I mostly just think worst and even better is hard to judge. We just exist here. Good and bad are just labels. And I find absurd to be an often more applicable one when it comes to the timeline stuff.
Well, scientifically speaking, we are living in one of the best timelines possible because there is developed life to ask this question to begin with. It’s all about perspective.
Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket
The problem with that is it has led to ignorant people believing they’re smart — all because they can find any random site that backs up any nonsense they assert. Critical thinking and credible research are endangered concepts now.
Oh, of course. There are negatives to everything for sure. But I think as a whole it’s made life better in a lot of different ways.
ive said to my kids "you have the sum total of all human knowledge available at your fingertips 24/7 and youre bored? "
Give them welbutrin and there mind will be on overload. Worked wonders for me. no sarcasm.
Do you feel this “overload” all the time or in bursts?
It was all the time because couldn’t get my mind to connect to all the things I was thinking about. Now I can and it just comes out. For example I never wake up in the morning hungover or anything my eyes just go bing and I am wide awake. I then rune 3 miles then read about an hour of wiki for whatever my mind comes up with. Then I got to my job for 48 hours.
Wait so now I’m in trouble for not being on my phone? Make up your mind! /s
There’s a big difference between doom scrolling and education.
We haven’t had a nuclear war yet!
Actually we did, 79 years ago.
And yet, despite stockpiling weapons for the next eight decades, never again.
Maybe that’ll change in the next decade, but hopefully we can keep 1945 as the last year nuclear weapons were used for a bit longer.
Well. Right now, putin is in an unwinable war. He CAN’T win given his lack of superior quality war machines and materials. His lack of combat experienced military personel, and his lack of air defenses. They’re losing literal thousands of personel (mostly soldiers) every single day.
If putin loses, he dies. He will be forcefully removed from his position and executed. He knows this. The united states knows this. Everybody in the situation knows this. Which is why for a very long time, nobody would allow Ukraine to use their weapons deep into russia in an effort to curb escalation. Because back against the wall, with no other possibility for winning the war, putin is going to eventually use nukes. He’s going to use nukes when it’s a situation of “fuck it, I’m going to die anyways. Nuke em.”
And as each day passes, russia gets further and further into a state of permanent national destability. This war is going to harm them for generations. Even before the war, they hadn’t replenished their population to pre-WWII levels. This is on-par with that. That should give you an idea of how badly this is going to damage their next 40 years. Hundreds of thousands of young men all dead. And eventually, russia will run out of men to send to the war. That’s when putin pushes the button. He’s going to nuke Ukraine. Probably Kiev. And it will happen before this war is over. Unlike hitler just killing himself and his wife, putin is going to try to take everybody down with him. Because that’s how big his ego is.
Only question is…does he ONLY fire at Kiev? Does he just go balls out and nuke everybody instead? Scorched earth kind of thing.
Only time will tell. If we live to tell the tale.
A nuclear war definitely implies use of nuclear weapons on both sides. That was nuclear conquest, or nuclear terrorism.
Just slaughtering civilians in a country that was already willing to negotiate their surrender.
Willing to negotiate a surrender favourable to them, sure.
Willing to negotiate a surrender that wouldn’t force them to become a conquest of the US. They just wanted to keep their own government. The US refused, it wanted unconditional surrender and total control of Japan.
Japan wasn’t exactly a bunch of saints when it came to slaughtering civilians.
Japanese civilians weren’t exactly the ones doing the slaughtering. It’s not like the nukes targeted a military target.
I was definitely talking about the nation of Japan and their military.
Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven’t all nuked each other (yet)
Pretty sure Japan wouldn’t agree with that last point…
No, it is genuinely a good point. The fact that its use so far has been entirely limited to the two that ended WW2 was certainly not a given. Some US military leaders wanted to use nuclear weapons in Korea.
The Korean War was so soon after WW2 that the strong taboo against the use of nuclear weapons hadn’t yet taken hold, and the USSR had a miniscule stockpile, so the US could genuinely have done it with limited risk to themselves. The fact that they didn’t use them is a really important turning point that helped build in the taboo against their use that has so far held to this day.
the south lost the American civil war,
They’ve been trying to play the long game
The cultural victory, if you will.
The south won the war when they killed Lincoln.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
Wait, when you say Republicans, do you mean the organisation that Americans currently call the Grand Old Party, the GOP, the modern Republican Party? If so, I find it ironic that the party standing for freedom has evolved into the party that shields and encourages racists and criminals.
the party standing for freedom
That died with the Hayes Administration.
The American parties in the American civil war that share the names with the current parties are largely ideologically inverted at this point.
Kinda terrible examples tho…
Sure “Hitler lost”. Cause he killed himself and stuff. But the Nazis won. The US saved most officers and gave them jobs in NATO and the nascent west German government. Then used them to hunt and undermine communists all over the world. The Nazis themselves kinda won. The Cold War was basically a Nazi war, which they won.
The south “lost”. But after they lost the US became the most racially segregated country in the world and became the chief inspiration to the Nazis.
Then the US literally bombed Japan TWICE for no fucking reason other than spooking Stalin.
You have 3 wrong examples, that actually show we are living in the timeline where the Empire won.
Ok dude
Hitler learned about Eugenics from America. We were forcibly sterilizing people for being “inferior” which you can imagine who that meant. America built their own concentration camps for Japanese citizens and our forced labor in our current prison system is just tge more pletable version of labor camps.
The American civil war was about slavery, but tge north was not full of abolitionist people like you might assume. Tge rich in the North and South were against ending slavery, but their hands were forced by the larger population. The only reason we have not had nukes go off is only because they are old and not maintained well. We’ve dropped a few nukes on accident that just didn’t go off. At least two of those were over America.
we have a lot of life saving technology medically that we use to snap people from the jaws of death so that the state can execute them later
WIN WIN WIN
Good people still exist, so does love.
Can’t confirm. World is dark. Life is pain.
Its there, you have to find it.
I try to be a “silver lining” type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I’ve been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There’s even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.
The RSV vaccine is even being used in the wild! Certain high risk demographics can get it during RSV season. And not rare high risk either, women beyond a certain point in pregnancy and older people.
the common cold
the WHAT?
THE COMMON COLD
(well… just the coronavirus variants that cause it about 50% of the time, no word yet on a norovirus vaccine - https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-sets-sights-common-cold-triple-attack-against-respiratory-diseases)
Common cold is rhinovirus, not norovirus.
I mean, we’re communicating over the Internet right now, which is pretty cool. Right?
On Lemmy. For now. Things will change. But for now it’s pretty cool. Um.
Hi. :waves:
Do you ever worry that somebody could just forcefully grab you, unzip your pants and forcefully stuff hundreds of angry snakes into your pants? Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower? Or that one day all the countries will just nuke each other for funsies?
I often worry about things that don’t makes sense. Like the one time my ex girlfriend was eating ice cream, and I wondered if one day she might give birth to a moose.
Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower?
Ha! Joke’s on you. I don’t have a shower curtain!
Well then you’re not protected from the bathroom skunks!
I like you. Never change.
Hi! How’s it goin?
Hi!
I’m OK, mostly.
Had some good Chinese takeaway tonight, which was a treat. Ate that while watching my countrymen descend into some kind of froth for dystopic, authoritarian autocracy. That’s kind of a bummer.
I abide. Trying to, anyway
For now.
We got the Beetlejuice sequel we have now instead of the original script they had planned.
What was the original script?
All the times where we narrowly avoided nuclear war.
The vast amount of good quality video games out there to play, the amount of good quality animated shows ranging from cartoons to anime to even Chinese Donghua (not you I’m Joybo) like the Legend of Hei movie or All Saints Street, the amount of amazing music being made today by hard working individuals (if you are into what I call the vocalsynth genre (vocaloid, utau, deepvocal, enunu, diffsinger, etcetera)), the ever growing amount of good yiff on E621, and more.
Pizza
Medical science.
We live in a world of plenty where we still produce enough food that nobody need go hungry.
I know this is suppossed to be a good vibes post, but “nobody” is probably a slight underestimation.
Well, we do produce enough food so that’s the good news. As long we ignore the distribution which is the bad part. xd
Capitalism demands that some starve
That was my, admittedly bitter, point, yes. You do have to wonder what the hell weretcollectively playing at.
