me, an aged monarch lounging on my fur-strewn throne, gesturing for my servant to bring me my monacle: Bring them here! Bring them here, I say. Let me look at them.
guards: *drag the unwitting blog before me*
me, peering intently at the new blog and poking them with my scepter: Is this a real person? Hmm? What have you to say for yourself? What are your fandoms? Your interests? Speak up, these old ears aren’t what they used to be.
guards, tentatively: they do seem to be a real person, sire. We found them in possession of several memes and a fandom rant.
me, subsiding back into my sumptuous furs and waving them away: most extraordinary. It has been an age since there was a real person, but just as well, the dungeons have been overflowing with those tacky pornbots. This newcomer may remain in my domain. Make them welcome. And fetch me a quill! I feel a ficlet coming on…
I was attacked by the living embodiment of death. Death was a black void shaped like a lizard and they were wearing a white fedora and a white trench coat.
there are a depressing number of people who want to return to a world of high mortality rates simply because they find it aesthetically appealing.
I mean, I would take high mortality rates if it meant that life was more enjoyable.
newsflash: it won’t be.
Just head over to sountries with higher mortality rates now, see how your enjoyment goes
I can believe that this is true in most cases, but I would be surprised if there weren’t at least *some* situations where that tradeoff existed? Not sure what they would be though.
Motorcycles.
Some types of risk are more fun than others. Motorcycles and high speed chases, yay. Randomly dying of diarrhea over a 2 week period, boring, and unfun
Cholera is modern, though, and many of the other horrific diseases are reasonably recent as well.
Plenty of reasons to dislike ancient lifestyles but much of the suffering we attribute to antiquity is recently imported.
Honestly, I find it really hard to reason about this stuff. If we went back to Ye Olden Times today we’d probably retain a lot of useful knowledge about disinfection, preservation, and obstetrics, which would be a substantial improvement over how stuff actually went at the time; I suspect the biggest issue would not be stuff like people getting cancer from smoked meat or organ failure from type I diabetes, but rather periodic famines from the reduced slack in food production. But if you want to count periodic catastrophes in your mortality rate then it becomes hard to measure the mortality rate of our current lifestyle, because our modern population expansion and resource consumption are so wild that it’s entirely possible the end result is a massive collapse that kills shitloads of people – basically the same model as famines but rarer and on a larger scale because we’re better at shuttling resources around the world now. Since that has never happened, trying to do the math is not easy.
I also have a moral intuition that it’s less bad if people die when they’re extremely young or when they’re nearing the end of their natural lifespan, which were the most common kinds of death historically outside of war and childbirth, so trying to figure out how that factors into things is even more complicated.
I would actually expect disease to be less of an issue than most of the other factors, simply because you’d have fewer and smaller cities, with more of your population in small isolated communities; the livestock communities would also be smaller and more separated, which would help given how many of our diseases use livestock as a reservoir. But those are also the factors that make famine more an issue, of course, hence my concern that famine would be the big problem.
We could also you know, use modern methods of preservation to greatly increase our ability to store surpluses for longer. Along with developing methods of blending agriculture into nature so there are untapped resources that can be called upon during the hard times but are less convenient to the point they won’t be exploited in favor of over capacity.
Bonus Nick Offerman reminding people there actually is no such thing as “manly”:
Actually there is a thing called Manliness.
Manliness is the ability and willingness to fight.
In our dominant culture, the Consumer Culture, fighting is considered “aggressive” and “violent”.
However, in the Martial Culture, the culture of the fight gyms, Manliness is defined as fight skills (ability and willingness to fight), a trained and conditioned body and most importantly the Moral Virtues of Humility, Integrity, Selflessness, Self Control and always showing Respect.
Manliness is very moral.
In the Consumer Culture, Manliness is bought. It’s all about “appearing” Manly. The right clothes, car, house, partner, even the body (steroid muscles).
In the Martial Culture Manliness is earned. You train and you fight.
You learn to protect and defend yourself and those you love.
So there actually is such a thing as “Manly”!
Visit a fight gym and find out!
Train and fight!
Always seek Manliness!
WarriorMale
I think @warriormale just broke down that over indulgent Consumerism was the root of the fall of Manliness in America
Very true!
Today over 90% of Men can’t defend themselves because they don’t know how to fight.
Really tragic.
They look good - big muscles, great clothes, fast cars - but don’t know jack about how to defend and protect themselves.
