Something I pretty much never see pointed out is that we don’t need billions of humans. Our governments keep encouraging us to have children, but they should be working to end the culture of pressuring people (especially women) into having children because they’re somehow incomplete without them. There should be more programs offering access to birth control and family counseling services. This endless and meaningless growth is as harmful to us as it is to the rest of our planet.

I believe pets are counted as livestock, but it’s not specifically referenced as far as I have the interest to read.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115

But what if she had four wheels?

No. What is or isn’t a vegetable is determined entirely by whether we collectively consider any given plant or plant part a food item.

I don’t love the honor translation partially because it’s been used in racist caricature, but also because it’s often inaccurate. Like you might say ohana because you’re in an extremely formal interaction, or because you want to sound poetic or whatever, but you’re not actually saying “honorable flowers” usually. You can mean that though. I feel like it’s too context-sensitive and culturally nuanced for simple translation.

In Swedish the prefix for bad stuff is the same as the prefix for not or un-. So a monster is a not-animal and a weed is ungrass. Which is especially interesting to me because that same prefix (o) is for better versions of things in Japanese.

e: This got me thinking about “plant,” and I realized it’s literally the verb to plant. In Swedish it’s a growth, or thing that grew. Japanese and Chinese: planted thing. Spanish is also the same as the verb. I feel kinda bad we mostly talk about them in terms of farming them rather than giving them a proper name. Like if they get sentient someday, plant will probably be considered a slur.

It definitely counts as invasive if we put it there though. I don’t see rabbits swimming to Australia.

Everything being said on both sides in those screenshots doesn’t really mean much to me without data to show it’s actually the case.

My personal feeling is that I don’t care to own most games in the first place and would be happy getting them all from the library the same way I do with books. Without Gamepass I wouldn’t have played things like Payday 3 or Grounded in the first place because I won’t purchase them. The alternative for me is piracy.

That’s ableist.

It’s fine if people come in to learn about it though, right? I think a lot of people like myself can’t get diagnosed for various reasons, or maybe they just have a loved one who has ADHD. I think it’s better to say that if you’re going to be ableist about it, you can keep your mouth shut.

I put the phrase in quotes to indicate the meaning of treating someone poorly. Treating animals poorly is not appropriate.

But my point is that animals should not be treated “like animals” either. They should be included in the social contract and afforded a basic minimum of respect and autonomy, not enslaved and exploited.

Why?

Isn’t similarly militant and self-righteous when someone feels this way about trans rights or abolishing slavery?

It is demonstrably true that life on a planet alters the conditions of the planet (which then alters the life, etc). Most glaring is the abundance of oxygen in our atmosphere. We don’t look for oxygen on other planets because oxygen is necessary for life; we look for oxygen because it’s unlikely to exist in high densities without life to produce it.

The sci-fi novel Death’s End by Cixin Liu (third in a series) further suggests that life alters the universe rather than just local systems, which was a fun idea. He’s a rather long-winded author, but he’s easy to forgive.

That said, this is the first time I’m hearing of the hypothesis by name, so I can’t be sure what all it says. A quick skim lines up with reality though.

It’s always crazy to me to be reminded that people were doing so well in the past that they could be this obese, and I wonder if it really was a paradise or if there were enough downsides to justify the way we do things now.

I’m pretty sure I already signed this, but I’m concerned it might be a newer thing than the one I signed. Is there a way for me to check?

Literally thought DarkSydePhil had some kind of redemption arc for a second.

Pretty much every mental diagnosis that exists is a case of something completely normal which presents in too extreme (or too muted) a fashion in the given individual. The criteria for diagnosis isn’t just whether you experience X, but whether X has a significant negative impact on your life.

Genetic evidence suggests that carnivory developed by co-opting and repurposing existing genes which had established functions in flowering plants

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivorous_plant