The problem is you need to depict their actions as evil and monstrous, or fascism might appear to be a reasonable solution. Isolating the evil of fascism from the ordinary people pushing for it is subtle and complicated. Especially when some fascists really do cross the line into evil behaviour.

Basically humans are often bad at sharing subtle messages widely. Regardless of how much nuance you add to begin with, the message will always devolve for most people into either “hitler evil” or “hitler wasn’t that bad, he was nice to animals”, so given the options, most people prefer to lean into the evil side and avoid normalising fascism, with the inevitable consequence that it appears you have to start wearing skulls and torturing people in order to be a fascist and people forget that for the vast majority of everyday fascists it was “just politics” right up until they lost the war and had to start rethinking things.

I offer no solutions, but I don’t think you can blame just the bourgeoisie, but rather the human condition in general, us vs them, and the difficulty in sharing detailed concepts to a wide audience. There will always be “bad guys” who are so bad that we can’t possibly become them. I do think we’ve gotten better at telling stories with complex evil, but the flip side is that seems to just reduce people’s resolve to act. Almost like the 2 options built into our brains are “us vs them, kill the evils ones” and “meh, corruption is inevitable, just ignore it”.

Nobody will ever make a better car because the world has ended?

There’s been plenty of explanations already, but here’s a perspective I think can help:

Your original intuition is entirely correct for an object that appeared next to earth but which isn’t moving relative to the sun. It would fall straight in with very little trouble. If it’s moving a little sideways then it’d need to be nudged to make sure it didn’t miss the sun.

But the Earth is moving super fast sideways, so an object coming from Earth would need to be nudged a lot to not miss the sun.

He did technically kill at least one person personally, though most people wouldn’t call that one much of a crime, as such.

I guess they are all cat-related.

Simba would be the singing gorilla of the cat world.

Yes, it’s empathy plus anthropomorphising. There’s nothing wrong with refusing to anthropomorphise, but for the people who do, the empathy is real, even if the characters are not.

We knew it was wrong of course…. But we didn’t say anything because we didn’t want to cause a fuss.

Which of course is a symptom.

“My leg is broken” “Then walk to the hospital, duh” “I can’t, my leg is broken” “Why are you choosing to live in pain?!”

Tbf the kind of person who might make this mistake is exactly the kind of person who would be embarrassed discovering the true meaning. The kind who doesn’t swear but is exposed to people who do and pick up the vernacular without the origins.

Probably whoever gave them the sofas

It’s also been used for hundreds of years, it’s not a post-internet concept.

It might be a youtube title, or it might be quoted Greek or Latin text. Or various other uses in between.

Well that sucks. My favourite moment in a hidden role game was when a player won by misreading their card and convincing both of us that we were allies at the start. They ended up the only evil player for most of the game and then in the last round after we’d worked together to systematically kill everyone else (all weirdly innocents, we were both feeling guilty by this point), when they finally realised they knew there was no evil player they checked and… killed me. Total madness and a glorious victory for them. How can you be mad at that?!

Whilst I agree that universal consuming nanobots are a bit far fetched, I’m not sure I’m sold on the replication problem.

Life has replication errors on purpose because we’re dependent on it for mid to long term survival.

It’s easy to write program code with arbitrarily high error protection. You could make a program that will produce 1 unhandled error for every 100000 consumed universes, and it wouldn’t be particularly hard, you just need enough spare space.

Mutation and cancer are potential problems for technology, but they’re decidedly solvable problems.

Life only makes it hard because life is chaotic and complex, there’s not an error correcting code ratio we can bump from 5 to 20 and call it a day.