Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

Continuing the theme of that Star Trek discussion, I’ve heard of smart phone apps for calculating artillery trajectories (used in Ukraine) and calling in Airstrikes (used in Syria), but think of how it would look in a piece of fiction to have people use that.  Would they be technically minded serious resourceful Heroes or garbage millennials who are too lazy to calculate their own artillery strikes?

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, but obviously they aren’t being serious, or they’d put it in augmented reality glasses as part of a total integration of tactical information in the battlespace.  :)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

But I thought the EPA was evil or some libertarian bullshit

diarrheaworldstarhiphop answered:

im a dirty environmentalist lmao

[mitigatedchaos]

Only the Iron Hand of the State can truly keep the environment clean.  At least, under Capitalism, if you like having rivers you can actually wade in.  Soviet Russia not so much.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[edwad]

my upstairs neighbors are always f*cking

[triggeredmedia]

Imagine that. People have free will. No wonder you hate it. 

[edwad]

triggeredmedia has finally debunked edwadism once and for all

[collapsedsquid]

Shoulda been an ancap, then I’m pretty sure you then would be allowed to nuke them for aggressing with their sound.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[afloweroutofstone]

If you believe in a massive and active military, militarized borders and restrictive immigration policies, support for law enforcement as they currently exist, traditional family values, and the need to preserve a national culture, you’re not a libertarian. You’re not fooling anyone. You want a highly ordered and hierarchical society enforced by state coercion, just give us all a break and stop pretending like your beliefs about taxes and firearms make you a freedom fighter

[collapsedsquid]

Way I think this argument is justified by those types is that because we don’t have Freedom where businesses or even towns are allowed to discriminate, the government needs to do it instead.

To me that result has a very different takeaway though.

[mitigatedchaos]

While OP has a point, there’s also the issue that Libertarianism has to have political support (including within that culture) in order to be maintained, and mass migrations can change the political environment of a territory pretty substantially.

It makes more sense if you assume it’s fragile rather than the default to which all societies will gradually slide.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

youzicha asked:

Why does China dislike the THAAD so much?

xhxhxhx answered:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

China doesn’t like missile defenses pointed in China’s general direction, I guess

but you know more about missiles than I do!

[mitigatedchaos]

“We can destroy you with missiles at any time” is a kind of unstated political leverage.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[quasi-normalcy]

Erdogan is actually a very good case study in how successful authoritarians don’t always deal themselves all of the cards immediately after coming to power.

[argumate]

I wanted to attach a picture of Xi Jinping smiling knowingly but the dude always has this slightly peeved expression, like he’s just caught the dog pissing on the carpet again.

[mitigatedchaos]

If you ruled China and were responsible for over one billion people and one of the world’s largest economies, would you smile?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[official-mugi]

You know we talk shit about Tumblr ™ a lot but Twitter ™ genuinely believes that Gamergate led to the Alt-Right and nazis

[bubblerevolution]

do people seriously believe a bunch of mad nerds arguing over video game journalism with other mad nerds led to neo nazis

[official-mugi]

[ranma-official]

I’m not sure if you’ve actually physically been on /v/ at the time, but gg basically seethed with /pol/ shit and that’s like one of the core reasons people are screeching about non-white people in videogames there now

nonetheless, bitching about videogames journalism has been the favorite pastime activity for like a decade, and I wonder who’s behind telling people that it suddenly makes them Nazis

[mitigatedchaos]

Well, as they say (or should say), there is one group that will never hate white males for being white males.

Honestly, this whole Venn Diagram of Oppression ideology has been just such an extraordinary disaster.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

When it is forbidden to criticise people for immutable bad attributes and mandatory to criticise people for mutable bad attributes determining the mutability of attributes becomes the paramount concern.

[mitigatedchaos]

Yes, in fact, enormous fights might develop over such things…

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[blackblocberniebros]

Awfully convenient that the STEM-lords who worship at the altar of “hard science” are also really likely to trust the research findings of evolutionary psychology and the study of intelligence, two of the flimsiest and most disputed scientific disciplines around.

[ranma-official]

The reason they are considered flimsiest and most disputed is because the findings may not necessarily be progressive in the first place so that’s just putting the cart before the horse

If we are talking about social sciences, people still quote as fact defining all of human condition studies that completely failed to replicate, and that’s for some reason not controversial

[mitigatedchaos]

TBH it’s good we’re not so far off from genetic modification and other exotic technologies, since it’s looking like some of the things that weren’t supposed to be true (especially given some of the original motives) are one half to one quarter true, which is really inconvenient.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

The new Star Trek is really going to have a problem with how technology has been changing since the earlier series.  Either they accept it, and give everyone a smartphone-camera-tricorder and have drones that perform exploration and simple errands in which case they become insufferable selfie-taking millennials who are too lazy to carry their own laundry or whatever, or they ignore that and we mock them for having technology worse than our current day technology.

I think the issue here is that smartphones and drones would be a serious advantage in a situation like that, not just a convenience, but we still think of them as conveniences. 

But then I think that very few people in sci-fi have dealt properly with the consequence of ubiquitous computing, they either bypass it entirely or come up with technology that’s worse than today’s.  Bypassing it is a justifiable decision though, if you don’t you can end up with futures that end up looking ridiculous where everyone communicates with handheld fax machines.

[mitigatedchaos]

The problem here is that the next logical step is Transhumanism.  Why aren’t the crew of the Enterprise all paramilitary cyborgs who, while looking human externally, have in-built communications technology and redundant backup organs?

But Transhumanism isn’t the Humanism on which the original Star Trek was built.  Star Trek was intended to be about Human stories, Human morality, Human ethics…  Transhumanism is… well in many ways it’s deeper than that, pulling at threads that ordinary human ethics buries.

[rocketverliden]

It comes down to how the picture of the world when a work is made informs the future. Mobile Suit Gundam was made in 1979 and it seems like Tomino may have envisioned grand space colonies and so forth, but not personal computers or the internet. A lot of works that were made before the days of widespread cellphone use may seem a bit head-scratching when limitations in communication are a plot point.

[mitigatedchaos]

Now see, that applies to Classic, Original Series Trek, which has actually aged remarkably well all things considered, not this new J.J. Abrams Trek.