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Covid just made us all realise we know a lot more people than we thought we did who would hide a zombie bite.
More like we know a lot more people that would have zombie bite parties because they “trust their immune system” and simultaneously don’t believe in the zombie hoax.
Also there are people who will intentionally smear their zombie bite juice on you because ain’t nobody gonna trample on their freedom.
Kiss that damned zombie you coward. LIVE WITHOUT FEA—BRAAAAAAAINS
Explains how zombie apocalypse movies happen
Nadine isn’t a zombie, she just likes biting! Don’t you dare kink shame her!!!
You didn’t know that already? The cute to a zombie bite is a bullet to the head and no one wants to be shot.
And yell at you for asking if they have ever been bitten.
This is a great comment
Funny, I was saying this for decades about zombie bites. I was such a downer pessimist. Now after COVID hit my family has rebranded me a realist.
I still can believe the world to rally together when it means to kill something.
The enemy must be simple though. Too complicated or invisible or something and the conspiracy nuts will take over.
You wouldn’t be able to see the aliens. The best you would be able to do is get blurry pictures of their ships from telescopes if you’re lucky. Conspiracy nuts would do fine.
Any civilization able to get to us, would be advanced enough that a carrier task group bombing the uncontacted people of the north sentinel islands would be a fair fight in comparison.
We would see a blur in our telescopes followed by death or whatever they want to do to us.You’re absolutely right. I was describing the hypothetical scenario where the aliens just want to fuck with us by blowing up the sun or something. If they wanted us dead it would be lights out before we know they were there.
There are so many nightmare situations you can imagine.
A single missile loaded up with a highly contagious 100% fatal pathogen, use drones with infrared to pick off the remaining hermits.
Just drones. Self-replicating killing machines that know all the human tricks.
Neutrino bombs, a few million of them.
A horrible digging machine just digs and releases all that poisons stuff from under us. We all suffocate.
Sunblocker, apply for 30 years. The few remaining humans living in cannibalism around geothermal vents get nuked from orbit.
Giant space mirrors. Fry us.
Bioweapons which specifically target or exclude a certain genetic profile. The dark side of gene therapy.
or whatever they want to do to us.
Anal probing, most likely.
Poor aliens just think our ass is the mouth. Where they come from bipeds are assmouth to assface
I thought the same thing. I could see the world banding (mostly) together for a fight, but not to just make life better.
I still can believe the world to rally together when it means to kill something.
The pandemic was an opportunity for humanity to kill something, at least to the extent that viruses are alive.
But a pathogen is too complicated to fight and invisible.
Immunology is hard. Let’s go shopping.
Do viruses bleed?
I guess they bleed RNA instead of blood.
On that note, I highly recommend checking out The Three Body Problem books. Without going into spoilers, this is a huge part of one of the books.
I’m halfway through book two and I was thinking the same thing.
That’s the book I was thinking of!
Too complicated or invisible or…
Bing bing bing!
Internal Combustion Engine? Nuclear Bomb? SCIENCE, praise be.
Invisible / long term & murky phenomena? JUST YOUR OPINION, man, I trust Facebook and WhatsApp forwards on this one.
I recently watched Utopia, British show about a super secret group putting naughty stuff in a vaccine.
Their plan hinged on every person being so afraid of a pandemic that everybody takes the vaccine. This was made pre COVID of course, because we now know that would never work.
Covid proved to me any libertarian hope/dream I had wouldn’t actually work because people would never get together to do the right thing as a group.
People getting together for the common good is just a government, the exact thing libertarians hate.
No not necessarily since government = force. The hope of libertarians is that they would do it out of a mutual interest in protecting others. The whole do what you want as long as it doesn’t impact me. That argument was proven fucked by the actions of the pandemic. That’s what I’m talking about.
Worse, there have been two “libertarian cities” over the past few years that suffered an awful fate. First thousands of people moved to a town in NH and then voted themselves into all city positions. They shut off the government, had everything collapse, and returned to where they came from a few years later when it turned out that fire fighters are nice and bears roaming the town (cuz one person’s hobby was to feed them donuts and they are libertarian so they can do that dontchano). In AZ, they built a community without any infrastructure specifically to avoid taxes and government control–they were buying water from another community until that community said they needed the water for themselves, leaving them with nothing.
What cities were those? Would love to read more about it
AZ was Rio Verde Foothills.
Most likely it was South Park, Gotham or Duckburg.
Part of the problem is that from a social history standpoint, libertarianism typically has attracted people looking for an ideology to justify their selfishness.
The ideology that tends to attract people who value social organization while minimizing a forceful overarching government has been anarchism.
Well it makes sense. Most people think they are lucky, and to one extent they are, the unlucky ones are all dead so survivor bias. Once they are aware of a problem they reason out they will be the lucky one. Additionally, the interests of an individual has little to do with the interests of the crowd. We really should start learning this concept and stop with the invisible hand nonsense. It could make perfect sense for someone in the energy sector to keep burning oil. It can make sense for a company to not bother with environmental cleanup. It can make sense for a restaurant owner to not want a lockdown.
The whole appeal to rational self-interest depends on a false premise. Biology has furnished an example. For the point of view of cancer it makes perfect sense to keep on multipling. The time horizon of each cancer cell is pretty short maybe a few months. If it doesn’t spends those months multipling as fast as it can other will.
The whole appeal to rational self-interest depends on a false premise.
I mean, potentially. We also hate cancer cells because cancer cells kill people, you know, like, we are capable of higher reasoning. The reasoning that co-operating with somebody else is oftentimes of more benefit to us than not doing so. The reasoning that, you know, we fucking die, grappling with our own mortality, and making plans for after we’re dead, based on reasoned principles that we can come to as an idea for what might be “good” for people, generally. We’re capable of long term planning and decision making, all in our own self-interest. It doesn’t make sense for someone in the energy sector to keep burning oil precisely because of the effects climate change in the long term, likewise with environmental cleanup, or keeping your restaurant open. It is not effective for society to do these things in the small or in the broad.
The people in the energy sector aren’t burning oil because they’re just assholes. There’s a little bit of that, of like “fuck these guys because I just kind of hate them now”, but it’s mostly just because they’re not convinced that climate change is real. They’re convinced that some short term concern or other concern about “national security” trumps the threat of climate change. They’re convinced that they’re the best locus for power, in the field of energy (or maybe even generally for the egomaniacal), even if they’re actively destroying the environment by holding onto their power. It’s not because they’re incapable of long-term reasoning, it’s because their long-term reasoning is flawed and neglected.
I dunno, it works out to basically be the same as though they only had access to short term dogshit reasoning, in the actual environmental effects they have on the people around them, but I find it pertinent to know that they had access to long-term reasoning skills, and those skills were just co-opted, warped, and ignored. The long term reasoning was applied to rationalize their short term goal, their ideal shaped their reasoning, rather than the other way around. Not really to say that you can’t just start out from a different position and come to a different end point, you know, just to say that. The memes are more complicated, even in their malignancies.
There’s a little bit of that, of like “fuck these guys because I just kind of hate them now”, but it’s mostly just because they’re not convinced that climate change is real.
No, it’s partially because some know climate change is real but they think they will be rich enough to weather the troubles and even thrive and profit from when the SHTF.
Here’s how that works.
Oil exec says fsck climate change, meanwhile they’re amassing billions in profits. The rubes below him echo “bah climate change is hogwash”. Then climate change hits, the coastal cities go underwater, super storms hit, and doughts. The Oil exec meanwhile bought him some prime higher altitude land inland - he only needs to be 500 feet high to escape the rising seas - and he makes a castle out of it, then bring in useful servants, and wall up. The world falls into chaos and when it’s over you call it Panem.
May the odds ever be in your favor.
You are just repeating the argument, which doesn’t work. It is perfectly rational for a person not to care about the long term damage they are causing. If your life expectancy is 80 and you are 60 then nothing past 20 years matters. If you are wealthy enough to be shielded from your actions then nothing matters at all.
Even putting aside the differences in people you still have the tragedy of the commons. It is in your best interest to exploit any shared resource before someone else does.
This is why the free market at best, and works best, when it is given a limited domain to act within.
If your life expectancy is 80 and you are 60 then nothing past 20 years matters. If you are wealthy enough to be shielded from your actions then nothing matters at all.
Yeah but like. Why would you care about what happens in your own life, you know? You only have 20 years left, what’s the point in life? The self exists beyond just the id, beyond the animal instinct, is what I’m saying.
My point is that broadly, you can kind of assume hedonism as the default, I suppose, but I’m not sure that’s really true. Even so, after a certain point of economic security and ability to spend money, you’ve fulfilled and then completely burnt out all pure hedonistic desires. You’re going to start inventing things that you want, or, more realistically, you’re going to start consuming other stuff, that tells you what it is that you “really” want, and you’re going to start living by just sort of being this shitty consumer of other people’s virulent memes that are marketed at you. You see this all the time with “upper middle class” techbros, accountants, managers. The same is true of the people at the very top, they just tend to have values that are shaped more by the political climate of 20 or 30 years ago because that’s generally how long it’s taken them to worm into their positions.
So once you move past hedonism (if we ever even had that in the first place, for people, which I generally find not to be the case), you kind of find yourself in a vacuum as to what your meaning is, what the point of everything is, and that’s when it starts getting filled by actual frameworks of how reality is. This is why rich people unironically believe that poor people just spend their money irresponsibly. It’s because power is magnetic to the corruptible, you know, there’s a selection bias for that strain of thought as you move up the ladder, but it’s also that power corrupts, people in those positions of power get that strain of thought marketed to them much more stringently.
It is very rare that you find the total encompassing sociopath that’s only capable of seeing everything from a materialistic egocentric perspective, where they only live 20 years, so they might as well do everything they can get away with and die on a big pile of money that has ceased to mean anything for them. That’s a caricature of the ruling class, it’s a caricature of humanity. People are capable of longer term thinking than that, and of much more complicated thoughts, and so there are much more complicated systems of propaganda and incentive structures that are set up in order to manage people’s ability to rationalize the world.
I don’t think it’s possible to reconcile no force, only mutual interest action, individual free actions with no or minimal negative mutual impact, and a single acceptable outcome…for basically any issue.
The hope of libertarians is that they would do it out of a mutual interest in protecting others.
The larger the population you apply that ideal to, the less possible it is, due to tribalism. To get rid of tribalism you have to get rid of humans. Fail to get rid of tribalism and libertarianism isn’t just dead on arrival, it’s spontaneously aborted.
I think Don’t Look Up got it pretty right, a lot of people would be willing to band together, if not the majority of the world. But politicians and billionaires would ruin it for everyone even if it means everyone dies. When the time comes we can still band together, and take down the people we need to
It boiled down to one idiot messing up the entire operation. the story breaks down on the part where he could do that without the government telling him to f— off. That would never be allo-
oh wait
https://www.amazon.com/Libertarian-Walks-Into-Bear-Liberate-ebook/dp/B083J1FXY8
Here’s a plug for a book I’ve never read. I think you’ll like it.
You were smart enough to see that it’s really a fetish.
COVID, when the world partly united to make a cure and a vaccine in quite a record time?
Yep, scifi will need to amend the trope to “united just enough…”
If they had made a cure we wouldn’t be living through the biggest wave since it first started, years later, with hundreds if not thousands of people still dying from it daily around the world (never mind the millions left disabled)… 🙄🙄🙄
It has become endemic, like the flu, AFAIK people are not dying en mass and the hospitals are not overwhelmed with covid cases.
It’s pretty much over for most of the world. Now its more like the reoccurring Flu outbreaks every year.
Academia and pharmaceutical companies united to develop the vaccine while the shitmunchers were rioting in the streets because epidemiology is confusing
And ut couldn’t have possibly been because of your authoritarian reach or anything like that. You were 100% perfect and harmless, and did no wrong whatsoever.
I happen to really like District 9 for this reason
There’s no malicious plot of aliens blowing up shit or invading to colonize: nope, aliens literally just crash-landed on accident and humanity was like “stay the fuck right there, we’ll take all your shit until we figure out how to
deal withexploit you”Humanity is always its own worst-enemy
Also, the future of Elysium (also Bloomkamp) looks more and more likely, with the 1 percent fucking off to a luxury space station in orbit and the rest of humanity living in poverty on the destroyed Earth.
Another interesting thing about Elysium is how the AI is programmed to only recognize rich people as humans. Just like rich people think about it.
I am still hoping for a Halo like future, with civil war in space, war against aliens, the threat of a dark and ancient threat and all of that. Or maybe just a Stellaris future with the same but more megastructures
Forgot the name, but that movie about tentacled aliens invading earth with like 12 monoliths and a linguist tries to understand them
The way world cooperation is portrayed is kinda reflecting. Not perfect, but somehow realistic
Arrival. Great flick.
tyvm 🫡
For me it is that book Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs. My kids favorite. The ending is natural disasters make the town unlivable so the population flees to a new home and are welcomed with open arms.
Yeah that is so fucking bullshit. You telling me that a nice wealthy population would allow foreigners facing death into their land? They would keep them at sea until they all starved and churches would call them rapefugges.
Not everyone would unite, but the big governments of the world would at least sit together to form a plan towards a common enemy.
Like how we formed the Allies during WW1.
Your local redneck probably won’t, but that doesn’t matter.
thats a good point. I bet for an acute existential threat the major powers would nominally ally themselves against it, while still playing politics. So NATO, Russia, China, India, and whomever else would throw their hat in.
We see that if the threat has a long tail though (climate change) that nobody gives a shit.Neon Genesis Evangelion had this as a sub plot. They could only have 2 or 3 EVA’s ‘battle ready’ at any time in one country depending on when in the series you are. I want to say it was pointless politics but… Yeah, right concerns, wrong application.
There are so many stories from WW2 about how Americans didn’t unite.
Here’s one of my favorites Patriots complained about air crews painting naked ladies on their planes. They were fine with kids getting drafted and sent overseas, but God Forbid they thought about S*X
In the real word: Aliens don’t exist.
On Lemmygrad: The Sun deserves it for defecting to the west!
Nice. I’d have used lemmy.ml as my target, they are a bit angrier over there.
More like the world unites and then the United States turns it into some pointless political issue.
Change “the world united to…” to “The US decided the world would…”
There is no way the “united” states makes it a thousand years (climate change allowing).
Even fiction has its limits
The US couldn’t even get it’s own shit together, let alone make any coherent pronouncements to anyone else
…has ruined sci-fi…
No, just ruined the generic good vs evil trope.
There’s a lot of good sci-fi (books/movies/series) out there that has a more nuanced take on humans and society.
OP desperately needs to read The Expanse. 🤦
This is more believable, I think.
Humans require an external threat to unify against. An alien invasion could provide that. Without some great enemy to oppose, I do not think we would come together willingly.
Humans can’t even unify against trump. I’m telling you you’ll be seeing factions worship them aliens while some will be hiding inside their bunkers isolated from everything
This reminds me of the factions that form in the strategy game Terra Invicta. Some want to kill the aliens, some want to worship them, some want to study them… and my favourite faction, The Initiative, want to use first contact as an opportunity for profit, and they achieve this by sabotaging the other factions and spreading misinformation among the general population.
So, who’s up for false flagging an alien invasion to get earth away from a dystopian path
Ozymandias?
I did it 20 minutes ago.
yeah i think in 2020 everyone got fed up because it wasn’t like a tangible, visible threat. it’s just invisible, everywhere, all the time. you have to desensitize to some degree to live a semblance of a life.
if there were alien snipers posted up everywhere it’s a much different matter
We can most certainly come together willingly, it just depends who has the power.
Ok sure an external threat helps, how about your boss? Most everybody has a boss.
Or healthcare, unaffordable bad healthcare is perhaps the greatest external threat we all face on earth. We can certainly unify around that, it is absolutely in the realm of possibility.
How many times in history the colony was still infighting even under the bootheel. There is no way a united India or a united China or a united South America would have been ruled by the Europeans. They got a billion and homefield the other side has a few hundred guys with muskets.
I would have turned the movie off if the narrator said, “The people were terrified, remaining six feet apart. And everyone was hoarding toilet paper.”
