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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Then there's the Three Body Problem series, which goes pretty hard on the 'do not let women have positions of power, don't let your civilization turn into a feminized race of soyboys or you will face complete extermination' angle.

I consider 3BP to be more nuanced than that. Liu quite directly says that humans that rejected their soy/lunar/yin aspect to survive became a different civilization. It's the combination of both soy and chad that makes humanity humanity, even if dooms it on a galactic scale. And even then, there's Yun Tianming, soyboy extraordinaire, who achieves much more than Thomas Wade the gigachad, who is ultimately too lawful stupid, too proud to succeed.

If it weren't for Wade failing, Yun Tianming would've been superfluous. Humanity as a whole didn't listen to him anyway and put in the work to be safe. Sure, Wade was wrong to listen to Ms 'I will never do anything correctly' but at least his instincts and goals were right. He would've made a much better Swordholder, as remarked by the Trisolarans.

To me survival is an unalloyed good. Even if you have everything else, happiness and freedom and prosperity and eudaimonia but you don't survive... then it's still a failure. Those chapters of misery and slaughter of the post-scarcity society and relocation to Australia were haunting. They should've woken up after that. If that didn't make them take things a bit more seriously, then what would? I can't fathom a civilization who thinks 'oh we'll just hide behind Jupiter against an enemy with STAR-BUSTER ATTACKS'. If nothing else, they could just fire 2 or 3 more shots at the gas giants!

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