I didn’t say anything about Kant himself (Kant also thought that non-human animals were basically just “things” without rationality or self-consciousness, which is however in direct conflict with the current scientific consensus. Kant still argued in favour of treating animals “humanely”, just not for their own sake). Anyway, some well-known and well-respected contemporary philosophers who argue(d) from a Kantian perspective in favour of animal rights include e.g. Christine Korsgaard or Tom Regan, and many lesser known philosophers (see e.g. here for a recent example). I also see no indication that these types of arguments as a whole are supposedly “thoroughly rebutted” (not that serious philosophy really works like that anyway). Some other philosophers disagree with some of their arguments, of course (this is normal in philosophy), and many don’t subscribe to Kantianism in the first place, but afaik most of them tend to take issue with how Kantian ethics is applied (or that it is applied) moreso than that they’re trying to defend animal exploitation as such. Either way, none of that changes the fact that ethicists have been using Kantian ethics (among many other meta-ethical frameworks, as I said before) to argue in favour of animal rights, and that there aren’t really many arguments in defense of killing animals for food (in particular in the context of factory farming) that find widespread support (among moral philosophers, that is).
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I didn’t think the had an official organized statement
There sort of is. The term “vegan” was coined by some members of the Vegetarian Society of the UK in the 1940s (at the time veganism and vegan diet were mostly referred to by terms such as “strict vegetarianism” or “no animal food” etc.), who shortly after founded the Vegan Society [of the UK]. The latter has an “official” definition of veganism:
Of course individual vegans may have slightly different definitions, and may interpret them differently, but as a whole this seems to be a fairly accurate definition for many vegans (although there are some exceptions, e.g. people who adopt plant-based diets for (percieved or actual) health benefits, or religious reasons, sometimes (but not always) also refer to themselves as “vegans”).
As to the “literally right” part (I assume the OP was referring to veganism in general, not the specific issue of the thread), it mostly boils down to whether or not we think the statement “it is (morally) wrong to unnecessarily cause harm to animals” is correct. Since most people (with perhaps the exception of some with rare medical conditions) can survive just fine on a diet free of animal products (same goes for clothing etc.), we can conclude that it is at least unnecessary to use animal products. Thus, if we agree with the rest of the statement (i.e. that exploiting animals for their meat or other products causes them harm) we should also agree with veganism as an ethical stance. Naturally this could be discussed in much more detail and with many caveats, but for me this is more or less the core of the argument. And as it turns out, a lot of moral philosophers from different meta-ethical schools (such as utilitarianism, Kantian ethics or virtue ethics) seem to agree at the very least that the arguments in favour of veganism are much stronger than those in defense of eating meat (and particularly those in defense of factory farming). Some further reading for those interested:
9·10 months agoThere seems to be a bit of a difference, even though both involve asking questions. To quote wiktionary:
sealioning (uncountable)
A type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter, in order to wear down an opponent and incite angry responses that will discredit them.Apparently coined by this webcomic:
JAQ off (third-person singular simple present JAQs off, present participle JAQing off, simple past and past participle JAQed off) (slang, derogatory) To ask loaded questions inviting someone to justify their views or behaviours, in an attempt to make tangential claims of little verisimilitude appear acceptable.
So the way I understand it, “JAQing off” is when you’re trying to guide your audience towards a certain conclusion without stating it outright (e.g. “Are the official numbers of holocaust victims really as solid as people claim? Are there alternative historical interpretations? I’m just asking questions here, not implying anything folks.” when you think just saying “The holocaust didn’t happen!” might make it too obvious you’re a Nazi), while sealioning is more about annoying the other party and trying to make them look bad/unreasonable and yourself polite and reasonable in comparison (e.g. “I’m just curious, is there any actual evidence that fascists are inherently bad people, as you claim? As a person with no opinion on the matter, I would just like to have an honest and open debate on this subject.” so when people reply with something like “Fuck off, fascist!” you can say “Wow, so much for the tolerant left.”). Both tactics are frequently applied by online trolls, especially of the far right, but they have somewhat different goals.
311·1 year agoIt’s precisely what everyone said would happen.
I don’t disagree with your general point, but I remember that there were many people (on reddit, but also on lemmy) who said there would be lots of power-hungry redditors just waiting to take over and that the admins would thus have no trouble at all finding replacements.
That takes something from being completely unreasonable to be understandable.
Why would taxing a gross income of above a billion US$ by ~66% be “completely unreasonable”? Imo taxes for such incomes should generally be higher if anything.
13·1 year agoIn physics, however, using Latex is absolutely the norm, and on the arxiv it’s also absolutely the norm. That they aren’t using it shows at the very least that they’re out of touch with academic practice. I mean, if their extraordinary claim is true it would be one of the most significant discoveries of the century and pretty much a guaranteed Nobel prize. Therefore you might think they would put at least some amount of effort into presenting their results, such as producing nice looking plots, and, well, using Latex like a normal working physicist. The fact that they don’t doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, but it doesn’t exactly increase their credibility either.
PS: I also just noticed that one of their equations (p. 9 in 2307.12008) literally contains the expression “F(00l)”. Again, maybe they’re just oblivious and didn’t realize that could look like they’re calling us fools, but the extraordinary claims together with the rather unorthodox and low-effort presentation make me very skeptical.
A big paper with only three authors?!
That part isn’t so unusual, especially in condensed matter, where labs can be relatively small. For example, the paper announcing the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in 1986 only had two authors (Bednorz & Müller).
I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find the lab from which it has been published.
For those who didn’t look into the paper: They seem to work for a company called “Quantum Energy Research Centre, Inc.”, which does sound a bit… woo-y to me. At least the third author seems to work at Korea University, which, according to Wikipedia, is relatively prestigious. Who knows, maybe the authors just can’t be bothered to use Latex and didn’t choose the name of the company or didn’t put too much thought into it, but for the moment I’m also rather skeptical.
As a non colorblind person, I would like to understand how this image could have been modified to include our colorblind brethren.
In general it is a good idea to use colour gradients that monotonically increase (or decrease) in brightness in addition to (or instead of) hue (see here for an in-depth comparison of different colour maps. It’s from a Python package, but it shows some interesting plots comparing different colour maps when it comes to brightness vs. hue). This isn’t just useful for colour blind people, but also helpful when printing in black-and-white.
If you absolutely have to use a diverging colour map, you might reach most people by using blue as a major component of one, but only one of the two branches (the map in the OP uses blue as a major component of both branches, which is why red/green colour blind people can have a problem with it). That way most colour blind people should be able to distinguish the branches, since blue colour blindness (Tritanopia/Tritanomaly) is much rarer than red (Protanopia/Protanomaly) or green (Deuteranopia/Deuteranomaly) colour blindness.
Apart from that it is also possible to mark information visually in other ways than by colour, e.g. by shapes and patterns, like dotted or dashed lines for line graphs, shaded or dotted areas for bar and area graphs, or different geometric shapes like crosses, diamonds, and circles when plotting individual data points, but that is probably more useful when different sets of data are plotted in the same graph.
In what world is a country with billionaires and an autocratic ruling class in which the workers decidedly do not control the means of production, “socialist”?
Yes, my list is by no means complete. I’m sure there are many more things any of us could do, it’s more meant as a list of some examples to give people starting points for practical things to do.
Not sure if this will give you hope or not, but one thing to consider is that we could still make it far worse, or put differently, that it’s still in our power to stop that from happening. We can’t change the fact that climate change already has noticeable negative consequences today, nor that global temperatures will rise by at least 1.5° towards the end of the century (compared to 1950-1980), probably more. But we do have a somewhat realistic chance of keeping it at around 2° or below (see e.g. here or here for easy simulations in your browser). The point is that every tenth of a degree counts, and our action or lack thereof now might well make the difference between it “just” getting bad with regular droughts, crop failures, some regions becoming temporarily uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and so on on the one hand, or all of that on a much larger scale leading to societal collapse if we don’t act at all. We live in the worst extinction event the earth has seen since the asteroid that killed the non-bird dinosaurs, but we can still keep it at that instead of turning it into the worst extinction event the earth has ever seen. Luckily, governments (and industry) largely have at least accepted that climate change is a thing, and in Europe and the Americas green-house gas emission have actually already been sinking for the last 15 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not great, and these governments still should do much more, but it could also be worse, and the fact that we’re lowering emissions despite our politicians generally being very friendly with industry could give at least a sliver of hope. The emissions of China and India (and the rest of Asia) are still rising, but show signs of decelerated growth at least, and in Africa emissions are still fairly low and rising rather slowly, with a chance that some less developed countries might more or less just skip a big chunk of carbon-based industrialisation in favour of renewables. Altogether this means that we’re already on a way to avoid the worst possible scenarios, and still have the power to keep it towards the lower end of the scale as far as terrible outcomes are concerned.
In addition, while individuals have always less power than whole governments or industries, there are nevertheless things anyone reading this could do, e.g.:
- Voting for parties that favour stronger climate action, and perhaps even more importantly, not supporting those who do less or even nothing. You can also protest or try to influence your government in some other ways.
- Reduce your personal impact by not consuming animal products (in particular meat and dairy), not flying if you can avoid it, not buying stuff you don’t really need, and not having (more) kids. Edit: Also try to favour public transport over driving your own car, and if you need a car, try to use a small, electrical one to reduce emissions.
- Tell other people you know who might listen to do those things. Many people favour climate action in principle, but are too lazy, scared or just otherwise preoccupied to actually start doing stuff on their own. You kicking them in the butt or leading by example can motivate them and in turn other people they might now.
If you’re reading this and whether or not you’re already doing some of those things, I’m sure you can find at least some things you could do (I know I can, and I’m trying to put it into practice), which might in turn also make you feel less depressed about the situation. As mentioned before, I’m not saying that we’re in a great situation, but whining about it helps nobody, and we’re still in a situation where we have the power to stop things from getting even worse.
Not sure if this will give you hope or not, but one thing to consider is that we could still make it far worse, or put differently, that it’s still in our power to stop that from happening. We can’t change the fact that climate change already has noticeable negative consequences today, nor that global temperatures will rise by at least 1.5° towards the end of the century (compared to 1950-1980), probably more. But we do have a somewhat realistic chance of keeping it at around 2° or below (see e.g. here or here for easy simulations in your browser). The point is that every tenth of a degree counts, and our action or lack thereof now might well make the difference between it “just” getting bad with regular droughts, crop failures, some regions becoming temporarily uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and so on on the one hand, or all of that at a much larger scale leading to societal collapse if we don’t act at all. We live in the worst extinction event the earth has seen since the asteroid that killed the non-bird dinosaurs, but we can still keep it at that instead of turning it into the worst extinction event the earth has ever seen. Luckily, governments (and industry) largely have at least accepted that climate change is a thing, and in Europe and the Americas green-house gas emission have actually already been sinking for the last 15 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not great, and these governments still should do much more, but it could also be worse, and the fact that we’re lowering emissions despite our politicians generally being very friendly with industry could give at least a sliver of hope. The emissions of China and India (and the rest of Asia) are still rising, but show signs of decelerated growth at least, and in Africa emissions are still fairly low and rising rather slowly, with a chance that some less developed countries might more or less just skip a big chunk of carbon-based industrialisation in favour of renewables. Altogether this means that we’re already on a way to avoid the worst possible scenarios, and still have the power to keep it towards the lower end of the scale as far as terrible outcomes are concerned.
In addition, while individuals have always less power than whole governments or industries, there are nevertheless things anyone reading this could do, e.g.:
- Voting for parties that favour stronger climate action, and perhaps even more importantly, not supporting those who do less or even nothing. You can also protest or try to influence your government in some other ways.
- Reduce your personal impact by not consuming animal products (in particular meat and dairy), not flying if you can avoid it, not buying stuff you don’t really need, and not having (more) kids.
- Tell other people you know who might listen to do those things. Many people favour climate action in principle, but are too lazy, scared or just otherwise preoccupied to actually start doing stuff on their own. You kicking them in the butt or leading by example can motivate them and in turn other people they might now.
If you’re reading this and whether or not you’re already doing some of those things, I’m sure you can find at least some things you could do (I know I can, and I’m trying to put it into practice), which might in turn also make you feel less depressed about the situation. As mentioned before, I’m not saying that we’re in a great situation, but whining about it helps nobody, and we’re still in a situation where we have the power to stop things from getting even worse.
31·1 year agoIt’s from a longer quote in “A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages” about the language Haskell:
1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?”
Some other languages like e.g. Rust also use monads. The point I was trying to make humorously was that many programming languages sometimes do use math concepts, sometimes even very abstract maths (like monads), and while it’s not maths per se, programming and computer science in general can have quite a bit to do with maths sometimes.
The article gives another reason:
Authorities say the river will help expand agricultural land and reduce the need to import food and wheat.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year drove a global surge in wheat prices, leaving Egypt struggling as it is the world’s biggest wheat importer.In addition, in recent years there have been droughts in East Africa as well, which can’t have been good for the amount of water the Nile carries, and the dam you mention just adds to the whole thing.
For those wondering like me where the water is supposed to come from:
Authorities have said that water for the artificial river will come from recycled agricultural drainage and groundwater.
This doesn’t really strike me as a long term solution though, unless Egypt has vast reserves of groundwater.
coding has nothing to do with math
A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?
i read that something like 1/3 of all human caused extinctions are because we keep bringing cats with us
Do you have a source for that? Intuitively 1/3 of all species extinctions (keep in mind this in general includes plants and other kingdoms of life, not just animals) sounds far too high imo. Maybe you have read that number in a slightly different context, like bird deaths in urban areas, or perhaps in a more specific context similar to the one in your link? Don’t get me wrong, like your link shows, (house) cats can easily have a devastating effect on the local wildlife, in particular birds and small mammals or reptiles (wikipedia has an article on the topic, although I didn’t find anything like your numbers in it). But as far as I know the major ways in which humans have caused extinctions are historically overhunting (mostly affecting large birds and mammals), habitat loss in particular since the advent of agriculture, and more recently of course the effects of the climate crisis since the industrial revolution.
No, it says
100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate
both in the general intro and in the “Extinction rate” section, and
10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth
in the “Extinction rate” section (both verbatim quotes from its first sentence).
The author of the article you mentioned (Alex Howe) is a good example for what I insinuated: He takes issue with Korsgaard’s argument (and, it seems, Kantian ethics more generally), but in his PhD thesis argues for granting “basic citizenship rights” to domestic animals (including farm animals), which is arguably a far more radical position than veganism, which merely posits that it is immoral to exploit (or be cruel towards) animals (e.g. as a food resource). Either way, if you have an issue with Kantian ethics and how they are applied to animal rights, I suggest you take it up with a Kantian (which I am not). And, even if I am repeating myself, none of this has any direct relevance to my earlier point, which is that many moral philosophers from many different schools of thought (including, but by no means limited to, Kantian ethics) have arrived at conclusions which are at least similar to the basic vegan stance, i.e. that unnecessarily causing harm to (sentient) animals, e.g. by exploiting them as food, is immoral.