And "our own" Steve (S.M.) Stirling's dystopian alternate history
world/culture the Draka <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination>
erupted out of South Africa.
I'm wondering if Pieter is aware of this body of work/author?
Stirling, who moved to Santa Fe 30ish years ago often writes at Joe's
diner (has his own designated booth?)
I'm generally not a fan of military fiction but this series, in spite of
it's dystopian brutality captivated me.
He also collaborated with the esteemed Andre Norton in her "The Ship who
XX" series... with "The Ship who Fought", actually seeming to be a bit
autobiographical.
I also enjoyed the technical elaborateness of his Emberverse series
(post-apocalyptic set in the PNW after a subtle shift in basic physics
undermining electronics and explosives like gunpowder, internal combustion).
On 1/21/25 3:39 AM, Santafe wrote:
It’s not an empty connection. I forget where I first read this, but in going
to look for something just now, I find this Financial Times article that
summarizes the names:
https://www.ft.com/content/cfbfa1e8-d8f8-42b9-b74c-dae6cc6185a0
(In case that link somehow spoofed incorrectly, the article title can be searched,
and is: "Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa”.)
I have been aware for a while that, for example, Stephen Miller is a sadist.
There is no dimension of character in which he is _at all_ better than the
worst of the Nazi camp commandants. This sets him apart from people like trump
or Bannon, whom I would not characterize principally as sadists. trump is a
juvenile bully with other severe problems, and Bannon so badly wants to be a
messiah that everything else is instrumental. But Miller would give up
something personal for the chance to inflict pain on somebody else.
So what keeps people like Miller from openly declaring a campaign to
systematically exterminate a subset of the American population? It is
something like “Americans aren’t `used to’ that kind of public act” yet, and
there has been less to inure them to it than the 50 years of public
persecutions that had erupted throughout Europe by the 1930s, followed by a
severe depression in Germany. Getting used to things takes time and a certain
structured environment.
Something similar w.r.t. contemporary Russia. There was a little documentary
called “Town of Glory”, to which this seems to be a link:
https://dafilms.com/film/10987-town-of-glory
One wants to understand a dynamic in which so many people are afraid or,
apparently, deeply miserable, yet around them seems to be a vacuum of agency,
so nobody thinks in terms of changing things. It is at a threshold far enough
above starvation that people don’t seek a riot hoping to die, because it would
give them some relief from living. They, too, have “got used to” a way of life.
I too am not going to support news that normalizes this. Not that I don’t want
to track things that go on. Rather that all this stuff that is delivered to
the news is some combination of circus and mob-sourcing (I haven’t heard this
term used before) that is part of the overall attack. One wants to be aware
that it is there, but not lose energy and attention participating as the
intended target. Whatever the counteraction should be, it should be in some
other role.
There is a nihilist faction (or streak, or strain) in the U.S. that wouldn’t
mind “getting used to” things that for now are still parsed as atrocious. It
raises a few (former or current) S. Africans to a salience one wouldn’t expect,
from their small numbers in the population, as people who can contribute to
coordinating that shift, because somehow the life on the far side of it is
already a known territory to them. (I don’t want to leave out the fact that
Musk and Thiel did have some skills as software developers, at a moment when
the U.S. economy directed a winner-take-all pot to that effort, and Musk is
skilled as a VC; those things also matter, and were significant before they
became mainly trolls.)
But anyway: as S. Africa now decides as a culture that that wasn’t a good
direction, the U.S. is seeking tutors in what it might be like.
Or that is my best effort to guess at words for it today,
Eric
On Jan 21, 2025, at 1:04 AM, Pieter Steenekamp<piet...@randcontrols.co.za>
wrote:
To my American friends,
As your friendly South African observer, I've been watching the American political scene
with great interest (and a bit of amusement). I couldn't help but notice how some
describe Trump. Here in South Africa, we've had our share of colorful political figures,
but I must say, America's latest "dictator" seems to be quite the character!
It seems as though the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting
times," has indeed come to fruition in your part of the world.
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