Whenever I see memes based on this comic, I remember the original and the creepy squicky feelings come right back.

I’d suggest a BDSM munch or a LUG at a cafe. Also writing groups.

I didn’t pay $15K but I got a new one. And then the gears were two low because it was a mountain bike and I had to install a custom touring drive train. (I’m having the same problem with my current e-bike, in that I run out of gears and e- at about 20mph.)

As a fellow gen-x, I had one in my early forties and again at fifty-seven!

Um, a deep dive into moral philosophy? No academic institutions were attached to it. I just read a lot.

I don’t think naturalism negates our collective community, but it does mean it is up to us to navigate an instinct for small tribes. Once we took up advanced agriculture and stopped migrating, we built large societies. And since then we have been contending with subversives who favor their own smaller sects over the good of the community, and they are very good at subverting larger systems for their personal gain.

Most theistic paradigms insist that there are higher powers to assist us when we confront existential threats (such as the climate crisis). Naturalism is one of the paradigms (not the only one) that confronts that there are no safety nets or training wheels. The human species can die out without the assurance of self-sustaining off-world colonies, and there are no higher powers to care or even notice. (Again, not to say they don’t exist, but we’ve looked hard and been unable to detect them.)

Human society may, possibly in the face of the Trump regime, finally take class consciousness and community-focused governance seriously on a large scale. (There have been smaller scale examples.)

However, this isn’t the first time we’ve thought about it and been subverted by established political power. Rather historically, often just after a bout of tyranny, societal collapse and its consequential horrors, we decide as firmly as we can that this time we’re going to do it right! and then it gets diluted and subverted within even thirty years.

So to address the matter of uniting our collective community in a global cooperative effort: It’s going to take a sociological miracle. We need to discover some new method, invent some new technology that enables all of us, even Trump, Musk, Vought and Thiel to recognize that every one of our fellow 343 million Americans (or 8 billion plus fellow humans) is, as Jesus put it, our neighbor who we should regard equally, that the worst renegade and the most wretched transient deserve the same benefits and treatment as themselves. And then this new thing needs to be resistant to efforts to subvert it.

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal imagined such a gimmick, though I can’t locate the specific comic. In it a point system is invented, and it’s noted that people are nice for the points rather than for a sincere interest in community, but the system works, so it doesn’t matter much.)

And we need to do it soon. We’re running out of water, and the global average temperature is now at levels where experts warned us could prove a challenge to responders even at the national scale as hurricanes and wildfires rampage across the planet. The unlucky ones will survive until the global famine.

Naturalistic philosophy doesn’t say we can’t navigate our way to a community-driven society that acknowledges the least of us deserve a comfy life and we should mind the environment, rather, it only acknowledges that if we don’t we risk human extinction, and if we die out, there’s nothing watching out for us. The greatest cosmic horrir: throughout the universe not even a fraction of a fuck will be given as all of our culture, all of our ideas and works will be reduced to another geological layer on a speck orbiting a spark.

And a lot of people are not prepared to confront this.

Yeah, I warn those who are challenging their own faith that naturalism isn’t for everyone. For me it was a stark process to come to terms that I’m thinking meat, and my species is looking at some imminent great filters even before we are able to create a dependent colony on our own moon, so mostly harmless is going to be more of a footnote than our society deserves.

As someone who had an early aspiration to add something significant to the collective community that it could take with it into the future, this proved to be a bit of a let-down.

I’m getting a paywall or adblock block or something. Anyone have a less problematic link to the article?

The climate crisis has a good chance of completing the job. And then there’s a lot of not-quite-worst-case scenarios where a tiny number of humans are able to survive for the tens of thousands of years it’ll take for the earth to repair itself. Everything we know about humanity will be lost and replaced by an entirely different culture.

BMW and VW are the same beasts they were when they were backers of NSDAP in Germany.

Between the VW emissions cheating and BMW’s subscription car features, it seems their attitude towards commerce has not changed a jot.

Thought about this before. I’d build out the high-speed internet structure to encompass all the populated parts of the world (omitting coverage across large swaths of open sea) and provide free, no-questions-asked WiFi internet service to absolutely everyone.

(Yes, a lot of places don’t have devices, but parallel programs already exist to get people enabled on cheap devices)

The obstruction would be legal battles with current stakeholders that have regional monopolies and are very addicted to making odious profit. (Looking at you, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc.)

Then let’s see Microsoft do this with full transparency and keep a publicly accessible list of forbidden words. Then evidence this is a general policy should be plain.

If your oath against genocide has any exceptions, it’s not an oath against genocide.

So long as one person is in danger from genocide, we all are in danger from genocide.

Your problem is rich people. Don’t let them.

Extra convincing since animal genitals in furry porn are a controversy in the furry sector. Some like their characters to have animal-appropriate gonads where others (e.g. VISA, the credit card) feel thats a line too far.

(Not a furvert myself but have researched intersections of sex-focused content and the freedom of speech, or in some cases, commercial restrictions on free speech.)

20 since I was like 9 or 10.

Evidently it’s a German thing? Though I was never pressured to do so, it just seemed right.

When Lucasarts was making a lot of Star Wars games we tryed to make ourselves Star Wars names by anagramming our government names.

I have finge, extremist political views. I’m a Satisfactory player.

ai had the opposite problem (as did my mom) we were the ones with less-appreciated mental skills dumb ones in a family of geniuses. And then would learn oh the rest of the world can’t do molecular chemistry computations in their head either.

My dad, a literal rocket scientist (his job title was Aerospace Engineer) could do extremely sophisticated math where I failed Calculus Integration (and was called baroque by my calculus math instructor). So I grew up believing I was an idiot.

I’m more likened to Ferdinand the Bull or Murphy the Eagle.

Also BMW was a major sponsor if NSDAP when the Communists were considering nationalizing private wealth.

All the hate and cynicism directed at Bavarian Motor Works can never be enough.