Thomas Riker was created through a complete freak accident involving a distortion field that reflected a transporter beam in the exact right way to duplicate Will Riker. It's not something that be done easily at will.
Now cloning and memory implantation are completely possible as well, like that one TNG episode where they make a clone of Kahless or that one very dumb ENT episode where there's a clone of Trip. I'm not sure, but cloning is probably illegal by the time of Voyager, since genetic augmentation is completely illegal throughout the Federation.
But the main problem is that nothing other than killing Tuvix would have satiated Janeway's bloodlust. For real, she's like the most evil person in that entire show.
The most expensive single meal I've had was a 20,000 yen (~$170 usd) vegan full course meal at a 1 Michelin star restaurant called FARO in Tokyo. I bought some wine for my friend too, so it was more like 24,000 yen.
It was actually pretty good. Some kind of fancy bread appetizer, a main course meal of potato pasta, a really good set of seasoned vegetables, then vegan dessert which was a slice of cake and some kind of extremely fancy cookie perched on a bed of hazelnut spread.
Honestly most of the cost was the presentation I think. Every meal was set out in front of us arranged all fancy on these big stone plates and bowls. The food was good but not worth the cost. My memories of the meal is still good though because I was there with a friend and I hadn't seen him in a while.
Oh yeah, there will be a bigger reactionary backlash, and that backlash will cause even more "normal unaffiliated" people to realize what's at stake. I don't mean to sound accelerationist or apocalyptic, but everything has a breaking point and pronounced change only comes through conflict.
I think we're seeing a little bit of it through the abortion bans. People are genuinely pissed off about that.
We just have to hope there will be enough people who won't tolerate reactionaries. I can't say what will happen, but you're right, it might get very ugly soon. But at the same time we can't say we're already defeated
I'm hoping this will break liberal fantasies about trusting certain corporations, but it probably won't. It'll push more suburban white liberals into the maw of being reactionary.
Is it accelerationist of me to want comfortable suburban liberals to just become conservatives already? They're already most of the way there and it would help more properly delineate where the political divides really are.
My gut says it's going to be more complicated than that. I believe in people and at a certain point the reactionary stuff is going to overplay their hand and I think we're already seeing it.
At a certain point this stuff just breaks down, people will lose their patience. In my wildest dreams the 2020 riots were a kind of dress rehearsal for something more organized in the future. Eventually I think liberals might lose their ability to usurp movements.
Don't get me wrong, we're headed for bad times, but we don't have to feel doomed. Believe in people.
Ok first I'm gonna point out that I don't wanna re-litigate any of this and I'm not interested in conversation about the content, but rather how the conversations normally go. I'm honestly not an expert on this stuff and it's really tiring constantly talking about them. The main things that end up being fierce discussions right now are issues with China (namely Xinjiang and the 1989 Tienanmen square incident), and sometimes issues with the USSR (namely the 1930s Ukranian famines).
it seems like that no matter how much discussion is had on this stuff, nothing budges, no one comes away with different ideas and none of it matters. It always devolves down into shit-flinging, because the conversations themselves are proxies for current unresolved political contests. I don't think the historical content of the stuff even matters anymore. Furthermore even scholars on these subjects are divided. There isn't a consensus among historians on if the Soviet Union is responsible for genocide, there are nuanced stances on Tienanmen square, and there's a vast gulf of stances on how Xinjiang is talked about. And that's because it's all still part of the same proxy for political competition. These historical incidents are not yet resolved as unanimous because there is still an ongoing worldwide conflict between powers that could broadly be described as capitalist/western/wealthy and another set broadly described as socialist/unaffiliated/poor.
so even in civil spheres like international diplomacy and academics, talking about genocide or the nature of historical events can be highly politicized. There's also a lot to be said about admitting certain deaths occurred without ascribing certain political motivations to them. That seems to be a massive point of contention specifically. For instance, I might say that the events of Tienanmen square did occur, but the way they're talked about is misinformed or that the conflict is presented in an incorrect framework, which is the standard kind of Marxist view of the event. Liberal frameworks might say it was a conflict between value systems, between freedom and tyranny, whereas a Marxist might say something more like it was an event caused by social dissatisfaction with the Chinese market reforms started in the 70s, and this dissatisfaction came from both a working class socialist perspective and a more wealthy liberal perspective.
To some people this is unthinkable, to present it in a different framework is to deny accepted events entirely, and I don't think that's true. Scholars are constantly redrawing the frameworks for why events occurred, and all history is going to be seen differently by people of different class perspectives.
![axont [she/her, comrade/them]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/2289d3c4-69f9-40ed-a21d-cf84b32ccd85.webp?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
I love Michael Douglas