The artistic talent here is remarkable but the title ‘Symbiosis’ (as defined as a mutually beneficial relationship between different species) does not accurately describe the relationship between man and horse. Man enslaves and exploits Horse for labor. Given that Horse must be ‘broken’ to be ridden and caged to prevent him from finding his freedom we should assume that he does not desire to be so used because it does not bring him a pleasure greater than freedom.

Listen, AI is great when it’s folding proteins or looking for novel solutions to math problems, doing work that can be checked by human minds to make sure the logic of the AI and the logic of the problem are in accordance. It’s universally reviled when it replaces art with garbage. Art is meant to enrich human experience, to help us understand, to help us grow, to be an authentic expression of our inner world. AI has no inner world. It has no experience and no understanding. Perhaps there’s something to the arguments of those who hate it?

Perhaps in this world where so much of real value has already been taken from us we reject this most recent attempt to take away the thing that satisfies one of our most basic needs?

Have you considered what you’re looking at and what it means? Because the work of a human artist has meaning even if the technology is old. Hallucinations of a machine have no meaning. If there is no meaning the act of consuming the media will hollow you out instead of filling you up.

lol, if you were brought to full weight before slaughter you’d already be dead and I wouldn’t have to listen to your nonsense. From the point of view of the victim, who is placed in what’s colloquially referred to as a rape rack and has an arm and an needle forced inside her, it’s a rape. If she wasn’t restrained she’d kick her assailant or run away. Anybody believing this weird claim about veal can go look up veal farms, endless horrible rows of tiny enclosures containing baby cows.

Let’s not forget that farms have an exemption from bestiality laws because those laws would prevent them from doing what they do.

THUMPASAURUS https://youtu.be/T6dmMUR9TVI This is one of the best songs in existence.

That’s kind of a crap article with a fair bit of obvious bias. They’re parroting common weak anti-vegan talking points.

Capitalism is what’s actually at play here. Veganism is and has been clearly rising in popularity forever, but capitalists got it in their head that the big moment of cultural shift was here and they made a bunch of new investments hoping to ride the wave. That wave isn’t quite here, and so they overreached, and now they don’t have the demand they gambled on. Veganism is still on the rise, steadily, but we aren’t at a tipping point yet.

Who give a fuck about the money, though? Veganism is a rights issue. It’s about the radical idea that torturing and raping and killing animals who are substantially the same as us is a fucked up and terrible thing to do. We do violence towards other humans because of this pervasive idea that it’s okay to hurt others for our own pleasure if we can just figure out a convincing enough excuse. Vegans reject all excuses. If there’s a victim, there’s a crime. You rape a cow to get her pregnant so you can kill her baby for veal and milk her so hard she bleeds and then rape her again and keep the cycle going until she dies on her feet, all for nothing more than your own pleasure, then a rape was committed, and so was a murder, and so was an insane violation of the bodily autonomy of another sentient being. We don’t care who the victim is, only that they exist.

Bullshit, veganism is the moral baseline for decency towards other sentient beings. Effective change starts at the personal level and progresses to the systemic once enough people have actually changed themselves. Anything you hear about how people aren’t personally responsible is a cowardly attempt to avoid responsibility. People give money to corporations, that’s how they do the evils they do. When you can stop giving corporations power without harming yourself and you choose to still give them power? You’re the problem, and personal change is the solution that must precede system level change.

Veganism is praxis. Making empty claims about opposing abuse while actively, materially supporting it is not.

Criminy, ‘vote blue’ doesn’t mean vote and then sit at home thinking your work is done. It means voting for the lesser evil and then continuing to leverage the whole of your might to making the system better. It means fight just as hard for justice, just do it while trying to pick a less evil bad guy to have to fight. You want a whole new system? Then fight for it, and vote blue while you’re at it because it’ll be easier to kick those idiots out than the outright fascists.

This hurts me. The term is ‘yoked’ as in strong as an ox that can bear a yoke, not ‘yolked’ as in somehow related to egg slime. Hugging gorillas is very wholesome though.

Bro vegan athletes win in the olympics, in strong man, in sprints, in marathons, all over the place. They have to work hard for it, sure, but there’s nothing special about meat protein.

Many things follow this pattern, but not all. It’s important to recognize when you’re being fed outright lies by the real villains and when you’re actually part of the problem. Don’t pretend corporations are solely to blame if those corporations can only do what they do because you willfully pay them for it. When they have a monopoly on necessary goods, sure, they’re entirely the bad guys. When they would do harm whether or not you pay them, same thing. But don’t act like the corp is the bad guy and you’re the poor little victim if you’re choosing to empower the bad guys when you have the option to spend your money ethically instead.

The reason is that art made by a human has human creative reasoning behind it and therefore when I take the time to look for meaning in it I can find it. The art can say something to me that means something about the human experience. AI art has no human creative reasoning and so when I look for meaning there is none. It is only a surface impression and so the time I spend looking at it is wasted because there is nothing but illusion.

We don’t care about art for the shapes and colors, we care because a human did something with meaning and intention and by studying it we can learn about the human condition. AI slop brings no joy. It looks like a cake but when you cut into it it’s nothing but sawdust.

Yes my friend. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” ― Albert Camus

Who enforces the ‘strong rule of law’? There’s no way we can have some perfect incorruptible authority on which to depend and that’s why organizations that are more horizontal than vertical are better for us. A citizen militia is organized enough to get shit done and leaderless enough to be resistant to centralized corruption. The model is not without its flaws but we mustn’t pretend that the coercive vertical hierarchy of our current system is better.

The limits on power you desire can only be enforced with power and it’s best if the power doing that work is decentralized.

It’s an appeal to futility to say that you shouldn’t do the good you can because you can’t do the good you want to.

A world with no billionaires and no cars that still supports the industrialized slaughter of billions of sentient beings for the sensory pleasure of a privileged minority is still an evil place. That’s billionaire shit, right? Profiting off of the suffering of countless others who are trapped in a system that exploits them?

Sure, the climate needs systemic change and one person can’t stop it, but do you think people who aren’t even willing to change their own lives are gonna change the whole system? Of course not. The first step is finding your courage and changing yourself. Then you work your way outwards and build community and then movements and then you change the system.

I think we should consider this the way we would any other form of hurting people. So long as you don’t have to, it’s wrong to do so. I agree that we shouldn’t body shame and I question the need to do so even in this instance, but I have to acknowledge that those on the right do not respond to reason or appeals to their better nature. If by mocking them we can hurt their ego enough that they start acting better to stop the mocking and that stops them from literally killing people then by calling them ‘short’ we saved lives. War is messy business and I’d much rather hurt someone’s ego and cause the societal harm of normalizing shaming about body type than have to kill somebody.

I’ll reiterate that body shaming is an ugly thing and the only way to justify it is as the lesser of two evils. We have to hate fascists openly and unabashedly. They have to know that all the social niceties we give to tolerant people cannot apply to them.

Body acceptance is a form of tolerance and tolerance is a social contract. It’s dangerous to body shame but not more dangerous than tolerating the intolerant.

Emphasis on ‘potentially’. Don’t waste too much time on them, some of them get off on watching you uselessly spend your time and energy and sanity on them. Brainwashing doesn’t work like it does in comic books. These are people who were already willing to and capable of rationalizing putting kids into cages and the ‘brainwashing’ just gave them an easy explanation.

It’s like a person who has committed rape. Even if they come out later as an anti-rape activist and they’re publicly remorseful and they do a lot of work to make up for the harm they caused you still aren’t gonna leave them alone with your sister.

I like it, let’s try it. I’m sure there are pitfalls but they can’t be worse than what we have now.

Sounds like you don’t have enough experience with modern automatics to hold such a strong opinion about them then. I love a manual transmission but modern automatics are usually very good. There was a time they were less efficient and less good at shifting at the right time but those days are pretty well gone. You do still sacrifice some fine control that you almost never need and they are less fun, but let’s not talk shit on them for issues that have been solved for years.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that animals feel pain and are sentient like us, and despite the pop science articles to the contrary there is no scientific evidence that plants feel pain or have sentience at all. Plants respond to stimulus in very complicated ways, that’s what we have evidence for. Don’t pretend the two are equivalent. Stop getting your ideas from sensationalist pop science garbage and read the actual studies.