> “Note that I'm allergic to kitsch Americana, especially Westerns, am a singularity skeptic and atheist in real life, expect FTL travel and/or time travel to prove impossible, ditto mind uploading and "true" general artificial intelligence, and strongly suspect the answer to the Fermi paradox is that our kind of tool-using intelligent life is vanishingly rare in the cosmos. Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) bullshit, as is eugenics and space colonization. I'll play with these as fictional tropes, but only in storytelling mode, not predictive mode.”
Since he’s the Antipope, does this mean Elon Musk is the Pope? Loves kitsch Americana, manifest destiny space colonization, and generally bullish on all these tropes…
From the front page, "This site is called antipope due to a typing error long ago in the pre-history of the web. If you want to read about it, here's the history" linking to https://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/antipope.html .
> Antipope acquired its name due to a drunken mistake in 1991. ... "What sitename do you want?" ... "I said, "How about autopope.uucp?" ... "Okay." Hic. Burp. And the next day, I was the somewhat bemused owner of a site called antipope.uucp .. And of course, it seemed reasonable in 1996 to register antipope.org and hang it off my own server in 1997, when I finally got around to a colocation deal.
> So Antipope is not a significant name; it's just a communications error. You have been warned.
What makes the joke not work is that cstross is really the autopope, drunkenly mislabeled the antipope. You can clearly see he still provides pontifications.
If Musk is the opposite of the autopope, what does that make him?
I’m not sure but Musk is certainly trying hard to be the Pope of something, not exactly sure what but I noticed a very high number of ads and posts that are more or less self promoting.
> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi)
Nazism is a phenomenon of early 20th century Europe. Even if that political movement drew on some older prejudices, it mixed them with new contemporary concerns, and the total aggregate dates specifically to that era. 19th-century North American manifest destiny was racist, and perhaps for certain people its space-colonization echoes today are, but to apply the label Nazi feels very ahistorical, dishonestly so. One might conclude that the author is being provocative for the sake of profitable online outrage.
Labels are getting thrown around too carelessly. I’m reminded of an HN post I once saw where anti-LGBT attitudes in the Muslim world were called literally fascist, even though they often predate fascism (again, a distinct political phenomenon that appeared at a particular point in time and space) by centuries.
A fascist doesn't bundle an axe into a collection of sticks and then hit you with it either. The nazi party wasn't particularly socialist when it comes down to it, for that matter.
The use of words drifts, calling roughly aligned successor movements "nazi bullshit" is a useful signifier.
As an aside, it's probably for the best that the aforementioned bundle of rods around an axe isn't often used in a pro or anti context these days. Otherwise people might freak out about the design of the lincoln memorial or something. (this thought's been stuck in my head since I noticed them adorning a bridge's sides in a city where I lived next to a 1916 memorial.)
Whose homes? Under what conditions and decided by which institutions, under what power dynamics? When you elide all that as "find new homes" you are leaving a lot of room for work colonies, extractive exploitation, and eugenics, yes.
"Is having friends a conspiracy?" well... maybe, it depends on what you do with the friends. In cases like this you need to be at least a little specific about the implementation.
If this sort of straightforward rhetoric gets even a handful of people to notice that the concrete plan musk has is at least agnostic towards nazi bullshit then it was precisely useful.
Would it make any sense to describe the Polynesian settlement of Pacific islands as "nazi bullshit"? (Granted, we have little or no access to proto-Maori ideologies of the 13th Century, say, but discussions of what "colonization" is or means tend to be really Eurocentric...)
There's actually quite a lot of scholarship about what empire and colony can mean and look like in non-european contexts. People who do that work define and qualify the terms carefully.
In this case it makes sense to focus on europe, because european colonialism has recently & radically shaped the world we live in a way none other has. To the extent non-euro states are currently attempting or achieving empire, they are doing it based on the model and tools of european colonialism. Right now, as discussions of space colonization are taking shape, they are as well.
A joke I made elsewhere in this thread: when pacific islanders roll up trying to create indentured servitude on mars, we can expand & adjust the models and definition as needed. But for now there's no value in attempting to generalize, the narrow model fits the conditions we are presented with.
_when pacific islanders roll up trying to create indentured servitude on mars, we can expand & adjust the models and definition as needed. But for now there's no value in attempting to generalize, the narrow model fits the conditions we are presented with._
If you could travel to Mars in an open-air vehicle, and then land and survive on the surface wearing nothing more than ordinary clothing, and get your water from local streams and rivers, and grow crops on the surface with no special effort -- _and_ if Mars was already inhabited by human societies adapted to the land, whose food you could eat, with technology roughly equivalent or somewhat below yours, and political divisions you could exploit, and wealth and products you could extract -- well, then your European-colonialism analogies might have some relevance.
The reality is "the narrow model" (of European colonialism) doesn't remotely fit "the conditions we are presented with"... But we seem to be in the mode of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail": when all you know is European history, European history is the only possible model.
(Really, something like the Maori colonization of New Zealand -- which had no pre-existing population, and required the settlers to bring their own crops and scout for resources for making tools -- is _marginally_ more relevant. Even more relevant are things like research stations in Antarctica, where -- again -- there's no pre-existing population, and where you simply _can't_ grow food locally or easily survive outdoors.)
So what you're saying is that The Three-Body Problem, a pro-space colonisation novel is in fact white supremacist and espouses a Nazi ideology, despite being Chinese and written by an overtly pro-CCP author?
As is Dyson Sphere Program, a game developed by Chinese studio Youthcat Studios?
Okay, enough about China, what about Japan? Legend of Galactic Heroes, Xenosaga, Crest of the Stars, Superdimension Fortress Macross, Space Battleship Yamato, Starship Operators, Bodacious Space Pirates, Star Ocean? White Supremacy seems awfully popular among these non-White creators.
> Zombies, for example, show us something really ugly about embedded white supremacist terror of a slave revolt
I dunno about that. Years ago, I was (very stupidly) wandering alone in a very bad part of town, and the only other people on the street were the homeless drug addicts, scattered here and there and shuffling about slowly, only dangerous if you let them get within biting range, and I thought, "is this where the zombies thing came from?"
Night of the Living Dead (1968) kicked off the modern zombie trope, and that was around when drug addiction epidemics entered the popular consciousness as well.
If you're intent on imagining a subtext to Night of the Living Dead a movie which never mentions zombies and features the (undead) neighbours harrass a black man who is ultimately shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy then you might also want to recall it was conceived in the aftermath of the Detroit and Newark riots and released to audiences who had just seen National Guardsmen shoot antiwar protesters to death at Kent State University.
I'm not saying that movie in particular had that subtext. Rather, the zombie trope quickly took on a life of its own in the years after Living Dead (and split into the fantasy/cursed and scifi/infected subtropes). It's hard to say why it resonated but there are definitely some interesting parallels with other cultural trends.
It's an interesting film, as an Australian who came to it later (I think I first saw it in 1992 ish) it was a while before I apprecriated a whole other perspective it had for some (early case of a film with a black lead, early use of graphic horror, lead character being killed, etc).
The thing about tropes in movies and literature is that they are often identified and become part of the legend of a work without the intent of the autor.
Whether intended by Romero or not, according to the documentary A Century of Black Cinema (and other related print works) the film had a profound impact on many African American viewers of the time .. because of the lead, because of the story, etc.
Whether it was the original plan or not, by the time the movie gets to the end credits the parallels to a lynching are incredibly explicit.
I'd like to put in a rec for https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053454/ "The World, the Flesh and the Devil", which is an apocalypse movie with a slightly different premise: what if the only survivors of an apocalypse in apartheit 1950s America were a black man and a white woman? Contains some great shots of deserted New York and some very intense performances.
It's kind of interesting to read about contemporary reactions to Night of the Living Dead, which included "it's obviously a commentary on the Vietnam War" and "a critique of American capitalism". The closest anyone got to racial issues was the observation that at the end, the (black) main character is killed by a (white) posse led by a sheriff -- which seemed to some people to be an obvious commentary on the Civil Rights Movement and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X.
The modern (21st C) vogue for zombie apocalypse movies pretty clearly stems from two sources: Japanese video games in the 1990s; and a pair of British films in the early 2000s: Resident Evil (based on one of the aforementioned Japanese video games) and 28 Days Later. (It's a bit hard to argue that both the Japanese and the British were acting out some deep-seated fear of a black slave uprising.)
both of which have been cited by Romero as events he watched while writing the film. I'm guessing that perhaps you skimmed over those and mentally bundled them in with the Kent State shootings as "obviously Vietnam war"?
I would note that the original origin of the zombie trope among Haitians was a slightly different fear: what if slavery didn't end when you die? What if there was no release, ever, from being controlled? That you could be raised from the grave and made to do more work?
(hardly anyone does a zombie movie from the POV of the zombies; most people treat it as given that they are dehumanized, the Other that it's safe - no, morally necessary - to kill)
It's possible that he's speaking less about "Night of the Living Dead (1968)" as an early zombie film, and more about "White Zombie (1932)" as an influence on later films, as it earlier and more clearly on topic: Set on a sugar cane plantation on Haiti, with voodoo, etc. As the title suggests, the shock is not just that there's a zombie, but that ... this time, she's White!
Night of the Living Dead is inspired by the 1954 novel I Am Legend, which is based on vampire mythology. And although it's probably not a direct inspiration, it also reminds me of the chapter in the 1908 novel The House on the Borderland where the swine-things attack the house.
> when drug addiction epidemics entered the popular consciousness
That certainly isn't correct.
The fear of marijuana addiction epidemics was part of the popular consciousness in the 1930s, pushed in part by Hearst's yellow journalism and Anslinger's propagandizing. We see echos of that fear in the movie "Reefer Madness."
The same for heroin.
There's even earlier moralizing against opium and opium dens, connected with "yellow peril" xenophobia as ensnaring white people into addiction.
Stereotypical movie zombies are brainless but crave brains to consume. They can only die by destroying their brain. They look like humans but are no longer human but a kind of automatic animal. They are innocent in that it's not their fault they are like this and have no interior malice in their actions.
In a way it's mindless consumption on the capitalist frame (Romeros film in shopping mall helps) but also represent a broken or wrong search for knowledge, or brains or direction, dysfunction.
Generally zombie movies are really about the non zombies, the humans and their dysfunction.
> Shut-in stays indoors to avoid the Edinburgh Festival crowds under the pretext of fearing covid. August 2023 mind you.
Avoiding crowds is one of the best ways to avoid COVID-19. I don't understand what you're getting at.
> Craves human contact and camaraderie, sends out cry for help by vaguely connecting random pop culture tropes to white supremacy -- as is now tradition -- to attract others of his ilk to his comment section.
As is now tradition? I don't follow this either - can you list a few examples of what you're referring to?
Probably true, but at the same time: has it got less dangerous and the risk of side effects decreased? Even if it becomes "more dangerous seasonal flu", that's still a consideration for someone of cstross's age and health.
I’ve started to wonder whether zombies are metaphors for bad ideas that refuse to die, as they become wired into culture and belief. A few examples: crypto, carbon offsets, some might say certain religions. Other examples welcome for my own filing system.
Most zombie stuff is largely made for cheap shock rather than anything else. Few zombie stories are about the zombies themselves. The original author almost hits the nail on the head - the "Elite panic" stuff is a closer understanding of what these stories are about.
It's... Almost an accurate description of a zombie story. The goal of a zombie story is usually to just say "Yeah, look at us humans. Even when the world falls apart around us, we'd rather still hurt and murder each other for selfish gain rather than surviving and sticking together." Which is an assumption that has been challenged very often, especially on the scale of humans that most zombie stories operate on (usually no larger than 4 or 5 families that the cast interacts with.)
It's also to the point where it becomes very predictable when a group that seemingly breaks the mold shows up, just to show they're much more morally evil than it first seems. Group is well off during the apocalypse -> they're cannibals. Odd friendly loner -> he's keeping a zombie (usually a loved one) in his basement and wants to feed the main characters to it. Safe bastion with surviving humans -> someone offs themselves and it falls apart infighting because of the added zombie. Every "good" group must be punished because it'd defy the logic of the genre.
Personally I don't really believe much of what zombie stories have to say is accurate - reality has shown us that when humans are put through events where the majority of other humans around them aren't available (ie. Natural disasters), that we tend to stick together and survive together.
> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi) bullshit, as is eugenics and space colonization
Are we really at such a point where all thoughts on colonization are exclusively the realm of Western imperialism? There have been plenty of massive human empires where white people weren't involved, and reducing colonization to white supremacy feels more like erasure than anything.
Since he’s the Antipope, does this mean Elon Musk is the Pope? Loves kitsch Americana, manifest destiny space colonization, and generally bullish on all these tropes…