I always liked the “one soul” theory. The concept is toyed with in the short story The Egg.

Basically reincarnation is real. Except if a soul can jump through space between lives, there’s no reason it can’t also jump through time. Space and time are one and the same.

Imagine if when you die, you wake up being born in another life. But that life could be anywhere in the past, present or future. Your consciousness doesn’t move linearly forward through time in a series of lifetimes arranged in a line. It bounces all over the place. 21st century US one lifetime, 8300 BC Peru the next, 12000 AD Alpha Centauri after that. And the whole chain of consciousness is a closed loop. Ultimately, there is just one soul, just one consciousness, bouncing back and forth across all of the history of creation. And when the soul’s path is complete, when it has lived every life there is to live? It loops back on itself.

You are a being of this universe. You are the consciousness of this universe. As am I. You and I are literally the same mind, separated perhaps by billions of lifetimes. Or perhaps I will live your life next, or you mine. Eternal life is real, but contained entirely within our finite universe. An endless loop of awareness echoing throughout all of creation. And we need to be kind to one another, as when I hurt you, I am literally hurting myself.

I don’t really think it’s something I personally believe, but it is a really cool concept that I love.

This kind of thing happens even if you don’t assume time repeats. As far as we can measure, the universe is spacially infinite. Finite age, infinite spacial extent. If you ever hear someone talk about the diameter of the universe, they’re talking about the diameter of the observable universe - the part of the universe close enough for its light to actually reach us. But as far as we can measure (based on measurements of large scale spacial curvature), the universe is truly, literally infinite. It’s possible it curves back on itself with a radius much larger than the diameter of the visible universe. But if it truly is infinite, infinities make some very weird things possible.

For example, a diameter the size of the observable universe has a finite number of states. There are only so many atoms and so many ways to arrange those atoms. This number is unfathomably large, but it’s not infinite. But in an infinite universe, on a large enough distance, everything repeats. It doesn’t repeat in a regular pattern, but it does repeat. So get in a space ship and fly off into space. If you could go far enough, eventually you would run into an exact duplicate of yourself, with all the memories and life experiences you have - an atom-for-atom copy of yourself. Travel far enough and you’ll encounter a duplicate of our entire observable universe. And worse still, if the universe truly is infinite, there must be an infinite number of such copies.

I’m not talking about alternate realities or parallel universes here. I’m not talking about getting in a time machine and visiting an alternate timeline. I’m not talking about the quantum many worlds theory. I’m talking about the very space you inhabit, this universe. If you go out in a space ship and could travel arbitrarily far, it would eventually seem like you had come right back home, even though you’re quintillions of light years from where you were born.

Infinity is a terrifying thing.

You’re substituting “statistically impossible” for “emotionally impossible.”

There’s the truly bizarre timeline I want to see. For some inexplicable reason, the Trump cabal experiences a hard turn into Daoism. Literally saved by the Dao. They all just become devout Daoists overnight. And not just for show, but actually believe and practice it, having experienced some combined mass religious experience of some sort.

Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024. They would have lost in 2020 if it weren’t for covid.

Sure. History has proven that civil rights laws that are very specific and explicit are much more resilient to legal challenge than broad ones. They probably should have been a hell of a lot more specific in the Reconstruction amendments.

Sex discrimination is already fairly generic. The only way to get more generic is the Equal Protection Clause, and that’s proven completely toothless. Generally the less specific a protection is, the less real impact it has.

I cannot imagine what on Earth they’re thinking.

I can. They’re deathly afraid of another 2024. In 2024, they were reminded that you can’t take your base for granted. Kamala tried to appeal to moderate Republicans and through a lot of progressives under the bus. They’re afraid of a repeat.

And a lot of progressives are at risk of severe demoralization if Democrats backpedal on trans rights. First, there’s trans people themselves, who are about 1% of the population. But then you have supportive family and allies. And crucially, trans people are vastly overrepresented among Democratic party volunteers and nonprofit groups. Trans people often can’t help but be involved in politics, as their existence is a political issue. If Democrats throw trans folks under the bus, they’re at real risk of losing some of their most passionate and dedicated volunteers and donors.

This action is meant to speak to the progressive base. It says, “we hear you. We see you. We are not abandoning you to the wolves.”

Does it have any hope of passing now? No. Is it a performance? Quite possibly. But then again, all of politics is a performance.

Trans people were among the first victims of the Nazis. And here you are, continuing their legacy.

Over specificity in establishing rights and protections is how we end to with trans people being denied rights and how we have to argue semantics about who is actually protected by the law.

This isn’t true. It’s the vague generic protections that are easy for courts to warp. Discrimination against trans people is a plain violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause and is a form of illegal sex discrimination. Yet courts have found ways around those. You need to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.

We can’t rely on generic civil rights laws. We already tried that with the Equal Protection Clause, which provides a blanket ban on all forms of government discrimination. We already tried what you propose. In practice, when you want to protect civil rights, you have to ban specific categories of discrimination. Generic bans are toothless.

General civil blanket rights protections don’t work. We already have laws against sex discrimination. By any objective measure, discriminating against trans people is sex discrimination. It is literally sex discrimination to ban hormone treatments for minors. Imagine a doctor that will prescribe a cis girl E is she has low E levels, but she won’t prescribe a trans girl E because of her perceived or actual sex. That is literally sex discrimination. Yet the courts are letting laws against trans medical care stand.

What is needed is explicit legal protections for gender identity and gender expression. These laws protect both cis and trans people from being discriminated against based on these factors. But you can’t just rely on generic sex-discrimination provisions, as conservative courts have found absurd interpretations of the law to find that plain sex discrimination is anything but. You need to give the slimy bastards zero wiggle room.

Or for another example:

Don’t make the rule that “you can’t deny someone food stamps due to their trans identity”; say people can’t be denied food stamps.

This statement is nonsensical. What do you mean, “people can’t be denied food stamps.” Of course people can be denied food stamps! Bill Gates doesn’t need to qualify for food stamps. When you want to ban a form of discrimination, you have to specifically define what form of discrimination is banned. You cannot just pass a blanket law that says, “don’t discriminate against anyone for any reason,” as there are countless valid reasons to discriminate against people. It’s just not valid to discriminate against people based on innate traits. If I’m a restaurant owner, it’s perfectly fine to throw someone out if they’re rude or a belligerent asshole. I’m discriminating against assholes.

You just can’t rely on vague legal language, as courts will always find a way to rule that marginalized groups for some reason don’t qualify under the generic protections. This is why we had to pass laws specifically banning race, gender, and religious discrimination. More generic protections had already failed. After all, the highest law of the land, the Constitution, already has the Equal Protection Clause, and minority groups have found its protection to be incredibly weak.

“[Nor shall any State] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

According to the plain text of the Constitution, the Civil Rights, the Women’s Rights, and the Queer Rights movements should have been completely unnecessary. After all, Jim Crow laws plainly violated this provision. Yet because the language was weak and nonspecific, it was easy for courts to find that black people could be denied the right to vote.

As far as appealing to the manosphere? You’re trying to appeal to a carnival of liars and con men. The objective reality of your actions has little bearing on who they choose to target for their five minutes of hate.

Why would the military be a representative sample? Maybe when we had the draft, sure. But even then their were conscientious objectors, and of course women weren’t drafted. And plenty of people voluntarily enlisted even in the Vietnam era.

Is it not reasonable to expect that those with high empathy levels would be less likely to voluntarily enlist? Knowing nothing else, I would expect the military to select for those with low empathy levels. It’s an obviously useful ability if your job is to kill other human beings. And you’re supposed to carry out orders without any consideration for the consequences of those orders or who they hurt. That sounds like an extremely low-empathy environment.

This is what I’m going to do when I have a terminal diagnosis. Just go around mugging people. Point a gun at them. Demand they give over their purse or wallet. Then put a large amount of cash in it, hand it back to them, and walk away without a word.

They came very close. You do realize there was a deliberate plan on January 6th, don’t you? The riot was part of that. And they came very close to succeeding. Their goal was to provide enough chaos to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and to kill the people that were preventing Republicans in the House from handing the election to Trump. They didn’t have to hold off the army forever. They just needed to interrupt the mechanism of government at one critical moment. Pence was refusing to go along with the plan to decertify slates of electors under bogus election fraud charges. The rioters attempted to hang Mike Pence, and Trump’s security tried to spirit Pence away to an unknown location for unknown purposes. That was the ultimate goal. It wasn’t just a random spasm of violence. It was a deliberate and specific plan to make Trump the legal winner of the 2020 election.

A bunch of Gravy Seals in ill fitting mismatched surplus store body armour carrying AR-15s will never succeed in overthrowing the US government no matter how many childish circle jerk murder fantasies they share.

They came quite close to doing exactly that on January 6th. Have you forgotten already?

The US’s violence budget far exceeds any existing well regulated militia, let alone Cletus’ gun cabinet.

And yet the US lost in Vietnam, despite dropping more tons of bombs on Vietnam alone than used in the entirety of WW2. Come on, the entire 20th century was a story of revolutionary groups inventing the science of guerilla warfare. Small poorly armed forces can take on nation states in the right condition. Did you just…forget…the entire last century of history?

And why the hell do you think revolutionaries will be facing the army in open honorable combat? And what’s wrong with doing the fighting in urban areas and digging tunnels?

Sure, an AR-15 won’t take down a tank. But if you’re even asking if they can, you fundamentally misunderstand how revolutions and insurgencies work.

There has never been a revolution in history that wasn’t massively outgunned.

The real key is that you use the small guns to seize control of the big guns. And you recruit people who know how to use those tanks and other heavy weaponry. Revolutions often start with raiding armories and military bases for this very reason. You might think it’s impossible for a bunch of randos to storm an actual army base. But history proves otherwise. How many military bases are actually, right at this moment, actively preparing for a large group of civilians to storm the fences? The element of surprise is a powerful weapon.

Your city was built by people who walked. Your ancestors just weren’t as delicate and lazy as you are.