Kwakigra @ Kwakigra @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I had a really good dialogue about this a while ago. Here's a transcription, if you're interested in a detailed answer to this:

Factory farming is terrible. I completely respect anyone who is vegan because they oppose the abuse or exploitation of animals.

The issue with stuff like this is that it indicates some equivalency of human women and animals. I remember when PETA did a "holocaust on your plate" campaign which was fairly critisized for indicating that the murder of millions of men, women, and children was the same as eating meat.

I don't think the meat industry is ok and I agree that what it now considered normal in that industry is morally wrong. I also think it's a separate issue from human social trends. Minorities being compared to animals is never a good thing.

Two points on that.

1. There were multiple holocaust survivors that went vegan, citing the similarities between the their experiences and that of animal agriculture;
2. This is because what the holocaust was, in essence, was treating people like animals. Jewish people were loaded onto cattle cars on trains, sent to what were effectively slaughterhouses, and gassed in chambers - where I live (UK) almost all pigs are killed in gas chambers.

You can make the argument that animals deserve no moral consideration if you want, but a lot of the worst things that humans have ever done to other humans is what humans do to animals all the time.

It isn't the act of eating meat that is compared by animals rights groups to the holocaust, its all the stuff that came before it. Because it was essentially the same process.

I actually stated multiple times that I do believe animals deserve moral consideration. Once again, I think the norms of the meat industry are clearly immoral. Where we disagree I think is that I believe human considerations are fundamentally different from considerations of other animals, and putting people on the same level as animals in argumentation is more harmful than productive for a variety of factors.

I'm not saying that humans should have the same considerations as non-human animals, I'm saying that the holocaus analogy isn't innacurate, as the same acts were/are committed. Do you disagree?

As far as the animals are concerned, what they go through is the holocaust (obviously they aren't sapient, but you get my point).

Before saying anything else, I want to be clear that I would like to see a future free of animal meat from the practice of slaughter. I strongly disagree that these two things are comparable in any way other than they both involve the act of killing at high rates.

I’m not going to argue that our ancestral nature is morally correct, because in many ways we understand that many our instinctive impulses and wants are morally wrong. This being the case, the most available source of sufficient protein necessary to power our brains and bodies has come from meat, and this has been the case until very recently with advancement in our understanding of nutrition. Humans and our ancestors have killed other animals to eat them since before we even assumed our present taxonomy. There is an almost universal instinctual and cultural reason that people kill animals to eat them. I think we agree that it would be best to progress past this draconian practice, but there is no malice or de-humanizing campaign of extermination here whatsoever.

Compare this to the Holocaust. There is no way whatsoever that it could ever possibly be justified in any way. It was the result of reactionary politics coming into power and leading an entire society through the use of propaganda and terror to despise a group of sapient people for reasons that were entirely and demonstrably untrue. Sapience is a major factor. Although livestock can definitely understand when they’re being abused, they can’t comprehend the scope of what is happening beyond their immediate experience. The people in the camps lived every day with a full understanding that they were being tortured and murdered en masse as a political scapegoat at best and pure sadism at worst. They suffered their abuse and suffered the understanding of why it was happening and how little they could do about it. They weren’t being harvested, they were being murdered in a premeditated fashion in massive numbers exclusively for reasons of prejudice and intentional malice. The motives and suffering caused from this evil I think are significantly greater.

Complicating it further, there is a social imperative to de-humanize a person before they can be abused, exploited, or murdered. There is a common understanding that some creatures exist to be beasts of burden, some are dangerous predators to repelled, and some are invasive pests to be exterminated. There are life-forms such as actual cockroaches in which this understanding is completely justified. De-humanizing is taking a person who has agency and cognition and framing them as if they are an unthinking creature to be managed in some way for the “good” of the perpetrator.

Like I said above, the only similarity between these two evils is superficial. I believe they are fundamentally different.

I have to admit I had very low hopes for Lower Decks after that first teaser featuring a drunk Mariner being reckless with a bat'leth. It looked like it was going to be just another "adult cartoon" cash-in like the dozens on Netflix. Very happy that my initial impression was totally wrong.

Lower Decks was an effective Star Trek show as well as an effective comedy. While I also wouldn't trust this idea with just anyone, as long as there are people working on it who understand why Star Trek is important and how the themes are more important than being dismissive, I welcome another comfy optimistic comedy about a better world.

Classic empire strategy. Go to places where there are no possible consequences for inflicting any kind of terror onto innocent people, record what is the most effective to keep people in line there, import those strategies back home to keep the working class in line.

Great Depression Core

The tagline is “Tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets, she also must face the sins of her past.” In Section 31? She wasn't specifically recruited because her morals are aligned to Section 31? She won't be engaging in the mission of Section 31?

Racism is an extreme form of Classism which is caste-based.

Social class distinctions can vary by time and place and has been an issue among humans at least since the advent of agriculture. Social class may be determined by wealth, pedigree, politics, appearance, language, and likely hundreds of other variables depending on the social constructs of the given society.

Racism is derived from 17th-century European pseudoscience which proposed that there are "races" of humans which determine their intelligence, values, and appearance. According to the philosophy of racism which has been completely debunked as science for over a century, "White" people, the dominant caste, do not have inherent racialized characteristics while all other racialized groups (which are different over place and time) are born with certain characteristics that may or may not be tolerated depending on how liberal the racist is. I can't describe here the rules of why a person may be labeled a given race because it's as complicated as the entire field of sociology and unique to time and place.

Personally, I don't think any kind of classism is legitimate. That being said the majority of people throughout the world believe that at least some forms of classism are legitimate so it's not a question of allowing it, rather choosing how to deal with people who may discriminate against you for arbitrary and typically non-sensical reasons.

I've never understood why people think the most sophisticated and complex technology humans have ever been aware of is too mundane just because we have scratched the surface of understanding it.

This, like the Democratic party for the last few decades, is a bad joke.

I've been thinking about this today. The chickens really are coming home to roost. The US military has spent decades dumping cash and assets into our media to convince young men that the best way to solve problems is to kill "bad" people. We're primed to celebrate death already. Even in the 19th century when Anarchists were going around killing people who literally hired private armies to gun down strikers, the public was generally unsympathetic to violent retribution. Nowadays violence is the standard even when it's visited upon the investing class that the military was established to serve. Americans see a bad person getting killed and we're happy about it because we as a culture now believe that this is the way to solve problems. Considering that this is the public reaction, this could contribute to a solution where it wouldn't in a more sane culture which would not have allowed a mass murderer like Thompson to kill thousands every year in the first place.

One thing I've learned about ADHD is that since we can't control our thinking, we are each so divergent from the typical experience that we have little in common even with one another aside from common symptoms and the obvious reaction to those symptoms. My experience is not at all to invalidate anyone else's experience. That being said, it's very likely that the reason you are with your wife is at least partly due to how she is, and how she is is heavily influenced by her adhd. There are likely things you love about your wife that are directly influenced by her adhd or her life experience living with adhd.

Not a superpower. Thinking all moments of every single day, although exhausting, does make one significantly more experienced with thinking and how their mind works than those who can choose not to think most of the time though if untempered these thoughts are typically nonsense. It's an advantage in many situations to be able to think at light speed while everyone else is panicking, but the burnout that comes from not being able to ever turn it off is pretty nasty. It's different with different advantages and disadvantages. I personally wouldn't change my mind to be different, but I wouldn't recommend a mind like mine to someone who wouldn't be able to handle it since I'm barely able to handle it myself with decades of experience.

Bezos doesn't want his own newspaper messing with his international investment portfolio.

I'm at one of the biggest airports in the world in the middle of a very red state today. The mood is somber. I have never seen this airport this quiet. There is no sense of pride or celebration here, and I know the majority of people around me voted for Trump.

If I were to speculate, I see scared faces and other faces too guilty to look anyone in the eye. Eye contact among strangers in an expectation here under normal circumstances, but not today. Everyone is aware on some level that this is a bad thing.

λ definitely has my vote.

Science

On the ACES assessment, every single one of the 10 things asked about is known to cause neurological issues in children which persist throughout their lives. Only a 0 is insignificant. A 1 is very significant. I also scored "low" and thought it didn't mean anything, but I've since learned every single one means a lot.

When Microsoft hears " how can Microsoft get any worse?" they have always taken that as a challenge.

This is after they decided to be one of the most public facing corporate sponsors of the genocide in Gaza.

It is way, way worse than this. It's not hundreds, it's millions. 1 in 3 people in the US over 65 have some form of dementia. The Republican party is driven by dementia at this point. There is a literal reason they've been rhetorically targeting the cognitively impaired for the last ten years. I am a dementia care professional and this is not a joke.

Capitalists will say that it's fine for an economy to have a few capitalists own all capital and all physical and intellectual property while common people are only allowed to rent it from the capitalists at whatever rate the capitalist pleases. However, capitalists will also say that the evil of socialism is that you won't be allowed to own property. That's the most capitalist thing I'm aware of.