Everyone in here arguing against 4b need to take a look in the mirror. The fact that so many of you are trying push against it is in itself a demonstration of why it’s necessary. Respecting bodily autonomy does not have to be hard.

I lean in favor of rebirth, but via naturalistic processes rather than projections of our own moral wants. I don’t need a supernatural explanation to recognize that whatever is most irreducibly “me” was born at least once. Why would I assume it would only be once?

If we follow from that premise, we can also chart a kind of probabilistic, umm, not karma but something not far off: If we’re reborn after death, how do we determine what kind of life our next one is going to be? Pretty obvious actually, just look at what kind of life everyone has already. If, for example, only 1% of humans have an especially good life, it looks like there’s a a really slim chance any one of us is going to be the one who gets to have that kind of life.

By contrast, 99% of humans are living in increasingly bad conditions, lower wages, higher prices and virtually every economic card stacked against us, as well as *gestures broadly*. It’s remarkably more likely that anyone would be reborn as a 99 percenter.

But why should we assume that we would only ever be reborn as a human? The total human population right now is 8.2 billion. There are estimated to be about 20 quadrillion ants in the world. And more than 44 billion animals have been bred into existence and slaughtered for food this year alone. Are you more likely to be reborn a human, an ant, or someone else’s property?

There’s a consequence here if rebirth is the law of the land. It would mean that death is not an escape after all. The only way to give yourself your best chance of a better next life would be to put in effort to make the world better for everyone. There is no way out, only through.

The “what about plants” argument is such a thoroughly debunked joke argument that it’s amazing anyone would continue to make it. Eating animals and their secretions requires harming significantly more plants than eating the plants directly because animals need to be fed too, and animals as food is by far the least efficient and most environmentally destructive way to have a food system.

Context matters. In the ancient world starvation was a constant threat, so a source of concentrated calories like honey could in some cases be a matter of life and death despite the dangers of getting that honey. In industrial society we have in many cases the opposite problem - the majority of the top causes of death are lifestyle diseases which ultimately come down to overconsumption and sedentary lifestyles. Too much dietary fat, especially too much saturated fats, too much sugar, too much refined foods, too much concentrated calories, too much easily consumed liquid calories.

By contrast vegans by far have the easiest time maintaining balanced bodyweight levels.

If you all could learn to let go of your prejudice you might learn to recognize that doing the right things for animal’s rights is also some of the best things you could do for yourself. These “vegans” you hate so much are just trying to get you to stop self-harming.

Animal ethics isn’t just about whether other animals are being harmed or killed, it’s also about being against exploitation. They might not be able to think in quite the same way that we do, but it’s still clear that they have their own wills and lives of their own that they want to live. It’s worth asking ourselves if we really want a society that’s willing to exploit and turn other thinking beings into commodities, even the ones whose thinking appears to be so much more rudimentary than our own.

It’s easy to dismiss them because they’re “just bugs”, but presently bugs of all species are facing radical population declines with all the ecological instability - maybe even looming collapse - that brings. Maybe we collectively might be more willing to protect bug populations and do more to protect our environments if more of us stopped to analyze our anti-bug bias and considered that they have a natural right to life like we do. The planet does not exist solely for us.

Also, honey is essentially a refined sugar that’s no better healthwise than table sugar. Date sugar/powder is a sweetener made of whole fruit and is a much better choice. Plus, it’s just weird to want to eat the vomit of other species anyway.

It would be more accurate to say it’s like requiring you to make the source code for ZSNES available if you were distributing copies of ZSNES.

What, where do you get that? Any publicly conveyed copies of gpl-licensed software must make their source code available, and be published under the same license. This is true regardless of modifications.

Came in to say this. Linux on ARM is getting so close to daily driver ready.

I know it would have the same issues as the Unreal Engine - all the training, engine building, and systems integration it’d take to get a game released, but I think it’d be cool if Bethesda were to make an Elder Scrolls game on their ID Tech engine. That codebase is pretty celebrated.

Would you care to elaborate on what you feel like when you try living on plants? What do you tend to eat? How long does it take before you start feeling like shit?

Judging by your last comment about it “not hitting the same” my initial thought is that the issue might not even be nutritional, possibly more psychological/subjective.

Mint is literally a slightly modified Ubuntu.

The sheer amount of changes that occur on a plant-based diet are too numerous for me to be able to pinpoint any specific thing. It wouldn’t surprise me if I do get more vitamin a these days, as well as quite a few other important micronutrients that I may or may not have been low on.

And that’s not even getting into the vast topic of phytonutrients.

Or just use flatpak or Appimage.

Is the Snap backend available and open-source? If not, then it’s antithetical to software freedom because Canonical is trying to close their users into a walled garden in the ways that Apple and Google are with their app stores.

There are plenty of software packaging systems that work just as well or better than Snap, and promote software freedom (Flatpak, Appimage, or even just traditional package managers). By using and promoting Snap over these, you are working against the growth of digital rights.

It’s impossible to have a fully free system?

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

But more to your point, it’s a false dichotomy. Even before the latest changes to the Debian install media, for years it was maybe unintuitive but still easy enough to just choose the “nonfree” install iso. That one would automatically include all the proprietary bits that are necessary for a fully functional Linux system.

But now those nonfree parts are in the Debian install by default, so there really is just nothing that you get from Ubuntu that can’t just as easily work in Debian - especially since everyone is moving toward flatpaks, and appimages anyway.

This.

But you’re also promoting Ubuntu’s continued use, when Snaps are just one example of Canonical being antithetical to free software values. Mint is all the benefits of Ubuntu without that garbage, so why not that?

Snap should be reason enough that everyone should abandon Ubuntu, especially when Mint is right there. The last thing we need is to make Linux more like Android+Google Play.

When something needs to be said, it needs to be said.