lurker
7d ago
Well, might as well take the opportunity to hop on my hobby horse since when the hell else am I gonna get to talk about this on the the motte?
I'm pretty well convinced the oxygen catastrophe never happened, not in the sense that there was no oxygen spike but rather there was no mass extinction caused by this. When you look into the evidence for such a oxygen caused mass extinction, there really is only two peices, deduction that changes in environment cause mass extinctions and an apparent mass extinction happened 2.1-2 billion years ago. However I have 3 serious objections to this line of logic, first being the timeline. Oxygen started accumulating 2.4 billions years ago, so life existed just fine with high oxygen for 3-4 hundred million years before suddenly going extinct? Secondly, we recently discovered the gabonionta, apparent multi-cellular life from about 2.2-2.1 billion years ago. Theres been a lot of debate over whether these even are fossils or not but recently the tide seems to be turning that they are. That means there was on the contrary to the oxygen catastrophe hypothesis, a flourishing of life. Okay, but also there was also undoubtedly a mass extinction around this time, so what happen?
Did you know that the largest crater on earth is the vredefort crater? Thats it's 2-3 times the size of the chicxulub crater? And that it impacted about 2 billion years ago? I wonder if that would cause a mass extinction or not?
Unedited quickly typed out cause I'm gonna be late for work if I don't leave it here.
lurker
8d ago
I mean sure, you can word gnosticism in terms of utilitarianism but that doesn't make them utilitarians, gnostics are virtue ethicists like everyone was back then. They put the most value into the virtues of wisdom and knowledge, hence the name. Once you accept the premise of gnostic belief about the world being a prison then the conclusion simply follows from that regardless of ethical system, in this case all ethical systems share the same conclusions given gnosticisms premises.
Also, I figured you were using dualism in the zoroastrian sense rather than the cartesian sense, this is maybe a bit more reasonable of a claim however I still don't think most anti-natalists in that sense either, nor would I say standard gender ideology is either, baring the gender angels types.
lurker
9d ago
Since when are gnostics utilitarian? And in what sense are secular anti-natalist's dualist?
lurker
9d ago
I really don't see the intellectual continuity from gnosticism to modern anti-natalism other than they both oppose having children. As far I can tell they have as much in common with each other as either does to the shakers.
lurker
10d ago
Tangential to your point but alex cooper has that high cheekbone look so popular in hollywood that I find absolutely repulsive, so I would not in fact date alex cooper if given the chance.
lurker
18d ago
Just to add my own piece to this, my family never got a home computer till 2001 for my birthday. I remember cause 9/11 happened two weeks later. I think you're the one thats atypical. Although I did grow up in a poor rural area. Maybe you grew up in a big city and thats why you think everyone had a computer in the 90s?
lurker
26d ago
If you ever get back into it I'd love to join your group. Used to play EP with a russian DM but y'know, he hasn't had the time to play since 2022 :(
From first principles and basic biochemistry the dinosaur doldrums made a lot of sense and it was dead wrong. From first principles and basic biochemistry the ediacaran biota being immobile jelly filled nutrient absorbers made a lot of sense. From first principles and basic biochemistry orthogenesis made a lot of sense. History has shown this repeatedly to be a bad way to do paleontology.
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