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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • First: How do you reconcile that view with the idea that animals also experience the world as people do with the idea that animals kill and eat other animals? Bears, for instance, are roughly as intelligent as a kindergartener, and yet happily kill and eat any other animals that they can. Pigs and crows are also omnivorous, and will eat any source of meat that they come across. They can all likewise avoid killing if they choose, yet they don’t. Are they immoral? Or does morality only apply to humans? (Even animals that we traditionally think of as herbivorous are opportunistic meat eaters.)

    Second: What would you propose replacing animal products with, when there are no alternatives that function as well? What about when the alternative products also cause greater environmental harms?

    Third: So you would not have a problem with, for instance, hunting and eating invasive species, since those species cause more harm to existing ecosystems than not eradicating them would? What about when those invasive species are also highly intelligent, e.g. feral pigs? Or is it better to let them wreck existing ecosystems so that humans aren’t causing harm? To drill down on that further, should humans allow harm to happen by failing to act, or should we cause harm to prevent greater harm?

    Fourth: “Exploiting” is such an interesting claim. Vegans are typically opposed to honey, since they view it as an exploitative product. Are you aware that without commercial apiaries, agriculture would collapse? That is, without exploiting honey bees, we are not capable of pollinating crops?

    Would you agree, given that all food production for humans causes environmental harm, that the only rational approach to eliminate that harm is the eradication of humanity?


  • …And how exactly do you think people are going to be able to eat meat otherwise? Or have dairy, eggs, wool, etc.? Do you think that people should e.g., raise chickens in the city?

    And that’s ignoring the small obligate carnivores that make up most of the pets in the world.

    Hey, I’d rather hunt my own food too, but we no longer live in tribal or feudal societies where you can reasonably expect to engage in animal husbandry yourself.


  • “Truth” is a matter of conclusions and meaning, not of facts. Factual information would be something like–and this is an intentionally racist argument–53% of the murder arrests in the US come from a racial group that makes up 14% of the population. This is a fact, and it can be clearly seen in FBI statistics. But your conclusions from that fact–what that fact means–that’s the point of rhetoric and logic. Faulty logic would make multiple leaps and say, well, obvs. this means that black people are more prone to commit murder. A more logically sound approach would look at things like whether there where different patterns in law enforcement based on racial groups, what factors were leading to murder rates in racial groups and whether those factors were present across all demographics, and so on.




  • Anyone that is familiar with the ways that communism has existed in Warsaw-pact countries, in China, in southeast Asia in general, etc., should be able to see that. LGBTQ+ people were, if anything, even more fucked in most communist countries. There certainly wasn’t any meaningful religious tolerance, since religion was banned in at least some communist countries (or wholly controlled by the gov’t).

    I’m in favor of communism in principle, but not in practice. I’d love to live in a commune, but I don’t think I’d want to live in a communist country.


  • Most instances also defederated from lemmygrad (commies) so its not generally politically left either.

    IMO, Stalinists aren’t exactly tolerant either. You’re still talking about a totalitarian and authoritarian viewpoint, even if they’re on the left on economic matters.

    IMO, if your point is to make a community welcoming, then you have to get rid of intolerant voices. That–broadly speaking–means that you have to remove people advocating for any kind of absolutist, authoritarian rules. It’s easy to see at a macro level, but it’s all fuzzy at a micro level.




  • Centralization has another aspect that is simultaneously both good and bad: you can easily remove offensive content and problematic users. A centralized approach makes it very easy to remove cancerous people, groups, and content, while a decentralized approach makes that far harder. But in a centralized system, who defines what is cancerous content, et al.? Reddit did a great job at removing racist content, for instance (or, if you go back farther, they removed ‘jailbait’ and ‘creepshots’ communities, which were producing content that was just on the line of being obscene). But they also took a “both sides are bad” approach when it came to literal nazis v. antifascists.

    I’m a Reddit refugee, so it’s going to take me a while to learn to navigate this. And yeah, I’ve been kicked off Twitter, so Mastodon was already on my radar.