I mean, the point of a mermaid isn’t that it’s a sexy looking fish, it’s that other than its tail, it looks like beautiful human women. In some stories, sailors don’t even realize they’re taking to mermaids because their tails are underwater. Also, mermaids were generally considered bad omens or malicious entities, and when they did seduce humans, it was usually to kill them, so it’s not like the folklore was very pro-mermaid sex.

Does Lemmy have a Confidently Wrong community yet?

1. Agreed, except when it’s being done to retroactively justify your actions.
2. I think it’s a very bad idea to feed a cat a Vegan diet, but there are vegan products being sold on the market, and if you want to feed your cat one of these products, you should discuss them with a vet or other qualified professional. Regular dry food contains way more carbohydrates than cats are meant to have in their diet, which can lead to obesity and diabetes in cats. Are people who feed their cats dry food animal abusers? Should the Lemmy admins start policing the use of dry food?
3. The mods of c/vegan were trying to assert their ability to moderate their own sub as they saw fit in the face of a massive overreach from the admin. I think they’re the most insufferable community I’ve seen on this instance, but they should have the right to moderate their own community.

And yes, I’m on .world, but very little of my identity is tired up in my lemmy instance, and I’m certainly not going to bat for the .world admins when they do something crazy.

Well, various vegan catfoods have been approved for use in not only the U.S. but also the E.U., but your point about regulatory capture is fair. Unfortunately, it’s undercut by your support for vaping, a nicotine product brought to market with an insane lack of oversight. Ironically, most of what you’re complaining about with the cat food is exactly what makes vaping so dangerous. We don’t have as much research or long-term studies on the effects of vaping to say it’s as dangerous as smoking, but we know that they contain propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, which are toxic to cells, aldehydes, which are associated with lung disease and heart disease, acrolein, which can cause COPD, asthma and lung cancer, as well as various heavy metals. I’m pretty sure that a lot more people will die of vaping than cats will die of veganism. That being said, I don’t think people who support vaping should be removed from lemmy for using a product that’s probably unsafe, and and it’s not the job of admins or moderators to stop people from taking bad health advice from strangers on the internet.

Maybe, but this seems like a problem that’s bigger than a single instance. A few months back someone came with some pretty good receipts showing .ml admins going after people for having some very fair and moderate criticisms of China. Seems like most instances either have power tripping mods or are too small to have much activity.

Yeah, to be clear, you should not feed your cat a Vegan diet. Cats are obligate carnivores. Synthetic Taurine has made vegan catfood somewhat more viable, but cats don’t just need Taurine from prey. They need several vitamins, amino acids, and fatty acids from animal protein to survive. Beyond that, their digestive tract isn’t very efficient at digesting plant matter, so even if these foods have the nutritional value they need, they might not be absorbing it. Also, a lot of these products seem to be made from grains and other carb heavy products, and cats need a very low carb, high protein diet. If you want to completely divest from the meat industry, you simply shouldn’t own a cat.

That being said, Vegan catfood products are on the market, so whether or not they are good for cats, they have been approved by several regulating bodies. You can claim that they’re unsafe (I certainly do), but having an admin nuke a comment section for claiming otherwise is a huge overreaction. It would be like going into a vape community and banning accounts that claimed vaping is safer than smoking; it probably isn’t, but I don’t need admins deciding who gets to have discourse about that.

Finally, I’m also not a fan of dead cats, but if you’re dumb enough to take veterinary advice from an internet vegan group, you’re probably too dumb to keep a cat alive anyway.

I mean, leaving .world is a pretty fair response. That community is full of insufferable idiots, but an admin overrode their moderating decisions, and then the admin team made up rules to retroactively justify their decision. That’s pretty egregious.

Prior to the latest violence, Gaza’s water supply was already unable to meet the World Health Organization’s minimum requirement for daily per capita water consumption.

A 2020 study in the journal “Water” found the quality of the groundwater in the aquifer had “deteriorated rapidly,” in large part because it had been pumped out to meet the demands of Gaza’s large population quicker than it could be replaced by rainwater.

The aquifer is also polluted by untreated wastewater, leaving 96.2% of household water from the aquifer undrinkable, according to a 2020 report from B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

Most literate genocide denier.

Yes. You hid from literally every other point I made, and you were still spectacularly wrong, you sniveling coward.

OK, so let’s pretend that Hamas using human sheilds necessitates the killing of (at least, but probably more than) 40,000 people. I think that in most conflicts, when innocent hostages are. taken, the normal response isn’t to indiscriminately kill the hostages, but let’s ignore that for now.

How does that Hamas using human shields make it necessary for Palestinians in Gaza to live without clean drinking water for a decade before October 7th? How do human shields make it necessary to torture (tortures which include beating, rape, and the use of restraints so tight they havd led to amputations) Palestinians in prison camps? How does it justify Israeli settlers seizing homes in the West Bank, a territory that isn’t even controlled by Hamas? Because it doesn’t really seem like, “Hamas is hiding among civilians, so it’s hard to target them without hitting civilian targets,” can possibly justify any of those things.

Yeah, I mean, it’s not like the Palestinians are having their homes and property systematically seized, or being forced into ghettos with brutal conditions akin to living in an open air prison, or being sent to torture camps, or being exterminating en masse. I mean, you’d have to be a real dumbfuck to think all of those things were happening right now.

Oh, Lindell is not a grifter; he’s a true believer. He didn’t bet the world $5 million because it was a scam. He did it because he was certain he was right, and he thought he could make everybody see that. Guys like Jack Posobiec and Charlie Kirk are grifters. Lindell’s basically like any other MAGA chud that was convinced to ruin his life for Trump.

Honestly, unless we close the offshore tax loophole, reducing or increasing the corporate tax rate is basically symbolic, since the federal tax rate is functionally 0% for most cooperations.

Man, this guy would have been better off if he just stuck to crack.

Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars. My Dad had an IBM machine that booted up in DOS, and he installed a bunch of games on it for us. I played every Commander Keen game (including Keen Dreams), Wacky Wheels, Oregon Trail. Sim City, and Sim Ant on that machine (although I think I needed to boot up Windows to run those last two).

There absolutely is. Vance is describing how his mother-in-law took a sabbatical to help with their first child, and this specific interaction becomes the focus of the article:

“That’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory,” Weinstein said at the time.

“Yes,” Vance agreed.

That’s…mostly correct. He should has said, “hypothesis,” instead of, “theory,” and it’s certainly oversimplification, but otherwise, that’s a correct assessment of the Grandmother Hypothesis.

Now, it’s fucking weird to apply that hypothesis to modern society. It’s very strange how Vance can only analyze his mother-in-laws actions through the lens of traditional family values vs. free market capitalism. It’s also pretty telling that Vance ignores the racist comment the interviewer makes when he calls this, “a weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.” But the article glossed over those comments and goes out of its way to make the, “postmenopausal women,” statement sound crazy, without even acknowledging the Grandmother Hypothesis.

It’d be like if Vance said, “You know, if multiverse theory is correct, there may be an Earth where couches have vaginas,” and I wrote an article about how Vance has this crazy belief that there’s more than one Earth. That’s actually not that crazy, and it really shouldn’t be the focus.

Jesus, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize it was that bad. That’s insane.

Sure, no problem. Also, I think it would be disingenuous to pretend that at least some of this backlash isn’t from people who don’t like the idea that their beliefs may not be objective facts. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t struggle with that from time to time.

But the real problem I have with these bots is that they can never capture the kind of nuance vetting a source requires. The Raw Story ranks high on credibility because they don’t publish lies, but they don’t publish anything worthwhile either. Most of their, “stories,” are second hand accounts of something someone (who may or may not be credible) said on CNN, or how a politician or pundit got mocked on social media, and then given a title that implies the incident was more significant than it was. It’s difficult to judge something like that with an algorithm that simply looks for, “Credibility,” and, “Bias.”

evolutionary biology doesn’t dictate my purpose as a man, nor should it dictate the purpose of a woman.

Maybe you should have read all the way to my second sentence, where I made that exact point.

Yeah, pretty much nothing in our biology has prepared us for late stage capitalism.