the lower one of this pair arrived in the mail and made me say, first, “Huh? What? IDU!” — but then “Maybe this is from an arc and the context will help”. The immediately previous comic did seem to go with today’s, and is printed below, as the upper of the pair. (The Girls are drowning in “history”, so maybe the recent mini-thread on time-travel — discussed here — would also fit as relevant, but it didn’t seem a strong case.)
Well, these do seem linked but different. What can provide a rescue from history? Technology maybe? No, says the top entry. Then maybe philosophy? Dopes the lower entry also say No to that suggestion? Or does it offer some hope? And how the heck can intoning Derrida’s name as parts of other words invoke any magic?
P.S. Those with behind-the-scenes interest can take a look at this excerpt from the tree of categories:
Comics I Don't Understand 
I’m trying to figure out what the rock labeled “DUH” is supposed to represent.
I fail to understand how any solution coming from a “beery swine” could ever improve the situation.
@Powers Perhaps the rock is labeled thus because modern technology often fails in such obvious ways.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Not to deride this, but there doesn’t seem to be a stein full of wit here.
@phsiii: Interesting that Munroe uses Nebraska.
“There is a popular myth or misconception that suggests that all internet traffic in Nebraska ran through one building at the University of Nebraska. However, this is not true.
“While the University of Nebraska has played a significant role in the development of the internet, it is not accurate to claim that all internet service in the state ran through a single building at the university.” (ChatGPT, stolen from somewhere)
zbycyclist: That is interesting. Knowing him, deliberate.
I do live near Loudoun County, Virginia; multiple sources claim that 70% of the world’s Internet traffic runs through there. I can never decide if this increases or decreases the risk of a nuclear attack on Washington, D.C….
@ Phil (6) – I remember a discussion in college (during Reagan’s insane military spending craze), in which the hypothesis was raised that living in Los Angeles (or Washington DC) would be a definite advantage in a nuclear war, because it would ensure a quick death during the first-strike phase, so that one did not have to worry about any further effects, like fallout, or a “nuclear winter”.
P.S. I had classmates who went to work for military contractors that produced the MX missile. A similar “dark” hypothesis held that this was supposedly more “moral” than working to produce (for example) cluster bombs, because those things were (and still are) actively killing civilians, whereas nobody has ever (yet) died from a nuclear missile, and if that ever should occur in the future, then we will all be dead anyway, and unable to refute the hypothesis.
Kilby: that is dark indeed! All of it.
Loudoun County is quite something. I worked there twenty years ago, and now when I’m out there it’s “Wait, there’s *another* data center there? That was trees last week…” I’m not exaggerating (well, maybe “last week”). It’s basically wall-to-wall data centers.
“…, whereas nobody has ever (yet) died from a nuclear missile,…”
I was going to raise the seemingly obvious counterexamples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I suppose there is a technicality in that they were not onboard missiles.
I’m not sure how people dying or not dying figures into the outcome of moral questions. I’ve heard the argument that if the atomic bombs had not ended World War II and it continued for a very long time, more people would have died. That’s basically the trolley problem. But most of the people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be dead by now anyway. One hundred years from now, you and I will be dead because of some cause or other. So does it even matter what we do?
“But,” you may counter, “at least one may leave some sort of legacy and be remembered for a long time, like Franklin Roosevelt.” Granted, but suppose that like the Biblical king Nimrod your name means “Mighty Hunter” for five thousand years and then “Pathetic Little Idiot” for the rest of time after that? It could even happen to Franklin Roosevelt, depending on what Daffy Duck says about Elmer Fudd at some time in the far future.
MiB, and then there are the calculations of “excess deaths”
Well, the next installment is out.
@ deety (9) – That techicality was explicitly intended. In those conversations I mentioned @7, we were discussing current and future decisions and policies related to nuclear weapons. The decisions (and errors) that were made in 1945 were perhaps historically relevant, but not a pertinent part of the discussion at the time (in the mid 1980s).
P.S. At some point I took a political science class in which we examined the Cuban missile crisis in exhaustive (but very interesting) detail. Instead of trying to illuminate an objective “true” history of the events that occured, the professor’s approach was to look at them from the viewpoint of each of the agencies involved (both foreign and domestic), such as the President’s Cabinet, or the Soviet Politburo. The comparisons were fascinating, and shed a lot of light on why the respective governments reacted in the ways that they did.