• 3 Posts
  • 225 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • Alright, thanks! I think I understand where you’re coming from, and can relate. I’m an ex-Christian, although I guess for ex-Muslims this process is a whole other beast.

    And yes, I know exactly what you mean about culture and critique - as an leftwing, anti-theist leaning atheist, I often have to cringe about my peers. It feels like false romanticizing, like we did with native americans, or other falsly understood cultures. So many things which I despise in fascism are also present in strict Christianity and strict Islam. Although luckily, very few people take their religion seriously here. So our religious nutjobs are a fringe minority and can mostly be ignored.

    Refugees welcome, but I hate it when they try to establish religio-fascist areas here, spewing hate and all their nonsense, occasionally killing someone. I mean, if you want to live like that, go back. If you like our way, be welcome.

    Yeah, a sensitive topic which can easily trigger people. I try not to care about the boxes they try to put me in. And I absolutely love the freedom of speech we have here. I don’t want that be ruined by migrants who think they speak for Allah, nor by leftists who think every minority shares their values. Like I was one of them. In my youth, with coloured hair and ragged clothes, I was regularly beaten up by (almost exclusively) migrants. Created quite some cognitive dissonance, some effort to justify their deeds, like worse socioeconomic status blabla. Truth is, many people are quite “conservative”, naturally more so in less liberal countries of origin. And still, I vote and speak for open borders. Our society must find better ways than building walls. This issue is challenging European core values, with at least two ways to erode the values; we can lose them by allowing hostile subcultures to grow, or we can lose them by closing us off to the outside.

    Good lord, 6 years. Poor Aisha. I guess my brain was happy to forget that detail.

    So thanks again for this exchange. Stay safe.



  • Right. Also the speed of transition matters a lot.

    Take any devastating effect that climate change might bring. Regions becoming uninhabitable, millions migrating, thousands of houses destroyed, crops failing, species going extinct.

    For any of these effects, it helps a great deal if they can be delayed by years or hopefully decades. It gives everything more time to adapt. Like 10 million people migrating in 1 year puts a hell lot more stress on everybody involved (including the receiving countries) compared to 10 million migrating in 10 years.

    Or your country might be blessed to deal with wildfires and floods one after the other, instead of both occuring simultaneously.

    More time is worth more effort.




  • The day this country’s tensions between conservatism and liberalism die is the day the USA ceases to exist. That tension is at the core of our republic, literally since its founding, and it’s what makes us great, unlike any other nation on Earth.

    That sounds as if this tension was somehow unique to the united states. It’s not, it’s everywhere. Even worse, the US have less of a political spectrum than most other nations, just shy of dictatorships.



  • I think that’s fine. Unless we’re talking about greenhouses or urban indoor gardening, food grows in the environment. If you want to protect the food, you implicitly have to protect the environment, which makes you an environmentalist driven by food. There are lots of hazards which have little to do with climate (or at least which also have other, climate-unrelated causes), which can affect food. Invasive species, plastic, overfertilization, corporations, general socioeconomic disparities, just to name a few.



  • This is not the way to go about that

    What is your way to go about that?

    If you aren’t doing anything, what way(s) would you deem acceptable? If you know acceptable ways, why aren’t you following through? Honest if-questions, not meant as assumptions.

    Healthy and sustainable food seems to be a decent goal. People should be able to get behind this. So if all the disagreement is about the right approach, where are the people with the right approach, and where are all the people voicing their concern about art supporting them?

    Please help me out. It feels as if people are more concerned about pieces of art which they may never see, than about healthy food, the climate, or other major issues which affect everyone.

    I get why it puts people off, these points exist. I just wonder what the “right” alternative to these “wrong” approaches is, and wether the critics walk the talk.







  • An attempt to reconcile both views by comparing it to a structural collapse of, let’s say, a bridge.

    In the end, it collapses. Before that, the cracks begin to show. Before that, invisible micro-cracks form. Before that, pressure exceeds limits.

    Now, at which point in this story does “collapse happen”? Some use this to refer to the actual collapse, after the cracks began to show.

    But since collapse is inevitable after too many micro-cracks have formed (or maybe even earlier, since those are already symptoms of an underlying cause), some refer to this long, unspectacular build-up phase as “collapse happens”.

    I’m neither an economist nor a civil engineer. Bridges are complex, economies even more so. I still think these two views explain how the same term can refer to different things, or different phases of the same thing.


  • Depends on where on the scale between legit and scam your business is. I see three options:

    • 1, It’s a scam: Terrible news for you, but good news for everyone else. In that case, your wellbeing is a sacrifice we’re willing to make.
    • 2, It’s legit: Then it’s even good news for you, as it takes away the shady competition.
    • 3, It’s legit, but still treated as if you’re the bad guy: That’s the interesting point. If that is the case, can you show where the ban fails?



  • Hamas never had a chance against IDF in a military clash. They try to erode international support for Israel instead, by dragging the giant into a long and dirty fight.

    They also need to take care about their domestic support. In both cases, it is good for Hamas when IDF does cruel things.

    So the strategic goal of continued fighting is to show everyone, abroad and at home, how evil Israel is, to stay in power.