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Erin's avatar

Where can we move??

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Carsenio's avatar

The irony is that you have to show fealty with your Pfizer™ punchcard in order to go anywhere, now, regardless of your personal choice or beliefs. Can't get away from the rapidly expanding social credit system without complying by it.

I'm learning how to build a homestead and looking into Maine to buy land. I figure it'll be too cold up there for anyone to find it worth bothering me. For once I'm not joking.

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Abbybwood's avatar

I hear they have mosquitos there the size of hummingbirds!

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Carsenio's avatar

Hopefully this will be solved if scientists figure out a way to reduce the size of hummingbirds.

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Vida Galore's avatar

Minnesota does, too.

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Vida Galore's avatar

I was looking at Maine, too. But the cold is daunting... I got 'soft' living in California for 25 years. I'm in Idaho now (along with half of California - lol) but even these mild winters are tough for me.

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Abbybwood's avatar

I am sick of California politics and am really sick of the weather. Every damn day it is sunny. I miss the thunder and lightning storms in Ohio. And the seasons and the quarries and swimming ponds. And normal people.

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Carsenio's avatar

Storms are really underrated, as are gloomy nights. Southern Cali is nice to visit but I don't understand wanting the weather to stay the same all year round. I'd go crazy.

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Vida Galore's avatar

That's why I left. It nearly drove me insane, sun sun sun sun all the time. And heat.

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Carsenio's avatar

"Everyday Hot N' Sunny; Hot N' Sunny Every Day." - Bill Hicks

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Vida Galore's avatar

Aren't you guys locked down again? Agree, CA is cuckoo.

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Carsenio's avatar

It's my one edge: I do better in the cold than the heat. Heck, by the time I'm ready, maybe Maine will have the climate that California had when I was a kid.

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Vida Galore's avatar

Ha! Great point.

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Abbybwood's avatar

I am going back to Ohio. DeWine finally did something intelligent. He signed legislation stating that all state colleges must allow students full access whether vaccinated or not.

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rtj's avatar

I'd say Mars, but it's the tech billionaires who control the transpo. Probably the real estate too.

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Vida Galore's avatar

It's impossible to live on Mars. I can't believe people think it's possible - lol.

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Vida Galore's avatar

I already researched it. There is no way a human being can reach Mars, and live. Same with the moon landing, which was a hoax as well. People like to believe it though. Even though 30% of people at the time it happened didn't buy it.

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Abbybwood's avatar

Ha!!! Read Dave McGowan’s “Wagging the Moondoggie” online PDF. So damn laugh out loud funny!

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Vida Galore's avatar

It's one of the best series I've ever read. He slays me. SO funny.

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Readersaurus's avatar

"Same with the moon landing, which was a hoax as well."

That merely identifies you as a person who can't reason effectively. My respect for your opinions in general has just been destroyed by your revelatory comment. You can be a clown if you so choose. No one can stop you.

Just curious: What else about reality do you reject out of hand?

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Vida Galore's avatar

Ask NASA where all the technology to go to the moon went... I'll wait. LOL.

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Abbybwood's avatar

I know! I know! They “lost” all of it! Big warehouses full of valuable information just poof! disappeared. Am I right?

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Vida Galore's avatar

Poof! Gone! What was it, 700 crates' worth?

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Vida Galore's avatar

Read this then get back to me. I was once as much of a dupe as you are: https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie/

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Abbybwood's avatar

The best!

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Steve's avatar

"Impossible" is almost certainly wrong. You'd be much closer with "extremely difficult and expensive barring major scientific advances". But I have zero interest in moving there regardless.

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Koshmarov's avatar

Libertarian space colonization fantasies run into this problem hard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

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Carsenio's avatar

I like how Heinlen's perspective is that no matter how far into the future you go, the Libertarian Elite and Organized Labor are still locked in eternal war... and he's probably correct.

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Koshmarov's avatar

I caveat that I have not read *all* of RAH's stuff, really just the best-known stuff. He's commonly thought of as a libertarian, but I always got the vibe that he sympathizes with the working proletariat -- if not organized labor -- against the elite. He bought Philip K. Dick a typewriter and loaned him money to pay off the IRS. (PKD was broke a lot of the time, as one might expect.)

Money shot in this article: "Isaac Asimov, who knew Heinlein from the mid-'30s on, was convinced that his personal political views were largely a function of the woman he was married to at the time."

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Lightwing's avatar

I have read everything he ever wrote plus all of the biographies, etc. I would say that he expressed a libertarian streak in many of his books but he started out as a socialist and Democrat in the 1930s (Upton Sinclair).

I think more than anything else, he wanted the state to stay out of the way of people exercising individual agency. He felt that people should act like adults and conduct their own affairs and work things out individually. He frowned on morality police and despised the false sanctimony of organized religion.

He was well aware of the creeping totalitarianism inherent in giving the state too much power and in "Friday", one of my favorite books from his late writing period, he is not kind to California in terms of describing the political situation. IIRC, he mentions excessive taxation as a serious problem (quite prescient as it turns out). He hated bureaucrats and pompous politicians and many of his protagonists lived in armored or secured compounds due to the degradation and corruption of civil order.

A common theme in several books is that when a society gets to the point of requiring ids, liberty becomes a casualty. I think he chafed under the restrictive mores of his era and dreamed of a freer society.

On the other hand, in "For Us, the Living" (written in '38 but published posthumously in '03) I just listened to a scene where the protagonist, who time travels forward 150 years from the 1930s, is sent to be re-educated because he punches someone out of jealousy. Violence is not allowed and psychiatrists are called in to correct his atavistic behavior. No one questions the right of the state to brainwash the protagonist. Conformity to custom is enforced by law.

So, I would say he flirted with quite a few ideologies over the course of his writing. Regardless, I credit him with expanding my universe on a multitude of vectors. He is the first writer who challenged me to think about systems - in terms of governments, infrastructure, and the ways that societies organize themselves. He also made me think about what it actually means to be and live as a free person.

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Carsenio's avatar

I agree, I've also questioned whether the label fit him, but it speaks to the time when the intellectuals thought about ideology a different way.

I think back then you could still have an ideological stance but still question it and you'd be more respected for that. This ideological/intellectual/informational purity standard we find ourselves locked in has been a long time brewin'.

The irony is that if you care about promoting your own ideology it actually makes you stronger to question it, probe it, find out the weaknesses before opponents can exploit it. It's a form of empathy that makes you have stronger arguments. I've failed to explain this to many wannabe activists in today's world. It's Sun Tzu "know your enemy" shit that they deliberately stay ignorant of that would actually open the door for gaining of ground.

That being said, I think he has really smart ideas that were influential but I never enjoyed reading any of his books aside from the introduction of scientific concepts to storytelling (like in Troopers how a planet without sufficient radiation exposure would become "retarded").

I think we both know that the only reason PKD needed a typewriter was because They snuck into his house and sabotaged his old one 😉

That's very funny Asimov politely suggesting H. was pussywhipped. I guess it makes sense since he was in the Free Love scene which probably had a more Matriarchically structure given the difference of power balance (His Moon society was Matriarchically, IIRC).

This reminds of a Chuck Klosterman passage that I think of time to time, “Whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living.” The Inverse of this is that relationships take dynamic, thinking men and destroy those qualities. I could make a list...

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Koshmarov's avatar

I abide by Dr. Johnson's dictum that "second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience." PKD got married five times; clearly a hopeful man.

Isaac might have run afoul of #metoo if he were still around. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/35028/was-isaac-asimov-notorious-for-groping-women

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Carsenio's avatar

He already has, bro. They're trying to Cancel ol' Muttonchops now for the multiple books he published of his own dirty limericks. Shit like this...

It's a very idiocratic world and I want scientists to develop artificial gravity fields already so I can point it at an asteroid and wipe these fake feminists out of the universe. The collateral damage (end of all known life) has been calculated to be marginal from a cost/benefit analysis.

Ahem, but in the meantime, I like to think it was just one wife (secretly an agent spying on him) that wore a Scramble Suit. Also in the end PKD realized he himself was his own wife in the suit the entire time.

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Jul 18, 2021
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Carsenio's avatar

good info. I'm curious if - in the context of this kind of framing - if this means the next (severe) economic rebellion will be delayed or hastened compared to times past.

Whenever I look at what's going on in the US, being that there's a ridiculous concentration of wealth and resources adjacent to working people who are starving, I would think that it should have already happened by now. Obviously the establishment has taken great advantage with idpol in keeping an organized class rebellion at bay, this is a huge factor. But I can see the "individual achievement" mentality as working either way.

On one hand, if you tell people that hard work will make them prosperous but the hardest working can't even afford to live, then you'd think they'd get wise at some point and just smash everything that the Kings and Barons own. What seems to be taking place instead is that over the millenia "They" have just locked down the game to a point where the poor will just tear each other apart for a slightly better seat in Steerage.

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Jul 18, 2021
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Carsenio's avatar

This is aligned with my expectations. I *hope* that a dismantling of the establishment occurs more peacefully but the problem is that they're so damn greedy it seems like they'll die clutching their wealth rather than give up a single cent. Bezos is a perfect example of this.

I just don't' see a pathway of getting done incrementally when they've corrupted governments so completely. Just the visible stuff is bad, and I know there's a ton more secret shit they're using behind the scenes.

Ironically the greed that would have them watch the earth nuke itself is the only path I see out of the corruption. Like if they get so greedy they decide to skimp on the government payoffs, by which I mean lobbying. It already seems like they ought to be spending even more than they do considering the massive benefit they get from it. It's going to be hilarious if it all collapses that way, right?

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Jul 21, 2021
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Carsenio's avatar

Too smart for me to fully wrap my head around, but I hope it's good news. Whenever there's revolution it's a roll of the die in my experience. I just hope we land on Finland and not China (or worse).

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Jul 22, 2021
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Lightwing's avatar

Extra points for linking to Heinlein. He is my fave SF author bar none. Love TMIAHM. Great story.

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rtj's avatar

I'm not really a Sci-fi fan, but i can do a rock video. Not 80's though, my Prayers For Rain got answered and it hasn't stopped.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rB3LdLuFVw

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Koshmarov's avatar

I thought I was the only Grandaddy fan left alive.

https://youtu.be/23_xrih86Dg?t=53

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rtj's avatar

I'm not sure i can say i'm a fan, i came to them late and gave them a couple of listens (and liked them a lot.) But these two tunes are probably the only 2 i could name off the top of my head.

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Koshmarov's avatar

Flyover country. Medium town, small town. AKA Mars.

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Readersaurus's avatar

Apparently we can all move into Vida Galore's cranium--where there is infinite unoccupied and unused "space". It's a vast "vacant lot."

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Vida Galore's avatar

You sound jelly.

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