Zompist Bboard Again

alice wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 3:13 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 9:47 am

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 9:36 am but then Musk has a talent for turning technological gold to shit.

Not to mention a talent for turning technological shit into gold for himself.

I.e. some kind of Musk-flavoured Philosopher's Stone (or Sorcerer's Stone if you're in the USA).

I never got why J. K. Rowling's publisher thought American kids would have any more of a problem with the concept of the philosopher's stone than British kids.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 3:20 pm
I never got why J. K. Rowling's publisher thought American kids would have any more of a problem with the concept of the philosopher's stone than British kids.

"Sounds too much like that smarty-pants book-larnin stuff!"

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 3:20 pmI never got why J. K. Rowling's publisher thought American kids would have any more of a problem with the concept of the philosopher's stone than British kids.

Quite. Aside from her transphobia, that is something that has always bugged me about the Harry Potter books. That and the mechanics of quidditch. Doesn't the golden snitch render the rest of the game rather pointless?

malloc wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 3:33 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 3:20 pmI never got why J. K. Rowling's publisher thought American kids would have any more of a problem with the concept of the philosopher's stone than British kids.

Quite. Aside from her transphobia, that is something that has always bugged me about the Harry Potter books. That and the mechanics of quidditch. Doesn't the golden snitch render the rest of the game rather pointless?

I seem to recall reading a claim just the other day that Quiddich was intended to be wildly unbalanced as satire. (Though satire of what, I don’t quite remember…)

malloc wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 3:33 pm Doesn't the golden snitch render the rest of the game rather pointless?

Not always. Recall the 1994(?) Quidditch World Cup where Ireland beat Bulgaria despite Krum grasping the snitch for Bulgaria.

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 3:37 pm

I seem to recall reading a claim just the other day that Quiddich was intended to be wildly unbalanced as satire. (Though satire of what, I don’t quite remember…)

Cricket?

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 2:46 pm To me space colonization is not to solve humanity's problems today but to mitigate humanity's existential risks on a scale of millennia -- but if we never take the first real steps towards it we will never get anywhere in the first place.

Sure. But what IMHO has become abundantly clear in this discussion is that we first have to get things in order on this planet before we can colonize space.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Dec 07, 2025 6:17 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 2:46 pm To me space colonization is not to solve humanity's problems today but to mitigate humanity's existential risks on a scale of millennia -- but if we never take the first real steps towards it we will never get anywhere in the first place.

Sure. But what IMHO has become abundantly clear in this discussion is that we first have to get things in order on this planet before we can colonize space.

Just because there are problems on Earth right now does not mean that we should put off the very beginnings of the prerequisites of space colonization, as as long as things are not perfect on Earth we will always be putting that off then.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Dec 07, 2025 10:06 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Dec 07, 2025 6:17 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 2:46 pm To me space colonization is not to solve humanity's problems today but to mitigate humanity's existential risks on a scale of millennia -- but if we never take the first real steps towards it we will never get anywhere in the first place.

Sure. But what IMHO has become abundantly clear in this discussion is that we first have to get things in order on this planet before we can colonize space.

Just because there are problems on Earth right now does not mean that we should put off the very beginnings of the prerequisites of space colonization, as as long as things are not perfect on Earth we will always be putting that off then.

Fair. We will never live in a perfect world. But we can't colonize space now, and we have to deal with such issues as climate change or plastic pollution as soon as possible. And while we can wait with space colonization until we have dealt with the latter kind of problems, we can't wait with them until we can achieve space colonization. It seems to me a bit as if you advocate space colonization as a solution to our environmental problems, but I hope I misunderstand, in which case I apologize. We can't go on ruining planet after planet. The well-known slogan There is no Planet B is right: we must get things in order here and now; moving to another planet is not an option in the near future.

malloc wrote: ↑Sat Dec 06, 2025 3:33 pm Doesn't the golden snitch render the rest of the game rather pointless?

The purpose of the snitch is narrative: it lets the protagonist unambiguously win the game, but because it's merely a huge points windfall and not the equivalent of the gun in rock-paper-scissors there's room to write stories like (as mentioned) the Quidditch World Cup game in the fourth book where a team loses despite catching the snitch.* You can see the same sort of design play out in the house points system: Gryffindor is losing, but Dumbledore puts his thumb on the scales in response to the actions of the protagonist and his friend group.

* You're not supposed to think about how the metagame would play out, obviously. If you're the seeker and your team is more than a hundred and fifty points behind, wouldn't your incentive be to run interference on the opposing seeker and buy time for your teammates to bring the score back to the point where your actions can win the game again?

maybe it's a weird pet peeve of mine but... isn't it weird we speak about space colonization? like, there aren't brown people on the moon we can enslave or exterminate and take away their land. we can't exterminate the martians and steal their crops, cause there's no martians *or* martian crops.

and i don't think it's just a word or anything, people routinely imagine establishing a human presence beyond LEO as basically, well, the age of sail... IN SPACE. complete with "colonies" that quickly grow to rival "the metropole", mirroring the relationship between the thirteen colonies and britain. it's a weird kind of parochialism.

I like that probes are sent to distant bodies. i really really do, i literally have that picture of pluto new horizons took printed out on the wall behind it, and i enjoy looking at it from time to time. i should like it if people were sent in voyages beyond LEO again. I will very much like it if (likely when) the chinese land people on the moon again. but we're probably centuries, possibly thousands of years away from a relevant percentage of humanity living anywhere other than earth. and if ensuring the survival of humanity is one's goal, I don't really think space is at all relevant to that goal, not within the next 500 years despite what the richest man in the world, a conman, routinely says.

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 4:10 pm maybe it's a weird pet peeve of mine but... isn't it weird we speak about space colonization? like, there aren't brown people on the moon we can enslave or exterminate and take away their land. we can't exterminate the martians and steal their crops, cause there's no martians *or* martian crops.

and i don't think it's just a word or anything, people routinely imagine establishing a human presence beyond LEO as basically, well, the age of sail... IN SPACE. complete with "colonies" that quickly grow to rival "the metropole", mirroring the relationship between the thirteen colonies and britain. it's a weird kind of parochialism.

Yes and no. You're quite right that a lot of SF is an analogy from Western colonialism, and libertarians think space is like the Wild West, someplace you can claim and exploit without rules. (This does not differ in any interesting way BTW from Spanish/Portuguese colonialism, or Chinese, or Russian.)

On the other hand, what do you want to call them instead? You could say "bases" or "settlements", but does it matter much if there are not, in fact, Martians or Lunatics to take over?

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 4:20 pm

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 4:10 pm maybe it's a weird pet peeve of mine but... isn't it weird we speak about space colonization? like, there aren't brown people on the moon we can enslave or exterminate and take away their land. we can't exterminate the martians and steal their crops, cause there's no martians *or* martian crops.

and i don't think it's just a word or anything, people routinely imagine establishing a human presence beyond LEO as basically, well, the age of sail... IN SPACE. complete with "colonies" that quickly grow to rival "the metropole", mirroring the relationship between the thirteen colonies and britain. it's a weird kind of parochialism.

Yes and no. You're quite right that a lot of SF is an analogy from Western colonialism, and libertarians think space is like the Wild West, someplace you can claim and exploit without rules. (This does not differ in any interesting way BTW from Spanish/Portuguese colonialism, or Chinese, or Russian.)

On the other hand, what do you want to call them instead? You could say "bases" or "settlements", but does it matter much if there are not, in fact, Martians or Lunatics to take over?

On the Wiki there is a whole section of the space colonization article dedicated to anti-colonial criticisms of space colonization... while completely ignoring the fact that to the very best of our knowledge there are no Martians or like for us to enslave, exterminate, or steal land from in the first place.

i'm partial towards words that describe their purpose, as we do with settlements on earth already. a mine, a research station, a town. they're more expressive as well.

i think there are interesting differences between spanish and english colonialism, tho... the english were a lot more genocidal, the spanish a lot more enslaver-ish [writing this, I think i've wrote this here before]. i don't know a lot about the russian colonial expansion towards siberia etcetera in early modernity, but from what i gather it was rather on the enslaver side. the chinese, i wouldn't know tbh.

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 4:56 pm i think there are interesting differences between spanish and english colonialism, tho... the english were a lot more genocidal, the spanish a lot more enslaver-ish [writing this, I think i've wrote this here before]. i don't know a lot about the russian colonial expansion towards siberia etcetera in early modernity, but from what i gather it was rather on the enslaver side. the chinese, i wouldn't know tbh.

Mind you the English (and the Americans) engaged in plenty of slavery; they just happened to import their slaves mostly (but mind you in cases they did keep native populations of places like parts of India in conditions that could be considered unfree labor). Conversely, Spanish colonization of the Caribbean certainly was very genocidal. As for Russian colonial expansion, it definitely had very genocidal aspects to it, considering what the Russians did to the native populations of Siberia and the Caucasus.

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 4:10 pm maybe it's a weird pet peeve of mine but... isn't it weird we speak about space colonization? like, there aren't brown people on the moon we can enslave or exterminate and take away their land. we can't exterminate the martians and steal their crops, cause there's no martians *or* martian crops.

No. It's the use of colonise for conquer that seems perverse, except where the previous inhabitants are exterminated or otherwise made irrelevant. It gets complicated when land use is changed by the activity.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 4:20 pm and libertarians think space is like the Wild West, someplace you can claim and exploit without rules. (This does not differ in any interesting way BTW from Spanish/Portuguese colonialism, or Chinese, or Russian.)

Not so sure about that. Yes, the end results for the colonized people were very similar, but were internal power structures among the colonizers really the same in the Wild West as in your other examples? Sure, there were cattle barons and the like in the Wild West who were kind of like hacienda owners, but they seem to have had less of a monopoly on running things than actual hacienda owners in the Spanish colonies and later the former Spanish colonies. All your non-Wild-West examples seem to have copied the social and power structures of the respective "motherlands" a lot more faithfully than the Wild West did.

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 6:38 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 4:20 pm and libertarians think space is like the Wild West, someplace you can claim and exploit without rules. (This does not differ in any interesting way BTW from Spanish/Portuguese colonialism, or Chinese, or Russian.)

Not so sure about that. Yes, the end results for the colonized people were very similar, but were internal power structures among the colonizers really the same in the Wild West as in your other examples? Sure, there were cattle barons and the like in the Wild West who were kind of like hacienda owners, but they seem to have had less of a monopoly on running things than actual hacienda owners in the Spanish colonies and later the former Spanish colonies. All your non-Wild-West examples seem to have copied the social and power structures of the respective "motherlands" a lot more faithfully than the Wild West did.

I don't get your objection. My point is that colonization always looks the same: Greek, Roman, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese. People move in and settle a land which on our planet almost always belongs to someone else.

Were there interesting internal differences in government and culture? Yes, of course, why would you think there weren't?

The Wild West wasn't very different from settlement of the East (i.e. the areas west of the original 14 colonies. It also wasn't very different from settlement of Canada, or southern Chile & Argentina, or Australia. And sure, you can find differences ("Are you saying the Argentines spoke English?!"), but there's no need to miss the forest looking at the trees.

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 4:10 pm maybe it's a weird pet peeve of mine but... isn't it weird we speak about space colonization? like, there aren't brown people on the moon we can enslave or exterminate and take away their land. we can't exterminate the martians and steal their crops, cause there's no martians *or* martian crops.

In Réunion there was nobody living permanently until a few Malagasy and French people came in 1663. It's still called colonisation.

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Dec 10, 2025 4:10 pm maybe it's a weird pet peeve of mine but... isn't it weird we speak about space colonization? like, there aren't brown people on the moon we can enslave or exterminate and take away their land. we can't exterminate the martians and steal their crops, cause there's no martians *or* martian crops.

I think it's supposed to remind people of the Thirteen Colonies. The connection was repeatedly, often and unsubtly made in Golden Age SF