CarbonIceDragon

There is a somewhat obvious seeming out to this that a religious person could take I think: what if they were to simply look at the start to it and say "Evil doesnt exist, everything we think is evil actually isnt for -insert some reason here that presumably whatever god they follow understands but humans cant/dont-" It wouldnt work for truly dualistic religions since having an evil deity as well as a good one requires evil obviously, and it does make "good" a fair bit less meaningful, but still. Granted, Im not sure if any actually do this.

I dont have a whole lot of time tonight as it happens, though I'll look through them for a little to see if I find what youre talking about. Im not sure if you know of the youtube channel "philosphy tube" or not, or if they're liked or disliked here if so, but they did a fairly critical video about the topic once that I seem to remember touching on some nasty characters involved in the beginning of it, if that kind of thing is what you mean. I do understand that there is a lot of potential harm you can do with the idea, both if implemented in a bad manner or by someone interested in abusing the power it implies, or in the nearer term using the hypothetical promise of the idea as a ruse to gain support for like, eugenics or such, but I think that there is enough potential good if done well that attempting to do it well is worth a (probably careful) try.

And why wouldnt he? After all, he wont be running for election again; either he doesnt manage to cancel the normal electoral process and isnt eligible, or does, and therefore doesnt actually need to run the risk of losing by making it fair enough to potentially lose. The only reason for him to care about popularity is ego, so if just insisting to himself and others that his decisions are popular is enough to convince himself of it, he will.

This here is the reason why I think that, when dealing with "trolls" of the political influence campaign sort rather than the "just wants to get people mad" sort, the classic advice of "dont feed the trolls" doesnt work. If people wanting to influence public opinion say a bunch of things, and are unchallenged, then anyone coming into the space they are at work in will get the impression that theirs is the sentiment that that community holds and disengage if they dont agree, ceding the space to the influence campaign. If instead those opposed to the influence campaign try to drown out the trolls, then at least they dont appear to represent a consensus opinion.

Hmm, you probably wouldn't/shouldn't like me particularly much then, I've not heard that term before but I do very strongly consider myself a transhumanist at the very least. I suppose I won't try to explain why that is, if it's both a place that doesn't like that stuff but also bans arguing. Feel free to laugh at my hubris I guess, if that's what you mean by sneering? Though I guess I can get the part about silicon valley types, if the technology to do what I would actually want to do with myself came out but it was developed and sold by like, Elon Musk or such I'm not touching it with the world's longest pole.

That wasn't a debate, I just find it easier to process my thoughts about something by writing about what I think of it in a semi-formal way (not because I expect people to actually read whatever I ramble on about, but because it's easier for me to go back to it myself if it visually looks less informal). I'm not trying to actually debate anyone here, wherever "here" is (I don't remember if I've seen this community on my feed before, I don't generally pay that much attention to what specific community something is in but looking at it upon it coming up, I'm a bit confused about what this one is). I don't have a lot of self control about replying to things and find it very hard not to get into arguments if I find something I disagree with, but I don't actually enjoy arguing and don't have the skills for formalized "debate" anyway.

I'm not saying that the article directly stated these things, they're the subtext that I got out of reading it, and mostly come from the later parts of the text or just from other stuff I've read that felt like it had the same sort of message (because again, I'm not trying to actually prove anything to someone with all this). I did read the earlier parts too, yes, but I guess they seemed obvious enough that they didn't stick in my head as much as the later bits. Of course facists lie, that's pretty much the only thing their ideology runs on, that's less interesting to me than the bits at the end where they mentioned, for example, Kim Stanley Robinson. I know golden age sci-fi runs on magic, but I also think that things of similar scale and potential are possible within the already known physics of the real world, eventually.

What if I'm saying names out of order, and say my last now but will say the beginning or other entries on the list later?

I wonder if this is intentional, some kind of regional thing to call it that instead, or perhaps someone using some sort of translation software that is using a synonym for "squash" in a context where it does not apply? (Though, that would require the original language also use the same word for the vegetable and for squashing things, is that common or unique to English?)

"No punishment greater than forgiveness" ppl when the person harming them just does it again because they've experienced no negative feedback as a result of their behavior:

This, and similar writing I've seen, seems to make a fundamental mistake in treating time like only the next few, decades maybe, exist, that any objective that takes longer than that is impossible and not even worth trying, and that any problem that emerges after a longer period of time may be ignored.

It has a valid point that anyone trying to convince you that they can bring a society of the very far future within your own lifetime, if only you do as they say or give them money, is either scamming you or fooled themselves out of desperation to see the end results without the work being put in (understandable when the work required for that society to exist will barring an unlikely miracle of technology take far longer than anyone currently alive now will live), and perhaps that some of this tendency comes from speculating about the possibilities of the future without as much thought to the practicalities of getting there.

It also, I think, is generally correct in that trying to build a more sustainable society is of high importance.

However, at the same time, the kind of future vision it and similar things I've read seem to imply they want people to imagine instead don't really make much sense past the next few decades or maybe centuries. Sustainability is important, sure, but it should be noted that, thermodynamics being what it is, it's also not truly possible. You cannot design a civilization that can persist beyond a certain point without outside input, so if you're trying to think about what paths to take in the future, and value people and societies, it is eventually imperative to acquire resources from outside. This won't bring you utopia forever, but it should bring you more and longer. It also isn't really fair to say that things like space development cannot happen simply because they are very hard, and haven't happened yet despite science fiction sometimes showing it as having happened in the near future. There has simply not been enough time. This kind of science fiction has existed for what? Decades? Maybe a century depending on what you count? Just developing the "easiest" (relatively speaking) parts of the solar system is a task of centuries, getting anything meaningful even barely beyond the solar system one of millenia, and actually controlling the galaxy, assuming it truly does turn out to be empty for some descendant of us to control, one of millions of years, simply on account of the scale of it. It is far too premature to say these things cannot happen just because they haven't in decades. It also is a bit absurd to claim that they won't happen because they simply cannot be done: it is very hard to build a society in a place as desolate as, well, anywhere off earth, and we don't yet have the know-how to do it, but we know that a system capable of sustaining life and civilization over the timescales needed to move through space can exist, because earth is already an example of such a system. Given that it isn't even engineered, it is highly unlikely to be the smallest or simplest possible example of such a system either. We have a society that exists drifting in space already, to replicate and expand it breaks no physical laws, else it couldn't have happened in the first place and I wouldn't be saying this.

There is a certain irony to everyone involved in this argument, if it can be called that. Those who like to think about what could be achieved in the very far future tend, in my experience (I have a very strong interest in such things myself and so hang out in some spaces for such discussion) to have an extremely overoptimistic notion of the timeline, steps and work involved and so seem to think that it will all happen tomorrow, figuratively speaking, without much need to contribute to the actual process of achieving it (or else they have a very grandiose and often counterproductive notion of what that looks like). Meanwhile, those that suspect it's all impossible dreaming that distracts from the immediate problems facing society probably make these things more likely to happen, partly because to build the society of the far future, society has to continue to exist and function from now until then, and partly because knowledge and practical experience in how to maintain a climate, keep industrial activity from destroying it, and not use up nonrenewable resources in a few decades, is also one of the exact kinds of expertise any society built beyond earth someday would need to have. The work of building the future is, for the average person, just in keeping society working long enough for incremental improvements to stack up, and that simply isn't that exciting even if it's the logical prerequisite for much exciting to happen.

It's doubly ironic that many of the people that think that if everyone just listens to them they could do it all quickly, think of themselves as thinking about the long term by doing so. Truely long term planning requires patience and flexibility beyond what any one person is probably capable of at present. At the same time, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to imagine a much greater future than what we have, or to put in the work for it, if we can be realistic about what progress we can expect to watch happen and what that work really is.

Guam wouldn't even be leaving the US, unless you expect it to secede sometime in the immediate future and be successful at doing so. For that matter, if the question is "what would your dream place to immigrate be" rather than "what place do you think you would have a decent shot of being welcomed", why should people not mention popular places? If people didn't find them appealing, they wouldn't be popular in the first place.

That's not how a railgun works, that's how a coilgun works. Railguns create a loop of electric current that flows into one "wire" (the rail), through the projectile into the other wire, and back down to the starting point again, this configuration creates a force that pushes the projectile down the rails