Comic Strips

Factorio.

The factory must grow.

The factory must grow

I feel so bad cutting trees and draining lakes 😔

It's true, but when I play games like Terraria, I try to preserve beautiful features of the map and even incorporate them into my builds. Like those surface cave things where it's basically floating dirt/rock with grass and trees growing on them. I often make those into the entrances of underground homes. Same with the deserts. When you get the actuators, you can make sand entrances. I also enjoy making houses in the leaves of the living trees.

That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the ~~slaves~~ ~~forced labor~~ ~~work bit*hes~~

*Due to recent very public events our Public relations officer has been sent on leave with pay instead Nataly will complete this statement.

That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the (Checks Notes) Employees park there cars?

Fucking Tarzan was fighting evil white exploiters of pristine Africa in books back in the early 1900s.

A good white saviour from the evil white people, because the indigenous can't do it for themselves. Just like in Ferngully and Avatar.

One time I unmatched someone from a dating app because the second avatar movie was coming out and they said that it was weird of me to say that the alien people were supposed to represent Native Americans because "they're just blue aliens why would you compare them to real life?"

Apparently media literacy makes you a weirdo?

Like, to absolutely everyone? This ranks up there with "breathing is good."

It's a motif as old as time. Foreign invader getting Stockholm Syndrome with the natives. Another famous example is Dances With Wolves. That film called The Great Wall as well. Some versions of Robin Hood has it. Anthropologists call it Going Native, which is what Carlos Castañeda did.

But they're not all about economic expansionism

Wait until you learn about its subtle ecological message!

The issue is that you're changing the ecosystems and environments so much that all those eons of evolution are simply lost. The only other times this happens is during natural catastrophes. Sure, in the long run this allows new life forms to take the old ones places, but it's still a massive loss of diversity and evolutionary knowledge - and unnecessary suffering for millions of living beings.

When species compete for a habitat, they rarely destroy it - and those species that do either don't survive for long, or they wipe out large swaths. We're actively killing almost anything in our habitats, and destroying them for almost all previous species.

The resource being extracted on the avatar planet was unobtanium.

It was only available on that planet, precisely so intelligent people like you can’t say “why not mine barren rocks instead”?

There could be many reasons:

• The thing you are mining is actually very rare, and although it could be elsewhere, it's the only place you found it. This is the case in Avatar. The Unobtanium they are mining is not found anywhere else.
• It's easier to mine on a habitable planet. You don't have all the extreme difficulty of operating in space or a planet/moon with no atmosphere. In Avatar workers can freely operate without any special equipment, using just a gas mask, and don't need to be astronauts.
• You are assuming they found Pandora to mine on it. They probably found it through scientific research, and the mining angle only appeared later when the resource was found.

Another important detail is that in Avatar they don't have any faster than light tech. Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star to the Sun, and it takes years to get there anyway. Sure, there might be lots of better places to choose, but it's literally the only habitable body in reachable distance from Earth unless you want to spend decades flying in one direction.

That's what I was wondering. Capitalists didn't invent exploitation of nature, it just so happened that its worldwide adoption coincided with unprecedented technological advances. There's quite a few examples of historical societies that exploited nature as much as they could and suffered for it.

There’s a lovely coast and trillions to be made.

Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.