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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s also possible to be a person who genuinely cares about classic art and the environment already. And it’s also possible to be a poor person with little to no power to influence the fossil fuel industry. Chiding people for not having the privilege of free time and minimal obligations to protest isn’t very productive. Again, change needs to happen at the top and it’s not going to be achieved through appeals to emotion or coercion via symbolic or actual threats to famous art or sites.


  • I will not be fair, the publication isn’t. Why should I?

    Because arguing dishonestly makes you look irrational and does their propaganda work for them.

    but you are more likely to try to distance yourself from fossil fuel reform movements, and that’s all they need you to do to be successful.

    Not really. This isn’t an effective form of protest or reform. Stunts like this allow articles like this to be written in the first place, but the stunts, even if written of with the highest of praise, are useless. Effective action would involve changing the minds of those who profit from fossil fuels the most and making it unprofitable for them to continue. You don’t need to convince people who care about world heritage sites or famous artwork. You need to convince the profiteers of industry and that won’t come from an appeal to emotion but from a threat to their financial well-being.




  • This is a decent one, but a ton of the HFY stories are just so problematic. Many just feel like they’re congratulating humanity on being vicious and creatively violent, like they think the Terran Empire in the Star Trek Mirror Universe were good guys.

    Otherwise, a bunch just feel lazily formulaic and repetitive with others. Take a random human trait or convention from a human culture like say…fried foods. Use an alien narrator to describe how weird they think it is to fry foods. Find an angle to portray humans as plucky and great for their fierce devotion to frying foods and involve it in a narrative about humanity winning against greater odds. “And the human just dumped the entire chargizoid corpse into a vat of boiling oil! And then he took it out with something called tongs and ate it, skin and all! And that’s when I knew I needed humans on my side in the coming galactic war…”

    I guess I feel like the subgenre plays on the optimism of Star Trek utopianism, but ditches any real criticism of humanity’s past (or our present). I think the message from Orville’s Season 3 Episode 10 about what made humanity better in their past is a better heir to Star Trek utopianism than most of the HFY stories I’ve read.


  • I hated it when older people said this to me, so you probably won’t appreciate my perspective now, but you have a vast amount of life ahead of you with a lot more information you can encounter that will contradict what you think you know for certain right now. And you’ll encounter newer information after that that will contradict the previous new truths you felt so enlightened to recognize. You don’t have to listen to me at all of course, but if you think you already know what you believe, you don’t need to make a post here to discuss it. If you’re not open to the thoughts of others, I wouldn’t recommend wasting your time soliciting them. If you’re just looking for affirmations of your pre-existing perspectives, a chatbot might be a better outlet.



  • The original meanings of words change over time with usage. Though they have some overlap and some differences (Brazilians are considered Latino but not Hispanic and Spaniards are considered Hispanic but not Latino), the term Latino is generally replacing previous usage of Hispanic, though Latino is likely used more in urban and coastal regions of the US and Hispanic is likely used more in rural and landlocked regions. The usage of either term won’t always be accurate and it will be an exonym used for people who don’t call themselves by that term.

    You’re free to say, “I don’t identify as Latino. I’m Mexican.” Or “I’m Mexican American.” if you’re in the US. There will be surveys and polls and forms that won’t have Mexican as a choice though since they use pan-ethnic or continental terms for wide groups of people for categorization purposes. Similar to the fact that white isn’t an ethnicity or a scientific taxonomy. It’s an arbitrary designation with historical, social and political baggage.


  • Citizens who do not support the mere notion of government are forfeiting their best chance to ensure a world that works for their shared common interests as members of the public.

    People who support corporate hegemony and anarcho-capitalism are boot-licking authoritarianism. They are distracted by daydreams that they will be micro-authoritarian feudal lords and not the serfs being crushed under the corporate boot.