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Comment by rubikscube | Hacker News Reader

If all you are is a "meat bag", then a bomb blast is no more tragic than making sloppy joes with ground beef.

Silly nerd thinking. Your "meat bag" and "meat space" thinking is ridiculous.

You are making the classic mistake of assuming what people must think without actually bothering to stop and ask them if they really think that. Just because you think that he thinks that, does not actually mean that he does think that.

I simultaneously believe that humans are made of meat and that the loss of a human is tragic. You are in absolutely no place to tell me that I don't think the second because I think the first.

Edit: Also, "meatspace" generally is just shorthand for "life away from the computer. not 'cyberspace'" The term "real life" could be used, though many find the implication of that to be very silly for obvious reasons.

What he thinks was most certainly revealed there, and it's common for many commenters on sites like HN and reddit.

"We are all just meat bags ..."

If you told someone that their son was "just a meat bag," or if you were speaking on your behalf in court and stated you were "making an appearance in meat space," you would be naturally considered a sociopath.

So get real.

It's the nerd group-think reductionist tendency on the internet. They wouldn't get away with it in real life for long if they valued having friends.

You can choose to sound like the atheistic Colombine murderers and their ilk, but don't expect the less numbed to not call you out on it.

"atheistic Colombine murderers"

Holy shit. Nice troll.

Are you only trolling or deliberately misinterpreting a comment just to be angry at evil atheists?

Oooookay, we are done here.

I should have guessed a real conversation wasn't your goal when you started out with insults. My fault really.

You're trying to put people down by calling them nerds on Hacker News. It's not an insult that gains much traction anyway, but surely this is about the worst place you could possibly do it.

Nobody's suggesting what you're saying but you. If you're incapable of comprehending written English then you probably shouldn't be reading these comments.

> If all you are is a "meat bag", then a bomb blast is no more tragic than making sloppy joes with ground beef.

Does not follow, and I disagree strongly. Specifics matter, but that doesn't make the "meat bag" thing untrue.

It's also true that a person and a block of wood are the same - they are both made of atoms, and the same types of atoms for that matter.

If everything is true then nothing is. If you want to compare a person to a meat bag, then you also have to compare them to a block of wood, and the sun, and everything else. i.e. you've actually done nothing whatsoever.

          matter
         /  |   \
     meat  wood  ...
    /   \    \
  human cow   ...

Humans are not wood, though wood and humans are both matter. Humans are however "made of meat", just as any other animal is.

As far as I can tell, the point of describing humans as meat is not to make an assessment of worth, but rather to drive home the fragile and temporary nature of humans. I don't know why anyone would object to that.

"is" != "is (mostly) made of"

Fair enough. I suspect the terminology "meat" is mostly a homage to Terry Bisson's short story "They're Made Out of Meat". That is why I like the word anyway. ;)

After thinking about this for a while I propose "aggregates of stardust" instead of "meat bags" ^^

Because people like being pedantic in the worst possible way.

The fragility angle was obvious in his post, but people clearly just needed to be butthurt over something.

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