luka

Well-known member
you might be approaching this the wrong way. no one is trying to sell you on the idea as literal fact.
 

sus

Moderator
Seems to be greater and greater emphasis on timelines in Western popular culture. The concept itself has been around for a long time, but Community managed to turn it into a meme and now Marvel are really leaning into it with the whole multiverse thing,



You can chalk it up to just a clever way of recasting roles, recycling IPs and dealing with plot holes, but it clearly runs deeper than that as it's deployed in response to current events too. I don't know how many times I saw people going on about being in "the darkest timeline," during Trump's time in office, but it was a lot.

My current feeling's that this stuff stems from a certain fatalism re: things like corruption and climate change. We can't imagine a solution and too few of us are willing to seriously attempt to come up with and implement one anyway, so there's this desire to just escape the whole thing and go somewhere the bad things and people simply don't exist.
I like the double lives bit of the trailer. Seems like what Marvel's trying to do broadly. Grab a bluepilled psychology take about trauma or dissimulation and spin it into modern myth.
 

sus

Moderator
Also re: OP, my impression is climate change has more or less been solved; now the remaining hurtle is getting governments to allocate for climate engineering tech in their budgets.

Modern news cycle should get the brunt of the blame on modern mental health. It's all doom'n'gloom that none of its consumers can meaningfully act on. And then when forces (also outside their control) solve the issue, it's never reported.

See also acid rain and bee extinction—had huge fads of concern and upset in their day; both were solved within about a decade by science, regulation, and engineering.
 

version

Well-known member
The obvious answers are a) because it's not true or b) because climate change affords the establishment a great deal of power.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Wealth measured in energy, or energy complexity/efficiency, rather than wealth in money. Thats a big thing with my angle on capitalism, I see how it can generalize beyond financial wealth. But at that point, I don't think "capitalism" is the best term for it, but thermodynamic capitalism is the best I have so far
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
The obvious answers are a) because it's not true or b) because climate change affords the establishment a great deal of power.
There does seem to be an incipient world consensus about renewable economies, but at least here in the US it seems the biggest legislative hurdle is the GOP's resistance to higher spending, which is a perfectly plausible complaint as far as I can tell, so long as its used in good faith, i.e. not hypocritically.

I watched an interview of the deputy secretary of the department of energy, and he said he was staggered to learn that there was actually a ton of offshore wind farms that just weren't being used to full capacity, and that doing so would bite off a huge chuck of our long-term goal, in terms of megawatt hours. I can track it down if anyone is interested.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I think we'll pull through it, but unless the science is obscenely exaggerating, there still seem to be major issues beyond merely getting the government to do stuff.

The aerosol blanket effect is an example of this: if there is a ceasing of certain emissions, the aerosols (just airborne particulates, presumably larger than mere molecules) drop off significantly faster than the actual greenhouse gases (mere molecules).

Where greenhouse gases, as I understand things, prevent solar radiation from leaving our atmosphere once it has entered, aerosols, being bigger, prevent higher wavelengths of solar radiation from even entering at all.

So in ceasing emissions, and in aerosols dropping off way before greenhouse gases, we will enter a situation where the solar radiation that has already been getting past the aerosols is still trapped in the atmosphere, and the higher wavelength radiation can now enter as well, which would ostensibly heat things up further.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Modern news cycle should get the brunt of the blame on modern mental health. It's all doom'n'gloom that none of its consumers can meaningfully act on. And then when forces (also outside their control) solve the issue, it's never reported.
This is the boomer take. How many young people are actually paying attention to the modern news cycle? I think the right answer is the boring one - somewhere between capitalist realism and jordan peterson without the ideological biases
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
And I would say that its the speed of the modern news cycle rather than the doomy content. Its not like cold war era news cycle was any cheerier- nuclear apocolypse always on the horizon
 
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