This is an idea explored in The Egg by Andy Weir.

That’s what irks me the most, when people act like abstaining from an election is a grand act of protest that will change things for the better. I understand the reluctance to vote, but that should never be accompanied by a reluctance to act.

What’s your opinion of the Bolsheviks?

I would be wondering what I did to make his job more difficult.

That also reminds me of this scene from Invincible where during the copying process their experiences are sort of “blended” making them see from both bodies at once, only here they both live and are separate afterwards.

Edit: is it obvious how much of a sci-fi geek I am lol

If anyone’s interested in a hard sci-fi show about uploading consciousness they should watch the animated series Pantheon. Not only does the technology feel realistic, but the way it’s created and used by big tech companies is uncomfortably real.

The show got kinda screwed over on advertising and fell to obscurity because of streaming service fuck ups and region locking, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s at least partially because of its harsh criticisms of the tech industry.

The animated series Pantheon has a scene depicting exactly this, and it’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen.

Edit: Here is the scene in question. It’s explained he has to be awake during the procedure because the remaining parts of his brain need to continue functioning in tandem with the parts that have already been scanned.

That’s a fine perspective to have, the moral imperative to have children is a common enough feature of various religions and cultures. It is, however, just one perspective. One which you have no right to force onto others.

Here’s my perspective:

Every person has the inalienable right to self determination. One’s body is inviolable and subject to one’s own will alone. Having children is a personal choice that no one else can decide for you.

You are entitled to your opinion just as I am entitled to mine. By all means, be fruitful and multiply, but don’t demand that trans people hide themselves from children because you’re afraid of the ideas they might have. If you agree that people have the right to choose then you should have no problem with it being an informed choice.

And being “deeply confused” for a male child means not wanting to act out the traditional role of marrying a woman and bearing children?

From your original comment:

You can be a biologically-male woman all you want, that is your choice and your right

But then you say:

Boys need to understand that they are not women and will never be women, their role isn’t to bear children, it’s to meet a woman and be the father of a child.

So which is it? Is it the right of any person to identify as they choose, or must you act out the traditional (conservative) gender role predetermined by your biological sex?

I reject the premise that a child can be momentarily confused and end up getting full gender reassignment surgery. That’s just conservative fear-mongering that is willfully ignorant of all that’s involved in gender-affirming care.

the only political currency left to us being our votes

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, and I understand your concern for what it means that our lesser of 2 evils now supports a genocide. That being said, thinking that voting is our only means of affecting change made this rightward shift inevitable in our 2-party system influenced primarily by wealth.

I know this may be hard to hear, but our democracy - in isolation - was doomed to fail from the start. The only positive changes to our government were made not as a result of voting, but of direct action, which always has been and remains to be our most valuable political currency.

If you focus on the vote as being the only way to make change, then voting is indeed pointless, and that realization can only lead to doomerism and despair. However, understanding how insignificant the vote is is the first step to understanding how much more significant your other choices can be. When you know that organizing mutual aid, protesting, unionizing, and otherwise engaging in direct action is the most effective way to change things, the hard choice of how to cast your vote becomes much easier.

Personally, I will be voting uncommitted in the primary, and for Biden in the general, so that the Dems get some kind of message while I also buy time before the decline. Yes, it bothers me to vote for a man who is complicit in genocide, but knowing how little my vote matters allows me to give it a very small amount of thought and dedicate the rest of my energy to more important matters.

I haven’t run into anyone who considers emulsifier a scary chemical word. Most people I know with any baking skill know what the word means and use egg yolks for that purpose all the time.

Their TV show Sense8 is also really great progressive sci-fi.

Yep that’s a big red flag, unfortunate it’s so common.

To explain further, the problem is money as an end and the product the means. The best companies with the best products and services are ones that view their product/service as the end and money as the means. Such a company is satisfied when their product or service is the best it can be. A company viewing money as the end is never satisfied and the quality of the product/service is only relevant insofar as it’s not a barrier to making more moolah.

At the moment Solarpunk is a somewhat small and not very well defined movement, but it’s slowly growing and coming into its own. It started as a call to writers to write more hopeful fiction about the future as a response to the disproportionate prevalence of dystopian fiction, chiefly cyberpunk.

Here is a more comprehensive write-up about it. Solarpunk imagines a future where humanity finds a way to live in balance with nature, technology, and each other, with a heavy focus on being realistic, grounded, and attainable. Politically it’s very socially progressive, environmentalist, anticapitalist, and anti-authoritarian.

Here’s a quote from Martin Luther King that says exactly what he thinks of people like you:

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

The word libertarian is older than the conservative appropriation of it. It used to be an explicitly leftist label, referring to what we would consider today to be anarchists or communalists.

I’ve recently started using this, running it in a docker container on my media server. It’s fairly simplistic but that’s exactly what I was looking for.

It’s more likely you’re getting those hyper-targeted ads because of location tracking and relationship tracking than because they’re listening. It’s much cheaper and easier than running voice recognition on shitty audio clips from a mic in your pocket, and honestly much scarier.

People only ever have anecdotes to support the claim that tech companies are listening in on their conversations, but these companies openly admit to targeting ads based on your location data and specifically who you’ve been associating with.

It’s more likely that others in your congregation searched for that verse, so it was suggested to you based on your proximity to others who already searched for it.

You can, but definitely not by accident.