Jerkface (any/all)

I know you don’t really mean it, but I’m going to use your bad faith arguments to point out some things you should know but have probably never thought about.

Let’s accept that you are a fully committed plant’s rights activist. You considered killing yourself out of respect for your plant brother’s experiences, but ultimately you decide that no creature should be obliged to kill itself simply because of its own inherent nature. You cannot help that you need to eat. So what do you do?

You decide that while you have to eat to survive, that doesn’t mean that you can just eat wantonly, whatever and however the urge strikes you, because there are these serious consequences to your plant friends. You look for the way of life that minimizes the number of plants that you have to kill. Easy, you think, you’ll just eat animals!

Until you realize, those animals eat plants. Those animals ate WAY more plants than you would have if you hadn’t eaten any animals. Oh. Shit. The more animals you eat, the more of your plant sisters you are killing. You realize that your ethical convictions demand that you instead eat only plants, and only as many as you need to survive. Because that is the only solution to this ethical quandary.

But of course, in real life, you are not actually concerned with plant’s rights. It was just a ruse you were pulling. You did not go down this train of thought to its logical conclusion. These are not issues that you have spent years and years thinking about. Rather, like most people, you have been trained to not think about them. You’re not engaging with intellectual honesty, you have begun to attempt to frustrate meaningful discussion. I’m giving you a lot of grace here because I don’t think you realize you did it, and I’d like to give you a chance to see it.

Okay, I can see you have become defensive. It’s understandable. When I finally accepted the vast cruelty and violence I was a part of, it fucking broke me. That is what you are trying to avoid. That is what I tried to avoid for a very long time. Eventually I accepted that I could not be a kind, decent, good person, and continue to use cruelty and violence to exploit unwilling individuals. The person I was deserved to be broken.

I’m going to let you take back your bad faith arguments. This isn’t merely an intellectual exercise for either of us. We’re talking about things that matter and choices we make many times every day and it’s hard to talk about dispassionately and objectively. When you use bad faith, it’s not because you think it will defeat me, but because it’s all you have to distract yourself from thoughts and feelings that you don’t want to process.

Just for clarity, I don’t accept that it is okay to keep individuals as pets. But that isn’t relevant to the current discussion so I didn’t get into that.

Those chickens didn’t just happen. Their very existence is abuse. Creating an individual with the preformed intent that you prevent it from becoming able to care for itself, that it will be dependent on you for everything for it’s entire life, that is one of the most abusive things you can do to another individual.

Fine, rescue your cats or whatever, but that’s not what you’re talking about right now. You’re talking about a captive individual (ie a slave) who exists to convert calories for you, like a machine. And if you build your lifestyle around stealing eggs from slaves, then it’s not just one chicken, is it? You gotta replace them whenever they can no longer meet your needs for eggs. And in this scenario, what use is a broken machine that doesn’t produce eggs.

You’re not simply taking eggs that they would be laying anyway; they wouldn’t EXIST. Not as an individual, but also not as a genentic line that is cursed to lay far more eggs than its own interests have any reason for it to lay. It lays so many eggs that its body becomes depleted. It is not natural for chickens to lay eggs so often! That is something that we did to them. And it’s yet more abuse!

Abuse is inescapable when you use an individual’s body for your own purposes.

And again, we are talking about fucking eggs. There is no food shortage. So there is no justification for even a little bit of cruelty and violence. Plus, eggs are not good for you in the first place!!

I’m sorry, you cannot exploit the body of an individual against their will without cruelty and violence. This is a terrible thing to come to terms with, but I hope you try to. There is no way around it short of abject denial.

Here is some factual information about how egg laying hens (and their brothers, who are macerated alive in a blender within hours of hatching) necessarily suffer atrocity under the economic realities that rule them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko&t=1400s

Individuals must be treated as ends, never as means.

That’s cruel and requires violence. There are situations that justify cruelty and violence, but given that there is no food scarcity, it is not justified now.

We can easily grow more plants than humanity can collectively eat, and still have plants left over for global industries. Food is abundant. There is just no need to be that frugal with food. The problem of hunger does not come from lack of food, it comes from avarice.

Right, everyone who disagrees with you is a delusional sky-fairy worshipper. I’m not religious, dude. I’m also not suffering from religious trauma. Clean your shit up.

Clearly you CANNOT define what religion even is. But boy do you ever have strong opinions about something YOU CANNOT EVEN DEFINE. Your damage is just flowing out from every sentence. Your rage cannot change the world, but once you fix yourself, you can start to try.

Thank you very much!

It doesn’t mean their mental process is slow. It refers to developmental retardation. As if the person’s body is just going to “catch up” one day… Which is why it was a stupid thing to say all along.

“As powerful as LaTeX” is a huge claim. How strong is this claim?

Edit: The claim is that it is designed to be as powerful as LaTeX, not that it presently is. Does it reach its goal?

I bet you cannot even define religion.

I won’t rape, torture, and murder vulnerable individuals. Call me radical but if I can be happy, healthy, and enjoy life without doing those things to animals, I’m not going to fucking do those things to animals.

We aren’t pretending it isn’t happening. We are making a mindful sacrifice.

Leaving Facebook is more than just not using a website. Facebook is more than a website and leaving it is leaving the entire culture it has captured, so that our energies are spent building the culture that remains uncaptured instead of contributing to the captured culture. It’s a big fucking deal that affects every aspect of your life in modern society.

But your honour, I only beat him to within an inch of his life. What do you mean, guilty???

Don’t get too attached to anything.

No, it mightn’t. Err, won’t.