• BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 days ago

    likes to benevolently interfere with less advanced cultures to secretly improve their quality of life

    freedom-and-democracy

    spoiler

    I’ve never actually read any of the Culture books lol

    • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      It’s more that the Culture believe they have a moral imperative to combat fascist ideologies and do so through subterfuge that enhances the contradictions of those societies. It is explicitly viewed as morally gray that they interfere at all. When the Culture destabilizes the fascist Azad Empire by delegitimizing how their society chooses leaders, hundreds of people die in the immediate uproar. When the Culture wars with the Idiran Empire, which practices theocratic slavery, 850 billion sentients are killed, and it takes about 500 years for the war to become justifiable to many Culture citizens that lived through it.

    • Aphelion@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      To be fair, that’s my super quick summary having only read the first book, and half of the second, out of ten books, so I still have a lot more to read.