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If we had a hostile alien invasion, thousands dead in the first wave, footage of the aliens, everything. half the GOP would still be saying it’s a hoax, and making it into an anti Liberal/anti LGBTQ rant. Part of them would straight up worship the aliens, a bunch of them would drink bleach.
I wouldn’t have believed you a few years ago but that pretty much happened.
Aliens are woke
honestly by the time they get the technology to visit planets so far away they’d probably get pretty woke
You are looking for c/HFY and r/HFY.
But I agree, except for the West pretty much every banana republic tries to isolate itself so their dictators can easier rob their subjects riches.
I summed it up in the Short Story Hard WEST
Its good for Science Fiction can be aspirational sometimes though.
Classic Star Trek has humans living in an idealistic society meeting some weirdo aliens doing some weirdo alien shit that causes a lot of problems. Then you realize we’re more like the aliens than the we are like the idealistic future human society. Our society is alien to to an ideal society.
Then the Enterprise warps off to some other place to do some cool shit somewhere else and the aliens are stuck on their shitty planet because they’re a bunch of losers what can’t get past their weirdo shit.
The implication is that we could be the cool dudes in a starship constantly doing awesome shit. But instead we’re the losers stuck on a planet that the people in the starships laugh at.
So the reason why an ideal future isn’t possible is because we can’t get past our weirdo loser ideas.
I can now picture Kirk, Spock and Bones having a chuckle about some weirdo aliens that can’t advance because they’re stuck in the rut of doomerism.
“It’s quite illogical that they can’t understand they can never achieve anything if they presume failure before they even try.”
“Humanity once thought that way a long time ago but we eventually got past it. Anyway, off we go somewhere else to see some other loser aliens doing stupid shit we used to do!”
Username checks out.
So the reason why an ideal future isn’t possible is because we can’t get past our weirdo loser ideas.
I can now picture Kirk, Spock and Bones having a chuckle about some weirdo aliens that can’t advance because they’re stuck in the rut of doomerism.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was indeed a closet communist who infused his political beliefs into the show. The concept of a peaceful, egalitarian society united under one government, where resources were shared and everyone worked for the betterment of all - this is essentially a communist ideal. In fact, the characters themselves embody different facets of Marxist theory. For instance, Captain Kirk represents the proletariat fighting against oppression while Mr. Spock embodies the need for logic and rational decision-making.
Star Trek’s vision of the future was meant to inspire hope and demonstrate what humanity could achieve when freed from the constraints of class and economic systems. In many ways, the show serves as a subtle form of communist propaganda. As you mentioned, each episode often portrayed humans as progressing towards an idealistic future, while the aliens faced various challenges due to their clinging to old ideologies and social structures. This reflects Roddenberry’s belief that to truly advance, societies must shed outdated and divisive ideas.
By presenting a world where these barriers are overcome, Star Trek encourages viewers to question their own societal norms and consider how they might work together in a more just and cooperative manner. Although the series was never overtly political, its underlying message clearly illustrates Roddenberry’s support for communism, making it a unique piece of entertainment that not only entertains but also educates its audience.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was indeed a closet communist
Citation needed.
Quite a take on it!
Meanwhile, homo sapien are effectively half fighting chimp, half sexy loving bonobo.
We get to choose our own path.
Half sexy? I’m offended! I’m 100% sexy bonobo!
One of the iffey feelings I have reading three-body series, even though it’s a pretty dark series that also highlight the dark side of humanity, is that the world superpowers were somewhat effecticely cooperative. May be if Liu Cixin wrote the book around Covid, it might be quite different.
I happen to really like District 9 for this reason
There’s no malicious plot of aliens blowing up shit or invading to colonize: nope, aliens literally just crash-landed on accident and humanity was like “stay the fuck right there, we’ll take all your shit until we figure out how to
deal withexploit you”Humanity is always its own worst-enemy
Also, the future of Elysium (also Bloomkamp) looks more and more likely, with the 1 percent fucking off to a luxury space station in orbit and the rest of humanity living in poverty on the destroyed Earth.
Another interesting thing about Elysium is how the AI is programmed to only recognize rich people as humans. Just like rich people think about it.
I am still hoping for a Halo like future, with civil war in space, war against aliens, the threat of a dark and ancient threat and all of that. Or maybe just a Stellaris future with the same but more megastructures
American perspective.
The only kind that matters. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Not to worry, we had our fair share of COVID nutjobs in the Netherlands as well. Including a whole political party.
There is nearly a century of Nebula Award winning science fiction that is in the public domain. Hollywood can’t say, “they’re out of ideas” All they need are screenwriters who aren’t idiots.
Or maybe pay the screenwriters to do more than a first draft?
I also used to wonder why writing in TV shows and movies got so bad in the last decade. A lot of things feel like it’s just a first draft level of quality. Some information came out last year that indicated that they were indeed filming things off of a first draft. Because the studios didn’t want to pay writers beyond making a first draft.
Hopefully that issue has been resolved. Hooray for unions!
Gantz last arc did this so well, people just don’t give a crap about the truth, misinformation is widespread, and people will listen to whatever propaganda they want.
Alien invasion is probably the only thing that would make (most) humans band together.
When you have giant spiders trying to eat everyone, people will stop caring that their neighbors leaves blew into their yard, or your skin tone is a few shades darker than someone else’s.
I think you underestimate the level of hatred some people have for various groups or individuals.
Also it’s pretty damned likely that there would be a contingent of people who would insist that we shouldn’t fight back because we have it coming, that fighting will make things worse, that the aliens are working for God, or whatever.
Eight legged freaks?
I haven’t seen that film in years
Aren’t those just irradiated spiders?
I would have turned the movie off if the narrator said, “The people were terrified, remaining six feet apart. And everyone was hording toilet paper.”
You would really like the Three Body Problem.
Obama said the book had “immense” scope, and that it was “fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty”.
Covid just made us all realise we know a lot more people than we thought we did who would hide a zombie bite.
And yell at you for asking if they have ever been bitten.
This is a great comment
Funny, I was saying this for decades about zombie bites. I was such a downer pessimist. Now after COVID hit my family has rebranded me a realist.
More like we know a lot more people that would have zombie bite parties because they “trust their immune system” and simultaneously don’t believe in the zombie hoax.
Nadine isn’t a zombie, she just likes biting! Don’t you dare kink shame her!!!
Also there are people who will intentionally smear their zombie bite juice on you because ain’t nobody gonna trample on their freedom.
Kiss that damned zombie you coward. LIVE WITHOUT FEA—BRAAAAAAAINS
Explains how zombie apocalypse movies happen
You didn’t know that already? The cute to a zombie bite is a bullet to the head and no one wants to be shot.
Covid proved to me any libertarian hope/dream I had wouldn’t actually work because people would never get together to do the right thing as a group.
People getting together for the common good is just a government, the exact thing libertarians hate.
No not necessarily since government = force. The hope of libertarians is that they would do it out of a mutual interest in protecting others. The whole do what you want as long as it doesn’t impact me. That argument was proven fucked by the actions of the pandemic. That’s what I’m talking about.
Worse, there have been two “libertarian cities” over the past few years that suffered an awful fate. First thousands of people moved to a town in NH and then voted themselves into all city positions. They shut off the government, had everything collapse, and returned to where they came from a few years later when it turned out that fire fighters are nice and bears roaming the town (cuz one person’s hobby was to feed them donuts and they are libertarian so they can do that dontchano). In AZ, they built a community without any infrastructure specifically to avoid taxes and government control–they were buying water from another community until that community said they needed the water for themselves, leaving them with nothing.
What cities were those? Would love to read more about it
Most likely it was South Park, Gotham or Duckburg.
AZ was Rio Verde Foothills.
Well it makes sense. Most people think they are lucky, and to one extent they are, the unlucky ones are all dead so survivor bias. Once they are aware of a problem they reason out they will be the lucky one. Additionally, the interests of an individual has little to do with the interests of the crowd. We really should start learning this concept and stop with the invisible hand nonsense. It could make perfect sense for someone in the energy sector to keep burning oil. It can make sense for a company to not bother with environmental cleanup. It can make sense for a restaurant owner to not want a lockdown.
The whole appeal to rational self-interest depends on a false premise. Biology has furnished an example. For the point of view of cancer it makes perfect sense to keep on multipling. The time horizon of each cancer cell is pretty short maybe a few months. If it doesn’t spends those months multipling as fast as it can other will.
The whole appeal to rational self-interest depends on a false premise.
I mean, potentially. We also hate cancer cells because cancer cells kill people, you know, like, we are capable of higher reasoning. The reasoning that co-operating with somebody else is oftentimes of more benefit to us than not doing so. The reasoning that, you know, we fucking die, grappling with our own mortality, and making plans for after we’re dead, based on reasoned principles that we can come to as an idea for what might be “good” for people, generally. We’re capable of long term planning and decision making, all in our own self-interest. It doesn’t make sense for someone in the energy sector to keep burning oil precisely because of the effects climate change in the long term, likewise with environmental cleanup, or keeping your restaurant open. It is not effective for society to do these things in the small or in the broad.
The people in the energy sector aren’t burning oil because they’re just assholes. There’s a little bit of that, of like “fuck these guys because I just kind of hate them now”, but it’s mostly just because they’re not convinced that climate change is real. They’re convinced that some short term concern or other concern about “national security” trumps the threat of climate change. They’re convinced that they’re the best locus for power, in the field of energy (or maybe even generally for the egomaniacal), even if they’re actively destroying the environment by holding onto their power. It’s not because they’re incapable of long-term reasoning, it’s because their long-term reasoning is flawed and neglected.
I dunno, it works out to basically be the same as though they only had access to short term dogshit reasoning, in the actual environmental effects they have on the people around them, but I find it pertinent to know that they had access to long-term reasoning skills, and those skills were just co-opted, warped, and ignored. The long term reasoning was applied to rationalize their short term goal, their ideal shaped their reasoning, rather than the other way around. Not really to say that you can’t just start out from a different position and come to a different end point, you know, just to say that. The memes are more complicated, even in their malignancies.
What does this even mean? What does COVID have to do with Libertarianism?
Every strong libertarian I know, and there are several in my family, is strictly anti-mask and anti-vax. It boils down to “you can’t tell me what to do” and nothing else.
Right and that’s my point. I use to agree with that sentiment because it was built on the premise that people would do what they want as long as it wasn’t directly hurting others… Unfortunately we found that people thought their personal freedom meant more than protecting others.
Which is disheartening and eye opening.
One thing I have noticed recently, and I suppose it was the Pandemic that did it for me, is that we are sort of culturally narcissist in the West as a whole. People are very worried about their liberties, but few people stop to consider their social responsibilities. Libertarianism really is the idea that nobody has a responsibility towards other people–it’s a very selfish and narcissist way of thinking and requires you to be able to walk past someone who is suffering and who you could help with minimal effort/inconvenience, yet you mutter to yourself how it must suck to be them and continue on with your day.
Honestly same both from and outsider and in group way. Libertarians we’re willing to do nothing to help or worse risk others lives to virtue signal and statist saw governments fail to do anything meaningful and waffle about the best restrictions to put in place and still thought “but if my guy was in charge”.
There were people making actual differences out there, but it almost always a political.
I’m glad mutual aid gained some hype for a little bit at least.
Yeah any ideology that’s dependent on nobody prioritizing their self interest over society’s best interest isn’t going to work.
But that doesn’t mean a functional society isn’t possible. We’re living in one right now. Sure there are a lot of improvements needed, but improvement is possible.
Utopia actually translates to “no place”. Only fictional people can achieve a utopia. Real life functional societies with real people are an iterative process. Make improvements, some asshole finds a loophole to exploit, make more improvements to prevent assholes from exploiting the system. Repeat. Do that over and over again, vote in elections over and over again to move society a little closer, inch by inch, a little closer to the ideal, even when the ideal isn’t actually possible.
Societies aren’t created by intelligent design, they’re a product of evolution. But that evolution can be guided by the people that vote. Democracy isn’t something that’s ideal, it’s a grind. You’re never going to be living in an ideal society, but if you try you can make the society you live in a little better.
I think Don’t Look Up got it pretty right, a lot of people would be willing to band together, if not the majority of the world. But politicians and billionaires would ruin it for everyone even if it means everyone dies. When the time comes we can still band together, and take down the people we need to
I still can believe the world to rally together when it means to kill something.
The enemy must be simple though. Too complicated or invisible or something and the conspiracy nuts will take over.
I still can believe the world to rally together when it means to kill something.
The pandemic was an opportunity for humanity to kill something, at least to the extent that viruses are alive.
But a pathogen is too complicated to fight and invisible.
Immunology is hard. Let’s go shopping.
Do viruses bleed?
You wouldn’t be able to see the aliens. The best you would be able to do is get blurry pictures of their ships from telescopes if you’re lucky. Conspiracy nuts would do fine.
Any civilization able to get to us, would be advanced enough that a carrier task group bombing the uncontacted people of the north sentinel islands would be a fair fight in comparison.
We would see a blur in our telescopes followed by death or whatever they want to do to us.You’re absolutely right. I was describing the hypothetical scenario where the aliens just want to fuck with us by blowing up the sun or something. If they wanted us dead it would be lights out before we know they were there.
or whatever they want to do to us.
Anal probing, most likely.
Poor aliens just think our ass is the mouth. Where they come from bipeds are assmouth to assface
There are so many nightmare situations you can imagine.
A single missile loaded up with a highly contagious 100% fatal pathogen, use drones with infrared to pick off the remaining hermits.
Just drones. Self-replicating killing machines that know all the human tricks.
Neutrino bombs, a few million of them.
A horrible digging machine just digs and releases all that poisons stuff from under us. We all suffocate.
Sunblocker, apply for 30 years. The few remaining humans living in cannibalism around geothermal vents get nuked from orbit.
Giant space mirrors. Fry us.
Bioweapons which specifically target or exclude a certain genetic profile. The dark side of gene therapy.
Too complicated or invisible or…
Bing bing bing!
Internal Combustion Engine? Nuclear Bomb? SCIENCE, praise be.
Invisible / long term & murky phenomena? JUST YOUR OPINION, man, I trust Facebook and WhatsApp forwards on this one.
I thought the same thing. I could see the world banding (mostly) together for a fight, but not to just make life better.
On that note, I highly recommend checking out The Three Body Problem books. Without going into spoilers, this is a huge part of one of the books.
I’m halfway through book two and I was thinking the same thing.
Someone tell them what the ‘fi’ stands for in sci-fi
And then they’ll tell you what the sci stands for and keep bitching, and honestly quite rightly so.
It IS a dumb trope that doesn’t reflect realiy, and fiction’s job is to reflect reality, not to break away from it. Not with human reactions and behavior.
Just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be believable. A good story shouldn’t make you suspend disbelief to the point that it keeps feeling unrealistic, at least within the world that the author created.
If I write a story about an average Joe who goes back in time to the 1700s, people might be able to accept that premise, but then if I write that, because he’s from our time, he knows how to do everything our civilization does, from making and programming a computer to building a jet airplane to landing people on the moon, I think most people would find that too unrealistic to be enjoyable.
