• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • 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.









  • Somebody else already posted the Wikipedia link here about state atheism. Atheists are no more innocent than other people.

    Maybe it’s radical, even unfathomable; but it’s almost as if the only pathway with any chance of peace is one where enough people can come to recognize that every. single. person. has their own set of beliefs, and the only kind of accord that has any chance of working for everyone, is one that actively supports diversity of belief.




  • As a quasi-religious person I do agree that public policy and moral imperatives should have a secular basis. For example, when people look back at this point in history they’re going to see a particularly nasty stain in the way that 99% of the human population is responsible for a sort of perpetual holocaust of many other species of animal, all for nothing more than a little gluttonous sensory pleasure. That kind of morality is easily argued on a secular basis for all the substantial harms those lifestyles cause, and the sheer amount of tangible benefits for choosing a better way.

    But secular policy is dangerous if it does not also support religious plurality. When one or two belief systems dominate, they invariably oppress smaller groups. Diversity of belief is a natural buffer against that.

    That said, a religion does not necessarily need to base its exegesis on interpretation of arbitrarily chosen writings. One of the best things religious groups can do for themselves now days, if they want to adapt to the times and survive into the future, is embrace the scientific method in their own ways. Evolution shows us that the things that aren’t willing to change and adapt die.






  • 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.