We also got Russia and the US weaponizing social media to support far-right parties. The EU needs to get their shit together.

And when it’s the only way to keep their family from starving, for example, people will consent in droves, securing supply.

I feel like if a child with a similar level of cognition as the cow harms other children, most people will say they have no moral agency yet, and will still see harvesting their leather as immoral.

There are two ways to resolve that inconsistency…

And the good thing is, when demand for (human) leather is higher than supply, people will just breed some more humans, keep them on farms, use their labor and sell their leather. With nothing going to waste, just the beautiful circle of life.

We’ve gotten quite efficient at doing that so there’s plenty opportunity to have more jobs, make a profit and to provide a product at an affordable price point, at the same time, all with human leather farms. Just have to compromise on welfare and sustainability step by step for more profit, but humans are already really great at ignoring such things when it’s advantageous to them, so most won’t ask any pesky questions anyways. We just have to normalize human leather (from factory farms) and everything will be great.

Machine learning has some genuinely good use cases though. Protein folding is probably the most useful for society yet, especially for medicine research. LLMs can at least save a lot of tedious work, depending on the task, if used responsibly.

Regarding fossil fuels, it really depends on the use. For new electrity production, residential heating and cars for example it’s usually not needed anymore, and just a massive waste of carbon budget. For other stuff, the alternatives still have a long way to go to become practical.

Crypto bros depend on more people speculating with their currency of choice to increase the market value. If they’re pissed, that’s a good sign.

Thompson’s life may have been cut brutally short, but it will remain a model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life without the benefit of rich parents and an Ivy League degree.

Lol, was this meant for the onion?

“He managed to get filthy rich off the suffering of working class people. What a working class hero. Truly a huge inspiration for all of us.”

I’m not happy when people die. But looking at the scale of institionalized cruelty in the American healthcare system, I can certainly understand the feeling of retribution that many Americans have when people who are responsible for the suffering and deaths of others, while getting rich from that, get the same fate. Especially when they or people they know have been denied coverage. Of course some people don’t just want to bend over, and a political solution is out of the question for the foreseeable future.

This is great! It’s the first card meme I’ve seen outside ich_iel@feddit.org on lemmy. Are there even more?

Cruel cultural traditions make (good) people support horrible acts. A tale as old as time.

Fortunately plant-based alternatives have been growing and improving quite fast for 10-20 years now, so I’m hopeful that even those who “could never give up meat” might stop supporting those hell holes. I was one of them, after all.

Kabecz have been charged with several offences, including killing or injuring animals; causing unnecessary suffering to an animal; failing to provide adequate medical attention for an animal when it is wounded or ill; inflicting upon an animal acute suffering, serious injury or harm, or extreme anxiety or distress that significantly impairs its health or well-being.

Just inflict the same things on “farm animals” and it’s not only socially acceptable, but the average person will gladly buy the products, and therefore fund the abuse on factory farms.

We certainly have a looong way to go to become a decent society based on that metric.

Seems like they haven’t gained traction since the reddit exodus. I wonder how the other alternatives are doing. Lemmy has a decent amount of activity at least, although I still wish more people would use it.

We gotta spread the word. It still seems very achievable if enough people become aware of it.

What makes you think that processing food through an animal is healthier than through a factory?

You have to compare the actual nutrients contained in the product to draw any conclusion about health effects, and the macros are fairly similar for the plant-based versions compared to a given meat product.

The average person (in developed countries) eats significantly more meat than the recommended upper limit by nutrition organizations.

If you just go by the naturalistic argument, you’d conclude that processed drinking water is worse than untreated water, and that vaccines are worse than “perfectly natural” diseases. It’s a common logical fallacy.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-nature

To me that’s more ethical than killing of billions of animals, and the latter is considered ethical.

I think most people would actually consider factory farming unethical, they just put the blame on the producers for treating animals like shit. And the producers are locked into a race to the bottom for competitive prices, so they’d blame the customers/market conditions.

Damn it

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering

I don’t know, life before the industrial revolution was pretty shit for regular people too.

I’d rather not have to worry about my family (and friends) starving to death during the next famine. 40-60% of children in medival europe died before adulthood. I can’t even imagine the psychological suffering caused by this alone. Then there was frequent war and disease outbreaks, basically no healthcare, and so on…

I’m not saying that everything’s great nowadays, we urgently need to fix many issues. But many things were way, way worse before modern civilization.

Now, your claim is that Russia started the civil war as a pretext to invade and that the separatists are just Russian proxies. On the other hand, the Russian narrative would claim the same thing about the Euromaidan coup.

I guess most the 400.000 - 800.000 Euromaidan protestors were CIA agents in Russias view then?

It’s well known that many people in Eastern European countries don’t trust Russia one bit after their experiences in the USSR. Of course there’s enormous pushback when politicians in power try to strengthen ties with Putin (and cut ties to EU countries), it would be really weird if there weren’t. The same would happen in Poland and many other Eastern European countries who were staunchly anti Putin long before the invasion, even though they don’t have an immediate threat from a shared border with Russia.

In my opinion, if people really cared so much about the Ukrainian people, then we should’ve been providing them with foreign aid for domestic development, long before any of this started.

Before the war, people weren’t really aware of the situation in Ukraine and there were 100 other problems that seemed more urgent, so there just wasn’t any political pressure to do something.

As far as I can see, it’s just about US/Ukrainian state interests vs Russian state interests

Western countries just stood by in the first days and did nothing, as they had no hopes for Ukraine surviving for more than a few days. If the Ukrainian public weren’t willing to push back, they would’ve had no chance to stop the Russian advances and their government would’ve collapsed in days, just as both Russia and the West predicted.

It would be a better use of funds to accept territorial concessions

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fled from the occupied territories, and accepting that they will never get their relatives and homes back will be unthinkable for a large part of them, especially after the reports of forced relocations from occupied regions into Russia (including thousands of children) and all the suffering that Putin has brought upon Ukrainians. Maybe they will reach the point of making concessions if they see no hope of retaking the territory. Ultimately this has to be decided by the Ukrainian people.

You said that they are a reactionary government, but you also implied that their reactionary justification to invade is legitimate.

You said you “don’t fully agree” with Russia intervening in the civil war (by shelling kyiv I guess, because theres definitely civil war there). As if they didn’t provoke it in the first place to justify their invasion.

I also wouldn’t expect people who are criticial of war to say that they “don’t fully agree” with Russia waging a war of aggression and commiting mass murder and war crimes in Ukraine, I would expect some actual condemnation of such atrocities.