We Have Met The Enemy And They Are Us

The Robot Who Looked Like Me, from Cosmopolitan Magazine by Dick Ellescas (Nov. 1973)

My job on the Commune is going to be writing the new version of the Money Stuff newsletter but all about production quotas

"everything is counter-revolutionary wrecking," I like to say around here, meaning

You might find this confusing, as the criminal law governing counter-revolutionary wrecking was not intended to be the primary regulatory structure enforcing adherence to production quotas. Nevertheless,

Loathe as I am to say something nice about JK Rowling nowadays, LeGuin has it backwards here: Harry Potter was part of a pre-existing "magical boarding school" subgenre and the main way it improved on earlier examples was by drawing much more deeply on the broader fantasy cannon.

(Flat Trippy Valley) Well here is my newest piece…enjoy people!!!!!

Jimmy Alonzo.

I've never played WH40K because the aesthetic could hardly be less appealing to me, but I get the basic gist of the setting. And the idea that it's supposed to be a "satire of authoritarian beliefs" just doesn't add up to me. Something like The Great Dictator (portraying Nazis as stupid, hypocritical, and childish) or Look Who's Back (showing how easily people who are 'better than that' can still fall for authoritarianism) strike me as better examples of that category.

WH40K seems to do the opposite. Instead of subverting authoritarian beliefs in the real world by showing how foolish they are, it creates a world where authoritarian beliefs are the only things that make sense, because the alternatives are even worse. I suspect (again, never played) that given the over-the-top black-comedy aspects of it, this is to let players slaughter their enemies without feeling guilt about it, because everyone in the universe is terrible and monstrous.

But there are plenty of sci-fi/fantasy settings that are just as grim and ugly and play it much straighter, and in the hands of a good author that can lead to some fascinating philosophical questions along the line of "What does it mean to be good, or noble, in a world that seems inexorably pointed towards evil?" What does it mean for the reader's notion of 'humanity' or 'equality' if there really is an Inherently Evil Race out there? What does it mean for freedom if Hell is objectively real and all but a very narrow course of action will doom you to it?" I find that all more interesting than another round of "What if me and my twitter friends were Right About Everything?"

I don't naturally have the 'edgelord' disposition, but given how the discourse is dominated by people who think Stardew Valley is fascist, stealing treasure in dungeon-crawlers is problematic, etc., I find myself shrugging and defending the concept anyway. There's an anon in my inbox somewhere complaining about hope-punk and similar terms, and it's not the concept I mind so much as the people who subscribe to it thinking anything else is illegitimate.

I've had something related sitting in my drafts for a while now - a lot of the WH40K fiction contains a sort of 'privileged communication' telling us that these Space Marines or other protagonists are good guys. This isn't something said in-universe by a character that can be dismissed as propaganda/satire/etc, this is something expressed by the author which is as reliable as the author saying afterwards "it was supposed to be a satire!"

And this keeps happening because a universe of only assholes (or even a mix of assholes and flat characters) rarely attracts readers, so the authors keep putting good-guy-signs on the protagonists to keep readers invested, and then the authors [try to] disclaim their own good-guy-signs.

In particular, thinking of the WH40K Space Marine game, where the Space Marine that I'm playing as saves people's lives from fungus monsters. This is an unsatirically good act. Author commentary won't make it evil. Reinterpretation won't make it be in-universe fictional propaganda, because I carried out those actions with my keyboard.

I suppose one could try to pull a "you were hallucinating the whole time" but then I will simply hallucinate you didn't say that. ;) Brain-in-a-vat narratives are usually a waste of time.

Presumably the German police occasionally caught an actual rapist or murderer between 1933 and 1945, and their firemen put out real fires even if they did have Mein Kampf prominently displayed in the station lobby. If a game made you a police detective in Berlin in 1941, and your task is the unsatirically good act of stopping a serial killer, are you playing a good guy?

Probably yes, assuming the game is mainly as described and not having a third act twist, and other philosophical caveats for completeness.

I think the analogy is weak because the police detective in Berlin 1941 has a real context, whereas WH40K is nothing but self-contradictory fiction and jokes like Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clouseau, so the relative "weight" of the Space Marine doing real good is higher.

Now this is drifting a little off topic, sorry OP, but I want to touch on another point regarding the implicit vs. reported nature of the Imperium, which is that the Imperium can (succesfully) build spaceship factories.

The Imperium probably cannot build a spaceship factory.

Their closely bound allies of the Cult Mechanicus, whose forge worlds (including Mars) are sovereign by the Treaty of Olympus, can build a spaceship factory. Maybe. At any rate they could but I don't see much indication that they actually do any of that these days.

Yeah where on earth does this idea that 40k shows a society where fascism works come from? The whole point is that their society doesn't work, so despite having futuristic spaceships they drive around in WW2 tanks and get out of them to swordfight people. Because they are superstitious lunatics who think burn scientists as witches. Their society not working isn't satire or subtext, it's the basic premise of the game!

I think this is a bit of an adaption decay issue, in the early editions it's heavily implied that the Imperium doesn't really understand any technology at all and is totally reliant on black box STC nanofoundries. The wars they win against equally degenerate enemies were, though cool and badass, also a tragic indictment of their superstitious culture. The sense that a Culture GCU Dark Age of Technology battleship could conquer the galaxy over lunch was sort of essential to the feel of the thing, and it lost it's shape once that fell away.

By God I hate the stalkeresque fucking way different sites fuck around.

gmail offers a service where they'll redirect emails, so if you have "your.name@gmail.com", when you registered "your.name" they gave you that email, sure, but they also gave you every email address that starts with "your.name+"

So you can go to Github and make an account and when Github says "what's your email?" you answer "your.name+github@gmail.com" and Github sends all their mails to "your.name+github" and you get them like they're normal.

Which is great for many reasons.

Except one fucking company, at least, and it is fucking microsoft, they know that gmail does this, so if you have a Microsoft account with them as your.name+microsoft@gmail.com, and then you want to create another microsoft account for, I dunno, your.name+xbox@gmail.com (I don't have an xbox) they'll say "You already have a microsoft account as your.name+microsoft@gmail.com, you should log in with the account you already have."

Hey Microsoft guess what go fuck yourself. There are, like, ninety billion reasons to have separate accounts. You're not cute for doing this, you're just making me create another email account, don't fucking think I won't.

Particularly insane that Microsoft do this given that they also offer plus addressing and describe signing up for services with a unique address as one of the use cases:

Do they think those other services shouldn't let you sign up with a plus address?

Kay Nielsen “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (1913-1914)

Most, if not all, of these have appeared on Tumblr but finding so many Nielsen images (from one book) of such quality and I couldn’t resist. There are more out there, too. Beautiful work.

Monique Ligons’ Biblical Insectarium

Everyone talks about how Victor Frankenstein wasn't really a Dr. Because he never got a doctorate. But like, he invented an entirely new form of life! With no apparent previous work to build on! Like you could do dozens of Doctorates just on smaller pieces of the whole project! In what sense should he not call himself a Dr.? It's like saying the flash shouldn't count as a world-class runner because he never competed in the Olympics!

his results failed to replicate

@rotbrained "you can't call yourself a doctor, you merely made several different paradigm-overturning scientific discoveries but didn't go through departmental politics" says a lot more about academia than it does him. A real-life Frankenstein would be one of the greatest scientists of all time (insofar as that's a cohesive, constructable category).

You go through useless departmental politics to win a prefix. Frankenstein did not go through them and did not win his prefix. You win participation trophies by participating.

Also I don't remember him working as a healer or helping anyone regain their health over the course of the book, so he's also not a doctor in the "physician" sense as far as I can tell.

And I never said he's any less for it. If anything, we shouldn't hold the word "doctor" to such a high degree that we'd try to insist someone is "worthy" of the title and forego the actual process of getting it.

I understand that the whole "Frankenstein is not a doctor" thing probably stemmed from people who think that being a doctor makes you better somehow because you went through the useless departmental politics. But as technicalities go, they're still right.

Yes. That is my point, those technicalities are stupid

What if he did manage to convince the university to let him submit the creature as his thesis and that's why he's really chasing him through the arctic at the start of the novel.

I think perhaps describing "not killing a bunch of civilians" as "respectability politics" demonstrates some limitations of the phrase

another funny thing about trade during the Edo period outside of Nagasaki is that in addition to the Matsumae clan in modern southern Hokkaido being permitted to trade with Ainu the other ‘gates’ to Japan were the Satsuma clan being permitted to trade with the Ryukyus which the Satsuma had conquered and made vassals and the island of Tsushima being permitted to trade with Korea. The establishment of the Tsushima-Korea trade happened in the early Edo period and after an initial exchange of envoys and Japanese envoys reassuring the Joseon that the Tokugawa were different from the Toyotomi who had invaded Korea and were responsible for overthrowing them and the Korean king was like “Ok, but we’ll still need an apology for all that shit if you want trade to happen”. Ieyasu Tokugawa was fine with Tsushima trading with Korea but the lord who ruled Tsushima knew that there would be no way Ieyasu would send something as humbling as an apology to a foreign ruler especially if he felt his hands were clean of the whole Korean invasion. So what the happened is the lord of Tsushima forged an apology letter from Ieyasu including faking his seal and sent it to the Joseon court. The Joseon court found it acceptable and sent a letter addressed to Ieyasu saying trade will be permitted to resume. Because the Joseon letter was based on the assumption that Ieyasu apologized and also because the style of it clearly looked like it was in response to a letter Ieyasu never actually sent the lord of Tsushima put away the real letter and forged yet another letter this time an edited version of the letter from the Joseon removing any mention of an apology and making it sound like it was part of a brand new correspondence rather than a response to an earlier letter. The Tokugawa fell for this ruse as well and Tsushima was able to engage in trade with Korea after the ruling courts were tricked into thinking they had come to a mutual agreement because the lord of Tsushima had essentially been faking the back and forth exchange with forged letters

friendly man-in-the-middle attack

This also worked in Northern Ireland.

ads in gothic beauty magazine, issue 23

cryoflesh is still open btw

Rabbi Moshe De Leon Discusses Theology With Goku - Coño Culo, 14th century

Ew this is plagiarism algorithm, not real art

This was painted in the 13th/14th century by celebrated Andalusian artist Coño Culo. It is one of the earliest historical examples we have of Goku interacting with Spaniards.

Certain people's politics essentially boil down to 'what if we didn't honor contracts, wouldn't that be cool' without ever confronting the fact that next time we'd like to form some sort of contract

It is absolutely maddening to watch people talk about iterated games with established rules and incentives as if they were one-off games.

Certain peoples politics boil down to "What if the serfs weren't bound to the land and didn't have to obey the lord or offer their fuedal dues as stipulated in the oaths their ancestors made." What they forget is

"You can't make me obey any form of principle and therefore move out of the realm of pure power competition, into the realm of peaceful cooperation."

Yeah, it's on you whether to be a good person or not. I can't make any incentive system so complete that it would force anyone to act like a good person all the way through. You have to make a choice.

It's suspicious, isn't it, that the world works that way.

What the lord says after he orders his knights to to burn down his rebellling serf's village.

What the king says after he exiles the Jews from his land and confiscates all their property for the wicked crime of trying to make him pay back the money he borrowed from them.

Oh, were we only supposed to use make-believe examples? The law protects the weak from the strong, not the other way around. Lords don't need laws to protect them from their subjects. In real life, it's the subjects who need laws to protect them from their lords.

You may not have caught that my example was implicitly based on how the serfs would try to burn their feudal contracts and records when they rebelled, the law is a tool of legitimation by an elite that is outnumbered.

The peasantry revolted once per generation and yet almost every peasant revolt ended in failure. There are almost no examples of peasants actually succeeding at this kind of venture. Even the French Revolution ended with another Bourbon on the throne.

On the other hand, the example of a king expelling the Jews to get out of paying his debts (or cancelling all debts owed to Jews to boost his popularity among the indebted nobility) was actually pulled off successfully on multiple occasions. Kings have actually done it, got away with it, and then gone on to rule productively for many more years.

Burning contracts is fun, but less fun when the king's professional soldiers massacre you and leave your corpse to be eaten by birds. You might wish you lived in a country with the rule of law, where kings and paupers alike are forbidden to use a private army to execute uppity peasants without trial.

In other words, when you tear down the rule of law and let the powerful do whatever they like to the weak, it's generally the powerful who profit and the weak who suffer.

I'm sorry this is abuser "you should be grateful I don't hurt you more" logic, I respect anyone's decision to not aggravate their abuser but I will not insist that they should be grateful. And I don't think the real crime against the jews was sovereign debt default.

And yes the french revolution did end with another bourbon but some other things did change, a bit of a weird claim that "Oh yeah nothing changed as a result of the french revolution.

The law, in its wicked equality, forbids the poor as well as the rich to massacre their lendors, to shoot tax-collectors, to set up their own microstate in international waters and sell fentanyl on the darkweb,

-An Introduction to Religion in the American Empire

Very happy to see someone do a write-up of this! Its one of my go-to "you are wrong about x" facts if that is called for...not that, that is, uh, ever called for, I would never do that in a conversation. Probably why I never did a write-up myself.

But yeah the idea of the immigrants to America being essentially "undocumented masses" is a myth, 19th century European people had documented identities and were paying for passage via legal contracts - changing their name on arrival would have been a huge headache honestly, its a story that never made sense. I agree with Tabarrok that the Godfather was a big part of this becoming a 'known thing', but it did not originate the story; I have I believe seen versions of this story from the 1950's, bundled in the general mythologization of Ellis Island. And its in a lot of media - Don Bluth's An American Tail has an example of it, it was pretty much a go-to trope for any story of 19th century immigrant New York City. I would be interested in tracing out its origin! Maybe someone has done that somewhere, I will take a look.

Suspect it's just the most plausible sounding explanation for the observed divergence between european and american names.

In particular in the Irish case, the usual pattern is that the american side of the family lacks the patronymics used back in the 18th, and it's rather counterintuitive that this is because they have gone through fewer waves of name changes than the folks back home (patronymics start to return during the Gaelic revival and really only become common again after Independance, the bulk of Irish migration happened before either)

It annoys me unreasonably when you want to ask people "what bird and what mammal would make the worst gryphon" as a fun thought exercise, and people with no joy and no imagination always interpret it as "a gryphon that sucks, is physically impossible, and would hate being alive", and - being predictable and lacking in imagination - always, always answer with "a hummingbird and a blue whale lol".

Like come on. Why do you have to suck the fun out of everything. Why not use a fraction of imagination and delightful whimsy. Imagine the combination of a mouse and a sparrow. That creature would be merciless, burtal, absolutely determined to get into your trash and has the power of both wings and hands to do its will. Or a crow and a cat - that thing is smart enough to fuck with people and not afraid to do it. Imagine the ungodly shriek of the noble fox-seagull, also determined to get into your trash.

A gryphon that is a combination of a kangaroo and a cassowary. The only proof we have of a loving god is the fact that those things do not exist. If hell is real, it's full of them. That thing can't fly, but it will run you down, it will kill you, and you will look stupid the whole entire time you're dying.

Why would the first thing that pops into your mind at the words "the worst gryphon" automatically be "a gryphon that hates being alive". Can you not picture a gryphon that fucking loves being alive, and has both the power and the will to make it everyone else's problem.

That extremely loud bellbird and a skunk.

Terrible. I love you. Please don't come any closer oh god.

Hippopostrich.

Combine Lammergeier with Spotted Hyena for ultimate bone-eating menace.

Like, that's an animal that's not going to be an immediate problem for many people, but for the people it's a problem for, it's something that can and will literally devour every last scrap of you and I think there's a wonderful existential menace about that kind of predator.

10/10, horrible beast that wants your bones.

@gallusrostromegalus I needed to draw the bone-eater gryphon. Imagine the sound it would make.

BEAUTIFUL AND TERRIBLE AS THE DAWN!!

I love all your ideas OP but the thing is, "worst animal" inherently does imply a miserable and inefficient creature. If something is a problem for everything else, then that's literally an example of ecological success and power. That's simply not where the mind goes when we hear the word "worst," and especially not mine, because the bigger a problem a creature can create the more I find it charming and admirable.

Like if you asked me to name what's "objectively" the "best" jellyfish, by the parameters you're laying out here, I'd say the irukandji jellyfish, the one that can torture a person to death with one touch. The mightiest jelly. The best protected jelly. The "worst" jelly would be the poor stingless things at the mercy of everything else :(

So a hummingbird whale is the logical answer to "worst," or maybe the opposite, a moa shrew. All the other suggestions here are candidates for "best" gryphons because it is good and awesome when an animal can fuck people up or ruin their vacation.

So, in my mind the size differences of the combined animals aren’t a limiter as the Eagle half of a “normal” gryphon is clearly bigger to match the lion. Now a hummingbird front half to match a whale back half is impractical for obvious reasons (be cool as hell though, 100+ foot long flitting as best it can like a giant helicopter) but a tiny whale back half to match a hummingbird front? Plus it could be “adapted” to water flowers maybe to land? And hummingbirds like water I guess though not a waterfowl. I dunno, I think giving up on that particular combo is quitter talk letting the smartasses that give that answer a win.

Thank you! The two animals are obviously not at their original respective sizes when combined into a gryphon, because if that were the case the original gryphon would already be one of the worst.

And as the reply above me states, once you assume the two sides are proportional hummingbird/blue whale is obviously not the worst combination in any reasonable sense.

If you're going to play the game play by the rules.

Right, obviously if you want to create a gryphon that no loving god would create you need to mixup the ecologies, like a penguinape or polar parrotbear.

and of course She-Ra, like Star Wars, has “princesses” who are also a “rebellion” because everyone wants to be special but also the underdog.

I mean technically wouldn’t that make them usurpers?? or if the horde represents industrial modernity, perhaps just reactionaries.

I don't really know much about She-Ra, but I was thinking about this in the case of Star Wars.

One interesting aspect of Star Wars, when I think about it, is that while the Empire is an absolute monarchy, the rebel alliance -- and the Republic preceding Palpatine’s rise -- is a coalition of democratic forces that we think of as “succeeding” absolute monarchy, and religious orders, local nobles (planetary-scale kings, princesses, and such)  that we think of as “preceding” absolute monarchy (in Eurocentric Marxist/Whig-inflected Earth History terms).

It’s as if, when the French revolution happened, the pro-democratic, bourgeois revolutionaries like Danton, Robespierre, etc had formed a coalition with the remnants of the old Occitanian, Burgundian, Breton, etc, nobility and the remnants of religious orders like the Knights Templar that had previously been suppressed by the power of the French crown, putting aside their differences in their rebellion against the Bourbon regime.

I am doubtful if this was intentional “alternate historical scenario” spec-fic on Lucas’s part, but it’s interesting to wonder about scenarios in which something loosely like this might happen (or perhaps already has happened, in some times and places? Maybe Iran might vaguely fit, with the "anti-Shah coalition" including a variety Islamists, communists, liberals, and others -- with the Islamists ultimately prevailing and suppressing all others once they succeeded the shah).

politics makes strange bedfellows! ("and there was only one viable coalition??")

Although it’s probably not the main reason that Princesses are the more popular fantasy occupation, it’s perhaps relevant that there’s no such thing as a Queen-elector. 

Being a part of an elective government because you have a prince-level inherited title is not some weird fantasy thing, it was a major part of a number of historically important states (and the Holy Roman Empire is at least as significant an influence on cod-medieval fantasy settings as Britain). 

Plus you know, the Whites in the Russian Civil War combined liberal democrats and democratic socialists with absolutist monarchists, the rebellion in Star Wars is much more ideologically coherent than that! And the idea of the prince of a little country as a freedom fighter against the evil empire is fanciful but hardly fantastical: it crops up a bunch in 20th century media (eg: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels).

The other thing: the Republic in Star Wars was seemingly pretty federal, but it looks like it didn't impose a republican form of government on its provinces like the USA does.

Now imagining an alt-history scifi story where Leya Kamehameha, last surviving member of the pre-Dominate senate and Princess of Hawaii, fights to restore democracy to America.

you know historically algeria has quite a lot of hitler particles (vichy rule! government-sponsored harassment of minorities!) if you’re going to go that way

Wouldn't be surprised if this originated in Russian propaganda. "Hitlerites" isn't a word one normally encounters in English; people just say Nazis. Гитлеровцы, however, is a commonly encountered word in Russian, and the Soviet Union notoriously suppressed the truth about the Holocaust, which is also part of how the Russian government can get away domestically with calling the country with the democratically elected Jewish president "fascist" while it slaughters civilians in a grab for lebensraum for the glory of an authoritarian leader. "Fascism" just means "fights against Russia".

This is honestly more comforting a theory than the alternative, which is that the tendency of anti-imperialists to call everyone who disagrees with them a Nazi had so devalued the term, even to themselves, that they needed a new word for "person whose opinions actually bear some resemblance to those of Adolf Hitler". Which they immediately started applying to everyone who disagrees with them.

no matter how bizarre and morally repugnant a guy you make up, there will always be a real guy who's worse. this is called "gonzalo de aguilera's law", after the 11th count of alba de yeltes, media correspondent for the nationalists in the spanish civil war and real-life insane aristocrat, who believed that the cause of communism (in addition to the obvious racial question, the spanish proletariat being moors and asiatics) was that the invention of sewers stopped the workers from dying of cholera, believed in the murder of all bootblacks because "a chap who squats down on his knees to clean your boots at a café or in the street is bound to be a communist, so why not shoot him right away and be done with it?", and later shot both his sons dead because one of them knelt to massage his sore feet. but if not for that guy "race traitor states like saudi arabia" would be in the running for type specimen