I see what you guys are getting at, but it was useful to go somewhere hellish to demonstrate certain invariances, and the quoted comment was too good to pass up. I could have used more sensitive examples, but it did go through my mind that I wanted to make it horrible for some reason... I won't change it, but will steer away from such examples in the future.

That said, it's interesting that people react to the thought of rape and torture, but not the universe getting paperclipped, which is many many orders of magnitude worse.

I get more angry at a turtle getting thrown against the wall than I do at genocides... I guess some things just hit you hard out of proportion to their actual value.