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
The reason I don't believe in Um-Helat isn't just that I don't believe a system run by secret police stamping out thoughtcrime is unstable, although I do think that It's that I don't buy such a system would've been set up by the good guys in the first place
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
How did they breed out selfishness - the original sin of "seeing others as less than human" - but be simultaneously create a caste of police who summarily execute people Those two things don't go together
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The thing is it reads as science fiction pessimism of a school I'm really fine with but it rubs me the wrong way to not see it treated as pessimism
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read is a chillingly effective story about utopia being created by a plague that kills everyone with a Y chromosome
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
But it only works because it knows its premise is objectively horrifying and its whole POV is from the viewpoint of the one man who comes through the portal and gets euthanized at the end despite constantly trying to be a good guy, because he's infected
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Replying to @adrienneleigh @Nymphomachy
It's not horrifying because half of the world's population dying of a plague is inherently horrifying?
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Also no, I don't read Tiptree as having an uncomplicatedly triumphal radfem POV in this story As evidenced by her attachment to her male Tiptree persona irl She finds the caricatured feminine utopia the plague creates as alienating as the narrator does
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Replying to @adrienneleigh @Nymphomachy
No, the horror of creating a utopia by just straight up murdering all the people infected with "toxic" behaviors is still horrifying no matter what
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End of conversation
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