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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Unless you’re a raw milk TB-chaser type the milk you drink is probably processed too. Being processed doesn’t make something inherently worse, and “no nutritional value” is a daft claim. OK if you consume milk as your only source of protein or fat, you probably want to choose your milk substitute tailored to whichever the rest of your diet is deficient in, but better or worse for us is a fairly arbitrary concept.

    Livestock for dairy production are unarguably bad for the planet though.


  • Automation that replaces the need for work can be a good thing, but only if it is used to ease the overall burden instead of making a bunch of people unemployed so that the capitalists who own the company can increase their profits. The idea of machines doing all the work sounds great, but if that means that the handful of people who own the machines have a great quality of life and everyone else suffers then that is not a good trade-off.


  • Most people don’t vote

    About 70% of the electorate vote nowadays, it has varied higher or lower but never been as low as 50% of eligible voters to even say “half of eligible people don’t vote” let alone “most”

    https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8060/CBP-8060.pdf

    So assuming you have say 20 old people on your fictional bus, even assuming that all of your voter info is correct and everyone is on the register, the chances of all of them being able to cast a second vote without any of them being caught are billions to one.

    The idea that millions of people will risk a significant chance of a lengthy prison sentence for their individually tiny extra votes is absurd when any actual attack on election integrity would not happen at the point of “turning up at the polling station and hoping for the best.”

    Even if one in a million voters did try and get away with this - which again is a hugely inflated number from anything we get an indication of - if to do so you stop tens of thousands of people from being able to vote at all that still makes the election less democratic overall.



  • Some states do use their own definitions of terrorism to explain why it’s bad when other people do it but OK when they do it, but that’s definitely not a uniform definition.

    the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

    - Britannica

    The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals.

    - American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

    the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants.

    - Wiki

    (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal

    - Collins English Dictionary

    the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes… government or resistance to government by means of terror.

    - Webster’s



  • While some limited ecotage does happen, non-permanent disruption is more popular than permanent damage. And the more public, less relevant showboating stuff is what gets the public eye. Just Stop Oil got a lot more attention when they started sitting in traffic and throwing stuff at paintings and whatever than when they were focusing more on things like blocking oil terminals.

    I’d recommend Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline for more discussion about more radical approaches to protest, but bear in mind that there is a distinction between strategic sabotage which can get public on-side and the sort of adventurism that ecoterrorism implies. As /u/lil_tank@lemmygrad.ml mentions below this has the risk of driving more people away anyway.

    I’d really recommend Marxism Today’s youtube video about the film pseudo-adaptation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, discussing both the risks and bad examples in that film itself but also the broader context of trying to encourage this.

    Disruption and sabotage of fossil fuel machinery might be effective from a public optics perspective, as well as on a large enough scale hopefully impacting capitalist profits/making polluting ventures seem riskier to investors. However, ecotage is distinct from eco-terrorism and the latter should be avoided.

    However, not the question of subjective motives but that of objective expediency has for us the decisive significance. Are the given means really capable of leading to the goal? In relation to individual terror, both theory and experience bear witness that such is not the case. To the terrorist we say: it is impossible to replace the masses; only in the mass movement can you find expedient expression for your heroism.

    - Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours

    The [Earth Liberation Front] realises that the profit motive, caused and reinforced by the capitalist society, is destroying all life on this planet. The ELF therefore feels that the only way to stop the destruction of life is to take the profit motive out of killing.

    - ELF spokesperson in a 2003 interview


  • While stuff like Tomb Raider is the quintessential example, for a five year old you would probably be better with something more colourful and fun, even if you are the one playing it.

    With that in mind my first thought was A Hat in Time although I’ve not played it through to verify end to end appropriateness.

    You could also try Mirror’s Edge because bright colours and dynamic movement, I don’t remember it being that violent but maybe on second thoughts consider the safety aspect of introducing a child to the concept of jumping between buildings and maybe I’m talking myself out of this.

    Celeste is colourful and fun and honestly at that age I don’t know that she would pick up that much on the heavier aspects of the story which are allegories for anxiety/depression/gender dysphoria. A five year old is basically going to see it as a story with an evil twin I think.

    I haven’t played Child of Light but that might be appropriate?

    The main character in Crypt of the Necrodancer is a girl called Cadence, although that is one you would really have to enjoy to make it worth it imo. I’m mostly thinking rhythm and bright colours are child friendly again to be honest, but you still have to play what is basically a roguelike mixed with a rhythm game and if that’s not your jam it will be a waste of money.

    You can always play a game with selectable skins too, like Spelunky 2 has a few characters you could pick between which all play the same but has a variety of designs you can play as.









  • I don’t know that that’s true, there can be other cultural reasons.

    In Hindu-based cultures you wouldn’t eat cow, as in largely Muslim ones you wouldn’t eat pork.

    Eating horse is common in a lot of countries despite falling into your “useful enough not to kill” category. Sheep are useful for wool production but people still eat lamb.

    Rat is easy to domesticate and they are frankly useless at drawing a plough but eating them is still taboo in many places. A couple of billion people eat insects daily, but there are still many other countries where it is very rare to eat them at all despite the ease of farming.




  • Scientists can just make stuff up, but in this case Paul’s complaint appears to be more to do with the article than any underlying research as he is trying to draw information that the article doesn’t pretend to intend to provide.

    A lot of the problems with publicly visible scientific research are to do with media communication and the way that journalists will interpret or spice up results in their coverage.

    There are also problems with the incentive to publish surprising results more than confirmation of existing information, as well as with the incentives for research funding, and scientists can bring their own biases into research consciously or unconsciously.

    For things like company sponsored research, it is not uncommon for multiple trials to be run and only the ones with positive results to be published. I’d recommend Ben Goldacre’s pop sci industry journalism books Bad Science or the even better sequel Bad Pharma for more discussion of this.

    Then there are journals which function more like vanity press, with insufficient peer review processes and that just charge people to publish their papers.

    But there are also scientists who just wholesale make things up, whether for obvious financial gain like Andrew Wakefield making up the autism from vaccines MMR scare because he had competing vaccines he wanted to sell, or just for easy prestige like Jonathan Pruitt just copy and pasting underlying data samples to boost trends.

    It is not unthinkable for researchers to invent information, although my gut will always be to trust the researchers not the international megacorporation with an obvious financial incentive and the idea of suing researchers like this without substantial proof of fraud could have devastating effects on scientific research should J&J manage to push it through.

    (YT video essay about Pruitt)