“optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror
“For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born. As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have a unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
I always have to remind my mom that she legitimately thought Obama might be the Antichrist… I honestly think the entire premise of the “End of the World” religious beliefs is just pattern recognition instincts being pointed at something entirely random.
It looks very, very silly in hindsight, but natural selection actually selects for a nontrivial predisposition to make type 1 errors, so we should expect them to be very common.
>I honestly think the entire premise of the “End of the World” religious beliefs is just pattern recognition instincts being pointed at something entirely random.
It isn't ever entirely random. They thought Obama was the Antichrist because they thought he was a Muslim, and a common interpretation of the Book of Revelations is that the final war of Armageddon will be a nuclear war between Christianity and Islam, after a New World Order/One World Government established by the Antichrist.
This interpretation is a conspiracy theory driven by 9/11. If it was not, Saudis would be America's biggest enemy, not the most trusted ally after Israel.
The Comics Code Authority kind of took that line. "Realistic" crime could not be depicted in comic books, which is a big part of why Silver Age comic book villains are so surreal.
I do admit to suffering from nostalgia, but I also think it is the case that everything useful you could do with a computer was doable in 1993, and anything that you couldn't is probably a bad idea.
I literally do not understand this perspective. If that was true they would have let Netflix buy Warner Bros., which would have spun off CNN, and Skydance could have scooped it up for much much less money than buying the entirety of Warner Bros/discovery.
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