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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • If French troops were sent into Ukraine and were then hit by Russia, would that then trigger NATO agreements?

    Article 6 says:

    "For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack:

    on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France 2, on the territory of Turkey or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer; on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer."

    Aware this might be a situation where the spirit of the agreement ends up being more important than the legalese.




  • I get you, but I also think there’s value in considering how these kinds of conversations affect people who are neither vegetarian nor vegan.

    If you create a permission structure for 10 meat eaters to write off the whole group as extremist crazies, while you’re trying to bully 1 vegetarian, who might be, maybe, bullied into veganism, that’s still a net loss of a whole lot of animals.

    Also, this isn’t a veg friendly space. Having conversations like this among other veg*ns is entirely a different affair than doing it in an environment where the average response is just “hell no, I love my meat”


  • Sorry, but I just don’t think this attitude is useful for reducing harm to animals. It’s rare for people to hear about veganism and then go straight from eating meat to eating 0 animal products, for 100 reasons. I spent like 10 years vegetarian before finally going vegan.

    This overly critical attitude and stereotypes associated with it do a lot to push people away from bothering with making any steps at all.

    No one is able to fully eliminate animal harm from their lives, and any steps that anyone is making on the road to reducing it should be applauded. It’s our only option if we want to be anything other than a hated minority.






  • We ban things we want less of. More eating dogs means a bigger market for all dog meat, which means a bigger market for theft. I want less of that.

    People don’t steal things that no one wants to buy.

    I’m talking about the side effects of fostering a culture where eating a non-livestock animal is ok. My argument is that this kind of culture is pointlessly cruel to an animal that we’ve explicitly bred to be a companion.

    One element of discouraging a culture is government action, a ban (coercion). I argue this is a necessary step in ending a cruel practice.

    The other is cultural compliance (people behaving in a certain way regardless of the presence of law enforcement officials). I argue this is a necessary step as well, by way of education and improving access to alternatives.



  • I’m a vegan, but one argument specifically against allowing dog meat trade is that it often encourages stealing companion animals (aka pets) to make a quick buck. Sometimes they’re held ransom and people have to pay the thieves to keep a member of their family from being killed and eaten. Wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

    Also, dogs were bred specifically to live alongside humans, to form bonds with us. To do that to any organism and then treat it like livestock is a special kind of monstrous.

    So I’m in favor of drawing as many lines as possible when it comes to animal consumption of any kind. And then, if the situation makes you uncomfortable about some of the other lines you’ve drawn around cows, pigs, or chickens, then you analyzing those in more depth too is also a win in my book.








  • This question is probably worth revisiting after 2024’s election, since Trump may still have more mileage. A second term might be more dangerous than the first was. Assuming he doesn’t win, then his legacy will mostly be all of the weird and slightly hard to measure changes to American culture, specifically conservative political culture.

    He generally seems to have made more dangerous ideas popular but also to have made getting a governing coalition together to actually enact those ideas more difficult by eroding the Republican party. Bush’s foreign policy decisions seem to have been far more dangerous so I think I’d vote for Bush being the worst as of right now.

    That said, Trump still has a non-zero chance of bringing real American fascism into power so that would change things.