• Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Someone wake me when this isn’t just some distraction from some other, actually important, issue.

    When congress suddenly works together and suddenly putting aside all the partisan bullshit, it’s usually bad for regular people.

    See: The PATRIOT Act.

  • TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Alien: “We’ve come to rule you.”

    Dude: “Cool.” points at DC “One of our leaders spaced out yesterday for like 12 seconds and crapped his pants on live television yesterday. You can start there.”

    • DrMux@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      “Hmm… we really only wanted to rule over you to harvest your species’ brain power through an interface with our computational networks. This… just won’t do. Later losers!”

      • button_masher@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        You mean a network where everyone is connected and contributing to a shared goal? Where we are all one with everything around us and all the differences in our personalities gets recognized in a post scarcity environment?

        “I for one welcome our new overlords. What’s our purpose?” “Destroy.”

  • PunchingBag@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This has been the response to everything that’s come out since the Nimitz Incident. Bigger revelations have come out in the last seven years than in the last seventy. We’re tired, and we’re scared, I think. Aliens are going to need to really shake their cans if they want us to care.

    • DrMux@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      We’re tired, and we’re scared, I think.

      Worse, we’re used to being tired and scared. We’re apathetic to our own anxieties and exhaustion. The only thing to fear is not fear itself. It’s complacency toward fear.

      • PunchingBag@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        When I trawl the net for UFO stuff, what I see more than anything is people hoping for a savior. People hoping that aliens will save us from our economy, from climate change, from religion, from fascism, from war, from nuclear weapons, from disease, from Republicans, from Democrats, from progressives, from regressives, and mostly from ourselves.

        I’ve been speculating that that fear is a driving force for a lot of the current UFO craze. We’re in a dangerous time, things are only getting worse, and people are becoming desperate for a superhero to come and save the day.

        I think we’re more scared that there aren’t aliens, sometimes.

        • DrMux@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Sounds like a half-self-aware version of “Great Man” thinking, just with the caveat that there aren’t actually any among humanity.

          But actually, I think you’re right. It’s easier and more palatable to our narrative-hungry minds to believe that we’ll get some sort of cinematic climax before the credits roll, history ends, and we walk out of the theater, than to realize that the world can both be unimaginably shitty and also incredibly boring. If the world doesn’t end, or if this isn’t the end of history (I think a deus ex machina utopia granted by the aliens falls in this category) we might have to confront the grim reality of slow, complicated, and mostly nameless problems. And that’s a lot like waking up one day and realizing your parents are real people who don’t know everything, and one day they won’t be around to deal with things for you.

          I’ve had similar thoughts about other conspiracy-type thinking like the illuminati but yeah, makes sense that it would apply to aliens as well.

    • insomniac_lemon@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      That’d suck because I know he doesn’t have enough to share with the whole class. The radiation is gonna be cold by the time it gets around to us, so we’ll have to live through the aftermath.

      • Confused_Emus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I guess I should consider myself lucky to live in a decently sized population center? I just hope I have time to flip Nelnet the bird before I’m flash-incinerated.