…what. They’re everyone’s largest trading partner, why would they do that?

I can’t say I disagree. The tendency to outright dismiss christianity online is understandable, but a little frustrating. Even with that horrifying core, a lot of people find solace in it. For many, it’s the only semblence of community that’s lasted into the 21st century.

On another level, it’s just plain interesting the sorts of stories people felt needed to be preserved. It speaks to how they lived and what they valued. A lot has changed, and a lot hasn’t. That kind of narrative window into the past is valuable, and I’m glad I grew up with it, even if I don’t consider myself Christian anymore.

that’s how you teach them to highlight and copy/paste text

It’s interesting that that relationship changes, isn’t it? Like, early on God is the sort of deity to turn you into salt or flood the world if He’s displeased. And over time, He does that sort of spiteful intervention less and less. It’s hard not to see it as Him getting wiser and more compassionate. But… if He’s all powerful and all knowing to begin with, why does His approach to people change?

A few years ago, didn’t the British prime minister threaten to cut Ukraine out of economic relations if Zelenskyy negotiated with Russia? Kinda seams like that’s already happened.

It was just one line of dialog, but the sequel did mention that the company is expanding from just resource extraction to selling settlements to the wealthiest who are fleeing a dying earth

kinda depends on your definition of politics

the one I heard that I think is the most useful is, On the broadest level, Politics is how societies decide how and where resources are distributed

by that definition, healthcare can only be a political question, cus no matter how you set it up, you’ve made a decision about how it’s staffed and funded, who it caters to and what its goals are

gotta agree

nicotine is more addictive than cocaine, I’d never touch the stuff

but gun to my head? I’d take a cig over a vape any day. looks soo much better

I think there’s a tendency to see inter- (and intra-)stellar travel through the lens of the inter-continental expedition and colonialism. It… kinda makes sense… superficially, there’s some similarities; a voyage in a vessel, going to uncharted places, kicking off a new era of settlement and extraction. For this reason, movies and games really like the comparison, cus it makes for an easy narrative the audience is already familiar with.

In reality, though, nothing about space bares any similarity to anything in our past. Everything about the expeditions to, the colonizing of, and the industrial development and extraction of the Americas? All that was couched within the biosphere, contingent on it. Movies and media and junk get to ignore that because they exist to tell a story. So what if SciFi du jour doesn’t actually make sense? Doesn’t harm anyone, right? Except…

…except Musk and his fanclub really like describing Mars as the next colonial outpost. They’ll tell you it’s only a few short decades away! And I think that’s cus they don’t see where the metaphor falls short. To them, colonizing Mars is just the next thing that will happen in the narrative of history. After all, it’s happened once - so it must happen again right??? They don’t see the sheer wall of work and resources and work and decades (probably centuries, realistically) that would have to go into it. They don’t think about anything more than a superficial picture on a screen. People needed boats to cross the Atlantic, we’ll need rocketships. Now that they’ve got rocket ships, thats most of the work done. Afterall, in movies, you just need to get there. Then the plot can advance.

kinda sucks to be less free than the fucking geese

I guess you can draw that comparison, but then human territories are exponentially bigger than anything an equivalent social animal might claim as “enter at your risk” area. A traveling pack of dogs can just go around another pack’s territory. We can’t do that, we’re boxed in. There’s no neutral space left. I guess you could argue there’s international waters, but that’s practically inaccessible to most people.

The biggest existential threat is still ecological destruction. Old growth forest are raised to the ground, the ocean is warming and acidifying as it absorbs CO2, and it’s all to make computers and toasters that don’t even last a decade.

I know these things take time, but it’s really hard not to be skeptical of CHIPS amounting to much. It reminds me too much of all the grant money given to telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon - supposed to be for improving infrastructure and implementing 5G, but they just pocketed the money as profit.

This is an english meme about the one event in Chinese history that gets repeated in english-speaking spaces over and over and over again. This isn’t attempting to make an argument to a Chinese audience. Why shouldn’t we draw comparisons to similar things in the US? What else would we talk about? Just a whole thread of “yeah, that’s bad” again and again? For every time this gets trotted out?

Pretty sure polar ice caps are still shrinking.

Sorry the consequences of industry aren’t snappy enough for your short attention span, I guess?

The holovids always skip over Voyager’s many, many detours to extract resources and manufacture replacement torpedoes. Between this, negotiating with the Borg, and massively altering the timeline, Captain Janeway is as much a popular topic of conversation outside the federation as she is within.

Yeah, if anything the TOS ships are more realistic in regard to their interfaces. In an emergency, when you may not have lights or gravity or whatever, buttons and knobs come with certainty. Flat, featureless touchscreens? Not so much.

i hate that smooth-rectangle has become the standard

stop it with the extra cameras and the beveled edges, i’d give up half my screen space for some real goddamn buttons

i feel like the answer to what is and isn’t canon can be summed up with;

Why do the klingons look different?

They always looked like that, you just didn’t notice before.

Canon has always been squishy. The Eugenics Wars takes place in the nineteen-nineties… oh but didn’t Voyager’s crew visit our nineties? Plus, DISCO had that Elon Musk name drop.

…so the timeline floats up as the present day does. Canon is just a vague sense of the things everyone agrees on.

If i were gonna write the Borg going forward, I’d have the queens be a failed experiment to elevate one drone to the role of tactician specifically to deal with the Federation. It didn’t work, so they don’t do it anymore.