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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I think any vegan who is at least somewhat sane would say squishing an ant is not the same as killing a cow, because one is clearly more sentient and capable of experiencing suffering than the other. Obviously you don’t want to do either of them, and yes overpopulation and food waste causes us to kill enormous amounts of insects and wildlife. But I also don’t advocate for increasing the human population and try to waste absolutely 0 food because I know the impact it has. Buying food locally from non-factory farms is also much better, vegan or not.

    It’s also true that animals consume and require MUCH more resources than just eating the plants ourselves, so even under that framing we are still doing significantly more harm because now we have to grow extra food, have space for these animals, and deal with the extra emissions from feeding/giving water/transport.

    I absolutely can’t support myself nor anyone else with some backyard gardening, that’s definitely true. But with 2 people doing it in our leisure time, we reduced how often we have to buy any foods by about 40% by having ~8 fruit trees, 10 raised beds, and a freezer. Obviously this isn’t 0 harm because we do need a fence and sometimes have to trap and release some animals, but it is possible and not infeasable to feed a neighborhood by gardening like this, and it’s been done in many neighborhoods already.

    You definitely can not exist without causing harm, and meat is not the ONLY negative thing to reduce, it’s just the most obvious and requires the least amount of legislature to actually reduce the harm from it. If we had a much smaller amount of cows that only ate the waste, that were humanely slaughtered, I think most vegans still be sad about it but not be nearly as upset, and meat would be a special thing rather than a staple.



  • I agree! so we should try to get locally grown food without pesticides and then people can stop coping. Somehow my family manages to grow food without it and if there’s a bug we just dust it off into the grass. People who freak out over a little bug or fruit that’s not totally perfect are actually part of the problem.

    It’s pure cope to say “I can’t avoid causing suffering so me making a deliberate choice to cause MORE suffering to animals that are the same intelligence as my dog is actually fine.”





  • I mean sure, what you said is true, but you can’t deny that when given a choice they consistently choose comfort over doing the right thing. It’s the same reason people will say “I really should be vegan” and keep eating meat. While that’s the normal human thing to do, I can still call them out for doing the wrong thing because it’s easy. They also had many many opportunities to turn away from the propaganda when it started to become more insane, but they remained because it was comforting and change would be too difficult.




  • This is 100% not true as I have personally had several times where I got ransomware (though still the thing I wanted to download somehow?) in late 2000s / 2010s. Hasn’t happened a single time since, even downloading the most sketchy torrents. For a lot of younger people, if they want to torrent something they’re not looking at trackers or much of anything, they just want the download. Windows defender used to be complete trash at preventing viruses so you’d need to know to download things like malwarebytes and be a lot more wary of what you download, and even if the torrent is 100% legit you’d have random registry/driver/software issues. Now these issues are rare unless you’re downloading some custom software or a much older game.

    The one thing I would say was a lot easier back then is it would say “xyz free download” and it actually would be the thing itself instead of random bloatware.



  • I can think of a couple situations, one being if you live in a place where abortion is illegal and you’re talking to someone else/someone who knows someone who wants to get one. Doesn’t matter if you did nothing illegal but now you’ve likely gotten them in hot water. Another is if you’ve loaded a website that hosted something illegal unintentionally, now you have to explain why that’s in your cache/history/whatever (lemmy had a big problem with CSAM being spammed on some instances). Innocent people get put on trial/sent to prison for weak evidence, and your phone is an immense amount of information for the cops to look through and see if they can make anything fit.



  • I would’ve agreed with this a few years ago, but when you realize things can have subtle effects on our body that aren’t easy to measure or readily apparent, you shouldn’t fully trust something just because studies say it’s safe. A study can’t really show that “50 years of repeated exposure caused slightly more exhaustion,” for example.

    However, we DO know tooth decay is a major health risk for our whole bodies. Avoiding a maybe possibly slightly harmful chemical isn’t stupid, but avoiding something that prevents known and documented dental harm and the effects that has on your entire body, that’s just letting fear override rational thinking.