OBJECTION!

This thread has made me realize that while I was watching the hearings on it purely for comedy aspect, there were actually people out there being like, “Yeah that makes sense.”

Love it when the government takes away our stuff. Please, take away more of our stuff. Love me that security theater.

If you don’t like the app, just don’t use it. Nationalism is a hell of a drug.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with data security and everything to do with other social media companies lobbying to eliminate a competitor, using anti-China sentiment and fear-mongering as a justification. It’s all about the money.

Cows can eat plants which human would die after.

No shit.

I see we’ve moved on to strawmanning, who could’ve predicted that, when your argument fell apart, you’d move on to a different, equally bad faith approach?

There is some amount of inevitable food waste that can be fed to animals, but that doesn’t account for the bulk of animal feed. Even poor soil can still produce more nutrition through growing plants for human consumption than growing plants to fatten up animals over the course of their lifetimes to then be fed to humans. You can’t escape the fundamental fact that feeding animals food to then eat the animal is massively inefficient.

The simple logic will tell you that it will increase the demand on plants ( going vegan, we cannot eat the feed of animals because thats very poor quality of plants, even harmful to people).

What if, hear me out, instead of eating the animal feed, we grew different plants that are edible for humans?

We can’t feed the current 8 billion population without using the industrial way of agriculture and farming.

Obviously. Do you actually want to get rid of industrialized agriculture altogether? The aim is to reduce harm, not to instantly solve every single problem in the world simultaneously.

I stg y’all are just ridiculous. Let me explain this at a very, very basic level.

When you eat animals, those animals either ate a bunch of plants, or they at a bunch of other animals who, if you go down the food chain, ate a bunch of plants. It requires more plants to be grown to provide someone the nutrition they need through meat than it does if they ate the plants directly. That means that pointing out that harm is caused by the production of plants is just another reason to go vegan.

Since you’re very definitely arguing in good faith and not just trying to use whatever bullshit you can as a gotcha, I’m sure that you’ll realize now that the best way to address your concerns about pesticides and fertilizers is to go vegan, thereby reducing the amount of them that are needed. Or, coming back down to planet earth, you’ll seamlessly move on to the next talking point, abandoning this tact the moment you realize it doesn’t actually support your position.

Just because certain practices aren’t universal doesn’t mean that they’re irrelevant to the discussion. I brought it up because it’s a particularly on point example of the double standard of what people consider to be animal abuse - feeding cats vegan cat food is abuse, but feeding cows poop isn’t, somehow.

My general point is that it’s hypocritical to call something animal abuse when the proposed alternative involves abuse towards other animals, and that point stands regardless of that particular example only being relevant in the US.

Then I can’t imagine what kind of worries reading Jonathan Swift would give you.

Huh didnt you beginn the whole comment by telling you “have bunch of cats”?

Woosh.

Unscrupulous? It’s totally legal, at least in the US. Actually, looking it up, it seems to be illegal in Canada, which might be why you haven’t heard of the practice, it’s quite common here in the states. As the article states, the FDA estimates 1 to 2 million tons of “poultry litter” are fed to cows annually. If you want to call US cattle ranchers unscrupulous, well, I certainly wouldn’t disagree with you, but it’s not like they’re hiding it or anything.

We’re not talking about cows - don’t change topic please.

Are we not? Because beef goes into cat food. If people are calling others animal abusers, and their solution involves abusing different animals, then I think that’s relevant to the discussion. But if you want to keep it just about cats, ok, we can take cat food off the table and discuss the ethics of killing some cats to feed others.

I never heard of such thing even though I used to live countryside and have farmers in family

Then you’ve learned something new today, and you’re welcome.

I have a bunch of cats I feed vegan diets to, but to anyone concerned that I’m doing animal abuse, don’t worry - occasionally, I wring one of their necks and chop it up to feed to the others, so clearly I’m not abusing them.

Seriously though, I do not understand how non-vegans are all getting on their high horse about “animal abuse” when their preferred course of action is just abusing different animals. Cats do not hold a higher moral standing than other animals just because they look cute. You know they feed cows literal shit? Do you think that’s part of their “natural diet?”

I don’t have any cats or other pets, but even if the worst claims are true, the people doing it would be no worse than what carnists do every day. It’s simply that abuse against certain categories of sentient beings is so normalized that people don’t even recognize it as abuse, no matter how bad it is.

I wish we could have a higher level of discussion, with an expectation that claims should be supported by evidence. Less ad hominem and conspiracy theories about everyone with a different point of view being a bot. And much less “I heard someone from [group I dislike] say [comically evil thing],” being accepted purely off hearsay with no source.

I think lemmy unfortunately inherited some toxic reddit traits in that regard. If you make something up, whole cloth, that tracks with what people want to believe, you get upvoted, if you make a case with strong supporting evidence but it doesn’t fit with what people want to believe, you get downvoted - it’s circle-jerk-y.

Also, people just seem generally incurious about the world and it’s rich, diverse history, and just want to rehash the same talking points over and over again. Too many big communities are focused on news or current events, not enough on broader historical context or philosophical discussion. I don’t really want to rehash the same discussions about the US election over and over again for the thousandth time. When history is discussed, it’s at a meme level, with a handful of historical events being referenced exclusively, oversimplified and weaponized to own your political opponents. The world is filled with color, depth, life, and wonder, but when site culture is so focused on scoring points, the result is everyone’s too guarded and defensive to appreciate that.

I’d much rather read people randomly gushing about some special interest or rabbit hole they went down, or even just rambling thoughts about whatever, compared to the latest story about the latest thing and discussions where everyone knows where they stand based on their camp. It gets boring.

Fair, and people in swing states get inundated with ads as it is. Mostly I’d say it’s more useful for mobilization than persuasion, like if you get a text reminding you when voting day is maybe someone makes it when they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Ideally, volunteers could mean quality over quantity, less automated spam asking for money and instead actual humans responding to concerns and answering questions. Even more ideally, that could be paired with voters’ concerns being elevated and the party actually responding to them. The goal is to improve the quality of the campaign’s voter outreach, in whatever form that outreach takes.

I’m not a fan of Biden myself but I still think it’s worth discussing general electoral strategies.

The vast majority of Americans both already know how they feel about Trump and Biden and live in a solidly red or blue state. If you do want to focus on Biden, volunteer with phone banking or canvassing so that your efforts are directed to where they’ll actually matter and be organized in line with their messaging. Personally, I’d say you’re better off focusing on local races where you have more of an opportunity to come at it from a different angle and cut through people’s fortified positions. And as another user said, focus on mobilization, it’s easier to get someone who already agrees with you to register and make a plan than to convince someone to change their whole worldview.

There are also strategies outside of electoralism, such as protests and counter-protests. You can join an organization and form tactics and strategies to subvert the right’s actions, and engage with direct action to build trust and community that could be important in the future. Form strategies while being realistic about your goals and capabilities and coordinate with others.

Fuck Nazis.

This post is unsubstantiated hearsay! You should know better than to make claims without any sort of evidence to back them up!