#philosophicalmusings — Public Fediverse posts

I think something that is often not acknowledged is that someone can be more than capable of understanding an argument, but understanding an argument is not just about being capable of understanding it, but wanting to understand it. And the latter condition is much more outside the control of the person making the argument than people may realize. Because the manner in which you present the argument has much more affect on the tone of the response than its underlying content.

So if your purpose is to get acceptance of an idea your tone is actually a much less useful part of that than if you just seek individual personal acceptance. So in the end, all you can do is try to be as clear and focused in your statements as you can manage. The rest is out of your hands.

I maintain that philosophy is a centrally vital field of study, but most philosophers are unimaginably evil.

I think my goal is to specifically see what I can do to integrate both a collectivist and individualist sensibility in my philosophical view. I think to really have a complete philosophy, both of these things have to be considered: individuals cannot properly understand the consequences of actions taken at the personal level without understanding how those actions fit into and will be responded to by larger societal frameworks. At the same time, we cannot achieve collective benefit without considering how collective actions affect individuals.

I do not yet fully know what philosophical and political frameworks would best help me construct this philosophy, excepting that I think communist theory will undoubtedly be a big part of it, and it will most certainly be very different than Objectivism, excepting the respect for personal bodily autonomy.

Rand was not a feminist, in fact she decried feminism, but she was pro-bodily automomy and supported the right to abortion and in general the right of women to work the same types of jobs as men. I think the thing that Ayn Rand and other right libertarians crucially misunderstand is that a larger social dynamic like misogyny will prevent women from having individual bodily autonomy. They don't understand it because they imagine the world as it is as a meritocracy where only the best rise to the top, and so they imagine the preponderence of men in high social positions is due to the inherent superiority of those men rather than misogynistic favoring of men regardless of ability. They don't understand that women will simply not be allowed bodily automomy in a deeply misogynistic society, that individual bodily autonomy in general will never be allowed most individuals in a capitalist society.

I think my goal is to specifically see what I can do to integrate both a collectivist and individualist sensibility in my philosophical view. I think to really have a complete philosophy, both of these things have to be considered: individuals cannot properly understand the consequences of actions taken at the personal level without understanding how those actions fit into and will be responded to by larger societal frameworks. At the same time, we cannot achieve collective benefit without considering how collective actions affect individuals.

I do not yet fully know what philosophical and political frameworks would best help me construct this philosophy, excepting that I think communist theory will undoubtedly be a big part of it, and it will most certainly be very different than Objectivism, excepting the respect for personal bodily autonomy.

Rand was not a feminist, in fact she decried feminism, but she was pro-bodily automomy and supported the right to abortion and in general the right of women to work the same types of jobs as men. I think the thing that Ayn Rand and other right libertarians crucially misunderstand is that a larger social dynamic like misogyny will prevent women from having individual bodily autonomy. They don't understand it because they imagine the world as it is as a meritocracy where only the best rise to the top, and so they imagine the preponderence of men in high social positions is due to the inherent superiority of those men rather than misogynistic favoring of men regardless of ability. They don't understand that women will simply not be allowed bodily automomy in a deeply misogynistic society, that individual bodily autonomy in general will never be allowed most individuals in a capitalist society.

I think my goal is to specifically see what I can do to integrate both a collectivist and individualist sensibility in my philosophical view. I think to really have a complete philosophy, both of these things have to be considered: individuals cannot properly understand the consequences of actions taken at the personal level without understanding how those actions fit into and will be responded to by larger societal frameworks. At the same time, we cannot achieve collective benefit without considering how collective actions affect individuals.

I do not yet fully know what philosophical and political frameworks would best help me construct this philosophy, excepting that I think communist theory will undoubtedly be a big part of it, and it will most certainly be very different than Objectivism, excepting the respect for personal bodily autonomy.

Rand was not a feminist, in fact she decried feminism, but she was pro-bodily automomy and supported the right to abortion and in general the right of women to work the same types of jobs as men. I think the thing that Ayn Rand and other right libertarians crucially misunderstand is that a larger social dynamic like misogyny will prevent women from having individual bodily autonomy. They don't understand it because they imagine the world as it is as a meritocracy where only the best rise to the top, and so they imagine the preponderence of men in high social positions is due to the inherent superiority of those men rather than misogynistic favoring of men regardless of ability. They don't understand that women will simply not be allowed bodily automomy in a deeply misogynistic society, that individual bodily autonomy in general will never be allowed most individuals in a capitalist society.

I think my goal is to specifically see what I can do to integrate both a collectivist and individualist sensibility in my philosophical view. I think to really have a complete philosophy, both of these things have to be considered: individuals cannot properly understand the consequences of actions taken at the personal level without understanding how those actions fit into and will be responded to by larger societal frameworks. At the same time, we cannot achieve collective benefit without considering how collective actions affect individuals.

I do not yet fully know what philosophical and political frameworks would best help me construct this philosophy, excepting that I think communist theory will undoubtedly be a big part of it, and it will most certainly be very different than Objectivism, excepting the respect for personal bodily autonomy.

Rand was not a feminist, in fact she decried feminism, but she was pro-bodily automomy and supported the right to abortion and in general the right of women to work the same types of jobs as men. I think the thing that Ayn Rand and other right libertarians crucially misunderstand is that a larger social dynamic like misogyny will prevent women from having individual bodily autonomy. They don't understand it because they imagine the world as it is as a meritocracy where only the best rise to the top, and so they imagine the preponderence of men in high social positions is due to the inherent superiority of those men rather than misogynistic favoring of men regardless of ability. They don't understand that women will simply not be allowed bodily automomy in a deeply misogynistic society, that individual bodily autonomy in general will never be allowed most individuals in a capitalist society.

I think my goal is to specifically see what I can do to integrate both a collectivist and individualist sensibility in my philosophical view. I think to really have a complete philosophy, both of these things have to be considered: individuals cannot properly understand the consequences of actions taken at the personal level without understanding how those actions fit into and will be responded to by larger societal frameworks. At the same time, we cannot achieve collective benefit without considering how collective actions affect individuals.

I do not yet fully know what philosophical and political frameworks would best help me construct this philosophy, excepting that I think communist theory will undoubtedly be a big part of it, and it will most certainly be very different than Objectivism, excepting the respect for personal bodily autonomy.

Rand was not a feminist, in fact she decried feminism, but she was pro-bodily automomy and supported the right to abortion and in general the right of women to work the same types of jobs as men. I think the thing that Ayn Rand and other right libertarians crucially misunderstand is that a larger social dynamic like misogyny will prevent women from having individual bodily autonomy. They don't understand it because they imagine the world as it is as a meritocracy where only the best rise to the top, and so they imagine the preponderence of men in high social positions is due to the inherent superiority of those men rather than misogynistic favoring of men regardless of ability. They don't understand that women will simply not be allowed bodily automomy in a deeply misogynistic society, that individual bodily autonomy in general will never be allowed most individuals in a capitalist society.

I really don't see a lot of value in guilt. Supposedly it's supposed to drive people to try to make amends for bad things they've done, but from what I've seen, it's either people feeling bad about things that aren't actually wrong or harmful or people just wallowing in feeling bad about doing bad things but instead of trying to fix any of that, they make a big production out of it and make it other people's problem, especially the people they've harmed by their actions.

Just seems the opposite of useful to me.

The thing about computer security is that while it is by no means absolute, that doesn't mean it's pointless. In the same way it's not pointless to avoid posting your credit card number online just because people can still steal it if you don't, it's not pointless to avoid revealing other information about yourself just because there are people who can find that information through other means. 

In fact it is a general principle that perfect security is impossible, whether online or offline. Increased security can sometimes also come at unacceptable cost, not just in money, but time, convenience, and social connection. So good security is about finding good tradeoffs, and what may be acceptable to one person may not be to another. 

But learning about security can help you figure out whether it's worthwhile to change your security practices.

People say a lot of things that are wrong. We can't concern ourselves with all these things, as our time is limited, so how do we determine which of these things to concern ourselves with? 

The answer is that we need to choose to focus on some subset of things which have real political relevance. Usually these are the things which are either being enacted by actual politicians, whether they are at the country level or more local, or have been implemented as de facto political policy within the context we are discussing. 

Most political talk is just that, talk. So we can largely ignore this talk unless it starts to have actual real life impact. The exception to this would be when discussing politics with someone you are directly organizing with. In this case, it can be important to address problems before they impact your activism. But in many other contexts this impact can't be anticipated unless it is part of an already existing political dynamic.

Advice For Young Adults (And the Not-So-Young)

Applies to high school, college, and getting your first jobs after graduation, among other situations:

Imposter syndrome will happen, but keep in mind that you aren't done yet. In fact, for as long as you live, you won't be done. Celebrate those times you figure it out, whatever 'it' may be, and keep in mind that it's a myth that your brain stops growing at 25--your brain grows your entire life. You have the rest of your life to grow and change and learn.

Keep going!

They haven't even seen your final form yet!

One failure of the 'listening to x voices' mindset is how it is fundamentally premised on this false idea that good principles can arise from simply passively taking what one is told at face value. Selecting what values to promote is always an active choice, even if that choice is made with little thought. If listening is taken to mean adopting a position as one's values, then listening to some voices necessarily precludes listening to others. And if listening is not taken as endorsement of a position, then it is simply a cowardly excuse to avoid expressing values of one's own at all. 

What should be done is to amplify the voices of the oppressed. But that cannot be premised on the idea that it's possible to be a passive participant in one's own decisions on who is oppressed and who within this group best articulates what needs to be done about that oppression in the first place. Yes, mistakes can and will be made, but not owning up to them only compounds the problem.

I don't really think it makes sense for anyone to be smug about their politics right now. No one is doing enough to fix the sorry state of our world, and unless enough people do some real introspection on why that is and work to fix it, things are not going to get better. 

I conclude that:

Some groups have the numbers needed for change but lack the political understanding or action needed. Some groups have the political understanding needed but lack the action needed. And some groups have both the political understanding and perform the needed actions, but lack the numbers needed for change.

Sure, maybe we get meaningful change in 10, 20, 100 years down the line just as a result of things becoming more and more intolerable forcing people to become more meaningfully politically active, but I guarantee that people passively waiting for that while collectively just doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping it works out differently this time is going to be the absolute worst decision we could ever collectively make.

Dreams are not activism or accomplishment, but if a person's dreams can be made small, they can kept from activism and accomplishment. Therefore, this is one way that society keeps us chained, by keeping our dreams small.

This is why I try to dream big. A dream of me suddenly being a billionnaire able to dispense charity to my chosen causes would be a small dream. It accomplishes almost nothing that is fundamentally important to me and simply positions me as a higher class in the existing system. It improves my life, and perhaps the lives of some fortunate individuals, but would actually do little to make the world a better place.

No, my dream is for us all to be able to live like millionnaires. To have reliable housing and food and water and all our basic needs met, and to be able to pursue our highest aspirations. To never have to worry about healthcare or education debt or transportation. To be able to live fulfilling lives.

Locked in with The Iron Garden Sutra https://www.allforgardening.com/1655711/locked-in-with-the-iron-garden-sutra/ #garden #LockedRoomMysteries #PhilosophicalMusings #TheIronGardenSutra

The word story is not synonymous with fiction. We tell stories for reality, too. Stories are how we make sense of the world. They are a reflection of the storyteller's understanding of the world, of what caused an event and what it in turned caused, of whether it was good or bad. In a sense, these stories are still not real in that they may say more about the storyteller than they say about the event. 

And in a sense, stories are always to some extent about the storyteller, even when the storyteller is not a subject of the story, because they reflect the  storyteller's values. This is because all questions of what should be done are a reflection of a person's values, including for questions as fundamental as who or what a story should be about in the first place. And these judgments by the storyteller become reflected in their story. A person who cannot answer the question of what the story should be about cannot tell the story in the first place.

While I do overall tend to prefer when people agree with me than when they do not, what is even more important is: is it clear to me that  they understand what I am saying, and do I understand what they are saying? Misunderstandings can be more frustrating than simple disagreement.

While I do overall tend to prefer when people agree with me than when they do not, what is even more important is: is it clear to me that  they understand what I am saying, and do I understand what they are saying? Misunderstandings can be more frustrating than simple disagreement.

Scavenging, Freeganism, and Veganism

One area that I think there can be quite a bit of contention on is whether scavenging and freeganism are vegan. My answer to this is: it depends. I think the context in which the question is being asked is important.

My personal approach is to avoid scavenging and freeganism, and I feel this approach is optimal to the group of people in my particular situation as the optimal way to practice and model veganism. But I don't think it applies to people who live in extreme poverty or live a subsistence lifestyle where choices are greatly restricted because veganism is about doing everything practicable to avoid animal exploitation, and what is practicable to someone like me is not necessarily practicable to someone with greatly restricted resources.

Furthermore, I also think that in a context in which avoiding it is not practicable and the option is available, scavenging and freeganism is not only reasonable because it is practicable, but it literally is the vegan option. I think that practiced correctly, scavenging and freeganism do not exploit animals. I don't think all use of something that came from an animal is inherently exploitation.

Allow me to illustrate with a couple examples. If someone wanted to collect the hairs I naturally shed as I was walking around outside, I would not consider this exploitation. What would be exploitation would be forcibly cutting my hair, especially if I were treated in a similar manner as the vast majority of commercial sheep are (hyperexploitation). 

A big problem with  commercial sheep is they are bred to not shed their hair naturally, causing them to require shearing which their natural counterparts do not. This breeding is exploitation in itself, as it produces traits harmful to the sheep that exist only to benefit humans. Commercial sheep are then further exploitated in the most deplorable ways imaginable. Shearers are typically paid by the amount of wool they shear, not by how long they work, which incentivizes fast shearing that inevitably leads to frequent shearing injuries. Suffering is the price of profit to the capitalist class, for both the shearers and the sheep.

Consider another example. I die of natural causes or of an accident. If a human stumbles onto my rotting corpse, as long as they didn't cause my death, I don't think they're exploiting me if they decide to...eat that.  Not going to spend a lot of time thinking about it since I'm not personally into vore, but I wouldn't consider it exploitation. Now, other people may feel differently, and I think that should be respected, but I don't think human conceptions of the treatment of their corpses apply generally to nonhuman animals (though this is potentially a more complicated question for animals like elephants that also seem to practice their own death rituals).


So I think scavenging can not only fit the definition of veganism for qualifying as the best practicable option, I think that in some cases it fits the definition in the sense that it doesn't cause the exploitation of any animal.

Nevertheless, I don't think scavenging and freeganism is vegan for everyone. And one big reason for this is that capitalism exists. Capitalism makes exploitation inevitable in a search for greater and greater profits. And regardless of capitalism, people can lie to both themselves and others about whether something was truly scavenged or acquired in a freegan way. They can also simply be mistaken.

For example, eating the free non-vegan pizza served at the university event isn't practicing freeganism, though it may seem to be. This is because while that pizza may be free for the person eating it, it was bought by someone who is thus producing a demand for it. On the other hand, eating a non-vegan pizza that was obtained by dumpster diving is freeganism because no additional demand is being created by that act.

I also think that if an item is being sold under capitalism, that even if people start purchasing only scavenged items, a strong incentive exists to label items as scavenged that definitively are not, in the same way that greenwashing occurs and in the same way that corporations lie or exaggerate about how well they treat their workers.  Additionally, this incentive is increased given that scavenging is not nearly as scalable as more exploitive methods of production, and so practical veganism needs non-exploitive solutions that can be deployed at scale in order to effectively counter animal exploitation.

Quite simply, there is no way out of exploitation of any kind without being able to deploy solutions that can scale to fill the necessary demand, which scavenging and freeganism cannot do. And this is why, even though these can be vegan, even optimally vegan, in certain situations,they are not vegan in a general sense. Additionally, in the current environment, for some people, they are vegan only in the sense that better options are not practicable for the people in question. This is because I think it's important to show that one isn't 'too good for' ethical solutions that can be deployed at scale. Otherwise the position becomes that avoiding exploitation is somehow only for the well off, which is not itself a vegan position since that would necessarily only reduce exploitation for a small fraction of the animals currently being exploitated. There is therefore also a larger obligation, when possible, to push society to deploy the solutions that veganism needs to end exploitation at scale, and not just on an individual level.

And this also just so happens to help end the exploitation of the most oppressed and hyperexploited of humanity as well, because the hyperexploitation of animals of today is fueled by the hyperexploitation of human workers in a way that simply cannot be resolved at scale for the human workers involved without abolishing the exploitation of the animals involved.

Things absolutely can get better but action is necessary for that to happen. To solve a problem, one must first acknowledge and understand it. Negativity without positivity is a dead end, but positivity without acknowledging the negative realities of the world is equally so. And the person pointing out a problem doesn't need to be the one fixing it--sometimes different people have different roles they are best suited for in the political project. However, the people working to solve a problem must work in tandem with the people identifying and analyzing it. And so, the positive solution can only arise from understanding and facing the negative, from understanding and confronting  the obstacles to that solution.

I think one of the biggest problems in character judgment is what I call the 'but they were always nice to me' fallacy. It's the fallacy that because someone was always good to you or generally pleasant or decent in the contexts in which you dealt with them, that they are that way to everyone else or in all other contexts. 

There are people I know who are unpleasant with me who might be otherwise decent people, or who might be absolutely delightful with  others. There are people who have been perfectly nice to me, who I know due to them mentioning details about their past or catching hints of it in casual remarks of theirs are deeply unpleasant to others, or even have committed full-scale atrocities on others. You can't truly understand the scope of a person simply by how they behave to you or around you. People don't treat everyone they meet with the same level of regard or fairness and they don't in general present the same face to everyone. 

There are many people in the world who are Jekyll to some and Hyde to the rest. Alternately, there are people who may be awful to you for reasons that would be understandable to you if you had the distance to be less affected by their actions and the perspective to understand their reasons.

On the Fundamental Inconsistency of The Pro-Life Argument

I believe there is considerable evidence that most people who proclaim themselves pro-life are not actually even remotely consistently pro-life.

And this is generally the case even for people who are pro-life and also vegan anti-war pacifists opposed to the death penalty (and even this alone would be a veeeerrry small number of people).

The reason? Well, I'm going to give the most robust argument I know of regarding forcing the birth of a fetus based on preserving their life, and then show that this argument is generally considered unacceptable in other relevant contexts.

The most robust argument I know of for the pro-life position is this:

1. The risk of pregnancy to the life of the pregnant person is considerably less than the risk of abortion to the life of the fetus (often true).

2. Since life is being valued above all else, including bodily autonomy, denying the the pregnant person their bodily autonomy to force them to birth the fetus is therefore the lesser evil.

Here's why this argument is fundamentally inconsistent with what most people consider morally acceptable in other contexts:

Say someone has lost both kidneys. This person is not able to stay on dialysis indefinitely, and dialysis is determined to be far more risky for them than having a healthy functioning kidney. They need a kidney, or they will die. It should be easy to find a healthy donor. You just need to force a bunch of people to come in and do some testing to determine compatibility, find the lowest risk donor in that group, and then force that person to donate one kidney. Problem solved, right?

Except you might have trouble finding many 'pro-life' people who would advocate for this position...

The Left/Right Political Axis is A Fundamentally Broken Concept

So another fun thing I've been thinking over that affects a lot of the ways I and most other people characterize politics is the left/right political axis. I think a fundamental flaw with conceptualizing politics with a left/right political axis is that this supposedly single axis is actually the collapse of a whole bunch of different axes and so what moving left or right actually entails is really hard to quantify. 

Like take the example of someone who is a ecofascist eugenicist homonationalist TERF. There are probably going to be some people who look at those positions and say 'oh, this person is far right for sure' (me for one) because of the fascism, eugenicist beliefs, nationalism, and transmisogyny (TERFS can be and often are generally transphobic, but they are definitionally transmisogynists). But there are going to be others who think of these positions as mostly cancelling out and so maybe consider this person practically a centrist even though they are quite clearly an extremist. And then there will be some people, like maybe a gas guzzling climate change denialist who is anti-gay and a universal misogynist, who are going to look at this person and probably characterize them as far-left. 

And there's not really any good way to choose weights for any of these things. It's also not really possible to ignore this conceptualization because of how omnipresent it is. But this example shows that you can take the same person, ask three different people to characterize them, and get three wildly different answers. This system is basically operating almost entirely on vibes.

So that's a real mess.

Virtue Ethics is Bad Political Ideology

So, I need to flesh this idea out a bit more. but I wanted to get it out there, because I think this concept is kind of central to developing a robust political framework.

If I could name one big factor responsible for political failure, it would be the implementation of virtue ethics as political policy. Politics needs to be concerned with practicality, and regardless of what principles a given set of virtue ethics contains, it is going to be utterly impractical to implement, both due to the existence of competing ideologies and human inconsistency. This is not even getting into situations where different values in a given system may conflict with each other. Politics has to be concerned with consequences--too much focus on virtue (for just about any given value of the term) will be the downfall of any political system.

Though I must note that I think the most well known form of consequentialism, utilitarianism, is also fundamentally flawed.

So recently I've come to the conclusion that rights based politics is bad. However, since I don't think the reasoning behind this conclusion is particularly obvious, especially since it took me several years to come to this conclusion myself after first encountering someone saying that the rights-based franework is bad, I will explain why I believe this to be the case.

The concept of rights is common in political discourse today, coming up in such wide-ranging political arenas as human rights and animal rights. So in just about any area of political discussion, we encounter this concept. However, it has a fatal flaw: the concepts of rights actually says nothing about either what you value or why you value it. Actually, there is one scenario in which it can say something about values: if you derive your values from what you consider to be an inerrant authority, like a god or governmental power. But even then it doesn't make clear who or what you consider this ultimate authority to be.

Saying something is a right is like saying something is good: it is a pure value judgement that provides no rationale for how that judgment is derived. And saying 'I believe in human rights' is like saying 'I believe in doing good', as this doesn't even give any indication of what one believes should be valued.

It's like if instead of having political parties everyone just called themselves a Gooditarian whose primary precept is they believe in doing good things and not bad things. Except some gooditarians want to elimate world hunger and solve climate change, while other gooditarians believe that we should continue to have plutocrats that have extractionist control over the majority of the world's resources while vast numbers of people starve as a result, and that we should accelerate climate change so they can have cheap boat travel across the iceless North Pole. Sounds like gooditarian is a pretty meaningless term, then, no?

But the concept of rights is the same. Some people who believe in rights believe in the right to free speech, others don't. Some people who believe in rights believe in the right to privacy, others don't. Some people who believe in rights believe in the right to shelter, or food, or water, and others don't. And so on. So even if one wants to divorce the concept of rights from the idea of it stemming from any authority, or if one accepts that authority as good, there is still the issue that it is an essentially meaningless term that conveys neither the what nor the why of your value system.

Rights is just the real life gooditarian terminology. It's not an ideology, but believing in 'human rights' or 'animal rights' is often treated as if it is one. When in reality, it's a word that says nothing about one's system of ethics at all. We're better served by saying which of our principles we are talking about and why we hold them. For example, saying we value bodily autonomy tells you something of what we value and why. It's informative in a way that saying we value people's rights isn't. Of course, the truth is such things tend to not be all-encompassing values. But that's okay. If we just want to talk about all of our values in a general way, we can just say something like 'our politics' or 'our ethics' or 'our values' without using a terminology that functionally helps to obscure the differences between different value systems.

I think there's a tendency to do one of two politically harmful things: one of which is to mistake self-punishment for politically restorative action, another is to mistake an active choice to remain politically ignorant for avoiding the former.

I think it is important to avoid both of these tendencies. We must guard against the tendency to criticize ourselves merely for the sake of criticism, as if our guilt alone somehow cleanses us of culpability. We must guard against the attempt to expose ourselves to the negative merely for the sake of it, but also   against the tendency to avoid the negative and the unpleasant because we assume political futility; because we assume there is no value in knowledge that may be difficult or upsetting for us to confront. Because there is value in that knowledge--confronting that knowledge is the first necessary step to the actions that can heal our world.

I don't accept the idea that it's ever valuable to focus on arguments appealing to people's emotions to the exclusion of logical or factual rigor. In fact there is no reason a factually correct and logically rigorous argument cannot also take into account emotional presentational choices and a lot of reason that an argument using every rhetorical and emotional trick in the book while being factually incorrect or lacking logical rigor will undermine your position with a lot of people. Really the only reason to use the latter is if you yourself believe you are wrong and are trying to manipulate people into believing lies or acting against the best interests of themselves or others.

The only reason it's ever more difficult to eat vegan is due to the selective way that that food is stocked in grocery stores and what is presented in restaurants. 

Most of it is relatively easy to veganize, certainly nothing that would be beyond the current abilities of stores and restaurants. And this would certainly not be preserving the 'just pay more for stuff with cheaper ingredients' nonsense or 'just put up with an extremely abbreviated range of choices' nonsense or the 'just remove the meat leaving a sad shell of a meal' nonsense or the 'serve something completely different and unrelated to the regular theme of the restaurant' nonsense that is so often employed for vegan food replacements.

Like the primary reason processed vegan food is often so comparatively expensive is that it doesn't have access to the economies of scale that nonvegan food does. If it did we'd be able to get huge blocks of vegan cheese for less than it costs to make dairy cheese. Likewise, there's no inherent reasons that there needs to be fewer types of vegan options available. In my vegan utopia, there will be as many options of vegan cheese as there is dairy cheese in our current meat dystopia. More options, even! Vegan green cheese with vegan green ham! Vegan bleu cheese and Star Wars style vegan blue cheese! And more!

Also, why is it so common to think that the vegan version of a dish is just the meat version with the meat removed? If I want a replacement for spaghetti and meatballs, I want a vegan substitute for the meatballs. You can't just say, "Oh, I veganized spaghetti and meatballs" and then just give me a plain spaghetti with marinara, no parmesan! Unacceptable! Vegan meatballs are cheap and no more difficult to produce than murder meatballs. Even making vegan parmesan at home is just a few ingredients, a food processor, and a few minutes of time away. Am I to believe restaurants cannot possibly handle this?

Also, if the theme of the restaurant is barbecue, why is the vegan dish a hummus platter? Am I to believe that barbecue soy curls or seitan or jackfruit or tofu are all somehow too hard for a restaurant? 

Like the only reason any of this is ever comparatively harder for customers is because of an active, concerted effort by suppliers to suck up to the meat and animal products industries.

RE: https://fandom.ink/users/unspeakablehorror/statuses/115823787950844489

Ah yes, the deep, philosophical musings of 2025: the year when "vibes" replaced actual content. 🤔🎉 One would think that leaving the cursor behind would be mind-blowing, but alas, it’s just another year of buzzword bingo. 🍾✨
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a-year-of-vibes/ #vibes #buzzwordbingo #philosophicalmusings #contentcreation #2025trends #HackerNews #ngated

Ah yes, the deep, philosophical musings of 2025: the year when "vibes" replaced actual content. 🤔🎉 One would think that leaving the cursor behind would be mind-blowing, but alas, it’s just another year of buzzword bingo. 🍾✨
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a-year-of-vibes/ #vibes #buzzwordbingo #philosophicalmusings #contentcreation #2025trends #HackerNews #ngated

Ah yes, the deep, philosophical musings of 2025: the year when "vibes" replaced actual content. 🤔🎉 One would think that leaving the cursor behind would be mind-blowing, but alas, it’s just another year of buzzword bingo. 🍾✨
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a-year-of-vibes/ #vibes #buzzwordbingo #philosophicalmusings #contentcreation #2025trends #HackerNews #ngated

Ah yes, the deep, philosophical musings of 2025: the year when "vibes" replaced actual content. 🤔🎉 One would think that leaving the cursor behind would be mind-blowing, but alas, it’s just another year of buzzword bingo. 🍾✨
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a-year-of-vibes/ #vibes #buzzwordbingo #philosophicalmusings #contentcreation #2025trends #HackerNews #ngated

Sometimes I lay here and wonder why? 🤔 Life's little mysteries can get so deep!

‍#deepthoughts #lifequestions #feelingpensivee #contemplativethoughts #existentialreflections #philosophicalmusings #introspectivemoments #seekingunderstanding #darciedolce #follow4like

I think personal attacks on others are generally counterproductive in political disagreements. For the same reason, I also think that personal endorsements or compliments should be avoided in a political conversation, whether the person being endorsed as wonderful-amazing-incredible-moral paragon is your political ally or your ideological opponent. Keep that kind of thing for your personal interactions, not your political engagement. Politics is about policies, not personalities.

I also think the specific phenomenon of being polite to political opponents in practice is typically only extended to those with some kind of significant political power (and thus overwhelmingly to conservatives). I almost never see this kind of politeness extended to  leftists, and in the rare times I do, it's pretty much only coming from other leftists. So it's something I more perceive as being motivated to appeal to the powerful rather than as actual principled treatment of other people.

While I think a necessary condition of being politically effective is collaborating with others, it's not a sufficient condition. And I think this, along with thinking that increasing the sheer number of people one works with automatically makes one more politically effective is a very common fail state and political dead end.

Here's the thing: the effectiveness of an organization depends primarily on how it is structured. Essential aspects of effective structuring:

1. Clear and consistent goals - it is nonsensical to evaluate an organization without clear and consistent goals. What tangible things does the organization hope to accomplish?

2. An actionable plan to achieve those goals.

3. Clear communication of member responsibilities.

The nice thing is that you don't have to be part of a formal org to have any of these three things. However, there are many formal orgs that are missing one or even all of these things. Additionally, even if an org possesses all three of these qualities, if the clear and consistent goals are not aligned with your own goals, working within the org is actually likely worse for achieving your goals than working with no one and doing nothing at all. Working against your goals is a lot of work to gain less than nothing. It's like deciding to deal with the problem of people bullying you by punching yourself in the face. 

Now, no matter how effective a group is, it needs resources like people, money, and time to increase the magnitude of its effect, but this is different from believing that any of those things by themselves automatically makes a group effective or means that joining it will help you accomplish your goals.

Though the power of any one individual is limited, we also often have a lot more power than we realize. And with that power comes responsibility.

Which is a reason people can be incentivized to believe they are powerless. Because if we can convince ourselves we can't do anything, then we convince ourselves we don't have to try, that we can tune out as the world burns. This lack of resistance cements the power of oppressors.

Not everyone can contribute in the same way, or to the same degree. What you can do depends on your situation. But for most people, there are things that they can do. The most effective of those things will likely involve collaboration with others, but the best form for that collaboration may be different for different people. But we should all be thinking about what action we can take and who we can work with as climate change and violence threaten our entire world.

RE: https://fandom.ink/users/unspeakablehorror/statuses/115547844371242272

One thing that can be very counterintuitive to modern sensibilities is that sometimes the fastest way to reach a goal is to stop, rest, and proceed slowly, deliberately, and carefully.

Another approach that can be counterintuitive is to try many things very quickly, making a lot of mistakes, and through this process to learn  what works and what doesn't.

I think both of these approaches are very underrated, the first because speed is overvalued in our society, and the latter because failure is viewed as an end state rather than a valuable learning technique.

The War in Ukraine: The Only Correct Opinion
by BadEmpanada

So, first, a short preamble. This is a video expressing staunch support of Ukraine from a leftist perspective. So while I very much agree with the opinion here, I hesitated to link this sort of video because I abhor uplifting random YouTube personalities, which is what this guy is. Few things grate more to me than the edgelord ethos of the average YouTube commentator, even when I agree with what they are saying. Nevertheless, he expresses his support of Ukraine very articulately (with sources!) from a principled anti-imperialist perspective. And though I would prefer to instead articulate my own reasoning, I admit that I lack the time, energy, and skill to do so even remotely as well as has been done here. So, with that out of the way, here's the edgelord summary of this video:

In this video I talk about the Russian invasion in Ukraine and how the only correct opinion is to be a full Z orc/Zelenskite-Banderite hybrid SupportSources:[1] https://ukraine.un.org...[2] https://www.politico.e...[3] https://www.bbc.com/ne...[4] https://www.aljazeera....[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2...[6] https://www.theguardia...[7]    • Gaza Death Toll Denial...  [8] https://www.universite...[9] https://www.newsweek.c...

Sometimes I lay here and wonder why? 🤔 Life's little mysteries can get so deep!

‍#deepthoughts #lifequestions #feelingpensivee #contemplativethoughts #existentialreflections #philosophicalmusings #introspectivemoments #seekingunderstanding #darciedolce #follow4like

Sometimes I lay here and wonder why? 🤔 Life's little mysteries can get so deep!

‍#deepthoughts #lifequestions #feelingpensivee #contemplativethoughts #existentialreflections #philosophicalmusings #introspectivemoments #seekingunderstanding #darciedolce #follow4like

Sometimes I lay here and wonder why? 🤔 Life's little mysteries can get so deep!

‍#deepthoughts #lifequestions #feelingpensivee #contemplativethoughts #existentialreflections #philosophicalmusings #introspectivemoments #seekingunderstanding #darciedolce #follow4like