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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8830419" data-attributes="member: 4937">With you so far.No.  Absolutely not.  I disagree strongly.  That is the exact opposite of the case.  All those alien things are stand ins for The Other, and the Not Sefl, which we have to imagine since we have no cases of.  They are an attempt to create a mirror in which we can see ourselves, but the mirror is not us ourselves, but the means of comparison to ourselves.  We imagine things that are not us to give contrast and comparison that we would not otherwise have.  We know that from a vantage point inside ourselves it is almost impossible to see ourselves and what might make us distinctive and different and well, essentially ourselves.  We know it's almost impossible to learn anything from a set with one member.  So we need to try to imagine the not self, that is to say the ways a sentient being might be that are not us, so that we can actually study ourselves.No, absolutely not!  Or at the very least, I can say speaking for myself as an author, that is not at all my intent and you are completely missing what I'm trying to communicate if that's your take on it, and I feel pretty certain that you are also missing the intent and the purpose of a good portion of science fiction authors if you read the text that way.  No, that's a completely different issue.  The problem with the Hadozee was not that they were a race bred for servitude.  The problem with the Hadozee was that reading a race bred for servitude, the authors and content creators failed in imagination, creativity, and empathy and immediately made a deliberate analogy to a real human race that had historically been subject to unwilling servitude and abuse.  The problem was not in the concept of the alien, but that they failed to actually make it alien and instead relied on familiar, simplistic, easy, and offensive tropes and markers.  That is not the same thing.My children or grandchildren may grow up in a world of semi-sentient droids.  Giving them proper context for how to treat a droid with kindness, empathy and understanding is precisely my responsibility.</blockquote>

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