It's the same direction of travel as recent UK laws allowing police to stop people preparing to join protests if they think the accused might be planning to e.g. glue themselves to something.

IMO this is basically policing thought crimes. It worries me.

Rhetoric can be used to justify any action against any group on very arbitrary pretenses, and while I don't think "groups whose primary reason for existing is explicitly to facilitate crime should be closely scrutinized" is particularly dystopian, you're probably right that it could provide a good starting point for a slippery slope of criminalising association with political opposition :/

Could be? You should look into the history of the Black Panthers. The US government doesn't need to make membership illegal to suppress and destroy political movements.

Membership in an organisation can be conclusive evidence you joined a criminal enterprise/criminal conspiracy, making the the entire debate somewhat moot.

But fine, only joining the criminal conspiracy is illegal, being a member can be legal (you always have to join to become a member).

It’s scary seeing the president call me a terrorist for opposing fascism.

That's a particularly bad example to repeat in support of free speech restrictions:

> "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular analogy for speech or actions whose principal purpose is to create panic, and in particular for speech or actions which may for that reason be thought to be outside the scope of free speech protections. The phrase is a paraphrasing of a dictum, or non-binding statement, from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The case was later partially overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. an immediate riot).

Ok so add this to these "exceptions".

How's the health insurance? You got dental?

You have no idea how much F*s a cat gives.

You don't even have to feed my cat for it to like you. Any human attention at all and the engine runs.

A vet once told me that male orange cats can become food-obsessed, and my entire experience with cats agrees with that. One orange male that needs to be food restricted, while every other cat I know doesn't.

But how can this "remote-grass-touching-arm" push the "smell" and "tactile" back to the user? Is there an open spec for this? It should certainly be P2P and E2E encrypted. Also "smells" should ensure not to use patented or proprietary names.

Maybe some CSmS, Cascading Smell Sheets? Or TFP, Tactile Feedback Protocol, the one that uses JWT and JSON over HTTP2 and websockets?

and a remote foot for the feet people

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dont quote me on this but also there are 2 documented feeder types and i believe the second one, the shelter feeder, is the one that came to the U.S. the purrrr owners are very kind and will probably give you information though or at least a date for when they might become more widely available. contact info here https://www.hipurrrr.com/

I think veterinary drug residue is a big concern here too

Weightlifting and martial arts

I try for the classic "1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight a day" and I try to limit carbs whenever I have a chance because I already have a habit of eating too many of them.

There’s also a significant conversation about mere illegality and social rejection not actually doing much to address the underlying tendency to exploitation that (a) has prevented reconciliation and relief for formerly enslaved people and their descendants for more than a century and (b) is woven through the labor model common even in the West. Exploited paid laborers aren’t in the same category as enslaved persons, but we shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that economic injustice has been meaningfully addressed.

To make room for slavery mentally you have to believe that some people are subhuman or at least beneath the threshold for human rights.

What's surprising to me is that it's become more common to describe people you dislike as subhuman and to for people to support violence or cruelty toward them. Similarly there is a trend to see hatred and anger as positive goods.

Who is "WE"? The western world is perfectly happy with prison labor and other exploitative "voluntary" working conditions.

> most of the world does not hold that view

“most” is a lot. Which parts of the world?

> While everyone WE know thinks slavery is morally evil

Who is “we”?

Out of curiosity, which parts of the world is actual slavery a normal thing?

Well I had eaten last eggs I guess 2-3 months ago when my father kept on insisting it.

Otherwise i had quit it for an year straight or maybe longer, I just didn't want to say I had quit when I recently ate them (and actually I didn't like them thaat much) I rarely used to eat eggs but when they hurt my conscience I stopped eating it and its quite easy and I was never a true egg eater anyway, maybe on rare occasions which I have also stopped now.

So you could say I have quit :) but its always funny having my father explain to me that they are build in factories ,like, its still messy for those poor animals...

I am not even American but I remember McCain more and more when I hear about this. he was so much better than this.

I have hope that America/ any country can fix itself though, it isn't too late. Let's still hope things change for better since I feel like a lot of countries are becoming radicalized in that sense.

I guess we gotta be worried about what discourse we allow in our society or have some better checks and balances all around the world to lessen radicalization I suppose.

Also paradox of tolerance strikes again, should we be intolerant to intolerance as in this case, you decide.

The stuff coming out of young republicans is beyond the pale. These kids are making vile jokes about doing a genocide / Holocaust of Democrats, minorities, their political opponents, etc.

And they’ve been consistently doing it for so long in this chat, that it’s hard to dismiss this as some crass joking. It seems like many of these people sincerely hold pro-Nazi views.

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Considering the current US regime would like to revisit Wong Kim Ark (1898), the 19th amendment (1920) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) it's fair to say they're trying undo over 100 years of civil rights progress.

Not to mention the growing ICE detention camp archipelago which is reminiscent of the era of Japanese Interment (1942-1946).

Even economically - though we're in a K-shaped recovery - many of the labour protections and economic promises of the New Deal have been repealed since the Reagan era (by both parties).

I wasn't particularly being dystopian. I was thinking of the quote: "Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution."

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When have dystopian comments NOT been hot? Maybe a few years in the 90's, between the fall of the USSR and the Balkan war?

Then be angry at factory farming, not eating meat.

There are loads of people that still have a farm, just for them too. Yes, it's generally in rural areas in the West. Yet for thousands of years, people often just farmed to feed themselves!

Factory farming sucks. Yet this can be fixed, note that you don't need to full grass feed (as an example) to end factory farming. You just need room for mild grazing. We can easily feed people as we do now, not have factory farming, but still not have the tens of thousands of acres of grassland to feed a herd for 100% grass grazing.

This is just one example.

End factory farming. You have my support for that. You'll lose it if you take my dinner away. I suspect many are the same.

The same applied to humans before it did to non-human animals. We are prescribing our worldview of "safe" predictable lives to them, just as was done to us.

This argument can be made about humans. Are modern humans better of existing than not? Our lives also tend to be short, miserable and pointless. Especially compared to just not existing and never having to bother with this world's bs.

Would you ask an amoeba the same thing? A plant? What about an insect? A mouse? Humans are capable of thought that cows are not. Chickens are not.

For example, cows cannot conceive of object persistence. Human infants do not until 2+ years, some parrots do, etc. So what you have to ask yourself, is would the animals even be aware they are captured? And do they have the intellect to care? Or do they entirely live "in the moment", and thus, are happy if healthy, fed, and not being hunted or fearful of a wolf nearby?

Or maybe you might want to ask yourself, would you prefer to be eaten alive? For an animal like a bison, death seldom comes instantly. Death comes while pieces of your body are ripped off of you, as you mewl and scream and cry and bleed to death slowly. Passing out, waking up again only to see you're still being eaten.

Trying to make a choice based upon your mind, your body, your reality is frankly unfair. An example being, there are pack animals and animals that live solo.

By your metric, that is by measuring happiness for an animal by how you would want to live, you'd take those animals that hate living together, and try to force them to? Because that's what you're asking...

What would I want?

So I ask you instead, if we shouldn't interfere, should we then ensure we don't succor or help wild animals in any way? Let's say we stop eating all meat. We do so because "it's wrong to keep an animal captive, even if they are happier and healthier". OK.

So, then by what metric do we have to help animals in the wild? If they have a plague, should we not care or try to help? We have helped wild animals in the past with such things.

Would the animals understand the question asked? Would a cow understand vaccination? Eradication of bot flies?

There are many parasitoid wasps, of which the tarantula hawk wasp is only one. It's an sound evolutionary strategy even if their existence even horrified Charles Darwin (and these wasps were obviously the inspiration for the Xenomorph in the Alien movies)

> Your alien might have some 3rd property that you do not, and thus may farm you.

It is irrelevant, because reason and free will are sufficient to guarantee rights. Whether someone respects them is a separate question.

Also, it is a vacuous posit. You can't approach these properties superficially. Intellect and free will are not some arbitrary, contentless properties in some bag of properties of equally arbitrary status. They determine essentially and intrinsically what it means to be human. They are constitutive of humanity. It means something to have an intellect and free will, and they have consequences for things like body plan. You're approach is basically that of a child playing a game thinking he can just mix and match properties arbitrarily in a bucket without any consideration given to cohesion or causal relations. This is perhaps the effect of teleological blindness, which renders the universe unintelligible and ultimately undermines the viability of the entire discussion.

> A future AI that can produce and consume the sum total of all recorded human knowledge within the amount of time that you have a single thought will likely have many emergent properties that you do not, and thus may farm you as well.

First, AI is not intelligent and doesn't possess agency, as I have already explained elsewhere. To attribute these to AI is pure science fiction and fantasy rooted in a failure to grasp what computation is and what it lacks in relation to intellect. Second, even if we assume what you've written, it's not clear what your point is. What you seem to be describing is an evil being. I mean, I can farm people today, right? But I have no right to do so. I would be committing an immoral act.

> Your whole argument rests on sentiment and convention, and would have been summarily rejected by the slave owner based on his own.

Ha! No, it is absolutely not. It is rooted in natural law theory. NLT is one of or the most defensible moral theory there is.

> It sounds like you're conflating legal arguments with moral ones. You're saying animals lack rights so it's morally okay to enslave/make use of them?

I am not conflating moral and legal arguments, though the legal is a determination of the moral (contra something stupid and tyrannical like legal positivism). Genuine law is not arbitrary or established by fiat. There are general moral principles, and the law plays a role in determining their particular, contingent application in a circumscribed and prudential manner within the given circumstances. That is why an unjust law is not a real law and why within one jurisdiction something may be legitimately legal while it is legitimately illegal in another.

So I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion.

As for enslaving animals, I would reject that it is possible to enslave non-human animals as a matter of metaphysical fact. Non-human animals can be held in captivity or employed for labor, but this is not slavery. To be enslaved presupposes the properties I explained. However, the absence of rights does not mean a right to do whatever you please with animals. It is immoral to torment or to abuse an animal, even if the animal doesn't have rights in this regard.

> I'd argue it's much baser than that. Animals have feelings and often feel very bad when kept in enslaved conditions. Since humans can understand the pain they inflict on enslaved animals, then it's wrong of us to continue enslaving them when we have alternatives that are just as healthy for us, if not more healthy.

We have to make distinctions here. First, one I already used above, is the distinction between rights and morality. That is, the absence of a right does not entail a total absence of moral constraints or considerations in the relevant respect. I have no problem with criticisms of the contingent and particular conditions of, say, factory farming. I would agree that conditions in which animal welfare is better is preferable, but on moral grounds and by prioritizing human good. But these are matters of prudence, not principle. Whereas it is intrinsically evil to employ people in chattel slavery[0], it is not intrinsically evil to hold animals in captivity or to use them for labor.

> I would also say your assumption that pigs do not comprehend their actions and cannot choose between alternatives is false.

Okay, and I would disagree with you - it is an inference, not an assumption on my part - because pigs lack the kind of language that entails the kind of intentionality that would make rationality possible (which is what understanding presupposes), something free choice presupposes. That is, they "choose" based on sense impressions and appetite (in the broad sense of the term).

[0] Emphasis on chattel. Some forms of servitude are not immoral.

That's just because dogs and other pets are used as ersatz babies and are thus afforded the the same level of moral outrage when harmed. We accept base violence against adults but not against small children.