• 1 Post
  • 252 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle









  • Agreed on all that. Interesting points about sausages. My simplistic assumption has been that animal-based junk food is probably nutritionally superior to plant-based junk food not because of its protein but rather because of the sheer variety of molecules that animals contain by virtue of being higher up the trophic pyramid. I still think that’s generally true but thanks for pointing out those qualifiers.

    To be clear, ethically vegan food is superior across the board.


  • Completely agree. This needs to be better communicated. Vegan junk food is not meant to be healthy, it’s meant to be ethical.

    This whole subject is a misunderstanding.

    PS: I would go further and suggest that vegans stop insisting that a vegan diet is more healthy in itself. In the absolute, it clearly is not. Perhaps vegans are generally healthier eaters than non-vegans, but that’s because they pay more attention to food in general, not because they are vegan. In other words, the healthiness argument is a conflation of cause and correlation. I don’t think that this disingenuity helps anyone in the end.





  • Sure. I personally find cynicism intensely irritating. It’s infectious so it inevitably ends up poisoning everything. Nobody ever solved any problem with cynicism. In fact I’d go further: all the world’s backward societies (i.e. most of them) are characterized by all-pervasive cynicism (“they’re in it for themselves”, “they’re all crooks”, “nothing will ever change”), whereas the successful countries (few in number) are the ones where people have a more optimistic view of others’ motives. Cynicism is so obviously a self-fulfilling prophesy that I struggle to understand why so many choose to indulge it. I’ve heard a theory that it makes people feel better about their own helplessness. Perhaps I’m too logical but I wish people would choose not to wallow in pessimism - after all, nobody can prove anything one way or the other when it comes to the motivations of others. And oddly, most humans tend to trust others that they know personally. Personally don’t see why strangers would somehow be a different variety of human. Rant over.



  • IMO the “ownership” thing is a red herring. It has its roots in a specifically American obsession with private property.

    If everybody “demands ownership of goods”, that means we share nothing. Hardly a model of “sustainable consumption”. There are loads of examples of redundant private ownership of goods. My favorite stat: the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its entire life. All because every household in every building on every street must have its own one, instead of us finding a way to share them.

    In the context of digital “goods”, “ownership” really just means control. I wish we would use that word instead.