This conversation would go so much smoother if we used the actual descriptive term for "alt-right" and "far right": fascism.
However conflicting it may sound, arguments against freedom of speech and freedom of expression cannot be supported in an economic of free speech / expression. This is not actually a dilemma, because fascist politics are incompatible with these freedoms; one cannot exist when the other is the norm.
And just like in any culture and community, the best way to counter fascism is not incarceration and bans but heavy investment in high quality education, on the one hand, and heavy communal shaming and stigmatization of fascist politics and policies, on the other hand.
Good point, but I think part of the problem is that some people are champing at the bit to call someone alt-right or facist when that person does something that they don't like or doesn't align with their own views. (Even if those views are relatively tame compared to what the pure definition of alt-right or facist is.
People are getting increasingly segmented into their own belief systems and are un-willing to even slightly concede to differing opinions, or aren't willing to even associate with people who believe in different things.
Seems like religion is phasing out of style and political beliefs are becoming the new religion.
> heavy communal shaming and stigmatization
That sounds like the new brand of fascism we’ve seen from Antifa by shouting down and silencing people they disagree with, including very moderate people. Not saying “far right” is okay, but we’ve seen it swing to the other “far left” extreme in Portland, OR recently, and that’s not okay either.
You can say the same thing about the "far left". After hearing about how groups like Antifa are operating in Portland, I can unironically only think of one word to describe them: fascists
Yes. The original fascists were Italian and had hard-left policies, like very heavy state involvement in industry and communist-style dictatorship.
This rebranding of "fascists" and "Nazis" as right wing has been going on a long time, but when you look at what these groups of people actually did when in power their actions were all but indistinguishable from the USSR: The hardest of hard left power structures. They were both "alt left".
Anyone who ever interacted with any animal who had trauma in their part already knows this. The experiences of "other"s that people are too ready and wanting to ignore simply because those experiences were not rubber stamped by academic journals is astonishingly depressing.
I think it's just very inconvenient that animals can have feelings and can suffer. Once you accept this then suddenly a lot of things become ethically very problematic, e.g. zoos, circus animals, pollution, a lot of farming practices. Much easier to deny that and claim that humans are special and only they can suffer.
Which is ironic, because I have many old relatives who used to live on farms, and they are all very attuned to the feelings of animals. They can tell when one is in pain, how to take care of it, etc. Note that it is not at odds with the fact that there are raising the animal for meat, in some cases.
What is problematic is when decision chains get abstracted out and decisions depersonalized, and a bunch of company executives in a room decide how many chickens they need to fit per square foot of space in order to turn a profit next quarter, rather than those decisions being made by the people who take care of the chicken every day.
In that light, the psychology and social systems at play in industrial farming isn’t too different from that of prisons, internment camps, etc. Lives that are abstract numbers in profit equations to decision makers who don’t have to see up too close what those numbers really represent.
Tyson Foods, the biggest chicken firm, gives (sells) chicken to family owned farms that make the decision to cram the chickens in small space, and then Tyson Foods buys back the big chickens. The business is done in a way so that Tyson Foods has all the upside and little downside. I do not think they bore themselves with the logistics of raising chickens, they think of how to market their chicken scam to other family farms.
Thankfully several zoos have become wildlife rehabilitation centers, and some that hold on to the traditional model (like SeaWorld) are being publicly shamed. The biggest circus is all human. Progress is slow, but it is happening.
Many people are happy to admit and even enthusiastically embrace the concept that dogs have human-like emotions, but they will still resist that about farm animals and wildlife.
I think this is more of a new thing. I've talked about this stuff with people who are now in their seventies and eighties, and they basically seem to get that animals suffer in substantially similar ways to humans.
The difference is that humans are broadly capable of understanding the moral consequences of their actions, and in the west we seem to have developed the concept of showing mercy to animals (stunning and sticking rather than bleeding animals out through the neck while conscious).
While some animals have more complex proto-moral behaviour, they would not be able or willing to extend these same courtesies to us, in the reverse circumstance.
Able? No. Willing? Possibly. Maybe the desire to not cause suffering is so common in moral frameworks because it is hardwired into us and into other animals, almost like an instinct-based universal morality.
We inject a lot of assumptions about the nature of non-human animals in these discussions in what I think is an attempt to keep them as mentally distinct from ourselves as possible.
Agreed. This seems like one of the most obvious conclusions of research of all time. Why so you need to research an elephant? A simple visit to a local animal shelter would have probably sufficed.
Sometimes I wonder if news organization run these kinds of stories to reinforce the "scientist are clueless" angle and further sew our mistrust of science. Don't scientists have dogs, too?
Yep. My old dog had it's tail cut off before she ran away, and until the age of 15 always chased her tail in circles, as well as howled in her sleep on occasion.
Yes, plenty do, and as a counterpoint I have owned several dogs with cut tails as well who did not exhibit such symptoms.
OP's dog's neurosis was likely caused by something else unless the tail was cut late into the puppy's life. I'm not advocating for cutting tails at all but I certainly don't have PTSD about my circumcision...
Not to derail the thread, but PTSD or similar trauma from circumcision is very common.
Or in my case, when you were non-consensually circumcised as an infant, experiencing grief/anger/etc upon truly understanding what that means.
For anyone reading, you can restore what was taken from you by applying tension to the foreskin remnant (“circumcision scar”) and slowly re-grow the lost tissue via mitosis. You can’t reclaim everything (frenulum, ridged band) but you can regrow the inner mucosa and outer foreskin.
The process is called foreskin restoration, and I encourage anyone who is interested to look into it.
Do you think we should get children’s consent for vaccinations? I guess my point is sometimes our parents make choices for us. Hopefully they make choices that better us not hurt us. And I know with circumcisions a lot of the time it is done for religious reasons. Your parents perhaps believed in god and were doing what they felt was spiritually needed within their religion. I am curious is this the case with your family?
Elective surgery that removes functional sexual tissue: yes.
To make it clear, do you think it’s okay to cut off a newborn girl’s clitoral hood (the analog of the male foreskin)? I would hope not.
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My parents were raised catholic, but are atheists. So largely it was done for the usual pseudo-reasons: to “look like my father”, because it’s “healthier” (completely false), etc. I’m a white american so it’s a very common practice unfortunately.
The foreskin is not a vestigial organ. Violating the bodily and sexual autonomy of a child is never okay.
See I was circumcised and it sounds much like the same reasons as you mainly because my dad had it done. They long dropped religion so it was more like how you describe. I guess, from my limited knowledge, not all female circumcisions are the same. Some involve more serious removal of not just skin but the actually clitoris. I am against removal of the clitoris as it probably would mean decreased feeling. I really can’t say how much feeling I supposedly lost with my circumcision but I always thought sex was very enjoyable. The whole idea of either seems bizarre and pointless to myself. But I also feel a part of me has spirituality (and not in any god). So if the clitoral circumcision was just a bit of the side skin and for religious reasons I could accept it. But I think a lot of these female circumcisions do not just take side skin they remove a sexual organ. Yes skin and therefore foreskin is an organ but I don’t feel like I am missing anything. Thank you for your thoughts it has made me think more on this subject. I honestly don’t have any good reason to defend male circumcisions over female. What a weird world we live in.
It’s the “Netherlands Antilles” not the Netherlands. Also, it split in 2010 [1]. The US played Curaçao, formerly of the Netherlands Antilles, in this year’s Gold Cup.
Cutting for wood doesn't hurt since the carbon is still trapped in the wood. In fact it helps since they regrow new trees that sequester carbon faster in their early years than mature trees.
That is the superficial thinking but unfortunately it is not true. First when they cut trees, they do not haul in the branches and the leaves. There is no money in that. The branches and the leaves are all cut out and left in place with just the main trunk being hauled to the sawmill. The branches and the leaves then dry out and rot releasing their carbon. This means that big part of the trees mass (probably at least 50%) does not get its carbon sequestered. (For a similar reason freshly logged forests are a much bigger fire danger than forests that have not been logged at all).
Secondly unfortunately, in general loggers mostly do not regrow the areas they cut down. Although they do talk about regrowing whenever they are talking to the media, in reality the areas regrown are far less than the areas cut down and thus the earth is losing a lot of tree cover every year.
Dunno what kind of tree it is, but I do see tree plantations where each was clearly planted at the same time in a grid, and in a race to the sky, the trees don’t bother with outward branches much, just the ever rising canopy.
> since they regrow new trees that sequester carbon faster in their early years than mature trees
Is that actually the case? Wouldn't a larger tree's volume mean it consumes a ton more Carbon than a smaller tree, even if the smaller tree is rapidly growing?
Though when you consider forestry has the goal of producing sequestered carbon (wood), you would think they'd find a fast way to do that. In my country, commercial forestry is done with non-native species that are planted by the forest owners and obviously must be replanted for them to keep operating. They harvest them after about 20 years of growth. I guess that's the age when further growth would be too slow to be economical.
I'm confused, to what "countless genocides and systems of torture" are you referring?
I will acknowledge that there have been genocides and tortures against practically every group of humans in the past, but I don't see how that is relevant.
I’m guessing they’re talking about things like factory farming, habitat destruction, hunting to extinction, etc. Genocide is the wrong word there and probably responsible for the downvotes, but “systems of torture” is depressingly accurate.
However conflicting it may sound, arguments against freedom of speech and freedom of expression cannot be supported in an economic of free speech / expression. This is not actually a dilemma, because fascist politics are incompatible with these freedoms; one cannot exist when the other is the norm.
And just like in any culture and community, the best way to counter fascism is not incarceration and bans but heavy investment in high quality education, on the one hand, and heavy communal shaming and stigmatization of fascist politics and policies, on the other hand.