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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 20th, 2023

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  • I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you here, but thought I’d provide a counter argument.

    A group of children are dying of a horrible, deadly disease that can only be cured with the bark from a specific tree. So we go into the forest and chop this tree down to save the children from an excruciating disease.

    A squirrel had built its entire home in that tree. That tree was everything to the squirrel. Now the squirrel has nothing and will suffer because we chopped down its home.

    How do we explain this to the squirrel? Well, we can’t. No matter how hard we try, we can’t explain why we needed to destroy its home. The squirrel is physically incapable of understanding.

    Playing devils advocate here, perhaps the reason for the need for human suffering is so beyond our understanding and comprehension that we are just physically incapable of understanding. Maybe we’re just squirrels, and human suffering needs to happen for some greater purpose unbeknownst to us.


  • That’s the thing. The math says they’re both correct, and that it depends on the viewpoint of the observer.

    I’m inside a car moving at 60 mph. I throw the ball forward (let’s ignore air resistance) at 30 mph.

    Me, who’s inside the car, sees the ball move forward at 30 mph.

    You, who’s outside the car, sees the ball move at the car’s speed PLUS the throw speed (60 + 30 =90 mph)

    So, the ball is moving both at 30 mph and 90 mph. How can that be? It depends entirely upon your reference frame (inside the car? Outside the car? Inside another car moving at 40 mph?). The ball moves at all these speeds, and they are all “correct” within universal terms.


  • With your example, nothing is “moving”.

    Imagine a giant wave in the ocean that is almost lined up perfectly parallel to the shore. Imagine the angle that the wave is off by is astronomically small (0.0000000001 degrees off from parallel). Also imagine the shore line is astronomically long (millions of kilometers).

    One end of the wave will crash the shore slightly before the other end of the wave at the opposite end of the shore. The difference in time between the two sides of the shore is also astronomically small (so small that not even light could reach the other end in time)

    Now let me ask you: did the wave “crash” travel faster than the speed of light? Of course not. I think that is a similar analogy to the laser movement concept you described.

    Edit: Fun thought experiment. Depending on where you are on the shore (which end you are closer to), you may see one end crash before the other end (one event happening before the other event). Have two people at different locations on the shore, once they meet up with each other, they might disagree on which end crashed first! And they would BOTH be correct! Relativity is fucking crazy









  • sigh another imagined argument about these mythical “Americans” I keep hearing about.

    Most Americans also hate this system haha. I mean, McCarthyism still has its effects to this day, and maybe the people I’ve met are not representative of the general population, but I literally haven’t met one American “in love” with capitalism. The most pro-capitalist argument you’ll get here is “well yeah capitalism has its flaws, but it’s the best we got”…which is a bullshit argument, and is in fact the same argument the south used to convince people to keep slavery around fyi.