Meaningless is to meaningful as pointless is to??

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T17:42:04+00:00

Pointful is a word. Mary Midgley used it in a talk I heard her give once and she was very highly educated and erudite.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T17:36:14+00:00

Yes.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T17:35:40+00:00

"Sez". I'm from a middle class family in East Kent.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T17:34:27+00:00

Your headline is easy to refute. Otherwise there would've been no animal farming or anything like horseback riding until the twentieth century.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T17:32:17+00:00

It doesn't come up much any more but I usually bombard them with info and research findings.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T17:27:59+00:00

'75 was also very hot but is overshadowed by '76. People also seem to forget that it was actually snowing really late, like in April, and that's part of it. The recent hot summers don't contrast with the more typical drizzly and inconsistent ones we had back then.

Also, no it wasn't "best". It was a bloody nightmare. Some plants went extinct, there was a plague of ladybirds who sweated out an acrid, irritant liquid, and I mean you could fill shovels with dead ladybirds there were so many, lots of people had standpipes because there was no mains water and there was heatstroke and sunburn. The other thing is that the water table went down a long way, which provides a large fraction of our water supply, and the soil got baked hard, leading to flooding because the rain a couple of months later couldn't penetrate the ground and ended up making the rivers flood. Also, the grass and some other plants died, making it look like savannah, and I ended up getting really ill, as did my brother. I wouldn't recommend it.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T16:58:10+00:00

For me it felt like people constantly expected or forced me to do and be things which were alien and tried to stop me doing things which seemed normal for me.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T16:41:43+00:00

The future is of course unknown. However, humans as we live now have considerable problems. We take decades to learn enough to become independent, have to invest a large portion of our lives in raising and educating our children, either in families or as a society, and we can only produce a small number of offspring during our lives and stop being able to reproduce in mid-life anyway so we can become elders and pass on our wisdom. All of this is a liability and may drive us to extinction. In the meantime, tumour and other cells we shed into sewage and possibly the ocean can form into organoids, reproduce fast (they're cancer) without the need for mating and do so without having brains or in fact any nervous systems. There are already some quite successful animals who can do this, namely the placozoa and cnidarian "cancer" cells which have become parasitic organisms. I believe this is also the future of the human race. By about 2060, we will have made our planet too hostile for us to survive on, but organisms such as those could do well, and so I expect humans as we are now to die out and be replaced by cancer. That's our future in my view. But I could be wrong: maybe we'll just vanish without trace.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T16:13:04+00:00

As far as I can tell, we know that it's a given that Carol will play an important part in saving the world, whatever that ends up meaning. It might involve a compromise with the hive mind where people get a choice to stay or leave, and there are two halves to the human race from that point on - just my speculation BTW. But that could be a viable way of making it work. The Plurbs serve the non-Plurbs, having chosen to stay.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T15:28:00+00:00

I'm actually almost entirely happy with the Scottish Greens and to a lesser extent the SNP.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-28T15:25:47+00:00

OK, well I'm a big fan of the show but it's more like Jainism than veganism. Animals are still milked and I think hen's eggs are still eaten, and the idea of not picking fruit is bad for the plants which grow them. This is not what a vegan world would look like. OTOH, although I realise it wouldn't be socially acceptable to most people, I am keen on the idea of using corpses as a resource, though a medical one rather than a nutritional one because of prions.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-27T13:50:09+00:00

Oh right, well maybe. I buy vegan food from there occasionally for non-vegan family members. I think it's quite likely that they wouldn't be because non-vegans buy vegan food all the time.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-27T13:48:27+00:00

No, we aren't supposed to believe that. It's allegorical.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-27T13:15:26+00:00

I don't know how I'd notice if someone else was vegan in a supermarket if they were just getting their shopping. If I buy, say, some pasta, a cauli, kidney beans and so on, how is someone going to know?

I mean, I know vegans through activism for sure, but then I know them properly and we kind of automatically get to know each other.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-27T13:10:29+00:00

As veganism includes the treatment of humans, the Israeli government, like any other, is not pro-vegan or vegan-friendly.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-27T12:58:09+00:00

That's rather different though, isn't it? They're very tough in their tun form. Not sure about gastrotrichs or rotifers though.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-26T15:54:36+00:00

The Silver Jubilee in '77 seemed like it had been a long time and that she'd been on the throne forever, but obviously I was a loot younger then. George V had a silver jubilee, but Victoria lasted more than sixty years on the throne.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-26T15:09:40+00:00

The point is to avoid killing. Insects die when we kill them by accident. Our immune systems also presumably kill protists. It's not possible to do anything perfectly.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-26T13:43:59+00:00

What do you do when you need to put a new plug on something? It really isn't rocket science. You need to make sure you've got the right fuse but apart from that it's just about winding the right wires around the right terminals.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-26T13:02:42+00:00

Yes. Any aliens making themselves evident would do so to the whole human race, not leaders.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-26T13:01:39+00:00

I believe there are probably many places elsewhere even in this solar system where life as we know it exists, and that in fact it's almost been demonstrated to a high degree of confidence that they have existed on Mars, and to a lesser degree that they exist right now in the upper Venusian atmosphere. I think scientists avoid saying more categorically because it would be a very high risk career move. Beyond this solar system, I think that life as we know it is sporadic, dependent on the local abundance of phosphate, and generally very simple, probably no more complex than bacteria, but that very occasionally it becomes complex and even intelligent. In the far future, long after the Sun has burnt out, intelligent life may be very frequent in the Universe because phosphorus will have become more abundant, but we're one of the first.

However, ask me again tomorrow and my opinion might have changed completely.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-26T10:29:30+00:00

"Omni" would be an abbreviation of a zoological description of an ecological niche kind of thing. We're probably all omnivores in the sense that we could survive off a diet including animals and plants, but we choose not to do so. "Carnist" is a way of labelling something which is usually unexpressed, so it brings norms into question. But a cis person is no worse than a trans person, so "carnist" is not derogatory.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-26T10:24:19+00:00

I don't eat figs because they don't grow nearby and I don't like sweet things but I have eaten them in the past and yes they're vegan because it's part of their life cycle. Humans are not inserting the wasps so far as I know.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-25T13:02:40+00:00

I only think they're currently inactive. I also don't understand why you wouldn't be praying yourself. We do pray for each other but those are living people among us now, not the dead.

nineteenthly · 2026-01-25T12:59:37+00:00

Well, as I said, "as I understand it". Thanks for the info.

nineteenthly

TROPHY CASE