> 2016-21 was a period of extreme leftist opinions
Wouldn't that have been nice? This can only have appeared to be true for those people who are so far on the conservative side of things that they think Democrats are leftists.
Who would need to be coerced? If I were in a foreign country and their paramilitary border force treated me like that, I'd GTFO, shake the dust off my feet, and never consider going back to such a crazy dangerous place - no matter how the legal nonsense was ultimately resolved.
My wife's pet cat leaves and returns whenever he wants to. While he may not share our capacity for language, his communication of his preferences - nay, requirements - was clear, forceful, sustained, and (eventually) effective.
If a Culture mind were faced with human behavior equivalent to pissing on everything but the litterbox and bolting for the door at every opportunity, I imagine they'd eventually get tired of playing jailer and let their pets go, too.
The stories make it pretty clear that if you want to leave you can just leave (maybe slightly different if you are an SC operative)? Similarly the Culture is fairly open minded about immigration to the Culture - but they worry about that looking like a form of colonialism so it's not like they advertise it...
That's certainly true - the minds obviously do care what their humans want, and go to some effort to help them get it. I just thought the idea that "pets can't leave" was funny and not entirely true, given some of the experiences I've had with them.
In Surface Detail there is some discussion of "slap drones", assigned to follow troublemakers around and prevent them from getting into mischief. It is explicitly stated that even a misbehaving ship may receive this treatment. I think the Grey Area's hobby was regarded more as a repulsive violation of cultural norms than an actual crime.
the gsv sleeper service had an entire other ship/Mind basically acting in this role (a rotating assignment/volunteer position), complete with human crew/residents
the grey area/meat fucker was a small, uncrewed, and demilitarized(?) ship/Mind that, while morally repugnant to the culture's sensibilities (or at least most other Minds'), no one considered significant/dangerous enough to give the same treatment
You can, and you can use that cake as an ingredient in something else! But if your goal is to "make a cake" and put your own touches on it, likely that weighing out the ingredients is not worth your time outside of the educational context you describe wrt teaching kids. (e.g. "here's how cake is fundamentally made, and later here's a box mix that takes care of the most boring parts and works better than anything we can make at home without substantially more effort").
This strikes me as the same sort of semantic game one plays when claiming that "humans are actually fish"; while technically true, this drains the term of its utility.
While I take your point about economy, in my kitchen it would actually take less time to make a cake from flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, because we always have them - whereas buying a Betty Crocker mix would require a trip to a grocery store, and not the convenient one around the corner I usually visit.
Nor are the results entirely fungible: I'd always prefer to avoid ingesting preservatives, artificial flavors, corn syrup, etc.
Wouldn't that have been nice? This can only have appeared to be true for those people who are so far on the conservative side of things that they think Democrats are leftists.
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