Literally the easiest pump and dump ever. Company failing and you want to dump your shares at a good price? Announce you’re doing AI! How? Who cares?! It’s AI!

I think the line between fantasy and SF is blurry enough that there’s no value in trying to find it.

They should invest in some NFTs while they’re at it. I hear those are only going up.

See, it’s not rationing if it’s voluntary. Nothing is wrong. There is no war in Iran.

This man is a delusional idiot, both because he believes AGI is happening in our lifetimes, and because he believes the US has any ability to militarily strike at China.

It’s the same thing, for very different reasons. Sanders is, I fully believe, being genuine when he suggests that development needs to wait for the law to catch up.

OpenAI, on the other hand, have embraced the call for a pause because they’re out of money and can’t admit it. They need to scale back on their staggering training costs, but their entire pitch to their investors has always been “We can get to AGI if we just keep training hard enough.”

That’s actually worse. You do get how that’s actually worse, right?

Slaanesh is all those things too, because it all comes down to how you’re reading it. Warhammer is a satire, it operates on more than one level. If you read Slaanesh strictly on the levels you’re describing, when examining a piece of media created in Thatcher’s Britain, then you’re doing a huge disservice to the original material and its intent. This is a satire of fascism written under a deeply homophobic government. You’re not supposed to look at the blatantly queer and gender-fucky god and think “Clearly the writers are being completely literal and expressing their own deeply held beliefs when they describe this being as pure evil.”

I’m offended by all of these comparisons. The point of the chaos gods is that they’re extreme and highly distorted depictions of the kind of things that fascist societies most fear. The Imperium / Empire are built on absolute and total control, and the chaos gods are the things that they cannot control.

Yes, in canon, the chaos gods are objectively evil, but they’re evil as distorted nightmarish examples of conservative fear-mongering. Depicting Trump as the god of “Fuck gender, do drugs, have sex, rock & roll” is pretty fucking nuts.

These guys are fascists. They’re not the chaos gods, they’re the High Lords of Terra.

But imo, the really high quality of Nolan’s visual directing does so much work distracting people from how lacking the movie is in actual substance.

Kind of describes most of Nolan’s movies really. As a technical director, he’s almost unparalleled, but his movies have often struggled to find a meaningful emotional core. They’re all polish, but often lacking in substance. Tenet was especially bad for this. An absolute masterpiece of directorial craftsmanship, but almost entirely devoid of basic elements like characters.

He’s made some absolute gems - The Dark Knight still holds up, Memento deserves its reputation, and The Prestige is a masterpiece - but I find that for the most part he seems more interested in technical flexes than in the actual story he’s telling. I’ve enjoyed every single one of his movies, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t stick with me the way that something like Prisoners or Only God Forgives does.

Yes, there’s a very clear difference between the political posture of our present rearmament and the investment in the military that took place in the mid-2000s. The latter was driven by a desire to align with the US on foreign policy objectives. They were there, so we needed to be there too. This was both an extension of a long-standing policy of Canada as global peacekeepers - a way to build our soft-power by establishing presence as a neutral power - and an extension of our desire to align with and support the US as our closest ally (that these two goals directly conflict is a big part of what went wrong with Afghanistan).

Our present rearmament is driven by the exact opposite impetus. Rather than aligning with the US we are seeking to detach from them. Rather than extending our reach into the world, we are seeking to protect ourselves from the reach of others. And in doing so we are working to protect those who cannot. I can tell you that the people of Latvia are deeply grateful for the Canadian military. They know first hand the threat that Putin presents, and we’re what’s stopping it.

I don’t want to live in a world where any kind of military is necessary. But as long as it is, we have to be pragmatic.

And more importantly, we have to recognize that it is not the military, but the use of the military that matters most. When we allow our politicians to take a practical tool and turn it to impractical or immoral ends, that is when tragedy happens.

Simply hating the military in all its forms, and arguing against any kind of military spending, is a very easy position for leftists to adopt. It requires no thought, no nuance. It’s a thought terminating cliche. Military bad, end of statement. When asked why, people gesture at all of the bad things militaries have been involved in and treat that as evidence. And when people on the right turn unthinking adoration of the military into a shibboleth for their beliefs, it only reinforces the pattern. “The right loves it, so I should hate it.”

It takes a lot more work to actually examine the military as an extension of our political policies, as the means by which a great deal of our politics is enacted, and as a tool that serves many purposes including self-defence and the defence of others, but that work needs to happen if we’re ever going to start addressing these topics rationally.

Genuinely incredible. Imagine if Studio Ghibli said “Fuck it, we’re doing TV now.” That’s the animation and directing quality in every episode.

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Fair enough. Even if I don’t agree with your assessment, I have a lot of respect for your attitude.

Genuinely, none of what you just wrote here is necessary. This person isn’t offering anything remotely close to reasonable criticisms. They’re just a faux leftist who has identified you as someone that it’s socially acceptable for them to bully.

There’s a stark difference between accountability and what you’re doing, which is insisting that no one ever gets to improve their behaviour or learn from their mistakes. That doesn’t make a better world, it makes the worst possible one.

If people can only ever be as good as the worst thing they’ve done, then why should anyone ever aspire to be anything better than the worst possible version of themselves?

Here’s the thing; at no point did anyone suggest that real life “muggles” are some kind of oppressed class or that you were engaging in some bold new category of ‘-ism’ by using that term. You can use whatever word you want for “people who don’t do magic.” No one really gives a shit. But if your purpose in using that word was to entirely divorce of it’s original context as an oppressive term for a biologically distinct underclass… Why use the word? Why not just invent a completely new term instead? If it’s going to mean something almost entirely different, why carry over those associations?

Now, this is the point where the sane thing to do would be to say “Honestly, at the time when we co-opted the term we just hadn’t done the work of interrogating how messed up the original context was,” and I would completely respect that. Because as I have just stated, I was a fan of those books too. I also let a lot of stuff slide that I really shouldn’t have, and it wasn’t until later that I went back and re-examined the material and started to really piece together just how fucked up Rowling’s worldview is, even as expressed in the context of her children’s stories. So I’m just as guilty as anyone else is in that regard. None of this is a call-out, just a call for further examination.

Anyway, thank you for the offer of the primer, but if I want to learn more about spellcasting I have at least a dozen or so friends I can consult for their expertise on paganism, heathenry, witchcraft, or chaos magick. None of whom have ever tried to use the terms “chakra” and “sephirot” interchangeably, which suggests a deep misunderstanding of either tantra, kabbalah, or both. Lovely art though.

The thing is, even without Rowling ripping the mask off, muggle was always a fucked up term to use in this context because it’s literally describing a group of people who are treated as second class citizens on the basis of an immutable biological characteristic, a situation that is basically never interrogated throughout the books. The fundamental ideological divide between the villains and the heroes is basically “We should enslave or exterminate the muggles” vs “We should treat the muggles like unfortunate idiot children.” In retrospect, it wasn’t actually all that surprising that Rowling turned out to be a gender-essentialist (and I do say that as someone who used to be a fan).

Sidenote, this is why Witch Hat Atelier absolutely kicks the pants off of Harry Potter.

And that, kids, is what happens when you add energy to a system while simultaneously releasing the potential energy already stored there.

They’re not saying that Rowling co-opted anything. They’re saying that they used to use the term “muggle”, lifted from the HP books, as their go-to term for “non-magical people”, until Rowling went full mask-off TERF.

Which does mean that they lifted a term that is literally used in the books as a slur, and were like “OK, yeah, this is a good way to describe people who don’t share my interests.”