US military spending is higher than the next 9 countries combined.

Cut it in half, it’d still be the largest in the world and we could fund just about anything we can imagine.

Just like soldiers do in war. Just like police do in the street.

Woah woah woah, use whatever justification you like, but you really shouldn’t put criminals and murderers on the same level as actual heroes like Luigi Mangione.

ITT: All kinds of wild claims about communists kicking puppies.

Not ITT: Sources.

Obama/Bernie/Trump voters are very fringe, despite the media’s attempts to suggest otherwise. There were more Clinton voters who went Republican when Obama won the primary in 2008.

I’m afraid my brain is just too wrinkly to allow facts and evidence to just slide off it and just imagine that reality is whatever I feel like based on absolutely nothing, like you can.

China is just bribing people to continue living by providing material improvements to their quality of life. That’s cheating 😤

In 2020, protests rocked the region of Inner Mongolia after the Chinese government ordered an end to Mongolian-language classes for first-year primary students, in favour of Mandarin.

As I said, they are mandating Mandarin as the language of instruction. It’s not illegal to speak Mongolian like you’re trying to construe this as.

Authorities also began a region-wide censorship campaign, shutting down Mongolian WeChat groups and removing Mongolian-language books from the shelves of retail outlets.

They also shut down Chinese WeChat groups and remove Chinese-language books, depending on the content. Are they being removed because they’re Mongolian-language? That isn’t actually said.

Even Fox News tries to avoid direct lies and misleads by selective opinionated examples, so I doubt any of that can be painted in any better light.

Exactly, only in this case they’re doing it subtly enough that you didn’t catch it.

It means they don’t fucking ban people from learning or using their original family language, eg Spanish, in the United States.

Nor does China. China is mandating a primary language of instruction, and that’s slightly concerning, but that’s not the same as banning people from using their original family language, and to call it genocide would obviously be laughably absurd.

They are more effective at not spreading it but also help somewhat in not catching it. A sneeze can carry the virus a very long distance without a mask, and a mask can provide a barrier but having contact isn’t great even with a mask.

Fauci did actually say at one point that masks don’t work against COVID and could actually make you more likely to catch it, which was a lie intended to avoid a rush on masks that would lead to a shortage for healthcare workers (after Trump gutted the emergency stockpiles). This whole debacle is a perfect demonstration of why it’s unethical to deceive the public even if you think it’s justified. Whatever temporary benefit might have come from it is vastly outweighed by the long term harm of destroying trust. Anti-mask people could literally point to clips of Fauci on 60 minutes saying masks don’t work.

The standard lib response is to either deny that it happened at all or to make some vague reference to “the science changed.” I’d be fascinated to see what specific scientific study at the time showed masks were ineffective at combatting a respiratory illness, and what caused this supposed study to be discredited. The fact is there was never anything to suggest masks are ineffective. It was just a lie, prompted by shortages. Other countries, across Asia and elsewhere, immediately rolled out masks because they obviously work and they didn’t gut all their emergency services.

It is of course pretty much impossible to express any sort of rational criticism of any of this without being lumped in with the crazies, but it was a significant deception that really convinced me the US is FUBAR. Even the scientific institutions have been corrupted. Of course, now we have RFK Jr. so at this point it’s very obviously a clownshow regardless.

Religion, famous for encouraging you to critically examine your beliefs.

It’s a scandal for her, not for him. And it seems like gossip and hearsay at that.

Sorry, the smoking gun on Melenchon is that his girlfriend is rude to people sometimes? That’s some tabloid shit, and kind of a counterexample to your overall point. People should ignore politically motivated gossip.

I’ve fallen off a bit on it, but Go. The amount of complexity that emerges from simple rules, the aesthetic forms that emerge, as if both players are collaborating on a work of art. To an experienced player, each stone has a meaning, in it’s own language, and you can almost hear them speaking. There are so many ways to approach the game, a player’s personality reveals itself on the Go board, and any flaw in one’s way of thinking, anything you need to work on, comes out on the board like looking into a mental mirror.

I’m actually heading out to a tournament now, and I’m super rusty but I think I’m starting to rediscover my interest in it.

And once again, this is an argument against factory farming and inhumane practices, not farming and domestication in general.

Yes, because that’s what 99% of the decisions of 99% of people involve. Just because it’s theoretically possible to imagine a situation where these things are done ethically doesn’t mean that’s actually an option that is practically available.

I am not particularly interested in criticizing small farms with relatively ethical practices. My position, from my original comment, is, “But surely in the present state of affairs where that treatment is not the norm, veganism is the only ethical approach, no?”

Is there a hypothetical situation where it’s ethical to kill an innocent person?Suppose some space aliens say they’ll destroy the world with a giant laser if you don’t. That hypothetical does not change the fact that not killing innocent people is still a good general rule in the vast majority of situations you’ll actually encounter in life. To throw out all reservations against murder just because of that hypothetical would be making a rule from the exception.

Likewise, I’m sure you can imagine a hypothetical situation where it’s ethical to consume animal products, but unless that situation is an actual, real thing in your life, that you’ve looked into to verify is the case (which the example of eggs in Germany makes me skeptical of), then what you’re doing is throwing out a generally good rule based on an unrealistic hypothetical, just because following the rule would be inconvenient.

Ukrainians and Irish are obviously too stupid to handle their own agriculture and desperately needed guidance from Moscow or London.

Pretty much every place in the world suffered from famines before modern farming techniques were introduced, and while under the rule of extractive nobles/landowners. It has nothing to do with being “too stupid” or “needing guidance.”

Famines in Ireland and India continued frequently under British rule. The famine in Ukraine was in a large part caused by political upheaval from overthrowing the power of the landowners (who responded by burning their stores), which is why it only happened once.

What about wool, honey, milk, eggs.

Again, it’s a matter of whether you’re looking at things in the abstract, or in terms of how things actually work.

Take eggs for example. Eggs aren’t just a byproduct of having chickens around, there are specific breeds that are dedicated to egg-laying. Because only a small number of males are needed for reproduction, most male chicks are put on a conveyor and ground to death. While I can’t claim to be an expert in German laws, I did find that German courts have allowed this practice.

It’s a similar story with milk. Because dairy cows are a different breed, male calves are typically slaughtered at birth. Dairy cows are kept in a constant state of pregnancy, suffer the stress of being separated from their young, and are killed as soon as the milk slows down, typically a quarter of their natural lifespans. Dairy is also similarly bad for the environment as beef, and there are widely available plant-based substitutes like oat milk that taste just as good, if not better.

No matter what animal product we’re talking about, maximization of profits is almost always going to involve cruelty, environmental harm, and selective breeding to the point that any expectations about natural by-products aren’t true. Even with regulations (which can be difficult to enact effectively), there are tradeoffs: limiting cruelty can increase environmental impact (as well as the price). If animal products were appropriately priced based on offsetting the harm they cause, they would be unable to compete against plant-based alternatives.

The way I see it, the tiny fraction of meat that’s produced ethically should go to the tiny fraction of people with dietary restrictions that require meat.

The vast majority of people are not going out to investigate small farms to see if their practices are ethical. They are buying meat from a grocery store, and if they consider it at all, they might pick one with a label slapped on like “organic,” completely meaningless thanks to lobbying.

Practically speaking, it is almost always a choice between torture products and nothing.

Labels like “organic” are essentially meaningless.

But surely in the present state of affairs where that treatment is not the norm, veganism is the only ethical approach, no?