uriel238
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on I get dumped on at work all the time. The least I can do is return the favor. 7 hours ago:
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 1 day ago:
No, what I said was different from what was read. I’ll take the blame you like. I’m not trying to win an argument, and don’t think less of you if you fail to make a relevant point.
I’m trying to clarify my position.
I also wasn’t intending to imply we can’t or shouldn’t have to move away from meat (more on that below) but that society is going to be difficult to move in that direction.
Though I would say eventually for sake of sustainability we’ll probably need to move to veganism or cultured meat or invertebrate protein, at least until we can get our space colonization and terraforming programs up to speed. But we’re probably going to starve via climate-crisis driven drought sooner than any of these solutions become popular.
I do hope to be demonstrated wrong by the future, though.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 1 day ago:
Yes, of course, the revolution hinges entirely on my behavior and no one else’s.
Your unquantified adjectives are doing a fuckton of heavy lifting. Tread lightly, qualified-friend, you are one step away from a block. Think of me whatever you will, but your manipulative bullshit will not be tolerated beyond this warning.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 1 day ago:
Which is delicious! There are a number of things that are edible. But let me clarify…
In most of the households I lived in with others, I just needed to wait less than a month before the women around wanted flesh and blood. Neither spinach (which has the iron they crave) nor tofu (high protein) cut it.
And in the public, the mere smell of fast food burgers keeps them coming in. As long as dead animal flesh can be sold, it will be, and we don’t regulate it. (Yes, in India, cows are sacred, but chickens and goats certainly are not)
There are plenty of individual dishes that are fine. But if you want well rounded nutrition, eventually you’re going to be resorting to the few high-protein things that are either uninteresting or a bitch to prepare.
Now mind you, my kitchen savvy is limited. I’m learning, but slowly.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 1 day ago:
Dude, I already have doubts if I am worth my footprint, if we’re going to think in transactional terms. It’s easy to decide if cutting out meat is the only way I can make a difference, then why not cut out everything else as well? Should people kill themselves in order to spare nature the cost of their upkeep?
When we talk about the generation of greenhouse gasses, and the rising global average temperature, companies pollute in a day (in some cases, an hour) what humans produce across their lifetime. US suicides (49,000 per year, as of 2022, and rising with hate-crime and rampage killing rates) are barely a blip.
Maybe folks in the alt-right believe that human lives, at least the ones they don’t like, are worth less than the resources they consume, but a lot more believe the lives are worth the resources they consume, which is, again, insignificant to the ever-burning fires of industry.
Quitting meat doesn’t stick it to the man in any significant way, any more than self immolation does.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 1 day ago:
Not if you don’t want to. Maybe you think I’m wrong after a couple of sentences. That’s okay. The majority of American voters voted for an autocratic usurper. We can’t expect everyone to get it or care.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 1 day ago:
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but our elite class seems determined to stay there, and historically violent revolution is what unseats them and allows their wealth to be redistributed from their Scrooge McDuck vaults.
Nonviolent resistance might work, but we haven’t seen the kind of mass wealth dispersion that will be necessary.
And the elite are content to drive us right into extinction via the climate crisis and the plastic crisis. Even if you make technology that disrupts the meat market, they’re going to legally wrest control of it from you (unless you are rich enough to defend it from Nestlé). Regardless, when it comes to the climate crisis, the deal is done. The pooch is screwed. We know after the collapse the upper limit of sustainable population will be about one billion, and that number dwindles with each day of inaction.
Meanwhile the industrial world is choosing far-right parties over the usual neoliberal crap we’ve endured through the latter half of the twentieth century, so we’re not even serious about managing the climate crisis without the aforementioned revolution (and in that case, into some kind of communal government, since the typical outcome of a people’s revolution is a chain of dictators).
Good luck convincing our officials, elected or not, to choose veganism over the meat industry, or even nutrition over junk food. You will need all you can get.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 2 days ago:
Let’s put it this way, our bodies really like the smell, taste and mouthfeel of meat. So long as our system is focused on compelling people to eat via yummy food, there’s going to be a market for it. It’s not prescription, just description.
That’s why I was saying we’ll have to overcome capitalism before we can really beat this. Otherwise actual balanced nutrition will be a < checks spelling > commodifiable feature of food, rather than its essential point.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 2 days ago:
I have no question that everyone across the industrialized world would gladly switch to your delicious recipes.
Maybe you should start a business!
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 2 days ago:
The human brain is fueled by about 20% of your caloric intake. We’re evolved to be omnivorous. This isn’t prescriptive but descriptive. It’s going to take development to make vegan food delicious and something we want to eat (and then all the other features we want out of food: cheap, storage-safe, easy to prepare, etc.
For those of us who still eat a meat diet, it usually takes a chef to make something actually enjoyable from strictly vegetables. Otherwise, we’re used to receiving oddly-spiced bland much from our vegan friends. But we could do better if we were putting billions into it, and not the more-addictive cheeto.
But we live entrenched in capitalism, so no one is going to take this seriously until we’re already dropping dead from natural disasters and famine.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 2 days ago:
Telling boys to just go masturbate got us the Immorten Joe’s Warboys ^†^ that are the alt-right, that got Trump into power twice. The boys we told to literally go fuck themselves when they raged over their sexual frustration got us the army of militants and voters behind the white Christian nationalist movement. I was among them in the 1980s, when the society gave a meager few more fucks about them than they do in the twenty-first century.
I suspect similar movements exist through Europe, which is generally rejecting neoliberalism for fascist-thick movements towards one-party autocracy.
No, I don’t have a solution, and I’ve been working on it for thirty years. Christianity’s proscription against sex (later limited to non-reproductive sex) figures largely into the problem and it’s served so far as a sufficient distraction from class consciousness and effective response to industry’s effect on climate, and the imminent climate crisis.
We don’t have a way to let our young guys sow their wild oats, while we’re careening towards multiple great filters we are unprepared to navigate.
I know: 🧶📌📇
Maybe even: 🐰🎩🫖☕
And yet, very few people think about it, still. Those who do ponder the angry-young-men problem discount them as ineligible or feel they are too repugnant to civilized folk to consider. I’ve heard otherwise rational content creators actually say (I paraphrase) these guys were mistreated as kids and are now a societal problem. But they suck, so fuck those guys.
It might be a failing of the human species itself, that we are compelled to cast our young men out the way gorillas cast out their adolescent females (but welcome strange females), and capitalism intentionally only has limited seats where they can pick themselves up, so the system teaches them from the beginning to be aggressive, ruthless and transactional. Not to get completely nihilist, but maybe our capacity for civilization is limited and we just can’t overcome the paradigms that served us as migratory bands of hunter-gatherers.
In the meantime, our boys are taught they suck in our Christianity-heavy abstinence-only sex-ed, ^‡^ from which they descend into the incel movement, the manosphere, gamergaters, etc and from there into the transnational white power movement. Our society gave Trump his instant army, and it was ready for him the moment Trump went into politics. And our lack of interest or concern about the new batch of warboys we churn our from the US education system every year, is going to literally kill us all.
Just go vegan is going to end the same way, especially since the food industry cares not about actual nutrition but profit. Taking a page from Fourth International Posadism, we may have to end capitalism before we can create an ethical food production system (probably incorporating farming invertebrates as well as vegetables), but the problem right now is not what’s the end result ( Fully Automated Gay Space Communism ) but how the heck we get there and not crash and burn with the global ecology.
Totally open to ideas, but I’m not the guy you have to convince.
† Not to be confused with Warboyz of W4K fame.
‡ Twenty six states mandate abstinence-only sex ed, that stuff that teaches girls they are chewing gum, or someother one-use safety-sealed metaphor, and that boys aren’t allowed to think about sex until they have a salaried job and a ring. Seriously, this is still what is taught.
Three states mandate comprehensive sex ed: The west coast. And none of them require discussion of consent. (Some teachers include it anyway, as an elective topic). Of course, if we demanded opt-in consent in our sexual relationships, we might demand opt-in sex in our other contracts as well, say our jobs, our devices, our software, etc.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 2 days ago:
What ever horror humanity has done, we are still holding the beer of invertebrates.
And yet nature’s is is not a justification for aught. The fruit of the tree of wisdom (mythically) gave us empathy that we may live in harmony with neighbors, and in the late game, we have learned the imperative to see value in the fallow wilds.
A century ago, a vegan diet for humans as extremely difficult, possibly impossible. And to quote Saruman the forests will burn in the fires of industry! And they have.
We are not a vegan culture today because the food industry focuses on sales and profits, not on nutrition and health.
Though to be fair our massive land-hungry industrial farms will affect the biomes around them regardless of whether we grow plants or ranch livestock. Veganism is part of a solution towards a more harmonious civilization, but misses several pieces.
- Comment on Turning myself in 3 days ago:
I get that a lot. I am, however, against ostriching.
- Comment on Should have seen it coming 4 days ago:
This is how the US AI-dev sector decides to proceed at flank speed without safeguards towards friendly AI, leading to a robot apocalypse, sparing us from climate-crisis-induced famine!
- Comment on Turning myself in 4 days ago:
Part of the dystopian horror is learning they don’t care where you came from, and often will deposit you right into the hands of human traffickers.
And they’ll lock foreign-looking American citizens in a room with no contact and no lawyer and say You have forty-eight hours to prove your citizenship. Good luck. Followed by deportation as above. So no, your birth certificate in a hospital in San Diego will not help you.
And between those places are the detention centers that are packed at over double maximum safe occupancy, which get super dirty and super infected, and the ICE troopers / PSCs would beat the crap out of people for fun.
Some of the scary bits of the German Reich concentration camp program are already happening here in the US.
- Comment on My Honest Opinion 5 days ago:
I think that would be a great Lemmy feature that puts an AI content warning when it is so tagged, similar to how it blurs images tagged NSFW.
- Comment on Multiverse 5 days ago:
Azathoth just happens to be really useful to make idealism and the simulation hypothesis plausible. Either way, the mechanics that govern the universe are profoundly consistent and are not as fragile as our own dreams / our own simple, buggy simulations. So yeah.
- Comment on US Department of Labor to cease and desist all investigative and enforcement activity under rescinded Executive Order 11246 5 days ago:
Musk is a racist white South African who grew up in the ownership class and inherited an emerald mine. Behind the Bastards explains just how bad it gets.
He’s going to have to proclivities towards elitism and towards preserving his privilege. And when that is challenged by the rise of class consciousness, it means he’s going to fall on the side of fascist autocracy, oligarchy and monarchism.
No salute is necessary to determine where Mr. Musk falls in this paradigm, and he would rather kill, die and end the world than give up his wealth and power. I hope we don’t have to oblige him, but peaceful efforts to separate the super-wealthy from their ill-gotten gains have not historically succeeded, where guillotines (and hunting down any potential legal heirs, without remorse) have been more consistently effective.
The trick is getting from that moment to one that distributes that wealth and power diffusely or into actually-for-real public-serving institutions. Historically, we fail to do that part and have to kill a sequence of dictators scrambling to own the One Ring for themselves.
- Comment on the woke left is always like “we need less shootings” gun control so kids can’t commit domestic terror. but the right says i get wolf pussy so they win. 5 days ago:
The most direct correlation (consistent from city to city) was the mandate to swap leaded gasoline with unleaded gasoline. The entire city once covered in leaded soot is now covered in unleaded soot, which reduced our general lead intake.
One of the early symptoms of lead poisoning is an increase in violence, and decrease in impulse control.
Not the only factor, but likely the primary factor of the general reduction of violent crime in the 1990s. Curiously however, the accessibility of porn on the internet (especially niche porn) correlates with reduction in violent sex crime.
In the meantime, yes, people should generally – in their pursuit of critical thinking skills – become savvy with the phenomenon of spurious relationships.
- Comment on Gimme some evidence that anyone at all in the government is pushing back on Trump with any effectiveness at all. Someone throw me a bone here. 😬 5 days ago:
If you’re near a university, get your butt to the law school department and ask professors how feasible this is. (Buy them lunch if possible / necessary) And if it’s as brilliant as it sounds, they might be able to hook us up with the legal experts necessary to follow through.
We are in very interesting times, which may give the notion more traction than a far off whimsy.
We have colleges here in Sacramento. I’ll see what I can do here.
- Comment on Multiverse 5 days ago:
Aargh! Okay, I’m going to fix this and the fine tuned universe argument all at once.
Nature does not care about your silly numbers and hypotheses. All of our scientific mechanics are models of the observed universe. The ones we call theories are just models good enough to be usefully predictive as to forecast outcomes, allowing us to safely land airplanes, build bridges, make safe pharmaceuticals (or super addictive ones, if we want), split atoms safely to produce power (or unsafely to level cities) and so on.
We care about the math and the numbers because they give us results that are consistent with nature. But nature is doing what it’s doing because it’s behaving as a giant causal engine (ever-smaller forces that drive observable phenomena, at least until we get to Planck scale). So when it comes to the fine tuned hypothesis, to quote a Texas physicist whose name I can’t remember These numbers ain’t for fiddlin’
If there are any storm gods at all, anywhere in the world, to the last, they are content to allow lightning to behave strictly according to static-electricity electrodynamics. And ball lightning happens whether or not we have a model that explains it. (Presently, we don’t.)
If one or more of the many-worlds hypotheses are true, no given universe cares what its science-savvy inhabitants have determined and whether their mathematical models allow for models that are factual. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Facts don’t care about your science either. It’s more that the science does is best to describe what’s going on in the facts.
Irreducible complexity is solved.
PS: This also stabilizes the cosmic horror scenario of Azathoth’s dream, that Azathoth gibbers in the center of the universe dreaming its whole, and each and every one of us is a mere figment, who will vanish to oblivion when eventually he awakes: From what we can observe Azathoth has been dreaming consistently for thirteen billion years, and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to wake up, and his dream is profoundly consistent so that the mathematics we use to send probes from planet to planet, eventually into the outer solar system always works. Azathoth has our back!
- Comment on Hope they're into basements ***alot***. 6 days ago:
My tactic was to be upfront and sincere, to own my bullshit when I did it, and if they get wittingly manipulative, don’t tolerate it.
The keepers will strive to do better. The others will reveal themselves.
Of course, my advantage was decades in the recovery sector and the BDSM community (which plays with fire, sometimes literal, sometimes psychological) so I had a leg up re: self awareness.
- Comment on Gimme some evidence that anyone at all in the government is pushing back on Trump with any effectiveness at all. Someone throw me a bone here. 😬 6 days ago:
Yes. And if we go down that path, not only will millions perish in the purges, but then China will take us economically, and may be the Allies to our Axis.
And much like Germany, the brain drain and infighting at the top ranks will slow them down and become an exploitable weakness.
If we’re not careful, we’ll organize a rebellion and overthrow the Trump regime only to have it replaced with another despot, and then (as the pattern goes) another and another and another until everyone knows someone who’s perished in the fighting. And that’s no guarantee of a democracy.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve advocated we do something that (AFAIK) we’ve never tried before, and create a constitution before we try to overthrow the government. Make it public; get legal experts to pick at it for loopholes and exploits to close until it’s ironclad. And then, unlike the constitutional framers of the US, don’t let the fighting leaders take place as administrative officials.
But I’m a novice at history and sociopolitical studies. Maybe we are doomed to a century of tyranny and all we have wrought will burn in fire. But I know instances have occurred in which something different happened, via non-violent resistance, even.
At this point get involved with your mutual aid orgs and community orgs. The more of us that organize to resist, the more likely it will actually succeed.
- Comment on Gimme some evidence that anyone at all in the government is pushing back on Trump with any effectiveness at all. Someone throw me a bone here. 😬 1 week ago:
I want to add a running theme in GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire is that doing gross and inhumane things may horrify us in the moment and make us feel overwhelmed but tends to turn around on those who would resort to such methods despite Tyrion Lannister’s opinion that those method are not to be excluded from all options considered.
The most well known example in the series was the Red Wedding, the marriage of Edmure Tully, Roslin Frey, which was followed by the massacre of Rob and Catelyn Stark and many others, while under the protection of the tradition of hospitality. If we ignore the GoT Season 8 revenge by Arya Stark, reputation of fell deed figured in House Frey losing allies and trade, and Frey casualties far greater than those inflicted on Stark and its allies.
IRL, Trump’s heavy-handed response to the George Floyd protests in 2020 only doubled the protest sizes in the following days. Notoriously after Putin-style LGMs (unmarked uniformed men in military gear abducting citizens without due process) and brutal police action at the ICE building resulted in the moms joining the protests and then the dads (who brought their wireless leaf blowers).
An example that will be applicable to the US is the rise of the French Résistance during the German occupation of France. Despite efforts by German administrators to advice soldiers to stay polite, they couldn’t help themselves and were brutal to the French civilians. The people started engaging in light direct action, tearing down or defacing German propaganda, slashing tires, cutting phone lines, until they found each other and organized. Within two years, they were a formidable fighting force.
Yes, the find out portion of the upcoming era is going to be harsh. People who need services and supplies will not get them. Police will be cruel to folks at the border, and may even hunt down migrants and Trans folks like the SS after Jews. It will be fucking scary, but it will turn bystanders into resistance sympathists, sympathists into activists and activists into militants. And yes, it appears police just can’t help themselves but be brutal, and the resistance will not only feel justified in cutting them down, but will eventually hunt them to the ends of the earth to assure they see tribunal, even when the last guard and bureaucrat is ninety.
- Comment on Expectations 1 week ago:
They don’t want the gifted kid who turns into the mathematical supergenius, because either they get out of control in their own quest for world domination, or they get abducted by the government wanting to control them, and extract secret knowledge from their calculations. (My dad went the latter route)
But they don’t know it, so when they get the ASD weirdo like me whose gifts are in fields they don’t yet understand (talking to plants, radical left wing sociopolitical theory, or in my case, the ability to recognize that my cat is enlightened sitting in his box) they’re disappointed that the government is not clawing in to take them away.
- Comment on Good afternoon I choose well groomed. 1 week ago:
Innsmouth fashion.
- Comment on MFW people don't like my comments or posts 1 week ago:
That’s cat for I like you! I trust you!
- Comment on Punk circa 1200 AD 1 week ago:
To be fair, it’s only because no arrows or swords in the story are allowed to actually cause harm.
- Comment on Punk circa 1200 AD 1 week ago:
- Comment on Punk circa 1200 AD 1 week ago:
There’s a whole song about property law, which maybe we shouldn’t have.
