animist posted:

nah, it's not kinder at all

this whole thread I keep thinking about the teardrop scene in the Three Body Problem, where a little mirrored pellet of quarkium destroys Earth's entire military fleet by flying through it

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

https://twitter.com/uncertainvector/status/1401345403438645252?s=20

You can't get 2/3rds of americans to agree on goddamned anything
If that's accurate it also certainly makes me think the skeptics are a very squeaky minority

Hodgepodge posted:

i keep thinking of the Balrog from LotR because its cool af, and has as much to do with reality as the most recent sci-fi high concept wank written by an engineer

Bideo James posted:

playing synths for ufos

SmokaDustbowl posted:

SmokaDustbowl posted:

Vermain posted:

there's a difference between speculative fiction that attempts to address the potential outcomes of far-flung though reasonable scenarios (dragon's egg), or scenarios extrapolated from modern trends and technologies (black mirror, for all its goofiness), and speculative fiction that's largely allegorical. the balrog, in all of its evil, is clearly an allegorical monster that represents the unending greed of the dwarf lords of moria that caused them to isolate themselves from the rest of the world and ultimately doomed them, something that packs narrative punch in a story with a core theme of the importance of people coming together to confront evil instead of isolating themselves away from the world

Hatebag posted:

Maybe all the hypernormalization stuff has been an alien psyop to make people detached from an inscrutable reality so that gleep glorp can step out of his tic tac and say "hi I'm in charge now" without everyone wanting to kill all aliens.

Crazypoops posted:

I was thinking last night how loving broken my brain is right now that I would just be like "fine, what's up glorp"

SmokaDustbowl posted:

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Aliens would only be a problem for the state if people could petition them directly as agents who could solve their problems. As long as they're totally inscrutable like the gods of old or the god of the medieval Catholic Church, there's no challenge to state authority just like there was no challenge then. If such aliens could be petitioned directly or otherwise began to intervene directly in the state of the Earth, everything about human civilization would change--but only then.

The reason for the ufo taboo by NATO members and the Soviet Union is that it was a means of control over reports of experimental aircraft. The United States first encouraged belief that ufos were alien spacecraft and then used that putative explanation as a threat to silence anyone who saw flying things they couldn't explain--the point being to prevent people from talking about experimental aircraft.

It's been posted in this thread many times now, but the reason the US military is changing its approach to reporting strange aircraft is that they realized people could be self-censoring about foreign or non-state spy drones and they want to stop that from happening now that self-censorship harms rather than helps their interests.

SmokaDustbowl posted:

SmokaDustbowl posted:

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

And it completely fails to fit the actual phenomena. No Russian or Chinese aircraft is capable of the maneuvers documented in these videos.

BeefThief posted:

I'm not a fighter pilot but I do know if you lock on a friendly plane your plane will tell you that you are loving up big-time.

Victory Position posted:

I'd probably notice that

Shear Modulus posted:

my new theory is that the pilot did lock on to a friendly plane but he thought it was a UFO because his plane's computer was being hacked by an entirely different alien spaceship

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

That makes no goddamn sense
clearly what happened is that Fravor had his DNA spliced by the craft he was tracking so that he became the alien and the alien became him.

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

Did you read the paper? This is specifically addressed. Even the possibility of humans not being top dog is destabilizing to how the state has to generate consent. The state can’t accommodate things that both escape reasoning and leave physical evidence

The whole thing about experimental aircraft is post hoc coping bullshit masquerading as cynicism. And it completely fails to fit the actual phenomena. No Russian or Chinese aircraft is capable of the maneuvers documented in these videos. You are on crack if you think they are 100 years ahead of us in aerospace engineering and have been since 2004. If the government wanted to encourage more reporting of aerial phenomena to catch foreign aircraft they’d present foreign aircraft getting caught, not events inexplicable by science.

And the government, scientific community, the things we think of as “the establishment” never encouraged the public to take the occurrence of UFOs seriously. It’s always been officially suppressed and politically discouraged.

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Then why did the US encourage belief that ufos are spaceships from other civilizations so intensively after World War II? Why publicize things like the Roswell “crash” and establish things like Blue Book, which take as their premise that anything unfamiliar in the sky could be a spaceship and must then be proven not to be?

There’s a two-handed movement when it comes to the US ignoring the possibility that ufos are spaceships from other civilizations, which involves them cultivating the belief first so that anyone reporting one could then be ridiculed into silence with it.

The whole thing with governmentality is that forms of governance change as conditions change. The US can easily transition into some manner of open authoritarianism as conditions change and probably will once global warming takes off. The whole paper reads like the authors started out wanting a political theory of ufos and used Foucault instrumentally as he fit their desires. You’ll get no argument from him that government has to look like C20 bourgeois democracies or that there can’t be continuity between elections as the means of legitimating government and soldiers with guns doing it. He lived through such a transition.

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

You can write that off as legitimate fear that the Nazis actually created some of the poo poo everyone thought they may have. Surveillance was primitive, no one trusted anyone, and we'd just invented a bomb that could destroy cities.
Took a little while to put things back together and clamp down

unrelated (or maybe related? who knows)

https://twitter.com/Marinetimes/status/1401600451976511489?s=20

Hodgepodge posted:

im feeling a 'harmonic convergence'- of this + goatse

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

The US never had an accurate understanding of Soviet capabilities. They spent 50 years expecting space-based weapons and a devastating first nuclear strike that was never a real possibility. MKULTRA came about because they thought the soviets could already do mind control and psychic powers.

Google Butt posted:

im sorry I'm the source of covid and the entry/exit point for aliens

The Protagonist posted:

uh im p sure the soviets did in fact have working icbms

if you launch them first, and the other side has no counter measures, thats a devastating first strike...

gaslighting ourselves into the rest of that zanyness is pretty lol tho

SmokaDustbowl posted:

Bideo James posted:

no ring 5/10 ftl fml