Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
No, the golden path isn't a utopia! It's the necessary breaking of eggs to make the survival of humanity omelet. It's sort of a more twisted version of Asimov's Foundation carried entirely in the mind of a being with perfect knowledge of causality. The details of the plot don't necessarily map neatly, but the aesthetics, the fantasy, the torture-versus-dust-specksness of it is what the rationalists are all about. (Another wrinkle is that in Dune I believe [haven't read beyond godemperor] ultimately the solution is to create a being that escapes prophecy, a neat little transcendent conjuration. Solving alignment doesn't quite have the same oomph but it is also essentially a magic trick you can do if your freethinking and selfreliance stats are high enough. Also remember Rat!Harry's patronus is a Human! Benevolent AI should be seen as the liberated, transcendent form of the human mind.)
Have you read the Dosadi Experiment? It's a very strange book and a good way to get a high dose of Herbert's obsessions from a new perspective.
To be clear I love Dune, and I find Herbert fascinating because his ideas always find themselves in tension and are often baffling and muddled enough to provoke entertaining discussion. But the more you scratch the more unambiguously evil he is.