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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do viruses bleed?
I guess they bleed RNA instead of blood.
But a pathogen is too complicated to fight and invisible.
Immunology is hard. Let’s go shopping.
If we had a hostile alien invasion, thousands dead in the first wave, footage of the aliens, everything. half the GOP would still be saying it’s a hoax, and making it into an anti Liberal/anti LGBTQ rant. Part of them would straight up worship the aliens, a bunch of them would drink bleach.
Aliens are woke
honestly by the time they get the technology to visit planets so far away they’d probably get pretty woke
I wouldn’t have believed you a few years ago but that pretty much happened.
The GOP would become the “Human Power Elite” trope in “They Live.” Literally I swear to God that was a metaphor for Tim Scott and Herschel Walker. For that matter MTG and Boebert, too.
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.
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.
The whole point of a liberal democracy is that you replace “force” with individual political agency and consensus seeking mechanics. The state still maintains a monopoly on violence to some degree, but violence isn’t a necessary part of administering that monopoly. This is like the original enlightenment libertarian ideal. The whole Ayn Rand revisionist school and now whatever the fuck it is that Jordan Peterson is on is what fucked up the terminology
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.
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.
Edit: I bought it.
Review: People are scary. Bears like donuts. Sometimes it’s hilarious when those facts combine. Other times, it’s terrifying.
Therefore, due to my judging you entirely on one sentence, you will enjoy this book. (That is not an exclusive link. Get it anywhere. I bet your library has an app that can send it to your phone.)
Honestly same both from and outsider and in group way. Libertarians we’re willing to do nothing to help or worse risk others lives to virtue signal and statist saw governments fail to do anything meaningful and waffle about the best restrictions to put in place and still thought “but if my guy was in charge”.
There were people making actual differences out there, but it almost always a political.
I’m glad mutual aid gained some hype for a little bit at least.
You were smart enough to see that it’s really a fetish.
Yeah any ideology that’s dependent on nobody prioritizing their self interest over society’s best interest isn’t going to work.
But that doesn’t mean a functional society isn’t possible. We’re living in one right now. Sure there are a lot of improvements needed, but improvement is possible.
Utopia actually translates to “no place”. Only fictional people can achieve a utopia. Real life functional societies with real people are an iterative process. Make improvements, some asshole finds a loophole to exploit, make more improvements to prevent assholes from exploiting the system. Repeat. Do that over and over again, vote in elections over and over again to move society a little closer, inch by inch, a little closer to the ideal, even when the ideal isn’t actually possible.
Societies aren’t created by intelligent design, they’re a product of evolution. But that evolution can be guided by the people that vote. Democracy isn’t something that’s ideal, it’s a grind. You’re never going to be living in an ideal society, but if you try you can make the society you live in a little better.
What does this even mean? What does COVID have to do with Libertarianism?
Every strong libertarian I know, and there are several in my family, is strictly anti-mask and anti-vax. It boils down to “you can’t tell me what to do” and nothing else.
Right and that’s my point. I use to agree with that sentiment because it was built on the premise that people would do what they want as long as it wasn’t directly hurting others… Unfortunately we found that people thought their personal freedom meant more than protecting others.
Which is disheartening and eye opening.
One thing I have noticed recently, and I suppose it was the Pandemic that did it for me, is that we are sort of culturally narcissist in the West as a whole. People are very worried about their liberties, but few people stop to consider their social responsibilities. Libertarianism really is the idea that nobody has a responsibility towards other people–it’s a very selfish and narcissist way of thinking and requires you to be able to walk past someone who is suffering and who you could help with minimal effort/inconvenience, yet you mutter to yourself how it must suck to be them and continue on with your day.
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
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
The reason for that was because America wasn’t much affected by WW2 before Pearl Harbor.
A threat to the entire planet would include America, even if they like to pretend they are separate from the rest of the world.
Yeah bullshit like that happened. But that bullshit didn’t prevent the allies from accomplishing their objective, did it?
So it proves that bullshit doesn’t prevent things from happening. Though I think magnifying minor bullshit problems to the point where people give up on achieving anything may actually prevent things from happening.
99% of propaganda is getting people upset over minor stuff. Right now the GOP is pushing two ideas at once; that Joe Biden isn’t doing anything about the border AND that stopping Biden’s border bill is a priority. Too mad to think straight is the goal.
Yeah the problem is that the internet has made everyone insanely meta about everything. Let’s prevent Biden from solving this problem so he’ll look bad so we can get rid of the guy that’s trying to solve the problem we want to be solved because he didn’t solve the problem because we stopped him from solving the problem because we want to get rid of him because he didn’t solve the problem.
Talking in circles isn’t just for politicians now. A lot of people have roleplaying on the internet as a press secretary for their favorite politician for so long now I don’t think they even know why they’re doing it, don’t know why they support the politician they are fronting for and don’t know or care about the issues.
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 🫡
Its good for Science Fiction can be aspirational sometimes though.
Classic Star Trek has humans living in an idealistic society meeting some weirdo aliens doing some weirdo alien shit that causes a lot of problems. Then you realize we’re more like the aliens than the we are like the idealistic future human society. Our society is alien to to an ideal society.
Then the Enterprise warps off to some other place to do some cool shit somewhere else and the aliens are stuck on their shitty planet because they’re a bunch of losers what can’t get past their weirdo shit.
The implication is that we could be the cool dudes in a starship constantly doing awesome shit. But instead we’re the losers stuck on a planet that the people in the starships laugh at.
So the reason why an ideal future isn’t possible is because we can’t get past our weirdo loser ideas.
I can now picture Kirk, Spock and Bones having a chuckle about some weirdo aliens that can’t advance because they’re stuck in the rut of doomerism.
“It’s quite illogical that they can’t understand they can never achieve anything if they presume failure before they even try.”
“Humanity once thought that way a long time ago but we eventually got past it. Anyway, off we go somewhere else to see some other loser aliens doing stupid shit we used to do!”
Quite a take on it!
Meanwhile, homo sapien are effectively half fighting chimp, half sexy loving bonobo.
We get to choose our own path.
Half sexy? I’m offended! I’m 100% sexy bonobo!
Username checks out.
So the reason why an ideal future isn’t possible is because we can’t get past our weirdo loser ideas.
I can now picture Kirk, Spock and Bones having a chuckle about some weirdo aliens that can’t advance because they’re stuck in the rut of doomerism.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was indeed a closet communist who infused his political beliefs into the show. The concept of a peaceful, egalitarian society united under one government, where resources were shared and everyone worked for the betterment of all - this is essentially a communist ideal. In fact, the characters themselves embody different facets of Marxist theory. For instance, Captain Kirk represents the proletariat fighting against oppression while Mr. Spock embodies the need for logic and rational decision-making.
Star Trek’s vision of the future was meant to inspire hope and demonstrate what humanity could achieve when freed from the constraints of class and economic systems. In many ways, the show serves as a subtle form of communist propaganda. As you mentioned, each episode often portrayed humans as progressing towards an idealistic future, while the aliens faced various challenges due to their clinging to old ideologies and social structures. This reflects Roddenberry’s belief that to truly advance, societies must shed outdated and divisive ideas.
By presenting a world where these barriers are overcome, Star Trek encourages viewers to question their own societal norms and consider how they might work together in a more just and cooperative manner. Although the series was never overtly political, its underlying message clearly illustrates Roddenberry’s support for communism, making it a unique piece of entertainment that not only entertains but also educates its audience.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was indeed a closet communist
Citation needed.
Change “the world united to…” to “The US decided the world would…”
The US couldn’t even get it’s own shit together, let alone make any coherent pronouncements to anyone else
There is no way the “united” states makes it a thousand years (climate change allowing).
Even fiction has its limits
Oxford University wanted to open source it’s vaccine. Bill Gates and his foundation “convinced” them to partner solely with Astrazenica.
I hate that COVID makes the Star Trek utopia so much less likely. We’re living in the mirror universe.
Well it only starts improving after next world war.
mirror universe.
evil timeline
I mean, even in the StarTrek universe humanity got WAYYYYY worse before it got better.
There must have been an evolutionary change, like predisposition for sociopathy and narcissism and authoritarianism got reduced.
Turns out we were the borg all along
For us in Germany it went pretty smooth. Kurdish Immigrants developed the first and very potent vaccine, the industry went into overdrive and delivered faster than anyone could have imagined, a well know Immunologist became Minister for Health, we received daily updates, none of the major party tried to downplay anything, when a new chancellor was voted to power he mostly continued the policy of his predecessor and when priority lists for vaccination were given out people simple honoured them. After two years 75% were vaccinated.
And trust me, no one drank bleach. Everyone made fun of the stupid Yankees who did.
People on the Enterprise would point and laugh at an alien society that’s stuck in a rut because of Doomerism.
Thinking that cynicism will result in an ideal society is illogical. You can’t control how other people think, you can only control how you think. If everyone is is mired in the cynicism of doomerism, would we be in the ideal Star Trek society?
COVID, when the world partly united to make a cure and a vaccine in quite a record time?
Academia and pharmaceutical companies united to develop the vaccine while the shitmunchers were rioting in the streets because epidemiology is confusing
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’s pretty much over for most of the world. Now its more like the reoccurring Flu outbreaks every year.
Individual governments and pharmaceutical companies aren’t enraptured by the same degree of propaganda as your basic idiot citizen.
Yep, scifi will need to amend the trope to “united just enough…”
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.
…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.
More like the world unites and then the United States turns it into some pointless political issue.
Remember when Tawanize officials were trying to tell the WHO about their experience and lessons learned and the WHO officials pretended to disconnect because they were being pressured to not let them be acknowledged as a country?
There also was annoying back and forth of “not built here” syndrome between the US and Germany
As they say though, everything is political
Fun fact, the sun is already blowing up. Checkmate Aliens!
