I’m aware that Purgatory isn’t scriptural, and the community I was raised in believed a lot of stuff that wasn’t found in the Bible. (It’s one of the reasons I left.)

The point I was trying to make there is not “What is Heaven according to scripture?” I was speculating what heaven would need to be for me to consider it a paradise. And the answer I came to is that no place can be a paradise as long as I’m in it. Not because I think I’m a bad person, but because I have so much trauma and other mental baggage that I would be bringing with me. I would be too suspicious of a place with nothing bad in it to be able to enjoy it. I would unintentionally hurt those around me because of the pain I’m in. And those people would hurt me, and each other, because how many people actually manage to reach a state of complete emotional health before they die? No one is ready for paradise.

There would need to be a place and a time for healing the traumas of life before we could enter any kind of heaven. For this I borrowed the name Purgatory, because it seems to me a similar concept. And maybe the person who emerged from such a place would be so different that you couldn’t really say they were me anymore, but I think I’m okay with that. I don’t want to stay the person I am now; I want to become something better.

I guess that doesn’t have much to do with your original point about people not understanding eternity, other than being in agreement that it wouldn’t be a fun thing for humanity as we know it.

I made .iso files and mounted them in virtual drives to do the same thing. I could have used cracks but I didn’t want a virus and I still had the delusion that doing things “fairly” actually meant anything.

As an ex-Christian I find it amusing that you chose to explain via parable. :)

However, I think there are some flaws to your story. You seem to assume that Heaven would be like getting permanently sealed into your own personal holodeck, alone, no contact with anyone but the entity that put you there, the computer loaded with complete records of everything that had existed up to the moment of your death but never updated beyond that. It’s all so very static. Of course you would eventually go mad; what you’re describing is just a more comfortable version of solitary confinement!

It’s also not how Heaven was described to me when I still went to church. Some claimed we would all be sitting on clouds singing praise songs, forever experiencing a state of mindless ecstasy. (Which doesn’t sound like much of an improvement.) Others claimed the Bible says we will be rulers in Heaven, and how can you be a ruler without something to rule over? (That seemed a little better, but I also don’t really want to be some kind of king imposing my will on others.)

The most appealing concept of Heaven I’ve encountered so far is the one portrayed in the Housepets! comic. It’s just another place, but one where everyone has agency and security and has been healed of whatever traumas ailed them in life. They are free to build, create, share, and grow as they like. You can still fuck off and become a hermit if you really want to, but most people choose to hang out in a big city. Some have jobs but there is no money or material needs; they work because they enjoy it or because they believe it’s worth doing. One of the characters even chose to open a free massage parlor because they like helping people relax and wanted more opportunities to do that. And the mortal world still exists, so there are always new people to meet and new stories to read (or write!)

I could maybe spend eternity in a place like that. And if I had to change to make eternal existence possible, well, I’m not the same person I was five years ago and I have no desire to still be the same person five years in the future. I think if Heaven did exist, then Purgatory must also. Not as a place of punishment, but of healing. This world will crush your soul, and even the purest of saints (perhaps especially the purest of saints) carries too much pain and trauma with them for any place they exist to be a paradise. I think you’re right that in order to be okay with eternity we would need to be changed into something unlike our current selves.

Sorry this got so long and rambley. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what kind of hypothetical afterlife could possibly make this all worth it.

They’re not talking about natural monopolies. A natural monopoly is when there’s some barrier to entry that prevents competitors from entering the market, like a need for prohibitively expensive infrastructure.

What OP is talking about are situations like Walmart opening a store in a new location, operating it at or near a loss to drive the local competition out of business, and then jacking up prices once no competitors remain. The government isn’t forcing them to do that.

I spent 30 years thinking I was cishet (and suffering for it). When I finally realized that I’m trans, it was like a dam bursting; suddenly everything about my identity was in question. I’ve gone from “Maybe I’m a girl” to “I’m a trans demi ND plural therian” in three years and I don’t think I’m done discovering things about myself yet.

The child abuse and fear mongering are things that they’re proud of and believe are justified. Trying to address it just makes them feel more powerful.

Calling them “weird” works because their whole ideology is based on them being the normal ones. If you take that away, you also take away their entire (false) claim to authority.

If the AI could really detect any discrepancies between human and AI-generated text, it would stop making them.

To be fair, it’s kind of hard to come up with a defense when your premise is “Cancer treatments cause cancer” 😄

Which specific puberty blocker drug do you believe increases the risk of cancer?

Okay, this one I’m sending to my DM.

I was going to send this to my DM, but then I remembered that he would absolutely do it.

I was responding specifically to the implication that Biden isn’t trying to do loan forgiveness, which is factually incorrect. It’s the courts that keep blocking the plan and forcing it to be narrower in scope, not Biden.

As for this proposed cap on rent increases, I fail to see how a limited increase is worse than an unlimited one. Is it less action than we need? Definitely. Is it insulting that it took the credible threat of a fascist dictatorship to extract this tiny concession? Absolutely. Am I going to kick and scream because it isn’t everything I wanted? Hell no! Just the fact that the President is seriously discussing this is an improvement, and we need all the leftward momentum we can get if we ever want to start pushing the Overton window on economic issues.

I used to scoff like this at early efforts to decriminalize marijuana. “Lower penalties? State-issued medical cards with heavy restrictions? None of that actually solves anything! It needs to be completely legal!” Now look at where we are: Fully legal in 24 states, partially legal in most others, and the DEA has started the process for rescheduling to a less-restricted category. It was slow going and we’re still not quite where we need to be, but that’s way more progress than I ever thought we would get!

Seems kind of weird to blame the guy who is trying to do the thing you want and not the people who keep blocking it from happening.

No mention of trans people, which is odd given that Florida is a Do Not Travel state for its government’s efforts to criminalize being transgender.

This was before they added F2P, but ten minutes a day of checking my two hisec market alts (who didn’t have a lot of skills because it meant pausing my main’s training) was making me just enough to pay for my account and there was room to expand further. Granted, it did take me several months of trading to build up enough funds to support this operation, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect to do this on day 1.

It’s because the furry fandom, when it was founded back in the late 70’s by a gay polycule of sci-fi fans, was one of the only communities in existence that accepted openly gay and trans people. (And the only non-fetish community.) For many queer people, the furry fandom is the first place they ever feel welcome.

I’ve never heard it put that way before, but it’s an interesting observation. A lot of animals are culturally associated with personality traits (e.g. clever foxes, loyal dogs, proud lions) and furries usually choose a species they relate to, so it creates a system where people tend to self-sort into various tribes based on values and personality type. Look at any decently popular species and you’ll likely find that most of the people repping it share a common set of traits.

It’s how they believe it works and how they teach their children that it works.

I was raised by Evangelicals, brought to their churches, and sent to their schools. Girls were taught to dress modestly, because bare skin and certain types of clothing would “tempt” the boys. Boys were treated as mindless slaves to this temptation, taught to resist the urges they were all assumed to have, but never expected to actually succeed. It was always the girl’s responsibility to avoid creating the temptation in the first place. Cult programming to protect rapists by shifting the blame onto their victims.

That link is for a previous breach against a different entity, so not the same story at all.

Well, that was after he decided to start living in my head, so I figured I might as well try to keep him entertained.