Dr Malcolm perfectly captured the problem with too much moralizing sci-fi when he whined “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”Because of course they should! “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs*?” The answer is obviously yes, utterly yes, that’s the positive control case to test absolute YESness. You don’t ask people that question to find the answer, you already know the answer, you ask people that question to find out if they’re worth talking to.
*a scaled pseudospecies distinct from feathered “actual dinosaurs”.
The real problem is the wrong people asking the wrong questions, then blaming science for delivering overwhelming experimental evidence of their mistakes. Jurassic Park’s key question wasn’t “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs?”, it was “Should we unleash those awesome dinosaurs on a safari with worse security and fewer staff than the average Apple store?” No, you shouldn’t have done that. The science spectacularly succeeded in delivering a dinosaur miracle, and then specifically didn’t knock them out of the Park because that tourism screw-up’s entirely on capitalism. No scientist was collecting data for “Quantifying how much money we can make from tourism” or “Material testing the flimsiest fences imaginable with a goddamn Tyrannosaurus Rex”.
That’s the Malcolm Fallacy: blaming science for everyone else’s mistakes. You’ll see it in almost every techno-horror.
Should we invent AI? Yes! Should we connect it to military mainframes with nuclear launch authority? No!
Should we research viruses? Yes! Should we override the security computer and physically crack open sealed airtight doors when viral labs go into lockdown? No!
Should we research teleportation? Yes! Should we experiment on ourselves, alone, without even the most elementary laboratory (or even pizza parlor) standards of cleanliness? No!
Almost every sci-fi horror plot is driven by money-grubbing corporations but it’s the researchers who can’t even afford a change of clothes from their “I’m a scientist!” lab coats who take the blame. And now we have hordes of idiots destroying cropfields and resurrecting defeated diseases while CEOs gold-plate profit reports on basic medicine.
I’ve just discovered my new favorite painter, Vittorio Reggianini – those smarter than myself probably already know of him as an Italian painter from the 1800s who made satin look even satiny-er than satin. I just cannot get over how much he loved painting women who were NOT. HAVING. A. MAN’S. SHIT.
But there was one hottie that everyone seemed to like, and I can’t blame them…
It’s what happened to Jews in Germany in 1938 when their passports were declared invalid. That is what is beginning to happen here, now, to Hispanic citizens along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Oh, is it bad to compare the GOP to Nazis? Well, if members of the GOP do not like being compared to Nazis, they should consider not behaving exactly like Nazis.
Hispanic U.S. citizens, some of whom were in the U.S. military, are not being allowed to renew their passports. This is reportedly happening to “hundreds, even thousands” of Latinos, according to a report in the Washington Post. They’re getting letters from the State Department saying it does not believe they are citizens. The government claims their citizenships are fraudulent. “I’ve had probably 20 people who have been sent to the detention center—U.S. citizens,” Jaime Diez, an attorney in Brownsville, told The Washington Post.
The Washington Post also reports on ICE officials coming to citizens’ homes and taking their passports away. This is an escalation from a few months ago, when Americans were detained by ICE officials just for speaking Spanish to one another.
The administration is currently launching an effort to take citizenship from people who they suspect of fraud in obtaining it. Fraud in these cases is exceedingly rare. The last time the government tried to strip people of their citizenship was, according to Columbia Professor Mae Ngai, during The Red Scare of the 1950s. As Ngai remarks, McCarthyism is not typically remembered as a good period in American history.
There is good reason to believe that this could portend still worse things to come for the U.S. Hispanic population, unless people begin to speak out loudly, and fast.
All of the sources linked in the article- and the sources linked in those sources- are working and up to date as of 9/11/2018. None of them are behind paywalls, either.
Here are additional sources:
Cancellation of Jewish Passports Before the Holocaust:
SO in Britain all the swans may belong to the Queen, but lemme tell you about Hamburg:
Hamburg is built around a river, so there’s many many many canals (the 2400+ bridges put Venice and Amsterdam to shame), as well as a fairly sizeable lake (here the smaller section, innit precious):
This means a shittonne of swans
(stay away from the swans) (seriously don’t go sailing on the lake because they WILL chase you). Obvs swans aren’t made for cold weather (p sure they’re all Australian immigrants actually) so Hamburg has an official job position to take care of the issue.
This dude’s name is Olaf Nieß (trying to spell his name on non-German keyboards must be fun):
This guy’s job title is “Schwanenvater”, aka “swan father”, and his job literally consists of getting swans to safety before the winter chill sets in. How does he do this, you wonder? Easy: he goes up to EVERY SINGLE FUCKING SWAN in the city and sticks them in barges. I’m serious:
Look at this dude and his swans
Swans are like Satan’s personal pet and he paddles around with barges full of them like it’s nbd.
I fucking love this guy he’s braver than all of us and deserves some recognition for his absurd line of work.
Mooncustafer 