Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 8 Posts
  • 228 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • (I’m leaving this up for transparency, but I totally misread the comment I responded to. Sorry! I have attacked a strawman, and fought valiantly against ghosts lol.)

    You’re several decades out of date with that opinion.

    Chinese manufacturing has exploded in quality, safety, and efficiency over the last 20 years. The old stereotype that China is an assembly line economy pumping out cheap knockoffs and plastic junk, is false.

    China now has some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world. Even Tim Cook stated publicly a year or two ago, that they don’t manufacture Apple devices in China because it’s cheaper. They do it because China is the only country currently that has both the precision engineering plus the scale to build those devices at the volumes and quality Apple demands.

    China has invested massively into STEM, their students, engineers, and scientists attended the best Western universities across the world for decades. Learned everything they could, brought that knowledge back home, and have been expanding on and turbocharging it with massive state and private investments.

    Basically they did what the US used to do before we became a grift/vibe/hussle economy, and they are eating our lunch. Now I am absolutely no fan of China, but damn it, I am starting to get pretty jealous…




    1. The first argument is just another version of the “it’s natural/unnatural, therefore it’s right/wrong.” Many animals also eat their own young, rape each other, etc. Does that make it acceptable for humans to do it also? Of course not. Some homophobes will point out that homosexual relationships are evolutionarily disadvantageous, (“unnatural”) and therefore that means it’s wrong for humans to form homosexual relationships. Obviously a ridiculous argument, but it’s just the inverse form of the one above.
    2. Is it alright to torture a human infant or a severely developmentally disabled person? What about a person with very advanced Alzheimer’s? All three examples have little to no mental self-awareness, certainly less than a dog, pig, dolphin, etc. At what point is self awareness sufficiently low enough to make it morally acceptable to cause deliberate pain to that person for your own enjoyment? Second, there is a growing body of evidence that a large portion of animals, including many that are currently farmed/fished for consumption, demonstrate sentience beyond simple reflexes. Beyond the scientific studies, everyday experience indicates this in many animals. Dogs, pigs, birds, octopus, can all solve simple puzzles, demonstrate various apparent emotions like curiosity, fear, joy, confusion, anger, etc. Clearly some level of sentience is present, even if it’s quite simple.
    3. All essential nutrients humans need can be found in plants. You need to adjust your diet obviously, some nutrients like B12 and Iron are harder to get from a plant-based diet. While others, like Vitamin C and Fiber are easier. The old stereotype that vegetarians/vegans are all malnourished weaklings, is a myth. There are many vegetarian/vegan elite athletes, including Olympic medalists and world record holders, (Alex Morgan, Scott Jurek, Dotsie Bausch, Fiona Oakes, Meagan Duhamel). So at least in the developed world, (where factory farming is the most pervasive,) there is no nutritional need for the general population to eat animals.

  • Most people don’t use critical reasoning to make their decisions, hence why most people live their lives in a state of constant contradictions.

    My old philosophy professor once told us that the most effective way to expose somebody’s lack of critical reasoning about an issue is to just respond with, “who says?”

    Basically the Socratic method, ask them to justify the statements they make, and see how they respond. The vast majority of the time, you’ll quickly find out that they don’t have any good reasons to support their statements. They haven’t given them much thought at all, nor much thought to differing views/positions. They live their lives in ways that feel generally “correct” or pleasurable to them, and that’s it.

    Why do they think it’s alright to eat factory farmed meat? Because they like the taste, the thought of billions of animals living short, miserable lives, then being slaughtered and processed for us to consume doesn’t horrify or disgust them, so they keep doing it.

    Most people when challenged on it will put up some vague attempt to support their actions, “Other animals do it to each other, so why not us?” “Animals don’t have sophisticated minds, so it doesn’t actually cause them real suffering.” “Humans need animal protein to be healthy.” etc. All terribly weak arguments that are easily refuted. But most people don’t care, because most societies normalize meat consumption and factory farming. They grew up eating meat with other people eating meat all around them, and they never gave it any thought.

    Hence why most pet owners who eat meat would be absolutely horrified and disgusted if their dog or cat had a litter and somebody bought all of the puppies/kittens, only to torture, slaughter, and eat them. A completely inconsistent reaction given the fact that the pet owner happily eats other animals that are treated in the same way. But again, they didn’t reason themselves into their viewpoint, so they don’t worry about being consistent.

    This is further confirmed by anecdotes from vegetarians/vegans, who will tell you about all the awkward, unprompted reactions from meat-eaters when they find out they don’t eat meat. Many people get very defensive, often making snide or accusatory remarks about vegetarianism/veganism. They don’t like the idea that eating factory meat is morally wrong, because they like the taste and don’t want to make to effort to change their lifestyle to confirm with that moral principle. So they mock, tease, or try to “expose” inconsistencies in the vegetarian/vegan’s own worldview as a defense mechanism.

    If they can make the vegetarian/vegan look foolish, then that feels like a win psychologically to them, which provides mental and emotional comfort and allows them to slip back into their lifestyle without needing to confront their own moral failings.






  • Gaming PC - Nobara (Fedora base with lots of gaming-specifc kernel optimizations baked in.)

    Personal laptop - Linux Mint

    Business laptop - Linux Mint Debian Edition

    Junk/Test laptops - Void

    Home lab main hypervisor - XCP-ng (Highly customized Fedora under the hood.)

    NAS - TrueNAS (Debian under the hood.)

    Virtual servers - Mostly Debian, but a few Alma Linux VMs to get that RHEL experience. Ubuntu Server for my self-hosted gaming servers.

    Steam Deck - SteamOS (Valve’s immutable spin of Arch.)






  • Thanks for the response. I’m doing great now. Got a new job as a sysadmin making about 35% more than my old job, and I get to work on Linux a bunch, and my team is really solid.

    Still sucks that I lost all that work, but I was able to get some of the old hardware back for free, so my old servers can live again in my home lab.