Lucid, clear explanation (as is usual from @xriskology) of the grave risk posed by utopians with power & money:
1. #Utopian visions are inherently self-rationalizing. Their revolutions can never fail, they can only *be* failed.
2. #Utopianism is more or less always exclusionary. "If the Christian heaven were to include atheists, for instance, it wouldn't be heaven."
@FeralRobots @xriskology I'd just like to note that Brexit was/is clearly a utopian project (harking back to an idealized English past that never was) and has caused horrendous, ongoing damage in the UK. From a Putinist point of view the Ukraine invasion was a utopian project—to rebuild the pre-1914 Russian Empire and regain past tsarist glories. And so on.
When you visit a utopia, always look for the mass graves and the blank places on the maps that used to be cities.
@cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology "I have never seen a fictional utopia that was distinguishable from hell." – James Blish, more or less
"There were no children, and no animals." – JB, *The Day After Judgement*
That old fascist had his moments.
@ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology I always figured this applied equally to heaven. Nobody who wants to live anywhere "for eternity" has considered just how long eternity is, even if you consider it equivalent to merely the lifetime of the universe.
@VoxDei @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology the only way I could make sense of heaven’s eternity was to think of eternity not as endless time, but as timelessness, as removal from the flow of time. Which would make heaven a single, perfect, timeless moment, without past or future, change or decay.
Doesn’t detract from the rest of the discussion re utopias though.
@daskeit @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology Yeah, but if time isn't passing, how are you experiencing it? If you can think, time is passing in some form, and at that point it's probably worse because it'll take you about ten minutes to get bored, and then you're trapped.
@daskeit @ravenonthill @cstross @FeralRobots @xriskology (In case it wasn't obvious, I am arguing that heaven is another fictional utopia. Just one that, unlike the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatever libertarians think their end-state is, its proponents aren't expected to actually produce when they get the chance.)
@daskeit @ravenonthill @FeralRobots @xriskology Actually @cstross there's a Laundry idea for you. A Christian sect that has worked out how to actually bring about the Second Coming, for real, and with absolutely everyone to spend the rest of eternity in heaven. Any true Christian is surely duty-bound to support that, and yet a bit of thought reveals either it's an utter horror, or else you have lost the capability of boredom and are therefore no longer human.