I’ve had an unreasonable number of arguments against people who seemed to think animal was a synonym for mammal. Thankfully, we’re now in an era where you can look it up and show them now mobile data is cheap, so it’s become a winnable argument.
Except they still don’t care, and resent you for edumacating them. Whatever you say, they “win”. Welcome to the post -information age.
I rarely judge someone for ignorance unless it is wilful. I pretty harshly judge people who cannot assimilate new information. Over time I think I might be evolving from INTP->INTJ as I age. I used to have more patience and would try to encourage people to learn and adjust.
I get you - and am the same. I hold little to nothing against someone unable to learn… but that’s not what I am talking about. Imagine someone with an IQ of 50, who decides to pass themselves off as a doctor - you go in for brain surgery and, whoopsie, you get your event taken care of “at a reduced price”. Nobody blames someone who is authentically stupid - and if that sounds bad, note that I include myself first among that category:-) - until and unless they step up and decide to become a LEADER. The latter carries with it a societal obligation to do better, than us mere peasants.
Put another way, if you are going to perform literal and actual and fully physical violence against an establishment such as the government of the United States of America (i.e. becoming one who acts rather than being acted upon), then you might want to start with actually reading the document that you are about to overthrow. It does no good to sleep with it under your pillow - you need to pull it out and actually READ it for it to do any good! Although many who were there have self-admitted that they have not in fact read it, even so much as once.
Likewise, more people died in the USA from the recent pandemic than all wars combined. Much of that was preventable, and quite frankly we don’t even (nor will ever) know precisely how many are directly attributable to that, b/c those stats were deliberately fudged and forbidden to be counted. The same with school shootings - we counted at one point that there were more “mass events” (involving 5+ people) than there were calendar years, but the government is specifically prohibited from collecting this data, so once again we’ll never truly know the extent, only lower-bound estimates (which are already shockingly high). Also people have already died from the ham-handed prevention of “abortion”, that somehow includes cancerous masses, dead fetuses (from natural miscarriages) with necrotic tissue rotting away (but can’t remove either b/c that could be considered an “abortion”), ectopic “pregnancies”, and other life-threatening situations, which are nowhere close to the medical definition of “abortion”, yet to the lawmakers (some of whom claim that babies cannot be produced from a rape - I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP - b/c “God has a way of shutting that whole thing down there in the case of rape”) are too unintelligent to understand anything at all about what is going on.
However, nobody is that stupid, as to e.g. see Trump wear a mask, then turn around and claim to others that he does not wear masks. We have long ago crossed that line, from “stupidity” to “obstinacy”. This is cognitive dissonance, yes likely imposed upon people from others (e.g. Putin), but also willfully held onto by many.
And here is proof: a video by Kurzegatcht that is only 11-minutes long that explains why people should take the vaccine. This is VERY understandable. Anyone who watches this would INSTANTLY understand the situation fully - and it’s only 11-minutes long, so for something that could save a life, and possibly that of every one of your family members - is not too much to ask. And yet… people did not do it.
Moreover, much of the subject matters involved in all of what I mentioned above don’t even need a video of even 1 minute to explain - e.g. to say that “kids getting shot in schools all across the nation” is… what is is again? good? no wait, bad, yeah, that’s it, that’s a bad thing!.. right?!
That’s not stupidity - that’s stubbornness.
I feel like bees are a bit of a grey area. We’re not eating them, we’re kind of like landlords that give them a nice place to stay and they pay rent in honey. I’m not vegan so I’m not quite sure what the rationale is for bee stuff.
Best friend’s a vegan who raises bees. He doesn’t clip wings or use smoke. From what I gather he basically just maintains their boxes, feeds them sugar when it’s too cold for em, and collects honey when it’s time. Someone is about to come along and say “he’s not a vegan. Sounds like a vegetarian” and then I’m going to think “sounds like you’re gatekeeping a lifestyle like it’s a religion, and not even all vegans who don’t use honey agree on whether or not a vegan can use honey” but I won’t, because I don’t wanna get wrapped up in the nonsense.
But either way, yes, some vegans do use honey. And some, like that theoretical commenter, don’t eat anything that casts a shadow.
I feel like instead of a giant push for veganism, there should just be a push to eat what’s sustainable.
Beef and dairy? Causes huge amount of greenhouse gasses and with current methods of production, it is not sustainable
Blue fin tuna? These things have been way over fished and are endangered. Not sustainable, just try it once and move one with your life.
Tilapia ? These things grow like weeds and can be fed efficiently. Go ahead, good source of protein for your diet.
Honey? We need bees and they are an important pollinator for crops. Go nuts (just watch your sugar intake}
Almonds? Takes huge amounts of water to grow and exacerbates droughts in the areas they are farmed. Eat less of these.
Potatoes? Grow stupid easily in all sorts of conditions. Go nuts.
Turns out that what’s sustainable is often what is vegan. Vegans are constantly discussing the edges of all this stuff trying to come to a better understanding, its somewhat natural that they would provide some of the most well-reasoned and substantiated arguments.
Honey and tilapia are not sustainable currently. Its a demand issue. Rules and regulations will never prevent an industry from meeting demand. Thats why we currently use practices at large scale we never would at small scale.
Honey is a by-product of bees, the same way that all human made food is a by-products of humans.
so if I buy food from people I’m basically a cannibal
I think it’s more accurate to think of you trapping humans in your basement and leaving them a bag of groceries every once in a while. Then you go down there and take whatever they cooked with the produce. They get to eat what they make, you just get the leftovers. They also can’t leave.
Actually if bees don’t like the hive you put them in, they absolutely will leave. I haven’t had happen to me personally but I have heard of it happening to others; you put the package in and come back to find that 200$+ worth of bees just upped and flew away.
This isn’t true for the vast majority of commercial honey unfortunately. If you’re buying it from the supermarket, or any producer that operates at even medium scale, they’ll clip the wings of the queen so that the hive is unable to leave even if they want to.
