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Nov 28, 2022
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A.P. Yorick's avatar

"The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know. The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the Gulag Archipelago

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Nov 28, 2022
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A.P. Yorick's avatar

👎

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Nov 28, 2022
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A.P. Yorick's avatar

True. And I don't disregard your criticism. I just doubt this is the place to hash it out so a simple thumbs down is all I can say here, really.

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Nov 28, 2022
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A.P. Yorick's avatar

Hahaha I've had the exact same problem with a few pieces of fiction I have worked on over the past few years! Reality has hurtled past my visions with such regularity, and to the point rendering them redundant. Mostly social issues, but even scifi tech. It's been frustrating, but I also appreciate the challenge as painful as it is.

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Holly MathNerd's avatar

It's creepy how much of it started appearing in real life, sometimes in the same week I wrote a scene. It started to feel spooky, LOL. Eventually I gave up on it but it was a fun little project while it lasted.

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A.P. Yorick's avatar

Creepy indeed! It's made me wonder if the predictive model I'm working with is that accurate, or if it's just all too damn predictable.

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Holly MathNerd's avatar

I had just written a scene wherein a set of parents nervously decide that no, they're not going to put their kid on puberty blockers so she can pick later which puberty to go through -- my premise being that this becomes a standard thing -- and I fretted that I wasn't a good enough writer to pull it off. Not just six years into the future. Then I went to get some food, sat down at my desk and pulled up Twitter...and saw an argument in progress wherein TRAs were arguing that *all kids* should go on puberty blockers by default until they're ready to pick which puberty they want to go through. It damn near gave me a panic attack.

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A.P. Yorick's avatar

Bloody hell. I've come across that argument far too many times. This really IS that dystopian future all the books warned us about. The timing is such that one might wonder if they'd dreamed it all into existence.

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Holly MathNerd's avatar

Yep. I wrote my scene near the very beginning of this becoming part of the normal discourse. Creepy AF.

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George Purcell's avatar

I think you've hit on an important rhetorical point--the arguments the woke uses about the opposition are not transitive and in fact trying to play that game concedes the field of argumentation to the woke. Far better to hit different arguments that do work against the woke and that are similarly difficult or impossible to flip by them--mainly based on the disassociation of the woke position with objective reality.

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Holly MathNerd's avatar

Yeah. It was a painful lesson for me to learn, but they really do not care at *all* about being consistent. If you can point out their inconsistency and hypocrisy in clever, snarky hits under 280 characters, you can get some sweet dopamine on Twitter. But that's about all that arguments gets you. Unfortunately.

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Warmek's avatar

> "I get it, y’all. I get the hunger to make them be consistent, to live up to their own standards just once. I really do understand.

Hear me on this: it doesn’t work. “Whatever serves the Woke agenda” is the only principle they have, guiding or otherwise."

Quoted for truth.

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Warmek's avatar

Bloody hell. Even substack might be too much social media dopamine drip for me.

"Oooh! Was that phone buzz someone up voting a comment I made?"

Ugh. I turned off notifications, and I'll see if that cuts it, but I'm discovering that I'm susceptible to addiction there. I may need to simply go cold turkey as opposed to trying to moderate. I don't moderate *other* substances well, so this isn't particularly shocking, though it is somewhat disappointing.

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