It’s the top comment

Try to frame it like it’s exciting, not a failure. It’s fun that you have so many more books you want to read!

I thought I was far superior to people because I liked Pink Floyd and their music is actually meaningful and intellectual… yikes. I still like Pink Floyd though

I’ll start: Vulfpeck and Tool

I feel like you can easily find counterexamples that aren’t ironic, so this argument doesn’t make sense.

“It’s like rain on your wedding day” - This is not irony. Weddings are planned months, sometimes years in advance. There wouldn’t be an expectation that it couldn’t rain on your wedding day, that’s an understood possibility.

Because it’s an understood possibility that it can rain on your wedding day, it’s not ironic if it does happen, it’s just unfortunate.

An example that would be ironic, is if you are planning a hiking trip and you specifically go on Saturday because the weather forecasted it to be sunny, but it ended up raining anyway. That’s ironic because expectation does not meet reality.

Scary if true, but I’m in the US and everything seems to be working for me. It could have been a temporary bug that was already fixed? Not sure

Honestly, I hard disagree. Texting is so inefficient. If I want to have a conversation with someone, I just call them. It’s so much easier to just get everything sorted all out at once instead of trying to send messages back and forth and you get distracted and forget to reply. Meh. You can so easily turn a conversation that takes hours, sometimes days into a 2 minute phone call

Especially in online meetings with no camera. Without seeing body language, I often think people are done talking so I start talking, but they were just resting between sentences. Oof.

Okay but there’s a moral hierarchy when it comes to eating meat. Humans used to hunt, meaning we would kill animals that lived natural lives. Not to mention, we would typically target animals that were older or sickly, because we would have a harder time killing animals that are in their prime.

That’s so much different from modern day agriculture practices. We raise animals in fences so tight they can’t turn their heads, and feed them nasty stuff. We abuse the shit out of them until they reach the point where we deem them the most profitable then we kill them. There’s nothing natural about that.

Also, it’s really hard to know for sure, but we have a good amount of evidence that humans didn’t eat that much meat. First of all, the animals we hunted wouldn’t be nearly as fat as the animals we eat today. Secondly, there’s evidence that many humans ate roughly 100g of fiber per day, which is not possible if you had any serious amount of meat. Humans ate a lot of plants. 100g of fiber is an insane amount of plants.

Honestly I feel like the idea of “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is so lame. Like I understand that you could find something technically ethically wrong with everything, but that statement just feels like a way for people who don’t want to give up certain things to justify themselves.

Capitalism, especially modern day capitalism where the government and companies collaborate, does lead to a lot of ethical issues. And yes, I understand that it is not liveable to give up everything that is unethical. But you can still have boundaries.

I mean like, buying oats and grains from a grocery store, which are typically grown domestically, compared to buying dead abused animals or bananas from a company that uses slave labor. Those are totally different things.

If you prioritize buying things that are made in countries that have better labor laws, and avoid animal products, then that’s a pretty damn good start.

I mean, most vegans would still commend your effort to reduce animal product consumption.

But from a moral standpoint, simply eating less animal products really doesn’t have much value. Imagine using your argument for other moral dilemmas.

“Racism is wrong, so I reduced the amount of racial slurs I use to only 1/3”
“Rape is wrong, so I only rape on Mondays now” (in reference to meatless Mondays)

I hate to be so militant about it, but you either think animal abuse is acceptable or you don’t.

Now, what I do think could be a moral standpoint, if you really want to still be able to eat meat, is to only eat “humane” meat. I put “humane” in quotes because even farmers with the best intentions are still killing animals young. I don’t personally believe any animal product can be humane, but even then I can recognize that any animal that was raised on a pasture and ate real food is more ethical to eat than one in a factory.

So if you genuinely only ate pasture raised beef and chicken (and you were sure about it), then I would say that is quite honorable.

I wish this was true. I have some pet lizards I got before I went vegan, two of them are omnivores (blue tongue skink and Argentine black and white tegu). They can’t be vegan. I mean, honestly, if there was a large scale effort to research it, I bet we could come up with a suitable vegan diet for them, but I don’t think anyone will put a bunch of resources into that.

So the major problem with this, is that only hens produce eggs. So what do you do with all the roosters? You really don’t need that many roosters to breed hens. Since there is a roughly 50/50 split of roosters/hens, and only a couple roosters are used for breeding, what do you think happens to the rest of them? So the idea is that you can’t buy or own hens without them being a product of a massive amount of roosters being murdered.

I totally agree with the representation part. I understand I might not technically be 100% vegan, but calling myself vegan spreads awareness of veganism within my friend and family circle.

There’s definitely an extent to which my conclusion of “it’s okay to eat insects” stems from trying to cope with the fact that I have pet reptiles that need to eat insects.

I definitely believe that insects feel pain, which is why I try to give them a good life while they are alive. I guess I’m saying that if they are killed instantly, then they could potentially die a painless death, and maybe that’s okay because they don’t live that long in the first place.

Lots of open job positions is very healthy for the economy, it gives the worker the ability to choose, and it makes companies have to compete. A ton of companies are literally being forced to increase their wages in order to get enough employees.

Firstly, I think it completely aligns with libertarian principles to regulate environmental impact. If a company pollutes the airs and rivers, that physical affects everybody.

Secondly, yeah, it is sad that many consumers will turn a blind eye to poor working conditions and environmental impact … but I do think there is a limit. And honestly, most of the big companies in our nation are making some attempt to improve environmental conditions, probably because they know that some people will stop buying their product if they don’t. It’s not a lot, but I think the fact that it’s happening at all is some proof that companies can certainly be pressured into doing the right thing without legislation.

What I like about the free-ish markets is that it at least gives you a personal choice. If you don’t want to support a business, you don’t have to. It sucks if other people support it, but let’s be honest, if like 50% of the country wants to support a business that you don’t like, then what can you expect?

Respectfully, I think the opposite. I think, for the most part, a free® market naturally benefits humans with good intentions and harms those with bad intentions.

For example, let’s say in a free market, somebody wanted to start a business with horrible working conditions, horrible salary, horrible everything. Now, if the economy is real bad then people might work there, but for the most part, that business is going to fail because people won’t work there, and would choose other jobs instead. So in this case, a free market actually incentivizes “good intentions”. The business owner will have to improve work conditions, salary, etc. so that people will work there instead of elsewhere.

And one of the important aspects of a free market is the ability to start a competing business. If there was a company with overall poor working conditions and salary, it would highly incentivize someone to start a new company with better conditions, because they could pull in all the workers from the other company.

And look, I’m not saying this is fool proof and works 100% of the time, and I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a healthy amount of regulation. But if you compare this to an economic system where businesses are run by the government, you can simply just be stuck with shitty work conditions and shitty salary, and not be able to do anything about it.

I really hate this sentiment because if you actually look into the libertarian party platform and their recent candidates, they are nothing like Republicans. LP has supported LGBTQ+ rights for decades, they support open borders, support social freedom, don’t like religion in govt, etc. I mean, the only real overlap between the LP and Republican party is like, guns. I know many people would argue that they have similar economic policies but they really don’t, all Republicans have done in the last twenty years is spend more money and specifically only remove the regulations that are actually useful.

But at the same time, whenever I meet someone who calls themselves a “libertarian”… yeah 90% of the time they are just edgy Republicans.

Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that a natural monopoly doesn’t exist, but I think it’s pretty clear that big companies have a lot of influence on the government, and typically can lobby the government to pass policies that benefit them, and make it harder for competition.

And I think there’s an argument to be made that if the government were less powerful, then there would be less potential harm done when a corporation is able to influence the government.

I’m personally torn on this, because on one hand I think the government can be a useful tool in preventing monopolies, but on the other hand, I think expecting the government to not always work in favor of big companies seems naive.