And then my dad started saying torture was acceptable and waterboarding isn’t really torture because Donald Rumsfeld says so. And my only argument at the time was that the princess is tortured by the Galactic Empire (specifically by Darth Vader) to show that it is super evil and needs its Death Star blown up.
Twenty years later I’m fairly well read in moral philosophy, but also know my dad has gone full MAGA and wouldn’t have cared if I could explain why torture is wrong.
There is a general rule in the LGBT+ community now we have a lexicon (and some indices) of terms by which you can navigate your desires, feelings and behavior.
That lexicon exists to help you sort out who you are. It’s not there for you to categorize other people. People really don’t fit into categories (in any sense) and there are always outliers and fringe cases.
If someone starts an I wonder if I’m an egg conversation, its okay to engage with awareness of comfort levels. We each are captains of our own respective identities.
The hardest thing for people to grok is identity ≠ behavior. The continued necessity of the closet means we are still not free to be our true selves in public. Yes, this can be weird, but even close friends can gatekeep by surprise. We need room to explore and be cautious, even if you, personally are dedicated to inclusion and tolerance.
So yeah, if someone seems enby or trans to you, they remain whatever they identify as, and only they get to decide when it is open to discussion.
Um, can confirm. We call it post-scarcity communism and is an ideal where everyone can get what they need (and plenty of extras to keep them happy and comfy) automatically printed for them, and we’d provide for the acceptance and safety of every behavior people are interested in, even those that are countercultural.
This is the togas and spires utopia that is used in political theory as a far-off ideal, though it doesn’t necessarily have togas or crystal spires (much the way Mars colonies are signaled with domed cities on Mars)
What is interesting is how the capitalists don’t really have a notion of a globalized ideal. They personally want to be rich and live in luxury, but also want a fiefdom teeming with obedient serfs. The stratification and labor is built into the ideology, even if they automate the bottom tiers, there will always be a laboring underclass that is required to suffer for the pleasure of the aristocracy.
The esteem which the islanders nevertheless held for Cook caused them to retain his body. Following their practice of the time, they prepared his body with funerary rituals usually reserved for the chiefs and highest elders of the society. The body was disemboweled and baked to facilitate removal of the flesh, and the bones were carefully cleaned for preservation as religious icons in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of the treatment of European saints in the Middle Ages. Some of Cook’s remains, thus preserved, were eventually returned to his crew for a formal burial at sea. (on Wikipeda )
Allegedly she was so hideous that anyone who gazed upon her would be petrified. It was her contrarian personal aesthetics that killed. Lethal vanity.
It’s very Lovecraftian. Maybe its a Color Out of Space sort of thing.
Basillisks sometimes had to lock eyes to petrify, though the cockatrice version spit extremely corrosive acid. I suspect there’s a link by storytellers unifying their world building.
I know of some women who have practiced a withering stare that can paralyze with fear or shame. I seek to master such techniques.
And the Gorgoneion amulet (Medusa’s face on a plate, and on the shield Aegis) adorning every door in Athens to scare away evil spirits predates all the Perseus stories.
From OSP, I learned about Dread Persephone predating Hades in running the underworld and Aphrodite washing up on Kythira as Astarte (Ishtar) and bringing the alphabet that would replace Linear-B. The Hellenic myths go deep.
Oh and Ishtar might be Asherah, consort to Adonai, id est Yahweh.
Since the Great Depression (about a century ago!) The US government has been fudging the numbers so that the economy looks better than it is. Inflation, unemployment, wages, etc. are qualifed with modifiers (because why count anyone who stopped looking for work?).
The system intends to gaslight us and convince us the economy is doing great. We’re down on our luck, or we suck and deserve to be on the brink of homelessness and starvation.
After all, if our government was transparent with us, we might see it’s not all because of corporate greed and anticompetitive markets. We might realize regulatory capture has real consequences. We might pressure the government to actually serve the pubic and install some effective social safety nets. And then the companies would have to pay us living wages for short work weeks and provide a non-toxic, non-hazardous work environment.
It’s only a small portion of the climatology academic consensus that considers a massive population correction and civilization collapse. Specifically, if the average global temperature reaches pre-industrial mean M +4℃, (NASA page) our infrastructure will not be able to sustain support of a global population of one billion people (some scientists predict significantly fewer humans can survive.)
Granted, that’s a big contingency. We’re headed towards M+4℃ rapidly and we’re watching as contingencies accelerate the rate the global temperature climbs, whether from massive methane releases from the Siberian tundra or the ocean heat absorption declining as it acidifies. (I’m not fully aware of the correlative relationship in that one)
And yes, a lot of factors might mitigate or reverse the process. Many nations are accelerating their response to global warming concerns, ramping up sustainable energy resources over those that produce greenhouse gasses. We may engage in one or more geoengineering projects which mitigate the global temperature rise.
But right now, the projected trajectories don’t look great. Without some major push by the world’s nations and companies (that is, our oligarchical elite) we’re still going to see M+4℃ before the 22nd century.
But who cares? If it’s just a handful of Cassandras wailing about the world turning into a Roland Emmerich movie setting, then the rest of the community isn’t so bothered, right?
Well, here’s the thing: The rest of the academic consensus just doesn’t consider projections like that at all. They don’t deny that this is the expected outcome, or suggest scenarios in which we can endure M+4℃ and be fine. They’re not even imagining we’ll imminently solve the CME problem with settling on the moon or Mars. They’re just assuming that something amazing will happen between now and then and will postpone M+4℃ indefinitely, or at least to some future century.
They’re also not looking to deeply into what that something amazing might be. We don’t have think-tanks designing large geoengineering schemes. We are working on small steps that bring fusion energy closer, make solar energy and wind energy a little more sustainable. We are collectively doing a lot of not-big things that are definitely not going to slow down the speeding runaway train that is M+4℃
Furthermore it’s not like everything will be peachy at M+3.99℃ and we have nuclear holocaust as the needle hits the +4℃ tick. We’ve long known M+1.5℃ is going to be a shit show, as the coasts get hammered by hurricanes, more of the equatorial belt becomes unlivable and nonarable, more of our vert and forests burn (or are stripped by industry – that’s still a thing), and these factors are going to make it harder to organize the large scale projects we need to offset the infrastructure we depend on. (Mom, in Flagstaff AZ just sent a picture of her porch last week showing Montana levels of snow.)
Then there’s the sociology, which few people at all are thinking about, that it’s much more profitable to exploit disasters than it is to prevent them, that our billionaires are more inclined to build shelters in which they can pretend to be safe or create secret missions to Mars (that are likely to fail Stockton Rush style) than they are, create huge projects that serve the whole of society. So we can expect charitable contributions towards climate crisis mitigation to spring up like charitable contributions towards saving Haiti. As I said, the human animal has a tragedy-of-the-commons problem that we have yet to solve.
As for sources, Wikipedia teems with discussion of these matters, and there are some insightful pop-science climatology series on YouTube that dives deep into specific issues, either how we’re fucking ourselves, neat technology that might help, or how a specific situation can be unfucked. There are also ones on how shit is getting bad, is going to get worse and we really don’t want it to get worse. The internet has a lot of resources even while our search engines deteriorate.
And yes, in most climate science, the ongoing consensus is we really don’t want it to get worse and we’re doing way, way, way not enough to prevent things from getting worse. They like to leave it up to the rest of us how much of Titanic has to be underwater before be decide it’s actually going to sink.
I’d love, love, love, to be wrong. I’d like to imagine that humanity’s finest hour is yet to come. But my experience of human nature is we tend to not solve problems and let them become no-longer problems anymore. And we really are waiting for Greta Thunberg to try harder.
The outcome of least-resistance of the climate crisis is projected to heat the world to M+4℃ by 2100, possibly as early as 2040 or 2034 in very-worst-possible-timeline scenarios (clathrate guns, and biodiversity extinction acceleration and stuff like that). Famine and resource wars and no small amount of cannibalism is likely to be the order of the day. At that point we’re not going to be thinking about preserving Chopin and Shakespeare, but enough food to last the migration.