Unlike most blogs, this tags page displays pages in forward order, as many of the posts that I make are cumulative and it is better to start at the beginning.
We have a hard time imagining beings much more intelligent than us. It’s hard to imagine them as doing anything other than super-intelligently contemplating their navels, because we simply can’t imagine being far, far more intelligent than we are, and taking direct action based on that intelligence.
“Mind control” is just a terrible term, really. Something about the way it sounds. Bad prosody. Even without conscious attempts by evil to add additional silliness to the connotations of the term, the mere selection of that term is a bit brilliant for their uses.