apocalypstyx

A word replaced with one more vague one does not a robust argument make. Such a notion of universality lacks the concept of frames of reference and relies on an impoverished understanding of the concept of entropy. The argument for a cyclical imperative to history is at best tautological and fundamentally anti-empirical.

Maybe we should stop re-positing the specific developments of contemporary capitalism with some generic notion of civilization. A civilization is not some 'national body' that grows, matures, and dies exactly analogous to a biological organism.

Or airplane passengers vs those on the ground.

Something like 59 micro-seconds per 10 million frequent flier miles.

It depends on a certain consideration. If you take the argument (which I can't remember who laid it out) that (in Christian metaphysics, was the example) the experience of the individual (self) is replicable by God but the unique soul is not, consciousness experience (memories and sense of self) can be replicated by definition but the soul (necessarily unique) cannot. So soul and conscious experience must be distinct. The conclusion was that everything that makes an individual an individual as known (memories, experience, perception, personality) perishes with death and only the soul continues on and is completely distinct from the individual sense of self. So there is no experience of "heaven" by the self. Such is immaterial from the point of view of consciousness.

A version of this is what I took to be laid out by the 3rd question.

On this basis, the continuation of the soul is irrelevant with regards to the self. The death of the soul would be as immaterial to the self as the soul's continuation to "heaven" would be to consciousness.

They are disingenuously referencing trans affirmative care.

> Interestingly, child sacrifice is still with us, in the form of state-sanctioned castration. Plus ça change...

This isn't happening.

Intersex children being force-ably sexually re-assigned, that was a thing we did for a long time and which has only barely slowed in recent times. The only sexual modification of children going on is the regularization of the body.

> outrage over this is misplaced and typical of comfortable out of touch urbanites,

Born and raised on a farm. Worked logging from the age of eighteen. Worked in housing construction and also as a plumber's assistant and as an electrical assistant. And I, too, call bullshit.

Liability laws diminished (This was already the case with most state agriculture laws, so you have a lot of farm kids with injuries from tractors and the like.)

Kids working in bars serving alcohol and not old enough to drink, yet I've seen these exact people scream about a family-friendly drag show held in a bar venue when the bar part is shut down (so no alcohol served), yet they want minors around possibly inebriated adults.

People need a baseline education to participate in modern democracy. They should not be forced out of school by economic circumstances in order to work low-paying jobs for multi-million or billion-dollar companies.

It's been a lot of years since I first read Scanners Live in Vain, but I always remember the first two lines.

...

Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg were broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the Mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.

"I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It's my worry, isn't it?"

Social construct != not real™.

A king is only a social construct. One can still order your head cut off.

> I have nothing to say. I feel powerless and robbed of my own future by my parents' generation.

Beware, O Sinner, for Who Promises You a Tomorrow?

--St. Alphonsus of Ligouri

Just as we pretend the heat death of the universe shall never arrive and that time (billions upon billions of years is inconceivable to the human mind) we pretended it an infinity, never truly paying heed that there would be a last generation or that we might be among them.

The early 1800s didn't have governments?

Oh, a both-sideser.

Well, if that's the case, you really shouldn't care. It should be as easy for you to be one as the other, yet those who invoke 'both sides' really only ever seem to be favoring one side.