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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 2nd, 2023

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  • I will not be fair, the publication isn’t. Why should I?

    Because arguing dishonestly makes you look irrational and does their propaganda work for them.

    but you are more likely to try to distance yourself from fossil fuel reform movements, and that’s all they need you to do to be successful.

    Not really. This isn’t an effective form of protest or reform. Stunts like this allow articles like this to be written in the first place, but the stunts, even if written of with the highest of praise, are useless. Effective action would involve changing the minds of those who profit from fossil fuels the most and making it unprofitable for them to continue. You don’t need to convince people who care about world heritage sites or famous artwork. You need to convince the profiteers of industry and that won’t come from an appeal to emotion but from a threat to their financial well-being.







  • This is a decent one, but a ton of the HFY stories are just so problematic. Many just feel like they’re congratulating humanity on being vicious and creatively violent, like they think the Terran Empire in the Star Trek Mirror Universe were good guys.

    Otherwise, a bunch just feel lazily formulaic and repetitive with others. Take a random human trait or convention from a human culture like say…fried foods. Use an alien narrator to describe how weird they think it is to fry foods. Find an angle to portray humans as plucky and great for their fierce devotion to frying foods and involve it in a narrative about humanity winning against greater odds. “And the human just dumped the entire chargizoid corpse into a vat of boiling oil! And then he took it out with something called tongs and ate it, skin and all! And that’s when I knew I needed humans on my side in the coming galactic war…”

    I guess I feel like the subgenre plays on the optimism of Star Trek utopianism, but ditches any real criticism of humanity’s past (or our present). I think the message from Orville’s Season 3 Episode 10 about what made humanity better in their past is a better heir to Star Trek utopianism than most of the HFY stories I’ve read.