Existential comics is a humour series. I disagree, it’s a joke.

If that’s what you do, good for you. For every few dark jokes there’s someone posting “orphan crushing machine” style glurg. Optimism in the face of horrors or no hope is just unhealthy denial.

I was not trying to fix the world with that post, I agree. Sometimes I do write something that helps someone, though. IRL I do a bunch of volunteer work.

The joke is that Cthulhu is usually unreasonable (at least by human standards), but is able to logically explain himself to the satisfaction of the human shown. This is unexpected.

I’ll leave you with this: cynicism is hip, but it’s exactly as irrational to start with optimism. You’ve got to start with what is, and what ought to be and work from there.

Yes. I’m not in line to inherit a fuck-you amount, but it’s substantial, and if I move to a poor country and live modestly I should be able to make it last indefinitely.

I’d invest if I was above the poverty line, income-wise, but I’m not. Downward mobility is a bitch.

I mean, supported in the personal belief sense. I can assure you that it was never intended, even if that was accidentally conveyed.

Natural language is inherently imprecise. It only works because there’s shared background to interpret it on.

Dark humour is a thing, you’ll see it everywhere on the internet - I’m sure you know that. This is no exception.

At no point in the past week have I supported genocide, and defending part of an argument is not defending the whole. Nor do I expect most to read it that way in such a jocular setting.

I don’t think you’re a terrible person either.

Second person never has a gender in English. Saying “you” should also be fine, or “thee” if you feel like getting your quaker on.

Special requests notwithstanding - the platinum rule here is just to accommodate whatever you reasonably can.

The Mona Lisa is in the public domain, so no, that’s not really a good analogy.

So basically, they can try to stop you, but you’re allowed to win.

his conclusion is inextricably tied to his premise, and you pointedly did not separate the two in your comments until I pointed out to you that you are defending genocide.

It is not inextricable. From a utilitarian perspective, for example, humanity could still produce far more utility that it’s many indiscretions remove.

It was not pointed - it was merely omitted for the sake of expediency, along with commentary on the fictional nature of Cthulhu, or the fact that in cannon he does not speak English.

you say “all the rest could theoretically apply” referring to your agreement with cthulhu’s reasonings for global genocide.

To say “could theoretically” is not the same as “does” - there are many ethical systems that have been proposed.

It’s trying to be. You can’t do everything on there you can do on Facebook, though, which is pretty much this meme.

That’s what it’s trying to do. There’s no way in hell it has the same level of technical features, let alone the same network size, though.

That being said, I’ve never been on either.

I robustly defended humanity being unsavory. I did not robustly defend genocide. To justify Cthulhu’s premise is to not to justify his conclusion. I left the logical connection between the two unexamined.

Yeah, that was actually an awkward wording, sorry. What I meant is that given a non-continuous map from the natural numbers to the reals (or any other two sets with infinite but non-matching cardinality), there’s a way to prove it’s not bijective - often the diagonal argument.

For anyone reading and curious, you take advantage of the fact you can choose an independent modification to the output value of the mapping for each input value. In this case, a common choice is the nth decimal digit of the real number corresponding to the input natural number n. By choosing the unused value for each digit - that is, making a new number that’s different from all the used numbers in that one place, at least - you construct a value that must be unused in the set of possible outputs, which is a contradiction (bijective means it’s a one-to-one pairing between the two ends).

Actually, you can go even stronger, and do this for surjective functions. All bijective maps are surjective functions, but surjective functions are allowed to map two or more inputs to the same output as long as every input and output is still used. At that point, you literally just define “A is a smaller set than B” as meaning that you can’t surject A into B. It’s a definition that works for all finite quantities, so why not?

Well, sometimes it happens. Lemmy was semi-broken during the APIocalypse, and there still isn’t such a thing as a FOSS Facebook, or search engine backend for that matter.

And Linux/BSD are so good proprietary developers rip them off to whatever degree legally permissible.

I’m more of a stickler for accuracy, consistency and intention,

Same thing. Most people find it abrasive and unnatural, but I can roll this way too.

you were defending the reasoning for global genocide(I know you’re whistling a different tune in later comments, I’m talking about why I refuted your earlier defense of genocide)

Please quote the earlier defense of genocide.

Alright, since you seem like the kind of person that appreciates hyper-literalness:

Yeah, that one rings a bit hollow, although I guess it could use it as an argument we’re dumb, because we’re doing it to ourselves. All the rest could theoretically apply, though.

“could, theoretically”, sure.

but in practice those condemnations are too broadly applied and don’t reflect the constant struggle for progress or range of human success.

Do you intend to imply that “the constant struggle” makes humanity more worthy than our actions would imply, yes or no?

If yes, than you’re saying, relative to what was previously implied, that humans are pretty great. I supplied some reasons that they aren’t.

If no, why do you have a problem with what I said?

Alternately, if you do not have a problem with what I said, why are you here?

I’m not sure how to respond to that many one-liner points all at once, so I’ll pick and choose (quite) a bit.

Speaking of, your last point is literally just “no u”, so no, I’m not going to run a poll of users. It’s pretty insulting you’d expect effort that lopsided.

Lovecraft certainly had an (ahem) strong affinity for human, specifically white, specifically Anglo-American morality, aesthetics and general ways of doing things. He also acknowledged and deeply hated that there were other ways of doing things. In fact, the whole point of his Mythos was that, in a universe then-recently discovered to have multiple galaxies full of billions of stars each, nothing may be universal (and that we should be afraid). His letters make that pretty clear.

If you’re a moral relativist, there is no practical side to morality separate from the theory, since it’s an arbitrary construct. You choose a theory of morality, and then the theory and it’s application is all you have.

I’m not agreeing with Cthulhu here. We were talking about the whether these are valid, non-hypocritical reasons he could want to destroy humanity, which is a separate question from if he then should. It’s possible to not believe in punishment at all! Then you came in saying humans are pretty great actually, and that’s the claim I’m really interested in examining. You didn’t substantially respond about that, though.

Maybe Cthulhu wants to kill us all because we make it’s brain hurt to look at.

What an appropriate subject of conversation, because I’m pretty sure by the art style this is Existential Comics.

The use of “in practice” suggests an absolute morality, which I think Lovecraft would object to, and I think many Lemmy users would as well. That aside, pretty much the only counter to this is that we’ve toned down the war, slavery and brutal exploitation over the last 200 years. The last 10,000 before that and probably the last 200,000 before that are kind of the same thing happening over and over again. What’s more, nobody can adequately explain why it’s suddenly started to improve, or if it will stay that way. For all we know, we live in the turbulent transition period between agrarian hereditary autocracy and dystopian high-tech hereditary autocracy.

All in all, humanity is (morally) shit by humanity’s own standards. By nihilistic or existential standards humanity is neutral, as is everything else. Cthulhu’s standards are canonically beyond comprehension.