By that logic they can do literally anything to a baby, including murder, abuse, and I don’t really want to go on.

I don’t see how that means they don’t know how pregnancy works. Yeah, you could track it, or you could just cover all possibilities.

China’s government is actually pretty good at getting things done

You’re going to borrow-checker hell now

It does bring up the interesting conundrum: is there one “base” universe? Then how did that start? Makes no sense. Is it turtles all the way down? That also doesn’t make any sense. And yet those are the only 2 possibilities (assuming a few intuitive things about logic and reality, which is a whole 'nother thing…).

Those conjectures aren’t just equally plausible, they’re the same thing.

He’s got it all wrong, the quantum fluctuations in the flux capacitor prove with 99.84859% certainty that time crystals oscillate at a resonant frequency of the speed of light with hydrogen chloride. It’s quite simple, really, I can’t believe he’s so wrong.

Are you a sysadmin? Cause I’d like to $ top you.

I think the difference is world building. In the stories you listed there’s a sense that you’re only seeing a tiny fragment of everything notable going on. History is being made by everyone concurrently.

In Avatar, you see everything notable. We don’t care what’s going on on Earth (they never hint anything), we don’t care what’s going on outside this one tribe, the only thing happening right now is the conflict on screen.

Flesh, Blob, Square, Pants!

If you combine Econ 101 with American ideals of negative freedoms, libertatianism is what you get, and to be fair it sounds great on the surface. If you then turn a blind eye to all systemic issues that ruin that ideal of freedom/fairness you can even keep believing it!

Then you’re regular blind

So you won’t use your vote to help less people die?

It’s shell a program that spawns another running copy of itself, then they both spawn another copy of themselves each, then all 4 spawn another copy, …

But in the end, clown carton of eggs x in Z^+ | x = 0 mod 2 gas liquid solid

Emoticon

You said “and if not” which is binary, but “if [predicate] [x] and if [predicate] [y]” is not generally exhaustive.

Ohhh, you read the “and if” as being exhaustive. If they said “either… or” then I’d be with you, but they just listed 2 possible scenarios.

This is what hell looks like

I’m not sure where you read that in this post, because I don’t see it.