No, I assure you, there’s plenty of people that think they have all the solutions, and given the chance would turn everything upside-down on their snipe hunt. For every good idea there’s someone who thinks we just need a purge day, or a lot of tiny bunkers. The “good people that do nothing” are shit too, I guess.

Do you honestly think you can fix everything yourself? I hope not; stepping off the hard-edged debate thing a bit, I had a really rough time when I found out that’s not real life.

Yeah, I realise it’s kinda weird to post this after talking about how familiar a lot of things in Rome were, but in the narrow scope of existential problems the overlap is limited.

Liberal democracies work very differently from autocracies. The weather isn’t a mystery of the gods, it’s self-inflicted. Rome kept it’s population in check through massive natural and to a lesser degree artificial mortality, while we have great medicine but ever-lower fertility rates. Roman peasants may have been vaguely aware of the distant land of Italy, we have information overload conveyed by machines even 20th century people struggle with. When we have a plague, it’s less about escaping it, and more about convincing people they should.

Some problems are timeless - or at least haven’t been dealt with yet - but I feel like putting it in terms of Rome like this is misleading and can be used to justify all kinds of things. When I’ve seen this meme posted before, it’s usually a lead-up to really chuddy comments about immigration or loss of traditional values.

Existential comics is a humour series. I disagree, it’s a joke.

If that’s what you do, good for you. For every few dark jokes there’s someone posting “orphan crushing machine” style glurg. Optimism in the face of horrors or no hope is just unhealthy denial.

I was not trying to fix the world with that post, I agree. Sometimes I do write something that helps someone, though. IRL I do a bunch of volunteer work.

I don’t really buy it. Rome fell for reasons a professional historian of Rome has told me are still unclear, but I don’t really see a lot of parallels in our big problems, which are very new and untested.

The joke is that Cthulhu is usually unreasonable (at least by human standards), but is able to logically explain himself to the satisfaction of the human shown. This is unexpected.

I’ll leave you with this: cynicism is hip, but it’s exactly as irrational to start with optimism. You’ve got to start with what is, and what ought to be and work from there.

I’m talking about solar, EVs and so on. It’s straight-up cheaper to not use fossil fuels now, for most things, and the remaining ones seem like they’re inevitably coming.

Don’t worry, I’m still pretty doomer about it. The planet’s going to get a bit messed up in the meanwhile, and we’d have just kind of boiled ourselves like a frog, if we hadn’t gotten lucky with cheap renewables suddenly appearing.

Yes. I’m not in line to inherit a fuck-you amount, but it’s substantial, and if I move to a poor country and live modestly I should be able to make it last indefinitely.

I’d invest if I was above the poverty line, income-wise, but I’m not. Downward mobility is a bitch.

The thing is, negotiation is always easier than implementation, which is why it comes before.

It’s pretty clear at this point we’re going to stop climate change right around as fast as technology forces us to. I don’t see any other plausible path.

I mean, supported in the personal belief sense. I can assure you that it was never intended, even if that was accidentally conveyed.

Natural language is inherently imprecise. It only works because there’s shared background to interpret it on.

Dark humour is a thing, you’ll see it everywhere on the internet - I’m sure you know that. This is no exception.

Yeah, exactly! Nothing else comes close. The medieval and early-modern periods are just very different (and non-civilisational, I guess?), and then modern industrial civilisation grows up on top of it before the old is fully gone everywhere. If you want eerie parallels, you do Rome.

The history of unrelated civilisations on other continents seems inaccessible in English, or in the case of the Americas just poorly preserved in general, thanks to said early-modern Europeans.

At no point in the past week have I supported genocide, and defending part of an argument is not defending the whole. Nor do I expect most to read it that way in such a jocular setting.

I don’t think you’re a terrible person either.

The tricky thing there is that it’s been way, way higher than today in past eras long before anything breaks. IIRC most of the research shows it just goes up indefinitely, most of the time, and then reverses during times of collapse when the poor are finally able to loot the mansions.

I really hope actual democracies play by different rules, though.

Wow, that’s a hell of a quote. That’s a sentiment that rankles people today.

Second person never has a gender in English. Saying “you” should also be fine, or “thee” if you feel like getting your quaker on.

Special requests notwithstanding - the platinum rule here is just to accommodate whatever you reasonably can.

The Mona Lisa is in the public domain, so no, that’s not really a good analogy.

So basically, they can try to stop you, but you’re allowed to win.

I get the perception Cali can be prickly too, although I’ve never been there. Maybe orange for them too? And come to think of it, inland Oregon is very Idaho.

There’s assholes born everywhere, I guess.

I’m amazed by how consistently bad the reviews for Indiana are. Even the food is somehow worse than the rest of the Midwest, apparently.

Hawaii: Get the fuck here and hang with us.

_{(Plz, we need money to ship things across half the pacific)}

his conclusion is inextricably tied to his premise, and you pointedly did not separate the two in your comments until I pointed out to you that you are defending genocide.

It is not inextricable. From a utilitarian perspective, for example, humanity could still produce far more utility that it’s many indiscretions remove.

It was not pointed - it was merely omitted for the sake of expediency, along with commentary on the fictional nature of Cthulhu, or the fact that in cannon he does not speak English.

you say “all the rest could theoretically apply” referring to your agreement with cthulhu’s reasonings for global genocide.

To say “could theoretically” is not the same as “does” - there are many ethical systems that have been proposed.