Oh look, typical carnist cliché is getting offended because someone criticized the weird shit you do.
I didn’t see anyone else pointing out how bizarre it is to fetishize bee puke.
And people hate vegans because most people want to believe they’re at least “pretty good people”, and the very presence of a vegan challenges that belief. If you’re offended, maybe it’s time to look in the mirror.
What’s unhinged is people who think they have the right to confine, torture, exploit, rape, murder, and devour the flesh and/or secretions of other animals just because they’re different.
Yeah I get that bugs are easy to dismiss because they’re tiny, often obnoxious and treated like a nuisance, and less intelligent than other animals. But we’re still talking about living beings who have their own subjective experience of life, individuality, and their own agenda. Like all animals they came into this life with us, not for us.
Commodifying living beings is unhinged. And even ignoring the moral side of things, having a preference for bee vomit is unhinged.
The point is that virtually anything is a better alternative to honey.
ITT: a bunch of stolen bee vomit fetishists. Why pay so much money for something weird, gross, and every bit as unhealthy as sugar and corn syrup? Maple syrup (while also unhealthy) tastes way better. And date sugar, whole blended dates, or molasses are healthier alternatives.
Okay dude. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’m not trying to convert you, atheism is fine and has a lot going for it. So give the persecution complex a rest. Having to share a world where other people are granted their own rights, does not necessarily infringe on your rights. You think your freedom is infringed because people get days off on theist holidays? That’s like when straight people complain about gay marriage. Don’t like gay marriage? Nobody is forcing straight people to be gay. Don’t like theist holidays? Then don’t celebrate them.
And you say yourself that if God themself came down, you would still not belief in God? That’s like when a Christian says that no amount of evidence contradicting the Bible can shake their faith in the Bible. The whole idea with atheism is to be skeptical and evidence-based. And yet here you are with a faith so strong it cannot be shaken by anything.
Antitheists are as hypocritical and cognitively dissonant as carnists. Believe whatever you want, but here’s a reality check: there are as many religions as there are people. The world has always had a diversity of belief, and always will. You will always have to share this planet with theists. Any program that seeks the eradication of all but one religion will always be a hugely destructive and traumatic failure, because humans are always looking to disagree with each other and explore new possibilities. And yes, at a certain point atheism becomes a religion, particularly when it becomes dogmatic and institutionalized. You’re not special. You in particular have demonstrated a religiosity that is only comparable to the staunchest Christians.
You’re sounding rather manic here. Relax, the evangelicals are not coming to get you.
I personally would prefer it if we could shake off the last vestiges of christocentrism in our culture - the predominance of their national holidays, their stranglehold on government and taking away women’s and lgbtq rights, and even the documenting of history based on bc and ad.
But your assertion is illogical because religion is incidental to bigotry, sometimes used as a vehicle for it, but not inherent to it. For example I once worked as an intern for a summer camp owned and operated by a Lutheran church. It was run by a pastor and her wife, and much of their operations were specifically meant for sheltering and supporting lgbtq+ youth. They never once made any attempt to convert me, and only ever made me feel welcomed and accepted for who I was.
One of the core problems with most branches of Christianity, historically, and into today is the idea of religious exclusivism. They hold that the only valid belief is their belief, and everything else is false and must be done away with. This idea that only Christianity was valid is what allowed them to feel justified in the eradication of pagans in ancient Rome, forced conversions in Europe, and the genocides and cultural erasure of indigenous people on Turtle Island.
So for you and other antitheists to say that only atheism is correct and valid, is just another form of religious exclusivism. Clearly you are already calling for the cultural erasure of all these other competing beliefs, just as the Christians in antiquity did. And likewise, state-atheism already has a history of oppression under Mao and Lenin. Are you a tankie too?
As a sidenote, it would be more accurate to say agnosticism, or even agnostic-atheism are nonbeliefs or nonreligions. But the more proselytizing and dogmatic Atheism gets, the more religiony it gets. So yes you are religious, and yes you are hypocritically guilty of the same bigoted religious exclusivism that your oh-so-hated Christian brothers are. You want to be better than them? Then don’t be like them. Support a religiously plural world, a world where we can explore belief freely and still respect each other despite, or even because of, differences of worship.
It’s why I put it in a separate comment. It’s been scientifically shown that people often feel threatened and angry at the mere presence of vegans. What it comes down to is that most people want to believe that they’re at least mostly pretty good, but veganism challenges those narratives and highlights that the vast majority of people are very much doing things every day that are very wrong, and that they’re not living by their own standards.
I’ve only been vegan for two years, and have been learning very quickly that I need thick skin for it, and that it means every statement I make on the topic will get scrutinized by the highest standards of skepticism while every carnist can just chime in with all the same tired lies about veganism that have already been thoroughly debunked for years now.
Or, like, we could maybe recognize that humankind has always had diversity of beliefs, and just go ahead and respect that fact within reason.
That’s the problem with anti-theists pretending their beliefs aren’t a religion. By acting like it’s something different, you think it gives you permission to call for taking away other’s rights. I respect atheism, but people like you can keep your bigoted hypocritical fundamentalist Atheism to yourselves.
What happened with Opera was very predictable. When it comes to companies and corporations, and when their software products are proprietary, the pattern is always the same. They make something that might be good, maybe very good. Good enough to get some level of popularity. That’s how they start. Over time though, the profit driven model inherent in corporations pressures them to implement questionable features - things that might generate more revenue, but are things people might tolerate at best. At some point they become more anti-features than questionable. And eventually both the company and their product devolve into garbage and we find out they’ve been basically an arm of the surveillance state the whole time.
Mozilla is not immune to corruption. The deal people are referring to here is that Mozilla sets the built in default search engine to whoever is the highest bidder. If I recall, there was a brief period where either Microsoft or Yahoo was going to be that company. But generally it’s Google. And not everything Mozilla does with Firefox is considered good for privacy. That’s why we have smaller projects like Mull - basically somebody takes Firefox, removes all the problematic parts, and adds extra security and privacy features.
But those projects have a tendency to come and go, because maintaining a complex piece of software like a browser is challenging and costly, and those projects do not generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining.
So Mozilla isn’t perfect, but they are a nonprofit organization, which does provide them with a revenue model that allows them to strike a decent balance, and on the whole Firefox is a net good, and has always been one of the most important bulwarks for the free and open web. And the fact that Firefox is entirely open-source forces them to stay good.
See my other comment here.
I made a rebuttal below, but instead of having an emotionally reactionary response, I want you to consider something else instead. Is it more important to win an argument with a stranger online, or would it be better to take a bit of effort to get more deeply informed on this subject matter for your own sake - something that may actually save your life and maybe the lives of others you care about someday? We could argue about covid origins for days - it’s something that even the experts in the field have admitted might never truly be pinned down with a full degree of certainty.
But that can of worms has already been opened. H5n1 may still be prevented, as unlikely as it is that the world will embrace plant-based and vegan ways of living, in time for that. Even so, the more you know, the more you can at least protect yourself. Because even now we are on borrowed time.
https://www.surgeactivism.org/notifbutwhenbirdflu
From a purely statistical point of view, do people get bitten by bats more frequently than they come into contact with contaminated animal flesh? Maybe you live in an area plagued by an intractable bat bite infestation, but that sounds far-fetched to me.
The origins of covid-19 aren’t entirely clear, but there’s a good chance the animal markets played a decisive role. Having a wide variety of animals confined in unsanitary conditions in one place is a very effective method of incubating diseases that can infect multiple species, including humans.
“In the outbreak of SARS-CoV-1, palm civets, raccoon dogs, ferret badgers, red foxes, domestic cats, and rice field rats were possible vectors.[7] Graham and Baric wrote that human and civet infections likely stemmed from an unknown common progenitor.[67] Patrick Berche wrote that the emergences of SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV appeared to be sequential processes involving intermediate hosts, co-infections, and recombination.[68] In contrast with the rapid identification of animal hosts for SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV, no direct animal source for SARS-CoV-2 has been found.[69] Holmes et al. wrote that the lack of intermediate host is likely because the right animal has not been tested so far.[19] Frutos et al. proposed that rather than a discrete spillover event, SARS-CoV-2 arose in accordance with a circulation model, involving repeated horizontal transfer among humans, bats, and other mammals without establishing significant reservoirs in any of them until the pandemic.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonotic_origins_of_COVID-19
However, the main problem is that you’re thinking too narrowly. If covid was caused by a bat bite, that would still be an example of something caused by animal consumption, because animal consumption is inextricably linked with animal domestication, wildlife habitat destruction, and climate change.
“Bats are a significant reservoir species for a diverse range of coronaviruses, and humans have been found with antibodies for them suggesting that direct infection by bats is common. The zoonotic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus to humans took place in the context of exacerbating factors that could make such spillovers more likely. Human contact with bats has increased as human population centers encroach on bat habitats. [4][33] Several social and environmental factors including climate change, natural ecosystem destruction and wildlife trade have also increased the likelihood for the emergences of zoonosis.[34][35] One study made with the support of the European Union found climate change increased the likelihood of the pandemic by influencing distribution of bat species.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19
Animal agriculture is the single largest driver of wild animal habitat loss, as well as being a significant driver of climate change. Both of these are significant factors in our increasing proximity to the bats who played a role in covid. Food is like cars. To know the environmental harm of cars you also have to take into account the damage caused by all the infrastructure needed to make the car. In the same way, the harms caused by what we eat also have to take into account everything that’s necessary to make the food we eat.
And as more of a hot take, people need to reckon with the zoonotic origins of so many of these diseases. If it weren’t for humankind’s addictions to consuming animal flesh and their secretions - and the animal agriculture, loss of habitat for wildlife, and all the conditions these things create for the incubation of deadly diseases - we might never have had a covid pandemic. Likewise, an h5n1 pandemic may be a matter of when, not if, because the vast majority of people still refuse to let go of their gluttony for consuming animals.
If you think of all the hate there is for antivaccers, and the harms they caused in 2020 - and deservedly so - omnivores deserve every bit as much, if not more, for the roles they play in the outbreaks of these diseases.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52960876-how-to-survive-a-pandemic
I don’t know how much of a threat the original strain is at this point, but if anything I would be concerned about H5N1, what’s usually known as avian flu. The only thing currently holding it back from being a pandemic is that it’s not efficient at infecting humans yet. But it is extremely deadly, killing 50-60% of those who get infected.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1
Linux can do that too. ╰(▔∀▔)╯
An open-source, federated, and privacy-protecting alternative to the dominant advertising services. Something that gives the individual web user full control of which ads they see; from which indies, organizations, companies or any other groups. And where they can also filter ads based on clear categories, values, or tags, rather than everything being dictated by algorithms and “relevancy”.
Removed by mod