe.

In late DS9, the ferengi instituted multiple reforms giving full female suffrage, progressive income tax, anti-monopoly laws, workers' rights laws, and social welfare.

[Caracasus]

Because Star Trek falls into the same trap as a lot of sci fi with aliens. Alien races are given one dimensional characteristics that are usually a reflection of one of the more troubling parts of humanity. So you have the cunning and manipulative Cardassians, the angry warrior Klingons, greedy Ferrengi and ultra totalitarian Romulans.

I agree, it would be really interesting to have an anarchocommunist Ferrengi movement, or whatever but I guess that would detract from the purpose they serve in the show maybe.

In late DS9, the ferengi instituted multiple reforms giving full female suffrage, progressive income tax, anti-monopoly laws, workers' rights laws, and social welfare.

I forgot about that! Yeah, DS9 did a better job of developing alien races.

[Asherahan]

What would happen if you dropped a battalion of red guards with their political officers in a fantasy world?

[Pilarcraft]

What would happen if you dropped a battalion of red guards with their political officers in a fantasy world?

Depends on the fantasy world, I guess.

[Dumb Ideologies]

What would happen if you dropped a battalion of red guards with their political officers in a fantasy world?

Eaten by a single loli dragon.

[Ostroeuropa]

What would happen if you dropped a battalion of red guards with their political officers in a fantasy world?

Sauron supporters probably.

If the villain is equal opportunity evil and the heroes are a bunch of segregated societies, i think they'd gravitate to the villain.

[Bakery Hill]

What would happen if you dropped a battalion of red guards with their political officers in a fantasy world?

Sauron supporters probably.

If the villain is equal opportunity evil and the heroes are a bunch of segregated societies, i think they'd gravitate to the villain.

Dialectical materialism dictates that the Red Guard must support Sauron.

[Bakery Hill]

What would happen if you dropped a battalion of red guards with their political officers in a fantasy world?

Depends on the fantasy world, I guess.

In Game of Thrones I like to think they would support the Swallows or Brotherhood Without Banners. Most likely it would be Stannis or Daenrys who can offer the political stability in which social progress can occur.

[Ostroeuropa]

wonder if there's any good socialist/communist sci-fi books...

The Culture series is pretty much this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/L ... TheCulture

"Special Circumstances" as the covert and only explicitly violent branch of The Culture "government" (There is no government. There's just a loose boundary of what is considered Culture and what isn't. A ship that drops out or starts behaving in ways not in line with the culture's norms is no longer called or considered part of the culture by others. Any ship can up and decide to start "Special circumstances" and alter their routines, but the majority of ships just sit around as fully automated luxury space communism, at least until there's a war.), they exist mostly as an anarcho-libertarian-communist space fleet, and are skeptical of planets because it leads to too much centralized power. (The highest form of government in the culture is basically a single ship AI.)

The series revolves around what a utopian society does in space and how it interacts with other civilizations, some are a complete antithesis to the culture. While people and ships do leave the culture and start behaving in different ways (The civilization has a number of spin-off civilizations from this), overall, the culture grows over time.

The culture gets around imperialism through "Contact" which is basically the grey men on steroids in terms of infiltrating less advanced civilizations to distort their culture toward the cultures mindsets without clueing them in.

There's one race of beings that seem to thrive on cruelty and they are a threat to the cultures utopianism and form an ethical crisis for them since it appears genocide might be the only solution, etc.

The culture goes to war one time because its AI's calculate that more lives will be saved in the long run if they do, etc.

Utopia Justifies the Means:

Averted for the Culture itself. Crucially, the Culture's own utopian society is not in itself dependent on morally reprehensible means... or indeed any sort of resource exploitation that affects any other civilisation. A recurring point is that the Culture chooses to get involved (occasionally in underhanded ways) with other galactic civilizations - because the one thing a utopian society can't provide internally is a sense that what you're doing matters to the Universe. So they choose to get involved, via Contact, and try and spread the Culture.
And this is effectively Special Circumstances' entire reason for existence:

Zakalwe: I thought the rules were meant to be the same for everybody.

Diziet Sma: They are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe — break down; beyond those metaphysical event-horizons, there exist... special circumstances. That's us. That's our territory; our domain.

Zakalwe: To some people, that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behaviour.

Diziet Sma: And perhaps they would be right. Maybe that is all it is. But if nothing else, at least we need an excuse; think how many people need none at all.

"Special circumstances" usually means "Do whatever is necessary to culturize this target, or destroy them."

[Dumb Ideologies]

In Harry Potter they'd support all-round gud boi the Dark Lord as his work overthrew the semi-democracy sham in which only old families were represented, cynically used the pureblood fanatics as footsoldiers, many of them dying in the process, subjugated them to the will of a strong leader through use of the Dark Mark, and avoided the risk of future weak leaders reversing on the progress by taking measures to become a genuine Eternal Leader.

[Bakery Hill]

In Harry Potter they'd support all-round gud boi the Dark Lord as his work overthrew the semi-democracy sham in which only old families were represented, cynically used the pureblood fanatics as footsoldiers, many of them dying in the process, subjugated them to the will of a strong leader through use of the Dark Mark, and avoided the risk of future weak leaders reversing on the progress by taking measures to become a genuine Eternal Leader.

Harry Potter is why Blairites shouldn't write fiction.