Let's do the math. Rice contains about 0.4 mg/kg As by weight. The "bad" rice in Louisiana or whatever contains about 75% more - about 0.7 mg/kg. Let's round up to 1 mg/kg to make the math easy. Chronic exposure limits for a 50 kg adult are about 5 mg/day (on the low end).
So you'd have to choke down a full 10 lb bag of rice every day (about 110 cups of cooked rice) to start to tip the scales. Other sources of arsenic, like groundwater, are likely far more significant.
Just because they don’t give a shit about media preservation doesn’t mean they’re not helping towards media preservation by pirating. Just by downloading a torrent you share upload bits of it while you download, even if you stop and delete it after you watch it. And i’d argue, the more people have media, the less likely it will fade away in 100 years.
And also, leechers help in media preservation as well. The more copies there are of media, the more likely it will be preserved well into the future. Even if they dont seed now, just having and spreading copies of media definitely does help in media preservation
I’d argue that indeed we do as a community need to justify our actions. Mainstream knowledge and media label us as close to thieves and criminals. People need to realize we just want to share bits and bytes across the internet, and we are stewards of media preservation and freedom of information. As cracking down piracy become normalized, it’s even more important to have a voice in society, and reassure people that what we’re doing is morally grounded
there's also reencoding your plunder using Blender :)