• Hackworth@piefed.ca
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    4 days ago

    If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness. -Hocus Pocus

  • pedz@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

    There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

    ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

  • Pat_Riot@lemmy.today
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    3 days ago

    Heinlein wrote of a dictatorship rising in the US about now. It was the reason Lazarus Long took the Howard families off world. Tho life didn’t end on Earth it just got real bad.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Heinlein wrote of a dictatorship rising in the US about now.

      The B-plot of Orsen Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” was Ender’s older brother and sister gaming the two party system via the internet and posting their way into the Presidency. If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had been siblings, it would have been a near perfect reflection of real life.

    • btsax@reddthat.com
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      3 days ago

      Octavia Butler wrote The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents in the early 90s, set in a declining United States around 2024-2030 run by a Christian nationalist whose slogan was “Make America Great Again”

      • trolololol@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Did it have a label on the cover saying it was supposed to be fiction? Maybe the people “in charge” though it was a fortune teller saying like it is.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    3 days ago

    Would that Adams were still alive, that we might hear his thoughts on the current state of affairs.

    Adams’ superpower was noting the mundane, dragging it out to its assanine yet inescapable conclusion.

    Things like Hotblack Desiato spending a year dead for tax evasion, yet still attending his reservation at Milliways, and the middlemen of the Golgafrinchans inhabiting the earth because we were too stupid to have evolved from simians.

    The situation now is too flashy to draw his literary ire, other than to make it a footnote for some larger topic.

    … and the time that the leader of one of the largest and most well-equipped superpowers of the world started a war costing millions of lives because he had been refused an honorary peace prize…

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Last ww was about denying entry to arts school.

      Ww IV would probably be because president Camacho went to Carl jr and they were out of vanilla shake or something

  • D_C@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    Oh please. This isn’t about a peace prize, it’s about distracting people from asking about the kiddie fiddling and child rapes. The war stuff is just an added bonus.

  • blazeknave@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I feel like a fucking tramalfadorian right now with clear purview of the timeline but that’s just life in 4d so you don’t do anything about it. (Dear God, if you’re there, one internet stranger won’t think I sound like a madman)

  • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
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    3 days ago

    My pet theory is that they finally picked up the rights for Snowcrash and this is all guerilla marketing for the release of season 1. Basically a world scale prequel teaser

    • SanguinePar@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Had the same thought yesterday - a lot of what we’re seeing is like the latter stages of Catch-22 - they have the right to do anything you aren’t able to prevent them doing, and all that. Grim times.

  • shai_hulud@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    My thoughts (albeit 50% tongue in cheek) on the current narrative can be encompassed by a single Douglas Adams quote:

    “It’ll have to go”

    The other 50% of the time, I’m in a crying rage.