So, God is a pedo? That explains the Catholic church, then.

OP mentioned that an insanity plea was integrated with the defense already. The above argument incorporates that, though it does not mention it by name.

You are thinking of 'Good Samaritan' law, which compels people to take action to help injured or endangered others. Here, because of the time issue, you are free from legal prosecution: in the Germany of the 1700's, when and where the literary story of 'Frankenstein' occurred, there were no such laws.

If these events had happened after 2009, though, you would be liable for up to a year in prison for failing to render assistance to any person (specifically) in your view that had been injured by the creature - and possibly for failing to raise the alarm to warn the town (though that charge would be unlikely to stick). If you stayed in the university, and saw no person injured, though, you could not be convicted. The law only applies to what you could actually witness.

But, within the given time period of the novel - or even the movie version - no such legal compulsion existed yet, which makes you unprosecutable.

Additionally, there is the issue of the 'Bystander Effect', which is a known psychological phenomena where people fail to take action because they are shocked or stunned into immobility. You could, as a last resort, argue this stance, and that because of the overwhelming horror of the event, you can not be held liable for inaction.

So, yes, sufficiently terrible circumstances do, in fact, paralyze people sometimes, and the law can be forced to account for this effect. The animation of a corpse against all natural law definitely falls under the category of 'sufficiently terrible'.

The primary test for negligence is this:

If a reasonable person would have foreseen the reasonable possibility of harm and would have taken reasonable steps to prevent it happening, and the person in question did not do so, negligence is established.

It would be unreasonable for any person to expect it to be actually possible to stitch together parts from multiple corpses, shock the resultant pile of dead meat with lightning, and instead of it being burnt to a crisp to have it suddenly sit up and question it's existence.

More than this, no reasonable person could be expected to believe, nor to prepare for such a seemingly impossible event occurring, regardless of whether or not they themselves had collected, portioned, and stitched the corpses together, and then sent up a kite with the purpose of catching an unlikely lightning strike.

Because no reasonable person could have truly expected such an outcome as a monster being born - the very notion being ludicrous and utterly impossible to all learned and unlearned men alike - it is unreasonable to expect even a person attempting such a creation to have any preparation whatsoever for its containment, nourishment, or care of any kind.

It would be even more unreasonable to expect such a collection of electrically animated meat to burst out the door and go on a rampage across the countryside, because such things cannot reasonably be expected to ever occur in the first place.

On these grounds, it is unreasonable to expect any person, regardless of any other circumstance, to foresee any harm, or indeed any events whatsoever happening beyond the smell of burning meat on a hospital gurney.

Therefore, you can only be reasonably held accountable for complaints about the smell of overcooked meat being disagreeable, which in the Germany of the 1700's (which is where the creature is literarily created, at the University of Ingolstadt), is not a crime. more than this, the meat was not charred in any way, but instead walked away complaining of existential dread, so that not even a bad smell was involved at all. You are therefore not responsible for the extraordinary and utterly unimaginable events that occurred once the monster leapt up from the table.

No man can be responsible for the impossible, and until the monster actually stood up, every aspect of its existence and behavior was universally considered impossible.

On these grounds, you must be considered guiltless and all charges must be dropped.

Christians believe that a sky wizard cursed humanity because his clay golems ate a magical fruit offered to them by a talking snake that lived in an enchanted garden. The only way to escape the curse is to worship the sky wizard's undead zombie son who can walk on water and perform instant fermentation spells.

This is what you have to look forward to, kid. Welcome to earth.

Not the same thing, No True Scotsman, logical fallacy.

If you are going to make a counterargument, make a logical, rational one.

The Popper Paradox is semantic, and not truly a problem of logic.

No structure should include it's own annihilation: this is why it is illegal to try to overthrow a government, for example. Taking the term 'free speech' as an absolute has already been thrown out in countless ways, because it cannot be allowed to exist as an absolute. Calling for the murder of others is illegal, despite 'free speech'. So are making threats of bodily harm. And countless other forms of criminal speech.

Such limits are imposed because not all humans can be trusted to be responsible, reasonable, rational, or have good intentions. It is the same reason anarchy cannot ever be allowed: it always ends in violence and collapse (and warlords!).

Truly free speech could only be permitted if humanity was incapable of violent crime and destruction for its own sake. And that is not going to happen. 'Free speech' always means free speech with conditions. Always.

Absolute Tolerance, like most any Absolute, inevitably leads to disaster. Why would anyone ever think tolerance should be absolute? Once this silly notion is addressed, there is no paradox at all: free speech for all who support free speech and none for those that would destroy it.

Your mistake is that you are looking for magic where the authors entire intention is to disprove that it exists. Every single one of these examples are saying one thing together: "There is no magic, there are no gods, people are just using colloquialisms and poetic language to describe ordinary events and everyone is foolishly taking it literally."

THAT is what is being said here in these examples. The authors are not trying to explain catapsi or any other magical ability. They are saying that these stories are falsely invoking magic and gods to explain people stupidly ruining their own lives in various ways.

That's all. That is what the words clearly, blatantly, obviously say. If you see anything else in those words, it is because you are coming to them with the desperate hope that you have found something about thaumaturgy in the writings and not seeing them clearly for what they actually mean.

Of course actually dying isn't profitable. What is profitable is extraordinary, highly expensive treatments to prolong life. THAT is exceptionally profitable.

When those have been used up, and nothing is left that could work, or all the money is gone, then the hospital will dump you in a hospice or to home. If the money is gone, then there is no point anymore.

Dying at home isn't profitable for hospitals. How is a proper capitalist hospital going to increase revenue and stock value if people just refuse useless, super-expensive treatments and accept the inevitable? That's socialist talk.

America is a capitalist nation, god dammit! Profit is god!

I keep saying "Religion ruins everything".

And I am always right.

The reason should be obvious.

In a liberal democracy, people generally have uncensored access to the internet and information and can make up their own minds, and they would naturally look down on authoritarian/totalitarian nations.

In authoritarian/totalitarian nations information is rigidly controlled, and the populace is instructed who and what is considered an enemy - who to hate, and why it is 'patriotic' to hate them. There is no choice. Democratic nations are a natural threat to authoritarian/totalitarian nations because their existence denies the superiority of a single, absolute power in control and risks their own populations demanding democracy and freedom.

Bring it on! I just turned 63 today, and I have spent my life reading science fiction.

My greatest disappointment in life is that all these things you list - and many, many, many more - have not yet come to pass. When I was a child, I fully expected that by the time I was this age there would be sapient machine life equal under the law, cities on the moon and mars, universal income that makes money irrelevant, a world government based on scientific evidence above all, mind uploading, humans living in both virtual worlds and inside machine bodies, biological immortality, machine superintelligences able to solve problems beyond human capacity, and so many other wonders.

Instead, we've got uncontrolled covid, rampant racism and sexism, dumbshit robots, shitty AI that isn't even sentient yet, much less sapient, and fascism, religion, nationalism and unrestrained capitalism on the rise and destroying the planet.

I am beyond ready to embrace the future. Humanity let me down.

My kind of gal!

Wow! That is one big heavily pigmented rooster.

If by 'possibility' you mean a '1' divided by a number greater than Graham's Number, then sure. By 'rare', I mean desperately rare. Rare beyond human imagination. Rare enough that quintillions of universes could bloom and only one have a species capable of technology.

I used to think it wrong, but I am increasingly convinced of the Rare Earth Hypothesis - that life is exceedingly unlikely to occur, and when it does, even more exceedingly unlikely to develop into a technological species. So very many incredibly unlikely things have to be just precisely right for a tech species like humans to rise up. I find it more and more reasonable that earth may literally be the only planet with advanced life forms in the entire cosmos.

This also shows that the humans species could have, at any moment, dumped the use of unrenewable energy and switched over to entirely sustainable sources. It never required an illegal invasion by Russia to force this to happen - humanity could have done it years ago, if they wanted to.

And there is nothing stopping the world from moving over entirely in less than ten years - indeed less than two years if it was made a priority above all others.

The same is true of providing housing for all, food for all, water for all, and medicine for all. It could be done, the world could do it, and could do it easily.

They just won't until they are forced, because humanity allows oligarchs to rule them.

That this is happening proves that point, a very old point, one we have all heard our entire lives.

I am glad that the issue has been forced, but I am sad that the deaths of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians were what made it happen. I am sad that had to be the reason anything is finally changing at all - because fuel is being withheld and used as a political weapon.

Humans should be going renewable because they want to save their world, not because they want to keep profit margins up despite a brutal war.

But, take what victories one can, right?

This is a good thing.

"That, uh, shade of color... is very nice."

Of COURSE they are made in the USA.

Sigh.

So, Covid spreads like a disease?

Who could ever have known that.

"I didn't shoot that child, the robot did!" - Police sergeant Whitey Bigotti

"Besides, the robot thought he was threatening-looking."

Absolutely love The Expanse. I read all the novels out loud to my spouse. Watched the series too. I am a big fan of Hard SF.

The Thing that was Blair knew full well what the noose is and was for.

Allow me to introduce you to the TRULY scariest part of The Thing (one of my very favorite movies).

The Thing replicates a person down to every last cell. That means every neuron in the brain. Think about that carefully. It knows everything the person it absorbed knew. Everything. But it gets worse. Much worse. It's even stated in the film itself: what if you were the Thing and didn't even know it?

The Thing can become anything it ever absorbed in the past - including all memories. That is how it could build a flying saucer under MacReady's cabin, where Blair is being kept. It can also run a personality as part of its camouflage.

That means it is entirely possible that in that moment, in that cabin, Blair didn't know he was the Thing. That could have been - likely was - Blair's mind and memories, Blair's consciousness, being simulated by the Thing. For just long enough to talk to MacReady, Blair was alive again, sort of, unaware that he was already very dead.

And it gets worse still: the Thing is ultimately in control. The living mind of the simulated Blair could be manipulated. The Thing wants back in with all the humans. So, it would know - because it is superintelligent (you need to be to build an impromptu flying saucer from scraps and bits - also, I have read the original story it comes from "Who Goes There" by John W. Campbell) - that the presence of a noose would tug on MacReady and the other's sympathy to manipulate them.

Now, consider all of that. You could be the Thing and not know it. You could be alive one moment, thinking you are safe, but you are already dead, already eaten. The Thing is just using you, letting your mind run for a bit, before packing you back into nonexistence.

That, I think, is far more horrifying than all of the gore and shapeshifting. That is true shapeshifting - not merely mimicking the body, but also the mind.

How do I know this is true?

Interviews with Campbell as well as with Carpenter make this clear. The Thing, the concept from "Who Goes There" was originally written as a scare story vaguely about the spread of Communism. The paranoia is that your neighbor could secretly be a Communist, and they could turn other neighbors Communist, yet still act perfectly normal. This was the time of the big Red Scare, and Americans were made to be terrified of Communism, so stories that played on that fear sold well. What if, then, your neighbor managed to somehow convince YOU to be a Communist? Then what! Oh GOD the horror!

That is the original notion that became a science fiction story about an alien creature.

I'll give you one more fun fact: in the original story, they get to see the Thing frozen in the ice, looking as it did when it was still a copy of the alien that owned the giant saucer in the ice. That being had blue skin, three red eyes, three legs, two arms, and tendrils around the mouth and head. In the end, when they discover the saucer under MacReady's cabin, they also find special lights the creature made that told them what kind of starsystem the Thing preferred: a young starsystem with actinic - bluish - light from a very young star.

Read the original story, if you can. It's cool.