In the event of the Rapture America is doomed. How is a country that loses 60% of its population supposed to compete with the Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Shinto, etc... countries that were almost untouched? Does the Left Behind series even talk about this? I've never read the novels, but what little I know of it made the scope seem focused on the USA. Does the rest of the world just carry on as normal and it's just America that goes all Mad Max?
Honestly, one would expect New York City to be one of the less impacted locales on account of the cultural diversity and general high level of sin according to Evangelicals. Same with California. It's the Midwest that gets wiped out.
ggm 47 minutes ago [-]
"America" to these people, is the set of collected souls. They would deny what's left behind is America, its just the landmass north of Mexico.
blipvert 31 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps we should rename it as the Peninsular of North Mexico?
doug_durham 21 minutes ago [-]
I found the article interesting until they brought up the Apple headquarters. It’s just an office building. Steve Jobs was obsessed with people walking around and bumping to each other. That’s why it’s a circle. The landscaping mimics the area around the Stanford dish where he liked to go on walks with people a talk through things. That’s it. Jony Ive brought the minimalist architecture. No greater meaning. These types of articles tend to lose their way when that try to attribute meaning to things that have no specific meaning.
nradov 14 minutes ago [-]
It's sort of like how all those pseudo-intellectual literature professors and critics who are incapable of creating anything original waste their lives away trying to find deeper meaning in certain books. Often they end up fooling themselves by perceiving patterns in noise. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
ggm 48 minutes ago [-]
Reminded of the spoof "subscribe to have certified athiests look after your pet post rapture" thing.
kelseyfrog 2 hours ago [-]
There is a conspicuous lack of ceiling mounted escape hatches. A realistic belief in rapture necessitates avoiding being trapped in vaulted ceilings.
jandrese 1 hours ago [-]
I think the visions of people floating up into the sky are somewhat fanciful and are the result of people reading too literally into a translation. The actual Rapture is just whichever people qualify suddenly dropping dead on the spot as their souls are whisked away. Some probably get put on life support machines but never wake up again.
deadbabe 36 minutes ago [-]
This is the biblically accurate version. In heaven the body has no more purpose than the clothes people wear, so the bodies should just drop dead empty of souls.
However, a more terrifying interpretation could be that the bodies have no reason to just drop dead just because the soul is gone, instead, they would continue functioning as P-Zombies. This could mean the rapture already happened and we're just not aware of it. If you are not a P-Zombie, you weren't raptured. This could be a premise for a pretty cool story.
croisillon 1 hours ago [-]
ah, light black on dark white, my favourite reading setup
nospice 42 minutes ago [-]
"Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged or obfuscated ideological origins in accelerationism and nihilism, these endeavors, and their proponents in government and technology sectors, represent the ultimate preppers, ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else: in a self-contained unit like Biosphere 2 or HI-SEAS, on the newly discovered “habitable” planets, or on Mars."
Well, at least I can say with confidence that this essay wasn't written by an LLM. But I don't mean that in a good way. It's a lot of convoluted, wordy sentences just to paint a scary picture of an invented strawman you disagree with.
I think it's ironic because the usual accusation levied against "preppers" is that they're weirdos who are afraid of fellow man. And yet, the author is playing the same game, painting entire communities as extremist bogeymen who have some sort of a nebulous, sinister agenda. In the article, it's all connected: the Apple campus in Cupertino, 1960s civil defense posters, the NSA, Sim City 2000, Biosphere 2, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, rural gun nuts, Christian doomsday cults...
k310 2 hours ago [-]
There is plenty on earth, and a very high quality of life if it weren't for the insane concentration of wealth and overconsumption (think mega data centers to spare us from thinking, among others) resulting in environmental ruin.
And if we got along instead of divisiveness, nationalism, and religious wars, incredible unlocking of value tied up in militaries and relieving consequent mass suffering.
It's a choice.
People have chosen poorly.
Rendered at 22:47:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Honestly, one would expect New York City to be one of the less impacted locales on account of the cultural diversity and general high level of sin according to Evangelicals. Same with California. It's the Midwest that gets wiped out.
However, a more terrifying interpretation could be that the bodies have no reason to just drop dead just because the soul is gone, instead, they would continue functioning as P-Zombies. This could mean the rapture already happened and we're just not aware of it. If you are not a P-Zombie, you weren't raptured. This could be a premise for a pretty cool story.
Well, at least I can say with confidence that this essay wasn't written by an LLM. But I don't mean that in a good way. It's a lot of convoluted, wordy sentences just to paint a scary picture of an invented strawman you disagree with.
I think it's ironic because the usual accusation levied against "preppers" is that they're weirdos who are afraid of fellow man. And yet, the author is playing the same game, painting entire communities as extremist bogeymen who have some sort of a nebulous, sinister agenda. In the article, it's all connected: the Apple campus in Cupertino, 1960s civil defense posters, the NSA, Sim City 2000, Biosphere 2, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, rural gun nuts, Christian doomsday cults...
And if we got along instead of divisiveness, nationalism, and religious wars, incredible unlocking of value tied up in militaries and relieving consequent mass suffering.
It's a choice.
People have chosen poorly.