Capricious Musings

A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)

first it was the klingons—they’re originally supposed to be this cruel, bloodthirsty, war-obsessed people—and then tng comes along and it’s like wait no maybe war and violence is a part of their culture and actually ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies so we have to be woke about it.

hey these are the ferengi and they’re supposed to represent everything we hate about capitalist society; they’re greedy, scheming, profit-obsessed, and they look like ugly little trolls to emphasize how much we fucking HATE capitalism. oh wait fuck here comes deep space nine and we have to recognize that they’re PEOPLE. okok what if the pursuit of profit is actually part of their culture and ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies. so we have to be woke about it.

this is the borg, they’re a hivemind race of cyborgs who have no sense of individuality and their only motivation is assimilating people into their society. they want to assimilate humanity and we are completely defenseless against them because their technology is eons ahead of our own and they’re incapable of being reasoned with. oh sweet we have a borg prisoner this is the perfect opportunity to commit genocide against them. fuck actually we can’t commit genocide we’re woke and communists and in space.

hey these are the cardassians, they’re part of a cruel and vicious empire which is supposed to be a representation of fascism and authoritarian regimes, they’re a cold, bloodthirsty people with no sense of empathy or compassion, their society literally references 1984 on multiple occasions, and they’re known for the insanely cruel and inhumane methods of torture they use against their prisoners of war. we hate the cardassians…….. except, here’s a cardassian kid who grew up on bajor, and……. fuck. he’s a person. now we actually have to consider his humanity. and being racist is actually……. bad.

this is the jem’hadar, they’re genetically engineered soldiers who have no sense of individuality and only live to defend the state. they’re all born addicted to a synthetic drug that’s manufactured by the state and administered by their masters—this is how they’re kept subservient. they’re ruthless and powerful and they’re incapable of being reasoned with because their only motivation is violence and killing. so we should kill them all, right? FUCK….. what if they’re actually people. goddamnit. now we have to consider their humanity.

Ever since I was a kid I have never ever been able to find it at all funny when religious people do this. No matter how stupid the thing is that they're upset by, it JUST makes me feel blind rage and disgust?

Maybe it's because I remember my little cousins getting brutally punished by one of my aunts because they watched some kid show she thought was ungodly? Maybe it's also knowing that they genuinely think the rest of the world is full of hellbound idiots over things this trivial.

Original post by @morallygrayautisticscientist here, this post was so funny I decided to draw it lol.

Panel by panel below:

I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Kepler’s in Menlo Park and in TORONTO on Tues (Jun 23) at Osler Records. After that, it’s NYC, Philly and Chicago.

Perhaps you've encountered the stories about Dialog, an extremely weird secret society associated with Peter "Antichrist" Thiel, whose membership data and details have leaked this week:

https://www.wired.com/story/how-peter-thiels-private-dialog-club-secretly-ranks-its-members/

By all appearances, this is a comically creepy, awful talking-shop for the Epstein Class. It's not all that surprising, in retrospect, to learn that all these terrible people were in a group chat, secretly assigning ratings to one another, and periodically gathering to have tedious panels about, I dunno, "race science" or whatever.

I'm on the oligarchy beat, so stories about Dialog have been popping up in my RSS feed for the past week or so, but it wasn't until last night that I made a connection.

A year or two ago, I got an invite to speak at an event. This is normal, I get a lot of these and I do a lot of public speaking. I'm good at it, and it's a good way for me to reach people and get them energized about the issues I care about. Sometimes, I do these talks for free. Sometimes I get paid.

When I first glanced at this speaking offer, I thought, "Huh, I guess this is one to send on to my speaking agent," because the names the offer dropped were a bunch of rich people, and so I assumed that they were having some kind of summit and looking for a keynoter. Then I read a little more carefully and realized they – these billionaires and their lickspittles! – wanted me to pay them, thousands of dollars, so that I could shlep my ass to some luxury resort in order to have the privilege of speaking to them.

I came up as a science fiction writer, and at some point, every sf writer learns "Yog's Law," coined by James D Macdonald when he was running the science fiction forum on GEnie, under the screen name "Yog Sysop":

money flows toward the writer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Macdonald#Educational_work

In other words, whenever you, as a creative worker, are approached by someone who wants to "help" you with your work, and they want you to pay them, they are a scammer, preying upon your essential human need to communicate with others. Run away.

Which is what I did. I deleted the email.

“Hey, none of that. You're a valued member of the team, no matter what your power level.”

“I just don't understand how you can tear open that portal to the fire dimension so easily.”

“… fire dimension?”

“Yeah. Where the fire lives. Before you summon it. For fireballs.”