Thread by @KrisAtLarge

I've written a lot of *incendiary* stuff in the direction of @Tesla but I do genuinely feel sorry for all the programmers and engineers (and mail-room people and janitors and everyone else) who must surely be taking ALL the heat for failing to produce miracles on demand.

~Chara

https://twitter.com/MNateShyamalan/status/1615831675761565712

that's #technology under #capitalism: elitist dorks like @elonmusk or @pmarca or @fchollet make gigantic promises about things they don't grasp. if they understood things better, they'd have to scale down their promises to match the limitations of physical reality.

~Chara

and then a lot of underlings at @Tesla (or @Twitter or @SpaceX or @boringcompany or @neuralink or wherever) have to scurry around and try to make the miracles happen. they're *terrified* of failure because @elonmusk's a wreck of a person, with no impulse control.

~Chara

even *writing* about this stuff...I can feel the fear. you can believe that or not. I don't know how empathy works. do you?

the @GOP, the American #conservative and British #conservatives, say empathy doesn't exist. @Docstockk or @bindelj or @RichardDawkins would laugh.

~Chara

I've had to learn to deal with empathy the *hard* way...the long way round. I think some folks out there know that story better than I do.

it's not just *empathy* that these people say isn't real. it's all emotion, all human feelings. all fake, all chemicals, to them.

~Chara

when I first read #CSLewis's "That Hideous Strength", the academic villains of the piece, the N.I.C.E. people, seemed like bad jokes. people like this didn't really exist? I thought.

but they do. I'm still shocked to see how *on the nose* Lewis was about _that_, anyway.

~Chara

Lewis had a lot of defects but at least he knew that feelings mattered, and he knew the dangers of trying to pretend that they were meaningless.

"The Abolition of Man" might as well be about Great Britain. right now. right this minute. @RichardDawkins's Britain.

~Chara

and the thought *terrifies* me.

this is the fate that I avoided, when I was swatted clear of @Caltech—a carbuncle, a cauldron of Western cultural supremacy and toxicity created by a bunch of eugenicist businessmen and a handful of eugenicist scientists.

~Chara

@Caltech has three famous founders—R. A. Millikan, George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes—a veritable Holy Trinity of physical #science. a physicist, an astronomer, and a chemist. silly academic bigotries meant that a *biologist* wouldn't lead #Caltech until the mid-1990s.

~Chara

(one can be bigoted about things other than race. did you know that, @mtaibbi? did you know that "bigot" can apply to things other than racism or sexism or queerphobia or transphobia? you can be bigoted about cooking methods. just...take some more drugs or something)

~Chara

anyway, #CSLewis may not have knocked me clear of @Caltech, but he gave me a good place to land. I didn't fully understand that at the time. I didn't understand how *appropriate* it was that I should find "That Hideous Strength" in a Caltech dorm library, and read it.

~Chara

the book was a warning. the Earth and humanity really and truly were capable of getting *that bad*. the N.I.C.E. could be any one of ten thousand high-tech companies led by a little pack of high-power nerds of the @JeffDean / @antoniogm sort, people with weird bad ideas.

~Chara

stamp out any concern for another being's emotions and you can do *anything you like* to them, and say "it's for your own good".

#CSLewis, for all his faults, grasped and enunciated the truth in this.

he warned us about it, and then Western civilization *enacted* it.

~Chara

@bindelj and @Docstockk and @HJoyceGender could have staffed Jack Lewis's N.I.C.E.

@GOP politicians, and many of @TheDemocrats, would fit in nicely at the National Institute of Coördinated Experiments. what a nice chunky name, like American Enterprise Institute (@AEI).

~Chara

you know how @MattWalshBlog and @DouthatNYT and @realchrisrufo and every other right-wing blowhard loves to make fun of the LGBTQ+ "alphabet soup"? it's because they live in their own alphabet soup. these people are absolutely *drowning* in abbreviations.

~Chara

that's appropriate, I suppose; @realchrisrufo &c. have an abbreviated knowledge of reality.

~Chara of Pnictogen

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