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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America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’ (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 6 months ago by mpk@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

154 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The highlight for me is coming up with some weird pseudoscience justification for why it’s okay to hit your kids.

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[–] mpk@awful.systems 24 points 6 months ago (18 children)

Im also annoyed at how much words are written about the Collins. Stop promoting these doofuses. (They have come up in sneerclub before)

Apologies. First time poster, all that stuff.

The corporal punishment thing is a weirdly Anglophone obsession -- assaulting (sorry, "smacking") your kids has been a crime here since 1977 and the kids seem to be alright as well as having the bonus of being less likely to have grown up surrounded by violence and the threat of violence. In 7 years here I've seen exactly one person hit a child in public (looked a lot like a visiting grandma from elsewhere) and it came as a real shock. The more the Collins types (and, of course, fundie types) try to justify this as "normal" the less normal it appears to everyone else.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Starship troopers was written in 1959 so it predates the ban by a bit at least. (I assume there was already research on it being bad in the works then, as ST goes out of its way to decry the social sciences as fake research, but their moral system which is based on math (never explained in the book, which is prob good as it would be highly contradictory, as going to war to save a few POWs is seen as just, no matter the number of lives lost) is correct. It is a really weird book to read in 2020).

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

I've actually read Starship Troopers a long time ago and it's probably not too far out of line politically from other "silver age" SF. Heinlein had a weird career...

FWIW from memory Samuel R Delany (Black gay SF author) wrote somewhere that the realization that Johnny Rico was from the Philippines (he speaks Tagalog near the end) was very liberating for him personally as a form of inclusion. And Heinlein could probably truthfully state the only way he was "racist" was he was against the Bugs but for the entire human race.

The movies' lack of any PoC character whatsoever was probably Verhoven's way of playing with the Nazi imagery.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

yes, it was deliberate choice (along with using nazi-borrowed uniforms and tons of visual quotes from fucking leni riefenstahl.)

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago

And for many people, the references whooshed over their heads in low earth orbit.

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