N. K. Jemison’s Utopia: breaking those eggs
Yesterday commenter “huxley” wrote:
I just discovered there’s a new ultra-SJW-intersectional, black, female SF writer, N.K. Jemisin who has won three Hugos and a Nebula since 2016. That’s a very big deal. It puts her into grandmaster level with the likes of Heinlein.
I checked out her short story collection, “How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?” because it contained “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” which was a response to an all-time SF story and one that had a huge impact on me, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula Le Guin.
“Omelas” is about people who leave an almost-utopia which, however, requires the hideous suffering of a small child. “Stay and Fight” starts from an SJW utopia in an alternate universe, which is being corrupted by radios which can receive broadcasts from the US in our universe. The ones who stay and fight are those who dress in gray and ferret out those who have been corrupted by the Americans broadcasts and execute them with a pike for wrongthink.
Wow. That’s the new SJW science fiction. Here’s a real quote from the story:
“This is the paradox of tolerance, the treason of free speech: we hesitate to admit that some people are just fucking evil and need to be stopped.”
Jemisin is currently the hottest, most ballyhooed talent in science and this is one of her most important messages.
One might think Jemison’s “Stay and Fight” is a cautionary tale rather than a prescription. And I suppose that’s at least theoretically possible. Caveat: I have not yet read the story—in fact, last night was the first I’d heard of it. I haven’t read any science fiction in a long long time, although when I was young I read quite a bit of it.
However, reading this online interview with the author in Paris Review stopped me from further entertaining the notion that she meant her story to be cautionary rather than prescriptive.
I suppose I might change my mind if I were to actually read the story itself. But I doubt it, because Jemison seems quite clear in that interview about her intent. If Le Guin was saying that Utopian impulses are always built on the suffering of others and true Utopias are therefore not possible, Jemison is saying that the only thing that keeps us from Utopia is the will to create one, and that (to use an old metaphor) we have to be willing to break a ton of eggs to make that tasty omelet.
And I mean break (the quotes are from Jemison herself):
With Le Guin’s story, at the end of it, she’s suggesting that the only way to create a society that is a better place is to walk away from this one or to go off the grid. That’s not really what she’s saying, specifically, but that’s what a lot of people have concluded. But no, you’ve got to fix it, especially when there’s nowhere to walk away to. You go anywhere else in our current world and you’re either being completely exploited by capitalism or somewhat exploited by capitalism. So, I mean, it’s just a question of what kind of suffering you’re willing to put yourself though.
And the other thing is that I was trying to figure out what a society might be like if it was genuinely a good place, and I realized as I was trying to think of it—science-fiction writers are supposed to be able to come up with futures. All futures. But the one thing I could not imagine was a society stemming from our own that was truly inclusive, truly egalitarian, and truly good for all people. What a true utopian society was like.
That is the exercise that Le Guin is engaging in. Can you have a utopian society without somebody somewhere suffering? What would that life be like if no one suffered? And the only way that I could do it was to basically point out that the flaw is ideological. The idea that you have to have someone suffering is the flaw. So, this is a society that is utopian as long as they keep at bay the idea that somebody’s got to suffer. As long as they manage to fight off people who immediately assume that some people are less important than others and those people can be exploited. That is the danger. That is the toxicity. It’s not meant to be a society that’s perfect in every way. Obviously, people suffer in it. But the people who suffer are those who bring the contagion of suffering to others.
“Fight off” means “kill,” in this case, according to what I’ve read about the story. Kill everyone who thinks a completely egalitarian society is impossible.
And then by magic, it will be okay. Because the only enemy, really, is thoughtcrime. The only impediment to Utopia is the existence of people who don’t think Utopia is humanly possible.
That’s how I see this interview of Jemison’s, anyway. I just can’t think of any other interpretation.
The rest of the interview is hard to summarize, but one specific thing it contains is the common lefist fiction that capitalism is a “zero-sum game,” an idea which Jemison seems to attribute to the right rather than to the left. She says [emphasis mine]:
If you believe in the capitalistic idea of scarcity, if you believe in the capitalistic idea of zero sum, the idea that in order for a few to benefit, everybody else has to suffer, or for some to benefit, others have to suffer, maybe. But I don’t believe that has ever been the case. I think that we have enough resources on this planet for everyone. We have always had more than enough resources for everyone and we’re capable of thinking up ways to come up with more. People who write science fiction do tend to be utopian thinkers. We do tend to think that we can achieve great things as a species. We just have to be willing to acknowledge what needs to be done to get there and sometimes the things that need to be done to get there are terrifying or can be terrifying to those in a position of privilege.
So is her short story, then, a blueprint for action? Kill those who don’t agree with Jemison and the others who have the right Utopian ideas? Our inability to create a utopia is merely a failure of will plus a failure to get rid of those who would think otherwise?
I really cannot think of a better example of where human hubris plus ignorance can lead and actually has led. It it the totalitarian impulse pure and simple, the idea that killing those who disagree will create some sort of statist heaven on earth. Millions upon millions have died in this cause. It’s a solution that Le Guin rejected. Jemison appears to be openly embracing it. And she’s being lauded for it.
“It it the totalitarian impulse pure and simple, the idea that killing those who disagree will create some sort of statist heaven on earth.” [Neo]
The European Jews and Hitler’s thousand year Reich, opposition to the great Satan that “is” the United States, Stalin, Mao, and on ad nauseaum. That was then, this is now. Their “greater good” was wrong, but today our greater good is righteous and pure. It seems that even when we learn history we are destined to repeat it.
SJWs are the demons they imagine.
This peculiar fixation on “suffering” per se, and its presumably communal rectification, rather than on injustice or exploitation in a technical transactive sense, is I think the defining characteristic of modern leftism. Though it probably evolved out of the Marxist notion of “needs” as being socially defined and generated and justified rather than biologically.
Having enough to eat and a place to sleep, and the freedom to pursue your own ends is not enough for the kind who find their meaning in not freedom from exploitation and self-direction, but in the sacrificial commitment of others to their “inclusion” and satisfaction.
Hence the leftist disdain for “negative liberty”; which avails the mentally troubled and weak person precisely nothing at all: other than the freedom to wallow in their own dependency and disorder and be rejected as dangerous nuisances by other people wishing to avoid the negative costs associated with socially engaging them.
The freedom of others then, to disengage from the fulminating chaos of the leftist mind, is to the the leftist way of thinking, what is truly impermissible.
The talk of exploitation is a rhetorical “appeal to justice” cover which is revealed for what it is once the collectivist encounters a libertarian who is willing to radically restrict the legal power of anyone to coerce or exploit anyone else.
Up against that, the collectivist must switch tack and begin puling about empathy and caring/inclusion per se, as if it is the – to use a term seen here a lot recently – self-evident summum bonum.
Virtue (understood classically), and the liberty to develop it, has no place in Marxism or the demented second wave feminist hive mind morality. Basically it’s a matter to them of “Love me, care for me, or I’ll kill you, because I will not be ignored.” Marx, the great hater of everyone and everything, himself babbles on about “love” of man by man and the emergence of an end of history utopia which will supposedly develop once the realm of the private and exclusionary is completely eliminated. And that includes the private family and exclusive sexual relations too, obviously, and as the German reds of the 60’s and 70’s proclaimed.
Thus, the real problem, according to the Marxist, is not “exploitation” in the sense of a skimming off of from the return of value per se, but in the existence of any realm of the private, the autonomous, and the potentially exclusionary.
Haidt is right. He has discovered the roots of the divergent moralities of what must amount in practical terms to moral subspecies of mankind.
The brilliant ending of Game of Thrones is very relevant to this discussion. The Mother of Dragons truly believed in her mission to usher in a new age of justice and benevolence (by “breaking the wheel”) even if meant slaughtering innocents and refusing to consider the rights of dissenters from her vision. Her necessary (but very sorrowful) death was operatically beautiful and heart-breaking.
The Hugo Awards have gone downhill SJW last years. NK Jemisin is just the tip of the iceberg. They’ve being even changing the voting rules so the outcome would be ‘correct’. Last years Hugo look like a carefully distributed diversity quota.
This year, the 24 finalists for the 4 categories from novel to short story include… 22 racially diverse women, 1 black male, and 1 white male. We’re talking about sci-fi, which is the most characteristic male genre.
Jemisin is the first writer to have won 3 consecutive Hugo Awards. Not even Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov were able to do that. Jemisin is an average writer, but… she’s a black woman.
Last Hugo Award, she gave a speech that was on the edge of being illiterate. Robert Silverberg, one of the big names in sci-fi, complained about it:
Of course, he was labeled as racist and fascist. No surprise here.
An article about it:
https://poweredbyrobots.com/2018/12/05/is-scifi-author-editor-robert-silverberg-really-racist-and-sexist-or-has-the-internet-once-again-lost-its-mind/
Neo:
A very good follow on to last week’s post about human nature. Hard to find the “good’ in her line of thought. Also ironic, to me anyway, that Huxley would notice her and yet have faith in “progress;” “scientific socialism,” and the “arc of history” being what they are.
““Fight off” means “kill,” in this case, according to what I’ve read about the story. Kill everyone who thinks a completely egalitarian society is impossible.” – Neo
Well, if you are dead, then obviously you aren’t suffering.
It’s the lead-up to the execution that gets painful.
Sooo….the way to create Utopia is to kill anyone that 1) wants Utopia, and/or, 2) wants to lead people to a better society.
The rest of us can lament their sacrifice to suffering….
Last night I finished watching the HBO series Chernobyl. I thought it was very well-written, well-acted, and they didn’t screw up the science. It also gave a very depressing, and I suppose realistic glimpse into life in the Soviet Union. Jemison maybe should watch to see what her utopia vision devolves into, and what happens to science under such a system.
“Jemison maybe should watch to see what her utopia vision devolves into, and what happens to science under such a system.” [physicsguy @ 2:56 pm]
Nah! Just another example of socialism not done correctly; this is not what she advocates. (/sarc off)
The very term “resources” implies that they are limited. What is not limited in the science of ecology is called “condition”. So all this talk about unlimited resources is utter nonsense, but almost all Democrat candidates make this nonsense the basis of their plans to radically transform American society – from Green New Deal to universal health care, free colleges for all and cancellation of student loans.
“Capitalism” actually means that there is just one limiting resource, namely money. And the very purpose of this purely artificial resource is to limit consumption. If it becomes unlimited by printing money above a reasonable level or by handing out free stuff, the country turns out into Venezuela or Zimbabwe – a total failure. Then it becomes a socialist one.
Jemisen is old news to anyone who involved in the Sad Puppies revolt. There were also the Rabid Puppies for the radicals. The complaint was that the award nominations were jiggered by Tor and the idea was to offer an alternative slate. It eventually even led to some funny stuff when Space Raptor Butt Invasion got nominated 🙂 Anyway, the revolt died when the revolutionaries went off to found their own country and used the Dragon Awards as a Hugo replacement. This all took place the same time frame as Gamergate.
“Capitalism” actually means that there is just one limiting resource, namely money.
LOL
Maybe the reputation of Pol Pot can’t be rehabilitated, but apparently his ideology can, or at least attempted.
I understand that many believe Hitler set out to commit genocide against the Jews from the beginning, while others believe that was not his original idea. Work them to death perhaps, but not gas chambers. Then after millions of “fine Aryans” were lost on the battlefields, Hitler thought he would level the eugenics playing field and began the death chambers program.
I’m sure it’s a hotly contested distinction, but my point is that someone like Jemison is perhaps sprinting past a Hitlerian style of fascism towards the Pol Pot endgame. I guess you need to be educated at a place like Tulane U. to think like that. Tulane was Andrew Breitbart’s alma mater, of which he wrote extensively.
______
Good catch Neo, re: zero sum capitalism. Such economic illiteracy. If it weren’t for straw man arguments, the left wouldn’t have many arguments at all. I’ve always read that capitalism can and should create more for nearly everyone. And increasingly more over time.
While my limited understanding of Marx does indicate that he had some basic economic ignorance, I don’t think that he or anyone of note ever claimed zero sum economics over the long term.
And what about productivity? Jemison focuses on “resources” and nothing else. Just scoop out the iron ore, and snap your fingers and you’ve got a plow or an automobile?
Here’s something from Sowell’s “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” on the left’s notion of persistent poverty and income quintile analysis.
So less than 1/6 in the poverty bracket persist there for as long as 8 years.
LOL.
Why not? See, once the problem of alienation – in this case, of man from man – has been overcome by the social ownership of the means of production, man’s natural forces will be unleashed and explode, releasing a cornucopia of altruistic creativity … ‘Both satisfying and delicious!’ … in the famous words of …someone or other. You will naturally gravitate to the mines and blast furnaces for a few hours in the morning, before changing into a tutu for the evening’s festivals of artistic expression. You won’t find a slacker, manic depressive, or half-wit jerk-off anywhere in a population like that.
And how many plows do we really need anyway? Surplus capital leads only to misallocations and quite possibly competition between producers; as they grow more than is needed not for holy communal use but for individual rewards and standing, thus transforming the communally owned bread of life (clasp hands to bosom here) into a commodity, bought and sold for selfish ends and profit.
Now I ask you, Is that any way to run a utopia? No! Let man be reconciled with man through the abolition of selfish interest, and we will have arrived at a state of Bliss known as the End of History as it has been heretofore conceived of. Hallowed be the dreams we dreamily dream.
And what are a few tens of millions of eliminated reactionaries here and there against that kind of gain?
Yann: Thanks for mentioning the Robert Silverberg brouhaha. I’m not an authority on Silverberg, having read only two novels and several stories, but from what I remember Silverberg is a sixties-style liberal, not a quasi-militaristic-libertarian like Heinlein. Not that Heinlein would deserve such abuse, but it would be somewhat more understandable.
Jemisin and her supporters are Red Guard types, executing anyone less fanatical and not thinking twice.
neo: Thanks for putting this into a topic.
I was gobsmacked, as Andrew Sullivan used to say, to discover Jemisin and her version of Le Guin’s story. It was like finding the Sermon on the Mount had been rewritten as the Wannsee Protocol (the official Nazi paperwork, still vague, outlining the Final Solution).
I truly don’t understand how anyone, after the horrors of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, could voice such sentiments. Much less receive acclaim for doing so.
However, as I see it, Jemisin is just Ta-Nehisi Coates and Marcuse taken one step further.
Jemisen is old news to anyone who involved in the Sad Puppies revolt
Chuck: Aye, but what ordinary person knows of the Sad Puppies revolt?
So, thanks for bringing it up. The saga of the Sad Puppies is available with easy googling. An instructive story. The shit is deeper than I thought.
I’m not the only boomer kid who will tell you that science-fiction back then was a beacon of vision and reason which formed no small part of my identity. To discover it is now servicing Big Brother is a monumental betrayal.
The saga of the Sad Puppies is available with easy googling.
But avoid Wikipedia, which has it exactly backwards. Wikipedia is worthless for anything political.
Jemison is probably a millionaire. Lives in a comfortable home with wonderful things and is a ridiculous thinker. She is what she disdains.
“the only thing that keeps us from Utopia is the will to create one”. So once the will is there and achieves “success”, then it shall be “The Triumph of the Will”. And everyone will be “dizzy with success”.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” Kevin Spacey, the Usual Suspects
Ultimately and at base, it is against God and the reality of his creation against which they rail.
It it the totalitarian impulse pure and simple, the idea that killing those who disagree will create some sort of statist heaven on earth.
let’s play psych diagnosis this right…
given the frequency that we can be totalitarians, and Darwinian evolution, no one has a “totalitarian impulse” no matter how good or right that may sound…
so? what WOULD be the source of this?
(some) People who have a hard time dealing with others especially have a hard time getting others to ‘go their way’, and whether it be society in general or sexual relationships, they feel that things would be a lot better if everyone thought the same as them, then of course, everyone would agree, etc. Another version is, if you were a woman (or man) like me, you would understand… Pygmalion?
its rooted in the childish assumption that the easiest way for a theory of mind to be perfect is if everyone has the same mind… why work so hard to know what people think, like, are like, want, etc… “just to be understood”
[Haven’t you noticed how most of the real despots of the world are crass children trying to appear as refined adults? talk about a endless dark unfillable need for affirmation/confirmation]
-=-==-
the issue on power has to do with whether you need to ‘feel’ it or not… those who have power, but have no urge to feel it, never know what they have, its range or limits, because they have it by doing right (not necessarily being right).
Those that have to feel it, need to force people to do things they don’t want to do, and so, be helpless not to comply…
when you combine the childish computation that like minds are utopian minds (that all our discord is because we just don’t understand each other), with the need to feel power, you get a loop that feeds on itself… the more you can force to behave the way you want, and not the way they want, the more power you feel you have…and the closer you think your bringing everyone to utopia… cults? political groups that target young and love bomb them (guess the biggest one)?
No wonder they don’t like God…
The god of the bible and torah may have made examples of some people (Job for one), and may have done a lot of talking through others to tell things… but technically, for a god with the power to create the universe and all of reality, he don’t do much to force us (other than telling us there are consequences now and after)… though some of us do things to force others as if he asked
Good power does not need to be felt..
Having it and not having it feel the same… [it doesn’t change you]
Evil, forever in doubt, and paranoid of losing,
must always feel it… [it changes you]
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate
A poet, a pawn and a king
I’ve been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing…
your always you..
Odetta taught me that in a small gathering..
🙂
f you believe in the capitalistic idea of scarcity, if you believe in the capitalistic idea of zero sum, the idea that in order for a few to benefit, everybody else has to suffer, or for some to benefit, others have to suffer, maybe.
She’s the issue of the psychology department at Tulane and the teacher-training faculty of the University of Maryland. Mother a school psychologist, father an art-world denizen. Divorced parents. Psychologically, she’s just about as far away from ordinary production and trade as anyone you’ll meet. (Or she conceptualizes ‘suffering’ as someone else has something you don’t). She doesn’t understand what ‘scarcity’ means in economic terms and notions of technological adaptations, process improvement, and mutually beneficial exchange are foreign to her. (Not a close reader of Le Guin, but I’m going to wager that story is properly interpreted as a javelin thrown at utilitiarianism, not whatever bizarre notion Jemisin attributes to her).
Jemison is probably a millionaire. Lives in a comfortable home with wonderful things and is a ridiculous thinker. She is what she disdains.
It’s another indication that creativity and imagination may draw on intelligence or knowledge or wisdom, but they aren’t identified with it.
And the other thing is that I was trying to figure out what a society might be like if it was genuinely a good place, and I realized as I was trying to think of it—science-fiction writers are supposed to be able to come up with futures.
Her problem is she cannot make sense of the past.
Jemison is probably a millionaire.
She has a Patreon page, so maybe that’s not the case? https://www.patreon.com/posts/so-you-want-me-23680721
Or maybe one of her lines is trolling for dollars.
TommyJay on June 26, 2019 at 4:12 pm said:
Here’s something from Sowell’s “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” on the left’s notion of persistent poverty and income quintile analysis….So less than 1/6 in the poverty bracket persist there for as long as 8 years.
* * *
I’m guessing the 1/6 are highly correlated with the chronically homeless having mental health and addiction problems.
Just a wild guess.
In honor of huxley’s find and original comment, here’s a slightly relevant quote, courtesy of Donald Boudreaux’s “Hypocrites and Halfwits.”
“Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.” — Aldous Huxley
TommyJay: Ah yes, dear Uncle Aldous. He knew a thing or two and could put them well into words. He kept a copy of La Rochefoucauld’s “Maxims” near at hand for study and inspiration.
My favorite Huxley maxim from his novel, “Island,” in response to a character claiming not to understand why he did stupid things for sex:
The heart has its reasons … and the endocrines have theirs.
@Huxley: I was gobsmacked, as Andrew Sullivan used to say, to discover Jemisin and her version of Le Guin’s story. It was like finding the Sermon on the Mount had been rewritten as the Wannsee Protocol (the official Nazi paperwork, still vague, outlining the Final Solution).
I truly don’t understand how anyone, after the horrors of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, could voice such sentiments. Much less receive acclaim for doing so.
I just read the story and this is spot on. Then I read the Paris Review interview. Shame on the interviewer for not going anywhere near a discussion of this.
You can read the story here (it’s the first one after the Introduction section).
It’s that Jemison’s monstrous POV is becoming increasingly acceptable on the left that is disturbing. Just as “an idea whose time has come is unstoppable”, so too with great historical events.
Jemison and her ilk imagine that inalienable rights are rescindable, as they are incapable of considering that rights can exist independent of the current consensus of opinion. It’s likely to be a fatal shock when they discover that, here in America they are not rescindable.
Truly frightening. This is pure unadulterated evil.
On omelets, the making of:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60081.html#comment-1019920
Jemison thinks her side has the winning tickets, because of willingness to kill their opponents.
The Left has always depended on the American Right not to be a bloodthirsty as themselves (even if we are running 100,000 concentration camps…).
But, to paraphrase a common meme:
We ain’t played Cowboys and Communists yet…at home.
As JFK was once reported to have quipped:
“Those that make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.”
Democrats: Running Toward Omelas — so long as THEY choose the necessary sufferer.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1143934880771956736.html
If all of Rosie’s concentration camps are like this one, they can’t be too bad.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/aoc-weeps-over-empty-parking-lot/
BY JIM TREACHER JUNE 26, 2019
I don’t mind that Silverberg is playing Trotsky or Goldstein to Jemison’s Stalin or O’Brien. He’s long been an extreme, hard Leftist. Crocodile’s coming for him.
First people need to re-educate themselves and forget all the fake news on cancer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpaACo-7qn0&fbclid=IwAR0ZxweKPJKFQ2UHuTjGOCSeCX_F-spbqY9JX1vCpCggLCGiYK6AuIZVC2s
The problem with the Doctor Class is that they don’t obey the Hippocratic oath of no do harm that I have to truly follow.
It it the totalitarian impulse pure and simple, the idea that killing those who disagree will create some sort of statist heaven on earth.
SJWs become the enemy they fight. Look at Amazon and Alphabet.
So will conservatives and US patriots. So long as they continue to fight, they will absorb the characteristics of their foe.
By not killing the enemy, the enemy will convert them in due time. Good to evil, evil to good.
Jemison’s celestial chart has pre planned her fate on life. She chose this kind of life and challenge, and the free will of pre and post mortal existence still applies.
That means she is playing her mmorpg her way, and the rest of you are playing the game and the “stage” your way. That’s all that means.
This continual pvp “fight”, however, is what causes you to become like each other, which is far away from the Divine path.
Subotai Bahadur Says:
June 26th, 2019 at 3:09 pm
We are really pretty much stuck in the early phases of the Second American Civil War.
Okay, all the peeps here that thought I was wrong for talking about US Civil War 2, please take off your masks and bow as the curtain closes!
Chuck: Aye, but what ordinary person knows of the Sad Puppies revolt?
I am ordinary and I knew about Sad Puppies before it revolted, due to the LDS member from Baen, VoxDay, Alt Rightists, and Tor.
I probably didn’t mention that a lot, except one time online when I linked to the Baen author’s interview, in which many topics were discussed including the SJW infiltration of sci fi communities. This was ongoing even before 2015 “distracted” the public and the Alternative Right became mainstream topic due to patriots listening to HRC.
I just usually assume that when people talk about the Alt Right, they had done their research first.
I was thinking about “Omelas” last night, and realized there are some historical and literary cognates to that story, particularly Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” – which is probably not read in schools anymore.
In that very brief but wrenching story, the populace tacitly consents to participate in the random selection of one of their number each year to be stoned as a sacrifice for the continuance of the group. No one walks away, and no one fights back.
Go all the way back to Greek and Roman mythology (and perhaps others; some Native American tales IIRC) and you find the story of the Hero who voluntarily takes up the burden for his people. Usually, the hero then defeats the malevolent force requiring the sacrifice (Theseus and the Minotaur, or Beowoulf, for instance), but sometimes the hero (often heroine) dies in propitiation, sometimes being transformed into some kind of benevolent force (Baldur’s death is kind of a warped tangential version, and Iphigenia’s sacrifice doesn’t work out quite as anticipated).
Then, of course, there are the religious doctrines of the Jewish burnt offereings and scapegoats, which substitute animals for humans, and could be a prototype of walking away; and the atonement & crucifiction of Christ — the ultimate willing Sufferer.
And who is volunteering, fighting, or walking away here?
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/06/24/reporter-asks-ocasio-cortez-planned-parenthood-facilities-are-concentration-camps-fetuses/
Ymar,
So, if we fight we become what we fight and if we don’t fight we get converted? Do I have that right?
Ymarsakar:
There are many things that could be said about you, I suppose. But “ordinary” would not ordinarily be one of them. 🙂
Ymarsakar:
So, are you in agreement with the premise of Jemison’s story, that those who oppose your point of view are evil and must be killed?
Because that’s what it sounds like from your comment at 8:24 AM.
“Apparently she was crying about the lack of migrant children for her photo op.”
Not sure about this.
AOC is a New Yorker; and any New Yorker—seeing those unused, empty, wasted parking spots—would be most likely to break out in uncontrollable sobbing.
So, if we fight we become what we fight and if we don’t fight we get converted?
I don’t have all the answers. I am merely an ordinary and normal Son of God.
You’d have to ask the high echelon archangels and ascended ones for that. I don’t deal with the strategic end game of humanity. That’s somebody else’s problem (haha, thank god for that too).
So, are you in agreement with the premise of Jemison’s story, that those who oppose your point of view are evil and must be killed?
Because that’s what it sounds like from your comment at 8:24 AM.
I think there’s a fundamental problem with your philosophical premise and ego based survival beliefs. To be exact, there is no good and there is no evil. This world and plane is Maya, an illusion, or a computer simulation so to speak. I think I described this before.
Death has lost its sting. What do you think that means? Killing people is meaningless. They just come back. I cannot be killed. This body can be killed, but I can remake a new one sooner or later.
So what is the point of all you humans who act like animals in this Matrix, talking about killing things? You can’t kill them to begin with. They never existed as a mortal state of consciousness, that is outside of your time and space of course. Can you kill good or evil when the Source of it all is outside of your time stream? No way.
To be exact, evil and the npcs in this simulation are already “dead”. They need to be Resurrected first to need any killing.
This goes back to the Holocaust, where certain Jewish factions used it as a sacrificial burnt offering to appeal for the return of the holy land to their people. This intellectual idea that the traditions of man is true, is incorrect. The intellectual or rather instinctual instinct to survive evil or to defeat evil or to beat your foes in Red vs Blue, is part of Maya.
It is a dream, a stage, an illusion. Why do you all place such importance on this RPG game of yours?
AOC is a New Yorker; and any New Yorker—seeing those unused, empty, wasted parking spots—would be most likely to break out in uncontrollable sobbing.
You remember that line in 6 Rms Riv Vu.
===
AOC actually grew up in the exurbs on the border of Westchester and Putnam Counties. I’ve a cousin who lives in the same town.
Wow. I never knew that Pol Pot had a daughter!
I haven’t read “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” in a long time, but Art Deco a capsule assessment is what I took away from it (not stated so succinctly, to be sure)
KeVin herself takes up the alternative of “staying and fighting” in _The Word for World Is Forest_. SPOILER: the end is not a utopia.
In view of escalating Leftist violence, and their attacks–verbal and increasingly physical–on those on the Right, or frankly, on any one who doesn’t spout their party line, Richard Fernandez had this quote from Robespierre, which we may need to ponder in the coming days, as the explanation for what we are witnessing i.e.
“…As Robespierre put it, virtuous men have no choice but to employ any means necessary”–
Said Robespierre, “If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie. “
“…exurbs…”
That may well be; but AOC has an extraordinarily well-developed, deep sense of empathy (to match her keen imagination):
The empathy she feels so profoundly for all those “concentration camp” victims pouring across the border and for all those children placed in cages and fed like animals.
The empathy she feels so profoundly for all those students who are slaves to loans that somehow materialized from who knows where?—loans for which they (herself included) will have to struggle endlessly to repay.
The empathy she feels so profoundly for all those Members of the House of Representatives (herself included) who so desperately need more money to keep the wolf from the door.
The empathy she feels so profoundly for all those New Yorkers who, were it not for her, might have found themselves working
hopelessly in simply awful dead-end jobs at that evil company known as Amazon.
So I have no doubt that beholding empty, wasted parking spots could elicit from this truly talented individual, heartfelt, uncontrollable and persuasive bawling.