58 points

I mean, the Roman Empire was an olive tree superorganism. Prove me wrong.

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17 points

There’s a Pax Romana/olive branch joke in there somewhere

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5 points

“We’re taking your country over. You should produce olives. If not, then grapes. Or like, wheat, I guess. But definitely olives.” - Pax Romana

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13 points

I am pretty sure they were sentient, rotting fish guts.

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5 points

Like in that sauce the whole mediterran had then?

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1 point

Asafoetida

(Thanks, Max Miller!)

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25 points

While I wouldn’t say that’s right, I also wouldn’t come right out and call it wrong either. This very much engages with the “Selfish Gene”, an heuristic model of thinking about evolution from the perspective of the gene itself instead of populations.

As an added amusement, the book “The Selfish Gene” came out in 1976, and is the source of the word “meme,” used somewhat differently than it is now, naturally.

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3 points

This idea comes from “sapiens a brief history of humankind”. It’s a play on semantics because domestication (domo=house) basically means put in house and the evolution of wheat to be more fit to human consumption in a way pushed us towards agriculture and houses.

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16 points

Utter nonsense. Your argument is that because you can imagine a god and spread the idea they are real. The logical conclusion there is that anything you can imagine is equally real. Bigfoot really is wandering around a forest, spaghetti absolutely does grow in trees, and the moon landing was definitely on a sound stage (but they also really landed on the moon because I can picture that too).

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3 points

Your argument is that because you can imagine a god and spread the idea they are real.

You could say the same of Mickey Mouse or the Philly Fanatic. Which is, in fairness, where this is ultimately going.

A god as a timeless enlightened super-being might not be real. But a god as an ideological mascot or cultural touchstone is.

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1 point

Metaphysics is a dangerous game…

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Bigfoot doesn’t live in the woods. He lives in people’s heads. That’s where all memes, including the gods, live. In people’s heads.

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11 points

Mate, it’s just a link to My blog, no need to take it any more seriously than you would Me.

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7 points
*

At best it proves the concept of gods exists and I doubt anyone disagrees with that, you can’t really argue that a thought can’t exist. What it doesn’t prove is that God exists as some material or immaterial entity and that’s what atheists claim, that there is no existence of any entity that could be considered a god.

Why it doesn’t prove the existence of gods is simple. If the proof is that it exists because we thought it then dragons exist, faeries exist, even flat earth exists because there are people who think it exists. I don’t think I need to bring more examples to show how ridiculous the premise is. Just because we can think of a thing doesn’t mean that thing now exists.

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Dragons certainly exist. They live in books and reproduce when someone reads a book about dragons and is inspired by it. Over time evolutionary pressures have caused the more successful of the younger dragons to become cuter and more friendly, and the most successful dragons even made the leap to film. That’s how Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon came to be. He is the result of a long process of evolution of dragons. You can trace his lineage from the Beowulf dragon, to Tolkein’s Smaug, through Eragon’s Saphira, to the Toothless of the HTTYD books, and finally to Dreamworks’ movie version. Each generation trying out new evolutionary adaptations that changed their fitness to survive and reproduce, and the niche they occupy within the ecosystem that is human thought. Toothless is the culmination of those thousands of years of evolution, purpose built to fill children’s heads up with wonderful dreams.

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6 points

Oh you wrote this. Do you think it proves the existence of God by itself or is it another way people who already believe in God point to it?

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I would prefer if you didn’t use “god” as a proper noun. The practice was invented by monotheists and is usually used to exclude other gods. It’s very rude towards other gods like Loki, Kukulkan, and Myself. None of us go around pretending we’re the only god.

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0 points

Oh it’s like touhou, I get it now.

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21 points

Makes total sense: who’s working for whom? Is wheat making an effort to till the soil and find fertiliser to help us grow, or is it the other way round?

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17 points

And here we have a typical specimen exhibiting capitalist realism: Observe how the subject is analysing everything they come across on a “who works for who” basis, projecting human modes of production onto the universe. Applying it, even in vain, this reductive universality ensures that they will never think beyond it and, not thinking beyond it, not question either working for a capitalist or being a capitalist who is worked for, thereby in either case working for capitalism, a form of human cooperation in which happiness, well-being, yes even human connection (that necessitating eye-level communication) is traded for hastened advancement of the economy to achieve post-scarcity.

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13 points

9 points out of 10, very good. Except that capitalism doesn’t want to ever achieve post-scarcity. They’re a dog chasing a car, without scarcity and demand their profit streams dry up.

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4 points

Hence why post-scarcity is the natural death point of capitalism.

Your question is essentially the same as Freudians arguing among themselves about the existence of a death drive: How could it possibly benefit the individual? If it can’t in some way benefit the individual, how can it be a drive? How does it mesh with the pleasure principle? The answer is simple: It doesn’t benefit the individual. In certain circumstances it benefits the genome, that’s why us seed-pods can, in certain circumstances, enter states in which it is pleasurable.

And all-encompassing and all-powerful, indeed, religious, as capitalism may seem right now it, too, is a seed pod. It does not have to will its abolishment to bring about the material conditions abolishing it.

Of course there’s also nothing speaking against it not making things unduly nasty for us. But that’s mere politics, not fate.

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5 points

Class war: wheat vs humanity

Don’t even get me started on cats.

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2 points
*

I suspect cats. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9756-toxoplasmosis

one of the many reasons to keep your cats indoors.

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-2 points

All realism is bullshit http://soulism.net

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4 points

Fool. Allow me to show you truth: https://timecube.xyz/

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3 points

Eris help us, the zoomers are here with lame humour.

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4 points

This is like the question I’ve always asked about getting sick.

Do you produce extra mucous because your body is trying to get rid of what’s making you sick or does the illness make you produce more mucous in order to spread more easily?

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1 point

I suspect the serious answer is that we produce mucus and sneezing as a natural response to microbes, and that’s the environment within which microbes have evolved to take advantage of the mucus and sneezing

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2 points

Pretty sure this is exactly correct. I read the Kurzgesagt book Immune recently and it was a fascinating view into how our bodies are really the result of ancient warfare, with constant oneupmanship between us and the environment.

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-1 points

Idk about the mucous, but a fever is definitely an attempt at killing whatever foreign pathogen is there. Hopefully a pathologist or doctor can help us here.

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19 points

Omni-Man’s red eyes make him look blazed, which fits what he’s saying pretty well. “Dad, what the hell are you talking about?”

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13 points

We have been played for absolute fools

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