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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • With one linear timeline, you basically have Back to the Future rules. You can go back and change things, even if it rewrites you out of existence. Of course, there are some logical paradoxes that arise from that theory of time, so most versions rely on some delayed repair mechanism, like how the photo of Marty slowly disappears, or how The Ancient One explains the Time Stone to Professor Hulk. Time Cop, Butterfly Effect, and Looper do the same, with changes going into immediate effect like old injuries becoming later scars in real time, but erasing yourself really ought to be devastating to spacetime itself. I liked the concept in Butterfly Effect where the time traveler experiences all the memories of their new life in the altered timeline with every new change, but then they abandon the hard sci-fi aspect to get cute with stigmata. Donnie Darko probably handles it the best, where time travel itself creates a universe-ending paradox that requires the destruction of the time traveler.

    Essentially, you jump from now back to another location in spacetime where you didn’t exist the first time around. If you overlap with yourself, you’re either going to gain a new retroactive memory, or there’s some magical maguffin that erased the memory (like the Tardis does for the Doctor), or some universal force reconciles the timestream and eliminates the paradox.





  • I oppose it simply because it doesn’t work. It is not a deterrent, and it does not serve justice to put people to death, and it costs far more to execute someone than it does to rehabilitate them (the most expensive alternative - I’m not suggesting rehabilitation is an option for everyone).

    And sometimes we execute innocent people. Like, how many of your family members would you be willing to put to death to keep the death penalty? Every innocent victim of the death penalty had a family, and that family never imagined it could happen to them.


  • I would argue that it would impact the effectiveness of the effort, but the intention is just as important.

    Like if you want to make the world a better place, you can pick up litter in your local area. You could volunteer at the library or conserve energy in whatever way is easiest for you. The desire to move forward is critical, because nobody has all the information. Nobody can know all the angles, and be aware of every impact. Everyone is just doing the best they can with the information they have.

    Wanting to be better informed is also a progressive ideal. Know better, do better. We might discover that something we thought was beneficial is actually harmful. The difference between a conservative choice and a progressive choice is that when new information demonstrates that behaviors conflicts with values, the progressive changes their behaviors while a conservative changes their values.


  • I don’t think it’s helpful to think in terms of left and right. That presumes that each side is roughly a mirror analogue of the other.

    Think in terms of forward and backward. Will your ideas and political leanings push society forward? Will you be making the world better than you found it? Or are you trying to resist change, fighting against progress because the status quo, or the recent past, benefits you in some way?