• 34 Posts
  • 1.25K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • Dermabond might be a little different… once it’s applied, it interacts with the air to produce a thermal reaction and kind of cooks itself into place. The pain is mostly from the heat - if you’ve ever hit an open wound against a heating element of some kind, it’s basically that. It’s also not a good temporary option - if it was prepped correctly it should kind of infuse into the skin - if hospital staff needed to do something there, they’d basically need to grind your skin off.

    I’m guessing the product everyone else is talking about is a bit more forgiving.




  • Surgical tech here - we use a similar in surgery sometimes called “Dermabond” (it’s basically super glue for skin).

    It can be good for closing a clean incision, like if you get sliced with a razor and the skin edges almost seal themselves on their own.

    Jagged lacerations or open abrasions, or a flap like the previous poster described are NOT good candidates for that type of product, especially if you’re awake when it’s applied, cuz that stuff hurts like a motherfucker when it’s drying.

    Other than pain, if it dries when the skin isn’t perfectly aligned, it can make scaring worse; and unless you irrigate the fuck out of it with some kind of antimicrobial solution, that’s a lot of surface area to harbor a pathogen that leads to an infection. And you do not want to fuck around with things like necrotizing fasciitis (image search that if you want some nightmare fuel).








  • My point is that that’s logically inconsistent. A genocide killing thousands of people and an earthquake or famine killing thousands of people both leave thousands of people dead.

    The distinction is intent, which is an important factor if we’re talking about will. If you stub your toe on your coffee table, there’s no ill will coming from the table. If I approached you and whacked your toe with a mallet, there would be ill will coming from me. In those cases, the outcome is the same, but you’d be silly to be upset at the table; but very justified in being upset at me.

    So, take something like thousands of deaths from an earthquake: in a godless universe, it’s a shitty situation, but not an evil one. There’s no intent: the universe has no will. Throw an omnipotent and omniscient controller into the mix and suddenly that earthquake isn’t something that just happened as a result of planetary physics; it’s something that was intentionally designed to happen.

    …which kinda makes sense that you’d think of them as being the same, since through a theocratic lens they kind of are, it’s just that ones a genocide at the hands of men, and the other’s a genocide at the hands of god. Either way, both are very much evil.

    When you get down to it, the only kind of world that would not run afoul of the Epicurean paradox would be a no-scarcity paradise with only 100% happy thoughts, and at that point we’d be looking at robots (or I suppose angels, if there’s a material difference), not humans.

    Agreed, hence my disbelief.

    Worse, when you get down to it in such a world people would either lose the ability to even conceive of evil, or be prevented from committing it by an external force. Imagine if at the mall you always had an angel making you return your shopping cart, now multiply that by ten thousand times. Essentially we’re looking at a world of lobotomized robots, which to me doesn’t sound all that appealing.

    I’m kind of surprised to see that’s something that isn’t appealing - isn’t a blissful existence completely devoid of evil basically what we understand heaven to be? (or the Islamic equivalent - I’m kind of a dumbass when it comes to religious-anything outside of Christianity, so if I mislabel something or otherwise say something stupid, please call me out)

    evil is baked into the concept of free will.

    Disagree here as well. We are incapable of many actions - I’m sure you could rattle off hundreds of examples just off the top of your head - we can’t fly, breath under water, teleport, see in the dark, speak with squirrels, etc - you get the gist. But the absence of those abilities never calls into question whether or not we have free will, they’re just accepted as things we can’t do despite having free will. So why is the ability to commit evil so critical to the notion of free will?

    Another way to look at it: I haven’t had dinner yet tonight: there are literally thousands of options to choose from, between what I have the means to cook or by having a restaurant do it for me. There’s a lot of freedom in that decision. I could also satiate my hunger by abducting my neighbor’s 4 year old son and committing cannibalism. In this case, my freedom is narrowed not by a divine force, but by the law: if I make that kind of evil a part of my dinner decision making, then I spend the rest of my life in prison. Let’s switch to a different universe where my meal options are the same, but instead of a legal force, this time it’s divine: I’m literally incapable of even considering cannibalizing my neighbor’s kid, let alone performing the act. The other thousands of dinner options are there, but evil is fully off the menu… do I have free will?

    Without objective morality (which immediately follows from the lack of belief in a creator), how can there be good and evil? This application of the Epicurean paradox assumes that evil can exist independent of a higher authority able to determine good and evil, so it’s a case of circular reasoning more than anything else.

    Good and evil can exist without divinity because the lack of an omniscient creator means the baseline for the universe is apathy. It doesn’t care if you choose to be good or bad. Those are values that we created, and that we adhere to or not according to our choice… and as we see every time we turn the news on, there’s no shortage of people who choose evil. …and the ones who are proficient at it go on to become billionaires or world leaders or w/e. None of that would make sense in a universe that had a omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent god.

    The Epicurean paradox can only be used to reject complete benevolence (which, well yes), not complete goodness.

    Edit - misread that part earlier, sorry if you’ve already read this part of my reply. Anyway: I don’t understand the distinction between benevolence and goodness. How can the two be offset in the context of godly absolutes?


  • Muslim

    Full disclosure, I have no idea if the Muslim concept of god applies to the Epicurean paradox. I’m much more familiar with the Christian version which presents god as perfect in an absolute sense.

    a good creator wouldn’t allow their creation to suffer, or—taking it a step further—wouldn’t create a world where suffering is even possible.

    Yeah there’s a degree of obscurity - for the sake of this conversation I’d be okay with defining evil as deliberate suffering. Step on a Lego > hurts > not evil. Stick a knife in someone or like commit genocide > very clearly evil. Idk if the former is technically incompatible with the Epicurean paradox, but we have no shortage of actual extremes to choose from, so might as well focus on those.

    create a world where suffering is even possible. However, that would require human (or, really, lite in general) not to exist; give humans free will and suffering will happen.

    Under the current laws of our universe, yes, but those are what are being scrutinized. The question this prompts is: is god not capable of creating free will without evil?

    my answer is: I’ll drop (your conception of) the first pillar. God knows about suffering and is capable of stopping it but tolerates it for one purpose or another.

    Needing to drop a pillar to make god work is the point of the whole exercise: a god that’s aware of evil and has the power to stop it, but chooses not to, is himself some degree of evil.


  • When I was a little kid, I took what I was told at face value and didn’t question it.

    Magical thinking is normal for little kids. By about age 7 you’re supposed to have grown out of that shit though - like it’s normal to still enjoy the concept of magic, but there comes a point when you should have a pretty intuitive understanding that it’s fiction.

    For some reason we give religion a pass.

    Some old dude in a dress raving about how ghosts built the pyramids is instantly recognized as crazy; but some old dude raving about how the chief master ghost shat out our entire universe in a week is… somehow worthy of respect?

    So, my religion is no religion: I believe what can be tested and verified.

    The most concise test to disprove the notion of God is one of simple logic: the Epicurean paradox, which recognizes the mythology of God being composed of three core pillars: that he is 100% good (complete absence of evil), 100% powerful (his will is our reality), and 100% omniscient (he knows everything about everything)… but despite those three pillars, it takes no time at all to recognize evil behavior all around us, and for evil to be able to exist in our reality, one of those pillars must always fall.

    He either doesn’t know evil is happening in his universe, is powerless to stop it, or is okay with it.

    Every single time a religious person attempts to address the Epicurean paradox, the just shuffle the pillars to fill in the gap left open by the missing third (feel free to take that as a challenge if you think you’ve got the answer).

    Anyway, it became clear that at the very least, my religion wasn’t being honest about the nature of its own god, and that realization was the final nail in the coffin for me.




  • This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs.

    I hope that wasn’t meant to be a pitch for it. Diet Coke tastes like ass.

    They simply taste a bit less meaty

    See that’s the disconnect - diet Coke doesn’t taste like Coke that’s less Coke-y, it tastes like Coke that had the sugar replaced with a scoop of Grandpa’s ashes and a dash of betadine.

    If we’ve made the meat equivalent to diet Coke, the best course of action is to just skip that nastiness and cook up some tofu or paneer or something.

    If we’ve made the meat that’s just a little less meaty, okay cool, I’ll give it a shot.

    …but those two are NOT the same thing.