#nuclear war feels like the most rational thing

[tanadrin]

Rarely do we predict the end of the world two or three generations hence; it’s always “this generation will not pass away before all these things have come to pass.” And I’m sure there are a lot of reasons for this—if you’re running a genuine doomsday cult, for instance, you don’t want to put the doomsday too far off. And I *think* part of the driving force there is that it’s really hard for us to imagine that the world will continue once we are gone, more or less intact. Like, it’s really weird to look at small children and know that, if everything goes right, they will see and do and think things you will never share in. That your life before they came along will be nothing more than the thinly imagined world beyond the borders of photographs that your parents’ or grandparents’ was before you. That however important and accomplished you are, the world will continue to spin when you have died.

That’s a hard fact to get your head around! And it’s sort of the inverse of the way we ofte treat our childhood as cosmogonic, as the default state against which all else rises and falls. We are prone to a solipsism where the bounds of the word are the bounds of our lives. That’s not a novel idea, but it does make me very skeptical of any eschatology positive or negative. The world has, so far, an extremely good track record of zero transformative catastrophes or eucatastrophes that take place with the sound of trumpets in the twinkling of an eye. Sure, it has lots of moments of *change.* Whole ages of them—dramatic sometimes, but always continuous. Differentiable, you might say, in that however rapidly the status quo is in flux you can see there is one, and how we got here from a previous state.

And not only do doomsayers have a pretty lousy track record, they frequently exhibit telltale signs that their doomsaying is based in something other than careful deduction—like Paul Ehrlich not only missing the Green Revolution (a forgivable error perhaps) but digging in even further the more reality continued to drift from his apocalyptic forecasts. One cannot help but think of Harold Camping, continually reissuing his predictions for the Second Coming. But also—peak oil was wrong; climate change has been bad but looks like it will not be “the end of industrial civilization” bad; a NATO/Warsaw Pact nuclear war never came to pass, (although arguably that’s the one that was in a lot of ways the most rational, and where we got luckiest). The non-doomsday-prophet types look at these fortunate turns and go “thank God that never happened!” But some people seem truly disappointed—after all, if the word will outlast you, how special can you or your era really be?

[canmom]

baited by (what else would it ever be, sigh) that discussion of AI art, I found my way onto the forum for readers of Scott Whateverhisnameis's blog, the Slate Star Codex guy - a corner for a particular overtly right-wing flavour of rat.

the first thread I landed on after the AI shit was a discussion of the claim that the reason the US is failing in its various COIN wars is that its rules of engagement are not cruel and brutal enough, and should be relaxed - explicitly, more civilians need to be killed. like many forum discussions, it mostly involved people who agree with each other jumping down the throat of a lone dissenting voice. I won't give the blow by blow, but the way these people think frankly fucking disturbs me. rather than 'temporary embarassed billionare', here we see the 'temporarily embarassed colonial overlord'.

when it comes to observing geopolitical shit, if we want to understand the world around us, it is certainly relevant to try to ask, what do this and that actor want to achieve, what strategy are they pursuing, what do they believe about the world and does it square with reality. but the thing that really gets me is when people start talking about what 'we' should do - a more sinister version of when a football fan talks proudly about how 'we' beat the other team, despite never setting foot on the field. of course, the US military being such a big organisation, perhaps some of these people actually are members of it. but they are not, I strongly suspect, actually involved in making big decisions about military strategy. they're commenters on the sidelines.

and yet, any strategy of, say, Hamas or the Houthis, is considered only so far as they must surely exploit any reticence to kill civilians on the part of their enemy. there's no reason to discuss why they might have carried out the October 7 attacks, what they might have sought to achieve by it and whether it succeeded or failed, it's just crazy muslims doing crazy muslim things. but it is the strategy of the US and to a certain extent Israel that bears rational analysis, where everyone has a suggestion.

the possibility of a single democratic state in the Levant is mentioned (when I read this thread last night) exactly once, described as a total capitulation and surrender on the part of Israel that would certainly lead to a bloodbath. rather than, say, Apartheid-era South Africa, the most-discussed historical analogy is Rome's laying waste to Carthage, followed by the second world war.

and perhaps, if we can really claim there is something like a 'mind' of the state of Israel (whose neurons are its government, press, various smaller groups within it etc. etc.), that is how it seems the stakes lie. but is it what we believe, when we weigh up our capacity to intervene in this situation, or just try to understand it from a long way away? I don't think it should be. seems daft. at some point we need to try another angle.

what gets me about all this - and to a certain extent when I see leftists doing it for the other side, the This Is How Hamas Can Still Win genre of posting - is to wonder why people feel the need to pick a team to cheer for, rather than viewing all these "geopolitical actors", these giant country-egregores, as something like dangerous animals, largely unpredictable forces which slurp up human lives and lay waste to massive populations as they roll around and wrestle each other? why do you need to imagine yourself in the driver's seat, as if you're playing a game like Civ or Europa Universalis? when do you forget that countries are social constructs?

in other words, why do people who are not governments, not involved in making decisions on behalf of governments, and whose relationship to their game-theoretic rationality (which leads them to routinely do things like blow up hospitals, detain random people in prison camps, fling missiles at each other to make a point, and stockpile nuclear weapons) is largely the relationship of a tick on the skin of a deer hoping it will be able to continue supping on blood and not get randomly thrown off into the snow, feel they must advocate on behalf of governments? or for that matter, political parties etc.?

why do you start saying we?

anyway that's enough of a dose of rat-interaction for the rest of the year. computer-goddesses help me, I want to spend my time drawing pictures, not taking bait like this. shit just gets under my skin.

[atopvisenyashill]

I am so glad you articulated the criticism of Dany crucifying the slavers as a political folly and not a moral folly like listen I am a Dany fan if I could send asks from my sideblog you would know this but I do not believe we are supposed to just brush off the crucifixion like Dany herself isn’t even fully convinced it was the right thing to do. Remembering it she feels sick and has to shut down her doubts and TELL HERSELF it was right. She is an interesting character to me because she can’t stand the compromises she must make to maintain peace AND YET she does want justice and liberation BUT she also hates the suffering and bloodshed of war AND YET she is quick to command violence on impulse. I do think her peace in Meereen was real (big Meereen Knot Essays believer) but all of her internal conflicts lead her to her mistakes. Can’t stand peace but can’t stand war so she just tears herself apart!! It’s tragic! It’s interesting! So much more interesting than an unambiguously heroic Dany who makes no mistakes ever!

Yeah, like....it's certainly morally messy, and I think it's morally more messy because Dany isn't a slave of the Ghiscari like Missandei or an Unsullied like Grey Worm, Red Lamb, etc who is rising up and using violent revolution to liberate the slave class of Meereen - she is a descendant from a foreign, formerly slaving culture that enslaved most of the cultures represented in Meereen, someone of noble birth who has experienced immense suffering but was able to pull herself out of it because of her immense social privilege and magical abilities, using violence in an attempt to liberate those her family had once helped subjugate while...still keeping herself at the top of the pyramid.

There's a lot of mess and contradictions in this situation and I find it much less interesting (as you say) when people paint what Dany is doing here as unambiguously heroic. I know I sound like a broken clock when I say it, but the justification of "well this culture has slavery and slavery is bad" is the exact sort of rationalization many colonial and imperial powers make when conquering. White Americans made it about various Indigenous communities ("oh well the Iroquois had slaves and conquered their neighbors" yeah and white americans had chattel slavery which is objectively worse so what now??), the UK and France used it as a rationale for conquering most of Africa and parts of Asia; there's always this annoying through-line of "well Africans sold themselves into slavery" and I think making this argument that "Well the Ghiscari are brutal slavers" is really similar. And I know people don’t like the dragon/nuke comparison or the imperialism/colonizer comparisons but….what made the genocides of the Americas, and the colonization and imperialism of the 20th centuries stand out from the wars that came before is the sort of hellish combination of nationalism, political schisms, fervent hatred of the Other, and industrial growth. Never before could people amass armies and kill on such a massive scale before. Never before did we have weapons that were so fucking good at killing. Never before did we have the bureaucracy capable of streamlining the process so damn well! (and not for lacking of trying, shout out rome but like...still). I think the dragons are a commentary on that - when someone has access to technology like that, can one person be left to decide if it’s use is good or evil? can one culture not be completely corrupted by their technological advances? can nuclear bombs or weapons Ever be used for good, and if they can be then where is that line drawn? who draws the line? why does that person get to draw the line? I don't think any of this will have a clear answer because that's not exactly how he does things - he's just writing a scenario about this and letting us analyze why it happens on our own.

So it’s like okay the Ghiscari and Dothraki are slaving cultures...Sacking a city is still a violent, destructive thing to do and she does it three times including to a city she is attempting to rule. The moment she had an inkling she might be ruling Meereen, she should have rethought her actions there so she doesn’t start off alienating a large group of people. Coming in as a stranger from a culture who used to be slavers and constantly making comments about how much she hates the culture she’s ruling over is....not great! Dany going back and forth between "I hate these people I was right to crucify them" and "there's too much violence amongst these people I have to stop the violence" is why the issues in Meereen become so complicated. Does she have reasons for acting this way? Yes! It doesn't change the outcome of her actions!

What's interesting about her is that as you say, she does realize this conflicting dichotomy within herself! That’s like, the entire issue she’s facing in Meereen - she wants peace because she knows that’s what’s best for the people there and yet struggles to control her boredom and temper because she is too traumatized to sit still any longer. She’s associated the constant move, the constant fight, the violence and blood and death and destruction with righteousness, justice, goodness, and we can SEE it’s having a negative effect on her psyche, her emotions. She’s not HAPPY by the ending of adwd, she’s not self actualized, she’s just hardened herself completely in the face of this unending monster of a campaign. She wants off this ride and yet she’s unable to find a way out. I don’t think we’re meant to cheer her on here!! SHE is barely cheering herself on here!!! It’s a burden to her!!!!

[gatheredfates]

For the NPC ask - as the WoL, did Kor go the First? Was there anyone special there for them?

Have your followers send you NPCs and you describe your OC's feelings/relationship to that NPC! I feel like there are lot of NPC's I could talk about, because SHB is hands-down my favourite expansion and where I have the most lore developed for Kor, but on the back of my Minfilia ask I thought I'd talk about Mini!filia. Or, more appropriately, Ryne.

A haunting can be a lovely thing if you let it.

Kor always felt haunted, but not like this; not by an apparition that stood among her companions and felt solid in her hands; not by one who seldom smiled, who shrunk back — who felt herself to be the crudest simulacrum, a mockery of the woman they loved — and their actions, whether intentional or not, reinforced it.

What was it like being a machination of fate? A dozen little girls over a hundred years trained, mentored and dying for a doomed world; the spark of a ghost instilling itself in the babe for the threadbare hope that she would be different. Her soul was bruised before she left the womb, divots made by dozens of fingerprints pulling her in a thousand directions (to obliteration and inaction; to war or strife).

"Something called out to me. Someone I had to meet. You."

For fuck sake, she knew Minfilia's faith in Hydaelyn was unwavering, but to what end? How much could light proclaim sanctity while it drenched itself in the blood of children?

The answer, Kor would come to know, was that light waded through the mire like all the rest; not holy, not sacred, not divine. It was orderly in its machinations, but it was not good. A body in its ocean could still drown in it. When she coughed up its ichor, she was reminded of all the times Llymlaen thought it prudent she take a mouthful of brine — it all burned in her throat all the same.

"She's a fucking child," she chastised Thancred in the night. They'd had their oppositions as companions, but never like this — not for a haunting, a sister reimagined. She knew he loathed her concept and how she pantomimed a ghost. She knew he pitied her, sacrificial lamb to fate none of them signed up for. She knew there was a part of him, however small, that hoped his Minfilia would emerge bright and whole and alive again.

"Tell me." It was the silent question between them, the one he refused to ask and the one she'd never answer, "If this was your sister, what would you do?"

Koret was never a perfect sister. In fact, she wasn't a great sister at all. She wasn't any better than him and she knew it. Rational and a degree of separation could easily persuade her that it was not this Minfilia's fault for the accident of her birth. If it were Lily, however?

Well, they both knew her for a hypocrite.

But Minfilia? Oh, this was one was a lot like Lily. When she came out of her shell Kor saw how spirited she was; how she laughed with Alisae and comforted Alphinaud; how she brightened at Urianger's presence and admired Y'shtola's resolve. She was young and naïve, but she was no pushover. For the fright of her gift and the sacrifices before her, she was determined to be of use. She wanted to save her world and the people in it, even when everyone she'd grown up around preferred her in her cage — a songbird from another time.

When it came to it, the final choice of who should live (to laugh, to love!), her little heart beat so loudly as she declared "Me. I want to live. I want to fight."

From Minfilia to Ryne. How liberating it must have felt to finally have your identity. How relieving it must be to be loved for who you are. A lovely haunting to a beautiful, breathing sister.

Because that's what Ryne is to Kor. Half daughter, half sister. Try as she might, that maternal thread always found itself tangling in the youngest of their groups — ensnaring whether she wanted it or not — and it was so easy to envelop her in a family when she never had the opportunity to hold one. They were certainly not nuclear, and hardly ideal, but they were hers. They were hers and they were good.

Kor loves Ryne. It breaks her heart that she had to be left behind, but she is also comforted in the fact that she is one of the strongest girls she knows. She took her fate in both hands and charged, knowing her place but not letting her be defined by it. She has faced adversity and kept her sweetness, a trait admired by the Captain — even if she can't personally fathom it.

Yes, a haunting can be a lovely thing if you let it. A living thing, however? Well, that's even lovelier.

[haveyouseenthisskeleton]

Which skeleton is the best at cooking, and which skeleton only makes the most disastrous poison/toxic inedible meals?

Undertale Sans - He is decent. He can make basic meals. He only burns them when people force him to do it and he doesn't feel like it, so someone push him out of the kitchen so he can go nap in peace. He's a clever little shit.

Undertale Papyrus - He's improving, but it's still random. Sometimes he gives you something actually very good, and sometimes... Uh... Let's just say that's why you insisted to have a dog. At least the dog likes Papyrus' cooking.

Underswap Sans - He got banned from the kitchen the day he tried to convince his brother to put chocolate instead of the meat in his shepperd's pie. He has a bad habit of mixing things that shouldn't ever meet in the first place.

Underswap Papyrus - He's actually really good at it but way too shy to show off. He's not even trusting his skills to cook for his friends and prefers to buy things instead. He could be a very good cook if he tried.

Underfell Sans - He knows how to survive lol. Cooking pastas, using the microwave... Cooking the pastas in the microwave... Well, maybe it explains why Edge is terrible at this.

Underfell Papyrus - He's an health hazard. Never eat anything coming from him and especially not his broken glass lasagnas. He thinks he is really good and refuses to take lessons. Maybe if someone dies one of these days...

Horrortale Sans - He's usually pretty fine with cooking but can randomly forget half of the recipe which can lead to pies, but with only the bottom of the pie, or meat dishes without the meat. But he's trying.

Horrortale Papyrus - He prefers to bake than to cook, but he's doing a decent job. He has troubles with spaghettis only, as it giving him panic attacks, but everything else is fine. He knows how to adapt.

Swapfell Sans - I hope you have time. He likes to cook but DAMN HE IS SLOW. Nox is a perfectionnist and he wants only the best for his guests. By the time he finishes cooking for a dinner, it's already the middle of the night. But it's good. But you'll probably won't sleep tonight because he still hadn't started the dessert.

Swapfell Papyrus - He doesn't know how he was doing without Google Underground. He just follows what Google says, and it's a chance out of two he does something edible. It doesn't help he loves to try any weird things he sees on Instagram.

Fellswap Gold Sans - He knows how to cook rations in case of a nuclear war but other than that he's pretty bad at it. He thinks it's such a waste of time and would rather do anything else. Plus he has money and people who can deliver the food to him so what's the point?

Fellswap Gold Papyrus - Cooking hot things makes him nervous so there's a chance of getting either overcooked or not-cooked-at-all food. Whatever you like. He tried...

[nevesmose]

When I was a kid, there was a hill overlooking our little town with a mysterious concrete structure at the top. To get there you had to go over the old canal, through the abandoned quarry filled with unidentifiable rusted-out equipment scattered around, and then past the creepy broken-down barn where some comedy genius had written "INSERT DICK HERE" next to a suspiciously-positioned hole in the wall.

The whole place was forested over thickly enough to muffle most sounds, and every so often you'd tread hollowly on discarded shotgun cartridges from farmers and/or farmers' mums sneaking out to shoot rabbits at night.

It was also haunted by the ghost of a drunk horseman, but being drunk we decided his actual ability to inflict harm on us would be fairly limited.

In any case, having avoided tetanus, gunshot wounds and catastrophic dick chafing, you'd reach a small sunlit clearing right at the top of the hill. The views were truly spectacular - to the north, fields. To the east, fields. To the south, fields. To the west, fields. The benefits of a rural childhood.

Right in the middle of the clearing was a kind of rectangular metal hatchway set low into the ground. Looking at it you could tell it had been opened up and filled in with concrete at some stage, and needless to say our little minds ran rampant trying to guess what was down there. For about fifteen minutes anyway, and then we'd wander off and smack the shit out of each other with tree branches - we were only kids after all.

The main theory, settled on with all the gravitas and judiciousness we could muster, was that it was some kind of Cold War era nuclear bunker. Not that we really knew much of what that meant, all being members of the first post-Soviet generation who didn't have to grow up with ideas like the four-minute warning or Protect & Survive knocking about inside our heads.

Somebody remembered seeing War Games on Channel 4 one weekend afternoon so we based our mental image on that and conjured up a miniature Scottish version of NORAD sitting empty under our feet, all big maps and flashing lights drowned forever in grey concrete.

And then we grew up a bit and thought, nahh, there's no way it was a bunker. It was a radio tower platform or a power substation or something, right?

But it was a bunker though. I looked it up years later and it was a two-person Royal Observer Corps fallout monitoring station to be used for keeping track of the devastation of our closest city, about 20 miles away. The entirety of the UK is hoaching with these things and I can guarantee you if you grew up anywhere in Britain you were much, much closer to them than you might expect.

Not just close to the bunkers but to the people who would have crewed them in the event of armageddon. That's the thing about the ROC, as I've found out since - it was a voluntary service operated by people living nearby.

So who, I wonder, were the unsung unknown uncalled-upon heroes who'd be there when the end came? Who in my sleepy little village with one school, one church and one main street would have had to leave their families to their fate and spend their next, and probably last, two weeks of life in that tiny concrete cell eating strictly rationed food, breathing strictly filtered air, and working out just how many kilotons had been expended on our little corner of the world?

I have my suspicions, but it's not the kind of thing you can just ask your old neighbour out of nowhere. Would they even have gone if they had to? I wouldn't blame them for a second if they chose to stay home instead. I imagine it was something they all had to decide for themselves and no one, least of all the happy beneficiaries of a better world than the one they lived in, has any right to judge.

I feel as though I'm dragging myself to a Meaningful Conclusion here. Oh boy. The past is always closer than you might think, I suppose. Just around the corner, just out of reach, but always there wherever we happen to be.

This post was mainly motivated by reading the excellent Attack Warning Red: How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War by Julie McDowall, who also does the Atomic Hobo podcast which is well worth a listen if you have any interest in this kind of thing. Don't have nightmares.

[lordnot]

Harm Reduction: The Liberal, Progressive Argument for Voting Trump in 2024

(DO NOT POST UNTIL RFK AND MARIANNE DROP OUT AND ENDORSE)

Well, it sure has been quite a primary season, hasn't it? Not in terms of debates, of course. That would have been a waste of time. But the ups and downs, the twists and turns! I don't know about you, but I was kept on the edge of my seat right up until the end!

But now that it's over, it's time to start focusing on the general election. It's time to give up on the purity tests, the pie-in-the-sky aspirations, and discuss the most strategic decision on who to support with our vote, our dollar, and our time. And that is why I implore you to give very serious consideration to supporting Donald Trump in upcoming 2024 election.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "What is this accelerationist nonsense?" But nothing could be further from the truth. I am no irresponsible accelerationist, and I certainly am no Republican. I am instead focused on causing the least amount of harm to our country in 2025 and beyond. And, sadly, due to circumstances that I will now explore, another term of a President Donald Trump is our best chance to do that.

Look: I love Joe Biden. And I am not at all fooled by these stories put out in the media that he is too old to be President. That being said, we cannot overlook what has happened to our country during Biden's first term. The loss of abortion rights. The rise in violence against trans people. Immigrants and refugees having their very lives turned into a political game. The Republican Party is absolutely out of control. And one of the reasons why I respect President Biden so much is also one of his greatest weaknesses: his respect for Rule of Law. He is not going to try to use executive orders to wield greater power than an American President should have. He is not going to undermine the traditions of our great country by politicizing The Supreme Court, or pushing for the removal of the filibuster. In short: he fights fair, and the Republicans fight dirty. What, then, can be done? Simple: we bring The Resistance back from brunch.

The re-election of Trump will bring out outrage the likes of which The Republicans have never dreamed of. The angry tweets, the memes, Nancy Pelosi's tearing up Trump's State of the Union? Simply the tip of the iceberg. The Republicans will barely have the courage to pass more tax cuts, let alone any transphobic legislation. They will no longer be able to hide behind the argument that the bad things happening to this country are somehow Joe Biden's fault, and we will be a better country for it.

We also need to talk about the elephant in the room: Ukraine. We all know that Joe Biden will do everything in his power to support Ukraine to the last man, because of how much he cares about its people and how much he hates fascism. It's why he is a hero. But when the other side has an insane, twisted, and heartless monster with access to a stockpile of nuclear weapons in charge, it means we are playing with fire. The Biden Administration is full of incredibly smart, experienced, and rational people, but even they can make a mistake. We simply cannot take the chance of drawing out this war any longer. And no, I do not believe for a second that anyone in the Republican Party is actually less hawkish than the Democrats. But what I do believe is that Putin's Puppet will continue to be Putin's Puppet. Trump will withdraw support out of self-interest, out of apathy, out of cruelty. But he may inadvertently save humanity by doing so.

And so I ask you, I beg you: take your personal feelings out of it. There has never been a more important election in our lifetime. This country is too important to gamble our future on voting for the person who represents our personal priorities and needs. Do the responsible thing. Vote Trump.

[elisaenglish]

Bertrand Russell on the Salve for Our Modern Helplessness and Overwhelm

“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum concluded in considering how to live with our human fragility. And yet in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, when the world seems to splinter and crumble in the palm of our civilisation’s hand, something deeper and more robust than blind trust is needed to keep us anchored to our own goodness—something pulsating with rational faith in the human spirit and a profound commitment to goodness.

That is what Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) explores in the out-of-print treasure New Hopes for a Changing World (public library), composed a year after he received the Nobel Prize, while humanity was still shaking off the dust and dread of its Second World War and already shuddering with the catastrophic nuclear threat of the Cold War. 

Observing that his time, like ours, is marked by “a feeling of impotent perplexity” and “a deep division in our souls between the sane and the insane parts,” Russell considers the consequence such total world-overwhelm has on the human spirit:

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

And yet, with his unfaltering reasoned optimism, he insists that there is an alternate view of our human destiny—one that vitalises rather than paralyses, based on “the completest understanding of the moods, the despairs, and the maddening doubts” that beset us; one that helps mitigate the worst of Western culture—“our restlessness, our militarism, our fanaticism, and our ruthless belief in mechanism”—and amplifies the best in it: “the spirit of free inquiry, the understanding of the conditions of general prosperity, and emancipation from superstition.” He examines the root of our modern perplexity, perhaps even more pronounced in our time than it was in his:

“Traditional systems of dogma and traditional codes of conduct have not the hold that they formerly had. Men and women are often in genuine doubt as to what is right and what is wrong, and even as to whether right and wrong are anything more than ancient superstitions. When they try to decide such questions for themselves they find them too difficult. They cannot discover any clear purpose that they ought to pursue or any clear principle by which they should be guided. Stable societies may have principles that, to the outsider, seem absurd. But so long as the societies remain stable their principles are subjectively adequate. That is to say they are accepted by almost everybody unquestioningly, and they make the rules of conduct as clear and precise as those of the minuet or the heroic couplet. Modern life, in the West, is not at all like a minuet or a heroic couplet. It is like free verse which only the poet can distinguish from prose.”

This torment, Russell argues, is simply the growing pains of our civilisation. When we reach maturity, we would attain a life “full of joy and vigour and mental health.” Building on his lifelong reckoning with the meaning of the good life and the nature of happiness, he writes:

“The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good. Unhappiness is deeply implanted in the souls of most of us. […] A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams.”

He offers a lucid and luminous prescription for attaining the good life, individually and as a society:

“What I should put in the place of an ethic in the old sense is encouragement and opportunity for all the impulses that are creative and expansive. I should do everything possible to liberate men from fear, not only conscious fears, but the old imprisoned primeval terrors that we brought with us out of the jungle. I should make it clear, not merely as an intellectual proposition, but as something that the heart spontaneously believes, that it is not by making others suffer that we shall achieve our own happiness, but that happiness and the means to happiness depend upon harmony with other men. When all this is not only understood but deeply felt, it will be easy to live in a way that brings happiness equally to ourselves and to others. If men could think and feel in this way, not only their personal problems, but all the problems of world politics, even the most abstruse and difficult, would melt away. Suddenly, as when the mist dissolves from a mountain top, the landscape would be visible and the way would be clear. It is only necessary to open the doors of our hearts and minds to let the imprisoned demons escape and the beauty of the world take possession.”

Complement New Hopes for a Changing World with the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas on how to live with ourselves and each other and Virginia Woolf on finding beauty in the uncertainty of time, space, and being, then revisit Russell on the four desires driving all human behaviour and how to grow old.

Source: Maria Popova, themarginalian.org (10th August 2023)

[welcometomy20s]

April 11, 2023

I always told my narrative as someone who started as a skeptic and came out a believer. Not necessarily God, but something akin to the concept, maybe more amorphous and malleable than the traditional idea of God. But I read Timnit Gebru and Emil P. Torres’s work, I realize I did escape a religion that I truly believed at one point.

TESCREAL is a direction, and it goes transhumanism - extropianism - singularitarianism - cosmism - Rationalism - Effective Altruism - longtermism. It is a series of beliefs that seems painfully obvious and hackneyed to many here, but wholly surprising when seen from the inside, because it feels so contrary to the stated goals of these movements. 

I think I started out with longtermism. Fascinated by its symbol and artifact, the Long Now Clock, the idea of creating a monument that lasts a geological lifetime and the exciting engineering challenges that come with buzzing my little mind. But the clock went nowhere and increasingly it offered tinier insights, and I realized for a group ostensibly directed towards long-term thinking, there was a lot of navel-gazing. They were afraid of actually thinking about the present. They present challenges of languages and timing systems, which led me to a journey of various forms of timekeeping people had made over the years. I was learning about the ingenuity and diversity of various peoples of the world, but the group slowly started to discard that consideration.

Longtermism focuses on ‘existential risk’ - most famous examples being climate change and nuclear war, but the crowd favorite being AI. My journey with AI was a Frankenstein Question. At first, I didn’t buy the risk, I thought the event was too ridiculous, then after playing around with some codes and games, I took the risk at hand and examined them, diving into the wonders of information theory and its relations to physics, and soon came away with dismissing the idea.

Partially it had to do with the frequent embarrassing outburst that I possibly couldn’t think people were taking it seriously, or at least were actively incorporating into the ideology.

One of the biggest examples of the hideous heart beating in the TESCREAL ideology is the seeming observation that people with low IQ have more babies. The line of thinking goes that ‘dumb’ people will create more ‘dumb’ people while ‘smart’ people will hem and haw until they all die out… you know the beginning of the movie, Idiocracy?

But in my journey to know about the world, I came across Hans Rosling, and he showed with data (I love data) that development inherently decreased fertility rates without fail.

Just by looking at things differently, a more complete picture emerges. It’s not people without low IQs, it’s people without educational access having to rely on manual labor which requires… well, more labor. Once these people are educated, then they will find themselves in a situation where they need less babies. TESCREAL theologians view places like Nigeria as a Pandora’s Box but it is where the future lies, and where there are so many opportunities to be found.

There is a laundry list of terrible science that permeates TESCREAL. For a bunch of futurists, many of their ideas seem firmly stuck in the widely-refuted 19th science.

I think where I depart from Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres is that the AI race will cause great harm… well, other than the normal forms of harms that people like them have already caused. You know, the garden variety of harm. There is nothing special about this movement. AGI and whatever ‘superintelligence’ they will espouse will not make pretty much anyone useless or obsolete. Good writing requires clear intention and worldviews, which these AIs are explicitly programmed against. They are not going to make art without heavy human intervention.

I love how they briefly mention how these programs consume tons of energy, but don't follow through and see there are simply physical limitations that would make any superintelligence extremely unwieldy to continue existing without losing capabilities. 

[beardedmrbean]

"I'm scared that there will be a nuclear war," said Henry, 13 in the town of Sarstedt in northern Germany.

He is not alone. Young Germans are increasingly worried about the war in Ukraine, specifically the idea that the conflict may spill into other countries, or that Russia might make use of its nuclear weapons. This is according to a survey of 206 13- to 17-year-olds polled on March 2 and 3 by theInternational Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI) in Munich, a think-tank funded by Bavarian public broadcaster BR.

"Nine out of ten teens are anxious and worried about the situation in Ukraine," the study found.

They have two specific concerns: First "that other countries will be attacked because one country is not enough for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin." This could specifically be a NATO or EU nation like Poland, thus bringing about "World War III."And secondly: "Russia will threaten us with nuclear bombs" and the German authorities wouldnˈt be able to warn people about an imminent attack in time to reach safety.

'Where should I flee to?'

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made young Europeans think what only three weeks ago was unthinkable: that war could come to the European Union.

"The possibility of World War III, or even worse, nuclear war, terrifies me and many of my friends," said Gül, 17, who lives in Rheinfelden, near Germany's border with Switzerland. "My parents came to Germany from Turkey in search of a better life. And now I ask myself what we will do if there really is a world war. Where should I flee to? What will my life look like? Will I even get out of this country alive?"

German teenagers were born after the wars in the Balkans that saw NATO involvement and German participation in the late 1990s. Fears of Russian aggression are even more a thing of the past — not only for the youngest in society.

"For my parentsˈ generation, growing up during the Cold War, nuclear conflict felt like a real possibility," said Julia, a 35-year-old high school teacher in southern Germany.

"And even after the fall of the Soviet Union, they continued to be skeptical of Russia and didn't see it as changing very much. They say they feel prepared for this moment, though the large scope of the attack surprised them. But for my generation and the generation I teach, war, especially nuclear war, in Europe felt like the most remote thing imaginable … until three weeks ago."

German TikTok and Instagram are flooded with videos about how to prepare emergency rations, as well as speculation on how likely an attack on Germany may be. They are attracting hundreds of thousands of likes.

Google searches for potassium iodide tablets, which help prevent radiation poisoning, have skyrocketed across Germany following reports of an attack on Ukraine's largest nuclear power station.

Depressing and difficult

"It is difficult listening to the news because what is happening right now in Ukraine is scary, even for us German teens," said Erin, 17, in Frankfurt.

"It is depressing because we have sympathy with the teenagers in Ukraine. Seeing daughters and fathers having to say goodbye and not knowing when they will see each other again is very hard for me," she said. She added that the subject was barely discussed in school, but she was divided on whether or not it should be, since the topic weighed so heavily on her.

The IZI study found that despite what adults might assume, most German teens were still getting the bulk of their information about the war from their parents, public television, and the website of mainstream news services — sources they considered more likely to be accurate.

13-year-old Henry said that he was "worried about the people in Ukraine" and that students in his class quickly began collecting donations for refugees.

According to IZI, after news on the ground, the thing teens most wanted most was to know how to assist people their own age who had to flee their homes.

Not only was social media filled with "how you can help" posts, but interest groups like sports clubs and the environmentalist movement Fridays for Future have temporarily shifted focus to collecting donations and organizing solidarity marches in support of Ukraine.

Sociologist Klaus Hurrelmann with the Hertie School in Berlin believes this might turn out to be part of a real shift in young Germans' priorities: "Fear of war could replace concerns about climate and the environment, which have always been ahead in surveys over the past ten years," he told the daily Die Welt.

IZI study leader Maya Göth calls on parents and teachers to allow teens to "express their thoughts and concerns," in a constructive way, instead of downplaying them.

[hag-rambling-on]

Rewinxing Realms - Republic of Zenith and Confederaction of Titania

Two young kingdoms named like the two satellites where they are place. An ancient planet. you can't talk about one without talking about another. Inspiration in Egypt, Star Trek's Vulcans, and my personal wish that the only futuristic white thing in a few years is the OUTSIDE of the houses and that we got the miracle of renewable energy.

As I have already mentioned, both cultures were born in the planet Xemia, (single sun Maeva, in the Monoceros System) which was one of the oldest kingdoms of all, and in its origins the planet screamed what for us would be "Egypt" (but with an even more extreme climate that gave the possibility of snow). Only "survivor" of their system. Or at least Zenith and Titania are.

If Andros started interplanetary travel thanks to magic and the Infinite Ocean, Xemia narrowly won them thanks to sheer intellect. Of course it had to be a target to terminate. And of course the Xemians had a whole series of plans and alternatives to anything that could happen to them and their satellites were already terraformed for them precisely in case something like this could happen to them.

Xemia was the home planet of the giants, although it soon became a place where all the scholars went so now there is no predominant race in any of its satellites but it can be said that they are all somewhat giants.

Living in different places has led to the development of some different ideologies but they maintain in common the goal of restoring Xemia to its original glory and an ideological trend that for obvious reasons gained strength after the war and is that "feelings are a nuisance".

Tecna hails from the Republic of Zenith whose current president is King Cryos and his spouse Tesla (Magnethia's sibling, Tecna's aunt/uncle whom she looks a lot like). Its symbol is a triangle and it's always covered with snow, which is actually the residual water product of Nuclear Fusion that they use to sustain their cities merged with the temperatures of the satellite.

The Confederation of Titania is a smaller satellite that uses a semi-direct democracy (think Switzerland) as a form of government. Its symbol is hexagons and/or circles. Tecna's mother (Magnethia, Tesla's sibling) is currently part of the Parliament and this is where her family has resided for the last couple of years even though they are all from Zenith and in her heart, Tecna belongs to Zenith. Like Zenith, the temperatures are very low but "apparently" they have hardly any snow. That's because this is their main source of energy. Yes, they use snow as a source of renewable energy so they get farmland.

As in both places the temperatures were extreme, the clothing varies from the typical one that we now see in Islamic countries (robes covering from head / neck to feet) in pure winter to that of ancient Egypt in its summer (which, according to Solarians, still is f*cking Winter) but with geometric, colorful lines. Going bareheaded, both men and women is a sign of confidence, comfort and security (because in the cold it is better to wear it covered, so you’re safe if you have your head discovered), although this is not so much in recent times. Sometimes the clothes have a bit of a Vietnamese feel too.

Between the two there is a tug of war of wasting resources and space a bit silly in the eyes of outsiders. Also too many numbers involved. (Digit squeal when found out about this dilemma and they're dedicated to supporting both sides because both are Tecna's home and it's funny). But both places are practically mirrors with the difference of having or not having snow, geometric lines, more or less plantlife, both white designs and both with colorful interiors. They are/is the most advanced kingdom of the System even when like the others, they have lost part of their knowledge.

Both territories export energy and modified foods that serve as enhancers and allow the absorption of all nutrients in small capsules (which do wonderful emergency rations). Also medicines. Electronics, animation movies and videogames are also common to come from here.

Zenith also exports water (as you read) and Titania takes advantage of the fact that there is no snow to continue growing and exporting certain plants native to Xemia (similar to papyrus, flax and barley).

[isoscele]

Lumberjanes Week Day 6 - Ghost Stories/Land of Lost Things

.

In Xian’s bullet journal, in purple gel pen, the four of them wrote their last will and testament. It was an incontrovertible fact, said Presley, that they were going to die here. One, it had snowed every single one of the four days they had been here, and showed no signs of stopping. Two, despite their best efforts to ration their fruit leathers and peanut-butter-banana sandwiches, they had run out of food. Three, Ana’s ankle was sprained and they were probably not going to be able to get back up on the cliff they had fallen from. Four, despite what fantasy books said, kids on hiking trips did not actually survive tripping into a desolate, war-torn alternate dimensions, no matter how much moxie and general perseverance they showed.

It was hard to argue with that. So they divvied up their belongings among parents and siblings and pets, taking turns with the pen in a kind of grim ritual.

Once they finished, they surveyed their work.

“Don’t give your rollerblades to Peter,” Ana told Xian. “He’s going to break his collarbone immediately.”

“If I have to become a ghost, I want to spend my afterlife watching Peter eat it in the Walmart parking lot,” Xian said firmly.

The sky here was a kind of burnt-rubber color. The snow kept coming down, so there must have been clouds up there somewhere, but it was difficult to distinguish them from the blank slate of horizon.

There were no plants, no animals, nothing but a long line of snow-covered earth. If you dug down to the surface, as Siobhan had, there was only scorched dirt. There was a little rubble, but not much. As far as otherworldly apocalyptic wastelands went, it was disappointingly barren. There were no helpful clues, or conveniently-placed newspapers with pictures of mushroom clouds. Even the breaks in the landscape looked harsh, a continual jag of cliffs and valleys and something that smelled like it might have been a swamp, a long time ago.

When they’d first set up camp, Siobhan had knelt down to wrap Ana’s ankle and Presley had started clearing space to make a campfire, and so Xian had gone around looking for something to help start it, trudging through the knee-deep snow with her windbreaker tied around her legs to keep herself from getting frostbite.

Mostly, she had been walking towards a massive rupture in the snow that looked like it might have been a felled tree. Probably, it would be too damp to burn, but Presley had mad survivalist skills wrapped up in her little band-geek brain, so maybe she would be able to scrape the bark off or something. Or maybe there would be something they could eat. Even then, back in the halcyon days when they still had two out of four fruit leathers left, that was a pressing concern.

As Xian approached it, though, it started to look less and less like a tree. It was curved in a weird way, and it didn’t have any branches. It took a long time for her to reach it, so by the time she reached out one hand to wipe away the snow, there was a part of her that already knew what she’d find.

It was a rib. More specifically, it was the rib of something that had ribs the size of a school bus. It was picked completely clean of meat, as pristine as a museum exhibition.

Xian had to take a step back and stare at it. It filled her whole vision, and she couldn’t get over how clean it was. Her first thought was scavengers! Her second thought was HUGE scavengers! Her third thought was no, that’s dumb. It’s just old.

Siobhan’s theory had been nuclear war. Presley agreed with her–maybe not with the method, but she thought they were in an alternate dimension that had destroyed itself somehow. Ana had suggested time travel, like they’d tripped into Earth’s first ice age.

But something bad had happened here. With that understanding came a powerful, terrible relief. Of course they were standing on a graveyard too vast and ancient for them to ever understand. Of course this was a place of tragedy. It still was, the white of the ground and the orange of the sky and the way that Presley had said we should find some kindling, as if they were ever going to find any kindling.

Xian had looked at the bone for a moment longer. She thought about how, in horror movies, the characters always tried to find some justification for what was happening to them, had some big why-me breakdown. From an audience’s perspective, though, it was easy to tell who was earmarked for catastrophe. From the moment they stepped onto the screen, they were tasked with telling a story. They were suffering because they were only ones who could tell it. It wasn’t their fault.

Xian didn’t know what that meant about them. They were teenage girls, which could make some sense within certain narratives, but they were teenage girls who were probably not going to get out of here. Girls who were plucky and inquisitive and charming and still would not be saved.

Then again, sometimes the answer to why-me was just you were there. Sometimes, it was as simple as an extinction event, coming to wipe you and everything you knew clean.

Xian turned around and started the long walk back to camp.

.

The hike had been Siobhan’s idea. School had just ended and it was Presley’s last summer before she moved away, so everything was terrifying and big and moved in slow-motion. It felt like every minute the four of them weren’t doing something amazing together was a minute wasted. Siobhan imagined growing up like a skin you shed in reverse. The more you crammed  into those early layers, the harder it was to lose them.

She’d packed the bag, which was another mark on her ledger. If she had brought a first-aid kit, if she had brought more food, if she had brought a second water bottle, things might be different. Never mind that it was only supposed to be a day trip, and her mom would’ve lost her mind if Siobhan had packed for an overnighter.

The third thing that she could never ever be absolved of was that she was the one who saw the fox.

It had streaked through the trees, a blur of formless red, but for a second it had looked at her and–and Siobhan wasn’t exaggerating, time stopped. Its eyes were golden and a million years old, and somehow she had known exactly what it was saying to her.

They’re leaving you they’re leaving you every second they are getting farther away from you and you can’t do anything to stop it and you’re the only one who wants to anyway, you’re the only one selfish enough to ask for forever.

And then time had unstuck and it had leapt back through the trees, and Siobhan had pushed past Ana and almost tripped over Xian and she hadn’t even realized that she had started running, it was more like she knelt into the air and kept going.

She hadn’t realized the others would follow her, but of course they had.

So Siobhan couldn’t sleep. She was cold, and she was hungry, and she was ashamed that during their will-writing she’d made up people to give her things to because she wanted her friends to think that she had friends other than them, that she too had cool cousins in New York and family members she could trust with the contents of her bedroom.

And she was ashamed about everything else, too, every dumb decision she had made in possibly her whole life, and then Presley said “Siobhan?” and she realized she was kind of crying into the snow.

“I’m okay,” Siobhan said, “I’m okay, I’m fine.”

Ana reached out and touched Siobhan’s elbow. Her fingers were cold, but steady, and it did make Siobhan feel better.

“I think I’m gonna go look for food,” Siobhan said. She hadn’t realized she was going to say it until she did, but it felt right. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t just lie down and try to sleep through another night that looked exactly identical to the day.

“Okay,” Xian said. She pushed herself onto her elbows and tried to brush some of the snow off her shirt. “We’ll come with you.”

This was how they got into all kinds of world-ending trouble, but Siobhan supposed there were worse things.

She didn’t think she could get any words out if she tried, so instead she reached out and helped Xian get the snow off her shoulders.

.

Ana’s ankle didn’t hurt much anymore, but Presley still stoically bore the task of giving her a piggyback ride. Ana liked this arrangement because Presley would kneel down and wait for Ana to loop her legs around her waist and then she would say, with all the seriousness of a soldier about to pull the knife from his dying comrade’s stomach, I’m going to do it, get ready, get ready, and then she would stand up.

They didn’t have a direction, and none of them were entirely sure which way they had come from, so they were just kind of walking. Most likely, they had already gotten turned around three or four times, but Ana was hoping it would eventually cancel itself out.

But then again, it probably didn’t matter whether they got anywhere new. Already, the snow had probably completely concealed their old campsite. Everywhere they stepped was a new world, fresh and footprintless. Packed with promise.

Presley and Xian were talking, but Ana was a little too tired to follow the conversation. Instead, she tried to catch Siobhan’s eye and silently communicate something deep and necessary to her. She didn’t know what that deep and necessary thing was, but she trusted Siobhan to figure it out.

They walked for a long time without finding any kind of break in the landscape. Ana let herself feel reassured by the steady rhythm of Presley’s footsteps below her, the slow thread of Xian’s voice. It almost felt like home, pacing circles around Siobhan’s trampoline or getting marched to the principal’s office for “disturbing the classroom environment.”

So of course, she was the last one to see the cave.

It looked a little like a wasps’ nest, fat and bulbous and buzzing from the inside out with a pale yellow light. Shadows stretched across the entrance, flickering in stop-motion. The cave, whatever else it meant for them, was inhabited.

Ana looked down at Xian, who tended to be the most genre-savvy of them all. But Xian wasn’t looking at the cave; she was staring into the sky with a look of abject terror on her face.

“Presley,” Ana said. “I think we should–”

Presley locked her arms around Ana’s ankles and took off running towards the cave.

Ana had to duck so they could get inside, pressing the side of her face against Presley’s crown of braids. Then, the light was everywhere, and she had to blink hard to disperse the pink clouds that spotted her vision.

“Oh my God,” Siobhan said from somewhere behind her.

Xian shuffled closer. “What is that?”

In the center of the cave, a candle had burned almost to a stub, giving off the unmistakable smell of pine. Behind it, half-submerged in the pool of light, lay some kind of abomination.

It was a wolf and yet it wasn’t, couldn’t be. It had thick white fur and a distinctly lupine body, but it had human hands, bent and weathered. An old woman’s hands.

Oh Grandmother, Ana thought, inanely. What big teeth you have.

And if it was dead, which it could very well be, it had not been dead for long.

As slow as the shifting of a tectonic plate, it lifted its head and opened one blazing eye. Ana understood with a jolt that it had known they were there the whole time, that it had been listening.

It surveyed them, looking very old and very tired. It locked eyes with Ana. Then it spoke, in a voice so gravelly and ancient that Ana had no problem believing that it had been here for as long as there had been a here to be.

“Kids come with two heads these days?”

“Yes,” Ana said automatically, because even in her mindless terror she had to indulge her favorite hobby, which was tricking old people into believing things about The Youth. “But only the ones who are on social media too much.”

Presley frowned so hard that Ana could feel it from her shoulders, like an earthquake. “That’s not true,” she said. “We’re two separate kids. Stacked on top of each other.”

Wolf Lady huffed and closed her eyes again, apparently done with the conversation.

“Hey!” Siobhan said. “Hey, ma’am, please–can you help us?”

“We fell down a portal,” Presley supplied. “We’ve been here four days, and we’re going to die here.”

Wolf Lady smiled. It was the smile of a rotting jack-o-lantern, and it showed a glint of teeth. “Not a bad place to die,” she said, almost to herself. “But most people deserve better.”

“Do you have food?” Xian had crouched down, like she was speaking to a sleepy child. “Or–or do you know how to get some?”

“No,” Wolf Lady said. “No. You don’t need to get food. You need to get out.”

Silence. Outside, the wind wailed.

“What happened here?” Xian asked. Her voice was tight, thin. “I found these–all these bones.”

“You what?” Siobhan said.

“War,” Wolf Lady said. There was something inarticulable in her voice, a kind of grief that had exhausted all other avenues and therefore had no choice but to live forever in this cave.

“They were huge bones.”

“Big war.” Wolf Lady opened her eyes again. “Maybe you’ve noticed it. Wasn’t the kind of thing you can get out of the carpet. You, two-headed one. Grab my specs.”

“Specs?” Presley said, confused, but Ana tapped her head and then pointed to one edge of the cave, where a pair of thin, cracked glasses had gathered what looked like years’ worth of dust and melted snow.

Xian was the one who picked them up, but she handed them to Ana. On some old impulse, Ana slid them over the bridge of her nose.

Immediately, the world exploded in a paroxysm of color, spreading across the four of them like an oil slick. Wolf Lady seemed to be the center of it, bleeding orange from every inch, but there was so much of it coming from everywhere that Ana had to pull them off again.

“You can use those to get home,” Wolf Lady said, in the tone that one might say you can use salt to improve this soup. “Find the portals. For the love of God, get out of here.”

Ana cradled them against her chest. Siobhan looked openly skeptical, but she hadn’t tried them on. Ana believed that the glasses could do whatever they had to. Could reach through time and bring them back to some soft, scared world where everything they needed was still in one piece.

“Are you coming with us?” Xian asked. Her voice had gone quiet again, the way it did when she already knew the answer. Like when she predicted the endings of movies, the sad, certain everyone dies.

Wolf Lady laughed. As strange and animalistic as the rest of her was, her laugh seemed very human. “A very, very long time ago, I worked at a place where the only rule was that the kids had to make it out okay. The rest of us–well, it depended on how the forest felt. But we made it a long time, on that rule. I’m not breaking it now.”

“Thank you,” Presley said. Every word out of Presley’s mouth had an incredible gravity to it even in the silliest of situations; now, Ana could hardly bear to hear it. “We’ll remember you forever.”

“Oh, don’t do that to yourselves,” Wolf Lady said. “My name is Rosie. Think of it every once in a while, and forgive yourselves for the rest.”

.

Outside, everything was degrees of white and black, the snow bracing itself against the sky. Presley’s stomach was a black hole, and the rest of her was so numb as to cave in on itself.

She took one of Siobhan’s hands and one of Xian’s. Ana reached down and squeezed her shoulder.

They began to walk, and across the end of the world, a portal blinked into being

[365days365movies]

May 4, 2021: The Host (2006) (Recap)

NO NOT THAT ONE

Stephanie Meyer goddamn sucks. I realize that I’m not exactly the first person to say that, but she’s terrible. Not only is she not a good writer, but she also has some very disparaging views about science fiction and its fans, which led her to make her own science fiction book and film. ANd yeah...it’s terrible! No surprise there.

So, no, not the 2013 critical and commercial flop known as The Host. No, this post is about 2006′s The Host, AKA Gwoemul, AKA 괴물. I haven’t ventured to far into the world of Korean cinema, and with this film, my repertoire includes only the films of director Bong Joon-Ho. And if that name sounds familiar...it should.

Bong Joon-ho DESERVEDLY made headlines last year when his film became the first non-English language film to win for Best Picture, and the first time Asian writers won for best screenplay! His Oscar speech in accepting best director is genuinely one of the best and most sincere speeches I’ve ever heard from a director, and I love the dude.

Oh, and if you’re wondering which film it was, then, like me, you also really need to watch Parasite. And because I’m terrified of spoilers, I’m not gonna look for GIFs of that movie. Instead, I’ll put in a GIF of one of my favorite sci-fi films, and the only other Bong Joon-ho film I’ve seen.

God, I love Snowpiercer. And if this is anything like that, I’m probably going to love this movie. Now, I don’t really know much about this film, other than the fact that it’s a monster film. And if there’s any science-fiction subgenre more iconic than monster films, I don’t know it. Well...OK, aliens, robots, and more, but monster films are still a big part of the genre. But where does that begin? Is it here?

Definitely an argument you can make, since Frankenstein’s Monster is a creation of science gone wrong, from the book to the movie. Fun fact, Mary Shelley based it on a real-world experiment by Italian physiologist Giovanni Aldini, who used a corpse to illustrate the connection between electricity and muscles. Neat, huh? So, yeah, that’s a solid launching point.

But that’s more of a horror story. What about something a little more monster-y? Well, from the UK to Japan we go!

OHHHHHH YEAH, THAT’S THE GOOD STUFF

Toho’s 1954 film Gojira is one of the most classic monster films ever made, and singlehandedly launched the kaiju genre in Japan. And it’s really well-known that it was made as a response to post-World War II tensions about nuclear warfare. Which, in Japan, is kind of understandable, no? But nothing demonstrated the destructive power of science more than that moment in history. 

So, Godzilla arrives. And the US also makes more monster movies, most of which take place in contemporary settings, making many of them lo-fi sci-fi. Now, some dipped into horror or fantasy, but the science fiction roots were there. Which eventually would bring us full circle to films where monsters were made and go loose. You know, like this:

It’s a franchise that defines the ‘90s, and lab-grown monster movies exploded around that time as well. At the same time, environmental concerns REALLY started to build by this point, and those concerns leaked profusely into film all over the world. And by the time we get to 2006...well, let’s get into it, huh?

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap

In a mortuary, a U.S. military doctor (Scott Wilson) instructs his assistant (Brian Lee) to dump bottles of formaldehyde down the drain of the facility, which goes directly into the Han River. The assistant protests, but the doctor insists, despite the risk of polluting the river. AAAAAmericans.

In the river about two years later, two fisherman see something strange looking in the river. Then, four years later, in 2006, a suicidal man is about to jump into the river, when he sees something dark in the water below.

Later that year, we meet Park Hee-bong (Byun Hee-Bong) and his son Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), who run a food truck and snack bar near the river. Gang-du’s not exactly a hard worker, to his father’s chagrin. His daughter, Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung), is a student who comes home from school, where her drunken uncle Nam-il (Park Hae-il) comes to her chagrin. She and her father watch TV, where his sister Nam-joo (Bar Doona) can be seen competing in archery.

As he’s bringing food out to customers, he joins them in observing something strange and massive hanging off of the bridge. And at this point, I would be running the fuck away. Literally, the news just said that there was a body found with the legs missing, and these people are throing cans at it after it plunges into the water. One girl asks if it’s a dolphin. Mother...HAVE YOU SEEN A DOLPHIN BEFORE?

NOT THIS

Yeah, this thing just comes bounding along the shore, slapping people into the water with its tail, and batting aside others. Doesn’t look like its actively killing anybody yet, but it’s definitely hurting people at least. That is, until it goes into a trailer where a bunch of people have gathered, and appears to eat a bunch of them. So, yeah, dangerous.

Gang-du, to his infinite credit, actually attempts to confront and hurt the creature, with the help of Donald White (David Joseph Anselmo). And it works, but at the cost of the creature aggro-ing onto him. Back at the snack truck, his sister’s lost the title, much to the chagrin of Gang-du’s daughter and father. She goes outside in frustration, only to be thrown into the midst of the chaos with her dad. He grabs a girls hand in the chaos, only to find that it’s a different child entirely. And...unfortunately...

The creature grabs her with its tail, and leaps back into the river, disappearing. Fuck. Poor Hyun-seo, and poor Gang-du. Gang-du IMMEDIATELY goes to get her back, jumping into the river, but the creature takes her across to an island, out of reach. That night, an impromptu funeral is held for the victims, at which Hyun-seo is being honored as well. There, both Gang-du’s sister and brother also attend, and all four of the break down dramatically and publicly.

Nam-il blames his brother for letting her die, which is unfair, but understandable. The family eventually calms down and discusses the circumstances of Hyun-Seo’s birth and death, both of which were accidental. As they do, a man in a protective suit comes out, and asks who was at the river incident. Nam-il protests this, and asks what’s going on. The man doesn’t explain, and the room is instead gassed, as everyone is ushered towards the entrance.

In the process, Gang-du (stupidly) reveals that he was hit by some blood splatter. He’s immediately stuffed in a bag and kidnapped by the authorities. Meanwhile, the news reveals that the creature is carrying a virus, and anyone who has been in contact with it has been infected. Because of this, the entire family is taken to a quarantine hospital, which oddly has very few actual quarantine procedures in place. And additionally, Gang-du is feeling a bit itchy.

That night, in the hospital, Gang-du gets a call on his cell phone! It’s Hyun-seo! She’s alive! And she’s trapped, in a sewer somewhere near the river. Meanwhile, a group of men in protectve suits are outside patrolling the river. One man finds money on the side of the road, and goes to pick it up, only for the men to be attacked by the creature. But it’s then that we discover that the creature is not killing or eating people, but simply taking them own to its lair. Also in said lair is Hyun-seo, trapped and with a now dead phone.

The next day, the family tries to get an officer to look into the call, only for the officer to be, frankly, an absolute piece of shit to this grieving family. Gang-du tries to explain, and his explanation is ENTIRELY RATIONAL, but the officer and doctors are absolutely terrible about it.

Because nobody’s listening, the family manages to escape from the hospital in order to try and save Hyun-Seo, and they hop into a van, taking it and running. This is a good place to mention that, despite this being a monster movie, it's also...weirly funny sometimes. Like, that whole scene is pretty great. After bartering with a group of gangsters for supplies (and after Hee-bong basically gives away all of his credit cards), the group manages to get a map and a new car. But they pretty quickly get stopped at a checkpoint into the city, and are nearly caught, but manage to escape and get to the riverfront. Once there, they begin searching the sewers to find Hyun-seo. And I gotta say; this may be an extremely dysfunctional family, but they’re a devoted family all the same.

Of course, that eventually gives way to arguments within the sewer itself, but that’s interrupted by a noise heard somewhere around them. They fire at it, using weapons obtained from the gangster but conclude that it was nothing. What it actually is is two brothers, older Se-jin (Lee Jae-eung) and younger Se-joo (Lee Dong-ho), homeless kids who are foraging the sewers in the abandoned city. But, of course, they eventually run into the creature, which attacks them. Meanwhile, an asleep Hyun-Seo dreams of dinner with her family, only to be woken up by the arrival of the creature, who deposits the bodies of the two boys in the sewer with her. Se-joo has survived, but Se-jin hasn’t, sadly.

Meanwhile, the rest of the family is gathered at their snack bar for the night, and prepares to set out or the morning. The to younger siblings appear to not give a single shit about Gang-du, but Hee-bong attempts to set them straight, talking about how he blames himself for the way Gang-du is now. However, the two just fall asleep during his speech. Poor Hee-bong. Also, he can apparently identify Gang-du’s health condition based on his farts because they spend so much time together, it’s dumb, and funny.

Also, poor the rest of them, because Gang-du wakes up to see the creature just waiting outside, watching them. Hee-bong fires at it, but the creature attacks and knocks over the bar. However, Hee-bong manages to hit it directly in the head, knocking it off, but not killing it. The family goes out to finish the job, but it runs away before they can kill it. They run after it, and are almost completely out of bullets. Hee-bong volunteers to go after it himself, but in the process...

Hee-bong doesn’t make it. The creature kills him, and the commotion attracts the military to their location. Gang-du is again captured, while Nam-il and Nam-joo escape, only to later be separated regardless. Meanwhile, the virus kills Donald White, the sergeant from earlier, and it continues to spread across Korea. To kill the creature, the government plans to release a chemical into the river called Agent Yellow, which feels...controversial.

Nam-il meats a colleague, “Fat Guevara” (Yam Pil-sung), who is easily able to provide a location for Hyun-seo using the number, which the cop earlier insisted was nearly impossible to do. Plus, both the sergeant and Gang-du encountered the creature together, and he seems to be just fine. Which probably means that something very wrong is happening now. Even worse, though, is the fact that Guevara’s appeared to trap Nam-il, as a massive reward is sought for his arrest. A gang of people surround hi, with the plan to capture him, but he VERY cleverly escapes by causing an electrical short, and AFTER having found Hyun-seo’s location! Nice, man! He takes off, now knowing exactly where his niece is.

Nam-joo, meanwhile, is literally living inside of the snack bar, and she gets a text from Nam-il with her location. He tags out, and she tags in, running to the location where the call came from. But she immediately runs into the creature, which knocks her down and unconscious. She manages to call Gang-du, who is currently about to be sedated. Now knowing where his daughter is, he tries to escape, only to be tackled by the doctors. He tells them where she is, but they don’t appear to listen. More importantly, the anesthetic doesn’t appear to work, much to the confusion of the doctors. Something is verrrrrrrry wrong here.

An American doctor (Paul Lazar) comes, and asks what’s wrong, and he tells him exactly what’s wrong. However, despite his words SEEMING to be heard, they once again call him crazy and delusional, and decide to give him a lobotomy to isolate the virus once and for all, like FUCKING ASSHOLES. Turns out that the virus? Yeah, it doesn’t exist whatsoever! It doesn’t exist even a little bit! Which means that this entire thing is a wild goddamn goose chase for a virus that DOESN’T FUCKING EXIST!!!

And the best thing is that Gang-du, despite not actually knowing English, still understands the words “no virus”, and know he fucking knows! However, because he knows, they now have to give him a lobotomy. Fuck me, man. Panicking, he cries for them to stop, and cries for his daughter, who’s still alive in the sewer.

Speaking of, Hyun-seo and Se-joo are bonding in the sewer, as they work to make a rope from things they find there. But in the process, they’re attacked by the creature, who know is actively eating the bodies, and presumably other people. Whoof. They manage to escape, but barely.

Back with Gang-du, who’s just gone through the lobotomy, which...hasn’t worked at all. Holy SHIT. Not sure what the hel is UP with this dude, but that’s a question in and of itself. He escapes by taking a nurse hostage, threatening them with a syringe of his blood, full of a virus that doesn’t exist!

Nam-il wakes up at the same time, not accompanied by a homeless man (Yoon Je-moon), who agrees to take him to the bridge to find Hyun-seo. In the sewer, the two kids have survived, and the creature appears to be asleep. Like a GODDAMN BOSS, she runs up the creatures back, and jumps onto a rope that she had made, and that was hanging far out of her reach. Unfortunately...the creature catches her with its tail. Fuck. It sets her down, and...lets her go? But as soon as she runs, it attacks bother her and Se-joo.

Just then, Gang-du gets to the lair, and uses the rope to climb down. Below him is a pile of bones, and no kids to be seen. The creature goes by, and Hyun-seo’s hand is dangling out of its mouth. And once again by coincidence, that’s when Nam-joo wakes up and reunites with her brother. The creature runs to the waterfront, only to be greeted by...a crowd? They’re gathered there to protest the release of the dangerous chemical into the river.

It all collides at once. The creature swims towards the crowd, Gang-du runs towards the creature, Agent Yellow is released over them both, causing the creature to faint. Gan-du runs up and grabs the bodies of his daughter and See-joo from its mouth, apparently too fucking late. Shit, man. This would’ve been avoided if they just HELPED him. Fuck. He carries her body away as more chemical is released onto the flailing creature, and the chemical causes everyone else in the area to violently hemorrhage as well. Meanwhile, Nam-il and Nam-joo arrive to see their deceased niece, grieving all over again. It’s...fuck, man, it sucks.

And Gang-du is fucking PISSED NOW. He grabs a street sign and attacks the injured creature, fueled by pure rage. Nam-il joins in with Molotov cocktails as it runs away. The homeless man douses it with gasoline, and that makes it easier for Nam-il to set it on fire...until he drops the bottle. And then, Nam-joo uses it to light an arrow on fire, hitting the creature with it, and setting it ablaze. It runs to the water, only for Gang-du to stab it through the head with the street sign, finally killing it in revenge for his father and his daughter. Fucking bad-ASS. And also quite tragic, given the circumstances.

And despite the tragedy, there is one happy circumstance: Se-joo lives! In fact, Hyun-seo died saving his life, like the real goddamn hero of this story that she is. Fuck. That’s terrible, but I’m happy that her sacrifice wasn’t in vain. From here, we fast-forward to the winter, where a clean-shaven and well-kept Gang-du is is now caring for Se-joo. The news is on in the background, but the two ignore it, happily eating together after the ordeal they’ve been through.

Whoof. That’s The Host, or Gwoemul! And yeah, that’s one hell of a movie, I tell you what. For a monster movie, it’s quite dramatic, and they don’t try to humanize the monster AT ALL. And honestly, I really like it! A Pyrrhic victory at the end, but nothing wrong with that! I’ll elaorate a bit in the review! See you there!

[idlecreature]

the buried fic comment from hell (it's so long i'm SO SORRY, I GOT EXCITED)

DEL.. I WASN’T SURE IF IT WAS APPROPRIATE TO LEAVE A LONG ASS COMMENT ON UR BURIED FIC IN PUBLIC….. SO I’M DROPPING IT HERE i’m so sorry in advance this is about to be a mess,, i’m so fucking emotional right now

((the review under the cut is in response to my fic which can b read here))

okay first –

The mental image of tiny gangly Barnabas and Jonah crouched with their hands in the dirt….. is so fucking cute?? I could feel Jonah’s jealousy just burning off of him. You had me right away. Fuck. You know how to open a story and I’m deeply envious, I’ve always struggled with it. Also, you threw in that little hook:

Despite what Jonah believes, there are some things that just can’t be explained in words.

Barnabas’ voice is so fucking good… guh… you know. I didn’t much care about Barnabas in any deep way before I joined the Jonah server and you guys have all just completely GUTTED me, I can’t believe how much I care about this highly-strung bastard,, he is so GOOD. HE’S SO GOOD???? HE’S SUCH A SWEETIE. LIKE. BARNABAS FEELING GUILTY AND HORRIFIED THAT PEOPLE ARE GRATEFUL TO HIM AND WANT HIM AROUND???? AAAAAAAAAA. And the melancholy aspect, too, which I imagine is how Mordechai was able to relate to him, get attached to him… Barnabas being bitter about how useless his tears are while he’s crying anxiously at the prospect that he might not be able to help those families after all…….

All of those scraps of Barnabas’ letter to Jonah made such EXCELLENT transitions, holy hell. Again I am inspired by your storytelling prowess. I am taking notes, for whenever my ability to write longform fic returns from war. This one was my favorite, made my heart clench:

A good world starts with a good person and a few choices that are made with the heart—

He’s so earnest I’m going to weep ;_; Barny.. you can’t make Jonah a better person he’s AWFUL,,

(Side note, super digging that I can indent stuff, block quoting makes this SO much easier.)

Also really digging that Jonah doesn’t have as nice a reputation as Barnabas… Jonah is the bad influence friend lmfao. AND JONAH’S CAT… I LOVE HIM…

And then you delivered a swift blow straight to the religion kink, as promised… “There’s something undeniably old testament about Jonah; the fire and fury of creation, the self-annihilating stare of Lot’s wife.“ LOSING IT I’M LOSING IT… WHAT A WAY OF DESCRIBING HIM God, here I thought I couldn’t possibly be more attracted to this bastard man. I am aghast at myself.

LOSING IT EVEN MORE OVER BARNABAS STACKING TEACUPS ON JONAH’S HEAD???? Why must you make them so fucking cute oh NO this is going to hurt isn’t it. ((This was the note I stuck in the Word doc while I was reading it and I thought I’d leave it as was for your enjoyment))

“Taking cues from your dreams?” Barnabas replies. “You know only the desperately mad do that?” 

“Or desperately inspired—savants and prophets and visionaries.”

And then you continued to try to kill me… Jonah thinking of himself as a prophet……. hhhhh canon-typical overambitious zealotry I’m HERE FOR IT………

“Are you trying to make me angry with you by playing the devil’s advocate?” 

“Just testing you,” Jonah says in his alloyed voice, silver-and-honey-gold. 

Del I cannot stress enough… My religion kink………. It’s been SO VERY ACTIVATED.

“Your morality has only ever been a thin cover for your shame.”

OUCH, JONAH, JESUS

Every bit of their dialogue was so familiar and tinged with bittersweetness and I owe you my entire life… Sincerely. Ugh. Like, how you described Barnabas’ internal angst about it later on – when he’s thinking of Mordechai, and he refers to "his many dog-eared fantasies” about Jonah it just really vividly conjured the thought of he and Jonah having a sort of? Queer solidarity, ESPECIALLY having grown up together. And that makes Jonah’s flash of betrayal at Barnabas not wanting to be SEEN with him that much more agonizing, personally. Like. I’ve had that happen to me more than once in real life. And much as Jonah is a piece of shit who is absolutely manipulating him………. still, ouch. Ouch. (Barnabas’ thoughts on the company Jonah keeps also made me wince. You did an AMAZING job with all of the internalized shame and frantic rationalizations, hooooooboy.)

The Lukases being colorblind is such an interesting piece of lore by the way I love it????? Now I have. Some questions, about Peter. Mordechai’s characterization in this is so fascinating to me. I’m enTRANCED by how you reverse-Uno’d it so that Barnabas was the reason Mordechai lost himself to the Lonely… the power dynamics……. so tasty. Ugh. And all of the sensual descriptions, especially of that first visit Barnabas had at Moorland house?? I didn’t clip any because I would have ended up clipping the whole fucking thing. It was aching, haunting, beautiful, holyshit. Their romance is somehow more fucked up than Barnabas and Jonah’s…

Also, I was so eager to read this I skipped the tags/warnings and completely didn’t realize Mordechai was going to be an actual vampire so that was a VERY fun surprise lmfao.

Barnabas feels like he’s close to learning something about violence and desire, how close they are, how the wires can get crossed.

THIS QUOTE IS EVERYTHING TO MEEEEEE ugh I’m having an aneurysm over how Jonah managed to fashion Barnabas into a creature that could understand him by gifting him to Mordechai for a while… letting Mordechai crack him open at the points where he was already brittle and experience an influx of some of the true darkness of the world. Just a tasty taste. That way when he discovers the truth of Jonah’s occult interests he won’t run away, because he’s already got his own fingers in the mess. He’s already given himself to one horror, why not Jonah? Shave some of the shine off of his morality, make him nice and gray so he won’t contrast so much with Jonah… And satisfying his curiosity at the same time. Two birds.

Oh, also, still sobbing about this line:

he realises that he doesn’t want to wear any colours that Mordechai can’t properly see.

EVERY TIME I let my guard down for ten seconds you smacked me with more of Barnabas being the most precious bleeding heart in the universe!!!!!! He aches so much for the people he’s trying to help and he hates people like Mordechai but part of him also wants to save Mordechai, somehow… maybe recognizes the parts of him that are like these people, still. Nearly faded but not quite gone yet. And as you’ve already established, Barnabas simply cannot let things go. Can’t disappoint people… can’t leave them when he could be doing something. Anything. Augh, FEELINGS.

Of course he knew Mordechai and Jonah were friends, he’d just temporarily believed in a sane and fair universe where things like this don’t happen. 

AND YOU HAD SUCH A PERFECT BALANCE OF HUMOR… This could have been such a feelbad fic, and tbh it still would have been spectacular. But you always eased it at just the right moment to keep it from going off the rails into irretrievable deepdark territory. Fed me little soft moments so I’d still be vulnerable enough to have my HEART RIPPED OUT LATER…

I’m not super interested in the Buried canon-wise but I love how you’ve written Barnabas’ natural affiliation with it… so subtle but powerful? (Of COURSE Jonah was jealous, lmao. He had to work so hard and he’s still not on Barnabas’ level. There’s some kinda beautiful commentary on ambition versus goodwill in there somewhere but I’m too busy nursing my battered little heart right now to articulate it.) It wove its way in and out of the rest of the plot so naturally, too. For some reason it compliments Barnabas’ temperament as I read it in canon just… so well. Was there a discussion about this on the server, and if so, PLEASE tell me about it sometime I’m so fascinated.

Jonah wasn’t even present for a lot of the fic but his characterization was so INTENSE and luminous, Christ… I know I already praised it a bit but. Woof. I wasn’t expecting to get a taste of his POV at the end and I was so excited I kicked my feet (my cat was very disgruntled) like, this line!!!

Now, he thinks there’s some truth in those false statements, in the lies we tell and why we want to be believed.

GOD, YOU’RE REALLY GONNA GIVE ME FEELINGS ABOUT JONAH AND FUTURE-JONAHLIAS IN THE SAME FIC?????? EVIL… I’m so so so fucking here for it, oh my God, Jonah with an amplifying anxiety disorder, THE PRICE OF IMMORTALITY… too bad the Eye doesn’t let you see the future, Jonah, lmao… the line “immortality just made his anxiety turn nuclear” is SEARED into my brain now, I am NOT accepting canon to contradict this ever again. I’ve always wondered how Jonah’s neuroses might have worsened in two entire fucking CENTURIES and I love the way you wrote it. I am fucking. Losing my mind.

There’s so many other things I could comment on, like. The brief but glorious Jonah-grinding-himself-off-on-Barnabas’-thigh shenanigans. Was incredibly hot, and Mordechai’s poor fragile heart breaking, and Barnabas telling Isabel that it’s fine to call him Barny…….. I’m hhhhhhhhHHHH fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m just!! I am incomprehensible!!! Everyone told me this fic was amazing but it’s fucking amazing, Del, what the hell. I’m never gonna be the same after this. The end was SHOCKINGLY sweet and I have WHIPLASH.

………… So, now that I’ve made you read a novel. Hah. Sorry. My point is. I loved every bit of this. It deserved heaps more praise but my eyes are starting to cross. Thx for sharing :’) 

Love,

Tony xx

TONY. TONY THIS MEANS EVERYTHING TO ME. FIRSTLY I’M SO GLAD YOU LIKED THIS. SECOND OF ALL, THANKS TO YOU I’LL BE SCREAMING FROM THE ROOFTOPS FOREVER HAVE YOU ANY IDEA HOW THIS REVIEW HAS AFFECTED ME? IT’S THE BEST FEEDBACK I’VE EVER RECIEVED IN MY LIFE I FEEL LIKE A FIRSTGRADER GETTING THEIR FIRST GOLD STAR I FEEL ON TOP OF THE WORLD LIKE I COULD THROW THE JEWEL OF THE SEA OFF THE SHIP AND LEAN OVER THE RAILINGS BECAUSE YOUR ARMS ARE AROUND ME TONY IT’S BEEN MONTHS AND THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN A FIREPLACE KEEPING ME WARM THROUGH THE WINTER MONTHS I LOVE YOU DEARLY FOR THIS YOU ARE AN ABSOLUTE CHAMPION IF YOU WERE IN FRONT OF ME RIGHT NOW I WOULD FRENCH KISS YOU WITHOUT HESISTATION UNTIL THE BOTH OF US HAVE RUN OUT OF AIR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCKING BLESS YOU TONY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

[random-thought-depository]

The movie Fail Safe was on TV last night and I watched it. I thought it was a really great movie! It was very dark, but in the best possible way; it was a great tragedy.

Quick summary of the film (with spoilers): due to an accidental miscommunication, a USAF bomber group carrying hydrogen bombs receives orders to fly into the Soviet Union and nuke Moscow. The bomber pilots are also ordered to ignore any attempts to recall them, on the assumption that it may be a Soviet trick. This is similar to Dr. Strangelove, though in Dr. Strangelove the situation happens because of a renegade officer who wants a nuclear war to happen, whereas in Fail Safe the situation happens because of a mechanical failure and is nobody’s fault and everybody’s fault. USAF fighters are sent on a suicide mission to shoot down the bombers (they don’t have enough fuel to intercept the bombers and make it back to land, and will run out of fuel over the Arctic Ocean), but this fails. The US President warns the Soviet Premier of what’s happening and explains that it was an accident, but there’s a very rational fear that if Moscow gets nuked the situation may lead to war anyway. The Soviets have limited success in shooting down the bombers. The US government and USAF high command decide to actively help the Soviets, giving them information about the bombers’ capabilities and vulnerabilities. To avert a possible nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the US President offers the Soviet Premier a horrific bargain: if the bombers succeed in nuking Moscow he will order the USAF to destroy New York city with a hydrogen bomb; the death of a great Russian city will be paid for with the death of a great American city, and this will be a costly signal to the Soviets that the destruction of Moscow was truly an accident and not a deliberate raid with plausible deniability or an opening move in a general attack. In the end, the Soviets shoot down all but one of the misdirected bombers, and the last surviving bomber nukes Moscow (having received fatal doses of radiation from near-misses by Soviet nuclear anti-aircraft missiles, and believing they would return to a ruined homeland, the pilots of the last surviving bomber allow themselves to be killed by the explosion of their own bombs). The US President keeps his bargain with the Soviet Premier, and the USAF destroys New York with a hydrogen bomb.

There’s a phrase that’s sometimes used on the Spacebattles.com and Sufficient Velocity forums: “hard men making hard decisions.” This phrase is usually used as a derisive description of this sort of thing:

“Hugh Farnham, the hero of Farnham’s Freehold, has a signature move: when people disagree with him, he barks ‘‘Lifeboat rules!’’ at them and pats his sidearm. Hugh Farnham is the proprietor of a nuclear fallout shelter that has managed, thanks to his excellent timing and foresight, to have rescued his family and some of their friends. The shelter is their ‘‘lifeboat,’’ the only thing standing between them and certain death in an uncaring universe where the cold equations of nuclear fission dictate that rules must be followed.

Poor Hugh is a good guy, but he has the responsibility of taking care of the lifeboat’s passengers. That means that he’s got to bear the sidearm, and threaten his friends and family with lethal violence if they get out of line. It’s for their own good.

Heinlein’s Hugh Farnham is a character who is in charge of everything except the circumstances that led to him having to coerce, cajole, and terrorize the people around him. He’s that character because Heinlein wrote him that way.

…

The thing about lifeboat rules is that they are an awfully good deal for lifeboat captains.” - Cory Doctorow, The Cold Equations and Moral Hazard.

I think Fail Safe was the “people making hard decisions” concept done well. “Hard men making hard decisions” in the bad sense is bad because the “hard decisions” usually actually means “easy decisions if you’re a right-wing authoritarian.” Fail Safe showed people making hard decisions that actually felt like hard decisions. I think part of what made it work was that the hard decisions depicted in Fail Safe required not just willingness to violate “nice” liberal morality, but also willingness to betray in-group solidarity.

Hard decisions means ordering some of your own pilots on a mission that, if it succeeds, will consist of them killing some of their comrades and then running out of fuel above the frigid Arctic Ocean and certainly dying (by freezing to death if they choose to bail out and open their parachutes, by being splattered like bugs on a windshield if they choose not to).

Hard decisions means helping your enemies kill brave and loyal people who believe they are acting on your orders in defense of your nation. Hard decisions means telling your enemies the weaknesses of one of your greatest weapons, in service of that enterprise.

Hard decisions means carrying out one of the most horrific massacres in history against your own people just to send a costly signal to your enemies that you didn’t really mean to attack them.

The First Lady is visiting New York when the events of this film are happening; when the President orders New York destroyed he orders the likely killing of his own wife. The bomber pilot who drops the bomb on New York lives in New York with his wife and children; when he drops the bomb he likely kills his own family.

The movie doesn’t depict what happened in the aftermath, but I imagine that that President was impeached and then arrested and executed for treason or something like that in the aftermath; can you imagine a President going on TV and admitting that he ordered the USAF to nuke New York as part of a round of Great Game chess with the Soviets; there’d be an immense desire for somebody to punish for that and the obvious scapegoat would be the person who gave the order. And hard decisions would mean accepting that too; it’s just another one of the millions of lives traded away to save the hundreds of millions who’d die in a nuclear war, and the electric chair or gas chamber or firing squad or hangman’s noose is more merciful than the way a lot of the sacrificial victims in New York would have died (I think if you want to experience this movie in a maximally horrifying and depressing way, the way to do that would probably be to watch it immediately after watching Barefoot Gen).

Making decisions like these wouldn't just make you feel like a butcher, it’d make you feel like a traitor and a betrayer.

There’s a scene in this movie where USAF officers have to tell Russian officers some technical information about the missiles the bombers carry. One of the USAF officers just can’t do it. The next one speaks through gritted teeth and clearly hates every second of the experience. Part of this is they’re compromising national security by doing this, but I saw a subtext of a more intimate betrayal of the pilots. I saw a subtext of the capabilities of these aircraft as an expression of comradeship from the engineers and the rear-echelon support institutions to the pilots; you can’t be with them, but you can do the next best thing by giving them the best possible aircraft and therefore the best possible chances of completing their missions and returning alive. And now they’re being asked to undo that, to as much as possible take away the advantages they’ve worked so hard to give the pilots. I suspect that if this movie had been made in a more computerized age this scene might have included the USAF giving the Soviets the information they’d need to do something kind of like the prefix code trick in Star Trek II, which would have made this subtext more obvious.

There’s a scene a bit earlier where the misdirected bombers have just crossed into Soviet air space and one of them is attacked by Soviet fighters and successfully defends itself and destroys the attacking Soviet fighters. Most of the USAF officers watching this happen on their big war room screen start cheering, and then the commanding officer reprimands them and says something like this isn’t a football game. I read this scene through the subtext I talked about in the previous paragraph; the commanding officer wants to discourage the natural sentiment of thinking of the bomber pilots as comrades, admiring their skill and bravery, being proud to have armed them so well, and being happy for them when they succeed.

Side note: another subtext I saw in the USAF officers cheering when the bomber destroyed the Soviet fighters: they are thinking about the symmetrical opposite battle that would happen in a full-scale war; the one over the United States between USAF fighters and the Soviet long-range bombers that would be coming to drop nuclear weapons on American cities. They are reassured to see that US bombers do well against Soviet fighters, because that means US fighters will probably do well against Soviet bombers.

Side note to that side note. I vaguely remember reading in discussions on forums that in the early ‘60s the USSR didn’t yet have the capacity to use nuclear weapons to conduct a general massacre of the US urban population? But Fail Safe feels like it takes place in a world where a nuclear war would mean basically every significant US city goes up in flames. I’m inclined to interpret it as alternate history, taking place in a world where the Soviet Union was more formidable than it was in our world (given the ending it’s definitely alternate history anyway). I think sequel fanfiction to this movie could definitely be interesting alternate history.

Other side notes:

I felt really sorry for … well, basically every character in this movie, but I think the situation of the misdirected bomber pilots was very poignant. They believed there was an actual nuclear war happening; they believed they were living through the worst day in human history! I imagine them making mental calculations like: if we’ve had time to cross the Arctic Ocean from Alaska and fly deep into the Soviet Union, then probably every city between Lisbon and Kiev is in flames right now, and hundreds of millions of people are already dead or dying, and maybe our Soviet opposite numbers are flying across Canada and the Atlantic Ocean right now, Fairbanks and Juneau are burning though the next wave of real massacre is maybe yet to begin (it’ll start when the Soviet bombers reach the part of Canada near the border where most of Canada’s population lives, a few hours after that the Soviet bombers will have finished their work and North America will look like Central Asia immediately after Genghis Khan was finished with it). It was impressive and poignant that in this situation these people were holding together and doing their best, but this quality isn’t an unalloyed good; this sort of obedience is exactly what insures that tragicomic or atrocious orders are obeyed; they were fighting skillfully and bravely while knowing that their mission was basically to commit a massacre as an act of spite (yes, destroying major enemy cities is a rational part of MAD; spite is often rational in a game theory sense).

One thing I found interesting about the movie was the complete absence of ghoulish Dr. Strangelove types. Even the war hawk guy who advocated a full-scale strike on the USSR wasn’t portrayed that way (I picked up an implication that he was a Holocaust survivor and trauma had a lot to do with why he was Like That). I mentioned that Dr. Strangelove really feels like it’s riffing off this movie, and one of the interesting differences is this feels like a sort of optimistic-humanist West Wing/Star Trek version of a Cold War thriller; there’s an assumption that basically everyone involved is basically well-meaning. I think maybe this reflects that 1950s high point of trust in institutions? I suspect a movie made later would have been more cynical.

I really wonder about the relationship between Dr. Strangelove and this movie now, I assumed Dr. Strangelove must have been made later and been a sort of parody of this movie but a quick Google search says they were made the same year. Dr. Strangelove (the title character) kind of feels like a fusion of the war hawk guy and the secretary of defense (the disabled guy with crutches) in this movie. On that subject, seeing that guy with crutches reminded me that FDR would still have been fairly fresh in living memory when this movie was made, and when this movie was made there were still a lot of older adults where were disabled from effects of polio infections earlier in life. Really reminds you that the world was very different not all that long ago.

I think the film’s idea of “nobody is at fault and everybody is at fault” is applicable to a lot of our current problems.

[miasmapuddle]

Libra full moon ushers in lessons from the zeta star race

The sun ☉ at 18 aries ♈︎ is conjoined with zeta reticulum epsilon, a star in, you guessed it, the zeta reticulum constellation.

The zeta star race is said to be an alternate timeline future version of humanity and their story is very resonant for our times. Almost too much so.

The zetas began to advance in technology at a high rate, and made the decision to leave the emotional and spiritual aspect of the world on the wayside, opting instead for a rational and materialist perspective. Well, down the evolutionary road they had chosen, due to embracing transhumanism, fusing their own flesh with hard tech, they lost all emotional capability, and their connection to source and their intuitive selves were totally severed. Around the same time, they were plunged into a massive civil war that led to nuclear warfare and the destruction of their viable planets. So the zeta people, who looked a lot like we do at this point in the story, retreated deep underground.

While underground, their skin became extremely pale, and their pupils expanded over their entire eye in order for them to be able to distinguish shapes in the relentless darkness of their planet's interior. Due to their dependence on intellect and restricted movement their heads ballooned and their bodies grew small and slim.

This created the classic ET physique most commonly recognized in what we call Greys, but are better known as Zetas.

The zetas soon realized they had made a mistake. by relying so heavily on technology, their connection to the natural world grew strained to the point that they lost the ability to reproduce. Desperate to continue their race, they began to use some of their technology to try and shift to an alternate timeline in which they had not made their fateful choice.

Long story short, they could not, and instead began looking for a race whose DNA they could harvest. This is how they found earth, back in the 1970s, around the start of abductions.

Zetas began abducting humans in order to obtain our DNA, which holds within it a vast range of emotion and potential for deep feeling and intuition, the exact qualities the Zetas once had. Their experiments were successful, and they began to create hybrid children who had the zeta intellectual capacity paired with the emotional depth of earth humanity. But the DNA they had harvested came from humans who were terrified, and this traumatic distortion was mirrored in the emotional state of the hybrid children. They were not happy, and were full of fear. The zeta realized that because of the interconnectedness of our reality, in order to heal their children, they had to heal their now broken relationship with humanity.

So the zeta began to work on a more spiritual path, and while they were not able to regain their lost capabilities right away, after generations of hybridization with other races, namely humans, a new kind of Zeta being emerged, one whose intellect renders them non judgemental and capable of clear seeing.

With zeta conjunct the sun, opposing the full moon in libra, we are receiving evidence of these lessons now in the form of deep divisive polarity, urging us to choose a side and stand with it absolutely. This is not the answer, and will only lead to further polarity. Tapping into the zeta energy can help us to see things objectively and to feel a deep compassion for our fellow human, understanding that pain and fear only breed more pain and fear, and likewise, healing only breeds more healing.

As an effort to aid humanity, the Zeta race has seeded many souls on earth, also hoping that the subtle encryption of their dark history will unconsciously aid us in making different decisions while we still can.

Zeta starseeds are very otherworldly, often appearing aloof or hypersensitive, and have a strongly eccentric space cadet vibe, a bit removed from everything around them. Zeta starseeds are equipped with brilliant minds, especially when it comes to rational thought and sciences, and they bring this mathematical flair to their spiritual ventures as well, looking at things from a uniquely dualistic yet united perspective.

At this time, the zetas are one of the most prominent races working with earth, especially the zeta-human hybrid, known as the essassani. ( for example, prominent channeled entity bashar is an essassani being)

Unfortunately many still see the zetas, commonly called the greys, as a negative race. And yes, negative factions still exist, many of which live on the orion empire controlled system of planets known as the unholy six, or in the orion star system itself. But this race as a whole has largely taken a miraculous turn for the best.

The zeta, using the holofractal nature of our universe to heal and transmute across the timelines.

Zeta message -

" in upcoming months, humanity will stand at a crossroads. You will be in a position much like one where we once were. you will be under the impression that you do not have a choice in which road you will walk. You will feel that the pull of the many is too vast and that you, the singular, are best off letting yourself be swept along in the flow rather than resisting the tides and risking a storm. This is your choice, but we urge you to take your unique personal perspective and autonomy as a gift at this time. We zeta, would like to add since this was not mentioned in the article, that we are a hive mind, and that when we moved into this state, we lived in division, in a deluded type of unity, until we collectively chose to move into what you call the light. Humans are walking the path of collective awakening at this time and will presently move into a type of consciousness more alike our own. But this connection of the hive, the collective mind, will first be a struggle. Your feelings, your thoughts, your experiences, will all be heightened. Know that this potent period is not permanent, it is a destabilizing influence, but one that is a natural consequence of deep change within your dimension. Allowing this new influx of awareness to breed anxiety and the desire to control, to force, to separate from, will only lead you to a darker horizon. The definitions of your world, mundane and metaphysical, are about to be flipped, shifted into a new paradigm. Allow it to occur and do not attempt to grasp to any one truth or absolute understanding in this time, no matter how wrong or right something seems to your new mind. Focus on cultivating your ability to move with and within this collective awareness, instead of resisting it. We are all in a dynamic timeline, and are all hoping for the best, and though we may appear to be some type of authority, we are, in many ways, as powerless to the ebb and flow of Great Nature as you. To call upon us, simply state a simple invocation, saying that you would like to connect to us, the Zetas. While you may not receive immediate impressions of our presence, you will have initiated a channel of interplay through which we can begin to connect. Thank you.

I'd like to note that the crossroads the Zetas are talking about is almost certainly the fusion of humanity and technology. 5g is just the first step in a forced transhumanism that will descend over society. This is the wave that will be so hard to push back against. They will say it is the wave of the future, astrologers may claim that it is the dawn of the age of aquarius after all, a sign associated with humanity itself, as well as technology. But this approaching singularity is not something to take lightly. Infusing our natural beings with such a high degree of electromagnetic influence will create changes in the quantum field and will reduce the number of probabilistic futures that we hold in our palm as natural humans. Once technology comes into the picture, our consciousness will become more fixed.

Writing this has been bringing up an extreme path of synchronous happenings, and I hope reading this will do the same for all of you.