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We live in ~~a society~~ an ecosphere.

No system but the ecosystem

What does that even mean?

Here's an aspect: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/nature-in-the-limits-to-capital-and-vice-versa

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The production of meat and other animal-sourced foods, especially in their industrialized form, entails significant exploitation of animals, labor, and the natural environment. However, concern with animals is often sidelined in left and progressive politics, and veganism is often derided by leftists as a liberal project. Many contend that veganism is fixated on consumerism, asceticism, identity, and deontological ethics, and is insensitive to the oppressions perpetrated by Western, capitalist epistemologies and economic structures. Responding to these charges, this article argues that veganism conceived as a boycott aligns with existing Left commitments to social and environmental justice, and also those concomitant with a trans-species anti-exploitation ethic. The authors elaborate a specific definition of veganism as a boycott, situate it as a tactic within the broader political horizon of total liberation – schematized as a three-tier model for political action – and explain why it offers an effective form of eroding capitalism and other systems of domination. The authors conclude that refusing to consume animal products has tangible economic and social impacts, increases solidarity between human and nonhuman populations, and sensitizes individuals and communities to the socio-political effects of their consumer behavior.

Jonathan Dickstein, Jan Dutkiewicz, Jishnu Guha-Majumdar & Drew Robert Winter (2022) Veganism as Left Praxis, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 33:3, 56-75, DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2020.1837895

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23197060

Male bonobos are larger and stronger than females, so researchers have found it puzzling that the female apes enjoy high status in bonobo society. After analyzing three decades of behavioral data, researchers recently shared a study that pinpoints their source of power: female alliances and coalitions.

archived (Wayback Machine):

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Video description (pasted):

The meat industry and its defenders promise ethical consumption and sustainable farming, but animal agriculture fuels ecological destruction, entrenches human supremacy, and masks cruelty with comforting myths. John Sanbonmatsu, philosopher and author of The Omnivore’s Deception, shatters the myths of “humane meat” and the 'naturalness' of eating meat, and explains why abolishing the animal economy is essential to living an ethical human life. Highlights include:

Why growing up as the child of a Jewish mother and Japanese father in the U.S. sensitized John to bullying and injustice - against both human and nonhuman animals;

Why the origins of human domination over animals are rooted in patriarchy and an ancient human estrangement from animals, and reinforced today by a toxic nexus of masculinity, human supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, and pronatalism;

Why focusing only on factory farming misses the fundamental problem of human domination of animals and the planet - and how books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the new American pastoral ethos perpetuate myths of so-called ethical meat while attacking the animal rights movement;

Why justifying meat-eating as “natural” is ethically bankrupt - on par with past appeals to nature to justify slavery or denying women’s rights - and how vegans and vegetarians provoke defensive ridicule because they reveal uncomfortable truths;

Why the flood of scientific studies on animal cognition and emotion hasn’t changed behavior - and how cultural fascination with AI and plant consciousness distracts from our brutal treatment of fully sentient animals;

Why bad faith - our self-deception about how we treat animals - is the most destructive force preventing moral progress, and why what we’re doing to animals deserves to be called 'evil';

How empathy, an evolved trait we share with animals and desperately need to nurture, is being eroded by increasing social disconnection and anti-empathy tech bro ideologies;

Why lab meat, also known as 'clean meat', is not the solution to speciesism and human supremacism and consuming our way to animal liberation is a delusion;

Why the animal rights movement is being undermined by the money pouring into utilitarian effective altruism and “realistic” approaches - when true compassion demands not animal welfarism, but the abolition of animal exploitation and a direct challenge to the entrenched power structures that prevent moral progress.

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"Draw a circle around the one God loves the most"

Some type of Christian school book.

The choices, ordered like a podium are:

  • bottom: plants
  • animals
  • baby - not baptized
  • top: baptized baby

This kind of indoctrination shows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being with some religious "zoom-in" on the human baby and religious identity.

Traditionalism for the world religions includes this long tradition of "natural hierarchy". It's a core hierarchy as a set, and then each religion can extend it a bit with their own flavor of hierarchy; more layers. The core of human supremacism remains, always.

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This video has a content warning: lots of flesh, organs, and milk, and assholes.

I am going to have to insist on a hypothesis:

Fascism is carnism in decline.

The youtuber there is not vegan, unfortunately, but I do appreciate the effort to point out a few of the associations between ketobros and carnivores to fascism. She manages to talk about class/status in the last third of the video; much less about hierarchy.

It's also important to note that fascists don't really have an ideology, so it's not useful to focus just on ideology.

In the rat race of the "law of the jungle", these proto and paleo fascists also focus on what's now called "biohacking". Well, the rich get real biohacking like that plant-based rich guy who wants to live forever, Bryan Johnson, and the rest get more and more pseudoscientific products; scams.

The thing with diets is that the if you're not getting acute toxicity or poisons, you don't really grasp how harmful it can be, especially if it's not found in long-term population studies.

It's such a pain in the moral ass. These meat clowns are harming themselves with their ignorance and LARP diets, and that forces me to figure out if I should warn them or if I should just let them earn Darwin awards. Either way, they are feeding a not-so-modern grifting economy, which spreads this contagion of foolishness to others.

The product fantasy of this "meat", raw or not, from whatever animal, is a strange thing.

It is presented in this naturalistic fallacy wrapper, which wraps around an appeal to tradition fallacy wrapper, which actually wraps an empty box of hope that's actually techno-hopium:

It is about a "meat technology", and I don't mean just zootechny.

It's the technology of extracting scarce "dense nutrients", nutrient mining. And so it carries the status of luxury... and not just any luxury, but luxury that provides "powers".

The "powers" aspect is important for the fantasy, for biohacking. Much like the "nofap" types believe in powers from semen retention, the carnivores believe in other powers that they gain. And those powers are useful in the rat race, to dominate others, to win. In their fantasy.

Vegans aren't immune from such beliefs, especially raw vegans; I bet that those are more likely to go from vegan to ex-vegan to carnivore on their "journey".

Anyway, in the old days, this would be a talk about magical beliefs. They're treating meat like an alchemical potion from fantasy games. In modern times, this is about pseudoscience, a power-up.

Any sufficiently obscure pseudoscience is indistinguishable from magic.

That's the spirit of advertising these uber-carnist diets.

MEAT is sold to these "high-status males" (seeking) like those science-fiction pills from last century, those pills that contained all the nutrients and you could replace an entire meal by swallowing a couple of those pills.

They are not actually selling some true paleo diet, they're selling a fantasy of the past packaged as science-fantasy present:

The 🥩red pill.

And the extra layer of grift, because it appeals to extremely ignorant people, is that it works on the conspiracy logic easily:

"the meat pill technology was always there, it was just being hidden by a globalist conspiracy!"

The retroactive implication that the meat power-gaining solution was always there is following the scam method of making the target think that they were always right, that they are smart without knowing that they are smart. That's like a drug for fools and people who believe that they were born perfect.

Of course, the meat pill works only so much for marketing, so it's usually accompanied by supplements.

The conspiracy aspects, which are also seen in the denial of science, are a very obvious funnel to fascist beliefs, with an ecofascist bent.

The retroactive implication of the grift, with its conspiracy, is that common one in fascism: the myth of being fallen. Whether it's fallen from some paradise or fallen from space or fallen from the top of the "food chain", it's about The Fall.

In the paleo-conspiracy, humans, at least a certain... "subspecies" of humans, fell from the glorious past of maximally manly men when the evil Poaceae plants enslaved him 10000 years ago, and it has just gotten worse with industrial agriculture. The grifters promote a cure for The Fall, a restoration to well deserved glory.

The palingenesis consists of that rebirth as Fred Flintstone barbarian macho man model of extremely toxic masculinity.

The nation, however, isn't necessarily identified by nationality. In some cases, it can be, if the nation is based on settler-colonialism which usually came with pastoralist entrepreneurs (very European). But the nation can simply be any cult, any religion, any ethnicity, any special tribe, united in spirit.

The Nation of Meatflakes.

These are not harmless movements, fascism is never harmless.

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The rhetoric of “hopium” is failing as ecological overshoot deepens. “Hopium”, a colloquial term that is a blend of the words “hope” and “opium” (as though it were a drug), represents a faith in technological and market-based solutions to address our multiple reinforcing crises, despite evidence to the contrary. We're living in the long defeat and we must own and confront it with courage. Award-winning essayist, Pamela Swanigan, joins us.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.vg/post/2138546

"Understanding and safeguarding the social lives of elephants is no longer optional. It's a necessity for ensuring these magnificent animals thrive in an increasingly human-dominated world."

Paper: Knowledge transmission, culture and the consequences of social disruption in wild elephants | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Cultural knowledge is widely presumed to be important for elephants. In all three elephant species, individuals tend to congregate around older conspecifics, creating opportunities for social transmission. However, direct evidence of social learning and cultural traditions in elephants is scarce. Here, we briefly outline that evidence then provide a systematic review of how elephant societies respond to the loss of potentially knowledgeable individuals or opportunities for knowledge transfer, which we characterize as social disruption. We consider observations from 95 peer-reviewed, primary research papers that describe disruption to elephant societies or networks via the removal or death of individuals. Natural deaths were mentioned in 14 papers, while 70 detailed human-caused deaths or disruption. Grouping descriptions according to consequences for behaviour and sociality, and demography and fitness, we show that severely disrupted populations are less cohesive, may exhibit reduced fitness or calf survival and respond inappropriately to threats and predators. We suggest that severe social disruption can inhibit or break potential pathways of information transmission, providing indirect evidence for the role of social transmission in elephants. This has implications for elephant conservation amid increasing anthropogenic change across their habitats.

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To paraphrase a famous old book character,

Those who live by hierarchy, die by the hierarchy.

What few people seem to observe and critique is the role of optimism in this culture of generating dystopias. Optimism bias:

Optimism bias or optimistic bias is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. It is also known as unrealistic optimism or comparative optimism. It is common and transcends gender, ethnicity, nationality, and age.[1] Autistic people are less susceptible to this kind of bias.[2] It has also been reported in other animals, such as rats and birds.[3]

Video description:

America feels broken—but how did we get here? In this video, we break down three of the biggest flaws driving modern conservative ideology and how they’ve contributed to the country’s ongoing decline. From anti-intellectualism and distrust in public institutions to the abandonment of the working class, we explore how media literacy, neoliberalism, and identity politics intersect in shaping today’s political chaos.

We take a closer look at the contradictions within conservative thinking: how calls for “Make America Great Again” ignore the reality that the golden era many long for was built on progressive policies, strong unions, and high taxes on the wealthy. We also examine how the influence of right-wing media—from Fox News to figures like Joe Rogan—fuels fear, misinformation, and reactionary politics, despite many conservatives having real, lived experiences that contradict what they’re being told.

If you’re frustrated by the current state of American politics, confused by the hypocrisy of MAGA populism, or just want a deeper understanding of how we ended up with such stark political divides, this video unpacks the economic and cultural forces at play.

Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe if you want more videos on American politics, conservative contradictions, and the battle over the future of the country.

TIME STAMPS:

00:00 Introduction

00:55 Psychological Basis for Conservatism

05:21 Symptoms Not the Cause

12:34 Anti-Intellectualism

16:29 No Empathy

19:12 MAGA?

22:01 Don't Be a Bootlicker

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

No summary, the video is only 17 minutes long.

Not sure why the automatic preview text is not in English.

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One of the purposes of religions like the Abrahamic ones.

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Note that climate models have a history of underestimating the cooling effect of aerosol pollution:

Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? (2025)

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27369670

I know, not all omnis. But this is based on personal experience.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26874488

Capitalism is a scam, and a part of a broader scam culture, a scam tradition.

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