That the dead man's daughter is diagnosed as "infected" because her reaction to her father's death is vengeful anger rather than having enough faith in her society to ask what the socially necessary reason was for him to be killed?
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Note that the infection clearly isn't specifically something like "racism", it's the basic concept of *selfishness* The little girl's mind is diseased because she cares more about her dad than about the abstract idea of society and the welfare of strangers
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Seriously, it says that once your mind is infected by bad ideas the only two options are death or having brain implants that render you incapable of acting on those ideas And all of us in the real world are so infected and could only have one of these fates in that society
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
It's straightforwardly dystopian by most people's standards and I can only read Jemisin as being ironic or at least intentionally provocative with it It's an attempt to mimic the deliberately confrontational tone of the original Omelas story that I'm not sure came off
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
I'm not saying I fully reject the mindset of the story but the presentation didn't work on me The tone of Omelas worked because it was an ironic tragedy, the hectoring voice of the narrator trying to get the reader to accept something the author, irl, doesn't accept
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The snark about the paradox of tolerance notwithstanding, the situation in this story obviously is tragic - the only way to deal with bad ideas is to ban them? Nothing can defeat racism but murder and brain implants? - but the tone doesn't really acknowledge it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
I mean you can't just crumple up the paradox of tolerance and throw it away The paradox of intolerance is just as bad - great, as soon as someone says anything evil they should get two in the back of the head Now who gets to decide what counts as evil
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
I get what you are saying and yeah, I’m also troubled by the implications about bad ideas. But I find it compelling because in our current reality, we really ARE facing the fact that the things we were told would defeat racism; education, argument, reason, etc. have-
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-utterly failed to defeat it and other forms of bigotry, and indeed have been hijacked (as has free speech in Pen’s original point) to, in fact, FURTHER these things.
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The supposedly dystopian solution to terminally dangerous ideas looks appealing when we find ourselves in a place where nothing else seems to work against them.
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Okay but come on it's not like the reason no one's tried killing people is we're all just too nice, and if we just had the courage to get our hands dirty for once the problem would be solved
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
No one is saying it is, and I think thats clear. But its easy to see why something like this story would come off as not QUITE dystopian, or as dystopian as it intends, given the specifics of the situation.
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Replying to @dreamingnoctis @arthur_affect
I think part of the point was to design a more challenging thought experiment than Le Guin's, and I think it succeeded, whatever my logical mind may tell me I'm warmer on Um-Helat than I ever was on Omelas
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