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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • You’re absolutely right and it is something I sometimes fail to account for since it nourishes hopelessness in me. I do, however, believe that such empathy is developed and not something you’re born with. You see it in varying degrees by how much someone cares for their families, friends, their community, and really even themselves. Some just care about themselves, some care about their peers but not their communities, and some don’t care about themselves but would bend over backwards for others. Empathy for lives beyond our own species is something that would be nurtured just like empathy for other humans is.

    When I talk about our options as a species, I am inclined to believe that most of our species leans towards having empathic feelings for lives beyond our own species. It may just be a matter of hope that I’m reflecting on my comments, but it is also an evolutionary advantage for us to develop such empathy as we further develop our abilities to morph this world to our needs and wants, since we do depend on other species for almost everything.

    Maybe I’m intertwining the necessities of our species with our individual feelings over those necessities, but I would believe this moral conflict would surface for most of us, with the level of such moral conflict varying greatly from person to person. My previous comment mostly wonders of the possibility that a great number of us start to develop such moral conflict over more than just domesticated species or cute mammals or such.

    With regards to the trolley problem, you’re right. By me profiting from the atrocities of others, I’m a part of such atrocity. It’s a fact of more than just harvesting farm animals. It affects our economies, our climate, our biodiversity, our social norms and behaviors towards outsiders and minorities, as well as our digital lives. It’s a cop-out to just wash my hands from such actions and only hold myself responsible for my direct actions regardless of those of others that my benefit me, and that’s why I said it was a cognitive dissonance, one that I just have to live with of my own choosing.


  • I understand that people, especially children, are malleable into believing and doing horrible things, and it’s a fact that this will happen to many under Hamas or as a consequence of the ongoing conflict regardless of Hamas, but it’s also unfair to those hostages to assume that they’re already murderers. It’s a tragedy waiting to happen for multiple dimensions of reasons for many people involved in this entire conflict (wouldn’t you be radicalized if you saw your entire family covered in rubble or being treated like trash by other groups of people?), and it’s extremely unfortunate, but we can’t just instantly label them all as bad apples for something that may or may not happen to them, or that may or may not describe them currently. They’re still children, we can’t cast the dice on them, or we’re no different from those radicalized beyond common civil morality.


  • On one hand, animals are animals, so one should either object to eating all or not object to eating any.

    I feel like this is a sort of ironic dichotomy we humans find ourselves in due to our evolutionary development that lets us reflect on our actions, along with our empathy stemming from our understanding of suffering of life in general.

    On one hand, we are omnivores, we eat plants and animals, it’s not that we decided to eat animals, it’s that we’ve evolved to do so. Vegan diets end up relying on supplements and lots of hoop jumps to achieve the same results an omnivores diet would have. That, while commendable on those who try, shows us quite clearly that we’re going against our most fundamental evolutionary traits.

    On the other hand, we understand we are causing suffering to other beings in order to sustain ourselves. No matter how humane out treatment of such animals may become, it’s still something that we will struggle to accept, or that we will ignore outright to not have to struggle with the thought.

    It’s a terrible situation to find ourselves in, because that’s literally the solution life itself has come up with, we steal nutrients and energy from other life, period. Yet we understand we are denying other life forms their chance to life, and a lot of the time they suffer while being denied that chance. But what other solution is there? We haven’t come up with better solutions, and we may never do so. We defined a certain threshold for what we deem acceptable, some of us move that threshold, but none eliminate eating life entirely, because it’s not possible. Plants are still alive, fungi are still alive, bacteria are still alive, insects are still alive, and we never ever stop to think about them like we do our farm animals, we only stop to think about life that resembles our own. And that’s, unfortunately, necessary to not starve ourselves out of the equation.

    I wonder if we will ever solve this riddle for ourselves. Will we simply accept this forever as a given that some animals just have to suffer for our sake? Will we start growing our own meat, and declare the threshold to be “organisms without a complex neural system”? Will we be able to forego depending on other life entirely and develop our nutrition in factories or through biological modifications without even relying on other cellular organisms? Where will we draw the line next, and will we be able to satisfy our moral qualms?

    I can’t be for or against any of this, all I can do is hold my own actions to my own moral line and accept that everything else is just how things have to be due to the cruel reality of being alive. I’m unable to kill, and I’m convinced I’d first die than kill even a chicken to survive (or if I do, the guilt will eat me alive), but I eat chicken every day and I will continue to do so until the day I die, even though there’s a strong cognitive dissonance there, since I can’t really do much about it without compromising my own nutrition in some way, I can’t go against the very rules of life. It’s truly a cruel joke that life has played on us, forcing us to depend on taking life from other organisms to stay alive, while also allowing us to empathize with other life forms and enter such a dissonant state of mind. That’s just the torture of life, I guess.


  • I don’t know of a country there that allows private ownership of firearms

    Well, we do allow private ownership of firearms, just, AFAIK, a very limited number of models provided by a very specific entity rather than just about anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if most countries in the americas allowed some degree of firearm ownership (don’t care enough to look it up).

    I didn’t mean that when I said “privately owned militias”. I meant the banana companies which dealt with strikes by sending privately owned troops on privately owned ships to these countries in order to reign in their poorly disguised slavery.






  • This whole “associating a group of people with a government/country” thing is kinda fucking whack. Your everyday jew is not going to be celebrating the shit Israel does any more than your average Palestinian will celebrate Hamas’ doings. Why the fuck would you imply antisemitism on the very notion of criticizing a government that oppresses its neighbors and steals their land? OP didn’t even mention jewish people, they mentioned Israel specifically. Israel doesn’t speak for all Jewish people, just like Hamas doesn’t speak for all Palestinians.






  • While it’s true that it’s not the entirety of the Russian population, there’s still the oligarchs, mercenaries, media outlets, the entire government body, and a fuck ton of the military, all more than happy to fuck over their ex-comrades as soon as they get the green light. I’m pretty sure that’s who we mean when we generalize “Russians”.

    As a Latin American, this applies to Americans as well. Much love to a decent part (if not most) of the people there, but FUCK the US for fucking us all over with banana republics, neoliberalism, and red scare shenanigans, only to then have the galls to turn out to be xenophobic, warmongering, orangeman-loving fundamentalist imbeciles.

    Anyway, Russia, right. Fuck Putin and his greasy ball oligarchs.


  • Pretty much same as you: If it works for NASA or it’s a heavenly body, it works for me. Main PC is called SATURN V (SATURN for most things). Laptop is called HYPERION. Currently saving up to replace SATURN with ARTEMIS. Might throw in a GAIA NAS/virtualization server at some point, if cash flow allows for it. I’m not as picky about my family’s devices that I’ve set up, though… They’ll keep their randomly generated names, mostly out of laziness.