• 11 Posts
  • 95 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Why not? If the right eco answer is to eat more of a certain kind of meat instead of quitting meat,

    First of all that’s not likely correct info. I can’t see the uncited chart you posted but it certainly sounds untrustworthy. I’ve seen several charts in documentaries and research papers and they generally show roughly the same pattern, comparable to this chart.

    But let’s say someone managed to convincingly cherry-pick some corner-case legumes that are bizarre outliers to the overall pattern. Maybe there are some rare fruits that get shipped all over the world. It certainly does not make sense to divide, disempower, and diffuse the vegan movement in order to make exotic fruit/veg X the enemy of climate action in favor of preserving chicken factory-farming. Not a fan of Ronald Regan but there is a useful quote by him:

    “if you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

    IOW, you’ve added counter-productive complexity to the equation at the cost of neutering an otherwise strong movement – or in the very least failed to exploit an important asset we need for climate action. This is not an environmental activist move. It’s the move of a falsely positioned meat-eating climate denier strategically posturing.

    The wise move is to consider action timing more tactfully. That is, push the simple vegan narrative for all it’s worth to shrink the whole livestock industry (extra emphasis on beef is fine but beyond that complexity works against you). No meat would be entirely eliminated of course (extinction mitigation is part of the cause anyway), but when a certain amount of progress is made only then does it make sense to go on the attack on whatever veg can really be justified as a worthy new top offender. The optimum tactful sequence of attack is not the order that appears on whatever chart you found.

    The somewhat simplified take is: “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, then beat ’em”. Vegans are united and it’s foolish to disrupt that at this stage.


  • I’d far rather deal with the noise than having yet more surveillance.

    My cognitive dissonance triggers on this point because one of the reasons I cycle is privacy. I am also firmly in the #fuckCars camp (noise, pollution, death, selfishness of people putting their convenience above lives of other people & animals). It’s hard to give a shit about car drivers having privacy. And also realize that car drivers inherently sign up to give up privacy in order to use a personal car anyway (registration, insurance, banking transactions tied to those activities and their fuel purchases, etc). The fuel purchases of car drivers feed the oil industry, which in the US feeds the war chests of republican candidates who disrespect both privacy and the environment.

    Yet people making the wise pro-privacy considerate decision to cycle are still exposed to breath car fumes, noise, and life-threatening physics (e=mc²).

    Hard to have sympathy for car drivers. Although my dissonance needle moves a bit more if these noise cams are always recording video and thus capturing all people not in cars. I don’t know if that’s the case.


  • Electrics cars will make it a non issue

    I do not see EVs replacing scooters (which are driven by lower budget commuters). A single unmuffled scooter driving through #Paris at 3am can wake up 10,000 people according to Bruitparif. And don’t forget horns. Assholes will used their horns at 3am on my street. The only thing they give a fuck about is their own convenience when their favorite parking spot is taken.

    The idea of harsh punishments works if a vehicle is continuously loud because it will eventually cross paths with a cop. So that position is fair enough. But what about horns? There’s never a cop around when horns are misused.





  • It would be a lot more environmentally effective to convince people to reduce beef consumption and replace it with chicken/pork instead,

    Let’s not drive a wedge between the eco-vegans and the animal welfare vegans. Beef is the worst for climate while chickens get the least ethical treatment.

    This duplicity muddies the waters and makes getting real actual change that would benefit the climate harder to achieve and less likely to happen.

    Dividing an already tiny population of much needed activists is not how you get progressive change. Non-beef meats still shadow plant-based food in terms of their climate harm.

    Your pic was too big for me to download but if it’s the same data I’ve seen, then beef is the worst and lamb is 2nd at about ½ the emissions of beef, and all the meats are substantially more harmful than plant based options.







  • I would like to add that refusal to “ditch their car” is ignoring a glaring problem: Many cities are not walkable, and/or people live too far away from employment to choose cleaner options.

    That’s not an oversight. Choosing to live and work in places that do not require a car is part of the act of ditching the car. Indeed, ditching the car is not as simple as selling the car in many cases.

    In my case ditching the car meant vacating the shitty car-clusterfucked city I was in. I switched to public transport for a few years then realized that’s just a baby step (a city bus with just 5 people is as bad as 5 cars each with 1 person). So from there I migrated to a bicycle.

    It’s not guaranteed to be a positive experience or produce a “climate-friendly” change in mindset.

    Indeed it’s not for everyone. And in fact it’s somewhat late. The study shows that those who take psilocybin before they reach the age 35 are for the rest of their lives more open minded. I don’t think you can easily refute that. The leap I’ve made from there by saying open-mindedness is conducive to adapting to a changing world (being flexible about changing one’s own lifestyle) is probably not far-fetched. But certainly it’s not for everyone.

    Prediction: meditation will become more popular and the short-cut (psilocybin) will become a more and more liberated option in the future. It will make populations more adaptable to a changing world and future crises. At this point, I can see psilocybin helping people better adapt to a fully played out climate impact 20 years from now.