Pnictogen Horses Profile picture
Mar 30 7 tweets 5 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
one of the most bizarre aspects from the 1990s #technology / #Internet boom was how it somehow managed to convince a whole lot of optimistic and uncritical people in media (and business) that humanity had somehow entered a "post-industrial" age.

(cont'd)
computers and electronic devices are *manufactured items*, requiring a massive industrial base in order to function—and yet somehow it was easy for gullible editorialists and entrepreneurial grifters to talk as though the digital world had somehow *replaced* all that.

(cont'd)
the #programming nerd and #STEM-lord culture that arose seemed especially eager to believe that they'd miraculously done away with the need for mining and factories and skilled industrial labor, merely because they had @arduino and #3Dprinting to play with now.

(cont'd)
the 1990s culture of ungrounded technological optimism has, of course, only gotten worse with time. scientifically and culturally illiterate geekbros like @sama and @VitalikButerin now pollute Western #technology as a direct result of nonsensical "post-industrial" talk.

(cont'd)
computers, these folks think, can simply do *anything*. @sama &c. inhabit an fantastical world of abstractions cut off from material reality‚ because the abstractions of #programming do not need to line up with physical reality. you can *imagine* anything—on a computer.

(cont'd)
and consequently if some simulation of a thing can be made to exist on a computer, the @sama / @VitalikButerin / @elonmusk crowd feel as though its *material* existence is a mere matter of course. they think of rendering images on a computer as "building" actual things.

(cont'd)
if the rendered images show a @SpaceX Martian colony—why, that proves that we'll be living on Mars any day now! after all @elonmusk is a genius, he can do anything! @mtaibbi says so—at least, he used to. (he maybe be keeping some distance, these days.)

~Mona Drafter of Pnictogen

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Pnictogen Horses

Pnictogen Horses Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @PnictogenHorses

Apr 1
so...this is a *thing*. this is a thing that most Americans maybe don't get. I'll tell you who does get this, though: the @elonmusk / @mtaibbi / @GOP set. the American fascist set understand this about Russia: Putin and his fellow autocrats think they're on God's side.

(cont'd)
right-wing Christians have a way of looking at the world that's very powerful and very *old*. they see themselves as the sole vectors of civilization into benighted heathen lands; Christians are more or less incapable of grasping that civilization existed without them.

(cont'd)
the reality is that Christianity is the religion of barbarians. the barbarism of ghoulish Christian fanatics like @MattWalshBlog and @RepMTG ought to be enough of a warning sign—but there's also the fact that Christianity was the religion that *ended* a civilization.

(cont'd)
Read 29 tweets
Mar 31
one of the most reliable traits of the right-wing crowd—@elonmusk, @mtaibbi, @RonDeSantisFL, @JesseKellyDC, @realDonaldTrump, @RepMTG, whoever—is their self-pity. they're like murdering cops who still want love and adulation; they're always snivelling about "haters".

(cont'd)
it's more right-wing doublethink of course. fascists like @realchrisrufo and @JesseKellyDC (and of course @elonmusk) need to pretend two things at the same time: they're the Good People™, law-abiding and rational and calm—and also they're ready to do patriotic murders.

(cont'd)
@JesseKellyDC &c. switch back and forth as needed from gleeful talk of guns and violence and how leftist weaklings can never stand up to tough and manly patriots, to blubbering about how nobody is civil to them and how those mean nasty leftists are the REAL terrorists.

(cont'd)
Read 13 tweets
Mar 31
I've talked a little about how Christianity and Christians have been lurching towards a semi-acknowledged *dualism* in their ideas of good and evil. extremists like @PastorMark and @pastorlocke have come to impute far-ranging, almost godlike powers to Satan and devils.

(cont'd)
in their zeal to paint the world as irremediably sickened and corrupted by sin and diabolism, @PastorMark &c. are almost *forced* towards invoking Satan and demons as universal explanations for everything they despise—and right-wing Christians despise almost everything.

(cont'd)
as a result, right-wing Christianity has coalesced around a _de facto_ dualism in which Good and Evil, Light and Dark, Order and Chaos (q.v. the gibberings of @jordanbpeterson), Saved and Damned, @GOP and @TheDemocrats are given roughly equal metaphysical weight.

(cont'd)
Read 18 tweets
Mar 31
I was talking about the phenomenon of co-evolution recently—this is a feature of biological #evolution of an entire *ecosystem*. separate populations of different organism are capable of evolving _together_, each influencing the evolutionary development of the other.

(cont'd)
racists and Christian fanatics don't like being reminded that evolution is a *group* effort; dullards like @EPoe187 and @SwipeWright and the @SimoneHCollins people want to think that evolution yielded a *winner*, i.e. humanity, and that they're the winners of humanity.

(cont'd)
but humanity is not alone on Earth, and countless species have co-evolved with humans. some of them have been *domesticated*, i.e. humanity took an active role in shaping the evolution of numerous beasts (often to ill effect, because humans prioritize superficialities.)

(cont'd)
Read 9 tweets
Mar 31
right now there's a lot of Republicans and conservatives (maybe even "independents" and "moderates" like @mtaibbi and @NateSilver538) theatrically beating their breasts about the arrest of @realDonaldTrump—as if ex-Presidents ought to be exempt from criminal justice.

(cont'd)
it's straightforward: the @GOP has been sodden with criminality for many decades—the administration of fascist figurehead @RonaldReagan (hello, @Reagan_Library, by the way) was one of the most corrupt in American history, and the trend has continued since the 1980s.

(cont'd)
the Republicans had a plan: every time a @GOP politician did some fraud or embezzlement, or tried to fix an election, or sexually assaulted a minor, or did any sort of crime that Republican politicians habitually do—every time, they could claim "political persecution".

(cont'd)
Read 15 tweets
Mar 30
I'd hazard to guess that if there's any one fallacy about evolution that right-wing cranks are likely to cling to (whether they're aware they're doing it), it's likely to be the fallacy that evolution is somehow *done*. to the @EPoe187 crowd, evolution is *finished*.

(cont'd)
evolution is in fact a continuous process. it involves not merely a single population of organisms on Earth but *all* of them, together. for a key feature of evolution is co-evolution: species evolve in contact with each other, and they affect each others' evolution.

(cont'd)
corvids, for example, have co-evolved with humanity. they've adapted superbly to sharing a niche with human beings, and they're slowly learning how to use human technology for themselves. evolution isn't a matter of winning and losing species—but not to @pegobry &c.

(cont'd)
Read 11 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(