naevaTheRat

She makes a handful of digital toys free. Slurs hurt real people. Keep this in context

I think I misunderstood you.

See my other comment for why I think freedom is sort of a useless thing to frame anything around. At least without further clarification.

Reactionary ideologies are incoherent.

In an age of neoliberalism governments are terrified of actually being a government.

The restriction of freedom of say association bans and move on orders is apparently fine. Restricting the freedom of a cesspit of an industry to hook millions of Aussies?

Gee idk. We have to weigh the pros and cons here.

What's even the point of a life in politics if you want grasp big moments like this? Yeah a few are crooked as hell, but most backbenchers have a shitty enough job that is going nowhere they must have some motivation right?

I think it's tempting to try and be pithy but freedom is complicated. For some people freedom is an absolute, do what you want when you want. For some it is about theoretical possibilities, for example if you ask if people are free to quit there job the answer heavily depends on how someone balances theory vs practice. Others take a practical lens, freedom only counts if it's plausible to do.

Sometimes freedom is about ideals. you are free to read all the political theory you like, you umm wont because it's boring but if someone threatened that would you be upset? At other junctures freedom because pragmatic, "what use is freedom to read if I don't have freedom to eat? I'll trade one for the other" someone might say.

Some people rate permissions more than restrictions, some the opposite.

I don't think it's a concept we can really pin down. Everyone has their own interpretation and it's not universally values: much as dominant ideologies often insist it is, the rise of fascism should hint that others care much less about it.

Sigh, I'll wade into this river of shit.

Liberalism is broadly understood as neoliberalism, which is an ideological descendant from classical liberalism. This ideology positions itself as being broadly in favour of individual freedom within a rather tight definition of freedom. Namely liberals are concerned with the ability of people to read what they like, own what they like, marry whomever they like and so on provided they do this inside of a system of capitalist free market exchange.

Modern liberalism tends to frown on heavy government intervention in market affairs, which they see as representing the free (and thus good) exchange of goods between individuals. They also tend to be broadly in favour of the militaristic western global hegemony.

Criticism of this attitude comes from 2 places.

1. too much freedom.

2. not enough freedom.

(1) is people that want women bound up in the kitchen and walk around with an odd gait that makes you remember Indiana Jones films

(2) are people (I'm in this camp) who see liberalism as a weak ideological position that favours stability over justice and, in so doing, ignores the suffering of billions.

I mean it's a minority of the suffering compared to like broiler hens slowly suffocating in sawdust filled with shit after their skeleton gives out under the rapid growth of their breasts.

Or even just the incredible use of pesticides and baits.

There's a lot to improve in agriculture, we need to do what we can where we can and the number 1 priority is getting everyone on a plant based diet. That said, I support my local CSA as a way to get a lot of the bits and pieces without pesticides and intensive agriculture.

No worries, good faith questions are always welcome. We have to learn somewhere. I think https://ourworldindata.org/ has a bunch of nice graphics about land use, emissions, and efficiency if you want to browse around.

I was going to become a farmer back in highschool lol, worked on the school farm etc. A lot of stuff is hidden from people by benign images of smiling cows and so on. Animal ag is, in general, staggeringly inefficient. Most of the abject horror comes not because farmers are evil, but because it is the only way to make an affordable product (and it's heavily subsidised!).

If you look at percentage of calories from plants across the world you see that exploited countries with low income levels generally eat a shitload more plants, and less industrialised people often reserve meat for feasts and so on (some exceptions, e.g. the Inuit but that's very uncommon). Until recently regular consumption of animal products was the domain of royalty.

I'm having trouble understanding your comment. It sounds like the gist is: Wouldn't we have to clear more land to feed a vegan world?

The answer is no. While we might have to move what land we use a bit, in general human crops either are, or can be grown on the same land as, farm animal feed crops. Because thermodynamics is a thing it is always going to be less efficient to feed soy to a cow, who as well as heat losses spends a lot of that energy doing cow related things, than to a human directly. Particularly in an age where processing like grinding and cooking can help us extract nutrients that would otherwise be difficult for a human body trying to eat e.g. raw lentils.

Before it's brought up, pastures are staggeringly inefficient use of land. We would actually have mass famines trying to feed everyone on pastured cattle.

It's true that some places with pastures wouldn't be suitable for cropping, but this is land we could return to our other earthling friends and it's not very productive on a calorie per square km basis anyway. Also think of e.g. all the soy fields for 'finishing' cows or feeding chickens and pigs we could just direct use at something like a 10x calorie efficiency gain.

you ever seen a combine harvester up close? Insects, small rodents, rabbits etc can get caught and freeze.

Habitat clearing can lead to starvation etc, or lack of cover to hide from predators, farmers poison pests and so on to protect yield.

It's not malicious, but it happens.

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess says Australia's terror-level threat has been raised to "probable" due to a rising mix of ideologies where more people think "violence is permissible".

What an asinine phrasing. Basically everyone except the Jains think that violence is permissible. Mike Burgess certainly thinks it is.

Where people disagree is over when, the degree, by whom, and to whom. This gross liberal idea what when the cops throw a climate protestor to the ground and pepper spray them, that is wholesome non violence. But if a climate protestor throws a brick through a window that is scary, evil, bad violence is part of how society stays so broken and alienating.

I'm probably much more towards the non violence spectrum than your average person. For instance it absolutely disgusts me that we permit police torture implements that would be illegal in war. Your average person is quite bullish on those, and that police are allowed to escalate violence by upgrading charges through resisting arrest. So don't take this as an endorsement of violence against people. Just that if we ignore how violent the status quo is we don't get to act surprised when it produced violent resistance, even if most of those people want something much worse.

Oh you're an unironic carnist. How dull.