Oh goodie, a dumb post making fun of veganism, I’m sure the comments are going to super mature and nuanced.

does one life form have more value than another?

Like with everything, there is no clear boundary and it’s up to us, the thinking, sapient creature to make these distinctions so that we can exist while minimizing our harm to the world.

We will never eliminate all harm we do to the living world, that’s ridiculous and nobody is expecting it except the most delusional people.

But we do need to draw lines somewhere. And broadly, we can make distinctions that higher animals like cows, pigs and chickens have more of an “experience” of the world than most insects, and thus their lives have more value. It’s a weird thing to say out loud but we can’t shy away from making these moral choices as long as inhabit the earth and want to remain the dominant species.

You haven’t seen how factory farms work then, which is good for your mental health probably, but you should really take time to understand the actual problems and serious it is.

The conditions that most animals live in is horrifying and they suffer a great deal before butchering, and the butchering process is often flawed and has tons of problems, with wide-scale reports of abusive conditions and botched kills, to say nothing of the massive amount of mental and physical harm it does to the people who’s job it is to kill thousands of living beings every day.

You don’t have to give up meat, but at the very least consider buying local from non-industrial farms.

The basic costs of getting a van and converting it can be thousands of dollars at the cheap end, not counting the van itself.

If you want to get a pre-made travel van with amenities like a toilet and lighting already installed it will set you back tens of thousands more than just getting an old beater and modifying it, and that counts on your ability and energy to actually engineer and build the stuff you will need.

So you need either a huge up-front investment, or you need to make monthly payments if you finance it, or you need an already stable lifestyle that lets you slowly collect and build the stuff you need over a long period of time.

I don’t know how you support a mobile lifestyle anyway unless you have a job you can do from the back of a van parked in a walmart parking lot, which is where you will spend most of your time as you will need daily life shit like toilet paper and a few meals a day. (Except you can’t park there overnight, you will need to park either in a campground or an RV park or some place for designated overnight parking, which usually comes with fees if they’re anywhere near a city. Long-term sites with utility hookups or bathrooms will need a monthly rental contract.)

I’m fully convinced, that at least in the US, every last “van life” influencer can only support the lifestyle by promoting it and riding on trust-funds when views run short. Homelessness isn’t that fun actually.

Whatever, slippery coward.

As a species we tend to mask irrational feelings with stories our brain make up, connecting abstract social issues and ideas to make us feel like our irrational discomfort is somehow part of a bigger, more “rational” story, but it all leads back to something that makes us uncomfortable. The cure is sanitizing sunlight.

And because Lemmy is packed with incel-adjacent minded young guys and require some pushback on their bad ideas, because people no longer experience social pressure as long as they can retreat to like-minded online spaces, so I rather people are open about what they think so we can challenge it, support it or offer alternatives depending what the actual feeling is.

That’s why I care.

Your turn.

Why is everyone vague-posting in here? Just say directly what bothers you about the comic.

There’s a name for these kinds of people: Fuddy Duddies

I prefer to call them “pedophiles and criminals” but I guess older terms also work.

They’re fantastic if you keep your blade maintained, it’s honing, not sharpening.

Whetstones by themselves will get your blade sharp real fast, but by themselves all you’re really doing is making a micro-serrated edge every time, and it dulls fast. Smoothing your edge after whetstone with a honing rod smooths the cutting edge and reforms the edge shape after regular use.

If you lose your edge you have to start over from the whetstone, so maintaining the edge with a honing rod will save you time and not take as much material off your blade.

Also, a lot of households have utterly worn-out honing rods in their knife blocks, as the household often will try to use it for actual sharpening and scrape off a lot of the honing texture, and eventually will get so smooth they do nothing.

Nah cynical dipshits on the internet who try to Jordan Peterson every conversation about art theft and AI regulation who are creating division. Have a good one, enjoy your AI titties and shit.

Yah except in reality it’s just a drone with a taser and an explosive charge. It doesn’t give you a warning, it already has your face in a database of known “opposition members” and you’ve been targeted as a radical terrorist for laughing at that meme someone posted to your facebook. It doesn’t care about stairs and can wait patiently outside your house for you to open a door or window.

Your violent death will be celebrated on state media along with everyone in your terror cell. (Family.)

I don’t know how satire writers are going to survive this century.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/elon-musk-says-tesla-will-stop-producing-s-x-models-shifts-making-robo-rcna256409

They never have concrete rebuttals to thought-out replies. If it was a matter of thinking, they wouldn’t be going to bat for generative AI. Good work though.

I just think it’s silly

I think you need to ask yourself why this one thing is annoying you enough that you felt the need to push back. I don’t want to know, I won’t even see the reply, I am suggesting you ask yourself why it’s important to you to fight a sentiment that a vast number of people who don’t otherwise share anything, happen to all feel the same about and what good you think you’re doing for anyone, even if it’s just yourself.

Yah.

Removed by mod

Okay but do you ever lose an argument?

I lived in a rural area and the nearest phone for emergencies belonged to one house that lived a quarter mile away.

The owner of the phone got hooked on WoW on dial-up at some point and basically ended the party line for everyone.

If it’s a personal friend group and we’re talking about life or sharing things or watching a piece of media, or the meeting is about each other, sure, makes sense to show up and “be there.”

When it’s gaming acquaintances and we’re just playing a game, it feels odd and out of place.

I used to basically do it. I was talking to young guys online since before Reddit, and then when Reddit blew up I was right there as well on the frontlines of a huge relationship-related subreddit doing the same thing. I never fancied myself an expert, but I am good at communication and a lot of these guys just needed help being explained how dating and relationships “work” and expect some kind of proceduralism around it.

You can scream until you’re blue that it’s not a system with rules and levers you pull, but if someone is neurodivergent, they’re going to be stuck on “X leads to Y, which means Z” mentality about relationships, and then they will try to apply that thinking in real life, meet rejection or embarrassment and get really bitter and angry. Right wingers and grifters (but I repeat myself) seized onto this with a thousand different “systems” erupting like volcanos in Iceland, covering whole swaths of people with bullshit “redpill” and “PUA” bullshit.

I tried. I really did. I had great success with the guys I focused on, but for every self-described incel who thanked me for helping turn their lives around, 30 more were waiting behind him, each angrier and more foul-mouthed than the last.

It was too much, and it’s extremely exhausting.