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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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People haven't had the capacity to sign our species' death warrant like they do now except during a relatively brief and very frighting span of time known as the Cold War.
edited 23rd Jan '17 4:16:09 PM by CaptainCapsase
It is my belief that we can survive this.
Maybe I'm deluding myself, but I'll be damned if I give in to despair.
Oh God! Natural light!I don't feel like doomsaying right now. I don't really expect things to get worse in the long run outside of climate change, and even then I don't let it bother me too much. It's a catastrophe, for sure, but I feel like humanity will adapt if we can't stop the worst.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas Edison![]()
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Oh, I'm not giving into despair. I'm still going to live my own life as best I can, and I'm going to fight as best I can too to make sure everyone else can do the same. It's just all of the lives several decades after mine that I'm worried about.
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Did even humanity even exist before the dinosaurs went kaput? I always thought the two living side by side was just some rather liberal artistic license, or was I mistaken?
edited 23rd Jan '17 4:23:52 PM by kkhohoho
I've already given into despair and come out the other side an Existentialist, which is, to me, the most healthy outlook on life, all things considered. As frightening and uncertain as our modern times are, in the grand scheme of things, we are as inconsequential as tears in the rain; it doesn't really matter all that much if the human species goes extinct; give it around 10^10^10^56 years and it's quite possible entropy will have wrapped back around due to random fluctuations and given us a second chance.
edited 23rd Jan '17 4:24:45 PM by CaptainCapsase
It's more that it's becoming apparent that even with constant action there may not be any kind of "Good Ending" and that the best we can hope for is "Maybe everything won't be shit forever" is rather disheartening.
Also humans never coexisted with dinosaurs.
edited 23rd Jan '17 4:26:26 PM by Lanceleoghauni
"Coffee! Coffeecoffeecoffee! Coffee! Not as strong as Meth-amphetamine, but it lets you keep your teeth!"About Trump's Patriotic Devotion Day.
Obama did the exact same thing for his inauguration, but I think people need to point out to the wording of the Day and not that Trump did it.
Also, the bill which prevents new regulations from forming and allowing Trump to roll back current ones has been seeming stuck in the Senate for at least a week and a half. We still need to make sure our Senators don't give this power to Trump, but it started up before all this hubbub about Trump's inauguration.
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."![]()
Or, to give a less needlessly pessimistic view on things, "There are no happy endings. Because nothing ends."
edited 23rd Jan '17 4:30:25 PM by kkhohoho
I'd be able to cope better if I wasn't so afraid of Cessation of Existence.
I've spent too much time around conspiracy theorists and hardcore racists to know that the ones who do realize how full of shit they are and change their views are a tiny tiny tiny minority.
Here is the thing though, those who escape racist and conspiracy circles never really bought into the ideology and follow it more through inertia than actual belief. For the child of a stormfront founder to leave his cult it mean that he didn't have much contact with the groups they are taught to despise, once they reach anyone else that they were taught to hate but those groups weren't the caricature of what they should despise, then they start questioning if they really believe their racism or not.
Now, there are the people who become racist on their own accord, those who genuinely believe that they are superior to other races, I mean the Dylans, Spencers and Dukes. These guys can't be reasoned with, first by trying to reason with them it passes the notion that their speech and beliefs have to be respected and acknowledged as valid first. Second is doesn't matter how many times you refute them, they have enough circular reasoning and fallacies to dismiss your arguments as being fabrications and manipulations, they aren't going to change their minds and even attempting to change their minds makes them shield themselves even further, because their logic is that if they are being argued with and confronted that means they are doing something right.
What makes those people racist to begin with is up to debate, if they are racist because they want a class that is bellow them so they don't feel inferior, if they despise everything that isn't them and think of themselves as being the perfect race, if they simply want someone to blame for all of their short comings doesn't matter, but once they start believing in it, rooting out that belief is a task that is simply not worth the effort and the best we can hope to do is to prevent having other people swallowed in their ideology.
You want to know how they do it? /pol/ has a guideline where they post black men on white women cuckolding white men threads to make white men feel sexually inferior to black men and foster resentment. The Daily Storm and Storm Front constantly dig any sort of crime committed by black people and spams it everywhere to create the notion that black people are inherently violent. Breibart seeks everything negative that can be attributed to liberals, women and minorities and paints a picture showing them to be SJW with stupid ideas to create an outrage. The racists parts of reddit constantly red pill redditers with pages showing whoever is Jewish or has a Jewish heritage controlling the media and financial institutions as if they are part of a conspiracy group focused on undermining and subverting the god's chosen white people.
The people who bought that bullshit and start believing it aren't going to seek other forms of information that will contradict their newly acquired beliefs, they are going to join the deep end racist and they will reinforce those beliefs. Which means that those kinds of racists aren't to be argued with, the best we can do with them is to deny them any sort of legitimate representation or venue for their ideology to carry on.
Treating them with the same respect as you would treat everyone else is exactly what they need to grow like the cancer they are.
Inter arma enim silent leges@bat178 If you want a more positive spin of things, there's the philisophically appealing notion of Eternal Recurrence
, which shows up in many modern modern cosmological models; the notion that the universe and all of existence/some form of multiverse has existed forever, and will continue to exist forever.
When you introduce infinite timescales or an infinite number of alternate universes, a recurrence of this exact moment at some point in the very distant future or in one of the infinite other universes is only a question of when or where, and from a purely materialistic view of the mind, that "other" you is just as much "you" as "you" are. It's not quite reincarnation, but it's not entirely dissimilar, and it would seem to be an inevitable consequence of a eternal universe or multiverse.
edited 23rd Jan '17 4:43:39 PM by CaptainCapsase
You got your facts backward about humanity not having to live under an unstable government for most of those years . . .
At our height we probably had one of the most stable governments ever. Our whole country's not even three hundred years old. Rome lasted longer than us, and most of her existence was a crapshoot that managed more horrifying rulers than ones deserving the name Great. Not to mention all the Kings/Queens Emperors/Empresses we've had throughout history. It's rare that the majority of any nation can actually sleep peacefully for more than a week at a time.
ETA:
I'm sorry, but no . . . if I'm reading bat right, ones like him and me don't care about the material value of it, we care about a continuous stream of consciousness and perception of a set of surroundings actually worth perceiving.
ETA:
That's not what he's saying. That's something I could get behind. What he's saying is that an exact copy of you that you can't actually touch or sense lives in a whole other Universe. Your ability to see, hear, smell, feel, and taste would be cut off. You, yourself, would not exist. Only a copy.
edited 23rd Jan '17 4:49:05 PM by Journeyman
That's been one of my theories, that life is a Stable Time Loop. As soon as you die, you start it again in a different body with your memories wiped.

It's not all doom and gloom. Even if we do reach the mythical 2 degrees celsius we've probably still got a century before Earth becomes uninhabitable.
So we have time to fly to Mars and repeat the process all over again :P
edited 23rd Jan '17 4:15:58 PM by math792d
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.