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#tlon — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #tlon, aggregated by home.social.

  1. CW: CW: Suddenly heavy subjects, kinda sweary

    @mitch

    That's interesting, I was thinking more of the conservative movements of the 1970s, how Chuck Colson took Nixon's defeat, and basically said, "Never again," creating a coalition of political forces and propaganda ("Faux News" and the like) to basically make their own pocket universe.

    Current events read WAY too much like #Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by #JorgeLuisBorges these days. (It's a [must read] if you haven't already. ;)

  2. CW: CW: Spoiler (information about) quote above

    The quote above is from Jorge Luis Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one of my favorite short stories.

    #JorgeLuisBorges #Borges #Tlon #Tlön #TlonUqbarOrbisTertius #TlönUqbarOrbisTertius

  3. Here is the next Speculative Fictions Studies video in the series on Jorge Luis Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius, this one looking at his outlines of this imaginary idealistic civilization

    youtu.be/lmjH3FBh9WA
    #Video #Borges #Worldbuilding #Tlon #Idealism #Literature

  4. Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas:

    In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named #Curtis #Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym,
    proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed
    “not productive”:
    “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

    Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time,
    clarified that he was “just kidding.”
    But then he continued,
    “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass.
    However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to #genocide.”

    He then concluded that the
    “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people:
    Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement”
    where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface”
    so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

    Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers,
    chief among them: tech billionaire #Peter #Thiel
    and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. #Vance,
    whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald #Trump’s vice president.
    🔥If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted #techno-#authoritarianism to the White House,
    and one can imagine—with horror
    —what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

    Trump’s first campaign was undoubtedly a watershed moment for authoritarianism in American politics,
    but some thinkers on the right had been laying the groundwork for years,
    hoping for someone to mainstream their ideas.
    Yarvin was one of them.
    Way back in 2012, in a speech on
    “How to Reboot the US Government,” he said,
    💥“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their #dictator phobia.”
    He had also written favorably of #slavery and #white #nationalists in the late 2000s (though he has stated that he is not a white nationalist himself).

    Both Thiel and Vance are friends of Yarvin.
    In "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power", reporter Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as
    the “house political philosopher” of the “#Thielverse,”
    a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit.
    In 2013, Thiel invested in #Tlön, a software startup co-founded by Yarvin.
    In 2016, Yarvin attended Thiel’s election night party in San Francisco where, according to Chafkin, champagne flowed once it became clear that Thiel’s investment in Donald Trump would pay off.
    Since entering politics, Vance has publicly praised
    —and parroted
    —Yarvin’s ideas.
    That was worrying enough when Vance was only a senator.
    Now that he could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency, his close ties to Yarvin are more alarming than ever.
    Superficial analyses of why certain tech billionaires are aligning with Trump tend to fixate on issues like
    taxes and regulations,
    but that’s only part of the story.
    Tech plutocrats like Thiel and Elon #Musk already have money.
    Now they want power—as much as money can buy.

  5. On , a few months ago, author Randall Munroe wrote a long story about the "Case of the Missing Hit", a song with the chorus "" with specific lyrics and style aspects, which other people seem to have also heard - yet the song doesn't seem to exist.

    bsky.app/profile/xkcd.com/post

    Or at least, didn't until it suddenly showed up ;)

    youtu.be/6LZdiLPDIvg

  6. J'adore ce #meme #johnmastodon et ses variantes (#jeannemastodon par ex)

    Idéal pour un dimanche matin de vacances. Il paraîtrait qu'on en a retrouvé trace dans la bibliothèque de #Tlön. Puissance!

  7. I can't help but imagine this Mastodon world is like living yet another instance of what #borges was writing about the whole time. One more room in the library of Babel. One more entry in the Encyclopedia of #Tlon.

  8. @juand_r Oh, yes! someone already explored that—and the answer is "terrifyingly systematic." #Tlön is very much in reach!
    maximumeffort.substack.com/p/i