naevaTheRat

naevaTheRat, 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Humans are wonderful. Not always good, not always reasonable, but wonderful.

We are rich, nuanced, vibrant beings. A small portion of us are defectors but by and large we are community focused and willing to give when we feel we are not being taken advantage of.

Unless you think all your friends, yourself, and your family are garbage it is inconsistent to assume a random sampling of humans would not display the same prosocial traits you find in them.

The one thing we are incapable of doing though is handling power.

naevaTheRat, 3 days ago

neither are the people claiming humans are, as a herd, fairly dumb and incredibly selfish

wtf? by what standard?

Humans frequently band together during disaster, humans care for their young and old, humans don’t typically engage in cannibalism of the weak, humans rarely fight to the death or even serious injury, we live in cities of millions with astonishingly low rates of violence etc etc

where is this terrible selfish stupid behaviour? what standard are you comparing the species to? we’re more violent than orangutans but they’ve never set up water sanitation so I think we can call ourselves smart and we’re less violent than chimps or gorillas… are you comparing us to fictitious ideal beings or what?

naevaTheRat, 2 days ago

you need to spend less time online and more time talking to your neighbours.

naevaTheRat, 2 days ago

“The masses” are just individuals. You sound like a 20 year old who just discovered atheism and started reading the paper.

naevaTheRat, 2 days ago

There’s no fucking antenna that pops out of people’s heads and overrides their thoughts when considered in abstract. That’s Murdoch rag level of boomer bullshit.

Idk what broken arse society you feel like you’re from but humans everywhere work towards the collective all the time. You try to come up with some derranged “actually we don’t support the vulnerable” because propaganda about costs is written about and yet even in the face of that people continue to not attack each other in the streets. Oh capitalism is cannabalism is it? fucking derranged take but even so you just conveniently ignore how that system is enforced by a tiny minority and billions of people struggle against it or try to tame it. Oh climate change inaction huh? yes sure if you judge us all by the fucked up leaders of states but what about all the protests? what about all the climate scientists? The journalists writing about? what about the fact that greenwashing is an effective marketing strategy?

Like I’m sorry that Shazza and Bazza on the street don’t know how to tackle massive structural issues but it is absolutely a lobotomised take to think that means they’re not decent creatures.

naevaTheRat, 2 days ago

I’m not raging I’m Australian.

naevaTheRat, 3 days ago

My wife is fortunately still alive so maybe that colours my view. However when I’ve lost other people the blessed anaesthesia of forgetting has been essential in being able to function.

From the short quote it seems like she maybe has a healthy-ish attitude but idk… I feel like this would be a shallow simulacrum that prolongs grief.

naevaTheRat, 3 days ago

Yeah. I am not a Buddhist but I’ve always found something rings true in the reflections on impermanence. When we bond with someone we accept the pain of loss, and when we feel it most people seem to describe relief once able to “let go” an accept it being over.

It seems to me that encouraging clinging and reminiscening stunts you a bit and only really provides temporary relief of the loss while drawing out the time it takes to process it.

Idk though, maybe I’ll have the misfortune to feel differently some day. It’s hard to judge someone hanging out with their spouse watching death creep closer each day. I have approximately zero idea what my opinions would be in the face of that.

naevaTheRat, 6 days ago

Most humans enjoy positions of blithe supremacy. It’s much harder to kill/farm/displace etc creatures if they’re like us and so they are not as we wish to do that.

Scientists are exactly as biased and politically motivated as everyone else, the process is just a bit more self correcting over time. If interpretations are not reenforcing popular ideas they tend not to be taken seriously until evidence is overwhelming.

naevaTheRat, 10 days ago

AM but it can just write bad sonnets about hate and make up shennanigan maximising answers to questions.

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

Oh yeah. The gas dissolves in the mucose around their eyes too, acidifying it like soda water.

Male chickens discarded from hatcheries are thrown live into a blender, “maceration”, or gassed.

Don’t ask about what happens to the male babies from dairy cow pregnancies for milk, or why veal is so tender.

There are… reasons why people go vegan despite all the vitriol we get thrown our way for daring to not be silent about this nightmare. Slaughterhouse workers get PTSD, even the people most ok with actually doing this shit have their minds recoil and fold in on themselves in the face of the sheer horror.

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

Thanks for letting us talk about one of the largest ongoing horrors as a treat.

Perhaps in time you would consider not enthusiastically supporting and partaking in it?

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-gooder_derogation

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

I am not sure how you ethically kill someone who doesn’t want to die.

On principle I don’t object to scavenging, I find it repulsive but just like how if you ate your parents when they died nobody would be hurt per se collecting road kill or something is not unusually cruel. Just creepy and gross given the lack of necessity.

But chickens are bred, the excess are killed young, chickens themselves have been selected for some pretty nasty traits in favour of making them more useful to us. Their ancestors live much longer, lay 10x fewer eggs, and don’t grow oversized straining their skeletons. It’s like pugs and stuff, we’ve bred in pain. I doubt your grandmother would give them medical care and comfort aimed at optimising their lives and happiness and only eating them after natural passing.

It’s like when people try to say “oh but such and such a slavery was better than this other slavery” or something. Like ok it’s probably true idk Roman house slaves had better lives than medieval Russian serfs but it doesn’t fundamentally change how unjust the social relation was and how unnecessary that injustice was.

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

I’m not sure how you get “Breeding people to kill them in their prime and eat their bodies” from “death is inevitable”.

Could you step through your chain of reasoning please?

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

You bookmark my profile, show up randomly to just say nice things to me like this so I feel less like I’m begging into a void (￣▽￣)ノ <3

For real though thanks for the kind words. Because controversy generates engagement saying anything against eating meat gets you inundated with replies, like 1 in 40 of which seem remotely good faith.

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

It’s actually pretty easy to. you probably wont have a great time if you try eat meatsm based dishes without the meat because they’ll taste lacking and be unbalanced.

Almost all poverty food around the world historically is vegan or at least vegetarian though so there’s huge variety to choose from. In chinese food there’s Buddhist influenced food like: thewoksoflife.com/buddhas-delight-lo-han-jai/, lots of African food is vegetarian or vegan (Ethiopian is stand out here), much south Indian food is and a lot of the stuff with yogurt can be made with soy yoghurt (easy to diy if you like) or cashew cream and a sour note, mexican dishes are easily adaptable too.

Then there are some other hacks like black bean paste and breadcrumbs pressed into patties just works as something you can fry and chuck on a burger (add a few spices to taste), TVP will sub for mince in many saucy dishes where it can absorb the flavour.

You’ll have fun, it’s an adventure that will teach you so much about how food works around the world!

Also you can start immediately by just ordering a vegan option every time you eat out. You don’t have to worry about having the skills or ingredients to do that.

Good luck!

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

I always find this kind of thought process fascinating because I’m also australian and as aussies we use much more than our fair share of resources in this planet. We pollute excessively, drive cars that are much too large, have excessively large homes and use ridiculous amounts of energy. I don’t belong in our ecosystem, my ancestors were brought over by the english same as the bunnies, cats and foxes. Well half the line anyway, the other half is a more recent transplant from post war Poland.

So uhhh I’m pretty sure I’m fucking terrible for the environment, and odds are you are too. Here’s the sticky point though: I actually don’t want to die. I would be pretty fucking upset if you told me I had to get culled to preserve ecosystem balance and prevent “overhousing” of bushland or whatever. Now the way I see it, any right I might have to exist unmolested is predicated on the notion that sentient beings’ desire to live matters, that while I’m not free to do whatever I like and have some responsibility to try and mitigate the harm to others I cause by being alive I am allowed to be alive.

So I’d ask you: why is it OK to shoot kangaroos but not humans? Why are we special? I think I have a life a little more complex than a kangaroo but I’m just guessing and that’s scary anyway because some humans might have more complex lives than me, and some less (e.g. the very young, old, or people with brain injuries) and that seems like a fucked up to all hell calculus to start doing. The kangaroos seem to want to keep being alive, I mean they eat, drink, run away when people start shooting them (the few that jump in front of traffic might be suicidal I’ll pay that but we can’t know).

Also like, those kangaroos are a way lower ecological load than idk all the animal ag we have and we actually have a way to reduce that load without murder. We can just stop breeding them! A plant based agriculture would be much less hard on the land which would allow us a lot more time to find some other way to manage populations, the same compassion we extend to ourselves! Maybe we could teach them about birth control, or less flippantly maybe we could reduce fertility somehow.

Shit maybe the only way for the next little while is killing but that doesn’t mean each death is ethical. They didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just doing a mass murder to avoid a complete murder and tbh if we think we’re being reasonable we ought to be completely comfortable applying the same reasoning to ourselves and I see absolutely nobody signing up eagerly to be population controlled.

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

Not for long with this new virus going around ;-)

I shouldn’t laugh but it’s astonishing how rude they are being.

naevaTheRat, 13 days ago

Kinda yeah.

naevaTheRat, 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

That is not a chain of reasoning, would you mind trying again. Step by step please.

edit: most charitable read (they blocked me?)

The most charitable read I can see is

1 - everyone dies 2 - I assume without evidence that death is generally unpleasant and painful 3 - I assume without evidence animals don’t have complex internal worlds and desires for things like freedom or long life 4 - I assume the lives animals lead in farms is good 5 - I am a naive utiliarian and see no issues with mere addition/the repugnant conclusion 6 - a quick death does not count negatively in a utiliarian sensw C - therefore we should breed as many animals as we can, kill them whenever convenient as long as they are not old, and this makes the world better.

I do not see how 1 through 3 connect to 4 through 6. And 4 through 6 is just the repugnant conclusion.

naevaTheRat, 12 days ago

The most charitable read I can see is

1 - everyone dies 2 - I assume without evidence that death is generally unpleasant and painful 3 - I assume without evidence animals don’t have complex internal worlds and desires for things like freedom or long life 4 - I assume the lives animals lead in farms is good 5 - I am a naive utiliarian and see no issues with mere addition/the repugnant conclusion 6 - a quick death does not count negatively in a utiliarian sensw C - therefore we should breed as many animals as we can, kill them whenever convenient as long as they are not old, and this makes the world better.

I do not see how 1 through 3 connect to 4 through 6. And 4 through 6 is just the repugnant conclusion.

naevaTheRat, 12 days ago

Look I believe in you and remember goodness isn’t a place you reach it’s a path you walk. If you stray a little that’s no reason to stop trying. Everyone has bad days when we don’t behave to standards that we want to, the important thing is that we keep trying and do better next time.

Just follow your heart and don’t give up :)

naevaTheRat, 19 days ago

I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.

Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.

naevaTheRat, 19 days ago

Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.

Majority of people: do horrible thing

Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.

Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?

you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.

naevaTheRat, 19 days ago

It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.

Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.

Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.

So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.

naevaTheRat, 19 days ago

you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.

Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.

By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.

naevaTheRat, 19 days ago

Hopefully people don’t need a college degree in literature to understand basic subtext.

I think it’s about learning that it’s worth doing more than anything else.

naevaTheRat, 27 days ago

Is that from the swan princess or something? I feel like I recognise that character from one of the films my little sis watched on repeat when like 8.

naevaTheRat, 26 days ago

I don’t do evil playthroughs because my fantasy is being able to always be patient and nice, save everyone, and find peaceful solutions as much as possible.

IRL you run out of resources pretty fast trying that on your own, and bad actors take advantage unless you have a support structure. In games it’s preordained that it can work.

naevaTheRat, 30 days ago

Fuck the fucking fuckers. Swearing as much a part of human communication as cadence is.

Puritans can fuck themselves with a pineapple. It’s as ridiculous as finding full stops offensive and insisting the rest of the world bow to them by using double commas or something.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

No. Like this ideology of putting yourself first is a bit stupid. you can’t come up with univeral rules (at least ones that can be expressed in a small picture) for human interaction.

If you feel anxious but your family member needs a lift out of a sketchy party then yeah, you’re a dick and should feel guilty for that. If you would have debilitating panic attacks while driving maybe not, but you’re also shit if you don’t call a taxi or something. We have obligations to each other. “we live in a society”

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

Maybe my post is a joke. Maybe you’re a joke.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

You from the usa?

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

whack. I usually only see that opinion in usaians and teenaged to early twenties boys who’ve never been in trouble and needed help.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

The real jokes were the posts we made along the way.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

How often have you just read a headline? It’s not about creating cases that stand up to scrutiny, it’s about creating the impression of a movement.

Nudging people by making things appear more reasonable than they otherwise would be.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

serial cables lain

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

Frankly anything that gets bloodmouths to wake up to how fucking cruel and unusual carnism is rocks.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

How liberating it must be to have no choices, a mere puppet dragged along by your whims.

The first vegan I know lived a few thousand years ago in a blind body racked by smallpox but do go on about your life is sooooooo impossibly hard you can’t behave with a modicum of decency.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

From vicious giant insects who have once again come back

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

It’s not an issue of national pride, Australia is a dog shit nation. It’s about being funny and interesting.

Funny joke: “I was arriving at the airport and they asked if I had a criminal background, I didn’t realise that was still a requirement”.

Boring, played out, uncreative nonsense: “haha spiders upside down haha”

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

Yeah you got it. Make fun of our stupid accents, our ridiculous infighting politics, the horrible racism, how every Aussie thinks we’re some rugged larrikin but we have fines and regulations for everything (welcome to Australia: fines apply on a sticker had me in stitches in an airport bathroom), the hilarious “this place was discovered in XXXX, by an expedition being guided by a local man to a sacred place” plaques, the sex pest tourism we inflict on our neighbours whatever.

I’m just so bored of people bagging on made up stuff about the wildlife. They’re cool and interesting, and there’s loads to crack jokes about.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides

read that page. You’re unlikely to come across it without trying. No confirmed deaths in Australia. You can find videos of people stinging themselves, it looks unpleasant but not that bad. Not even exclusive to Australia.

“Bad things can happen to you if you deep into the forest/jungle and don’t know what you’re doing” is hardly uniquely Australian.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

Fair fair. You’ll want to avoid bulldog ants if you’ve got allergies. I know the natural inclination is to get close because they’re so fascinating but they’re particularly known for provoking anaphylaxis :(

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

I wasn’t joking about wanting to approach them, they’re fascinating. I object to people saying something is less evolved than something else as everything has been evolving and surviving the same amount of time, but they are primitive in the sense of preserving characteristics from an intermediate stage between wasps and ants. Really fascinating to see the solitary roaming/eyesight heavy foraging behaviours alongside eusocial grooming etc.

Gosh I love them, but I don’t know how many stings I have left in me as it’s starting to get extremely painful :p. They are just about the only animal aside from domestic cats that seem to go out of their way to do violence to you with very little provocation.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

Take it up with my Canadian friend, I’m only relaying what he told me.

naevaTheRat, 1 month ago

It’s not about right or wrong, it’s the only revenge we have against the first and second most evil empires to ever exist.