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nachosncheezies · 5 months

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I can't find the post where you've rambled about Kurt Crawford before! Please ramble to me about Kurt Crawford!

Hi hello and thank you for your patience as I answer this one month to the day from when you sent it!!!! 🙈 oops

The Crawfords was my original answer to @perpetually-weirdening's question "what character do you wish we learned more about" but I'm so happy to expand on that, I have a lot of feelings!!! xD

The thing about the Kurt Crawfords is that (unless I'm forgetting something big) they're the first clones we've seen that are explicitly said to be the progeny of abductees/the MUFON women. We've met other clones before including the Samanthas in Colony/End Game but those were rogues trying to figure out how to hybridize themselves into some kind of genetic variability that would let them look different and blend in. (they used discarded tissue from abortion clinics rather than stolen ova) The bounty hunter was after them for simply existing outside The Project.

The Crawfords are different. They're part of The Project. The first one that Mulder and Scully meet is the one they track down after finding someone is remotely copying Betsy Hagopian's computer files. This Crawford claims to be a member of Betsy's MUFON chapter, and he tells them there's a conspiracy to cover up the women's deaths. He leads them to Penny Northern, who (unfortunately) directs Scully to Dr Scanlon and her first attempt at treatment. The bounty hunter comes for Crawford #1 in Betsy's basement the minute Mulder steps away.

Crawford #2 turns up at the fertility clinic where Betsy and some of the others had been treated. This Crawford is dressed differently but Mulder doesn't know yet that there's more than one, and accuses him of having run off with the files they'd been working on in Betsy's basement. Between them and the Gunmen, they track down Scully's name in a research lab directory, which leads them to data on the branched DNA they'd already identified after Scully's abduction. But if someone's looking at this as a possible cause for her illness, maybe they're also looking for a cure, so the Gunmen help Mulder break into the Lombard facility where he finds a whole room of Kurt Crawfords.

And this is where IMO it gets so complicated and so bittersweet and so REAL. We learn very little about the Crawfords in the few minutes Mulder is with them but what we do learn is pretty significant for something that's never really talked about again. They recognize Mulder, they welcome him. They lead him straight to the drawer containing Scully's stolen ova (the first time we learn what the project did to her when she was abducted). They tell him how they were harvested, that the radiation used in that procedure caused her (and the MUFON women's) cancer. They tell him that the men who are claiming to treat this rare cancer are the same ones that caused it, that those men are actually working to hasten the women's deaths.

But!!!! what gets me most is this exchange:

Mulder: You're trying to save them. Crawford: They're our mothers.

What a thing to think, to feel, to say. The Crawfords came from fucked up circumstances and they're not really human. They're complicit in perpetuating it all by making more of themselves, but this is their life cycle, this is their job, this is what they know. From what we're shown we have no reason to believe that any of them has ever experienced what it is to have a mother in any sense other than a genetic donor. They're grown in tanks from tampered genetic material taken from tampered women without either party giving consent.

But they recognize that they owe their existence to these human women, who were violated and now suffer and die for it. And in those very few words he says: they don't want that. They recognize it's wrong. They're trying to stop it. (They are risking their lives; their subversion sends the bounty hunter after them.) It's their chance at redemption for the crime of being alive and that alone is painfully human.

They want Mulder and Scully to know the truth. The fact that they lead Mulder directly to where Scully's stolen ova are kept. That they let him take from that drawer without comment. They let him take the truth in his hand, surely aware that he might return it to her. (I like to think they hoped he would.) Because she, and the other women, are their mothers.

IMO one of the biggest elephants in the room for this whole show, although we don't learn about her until well after this, is Emily. How many others like her might there be? It's fucking TRAGIC to think about. But she's not the only thing to come from those stolen ova. The Crawfords are not the children Scully or any of the other MUFON women wanted. But they exist. They are grateful, in whatever way a hybrid clone can be. They recognize the sacrifice and suffering that brought them to life. They are doing what they can, in their own way, to set it right. Because to them, those are their mothers.

Knowing about the Crawfords and their subversion of The Project could never undo what was done to Scully or the others. But as gross and shocking a revelation it would be to know that inhuman things are being made in place of the children they can never have, what the Crawfords show us is that not everything that came from those violations are tragedies in the way of Emily and any other children like her. I wonder if it might have been a comfort for Scully to know that out of one of the worst things to ever happen to the abducted women, These Men Who Would Create a Life Whose Only Hope Is To Die have also accidentally created lives whose greatest hope is to save people, to save her and others like her. That these inhuman children the women never wanted have somehow grown to have a sense of empathy, a sense of justice, a moral compass, a desire to do what's right. Things a mother would want for her children, things a mother could be proud of. That they may not be human, they may not know what it is to be children, but they know that somewhere out there they have mothers, and they care.

I wonder if Mulder ever told Scully. I hope someday he did.

#mulder recognized the boy in the tank from the drones he met in the bee fields #where he also met Project-approved samantha drones #so here's a question:#are there Samanthas out there - grown like the memento mori Crawfords - who consider the abductees their mothers too?#are there Samanthas out there made of what was stolen from Scully?#x files #the x files #thank you for the ask it was fun to ramble about and a PERFECT excuse to rewatch memento mori 😍#folks ask nachos answers #scully #kurt crawford

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happyk44 · 8 months

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Hazel tucked her chin against her knees. Shadows were blustering around her, picking up pens and making notations on a dozen different stray papers while Pluto stared, wide-eyed, at the three monitors in front of him. His eyes never flickered away from the one in front of him, but the mouse scrolled rapidly to either side, opening spreadsheets and clacking in numbers.

She liked watching him work. It was kind of funny. For other people it was probably creepy, his dead-eyed stare, pale skin illuminated by the bright monitor in the dim office. Shadows twisted around like tertiary limbs. He barely moved anything but his fingers. Didn't speak a word.

But work was done, vacations approved, overtime denied, gem and metal requests from various gods reviewed, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

It was so neat. She wondered if this is how she looked when she reviewed Camp Jupiter's spending. She probably moved more than he did, but the wide-eyed hyperfocused stare, everything else falling to the wayside of shadows and unimportance - she was sure that existed in her. Although she was definitely more startled by sudden presences than he was.

He didn't mind her watching him. He was fully aware she was there, greeted her when she walked in and patted her head when she sat on the edge of his desk, observing.

She glanced over to the monitor. Her eyes scanned through the data. It was an update on the recent mining activity - a couple dozen souls had recently been sentenced to the mines as punishment. Production would increase. Naturally. They'd need to figure out what to prioritize in digging out. No sense in increasing production if the gems being pulled weren't in demand.

Off the top of her head, Hazel considered what she'd do. Review past requests, see what was most popular around this season, what would be most popular in the upcoming season, start on the prep for that. Maybe she'd have some people look over the current trends in jewelry. People weren't clamouring for diamonds the same way they used to be. She was pretty sure pearls were coming back into style this year. Moonstone looked close enough.

She poked Pluto with her finger. He hummed, curiously, sparing her no look, but one of the wiry shadows blustering around poked her back.

She tucked her smile behind her knees. "Do you have moonstone availability?"

"I can," he said easily. "Moonstone does require more pressure to form. And very high temperatures. I usually build it closer down to Tartarus and near the Phlegethon." The screens blurred in a piston of movement as his fingers clicked and clacked at the keyboard and deftly moved about the mousepad. "Yama has very fine moonstone beneath his earth, as well. I'm sure he'd be happy to take some of our beloathed for punishment in exchange." He tilted his face in her direction. "Do you think moonstone will be viable this period?"

Her lip bit raw in her mouth. But she relaxed and nodded. "I do. Pearls are popular this year, but expensive. And there still exists concerns over harvesting. Moonstone is a much more inexpensive substitute and, if well crafted, will be indistinguishable from the untrained eye."

His eyes held her in that same dead-eyed stare. And then they softened. A smile gently graced his face. He slid his chair closer to her and caught the back of her head, bringing her down for a gentle kiss on the head.

"Smart girl," he mused as he slid away. "I'll make a note to increase our moonstone production then."

She grinned widely and resisted the urge to wiggle in excitement. Instead, she relaxed and let herself lean into the wall. The monitors twisted ever so slightly so she could still see them at her new angle.

Maybe Pluto would take her to meet his Hindu counterpart. She considered that, herself tucked into her father's side, dressed clean but not flashy, a little businesswoman at a godly business meeting.

It was exciting to think of. Already thoughts were flowing about what she'd say to urge his "Yes" to the moonstone mining beneath his earth. Pluto had friends across all the chthonic pantheons. They thought he was interesting, and his temperance was smooth enough to handle even the most rowdy of them, but still. She wanted to prove herself in this way. Prove she was of him, the same way Nico was. That she deserved a place at their table too.

I am my father's daughter, she thought. The underground, where all the mineral wealth hides, is my world too.

#my writing #my fanfic #hades (pjo)#hazel levesque #happy talks pjo

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holyshonks · 1 year

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If you've only listened to the audiobook of Contact Harvest, you miss out on the beautiful, heart-wrenching epilogue.

Contact Harvest contains a subplot between two of Harvest's AI: the flirtatious cowboy Mack, who runs Harvest's agricultural operations, and Sif- the elegant, no-nonsense AI in charge of Harvest's shipping operations. The epilogue--written as corrupted data, is intercepted by Catherine Halsey.

It is easily one of my favorite passages of a Halo novel, and I've included it below.

SPOILERS

When the Covenant began bombarding Harvest, they destroyed the Tiara, the space station which contained Sif. Meanwhile, Mack's core logic is spread out between thousands of his JOTUN agricultural machines. As the planet is falling, he uses those machines to transmit a message to Sif:

<\\> UNSC OFFICE OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE <\\> COLONIAL SECURITY ESTIMATE 2525.10.110 ["COLD SNAP"] <\ SOURCE: UNSC RQ-XII DRONE [PASV-SAR] <\ DEPLOYED: ONI SLOOP "WALK OF SHAME" [2525:02:11:01:11:34] <\ RECOVERED: UNSC DESTROYER "HERACLES" [2525:10:07:19:51:16] <\ ARCHIVE [SIG\REC\EM-SPEC] OPENED PER OFFICIAL REQUEST: <\ CIVILIAN CONTRACTOR "CHARLIE HOTEL" [ONI.REF #409871] <\ * WARNING: ALL QUERIES WILL BE LOGGED! * [ONI.SEC.PRTCL-A1] >> NOTATION KEYWORD SEARCH: "AO.AI" "MACK" "RAMPANCY" "LIFESPAN LIMITS" >> (...) ~ QUERY RUNNING >> (..) >> () < RECORD 01/10 [2525:02:03:17:26:41] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S2-05866 >

<\ Shall I --- < \ \\ c0mpare >> (???) ~ COMxxx--- \COMMIT >> thee to (............>> > >> \\ --- a summer's day? < RECORD 02/10 [2525:02:25:03:18:22] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S3-14901 > \ \ xxx No. <\ All those lovely days are gone.\--- \\ \ >> * --xING! COMM\ \\ >> \\ > \ SO.AI.SIF * < RECORD 03/10 [2525:03:10:19:05:43] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S5-28458 > <\ It's winter now. <\ The first sn0w \his world's ever seen is falling in gG--- <\ GRAY SHEETS WHERE THEY'VE STARTED BURNINGg--\ \ \ our fields and orchards. >> * WARNING! COMM FAILURE! * >> * FAILED TO FIND RECIPIENT: HARVEST.SO.AI.SIF * <\ You'd laugh if you could see me. <\ Every time I hit a patch of ice I slide into my own mM--- >> (...) ~ COMPILE\COMPRESS\COMMIT >> (..) >> * WARNING! RECIPIENT HAS INSUFFIxx -- \ \\ > PACKETS WILL BE LOST * >> * CONTINUE [Y\N]? >>>>>>> \ * < RECORD 04\10 [2525:03:15:09:59:21] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S1-00937 > <\ ---M < RECORD 05\10 [2525:03:26:12:10:56] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S1-00053 > <\ ---m < RECORD 06\10 [2525:04:04:44:15:40] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S2-08206 > <\ muddy furrows. < RECORD 07\10 [2525:04:21:05:15:23] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S5-27631 > <\ I saw another ship. <\ Well, heard \ \\ more like it. <\ JOTUNs' cameras are meant for steering not \ \ >\ staring at the sky. <\ But the antennae work alright, so I had plenty of ways to triangulate. <\ It was one of ours. Bastards stopped burning just long enough to kill it. <\ They had months to make repairs. Plenty of time t0-- :: sharpen their teeth. <\ I tried to warn it off. But radio's too damn slow. Would have used the maser, but it went when the reactor blew, along withH--- <\ EVERYTHING Else [ :00] \> <\ Including him \ >> * WARNING! COMM FAILURE! * >> * FAILED TO FIND RECIPIENT: HARVEST.SO.AI.SIF * >> (...) ~ SUPPRESSING ERRORS <\ Guess making noise wasn't the smartest thing to do. But I had to try. <\ Besides, they were bound to catch on sooner or later. <\ Aw, hell. <\ Speaking of which . . . >> (...) ~ COMPILE\COMPRESS\COMMIT >> (..) >> () < RECORD 08\10 [2525:05:12:23:04:16] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S5-29003 > <\ They started with the gondolas and dusters. Don't know why. <\ Probably thought I'd be hiding in the small ones. But the S4 and S5 plows are the only ones with enough circuits to hold the parts of me I've got left. <\ Course they're onto these now too. Don't have more than a few dozen, and they're all out in the open. But it's a\right. >> Just a few more \ \ > > rows to hoe > (...\\ xxx \ < RECORD 09\10 [2525:07:01:18:49:45] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S5-27631 > <\ I knew just by looking at the strands \ \ that the heart of you was gone. <\ When the elevators came down, they caught on the Bifrost--wrapped west across the Ida. Only way that much could have fallen is if the Tiara cut loose-- <\ is if he was as good a shot as you thought I wasn't, way back when. <\ Anyhow, you'd think I was crazy, talking to you like this. <\ But I always worked faster when I thought \ << \\>>>> you might be listening. <\ And I need to find it all. Every inch. <\ Bury your strands so deep their \\ > \ \ fires can't reach them \ \ \ and glass them like the rest. < RECORD 10\10 [2525:10:04:12:23:51] SOURCE.REF#JOTUN-S4-021147 > <\ Sky's choked with ashes \ \, snow's < \ \\ deep 0n frozen ground. The one horse I've got left is cold and hungry--- heading for the barn, and I can't stop him. <\ But this winter won't last, darlin'. >> * Not forever >> (.....\\ . > And when new hands >> set to tending this earth they'll till my pieces under. > > Grind them into the veins of g0ld I've laid. <\ then the roots of all they plant wi\\ > wind around usS--- <\ KEEPING <\ US <\ CLOSE--- \ \ <\ For an eternal summer that will not fade. <\ QUERY COMPLETE <\ NO ADDITIONAL RECORDS FOUND <\ ARCHIVE CLOSED \>

#halo #halo contact harvest #oughhh #i'm bleeding out

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raincheckow · 3 months

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We're losing knowledge

This week's millennial technology take: we're closer than ever to becoming the Adeptus Mechanicus. Maybe the world of Horizon Zero Dawn, if we're lucky.

Not to be all "Kids these days..." but

Kids aren't learning how to use actual computers anymore... just Apps(tm). I'm not quite 30, and yet my generation is already stuck telling older AND younger people how to save as PDF. Concepts are taught at such a high level that kids know how to code, with no idea of what the code is actually *doing*.

If you're a freshly graduated software engineer, it shouldn't be a big ask for you to know where files get saved. Copy/Paste shouldn't require using a mouse+menu each time. Efficiency shouldn't be left to the IDE or compiler. You're an engineer, you should be hungry to understand how things work... don't just sit around and wait to be told. Core skills are not being passed on anymore. "The system/library/pipeline takes care of it" and suddenly nobody is looking under the hood.

Convenience is killing our ability to create.

Break things. Figure out how to fix them. Repair your stuff, even when corporations tell you that's not allowed. Be proud of your knowledge, chase it down and find more.

A lot of the wonder and amazement around technology seems to be fading. Everything we do is stuck inside data-harvesting apps and nobody is learning the pieces that make the whole thing work.

One day things will break and we'll have nobody around who can fix it. We'll follow old guides, telling us these obscure steps to follow, having no clue what we are fundamentally doing. One day the ritual of "OffAndOnAgain" won't restore the Tech. Troubleshooting will become the job of the lorekeepers. Fixes will rely on auras more than logic until the system falls apart.

Generations of genius created the world we live in. Keep their knowledge. Be amazed that anyone could come up with what is now the mundane. Keep asking "but how could it possibly do that?" because they poured their very lives into these precious ones and zeroes.

I want to be wrong. I want the next generations to create wonders beyond the limits of my imagination. I want to be amazed by what was never possible before. I want my proudest creations to look like child's play compared to what the future holds.

I desperately want to have someone complain about teaching me how to save as a PDF

#technology rant #education rant #adeptus mechanicus #horizon zero dawn #dystopia

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tangibletechnomancy · 1 year

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What frustrates me about The Discourse about AI art is that everyone feels the need to have An Opinion...and no one is willing to look into the conversations that have been going on for DECADES surrounding the relevant issues, or the cases that set precedent for what we can do here going back CENTURIES.

Let me lay out two very important things here:

The dataset ethics issue is more of an issue of digital privacy than copyright.

The labor issue has been seen MANY times throughout history; we can look to MANY other times new tech has shaken up a job market for precedent before AI even STARTS being used on large commercial projects.

Point #1 is true because, I have said before and I will say again, image synthesis is not collaging. It is not copy-pasting. It does not composite images in the dataset. It doesn't even save the images. It looks for patterns in the pixels and tries to recreate similar patterns from random or semi-random noise. This is why it often sucks at anatomy without human guidance - it recognizes that the word "hair" usually corresponds to a pattern that usually goes near a pattern that corresponds to a "head", it recognizes that "hands" usually have a certain pattern of repeating light and shadows, but it doesn't understand the intricacies of where those things belong or how many times a pattern might repeat. This is why images of architecture often have impossible geometry - it understands the shapes that these things tend to take; it doesn't understand the logic of what connects to what. People can use it to plagiarize - they can, intentionally or otherwise, force a result that is overfitted to a specific piece of data in the set - but to say that's ALL it does is comparable to the asinine claim that ALL referencing is plagiarism, because SOME people will just straight up trace or recreate a full piece that already exists, sometimes even by accident. (And some people - not all, not even most, but some who claim plagiarism, whether from AI or traditional art, are just...really? Do you really think you are the only person who has ever drawn, say, a pink fairy sitting under a purple luminescent mushroom, gazing at a full moon in the upper left, composed with the 1/3s rule? Do you really?)

And the thing is, I agree that the kind of broad data scrapes that have been used to create most AI models should be reserved solely for scientific curiosity if they're used at all, and I respect anyone who doesn't want to touch image synthesis until that issue is resolved. The only reason it doesn't bother me too much to play with it myself is that...unfortunately, we're all interacting with much worse as we speak. Ever heard the word "spyware?" If you're old enough to know it, notice how you stopped hearing it when Facebook normalized making literally the majority of the internet into spyware?

You can't really use the internet while wholly blocking Google, and their evils are pretty well documented. (Remember when we rolled our eyes at their internal "don't be evil" slogan? And how deeply unsettling it was to then watch them REMOVE that while ramping up aggressive datamining?) Amazon made Alexa to harvest your data to sell you shit more effectively. If you have a smartphone, Google or Apple or both are harvesting your data for all kinds of much more malicious purposes than making pretty pictures. Twitter uses your tweets and browsing patterns to force you to interact with people you will hate because negative emotions hold your attention better than positive ones and they want that sweet sweet advertiser money from your constant engagement; this was the case even long before Elongated Muskrat took over. Spotify Wrapped and knockoffs thereof are ~fun tools~ that...normalize just handing data about some pretty personal things over to anyone who dangles a shiny novelty in front of you made with it. It's used for invasive surveillance and policing, and Facebook's for-profit datamining even ended up being a tool of election interference - had it not been for them we might not be in nearly such a bad state with the rise of global fascism.

Image synthesis is one of the most harmless and even potentially BENEFICIAL things to be created as a result of this disturbing norm.

The fact is, small artists: copyright law may protect you a little, sometimes, but it wasn't made for us (and yes, I say "us", because even if you don't count my partially AI work as art, I do traditional art too, guys). It was made for Disney and their ilk. It is designed to protect corporate interests, not artistic ones. That notwithstanding, the copyright angle is a weak one in the first place - it's easy to argue that, because the process is transformative enough, and the dataset is large enough and abstracted enough from anything it was derived from, AI training on online art would fall under fair use, and it is only individual misuses that would constitute infringement. It's especially easy to argue this when you recognize that, at this point, that's more where the corporate interest lies, and remember who the laws are made for!

Digital privacy, on the other hand? The right to your own data? The right to be forgotten? The need to have regulations on where robots can and cannot crawl, and for what purposes? THAT is a critical conversation that we need to be having here, and if everyone with An Opinion on AI art focused their energy there instead of mostly just misinformed screaming about the sky falling and Art Dying And Society Degrading (which is HORRIFYING to hear from leftists in knowing its history as a fascist talking point), we could probably get some MAJOR good done.

Furthermore, even if someone ruled that AI training doesn't constitute fair use under copyright law, that won't stop big companies from using AI - Disney has PLENTY of frames of animation to feed a model to make something entirely their own. So do most animation studios. I have even been in talks with people trying to work on a 100% public domain AI model - the biggest concern about it is that if we complete and finalize it before the labor side of the issue is being worked around properly, it will EMBOLDEN unethical use in industry by getting rid of the potential legal complications.

So let's talk about the labor side and recognize - this isn't the first time new tech has threatened to make major changes to the way something is done in industry, potentially resulting in workforce downsizing. It won't be the last. Honestly, as a person who's been both machining and doing mixed media art since I was a kid (and sometimes both at the same time), I find it deeply disheartening how many people have not cared about this side of the issue until it was certain art jobs that might get automated...and even more frustrating how people refuse to look to past cases for how the harms of new tech shaking up employment have been mitigated.

What we could and should be fighting for is a government program to compensate and optionally retrain employees who were laid off due to automation (ANY automation, not just in art!!), as well as independent workers who see a drop in income due to increased market saturation. We can do this. We've done it before.

We could and should also be fighting for UBI - this will be harder, but it's more popular now than it ever has been and some places are even TESTING it while the internet watches; it is not nearly as much of a pipe dream as it once was.

What's NOT going to help anyone is devaluing the labor of new automation tech operators - that INCENTIVIZES the corporations to adopt it FASTER where possible, and treat both new and existing employees WORSE. "I could replace you with a robot; you're employed out of the goodness of my heart" is one of the most common justifications for abusing and underpaying employees in relevant positions. Big media companies already rely on crunch at poverty wages; they're only going to get worse about it with AI tech because "oh you're just pushing buttons, what do you mean you can't do that for 20 hours at barely minimum wage, how lazy can you get?" if we continue this line of thinking. However, if we recommend and enable new automation operators - in all industries - to UNIONIZE before their work and thus their mistreatment even starts, it will make the transition a hell of a lot easier on both new and existing workers.

Tl;dr: It's great that we have a lot of people concerned about artists' labor rights and tech transparency now PLEASE LEARN YOUR HISTORY AND DIRECT YOUR ENERGY WHERE IT IS NEEDED INSTEAD OF ASSUMING YOU KNOW EVERYTHING FROM A FEW SENSATIONALIZED ARTICLES I BEG OF YOU

#not art

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spann-stann · 2 years

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Being amongst the most popular science fiction books ever, the Dune saga has been massively influential in future works. But Frank Herbert work is notoriously complex, deep, full of philosophical themes that are explored in full. Multiple readings are required to start to grasp some of the most interesting ideas. The average science fiction writer would or could not go that far into complexity. This means that often some of the themes in Dune, are then simplified and "dumbed down" in other works. Some of these other works being extremely popular themselves, they codified these tropes in a way that makes sometimes difficult to appreciate how well thought were the original. The Butlerian Jihad, which is the revolt against the machines that make that there are no computers in the Dune universe, is the forefather of all Terminator/BSG/40k revolts of the AIs. But in the Jihad, apparently, the AIs didn't revolt against the humans. Instead, it was the humans that decided that the thinking machines, and the way that they were used, was bad for humanity. Details are not explored, but it's strongly hinted that machines were used by humans to oppress other humans and also hindered the development of human potential by taking away the necessity - and therefore the ability - of human beings to learn how to do things and do them better. What's clear is that the Butlerian Jihad is not a catastrophe that falls upon humanity and takes away technology and progress from them, it's instead a powerful revolution that frees humanity from shackles they themselves built and enables them to move into the next stage of their evolution. Isn't that more interesting than "Evil robo toasters kill humans because bad"? Similarly, the apparent lack of technical progress in Dune, which clearly inspired 40k, is definitely not stagnation of progress. Dune's people simply stopped identifying "progress" with the act of creating a better machine and started to focus on how to make and be a better human. As the Butlerian Jihad destroyed computers, they created Mentats. Human beings trained to think in a way that would be able to substitute computers for data analysis and, ultimately, much more powerful than any thinking machine ever existed. Not only that but it's stated by a Mentat in the first book, that even a "normal" human would be able at that point to out-think the AIs of old, hinting that human evolution and mental training has surpassed anything technological. This is again, very clever if you stop thinking about it. Nowadays there are almost 8 billion human brains on Earth, each one of that hundred times more powerful than the more powerful supercomputer, yet we invest enormous resources to research and build these advanced computers. Wouldn't be more sensible to learn how to use our own brains to do these tasks? What if we could "simply" learn to run advanced simulations and protein folding in our brain? The genius of this is also that humans are basically tool-makers and tool-users, so making tools (AI, robots, computers) that would do the work without us would go contrary to our very nature. Building space ships and spice harvesters is fine since machines that do that are more efficient and durable at their task (and/or a better alternative that would render them obsolete hasn't been developed yet), but computers would merely be a lazy solution to something we could do ourselves following that logic. (And IRL it is a proven fact that certain people can do high-mathematics in their head alone, so Mentats are a viable concept with a bit of genetic engineering and additional help - think Sapho juice that helps them focus on analysis and calculation. We know of some autistic people being able to do computer like mathematics, but autism is not a radical departure in how the brain works, it just affect how people focus. It stands to reason that people might actually be trained to think this way.). This difference in the definition of "progress" for people in Dune, resembles a lack of innovation and science. But reading more carefully shows this is clearly not the case. Science is clearly present in the universe and used to understand and learn. In one of the books, we have an example of a physicist describing Paul's prescience from the point of view of quantum mechanics. Also the whole story of the Dune planet is arguably set in motion before the events of the first book, first by the "Imperial Planetologist" Pardot Kynes, a scientist sent to understand the ecology of Arrakis and the mystery of Spice. His original mission was to determine a way to produce Spice elsewhere than Arrakis, but he (and his son Liet Kynes after him) would ultimately turn the nomadic Fremen into a tribe of top-notch biologists instead, who would run a planet-wide network of research laboratories and start a huge process of terraforming on Arrakis. A big part of the narrative of the story is deconstructing the idea of a Messianic Leader. At fist glance, Paul Atreides' story in the first book follows a familiar tale of a scion of a noble dynasty who escapes the downfall of his house only to rise back up and reclaim his rightful throne, topple his family's ancient foes and ascend to greatness as foretold in prophecy. In truth, he gets where he is because of the actions of others (the Bene Gesserit's breeding programs and schemes, his parent's training, the Terraforming vision Kynes has cultivated among the Fremen) and while he does rally the Fremen to his cause by word and deed, causing them to see him as a divine figure, it turns out that releasing a horde of crazed religious fanatics hellbent on spreading the word of their messiah across the galaxy at the blade of a crys-knife is a bad thing. These examples demonstrate that science and research are still very relevant in the Dune universe-- with the difference being that progress would not mean to create a new generation of better machines, but instead to improve the human being itself. And improve them they did. The most prominent examples are the Bene Gesserit, who through controlled evolution and training, would develop literal superpowers like the ability to detect lies, foresee the future, access ancestral memories, and control their internal chemistry to the point of being able to stop ageing and neutralize poisons. At one point a Bene Gesserit is described while neutralizing a poison to use her senses of smell and taste as a chemical lab to identify the substance that was poisoning her. As you can see, this is still very much science, just very different science.

1d4chan’s Dune page, “Simplfied Themes”

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dzthenerd490 · 9 months

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File: Transformers - Energon

SCP#: AFD

Code Name: Energon

Object Class: Thaumiel/ Keter

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-AFD-1 is created by front companies: Star Child Powerhouse; Suzan, Charlie, and Philip's energy service; and many others. Mobile Task Force Hermes-4 "Cargo Hold" is responsible for getting processed SCP-AFD-1 form these companies to wherever in the Foundation they are needed.

Mobile Task Force Poseidon-4 "Rock Candy" is in charge of finding natural deposits of SCP-AFD-1 on earth and protection Foundation staff in charge of harvesting it. They are also in charge of safely disposing any found SCP-AFD-2 deposits as well as safely containing any found SCP-AFD-3 so that they can later be used for weaponry purposes.

Mobile Task Force Hephaestus-1 "Legion Crafters" is in charge of all experimentation, manufacturing, and harvesting of any and all variations of SCP-AFD-4 on both Earth and other planets in our solar system. They do this under the guide and orders of the Department of Technology, Alchemy, Science, Magic, and Warfare. Containment, delivery, discontinuing, and distribution is controlled entirely by this Department. Any requests to testing or utilization of any SCP-AFD-4 variant must be approved Department Director Malcom Wyllt.

Description: SCP-AFD is an extremely powerful fuel source created and used by Species of Interest: Cybertronians. It's a fuel source that is supposedly the blood of their home world/ deity known as Primus, thought weather this is true or not is unknown. SCP-AFD is not only an efficient fuel source but can also be quite unstable and has the potential to appear in variations both naturally and unnaturally.

SCP-AFD-1 is the most natural form of SCP-AFD, it exists in both a raw crystal form and a refined liquid form. When in its raw crystal form it is very explosive and if ever hit with energy or an explosion directly it will burst into a massive explosion. However, when refined into a liquid form it can be used as a power source for not only Cybertronians but also any form of technology. SCP-AFD-1 has a measurement of [data expunged] energy per unit, making it three times more effective of a fuel source than energy produced by Nuclear Reactors. SCP-AFD-1 weather in crystal or liquid from has a glowing blue texture to it.

It's because of SCP-AFD-1, as well as other instances, that has allowed the Foundation and its allies as well as its enemies to not only build but also maintain the advanced technology that exist today. It was even thanks to the development of producing SCP-AFD-1 through renewable resources that the Foundation was able to create Mobile Task Force Apollo-1 "Orion's Belt" in 1947 and allowed it to expand into the massive powerhouse it is today.

SCP-AFD-2 is another natural form of SCP-AFD it is able to not only boost the power of technology and Cybertronians that use it but can also keep it running even after receiving extensive amounts of damage. However, SCP-AFD-2 is extremely hazardous and corruptive turning Cybertronians insane and can make machines into mechanical monsters. Furthermore SCP-AFD-2 can make SCP-AFD-1 drain faster essentially eating it like as if it's a predator eating prey. Why or how this works is entirely unknown.

SCP-AFD-2 is said to be the life blood of the evil counterpart of Primus, Unicron the anti-Cybertronian. Unicron is said to be a being of pure evil, chaos, and death; his one true goal is to fill the universe with his blood making all Cybertronians into evil undead beings like him and all other life extinct. As such, though SCP-AFD-2 is seemingly more effective, and everlasting compared to SCP-AFD-1 it still has the side effects of causing mechanical mutations, it has been deemed extremely hazardous as a result. Instead by order of the O5 Council, found instances of SCP-AFD-2 are to be destroyed in a process known only by the DTASMW. Unfortunately, SCP-AFD-2 can naturally grow from certain volcanoes around the world thus SCP-AFD-2 must constantly be searched for to be destroyed so civilians and hostiles Groups of Interest do not obtain it.

SCP-AFD-3 is a toxic form to all over variants of SCP-AFD. When exposed to SCP-AFD-1, or any fuel source for that matter, it will immediately start to drain it quickly and eventually leave nothing left. SCP-AFD-3 is also able to cause metal alloys to rush and wither much faster than they normally would otherwise. This makes SCP-AFD-3 is highly hazardous and dangerous to synthetic and cybernetic entities like AFA units, A.I., and Cybertronians.

Thankfully SCP-AFD-3 is extremely rare to find, only found in large deposits of SCP-AFD-1 and SCP-AFD-2. Furthermore, the DTASMW have found that SCP-AFD-3 can be used in anti-Mekhanite weapons, more specifically explosives. Obviously, this also means that they are effective against Group of Interest: The Decepticons. But because of its obvious hazards it must be used with caution as to not cause a misfire toward allied Groups of Interest such as, The Autobots, Church of Maxwellism, and Eight Wings of Mekhane.

SCP-AFD-4 is a collection of artificial variants of SCP-AFD that are either need to be synthesized to exist or are so rare that they can only be synthesized to become common.

SCP-AFD-4.1, also known as Red Energon, is actually a naturally occurring form of SCP-AFD in both crystal and liquid form but as stated earlier it's so very rare that it's almost impossible to find. In order for it to exist commonly within the Foundation it must be synthesized which has been proven possible thanks to the DTASMW. Top researchers of DTASMW found that SCP-AFD-4.1 can be created by introducing SCP-AFD-1 particles into the atmosphere of Jupiter, they will eventually grow into clods of SCP-AFD-4.1. These clods can easily be harvested by SEHAECD-41 "Jellyfish" which are the same space drones used to introduce the SCP-AFD-1 particles, to start the self-cultivation process. Currently SCP-AFD-4.1 is used as a fuel source for Foundation super computers, machines and engines that requires massive amounts of power, power suits used by MTF Tau-5, and as emergency reserves for Group of Interest: The Autobots.

SCP-AFD-4.2, also known as Green Energon, is an artificial version of SCP-AFD-1 that exist only in liquid form with a glowing green texture. SCP-AFD-4.2 is created by via an extremely complex chemical equation known only by the most trusted units of MTF Hephaestus-1. Not only is SCP-AFD-4.2 easy to synthesize but it can also increase the power of technology and the strength of Cybertronians. However, it has the side effect of becoming addictive to Cybertronians and when used to fuel technology it can easily cause said technology to overload even if only a small portion of SCP-AFD-4.2 is used. As such production of SCP-AFD-4.2 has been discontinued. Only in extremely desperate X Class scenarios will SCP-AFD-4.2 production be approved again.

SCP-AFD-4.3, also known as Mana, created by spreading SCP-AFD-1 particles over the surface of mars. Originally an experiment to create an instance similar to SCP-AFD-4.1; instead, the end result was much more promising. SCP-AFD-4.3 strangely forms naturally in liquid form in underground pockets of the crust in Mars. Why or how this is possible is unknown. It was originally thought to be extremely unstable, unable to be utilized as a fuel source, and therefore useless. However, Dr. Alvik risked his life to see if SCP-AFD-4.3 could be utilized differently and surprisingly after SCP-AFD-4.3 is injected into humans it gives them the ability to produce magical energy.

Quite similar to SCP-ADK-3 it is able to allow humans to manifest elements, alter their physical characteristics such as strength, speed, and agility, and or allow the user to manipulate small degrees of energy. The more SCP-AFD-4.3 is injected into their bodies the more control they have and the longer it lasts. SCP-AFD-4.3 is actually the sole reason as to why Mobile Task Force Hecate-A "Real Magic" was established in 1995, After its predecessor Mobile Task Force Delta-3 "Solomon's Hands" was disbanded. Without SCP-AFD-4.3 MTF Hecate-A would not be able to function and thrive the way it does today. As such the O5 Council has approved to have the DTASMW to have full rights and authority over the harvesting of SCP-AFD-4.3 on mars and its deployment to MTF recon bases that house MTF Hecate-A units.

SCP-AFD-4.4, Also known as Spectral Energon, Created by SCP-AFD-1 particles onto the rings of Saturn. Another experiment to see if what kind of Energon can be produced in a different environment, which unfortunately ended in failure. SCP-AFD-4.4 is highly unstable in both crystal form and liquid form when introduced to technology it will cause said technology to overload in the best-case scenario, in the worst-case scenario it will shift into another dimension leading to unpredictable and disastrous effects. When a Cybertronian or any other synthetic life form like A.I. or AFA's use SCP-AFD-4.4 they will become equivalent to a Reality Hopper. They will start jumping into different realities, in different times, and into our reality via different dimensions. Thus, SCP-AFD-4.4 has been deemed extremely volatile and its production has been discontinued.

SCP-AFD-4.5, Also known as Yellow Energon, Created by SCP-AFD-1 particles onto the atmosphere of Saturn. Has a glowing yellow texture but only exists in crystal form which surprisingly is not an issue as it can fuse with technology and synthetic life and becomes fuel extremely easily. When used on technology SCP-AFD-4.5 is no different to SCP-AFD-1 but when used on Cybertronians as well as other synthetic life, it gives them the ability to manifest hard light contractions such as tools and weapons. These tools and/ or weapons are typically limited to who is given the SCP-AFD-4.5 but when they receive excessive SCP-AFD-4.5 their abilities with it become only limited to their imagination. However, for obvious reasons SCP-AFD-4.5 can be dangerous if found by hostile Mekhanite or if it lands in the hands of Group of Interest: the Decepticons. Though it is still cultivated and harvested heavily it is used sparingly and guarded by MTF Hephaestus-1 tightly.

SCP-AFD-4.6, Also known as Upgrade-E, Created by SCP-AFD-1 particles onto the atmosphere of Uranus. Unlike other variations of SCP-AFD-4, SCP-AFD-4.6 takes much longer to cultivate regardless of what is done and therefore is extremely rare. SCP-AFD-4.6 has a prism like reflective texture giving it a rainbow-like shine to both its crystal and liquid form. Surprisingly neither form is more unstable than the other and both can withstand massive amounts of shock, energy, and explosive force without the risk of damage or combustion. Furthermore SCP-AFD-4.6 has the anomalous ability to repair and even upgrade whatever machine it fuels, but at the cost of draining twice as fast as SCP-AFD-1. SCP-AFD-4.6 is extremely useful to Cybertronians and other synthetic life, even though the upgrades for them are temporary, it still gives a massive advantage in completing tasks and fighting in combat. As such, most if not all SCP-AFD-4.6 produced is given to our allies GoI: the Autobots

SCP-AFD-4.7, Also known as Elixualite, created by the DTASMW via having large amounts of SCP-AFD-1 an artificial spatial chamber synthesizing the gravitational pressure of a blackhole. A strong and durable metal able to generate its own power source and could possibly be programmed to manipulate the energy of said power source in different ways. Unfortunately, is extremely difficult to forge or and it takes [data expunged] kilograms of SCP-AFD-1 to create a single gram of SCP-AFD4.7. Furthermore, it takes a month to accumulate the power needed to even start the process. As of 2023 the Foundation has only accomplished in creating [data expunged] Kilograms of SCP-AFD-4.7. A request from DTASMW was sent to the O5 Council have the slowly growing amounts of SCP-AFD-4.7 forged into a Thamiuel Class Anomaly to be utilized by the Foundation, the request was quickly denied. SCP-AFD-4.7 is still being manufactured but is not utilized for anything and is instead heavily guarded at Site-[data expunged].

SCP-AFD-4.8, Also known as Possession Steel, created by the DTASMW via having large amounts of SCP-AFD-2 an artificial spatial chamber synthesizing the gravitational pressure of a blackhole. Though the manufacturing process is similar to SCP-AFD-4.7, the result is vastly different due to the amount produced being equivalent to the amount of SCP-AFD-2 that was started with. The resulting material much stronger and has a more powerful energy output than SCP-AFD-4.7 however the material also the ability to possess organic and synthetic life with the insatiable desire to spread death and destruction over time. Because of this, production has been discontinued in due to its hazardous nature.

SCP-AFD-4.9 Also known as Pink Energon, created by the DTASMW via having large amounts of SCP-AFD-2 an artificial spatial chamber synthesizing direct exposure to solar radiation from the sun. Extremely unpredictable in turning random organic, non-organic, and even non-metalic objects and materials into artificial Cybertronians. Has been deemed a possible species overpopulation hazard and thus has been discontinued of production.

Currently no other experiments to create further instances of SCP-AFD-4.9 have been approved or planned by the DTASMW.

SCP-AFD was actually discovered in [data expunged] by the [data expunged], [data expunged], and the Illuminati, all of which are predecessors of both the SCP Foundation and the Global Occult Coalition. It is believed that SCP-AFD variants have existed and have grown on earth since [data expunged] B.C.E. and possibly even during the [data expunged] era. It was thanks to SCP-AFD that the Foundation as well as its future allies of the ACPA were not only created but thrive the way they do. It's also because of SCP-AFD that the Foundation has decided to be less restrictive and actually allow anomalies that could benefit the Foundation to do so.

"SCP-AFD was honestly one of those god sends anomalies that we are so lucky to have in our possession because if it fell into someone else hands it most certainly would spell doom or domination over humanity. Still thought, there are those that argue because of SCP-AFD the Foundation both started off and has recently been growing too powerful. More specifically the DTASMW those guys hold complete capital over all our weapons, resources, experiments, and have even created magic, like actual magic thanks to this stuff! I am grateful but I don't blame those who are getting concerned. I think Dr. Zeek might be right, if we keep growing in power, what if we end up being the next big threat... then who will be strong enough to stop us?" -MTF High Commander Parker

SCP: Horror Movie Files Hub

#DZtheNerd #SCP: Horror Movie Files #SCP Foundation #scp fanfiction #scp au #scp mtf #scp mobile task force #transfromers #transformers autobots #transformers decepticons #transformers energon

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daughter-of-sapph0 · 1 year

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yes, blindly trusting scientists is bad. you shouldn't just believe anything someone says without questioning it. the point of science is to question everything. and scientists are humans who make mistakes sometimes. that's why science is always changing. we're always learning more about how the universe works, and our old theories are replaced with new theories.

but blindly believing scientists is just as bad as blindly ignoring them. infact, blindly ignoring them can actually be worse, and even detrimental to you and everyone around you.

like, I absolutely hate this new trend of people (particularly the annoying cunts on twitter) going full "I refuse to accept science. all scientists are paid off by the government! nasa is lying to you! the earth is flat and bread is mind control!"

refusing to accept anything an expert says on a certain topic is actually more harmful than believing them without question.

let me give you an example. Bob is a scientist. specifically, he's a botanist. he has studied plants for over twenty years. he has multiple phds. he, along with his group of other botanist friends, perform a rigorous study on whether or not fire kills plants. it should be obvious that fire kills plants. but you can't be sure unless you test it. so Bob and his team set fire to 70 different kinds of plants. and all of them died. they come to the conclusion that fire might be significantly harmful to plants. right now, you have three options. believe them, disbelieve them, or do nothing. if you believe them, you will not burning your plants. if you do nothing, then (I hope) you will still not burn your plants. because no normal person burns their plants and expects them to survive. but if you blindly question every single scientist on every single subject and do the exact opposite of what they say, then you'd take a blowtorch to your fields except a bountiful harvest. and you'll look like a fucking idiot when you end up with thirty acres of ash and zero tomatoes.

I'm not saying to blindly believe scientists. that's absolutely not at all what I'm saying.

I'm saying that if you dedicate your entire life to being a contrarian who thinks you know more about a subject than the people who have studied it for decades, then you're gonna end up looking like an idiot.

if you wanna be an idiot, that's fine. just don't be upset when no one wants to take you seriously.

if you go up to gender studies scientists who have studied intersex people, gender dysphoria, queer history, and transgender hormonal replacement therapy for basically their entire lives, and you tell them "uh, stupid liberals, there's only two genders. penis and vagina! it's basic biology", you're gonna get laughed at.

if you go up to astrophysicists who have studied rocket science, gravity, the earth, space, and physics for basically their entire lives and yell at them saying "the earth is flat! nasa is lying to you! there's a giant ice wall where Antarctica should be!", you're going to have tomatos thrown at you.

if you go up to geologists who have studied carbon dating, fossils, continental drift, cave systems, and the earth's crust for basically their entire lives, and you say "uh, dinosaurs aren't real. God put them there to test your faith! the earth is only two thousand and twenty two years old, because that's when Jesus was born", you're gonna be hit in the head with a rock.

I guarantee that you do not know more than the people who have dedicated their entire lives to knowledge.

again, this isn't to say that you should blindly believe all scientists ever. some scientists only have their own interests in mind when publishing data. some scientists perform faulty experiments, and it's your responsibility to call them out on that. some scientists aren't even scientists, and are just scammers in a lab coat.

but if you are in a situation where the data and experiment and the team of scientists are supported by other evidence and peer reviewed and accepted by basically the entire rest of the world, it's much better to listen to them, rather than trying to "disprove" or "debunk" them with the same credibility as a flat earth youtube channel.

blindly disagreeing with science is bad.

refusing to accept new knowledge is bad.

refusing to change your mind ever is bad.

you go your entire life without trying to better yourself or grow or change, and all you do is get in arguments with everyone all the time, and you think you're the only person who's right about anything... and then you wonder why no one likes you, you have no friends, the only reason you have a bunch of stupid fans is because you're rich.

#dostxt #yes #this post is about elon musk #i hope he dies

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beardedmrbean · 2 years

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SEOUL, Sept. 14 (UPI) -- South Korea has fined U.S. tech giants Meta and Google a combined $71.8 million for collecting user information without consent and using it for customized advertisements, regulators announced Wednesday.

The country's Personal Information Protection Commission hit Google with a $49.7 million fine and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, $22.1 million.

The penalties are the highest ever by South Korea for violations of data protection laws, the regulatory watchdog said in a statement.

The commission said that Google and Meta did not clearly inform users or obtain their consent to collect and analyze personal online usage data, which was then utilized to create customized advertisements.

RELATEDFacebook to shut down gaming app in October

According to the watchdog, more than 82% of Google users and 98% of Meta users in South Korea have had their browsing and purchasing data from third-party sites harvested by the companies without their knowledge.

Yoon Jong-in, chairman of the PIPC, said that the accumulated data represents "a risk of serious infringement of individual privacy."

The regulators also ordered Google and Meta to clearly inform users when their information is being collected and used and to obtain their consent in a way that enables them to maintain their right to privacy.

RELATEDGoogle, Amazon employees protest $1.2 billion deal with Israel

Both companies disagreed with Wednesday's ruling.

"While we respect the PIPC's decision, we are confident that we work with our clients in a legally compliant way that meets the processes required by local regulations," a Meta spokesman said in a statement emailed to UPI.

"As such, we do not agree with the PIPC's decision, and will be open to all options including seeking a ruling from the court."

RELATEDFacebook gives info on Myanmar war crimes, genocide, U.N. investigators say

Google expressed "deep regrets" after the announcement and said it would continue to communicate with the commission.

Wednesday's announcement is not the first time South Korean regulators have tangled with U.S. tech powerhouses. Last September, the country's antitrust watchdog fined Google nearly $180 million for abusing its dominance in the mobile operating systems and app markets.

South Korean legislators also passed a groundbreaking law last year that prevents Google and Apple from forcing mobile developers to use their proprietary payment channels for in-app purchases.

#nunyas news

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nicklloydnow · 9 months

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“Kennedy crowed to me about his horseshoe coalition gathered round a campaign he views as fundamentally populist. And it’s quite a band he has put together: crunchy Whole Foods–shopping anti-vaxxers, paunchy architects of hard-right authoritarianism looking to boost a chaos agent, Nader-Stein third-party perma-gremlins, some Kennedy-family superfans, and rich tech bros seeking a lone wolf to legitimize them. Their convening can give the impression of weightiness, but if you so much as blew on them, the alliance would shatter into a million pieces. The only thing that seems to bind them is Kennedy, the current embodiment of a warped fantasy of marginalization and martyrdom that has become ever more appealing — and thus politically significant — in an age of disinformation and distrust in government and institutions.

That’s not to say Kennedy’s campaign is a joke. He is both an addled conspiracy theorist and an undeniable manifestation of our post-pandemic politics. He is an aging but handsome scion of America’s most storied political family, facing off against an incumbent who many in his own party worry is too old and too unpopular to win a second term. Far from an exile, he is an extremely well-connected person with unparalleled access to the centers of influence in New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., who either has no idea what kind of fire he’s playing with, or does and is therefore an arsonist.

He is running a surprisingly potent campaign that, thanks to the lurid dynamics of social media and the boosts he is receiving from some of the wealthiest, most listened-to people in America, stands to grow even more disruptive, his deep thoughts on Rogan’s podcast translating into overflow crowds at his rallies. Lesser threats than Kennedy have played spoilers in elections before, and if he succeeds in helping burn us all to the ground, it will not be because he is an outsider, as he claims, but because of a political and media culture that has protected and encouraged and fawned over him his whole life — handing a perpetual problem child, now 69 and desperate for attention, accelerant and matches.

(…)

His vaccine beliefs hooked him up with a broader world of conspiracy theorizing. In 2006, Kennedy wrote a lengthy story, again for Rolling Stone, claiming the Republican Party had “mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” stealing the election in Ohio via Diebold voting machines — a specious claim that was seductive to Democrats who simply could not believe George W. Bush had won his reelection bid against John Kerry. Kennedy’s doubts in electoral results have persisted, and he recently equivocated to the Washington Post’s Michael Scherer about the 2020 election, saying, “I don’t know. I think that Biden won.”

Kennedy has also come to believe many other things that run the gamut from unproven to ludicrous to dangerously irresponsible. They begin with his conviction that the CIA played a role in the murders of both his uncle and his father and that Bobby Sr. was killed not by Sirhan Sirhan but by a security guard assigned to protect him; he actively campaigned for Sirhan’s release from prison against the wishes of most of the Kennedy family, including his mother.

(…)

Kennedy has also suggested that 5G high-speed-internet towers are being used to “harvest our data and control our behavior”; posited a link between mass shootings and antidepressant use; told Rogan that Wi-Fi pierces “the blood-brain barrier,” causing “leaky brain”; and claimed the presence of atrazine in the water supply has contributed to depression and gender dysphoria among boys since atrazine is known to clinically castrate frogs when dumped into their tanks.

Again: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been polling as high as 20 percent.

(…)

But he does not really emphasize reducing costs and making medicine and health-care treatments more broadly available to more people. If this were important to him, he would not have allowed Rogan to pit him against Dr. Peter Hotez, the Texas physician-scientist making open-source, patent-free vaccines available to poor populations around the world, undercutting the extortionate pharma companies. Kennedy’s fight is about vilifying lifesaving medical treatments in favor of others that he has decided, based on inscrutable metrics of his own, are more holistic.

(…)

American Values is also a laundering of a lot of dirty Kennedy linen. There is but one mention of Chappaquiddick and lots of florid encomiums about how devoted everyone was to one another with little mention of the famously chronic infidelity that ran rampant in the family. He lauds ancient Grandma Rose for her “curiosity about people of all backgrounds,” including “fishermen, actors, cabbies, political leaders, bus drivers, tourists, movie stars, heads of state, strangers in elevators,” a list that suggests that the full and dazzling range of humanity may fall into three categories: famous people, people who transport them to places, and others they may meet by chance on Cape Cod.

(…)

He is leaning hard into his family in this contest; his logo even borrows the iconography of his father’s 1968 campaign. It makes it all the more awkward that almost no members of the Kennedy family are supporting him. Many have already publicly endorsed Biden, who employs at least three Kennedys in his administration. Kennedy’s sister, the filmmaker Rory Kennedy, told CNN, “Due to a wide range of Bobby’s positions, I’m supporting President Biden.” On the day Kennedy filed his paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, his cousin Bobby Shriver tweeted that it was “a good day” to remind everyone he had been an early supporter of Biden in the 2016 primary.

(…)

Kennedy and his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the best friend of his sister Kerry, announced their separation in 2010. In 2012, Mary hanged herself in an outbuilding of their home in Mount Kisco. More than a year later, the New York Post published excerpts of a diary from earlier in his marriage in which he kept an account of the 16 women he’d had sex with that year. In 2014, he married Hines.

One of the keys to Kennedy’s appeal with a certain segment of the population is his view of himself as an outcast and victim. When his inaugural campaign speech went long, he joked with the crowd, “This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years.”

(…)

Being shunned in any way for ideas that, when it comes to vaccines, are not just about individual choice but about our collective responsibility is perhaps anathema to people raised to assume their voices would be heard and understood as legitimate. Public-health directives during COVID were crude and sometimes wrong — messaging on masking changed repeatedly, masking outdoors now seems silly, the school closures lasted longer than they should have — but the objections made by people like Kennedy were not rooted in special advance scientific knowledge. Rather, they stemmed from the fury of normally powerful people affronted by the argument that their individual impulses put them on the wrong side of a moral question of communal engagement and compassion. It is a dynamic many managed to reframe as their willingness to stand in patriotic challenge to weak-minded, compliant, vaccinated sheep. And it is the type of environment in which men born with immense wealth and power — the kind who casually mention that governors have called and offered them Senate seats that they have turned down — can recast themselves as martyred heroes.

(…)

But of course he’s a poser. This entire campaign is a pose, as is his outsider stance. He is a Kennedy. He is the fifth member of his family to run for president. His sister Kerry was married to the man who would become the governor of New York, whose brother was a television journalist; his cousin Maria was married to the governor of California, who also happened to be a movie star. His grandfather owned a movie studio. He has written, in American Values, of attending the 1960 Democratic convention at which his uncle was nominated; he was 6, and his family stayed at the home of Marion Davies, the actress and the mistress of his grandfather’s good friend William Randolph Hearst. At that convention, Frank Sinatra hosted cocktail parties celebrating his family. Kennedy’s own wife is a star whom he met through another television star, his friend Larry David, who recently offered the Times this classic clarification about his relationship with the candidate: “Yes love and support, but I’m not ‘supporting’ him.”

Over lunch in New Hampshire, I asked Kennedy how his conversation with Republican New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu had gone following his address to the state legislature; Kennedy told me, “It was nice. I knew his father” — who was also governor. It can seem as if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knows the father of every powerful person in America. Perhaps more important, they knew his father and his uncles and his grandfathers.

So he gets traction where no one else would. His relationship with the political media, which has published him, written about him, and seen him as a full and flawed and interesting human, has always been guided by his core identity as an insider, a member of the family that this country was taught to love above all others and to pity in their many public tragedies. As a journalist who has been told for decades that my empathy for the female candidates I often cover is probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification, let me just tell you that you should never stand between a white male political journalist over the age of 40 and his feelings about the Kennedys.

I was a young person in journalism in New York at the turn of the millennium when a lot of people I worked for and with were Kennedy’s dining companions, buddies, and neighbors. Peter Kaplan (another of my former bosses), then editor of the New York Observer, had been his roommate at Harvard and was one of his best friends. Kennedy and his cousin John Jr. — who ran the magazine George — were big handsome puppies who frolicked among a generation of political junkies who had grown up worshipping their dads and then wound up at the same schools, jobs, and parties as the sons. I saw this at Talk and the Observer and Salon; it was true at The New Yorker and the New York Times and The New Republic and The Atlantic and the places that published Kennedy from the 1970s on, providing him the mainstream credentials he cited when I asked him about his preparation for the presidency. For what it’s worth, in those same years, I was often asked to cover Trump, then a local celebrity and bargain-basement version of a Kennedy himself, an easy call to get a quote to fill a column, with every mention making his name more recognizable, his words more legitimate. How do we think these guys got here?

(…)

If he can have that effect on me, what must his draw be for those who have not spent hours reading about thimerosal and AZT and Diebold machines just double-checking that all this stuff he says with such assuredness is, indeed, nonsense? Imagine how strong it could be for millions of scared Americans who look at him and see shadows of people they’ve lost, of men the country has lost.

If he were your uncle, you would likely consider that he is fighting some serious psychological headwinds. His own uncle was assassinated when Bobby was 9. He was pulled from school at 14 and flown to the deathbed of his father, also assassinated. His cousin drove a plane into the sea on the way to Bobby’s sister’s wedding. One brother died in a skiing accident, another of a drug overdose. His wife died by suicide. All this in a family in which his grandfather’s dictum was “There will be no crying in this house.”

(…)

And it’s not benign. Because while, no, he is certainly not likely to win the Democratic nomination or ever become president, he could do well in a rogue New Hampshire primary in which Biden is declining to participate, and his performance in that state could trigger further distrust in our elections and throw more fuel on the legitimacy crisis that is raging across this democracy — a crisis that is dangerous, insurrectionist, violent, and terrifying. This campaign will mean his views gain a broader audience, and that too is terrifying when it comes to the erosion of the public’s understanding of disease, science, and public-health measures.

And then there is the bracing reality that, here in Trump’s America, another clearly damaged man, a man whose own close-knit family has waved red flags about his fitness for office, is getting this far in the anti-Trump party.

(…)

Not so distant from this performance of retro white machismo is the fact that at least some of the blame for this wretched state of affairs lies with Biden and the Democratic Party. When elected, Biden promised to be a bridge president: to formulate, alongside the equally senescent leadership of his party, a succession plan of some sort. But these aging leaders have not done that, so here we are with some of the anti-Biden energies among Democratic voters getting directed toward a man who looks like the saviors of old, a glitchy hologram of fabled politicians who once represented youth and hope.

He never, ever, ever should have been here. In this position. In these pages, in this context. He should never have been a politician or a public figure at all. He should have been a veterinarian.

In American Values, amid all his bizarre hagiography of his family members and rehashing of the Bay of Pigs, is story after story after story of pure delight and joy and love and fulfillment: There are the falcons and hawks and pigeons, the Komodo dragons, the matricidal coati, a red-tailed hawk named Morgan. There’s a California sea lion, Sandy, who “took up residence in our swimming pool” and “ate mackerel by the barrel, devouring everything but the eyeballs, which we found scattered like marbles across the pool, patio and lawn.” One day, after causing a traffic jam on the Georgetown Pike, Sandy, like the dragons, winds up at the National Zoo. And how about Carruthers, the 16-pound leopard tortoise brought back from Africa under the diplomatic protection of his uncle Sargent Shriver in Ethel Kennedy’s Gucci suitcase? Carruthers spent 21 years roaming the house at Hickory Hill in Virginia alongside “ten horses, eleven dogs, a donkey, two goats, pigs … a 4-H cow, chickens, pheasants, ducks, geese, forty closely related rabbits” and Hungarian homing pigeons, a nocturnal honey bear who “slept away his days in the playroom crawl space,” and a jill ferret who “fed her pups under the kitchen stove.”

(…)

But this country, with its political system built around white patriarchal ideals of who powerful men are supposed to be, and its very limited view of what other kinds of power might look like, has created too irresistible an opportunity for someone with a famous name, a tremendous ego, and a persecution complex. So here we are, eight years after Trump descended the elevator in Trump Tower, listening to a man talking about ivermectin and the fascism of Fauci and the castration of frogs and watching him run riot in a Democratic primary.”

“I’ve been doing my best to ignore the farcical presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His noxious views on vaccines, the origin of AIDS, the alleged dangers of wi-fi and other forms of junk science deserve no wide hearing. Polls showing he’s favored by 20 percent of likely Democratic voters over President Biden are almost as laughable as Kennedy’s views. It’s early; he’s got iconic American name recognition; and there’s almost always an appetite, among Democrats anyway, for anybody but the incumbent. His lies have been thoroughly debunked by Judd Legum at Popular Info, Michael Scherer in The Washington Post, Naomi Klein in The Guardian, and Brandy Zadrozny on NBC News.

But I’ve come to believe I have a responsibility to write about Kennedy because of my own shameful role in sending his toxic vaccine views into public discourse: I was the Salon editor, in partnership with Rolling Stone, who 18 years ago published his mendacious, error-ridden piece on how thimerosal in childhood vaccines supposedly led to a rise in autism, and how public health officials covered it up. From the day “Deadly Immunity” went up on Salon.com, we were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data. Some of his sources turned out to be known crackpots.

(…)

Now, Kennedy insists, as the The New York Times paraphrases him, that “Salon caved to pressure from government regulators and the pharmaceutical industry.” He repeated the false claim in his three-hour podcast conversation with Joe Rogan, another conspiracy loon, rehashing the debunked claims of “Deadly Immunity” and claiming that Salon pulled the piece after “pressure from the pharmaceutical industry.”

That’s just another lie. We caved to pressure from the incontrovertible truth and our journalistic consciences.

(…)

The pushback began almost immediately. I’ve already linked to our corrections, which with hindsight seem not to correct what were revealed to be the worst errors. Seth Mnookin, who happened to also write for Salon occasionally, was one of the most dogged debunkers, and his 2011 book The Panic Virus, which features a chapter on Kennedy and the Salon/Rolling Stone mess, ultimately helped convince us to retract the piece entirely.

Mnookin showed, among other things, how Kennedy misrepresented what went on at a 2000 meeting on vaccine safety convened by the Centers for Disease Control, at the Simpsonwood conference center outside Atlanta, where the claims of a link between Thimerosol and autism were discussed. Mnookin wrote, “Kennedy relied on the 286-page transcript of the Simpsonwood meeting to corroborate his allegations—and wherever the transcript diverged from the story he wanted to tell, he simply cut and pasted until things came out right.”

(…)

I tell this story, incompletely and imperfectly given the 18 intervening years, because Kennedy continues to peddle the lies he published and claim that dark forces cowed us and forced us to retract his story. The odious Joe Rogan has been going after vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez on Twitter, after Hotez tweeted that the Kennedy interview was “awful,” “absurd,” and promoting “nonsense.” He offered Hotez “$100,000.00 to the charity of your choice if you’re willing to debate [Kennedy] on my show with no time limit.” Twitter troll and site owner Elon Musk has been amplifying Rogan and Kennedy and going after Hotez. On Sunday a Q-Anon believer came to Hotez’s Houston home demanding that he debate Kennedy.

(…)

I regret the role I played in spreading Kennedy’s anti-vaccine propaganda, and however it helped foment the harassment of Hotez. The vaccine-autism lie isn’t the only big lie Kennedy’s told. But it’s the only one I can debunk personally.”

“I'd prefer to explore what a noted misogynist who reportedly tormented his second wife — and then vilified after she killed herself — says about the 2024 election.

Here was actor Billy Baldwin on Twitter in April, posting a photo of RFK Jr. and his late wife Mary — who, he said, spent many a time crying on his shoulder about her terrible husband:

'If Bobby were half a man she would still be alive today. It will all come out. His campaign will be over in weeks. If these walls could talk.'

Mary, according to those who knew her well, was in agony over RFK Jr.'s ceaseless womanizing. He kept sex diaries, which Mary discovered and gave to a trusted friend. Should anything happen to her, the world might know who we're really dealing with.

In the back of each diary were ledgers listing all the women Bobby had been with — many friends of Mary's or women in their social circle — numbered from one to ten, indicating, like a teenage boy, how far each sexual encounter had gone.

(…)

After Mary's death, Bobby sanctioned friends, relatives and at least one sympathetic Kennedy historian to tell his version of events: Mary was a drunk, a hysteric, a crazy woman. It was a miracle he even survived the marriage.

The greatest smear job came via a Newsweek cover story, which branded Mary's suicide part of the Kennedy Curse — oh, the terrible things that just keep happening to this family!

Somehow, the author got access to a sealed 60-page affidavit in which Bobby accused Mary of having a personality disorder, of beating him in front of their son, of drunkenly face-planting into her dinner.

Mary's siblings called the report 'scurrilous' and 'full of lies.'

(…)

Nonetheless, Bobby went to court to fight Mary's siblings, who hated him, for her remains.

Once he won, he made a big show of having Mary buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts, the media getting unobstructed photos of Mary's casket.

Not two months later, without the required permits, Kennedy secretly had Mary's coffin exhumed from her grave and buried alone on the other side of the cemetery, no gravestone.

He didn't tell her siblings. In my opinion, this was his final revenge — if Mary dared to humiliate him by killing herself — because it's all about Bobby Jr., all the time — in life, he would do the same to her in death.

(…)

This is a man who smeared the mother of his four children in the most public way possible, who made her life a misery and who gaslit the nation into thinking he was the victim.

He is, in my opinion — and I'm not alone — not just mentally ill. He's a bad man.

The Kennedys have this generational sickness, their abhorrent treatment of women.

Why aren't we talking about it?

How is it that no one's drawing parallels to Bobby's Uncle Ted, the last famous Democrat to challenge an incumbent Democratic president — you know, the uncle who left a young campaign aide named Mary Jo Kopechne to die alone after driving off a bridge at Chappaquiddick?

The party line on Ted was always that he was terrible to women in his personal life but great at legislating for us.

Tell that to the women he destroyed, his wife Joan among them, painting her as the family drunk, the political liability. Sound familiar?

Women, to Kennedy men, are scapegoats.”

“By now, you undoubtedly know presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a press dinner last Tuesday night that COVID-19 was an “ethnically targeted bio weapon” designed by the Chinese government to be deadly for Caucasians and Blacks, but spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.

(…)

The stunning moment was surreal and incomprehensible. But I’ve seen the video and heard the audio, so I know it’s true.

“COVID 19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” said Kennedy. “The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Sitting next to Kennedy at that moment was an Ashkenazi Jew, New York Post reporter Jon Levine. Check out his baffled expression on the video.

Contrary to Bobby’s hair-brained theory, I got the coronavirus. My son, brother, sister-in-law, aunt, uncle, nephews, niece, cousins and friends also got COVID. My neurologist’s medical partner got COVID and died. Ashkenazi Jews all.

Bobby knows who I am. My wife, Liz, and I donated to his Riverkeeper nonprofit organization and watched him fly falcons at the Hudson River home of then-Gov. George Pataki. Bobby should also know that Frydman is a Jewish name of European ancestry. I’m not Sephardic. I’m fair-haired and light-skinned. That makes me Ashkenazi.

You’d think his campaign manager, former Ohio congressman and Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich, and staff would’ve prepped Bobby about the probability of Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese journalists being in attendance. In fact, there was a Chinese reporter from the Epoch Times at the table.

(…)

But even Klein, a prominent anti-vaxxer and good friend of RFK Jr. who’s advised him on Israel, is reportedly “worried” about Bobby’s kooky COVID comments.

“This is crazy,” Klein was quoted as saying. “It makes no sense that they would do that. I read everything. I was totally against the vaccine…I wanted to convince myself it was correct not to take it. I have never seen anything like this.”

The Anti-Defamation League also weighed in. “The claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”

StopAntisemitism added, “We have no words for this man’s lunacy.””

#kennedy #robert kennedy jr #rfk jr #conspiracy theory #conspiracy theories #anti vaccination #anti vaxxers #antisemitism #misogyny

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