A Door on Other Time

Title is from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories". Handle means "storyteller" in Nahuatl. This'll mostly be about pop culture, linguistics, philosophy, history, and other things that interest me, but also about writing.

[tlaquetzqui]

[mister-merica]

[1americanconservative]

[tlaquetzqui]

Bad neighbors make good fences.

[redwhtnblue2020]

[tlaquetzqui]

All they have to do is get rid of the AI part. They’re in public so privacy isn’t a factor, but currently the AI hallucinates reasons to hold people suspect. Get rid of that and it just becomes an adjunct to cops following the normal rules—if you have a reason to stop someone, you have a reason to check the video of them. No psychotic chatbot imagining you have a reason, though.

[basedererer]

[traveler733]

The Diversity Blindspot

The Arday illusion: academia’s shameful infatuation with the diversity poster boy.

[retired-extremely-dangerous]

[diversityland]

"White" male Kaleb Turkustani (Saudi Arabian) was charged with killing Louijice Camille, a 17 year old black male, during a sweet 16 birthday party in Boynton Beach, Florida. This will appear in future state and federal crime statistic polling as a white on black murder.

[tlaquetzqui]

Government definition of “white” explicitly includes Middle Eastern (as it should), so this one isn’t an example of misclassifying nonwhite criminals.

[diversityland]

"Results from the study suggest whites are disproportionately portrayed as criminals five to eight times more often on police dramas compared to actual crime statistics for the city of New York, and exposure to police dramas leads to elevated perceptions of white criminality among non-whites.”

[diversityland]

Rep. Emily Randall (D-WA): “White men are committing disproportionate rates of violence in this country.”

[tlaquetzqui]

…Disproportionately low?

[diversityland]

"56-year-old husband and father Fredrick Lytton was working alongside 23-year-old Devin Rice at a U-Haul facility in West Nashville.

The two men were reportedly arguing about a soda when Fredrick Lytton walked away from the verbal dispute, returning to his work station. Moments later, Devin Rice walked up behind Lytton, pulled out a handgun, and emptied it into Lytton's back, killing him. Point blank murder, on the job, in broad daylight, over an argument about a soda that Lytton had already walked away from.

It's been a week since the murder and, as usual with white victims, there has been zero national coverage. Numerous local media have covered the story. Zero have published the victim's photograph."

[diversityland]

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

"Trust the Experts" This 2020 headline is from a "Science" section of a New Media outlet. I see no science here.

This is what a fucking cult looks like.

[diversityland]

[xredthedeadx]

Feminism has to become way more violent if we want to see the parriarchy end. We will no longer debate it, if your movement doesn't include intersectional and anticapitalist feminism, we will tear it apart.

[tlaquetzqui]

You don’t debate now, you just make pronouncements and expect everyone to fall in line.

[faggotfungus]

[bambamramfan]

The True Interpretation

Let's talk about the best movie ever made: Jurassic Park.

I don't mean "best" in the sense of most artistic or any other quality, but a harmony of every quality a movie is going for. This ranges from popularity as entertainment, to extremely well integrated commentary on both the future of the human race and cinema itself. If you want more, ask me. The belt-buckling scene alone.

I want to talk about what Jurassic Park is about.

Stephen Spielberg is probably not a luddite about genetic experiments. And the movie was a metaphor for CGI, a trend he has been supportive of. Spielberg's role in CGI is basically John Hammond. So what he thinks of the substance of the idea of the movie is probably not that creating dinosaurs is playing God that will inevitably backfire on us.

And objectively speaking, that is probably not what cloning dinosaurs would end up like. (For one, why are you putting so much effort into cloning large predators that are such a risk you have to isolate them and spend triple on containment, before you have even launched the park. Surely starting with protoceratops and therapods is enough while still working out the kinks.)

But. What is the movie about?

The movie is about how creating dinosaurs is playing God that will inevitably backfire on us. That is what is on the goddamn screen. At the end the island has been conquered, and the few survivors are fleeing having learned a costly lesson about hubris. You can be contrarian and come up with other layers underneath or on top of that interpretation, but there's no denying "fleeing your mistake in horror" is what is going on.

The only way to make it starker would be to call it "the Scientists of Jurassic Park" or "The Scientists Who Fucked Up Jurassic Park."

***

Let's talk about "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." Everyone has their post about what the story truly means. Of what TOWWAfO is really about. Ursula K Leguin, the author herself, says she was inspired by the question of why can't we accept a perfect utopia, and how a single horrible detail suddenly makes it more engaging. Maybe that really is the path that started her on the story.

People talk about how foolish we would be to give up that utopia for an individual price, or how we should free the child, or dozens of interpretations. And I do believe they genuinely thought this in response to the prompt the story presents us.

The story ends with a few people walking away from the city. The title of the story is The One Who Walk Away. The story presents a corrupt bargain, people who accept it, and the implication that destroying it would also be compromise of a sort. The solution the story presents, because that is what people do and it is described positively, is to just be someone who is untouched by the child or the utopia.

These people are described in a certain register. Not as smart or as righteous. They're described somewhat enigmatically and and calmly. This is a positive register in this form of media at that time. Overly smart people are assholes, and righteous people are dangerous, in genre lit. If the story was about these cowards shirking their duty, it would have used different words. Instead it portrays them as the best type of character that genre media valorizes: someone who prizes moral purity and is confident enough to not need to explain it. Someone who's answer to the trolley problem is to just walk away.

I honestly can't think of any character in genre media described that way, who is a villain or negatively portrayed.

This is what the entire concluding section of the story is about. The title is not referring to the city or the utopia, but to the ones who walk away. And I honestly don't see how those ones are at all connected to a theme of "we don't believe in a utopia where no one gets hurt." It's a theme of enigmatically smug moral superiority.

Which is like, fine. It's a classic, beloved story for a reason. But that is what actually happens in the story. It is not about revolution, or the nature of real utopia, or a dozen other clever ideas. It is a story about walking away.

[alkatyn]

Jurassic Park is texturally about why it's bad to create dinosaurs, but the reason people watch it, and it became a massive success, is the same reason that the characters in the film made the dinosaurs and want to go to the theme park, because it's really really cool to see actual dinosaurs, like, there's a dinosaur right there I only saw the bones before and they're massive holy shit that's super cool

In some ways the plot where it all goes wrong, mans hubris is punished etc. is necessary for it to be a movie rather than just a special effects demo reel. It can't just be a story where people go "wow cool dinosaurs" for 2 hours. Which kinda parallels what Le Guin says about how Omelas needs the suffering child narratively

[brazenautomaton]

it always bothered me in jurassic park they had the raptor pen

because raptors were obscure before jurassic park made them cool, so unlike the T-rex, nobody was really amped to see raptors. and the raptor pen needed all this security to keep the smart and deadly raptors from escaping. also you couldn't see inside the goddamn raptor pen so why even bother?

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Plenty of random things in actual parks and zoos are things that aren't popular ahead of time.

When people think of going to a Disney park, how often do they go "I can't wait to see the Hall of Presidents"?

[tlaquetzqui]

I still like Mark Greyland’s theory about what Omelas actually recommends walking away from (the obligation to do something about rampant sexual abuse in scifi fandom), but then, I hate LeGuin. Smarmy self-righteous hypocrite who regularly told bald-faced lies about American literature, including her own genre. Also a dime-a-dozen white Karen who appropriated Taoist jargon she didn’t understand to wrap her boring feminist Liberal Protestant sermonizing in. (She appears to think the “plain sense” of the Tao Te Ching is sufficient to understanding Taoism. Which not only ignores that it’s a definitively esoteric religion, but apparently assumes sola Scriptura is Chinese.)

I mean fuck, in Earthsea, Ms. tAoIsT portrays seeking immortality—not by illicit means, seeking it at all—as bad. But she’s totes a Taoist, ladies and gentlemen, the people whose deities are referred to in most other languages as “the Immortals”. And then there’s “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?”, an essay which for sheer fuck-your-mother mendacity is equalled only by Michael Moorcock’s “Epic Pooh”. And Moorcock’s fiction is at least not fucking smarmy sanctimony, unlike LeGuin’s.