@thijs_lucas@norden.social2026-05-12 06:17:54
Die feine @… mit ihren feinen Stoffen würde niemanls die eigenen Leute bedrohen oder erschießen, um ihre Politik gegen geltendes Recht durchzusetzen. Sie rüstet dafür ausländische Milizen aus und lässt sie in internationalen Gewässern auf deutsche Schiffe schießen.
Diese Schiffe voller Menschenleben sind leer von Öl und Gas und kaum sc…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-06-11 15:00:02
Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon
@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-05-12 10:35:47
Sources: Anthropic officials refused a Chinese think tank's request to change its stance and allow Beijing to access Mythos at a meeting in Singapore last month (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com…
@memeorandum@universeodon.com2026-05-11 21:05:38
Trump nominates Cameron Hamilton to lead FEMA, a year after he was fired from the role (Gabriela Aoun Angueira/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/fema-cameron-hamilton-trump-disasters-navy-seals-e1ef0f6c81f6ea992a2213714f6743b1
http://www.memeorandum.com/260511/p99#a260511p99
@matzekult@chaos.social2026-05-12 12:02:03
Even though a lot of planets and species only appear once in #StarTrek, some leave a lasting impression; even if just for the memes. As is arguably the case with the subject of today’s #TrekTriviaTuesday question.
As always no googling and no spoiling the answer for others. Please boost a…
@aardrian@toot.cafe2026-07-10 15:42:46
@krone@frawas.de2026-07-09 19:50:21
Angriff auf Baltikum? - Putin plant laut Insidern die nächste Eskalation #News #Nachrichten
@cdarwin@c.im2026-07-07 06:27:37
Whatever the expectations for the July 7-8 NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey,
the geopolitical situation favors Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan so heavily that he is all but guaranteed to emerge the winner
—if NATO summits can have winners at all.
In the wake of the disastrous Iran war,
both the timing and the venue are highly auspicious.
Donald Trump told reporters that he was coming to Ankara solely for Erdogan
—another small, symbolic victory.
The…
@servelan@newsie.social2026-06-09 23:50:42
“Can you reassure our NATO allies and make it clear to Putin that if a NATO ally is attacked and Article 5 is invoked, that we will defend them?”
“The United States is still in the NATO alliance,” he said, before adding that “NATO needs significant changes” and that Trump “is very disappointed in NATO.”
'You Won't Let Me Answer!': Rubio Thought He Had an Easy Way Out — Then a Congresswoman Blew Up Every Spin Attempt and Sent the Exchange Off the Rails
https://atlantablackstar.com/2026/06/09/rubio-thought-he-had-an-easy-way-out-then-a-congresswoman-blew-up-every-spin-attempt-and-sent-the-exchange-off-the-rails/
@zachleat@zachleat.com2026-05-08 21:51:32
my “Leather man” t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions that I feel like are already answered by my last name