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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2024

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  • I lean in favor of rebirth, but via naturalistic processes rather than projections of our own moral wants. I don’t need a supernatural explanation to recognize that whatever is most irreducibly “me” was born at least once. Why would I assume it would only be once?

    If we follow from that premise, we can also chart a kind of probabilistic, umm, not karma but something not far off: If we’re reborn after death, how do we determine what kind of life our next one is going to be? Pretty obvious actually, just look at what kind of life everyone has already. If, for example, only 1% of humans have an especially good life, it looks like there’s a a really slim chance any one of us is going to be the one who gets to have that kind of life.

    By contrast, 99% of humans are living in increasingly bad conditions, lower wages, higher prices and virtually every economic card stacked against us, as well as *gestures broadly*. It’s remarkably more likely that anyone would be reborn as a 99 percenter.

    But why should we assume that we would only ever be reborn as a human? The total human population right now is 8.2 billion. There are estimated to be about 20 quadrillion ants in the world. And more than 44 billion animals have been bred into existence and slaughtered for food this year alone. Are you more likely to be reborn a human, an ant, or someone else’s property?

    There’s a consequence here if rebirth is the law of the land. It would mean that death is not an escape after all. The only way to give yourself your best chance of a better next life would be to put in effort to make the world better for everyone. There is no way out, only through.





  • It’s impossible to have a fully free system?

    https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

    But more to your point, it’s a false dichotomy. Even before the latest changes to the Debian install media, for years it was maybe unintuitive but still easy enough to just choose the “nonfree” install iso. That one would automatically include all the proprietary bits that are necessary for a fully functional Linux system.

    But now those nonfree parts are in the Debian install by default, so there really is just nothing that you get from Ubuntu that can’t just as easily work in Debian - especially since everyone is moving toward flatpaks, and appimages anyway.






  • Even if we ignore the brutal abuse and murder that is done to animals raised for food, or the pandemic inevitability that comes from animal agriculture; or their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, destruction of natural habitats for expansions of ranches, or illnesses like asthma that cafos cause to local communities; or the physical and psychological harm that occurs to animal ag and slaughterhouse workers, many of whom are either immigrants or minors - any one of which should be reason alone to seek an end to animal-consumption ways of life - diets that are high in animal products and low in plants are directly harmful to human health.

    That’s essentially what keto, paleo, and carnivore are - high fat, high animal consumption, and low or no carb (and since most plants are high carb, that usually means low-plants as well). In the first case, low-carb diets don’t even meet all nutritional needs without supplementation. In addition these diets are all about increasing the very foods that cause our top causes of death like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc, while reducing or eliminating all the foods that are known to be most protective against these lifestyle diseases.

    https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-try-the-keto-diet

    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2021.702802/full



  • The mods at the lemmy world vegan community don’t see things the same way. From this post:

    “Today the lemmy.world admins made a follow up post about the incident where the admin Rooki interfered with moderation of this community in a way which was determined to be against lemmy.world TOS and factually incorrect. Throughout this incident there has been no communication with me, nor to my knowledge any of of the other moderators of this community. Rooki quitely undid his actions and edited his post to admit fault however there was no public acknowledgement of this from him. In fact I wasn’t even told I was reinstated as a mod which is quite funny.”

    “The lemmy.world admins’ response appears more focused on managing their own reputations and justifying similar actions in the future than providing a good environment for vegans, and other similarly maligned groups. Their statements about wanting to handle misinformation and overreach better in the future ring a bit hollow when they won’t take actions to address the anti-vegan circlejerks under their update posts which abound with misinformation and disinformation.”

    “The legalese written basically allows for the same thing to happen, and that if it does the admin decision is to stand while moderators have to quietly resolve the conflict at the admins’ leisure. Presumably with a similarly weak public apology and barely visible record correction after the fact.”

    Codified anti-vegan bias based on reactionary views? That’s unfortunate. Glad I’m not on that instance.