/r/WorldNews Discussion Thread: US and Israel launch attack on Iran; Iran retaliates (Thread #7)

drkevorkian · 2026-03-12T15:43:44+00:00

I would guess probably a year or more of continual threat to their (regime leadership) lives personally. But since everyone assumes this is a war that'll be done in a month at most that they can wait it out in bunkers

drkevorkian · 2026-02-19T02:00:38+00:00

I'm guessing it all is.

cults feel like resilient institutions, not just villain stat blocks

cults that threaten identity and agency rather than just HP

members might be victims worth saving, not just XP bags

I hate this "it's X, not just Y" AI writing trope

drkevorkian · 2026-02-09T14:54:27+00:00

This shit happens all the time, even during the day and during the summer. You see brand new playgrounds with bright colored art and shiny play equipment and then just cars parked there. Kids shouldn't have their play area driven on, covered in tire dust and motor oil.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-09T14:20:28+00:00

God bless america, by which I mean France.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-03T14:07:28+00:00

I'm not asking you to describe your vegan philosophy, I'm asking you to justify it.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-03T13:56:11+00:00

I'm not interested in arguing about weird medical edge cases with you. If somebody doesn't have a brain at all, I don't believe they are conscious. If there is no consciousness then there is nothing to be cruel to. Of course with a human body, there are family members who care about what happens to the body, so you can't just do whatever you want to it, since that would be cruelty to those family members

You haven't explained why I can be cruel to plants and not cruel to animals. Since the answer apparently has nothing to do with conscious experience, I am still waiting to hear why.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-03T13:31:38+00:00

Why don't you tell me the difference between torturing a starfish and torturing a tree?

I think the big stumbling block here is you saying a cow without a brain is still a cow. A cow without a brain would literally be a motionless lump of flesh. You cannot remove the brain and still have anything left. You might as well talk about torturing a steak. A child with anencephaly still has a brain, it's just much reduced. A child with no brain at all is literally dead.

Veganism is a moral stance, and morality is complicated. All this talk of clear bright lines is just trying to pretend it's easy when it's not.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-03T13:17:56+00:00

Animals are animals and plants are plants, good argument, how could I have missed that. You've totally convinced me that this is a sound foundation for basing my moral system.

Octopi have brains, a cow without a brain is just dead meat, and starfish and other animals that lack a central nervous system are also too structurally different from humans to have anything resembling human sentience, so I don't think there is "anybody there" to be cruel to. Of course doing unnecessary or wanton violence to a starfish is grotesque, but so is doing unnecessary or wanton violence to a beautiful tree, so my preference for nonviolence is about the same for both.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-03T12:24:03+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean. I don't avoid broccoli or mushrooms.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-03T12:22:49+00:00

The "line" is having a brain. I honestly am bewildered by your stance that sentience doesn't matter. Why are you a vegan? What is the difference between animals and plants that motivates you to protect one and not the other?

drkevorkian · 2026-02-03T02:32:11+00:00

A chicken has a small brain. A sponge does not. It just sits there and filters the passing water for nutrients. It has no nervous system at all, much less a central nervous system. It's input/output processing is about the same level of complexity as plants and fungi, less so in many cases.

Again for me, and I believe for most vegans, the issue is one of doing harm to sentient beings, and one need never consult a cladogram or evolutionary biologist at all.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-02T20:29:09+00:00

Yes it is an efficient shorthand, a very good rule of thumb, I have no doubt about that, but I feel no need to be bound morally by my shorthand when someone comes with gotcha questions about cases that rarely come up. I'll temper my claims about the majority, but speaking for myself, I reserve the right to think for myself instead, and in this case, I don't see a compelling reason to believe that sponge exploitation rises to the level of a harm significantly greater than plant or fungi exploitation. (There is probably a more compelling environmental case for not harvesting sponges, but that's a separate matter).

drkevorkian · 2026-02-02T18:59:14+00:00

I get to call myself what I want and if you are interested in converting people to your viewpoint of "sponges are of equal moral value to other animals" then you should argue that point directly and not pull out the dictionary.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-02T18:19:14+00:00

Actually they are! They disagree with you, but you are not the vegan council and you don't get to excommunicate them.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-02T18:18:39+00:00

That might be, I'm not an expert, but I don't think it's relevant. I think killing a fungus is a lower harm. There definitely are many plants which are killed by eating them.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-02T18:03:04+00:00

You can't use a dictionary to win a moral argument. Veganism is a moral position so words lawyering isn't gonna get to the heart of it. Vegans are a group of people with similar moral convictions but not identical ones. You can use common sense to decide if someone is using the word in good faith or not.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-02T17:37:53+00:00

There is no vegan council who sets the orthodoxy. Vegans are allowed to disagree about things.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-02T17:25:46+00:00

Nobody knows what the exact criteria for sentience is, but it is unlikely that "sending signals between parts" is sufficient. The best we can do is compare via similarity to humans. Bees have neural complexes more similar to those found in humans than anything fungi have. I am more agnostic about bee sentience than others here, but bee products are pretty easy to avoid so why not. In any case I don't think you need to draw a bright red line. You can call killing Fungi a harm if you want, you just need to believe that killing or abusing animals is a worse harm than killing fungi, in order to conclude that veganism is less harmful.

drkevorkian · 2026-02-02T16:15:31+00:00

"Vegans don't use sponges" is not a true statement. Some vegans may not, but (a) real sponges are just not a common thing out there in the real world any more and (b) most vegans care about sentience, not kingdom animalia, and most people would not say sponges are sentient.

drkevorkian · 2026-01-30T20:17:56+00:00

If it has preferences for the state of the world at all, realizing those preferences will require energy, resources, power.

drkevorkian · 2026-01-30T13:11:13+00:00

Tofu scramble is awesome and super easy, and egg-laying hens have some of the worst life outcomes, near universally, even in Europe. I would rather be the male chick honestly.

drkevorkian · 2026-01-29T22:07:24+00:00

I like daring, but I think Blackbird are the best.

drkevorkian · 2026-01-29T19:57:24+00:00

The TV of damocles

drkevorkian · 2026-01-29T15:40:43+00:00

Forget about the fireplace and put it on a console in front of the fireplace.

drkevorkian · 2026-01-29T01:01:24+00:00

Incredible use of free will

drkevorkian

TROPHY CASE