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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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There are times when prolonging the life of an organism is the correct decision, and times when it is not.

If an otherwise young and healthy person is afflicted by a serious but curable condition, then they should of course be treated to the best of our abilities. I don't fetishize "letting nature take its course" just for the sake of it. But when the elderly are sustained long past their expiration date - when there is nothing left to live for, when there is only the fear of death to struggle in vain against - then sometimes the most dignified option is to simply pull the plug.

When a particular cultural stratum, race, civilization, or species is failing to perform its basic functions (reproduction in this case), a similar analysis must be performed. Is it a temporary condition that can be alleviated? Or has the social organism simply exhausted its powers, put its best days behind it, and entered a stage of inevitable terminal decline?

All things die - ineluctably we will feel nostalgic for certain forms of life that we have become accustomed to, but this is no excuse for abandoning our sense of perspective. Let us simply hope that something new will be born to replace what is lost, and that this new form of life will be, if not "healthier" in an absolute sense, then at least more vigorous.

I know this is completely outside the scope of the conversation, but your comment put me in mind of those poor zoo employees wearing panda fursuits trying to convince pandas to fuck.

I feel like by the time someone's passed every filter to be in that position, they're probably pretty hyped for it. It's not like the summer intern shows up his first day and gets told "get in the fucking panda suit Shinji"

(See how common quiet bestiality is among dolphin researchers for example. You don't get to be there unless you really fucking love dolphins with those words in arbitrary order)

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