I can only speak for myself but I appreciate the effort. Realistically I don’t have high hopes for the longevity of this comm. I assume one or another of the antivegan admins will continue to find whatever flimsy reason to shut down discussions that make them unhappy.

I strongly recommend anyone interested in reading about veganism on the fediverse check out the comms on vegantheoryclub or hexbear. If your server doesn’t federate (e.g. world) make an account on one that does. Both of those places are administrated by vegans and suck a lot less.

Well personally I do think we have a moral obligation to reduce harm and I don’t see a good reason to privilege the life of one animal over another (humans included). Veganism as an ideology however is about what is practicable, and while it appears that cats can be transitioned it is very early days and can only be done responsibly if you are in a position to afford medical oversight and understand how to select correctly formulated foods.

As a vegan I am against pet keeping, but lots of abandoned animals exist and they need care there aren’t institutions to provide so they end up in homes. I have a couple of rescue dogs living with me atm for example. In situations like this I think where possible we have a responsibility to juggle their needs and desires with broader harms. Like I don’t let the dogs I care for hunt wildlife for fun, and give them enriching search games instead.

Abstracting away that death through food doesn’t really change it.

But we’re not insane, it’s early days and while evidence suggests for cats its possible it isn’t trivial and should be attempted responsibly, which nobody involved in this shitshow was claiming otherwise. The only people denying reality are the banned commentator who was saying that cats cannot survive on plant in the face of patient explanations by another user and the lemmy.world admin who tried to remove that user’s comments in favour of the science denying ones.

No I was unremoving comments of someone explaining how a plant based diet can be safe, who also acknowledged that a whole food plant based diet would be lethal. In explaining why I was I also acknowledging that a whole food plant based diet would be lethal.

Cats can survive on a plant based diet, but only one carefully formulated and processed with additional supplements. If you try to keep mr fluffypaws alive on carrots and lentils he will die.

I point out this acknowledgement as it flies in the face of the alleged action of promoting harm to animals. You can check the modlog for the full hilarity /shrug

I was removed for stating that synthetic taurine is a thing which is used in food all the time and that a whole food plant based diet would kill a cat. according to the admin this is promoting dangerous actions.

Synthetic taurine is a thing and is widely used in formulated food. Cats are sometimes taken off meat based diets due to medical complications. The posts you removed were reasonable and explained why in good faith, the other poster made wild asertions not based on modern evidence and made anti-reality claims such as synthetic nutrients not being equivalent and ‘meat’ needs being scientific fact.

They violate the rules of this comm and you are overreaching by interfering.

All companion animals should recieve regular health checks by vets, and any major dietary changes should be done with medical oversight but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Obviously a wfpbd will kill a cat, as the poster you censored pointed out. Your closeness is affecting your judgement here, and you cannot ‘own’ a sentient being.

You’re conflating very different processes here. While there is the hard problem of consciousness and we can’t falsify ideas like panpsychism consider a few things.

If you amputate my hand and press on it it will emit nervous signals. Does anyone feel pain? If you destroy most of my brain but keep me alive, then stab me almost all the nervous activity and hormones etc associated with injury will happen. Is there any reason to believe there is any pain felt?

I would say no in both cases, pain is not emitting nervous impulses, or something that precedes releasing endorphins and inflammatory factors etc. Pain cannot even necessarily be reliably correlated with stress markers like heart rate, and in the case of phantom limb syndrome pain can even be associated with a complete lack of signals.

There are good evolutionary reasons to exhange information and resources, even unwittingly. Apparently some bacteria in my tummy are in conversation with my body constantly but I’m not at all aware or actively participating in that. Maintaing pain only really seems to offer advantage if you can do something about it, while it’s possible for things to exist accidentally it’s not like grass can move to places without mowers or trees shade themselves. In all animals with nervous systems the nervous systems are the vastly most expensive thing to keep alive. In fact there are a few creatures who when entering an immobile stage of life rapidly digest their own (a good explaination for both tenure and retirees!).

Plants don’t have rapid long distance communication in their bodies, they don’t have centralised organs, they don’t even have anything approaching the levels of activity we associate with the simplest nervous systems.

It’s probably best to think of grass “screaming” as skin cells “screaming” for resources to make more melanin when exposed to UV. Or lymph nodes “screaming” when releasing hormones to heal a wound and stuff. This is all vastly below the level of consciousness.

Or whatever, embrace panpsychism, like the invisible dragon in my garage nobody can prove it false /shrug. Animals eat plants though and thermo law 2 is a thing so even panpsychics minimise suffering by being plant based.

Seems well adjusted. I’d keep my kids away from them if I were you.

Silly vegoon, only the cute animals I didn’t want to eat have feelings. The others are unfeeling slabs of meat that is magically created by wholesome farmers being folksy.

One of the points in my waking up to carnism was when I mentioned an interest in hunting rabbits (a so called invasive pest here) over dinner with my family as a late teen.

My father expressed an incredible disgust at the idea of hunting, made some comment about sadists or something. The rest of my family were more reserved but similarly aghast, that I would be willing to participate in the process by which meat, which we were eating, was created represented some sort of character flaw.

Yet at the time we had gone fishing, and I had done work experience on a farm. I volunteered at the school farm and had raised broiler chickens and helped load them onto a truck to a slaughterhouse.

It made me realise how utterly disconnected we all were and how the people around me were utterly repulsed by the violence required for their pleasures.

I moved out shortly after and went pescatarian largely due to the soul searching that prompted. Becoming vegan later when I realised Nirvana lied to me.

isn’t it just? My favourite is “While 99% of all meat comes from factory farms, no one eats that meat.”

Not a single person I’ve ever spoken to about veganism, not at demonstrations or privately, has ever admitted to eating factory farmed meat.

Is it all some bizarre welfare system? the butchers/supermarkets/delies just buy it from the farmers and throw it out?

Nutritious meals based on lentils/legumes are astonishingly cheap. wtf are you smoking? mock sausage etc is a luxury good, it is not a standard feature in any diet.

you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.

Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.

By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.

Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.

Majority of people: do horrible thing

Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.

Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?

you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.

I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.

Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.

Me approaching Foss developer with bug: Pardon me, if you could grace this lowly worm with but a moment of your attention; I with me a bug report, and I believe I have found the section of code responsible. This inadequate being lacks the technical expertise to fix it and would be eternally indebted if you would turn your monumental skills upon its trifling problems. It would please me immensely if my paltry efforts were of some assistance.

This user: SOFTWARE NO WORK FUCK YOU!

Yeah so there are still young nerds, they’re just all trans women now.

Fair enough, I don’t drink many sweet drinks and tried to carbonate soda water that way.

Re head space, you also need to make sure you’re leaving enough when you open it. You’re only very lightly carbonating with 3.5 g. Most soda water and softdrinks have a head pressure of around 70 psi, the bottles can actually spike to around 150 when dropped which is sort of terrifying. Without the addition of all the crap they add to slow nucleation bottles can erupt very merily when opened!

When making my own soda water (I just hook bottles up to a regulated stream of co2 and shake) I do actually add some but only about 1/8 of a teaspoon per litre.

Making things slightly salty makes them nice and I find it helps reduce some of the harsh acid taste the carboxylic acid. Also it seems to modify how the bubbles form which is interesting. Maybe a surface tension of water effect? I’m unsure there.

Really? But to get decent carbonation you would need to add a lot. Like 15 grams or so because dissolution is not very efficient, most the co2 is going to pressurise the headspace

Good question. The answer technically is maybe! however a few caveats.

Charcoal washes away into the ocean where it mysteriously disappears https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130419160715.htm it seems to enter the carbon cycle rather than get fixed. So maybe we could prevent that if we buried it very deep and sealed it in. Remember we are looking for a centuries long solution.

In practice: charcoal compacted has a density of like 1.5 g/cm3 coal is about 1.8. They’re both mostly carbon, we would need to bury a loooot of charcoal. We have dug up and burned tens of billions of tonnes, that is a lot of charcoal to bury and not just in the sort of open cut surface mines coal is usually excavated from.

Further making charcoal costs energy, even if you fuel it with the wood you’re processing. It’s a staggeringly expensive prospect to make billions of tonnes. There are around 280 billion tonnes of carbon that need fixing, that is just atmospheric. Significant portions are dissolved in the ocean and would start to come out as we reduced atmospheric carbon.

Carbon fixation is an unimaginably large project, we would need cheap fusion and decades to make it practical. Essentially you want to reverse the energy consumption of everyone on earth for the last 200 years, it just isn’t realistic.

For the few thousands of years we’re pretty much stuck with whatever we emit. Barring massive technological changes that are unforseeable

yeah and uhhh how much of that wood is still around. A lot of the carbon is in the atmosphere which is part of the problem.

I don’t think you quite comprehend how much we’ve dug up. Reforestation isn’t a bad thing but it wouldn’t put a dent in atmospheric carbon dioxide.