"If I was high
I could be a flame
I would bend the sky"
Velvet Acid Christ - Bend the Sky
Look, I'm a SciFi fan. I can't help but feel a slight rush hearing about the space program ramping crewed missions back up. I do have to remind those getting a little too excited that "possible long-term moon base" doesn't mean "moon city." Far as I know, astronauts've got little in particular to do on the moon except practice pitching tents on more interesting worlds. Also, I'd like to reiterate that any interplanetary expansion would invevitably be a dictatorial echo of Terran politics. It won't save our idiotic species from self-destruction. It'd just erupt in a tiny little faraway ka-boom to accompany the symphony down here.
Nevertheless I found myself rather basking in my morning newsfeed's mention of the Artemis I launch, aside from an exasperated sigh at the line "followed within a few more years by the program's first lunar landing of astronauts, one of them a woman" - how 'bout you tell us their actual qualifications instead? Or maybe something about intended landing/construction sites? Compare old/new technologies in use since the Apollo Program era? Something besides assuring the public you're striking valiantly against the testicular menace? Because that's not really either of your jobs as rocket engineers or reporters.
Still, I could've let that one slide and moved on... but the morality police couldn't. Human stupidity being endless, Reuters' article followed up with this delightful gem: "although no humans will be aboard, [the current flight] will carry a simulated crew of three - one male and two female mannequins" - one step closer to completely eliminating our man-nequin oppressors! Marion-ettes of the world, unite! Yes, those are the results we needed from NASA and the century and trillions of dollars in accumulated aerospace funding it represents: whether they penciled in a ding-dong or a hoo-hoo on the crash test dummies' crotches.
On a completely unrelated topic, I nostalgically reminisced some years back about a sociopathic drama queen from my old WoW server in the mid-2000s. It got more attention than I'd expected from a throwaway obscure anecdote, partly because she had just driven THAT many people nuts back in the old days... and partly because Retrodruid herself, still playing the game apparently, dropped by to sock-puppet some third-person glorification of herself, and likely personally accounted for half the post's hits basking in her renewed attention. Her sheer weirdness derailed my original point somewhat, as her exact antics were only relevant to the extent fellow players wouldn't've stood for the same shit in context from a male, much less kept forgiving and re-inviting him, time after time, for months and years (and apparently, decades!) running. Her apologia's wording however did emphasize key similarities in the cult of personality she'd attempted to build around herself and the general cult of femininity in society at large: the self-appointed martyrdom and conspiracy theories belied by the enormous amount of favoritism bestowed upon her, the claims to special knowledge, the possessive declarations of belonging and betrayal, and the cathartic wail of "I fheel unprotected by-y y-you a-a-aalllllllllll!"
All social justice causes in the past couple of decades carry a nasty reek of superstitious proselytism, but femininity's presumed entitlement preceded them all in our cultural consciousness and deserves special attention for its primeval cultish aptness. Such devotional ecstasy can be rarefied and sublimated or "switched from one object to another like the flame of a
blowlamp" to repurpose Orwell's phrasing from hate to adoration, at least so long as the new object of worship displays some nominal, performative femininity, be it an MMO avatar or an anatomically/politically correct rocket payload. One wonders why NASA bothered with realistic mannequins at all when they could've just loaded their capsule with a puppet of Snidely Whiplash and a couple of roped together Venus figurines, the better for the crusading masses to affix their dewy gaze to the heavens in meek lamentation of the plight of our plasticine sistren.
Has mass insanity on this scale ever avoided disaster?
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