this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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It's a few steps from one to the other, but it keeps holding true in practice. Science fiction is a fundamentally colonial genre for the most part.
I got introduced to the genre through Star Trek and I always found its moral vision, in addition to all the weekly alien weirdness & how it was approached with patient curiosity, strongly appealing. Roddenberry set out to create an explicit alternative to the impoverished perspectives of the Cold War era. The Prime Directive is non-interventionist to a fault.
Gotta have to push back on that. Certain genres are, but even the ones that are written nowadays and explicitely in the space opera genre tend to try to grapple with the ethics of colonialism.
Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three is set aboard a colony starship that's revealed to be chock-full of genocidal weapons to ensure that the target planet isn't a problem for humans to settle on. "Are we the monsters" etc.
sure, but even that's a reaction inside the genre to the genre being steeped in it
look at The Culture, Banks was a straight up communist writing about somewhere he'd want to live but the stories are about liberal colonisation