Years ago, when I was but wee naïve young tyke skipping merrily through the flowered fields of my youth, I believed that people would have no choice but to accept climate change when their communities were inundated with rising water.

I was wrong.

The town revolted. Like many local residents, Wanda Thornton, the town’s representative on the Accomack County board of supervisors, accepts that the sea is rising, but is skeptical that climate change and its effects have anything to do with the erosion of the beach. As a result, “I’m just not convinced that it requires the drastic change that some people think it does,” she said.

This one article didn’t convince me that I was mistaken; no, I realized that quite a while ago as well. But rarely do you see it laid out so starkly and so head-slappingly.

The plain truth is that a vast number of people will be standing in the skyscrapers of former NYC looking down at the surging tides swamping Fifth Avenue and be utterly unconvinced that climate change had anything at all to do with it.

Yes, the Great Filter is ahead of us I can confidently say.

Why is dystopian fiction so popular now, especially among teenagers and young adults?

Seems obvious, really.

The popularity of that sort of fiction is always concentrated in the portion of society that is likely to be most affected by the worsening – real or imagined — of the world that lies in their future.

Right now, the future light cone for the millennials and younger doesn’t look that bright. Median wages are decreasing along with job prospects. Inequality is off the charts. Their elders are doing fuck-all about potentially civilization-ending quandaries like climate change and resource depletion. More importantly, all of that seems to be getting worse instead of better.

In the 1950s, the dystopianism was aimed at an older audience as they mostly held the fears about the nuclear-tipped precariousness of the world and the resulting paranoia, hence all the films such Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and the mutant creature features —  all monsters therein mutated of course by radiation – such as Them!

Contemporary dystopian novels and cinema now concern themselves with severely restricted choices in a world of limited resources (The Hunger Games), utter society-mandated conformity (Divergent) and a combination of all three (Uglies).

This is no mistake. When a culture sings, everyone joins the tune. They can’t help it.

Criticizing readers and movie watchers – especially young ones – for consuming fiction that helps them deal with emotionally and to some extent understand intellectually the milieu into which they’ve been thrown without choice adds unnecessary insult to already-grievous injury.

After all, this dystopian fiction would not even exist if the current stewards of the world that these young people will inherit had not utterly and inexcusably botched the job.

About the release of celebrity nudes,  I’ve seen increasing calls for censoring the internet.

First of all, this won’t help.

Second, when the left and the right agree on something, it’s nearly always utterly flawed as it’s usually something big businesses want, or it’s desired by other interests inimical to the public good.

While the person or persons who hacked the phones and cloud accounts of the celebrities who had their private data stolen should be prosecuted, the call to censor the internet plays into the hands of the many, many groups who already wish to do so anyway.

Which will make it worse for everyone and not actually help with the problem.

It’s funny that we repeat the same mistakes over and over again as most people seem driven by momentary passions and propaganda. Not that I am some paragon of logic and deliberation, but I at least prefer a real fix rather than the symbolic gesture that lets all your friends know that you are the bien pensant  rubber stamper that they’re expecting.

To the extent that it ever was useful, Twitter is about to become the opposite of that.

One of the reasons I don’t hitch my digital wagon to online services such as Twitter and Facebook is that their whole businesses rely on manipulating you and infringing on your privacy. As many have pointed out, you are the product.

I run my own domains (though hosted), where I could migrate all my data very easily elsewhere at any time.

Twitter’s changes will as Nina points out make it utterly useless for news or digital activism. Which, of course, is the point because as Twitter sees it, the less controversial a platform can make itself the more money it can bring in. And just as important the more it can force you to look at what it wants you to see, the more cash for them.

I never used Twitter for just these reasons. Same reasons I never used Facebook, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and any of those other platforms. I don’t like being the product and avoid it if at all possible.

(This is not an implied criticism of those who do use those services. I understand the reasons. They just aren’t good enough for me.)

And also for the people who say, “Katniss can’t have looked like she did! Her mother had blonde hair and blue eyes, and so did her sister.”

Well, here’s a photo with Q’orianka Kilcher and her full, biological brother, Xihuaru Kilcher:

Notice anything about it? What all ya’ll say now?

Looking smart and being smart are two different things.

Because in The Hunger Games, Black people were the backdrop. Not the main characters.

Because white authors have a fixation in writing futuristic totalitarian dystopian stories in which only white people exist and are being oppressed by other white people.

This person clearly did not actually read The Hunger Games. Katniss was mixed-race. She is clearly described as having olive skin. Gale was also mixed race as were most of the people in The Seam, who are clearly described several times as being the result of races mixes over hundreds of years (implied).

Rue of course was black, as were quite a few other characters.

Yep, the movies were whitewashed. Not the fucking books.

Read the books before you comment on them, mmmkay? It destroys your argument — even if the argument itself is sound — when you get basic facts completely and utterly wrong.

This is a pretty good representation of how Katniss looked as described in the novels:

Yeah, not fucking white.

I see people say things like, “I was still just a dumb kid at 25” and such.

Do people really believe that? Is that really true? I can’t imagine that. I’ve felt and acted like an adult since I was 10 or 11 years old.

I guess I was just forced into it by circumstances, and natural proclivities. I didn’t in a lot of ways have any other choice. I was precocious by nature. I had no interest in the childhood world my peers inhabited.

People do seem to mature at radically different rates – my mother was more childish than me for her entire life that I knew her – but it seems self-belittling to speak of one’s self in that way.

One of the main reasons I got into trouble with adults from about 10 years old onward is because I insisted on interacting with them at or above their level and they punished me severely for it.

I never stopped, though, and am very glad I did not.

If you want an ad blocker that works with all browsers and yet won’t bloat your browser with add-ons, try this one.

I tested it in a VM and it works fine and doesn’t seem to do anything malicious after a basic bit of packet sniffing.

I’m sticking with AdGuard for now, but if you’re a Windows user this looks like a good alternative.

If you see articles claiming that V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email, ignore them. He did no such thing, unless he invented when it he was two years old in 1965.

“Probably the first email system of this type was MAILBOX, used at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1965. Another early program to send messages on the same computer was called SNDMSG.”

And the first email sent over ARPANET occurred in 1971, seven years before he claims to have “invented” email.

Hell, my grandfather was sending and receiving email at Purdue in the early- to mid-1970s.

In truth, no one person invented email. It was developed over time from very basic beginnings, building on older things as all tech does, and evolved with said technology.

Nearly all email conventions, practices and technologies, however, had already been developed by 1978. Ayyadurai had nothing to do with it.

There is no such thing as the unbiased view. I was thinking about that as I was reading this article, “The New Scientism.”

It’s most prevalent among engineering types, but even in science there is the belief that there is some platonic ideal viewpoint from which to make decisions and to pursue paths of inquiry.

This is a fiction; there is no human realm free of bias or of politics.

Even choosing what to study itself is a result of bias, of unconscious prioritization, and of what one has been taught is important to see.

This isn’t a groundbreaking insight or anything. It is rather obvious. However, rather obvious things are often not convenient for corporations and their lackeys, as well as governments, their solons and their pencil-pushers, so are often denied by large portions of the population.

Propaganda, after all, is extremely effective and promulgating the idea that there is just no other way to do things is one of the most effective pieces of such mind control ever devised.