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Slipways & Magic the Gathering.

So, basically Race for the Galaxy?

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uploading believers and uploading disbelievers as well

AI believers and AI disbelievers pointing at each other: Cartesian dualist!

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Creepypastas and horror movies where the characters are safe unless they deliberately fuck with the Scary Thing are in some ways creepier than the ones where they're doomed from the start. The paranoia and anticipation of the act being stronger than the act itself of course, but also the knowledge that you, reading/watching it, would also not be able to resist Fucking with the Scary Thing, because that's just the kind of person you are.

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NO WAY

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I feel like we need a massive public education campaign to inform people that "natural" and "healthy" are two completely different words with separate meanings

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Nu Jedi Order

“So, I’m curious,” Jocasta Nu said, over tea. “About your opinion on the ethics of clones, and of cloning.”

Yoda, Mace and Bant all sighed.

“This is going to be one of those difficult questions, isn’t it?” Bant asked, rubbing her temples. “Masters, can I bow out if this is too philosophically difficult?”

“No,” Yoda informed her, bluntly. “Stay you should. Good for you, it will be.”

“Thanks,” the Mon Cal muttered. “All right, so… I think that cloning isn’t any different to creating a child. The individual who has been created is their own person, both independent and autonomous, and you owe them a duty of care for their childhood and to make sure they are set up in the world. As would be done with a child.”

“That’s a strong start, Master Eerin,” Mace noted, with a nod. “Well done.”

“Thank you,” Bant said. “...though I hope someone else is going to speak up, now. I still feel nervous in these situations.”

“Nerves are the path to not speaking up,” Yoda said, sagely. “Not speaking up leads to ideas forgotten. Ideas forgotten are solutions missed, and contemplation lost. And a conversation, we are here for.”

“Do you think it’s ethical for a clone to be made into a soldier?” Jocasta Nu said.

“That’s… a difficult one for me, I admit,” Mace mused. “Because… we didn’t ask for the army. The army was already there.”

“What worries me about it is that they didn’t really have a choice,” Bant admitted. “They were trained for this since their birth, and… I know they don’t mind, they’ve said it, but I feel like I would have been more comfortable if they’d been given a choice.”

“The cloners of Kamino do consider their clones… output,” Mace said. “Product. It’s worried me about the whole thing.”

“When the war is over, the clones we will champion,” Yoda declared. “Nothing new, this is.”

“It’s not,” Jocasta said. “But I was thinking about it in the specific context of… raising a child from a young age to fulfil a specific role.”

She spread her hands. “That was what happened to all of us, after all.”

“You’re not wrong, Jocasta,” Mace conceded. “I feel like there’s a difference, but I’m not sure I can articulate it.”

“It’s that the Jedi are valued, I think,” Bant suggested. “We… well, it takes a long time to learn the self-discipline that’s essential to using the Force, and we have a position in the galaxy that is well thought of and well respected. The clones… they’re grown up faster so they can be useful more quickly, and they’re treated as a commodity.”

“So would it be different if the clones were better respected?” Jocasta asked.

Yoda frowned, putting down his teacup.

“An important consideration, it is,” he said. “To the rest of the galaxy, look like Kamino does to us, we might.”

“Perhaps,” Mace mused. “Though I think perhaps part of the difference is that we respect the decision of the parents.”

“Don’t the Kaminoans respect the decision of the parents, for the clones?” Bant asked. “If – if creating clones is like parenting, I mean. Jango Fett certainly gave permission.”

She looked troubled. “And is it the decision of the parents or the child that matters more? Did any of us really have the chance to choose to become a Jedi, except Anakin?”

“That gets back to the self-discipline argument,” Mace noted. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying that… there are other ways to reliably get soldiers, but are there other ways to reliably get Jedi with the proper self-discipline?”

There was a silence for a long moment.

“Someone who wants to leave the Jedi order can do so,” Mace added. “But it’s not common, and having grown up in the Jedi Order… someone might not truly feel they can leave.”

“Should it have been an option given to the clones?” Jocasta asked. “To either fight in the Grand Army of the Republic, or to choose to not do so?”

“Perhaps,” Yoda said, slowly. “Perhaps.”

He sighed. “Protectors of the Republic, the Jedi are. But protect it alone, we cannot.”

“I don’t think we were ever meant to protect it alone,” Bant said. “To protect it against the Sith, yes. To help it stay together, yes. But… surely the population of the Republic should be willing to fight for it? At least some of them?”

She looked down at her hands. “And if none of them are… does that mean it should still exist?”

“If the clones hadn’t been available, then the Separatists could have done terrible damage to the Republic before there were armies able to stop them,” Jocasta pointed out. “They were the ones with the armies ready to go. It’s a paradox.”

The archivist sipped from her tea. “The worst time to build an army is after being invaded, but that army has to be attached to the ideals of the Republic more than it is attached to any one person.”

“Devoted to the Republic, the Clones seem to be,” Yoda said, frowning. “But ask them more often, I should. And raised to be, they were.”

“...which is curious,” Mace noted. “Given who their template worked for.”

“They were ordered for the Republic,” Bant said. “For the Jedi, in fact – that was what the Kaminoans were told from the start. And, as we saw, the Kaminoans keep secrets rather than betray their employers – and they raised the army to be as they should be, based on what they were told.”

“I almost wish that the army had been ordered about years ago,” Jocasta said, thoughtfully. “Raised at a normal speed, rather than twice as fast – and offered the choice. Having grown up in a normal community, in fact.”

“That would make them normal citizens,” Mace noted, though he wasn’t disagreeing. “Treating them as people would be far more ethical, you’re right.”

Jocasta nodded, stirring her teacup.

“And no more questions that deeply philosophical, please,” Bant added. “I’d rather enjoy the tea. I get so few opportunities to relax…”

Around twenty years later, an X-Wing starfighter dropped out of hyperspace in the Adega system.

“...well, I don’t see much of anything,” Luke admitted. “But this is where Master Obi-Wan told me to go…”

R2’s reply appeared on the screen, and Luke laughed.

“Yes, he was there,” Luke replied. “I guess… see if there’s anything out there emitting signals?”

He flicked a switch as he did, then sighed.

“I really hope we don’t have to search this planet and its moon,” he muttered, noticing the forest moon orbiting the primary world. “Planets are huge…”

Then a signal came in, and the comm systems of his fighter crackled.

“Skywalker,” a voice said. “You’re expected.”

“I am?” Luke asked. “You knew I was coming?”

“Yes,” the voice agreed. “The homing beacon is on frequency 13, band 4.”

The transmission stopped, and Luke frowned – mystified – before seeing that R2 had switched one of the sensors to frequency 13, band 4.

A weak, fuzzy signal was showing up on the forest moon, and Luke rolled his little fighter before pointing it down to see what was going on.

When he landed on a clear landing pad, the situation was no clearer. There was a moderately-sized settlement just on the other side of a shallow river from where he’d landed, with irrigated farms and pastures for woolly animals on the hills, but almost half the settlement was built into the trees.

And there was something… weird. He could feel it.

“Well, I guess we should find out what’s going on,” Luke shrugged, getting out of his fighter, and as he did an old human woman came striding out of the trees. There were two young men and a young woman with her – the younger woman was a dark-skinned tholothian, while one of the men was a twi’lek and the other was a human.

“Welcome,” the woman said, with a smile. “Master Obi-Wan Kenobi informed us that you were coming.”

“What was he like?” the young human added, then looked embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s not a problem,” the older woman told him.

Luke was staring, because… the young man was just a little bit familiar.

And he couldn’t define how.

“So,” the woman went on, pleasantly. “Tell me, Skywalker. Have you ever had an idea where you can’t decide if it’s an excellent idea or a terrible one?”

Luke blinked.

“…more than once,” he admitted. “Most recently, there was this attack on an Imperial weapons facility where Han disguised himself as Jabba’s – look, who are you?”

“I am Master Jocasta Nu,” the woman said. “And these are Teras Gallia, Tora’shen… and Joras Kenobi.”

Luke might have fallen over if R2 hadn’t been immediately behind him.

“So, speaking of ideas,” Master Nu said, spreading her hands. “When the Great Purge began, I absconded with as much of the Temple medical records as I could find, and managed to source some cloning cylinders… and we have had no idea what is going on in the rest of the galaxy until now. Would you be able to inform us?”

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are you uncomfortable from your hands being dry? if you apply lotion, you can instead be uncomfortable with how greasy they are now. Subscribe for more tips!

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Hate Hate Hate stories that reward characters for refusing to do triage. 'I refuse to choose only one to survive even if it means both die' [plot contrives for this to be the only way both survive] is so weak. Making difficult decisions with no good outcome is not a moral failing

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"the magnus archives sounds cool! what are the content warnings?"

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DS9 as a show dares to ask the important questions, like for example “would Star Trek still be good if it was set at the food court at the mall??” and the answer to that is “yes, and actually it will somehow be better”

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I don't think there is a chance of me falling for a "mind virus". Actually I don't believe in mind viruses. I believe in emotional abuse, brain rot, mental illness, being full of shit.

I believe in the existence of cults, but I don't believe in the existence of basilisks.

I believe that you can entertain the possibility and the implications of conspiracy theories, without subscribing to them.

So it's not like Iike I think "You'll go mad from the revelation" or "People will go mad from the revelation" or "Debunking quack medicine and conspiracy theories will make people more likely to go down a rabbit hole", or any of that nonsense. I don't think taking ideas seriously leads to Nazi ideology taking over your brain from the inside.

But:

I think if

you have first-hand experience with a death cult, or

your childhood friend went on a crime spree and is now on the news, or

you still are friends on Steam with a guy who you never met who joined or was killed by ISIS,

then you should consider not tweeting about it.

I'm not saying you should keep whatever you know secret and take it to the grave. I just hate the kind of after-the-fact journalism where they interview the next door neighbours of a serial killer and they say he was always nice and inconspicuous (because he didn't kill at home) or where they say they always suspected something (because he had weird hobbies). Nobody ever says "He was already torturing squirrels. It was only a matter of time". It happens often. Instead of just summarising the opinions of distant acquaintances, you get vox pops from people who don't know any more than the average TV watching newspaper reading public, but who lived three streets down from the guy, now mugging for the camera. And journalists will happily give these people ten seconds of air time, because with six of these you can fill one minute of dead air. #content

And if you just tweet about it, you send a smoke signal to all the paparazzi out there. They will comb through your twitter interactions or your steam profile, and they will try to see if any of the people you played TF2 with are blue-haired SJWs, or if any of the people you have had one-off twitter interactions with are preppers.

I have interacted with people who, I have later learned, have a KiwiFarms page, and I know people who have had ridiculous false-flag operations done to them. Like, imagine having a fallout with somebody over shipping drama (so far, in the realm of the possible), and then your former friend sends death threats to public figures in your name (like, signed with your name and address), and you clear your name and take out a restraining order (the fingerprints on the letter aren't yours, thankfully), but six months later somebody like libs of tiktok finds a copy of the threatening letter online and doxes you to the world.

I think you should really reconsider tweeting about this, not in order to keep the mind virus contained, and not because would make your own side look bad, but because it would paint a target on your back.

I know that some rationalist-adjacent tumblr people think this fear is overblown. They say that rats are just too dismissive, and too afraid of mainstream media organisations like the NYT smearing tech people and misrepresenting facts. But it isn't just the NYT, or just KiwiFarms. It could also be sneerclub or rationalwiki or r/drama or gamerghazi. Once you're tweeting about this, you can't really guarantee that the NYT won't connect your twitter handle to your real name, and then KiwiFarms will do the rest. You can't really guarantee that the NYT will report on your tweet before Breitbart does.

But I also think you should reconsider tweeting "I know this guy" when all you really did was post on the same forum as the guy, after he had already been banned.

Sorry for rambling, but anyway... I don't think I have any inside info here. I am just joining the conversation on the boring, non-contrarian side of OPSEC. Please practice OPSEC. And if somebody you know has a mental breakdown and starts tweeting "I think you should firebomb a Wal-Mart for real", then maybe don't tweet "I always worried that guy was going to firebomb a Wal-Mart", captain hindsight. Maybe just let the posts speak for themselves. And if you firebomb a Wal-Mart as a political statement and post a political manifesto, that's kind of conspicuous, and not very OPSEC of you.

Please don't firebomb my local Wal-Mart for saying this.