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It’s possible for a dead character to have great influence on the plot without being undead or some other form of not-really-dead.
In real life, such things are echoes, or mechanisms setup beforehand.
Many years ago, I observed a discussion between an acquaintance and his father. The father said that the shows the son watched did not deal with death. The son said that Dragon Ball Z did deal with death - that the characters had died at such and such time, and were trapped in the spirit realm. But the father said that, as those characters came back, and so on, that they hadn’t really died, not in the way we understood it, and that the work didn’t really deal with death.
@leafyhotdog
hey does it feel good to be so passive aggressive against someone who calls for violence against those calling for genocide instead of the ones actually calling for genocide? cause its pretty fucking sad
Buddy, you and your friends are absolutely horrible at telling who is and is not “calling for genocide”, especially since you include anyone questioning the violence in your calls for violence - you wanted violence against “bigots” and said people against the violence were also “bigots”.
You can block me, but it’s the truth. The reason so many people are saying “hey, wait a minute” about this Punching Nazis thing is because we know that it doesn’t end there.
Maybe if it were enforced consistently and actually ended there we could tolerate it, but hey, “Racism is prejudice plus power, and <ingroup> have no power” people already exist, so realistically that is not going to happen.
compromise: ban Muslim men! only 800 million.
still too many? maybe can drop a few countries like Malaysia and Indonesia-
oh shit oh shit that’s Donald Trump’s travel ban
Islamic terrorist organizations are quite content to make female suicide bombers. Also, gender dynamics within Islam may contribute to the total amount of violence. And, for Islam in particular, the disparity. It’s a sad irony.
Reflecting a bit more on the “Death: Woke or Joke?” topic, I guesspart of the gap is that the people who feel strongly about eliminating death see it as a major source of surd evil, whereas it just doesn’t seem to me like very much suffering comes from mere fact of death so much as the particulars.
It seems to me that the bulk of the suffering caused by death is the result of prolonged and unpleasant deaths, which can largely be addressed with euthanasia, or else it’s either a matter death being used as coercion and punishment (which I expect would get worse in a world with indefinite lifespan) or of large numbers of people dying at once from the same thing (which isn’t something I would expect most death-cheating technology to help with). From where I stand it looks like nearly all suffering is caused by what I would call “samsaric” issues – competition over limited resources, Red Queen’s races, and incentive structures that make suffering beneficial to us, or make it beneficial for us to make others suffer. It seems more likely that technology that permitted indefinite lifespan would make all of those problems worse than that it would ameliorate them, though the exact way this is likely to happen would vary greatly depending on how the tech worked.
If you use that as a moral principle, though, you can justify almost arbitrarily-short lifespans.
Reflecting a bit more on the “Death: Woke or Joke?” topic, I guesspart of the gap is that the people who feel strongly about eliminating death see it as a major source of surd evil, whereas it just doesn’t seem to me like very much suffering comes from mere fact of death so much as the particulars.
It seems to me that the bulk of the suffering caused by death is the result of prolonged and unpleasant deaths, which can largely be addressed with euthanasia, or else it’s either a matter death being used as coercion and punishment (which I expect would get worse in a world with indefinite lifespan) or of large numbers of people dying at once from the same thing (which isn’t something I would expect most death-cheating technology to help with). From where I stand it looks like nearly all suffering is caused by what I would call “samsaric” issues – competition over limited resources, Red Queen’s races, and incentive structures that make suffering beneficial to us, or make it beneficial for us to make others suffer. It seems more likely that technology that permitted indefinite lifespan would make all of those problems worse than that it would ameliorate them, though the exact way this is likely to happen would vary greatly depending on how the tech worked.
If you use that as a moral principle, though, you can justify almost arbitrarily-short lifespans.
what’s even the point of living once your wavefunction collapses, really? you can never get those days back.
more seriously: my position isn’t exactly “living is terrible, and the less of it the better!” Rather, my concern is that there are fairly serious risks in circumventing humans’ senescence limit that don’t apply when simply helping more people to reach that ceiling, so if you have a mild preference for people living longer but are very wary of those risks, the safest lifespan seems to be “as far as you can get it without senescence-hacking”.
There are two separate angles on this. The first is that the more capital-dependent staying alive is, the more that dependency threatens quality of life by enabling extreme inequality and coercion. Most death-cheat proposals are extremely capital-intensive in ways that simply reducing incidental mortality is not. The second issue is that senescence is a feature, not a bug: lifespan varies widely in nature, and there are non-senescent animals, so we obviously evolved this lifespan for a good reason. Now, of course you can’t just stop at “God/evolution knows best” or it’s the naturalistic fallacy, but it seems to me that understanding why we have the lifespan we do instead of some other lifespan, what problems are likely to arise if we change that, and how we can get out in front of them, should be step one of eliminating death, and there appears to be significantly less interest in that topic than there ought to be.
Well, I mean there are two things here,
The first is that human lifespan is probably not as evolutionarily meaningful as human sexual dimorphism and various other traits are, because, like the Sherman tank, you expect to lose humans to the environment over time even without aging (including to insufficient resources), and that you’re making an engineering tradeoff for longer designed lifespan for each additional decade and if the tiger population is high and random diseases are high and there is parasite load, etc, it’s just not worth the effort.
That things like bridges aren’t designed to last forever is not a feature, it’s just something contingent on available resources, so I don’t find this particularly compelling.
The other thing is that I don’t expect those philosophers and pundits and whatnot to actually come up with much good. What I’ve seen so far has not impressed me, so it hardly seems worth increasing my risk of death just to be told some half-baked explanation about “human temporality” or some other hogwash.
Practical risks are the better argument, but, it lacks many of the worst possibilities of Transhumanism, since it’s just regular humans, but for longer.
The biggest risk I see is probably that people don’t accept limits on reproduction, but I think they’ll come around.
Jesus Christ
When talking about his death penalty sentence, Timothy McVeigh said that it wasn’t a victory for the government, because “[i]n the crudest terms: 168 to 1.”
fuck, he made a “still a good K/D ratio” joke before videogames started doing these
Where does “harvest the blood of those who kill more than three people in order to force them to pay back their debt in lives to society whether they want to or not, and if not fit for this purpose, use them to test the safety of experimental drugs” fit on the political compass?
opinions that sound good at first glance but go really wrong gradually, so bottom right
let’s do organ repo as an example because Niven did this.
with regular sentencing, there’s “guy goes to jail if I say he’s guilty, guy goes free if I say he’s not”. with organ repo
“guy gets disassembled for organs that go to sick people if I say he’s guilty, guy goes free and sick people are deprived of organs if I say he’s not”, which is a massive externality orthogonal to whether the guy is actually guilty or not and will inevitably pressure people towards harsher sentences and even disassembling the innocent.
Honestly I know it’s not actually a good idea for any existing government, but this kind of thing pisses me off. I want such crimes to ultimately be rendered futile, and if the new incentives lead all such persons to commit suicide during the criminal act that saves society the expense of a trial.
A more ideal state would be able to carry this out in such a way that it’s unclear if this is what is really occurring or if they’re life imprisoning them or just taking them out back and shooting them. On top of that other evidence of whatever message they wanted to get out or fame they wanted to achieve would be erased or compromised by hoaxes. The death of martyrdom.
Too bad there’s no government that can be trusted enough for that.
While this may not be the Perfect Policy That Would End All Badness Forever, a large part of my… not ideal world, but at least “world where things are mostly okay from a system one perspective” is just “competition and violence exist, but everyone is honorable and plays by the rules.” Like, where CEOs do their thing and make as much profit as possible, but are honest negotiators, don’t collaborate to raise prices, etc, and where war exists, but everyone follows the Geneva Conventions.
It’s weird to me that this isn’t a more popular position. In particular, it seems like “bring back honorable warfare, real men don’t torture children or use chemical weapons” should be prime neoreactionary territory, and yet somehow it isn’t.
I think the Neoreactionaries would welcome it - if they thought it were remotely possible.
I certainly find something… hmn, I’m not sure what the right word is for it, but I appreciate that CEOs in Japan still experience shame as an emotion.
And I probably shouldn’t. I probably shouldn’t be satisfied that someone embezzling ten million dollars would throw themselves into the sea, never to return, out of such a deep sense of shame.
Maybe it’s because one of our weapons against embezzlement is the stripping of social status - and if someone has no shame, it’s a sign that their social status hasn’t been stripped and can’t be used against them. And then what is there to stop them embezzling? White collar jail? House arrest? Not very effective.
It is hard to pick what my favorite piece of Awful Radfem Discourse is, but I think this might just win the prize.
Okay, but to answer the question. It’s more of a correlation thing.
Trans girls are often anime girls, for example, but not all anime girls are trans girls.
I’ve long had a theory that some groups that are drawn to anime are drawn to it because it telegraphs emotions in a very blatant manner.
For people around gender issues, it also often leaves facial features more vague and less gendered.
Okay, let me make a real post out of this for Prof. Sto– I mean @afloweroutofstone.
I think part of the public liking of anime and posting of anime tiddies, despite being considered low-class activities on the internet, reflects a coming meltdown in masculinity.
There’s a common perception that masculinity is essentially impervious to attack, which is driven by focusing almost entirely on men at the top and ignoring men at the bottom or treating them as non-men. (Also by ignoring what masculinity of the kind people want to attack even is.)
The real weaknesses of masculinity, however, are at the margins, not from Trudeau wearing pink. The men who are already having trouble performing masculinity and being judged wanting just… giving up on performing masculinity in terms of its integration with society.
For now, the broader status hierarchy based on performing masculinity in order to appeal to a combination of other men and neurotypical, heterosexual women, is holding.
But it’s going to erode as new, competing status hierarchies form and expand among those who have no reason to abide by their low status in the old ones. We’re seeing a war and division over them in “geek” culture, currently, but new culture hierarchy conflicts are going to spread as the gender system destabilizes.
This is one of those rebellions that begins with the peasants out in the provinces and makes its way into the city.
It’s visible in all sorts of low-status men that many of your readers would hate. But if it were already accepted, it wouldn’t be a true revolution, and this is what not being accepted looks like, in part, WRT the male gender role.
Everyone’s all “actually, stereotype accuracy!” but half the black people in my college went to the anime club meetings at least once, so.
And, like, back before I went to college I was the token white guy and also the one guy who wasn’t really into DBZ and Naruto and so on.
Puts an interesting spin on SWPL politics – maybe it’s less “white people shouldn’t be allowed to have spaces” and more “I feel guilty about being a SWPL but everything that’s popular among non-SWPLs is ~uncool~, so what we need to do is take the people who are visibly not SWPLs and somehow get them to like SWPL stuff”.
There are way way way too many Asian people who like anime for it to be a SWPL thing.
Globally, or where you live?