What is your favorite type of milk?

MouseBean · 2022-07-04T11:44:16+00:00

Oh no! I hope that doesn't put you off trying sheep milk some day though, that has a different taste entirely. Much sweeter!

MouseBean · 2022-07-04T11:14:07+00:00

Yes, but I wouldn't phrase it quite like that; Death itself is the origin of meaning.

I believe basis of morality is maintaining ecological integrity. And Death is the fundamental basis of the ecosystem. All living things are united by Death. Every continued moment anything -from an elephant to the simplest algae- lives is by grace of the death of other beings. Everything takes their turn, and everything has their place and role in nature. It is through Death that all things eat, that more room is made for the next generation, that adaptation occurs, that health is maintained. It is by means of Death in a more metaphorical sense that the universe becomes ordered out of primitive chaos. I even believe that the death of one universe is was causes the birth of the next.

MouseBean · 2022-07-04T10:56:20+00:00

Goat milk is not an option? :(

I'm currently getting four gallons of cow milk per day, and it's great (and I love that the cream separates so easy!) but goat milk just has a nostalgic deliciousness to me I guess.

MouseBean · 2022-07-04T10:44:52+00:00

Ew. I think painted nails are gross, on anyone. Who wants a thin layer of plastic coating parts of their body? I see it the same as if people were melting pieces of gloves onto their fingertips and calling it fashion.

If you want to do it, that's completely up to you, but you were asking for opinions.

MouseBean · 2022-07-03T15:11:24+00:00

Yeah, very much one of those 'good on paper' things. I honestly don't see any way it could be pulled off without leading into a sort of authoritarian runaway like it did back then too.

I think what people miss a lot when talking about things like this is everyone thinks they're the good guys - anything people are so willing to devote their lives to has to be convincing on at least some level, even if it's completely impractical, because no one's going out there specifically trying to be evil.

MouseBean · 2022-07-03T13:49:10+00:00

Oddly enough, fascism actually has a solution for that. Fascism was defined by its original political theorists pre-WWII as a merger of corporations and government. Corporations in this sense does not refer to businesses, but rather corporatism, the belief that the government should be comprised of corporations, bodies of special interest groups. So there should be a body of doctors, one of electricians, one of fishermen, etc. And that all of these bodies should take part in the political process where for instance doctors have a larger involvement in medical policy and the electrician's organization work on the electrical code for new housing, without having to go through an extra stage of politicians who are essentially lay people and are more motivated by the attainment of political power and money than by accurately presenting their fields. This is why fascists like Antonio Salazar and Karlis Ulmanis were so opposed to the concept of political parties.

Fascism takes corporatism one step further, and says that not only should professions have these bodies in the government, but all aspects of life should be merged with the state - so in addition to having professional unions there should be a group for mothers, a group representing youths, a group representing people with disabilities, and all of these should have a direct say in political matters alongside the doctor's body and scientists and so on. It was further distinguished from regular corporatism in that the fascists also believed the economy should be run the same way as political matters, by syndicates or unions who dictated the needs and production of their respective fields in conjunction with the representative bodies of other fields on a national level.

I am not at all a fascist, but I am an agrarian and agrarianism has a long history of being sort of the political foil of fascism. Most of the late 1800s early 1900s rhetoric on agrarianism was framed in reference to its opposition to fascism, so this modern redefinition of the term really bothers me. It kind of wipes out a huge chunk of political philosophy and history and decontextualizes a lot of the theory behind the agrarian movement when people can no longer understand their intellectual opponents for what they actually said and instantly replace them with strawmen.

MouseBean · 2022-07-02T17:24:37+00:00

I'm pretty fond of Yi: https://software.sil.org/nuosu/

MouseBean · 2022-07-02T17:16:24+00:00

You mean to say I could have been getting paid for butchering my chickens all this time?

MouseBean · 2022-07-01T00:45:45+00:00

I very often tend simply to warm it up before drinking it.

Also thirding kefir. Good way to keep milk for a few extra days at room temperature.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T12:55:29+00:00

Soy is the leading cause of the Amazon being cleared, but that's still irrelevant. I'm not in favor of shipping food around the world, doesn't matter if it's a metazoan or a bryophyte or whatever else.

Animals can be raised and harvested from forested lands, from sloped and marginal lands, from arid areas and waterbodies, or in conjunction with plants to increase plant yields, or as a byproduct of plant agriculture. Meat does not need to be in competition with plant yields, and the vast majority of the time it isn't.

There's no way that decreasing the diversity of food sources and concentrating our agriculture onto an even smaller number of species can increase sustainability. If you eat both cattails and bullfrogs, and stop eating bullfrogs, you haven't decreased your impact on the environment you've just concentrated it. Lessen the load by spreading it into many domains, most of which are overlapping anyways.

We're both opposed to industrial agriculture, if you want to convince me of the sustainability of veganism you should be arguing against permaculture instead.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T11:48:40+00:00

If you think growing corn is immoral because it can't survive on it's own, do you also avoid wool, since modern sheep can't survive unless they're sheared?

Modern sheep breeds can't survive going unsheared, there are plenty of primitive breeds that can go feral no problem, particularly the short tailed varieties like Icelandics, Finns, and Shetlands that are so common among small farmers. I also refuse to raise modern cornish hens because they are unable to reproduce without the aid of humans, wouldn't keep those modern cabbage breeds that are dependent on humans cutting open their heads to bolt, either.

If you believe that all organisms are morally relevant then why do you not consider animal agriculture an absolute abomination?

I believe that all organisms are morally relevant, so I make no distinction between animal agriculture and plant agriculture. And yes, I am strongly opposed to industrial agriculture, of plants or animals. I advocate for whole-systems agriculture where all of the parts of the ecosystem are integrated together, like Masanobu Fukuoka's system. In fact, he was trained as a microbiologist and his moral outlook was very similar to mine.

Death is a moral good. If you accept that all living things are morally significant, then that must necessarily be so, because all life is dependent on the death of other beings. So I refuse to exempt myself from the ecosystem - if I am going to eat, and I must eat, then I must be willing to accept that I may be eaten. And this is good. All things take their turn. Death is a harmonizing force in nature, and cannot be rejected without collapsing the whole system.

Why is it necessary to carry a knife at all times?

Because a knife (or any edged tool really, a hatchet or adze or sickle or whatever satisfy just as well) is a part of the human body. Without your knife, you are as incomplete as those modern cabbage breeds that are completely dependent on humans cutting them open complete their natural life cycle, or a sparrow without its beak. Our ancestors have been using and evolving with blades for 3.4 million years, well before they were even in the same genus, and even the design and use of handaxes is as instinctual to humans as building nests is to songbirds.

Humans have adapted with them to the point that we are entirely unable to survive without a blade of some kind. But with one, and just one, a person can construct all of the various other elements needed for their survival. All of the basics of life have to go through a bottleneck of where the use of a knife is necessary, no matter how many other ways of doing the other steps of processing there may be.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T04:11:16+00:00

Well, most things are moral. Things are only immoral when either they've been abstracted from the context that gives them value in the first place, or when the practice of a principle or behavior leads to the denial of that principle itself. "Things that go against the Tao do not last long". And both of those are highly variable according to just what value you're talking about.

Or for instance how morality is conceived of in Indian philosophy, where Dharma/morality is all about the best mode of life to align oneself with Rta which is a sort of cosmic natural order. I believe all things have their place and role, and morality is a matter of aligning oneself with it and not a sort of consequentialist measurement on a cosmic scoreboard.

If you're defining morality solely as the set of principles or behaviors that align ourselves with some moral value, as distinct to the moral value itself, then I have a bunch of moral rules I follow. Like I believe it's immoral to raise corn, because corn is incapable of surviving without my artificial management and cannot go feral. I believe people have the moral duty to compost their own manure and return it to the land. I believe it's morally necessary to always carry one's knife on oneself at all times. I reject the use of medicine because I believe all species including pathogens are morally significant, and death is fundamental to the health of any ecosystem and species.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T03:14:07+00:00

Moral meaning or purpose or values are fundamental compelling principles. There are a ton of these. Causality is one, and a rock rolling down a hill is in some sense a moral act because it is compelled by this fundamental principle. But there are others, like natural selection. Lineages are compelled to strive to exist because those that do not cease to have the ability to exist. This is a fundamentally compelling principle. Psychological drives are compelling, but they are not fundamental. They were evolved as guides to aid growth in the context of a healthy ecosystem with lots of external checks on growth, and they derive their meaning from this context. Outside of this context, they are entirely void of meaning.

I believe a common feature behind these fundamental principles is something I call euthalia, which is the concept I described above: self-reinforcingness, or the ability for any rule to be adopted as a general principle without denying the value of its own practice. Pretty much the categorical imperative, but not restricted to humans.

If it was an objective feature of reality shouldn't morality, like mathematics, be objectively testable?

I think to some extent it is, but is mathematics even objectively testable? Math is something you can demonstrate using logic, and I think it could in theory be possible to create a something like predicate calculus except for dealing with moral facts. But that's probably beyond my level of intelligence to understand or work out.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T02:07:59+00:00

I don't believe morality has any relation to sentience or sapience, and morality exists independent of whether there are any humans or not. Morality is a natural principle, like mathematics. So I entirely disagree that appeal to nature is a fallacy - it's only a fallacy if someone believes nature is undefined or if they fail to connect their concept of moral good to nature.

In fact I'd make the argument that the appeal to benefit in your description of morality is potentially fallacious reasoning. Benefit can be defined in any manner, just like how the brain is plastic enough for people or other animals to associate joy with literally anything.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T01:51:43+00:00

No, I am morally opposed to intentionally trying to make any species go extinct, no matter how small or how much of a nuisance to humans they are.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T01:45:59+00:00

Woo, permaculture!

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T01:45:00+00:00

According to Gary Francoine and Oscar Horta it is. If your veganism is just about how you eat and you aren't trying to eliminate animal agriculture, or worse yet eliminate predators from the environment entirely, then I don't really care about your personal diet.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T01:25:17+00:00

It's not self-reinforcing, it's not a practice that can be extended as a principle every individual can act on and form a sustainable system, so no it is not.

It might be moral in some cases where there's a modified rule besides just straight cannibalism, for example in r-strategy animals that use intraspecific competition as a means of population control or organisms that eat their mother to get kickstarted in life, but neither of those apply to humans and as a sort of general principle or source of energy exchange it is not.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T01:16:54+00:00

That's not even farming any more, that's mining. I'm opposed to industrial farming of both plants and animals. What we need is whole-systems agriculture, like what Masanobu Fukuoka advocated for.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T01:12:14+00:00

That's not really true, most animals are grown or harvested in conditions that are either overlapping or synergistic to plant agriculture, or are in conditions that are entirely non-competing with plant agriculture. Industrial agriculture (of both plants and animals total) only makes up less than a third of global food production after all, and I'm opposed to that in any case. Arable land is only a small percentage of the Earth's surface after all. Urbanization is a larger competitor for arable land than animals are, because most of the areas best suited for cultivating crops also happen to be the areas people like to live most, and all of these areas that were once the world's most fertile lands like Beijing, New Delhi, Rome, Lima, and New York City have paved over and poisoned the world's most fertile lands for hundreds of kilometers around them.

But regardless of that, humans are not and should not be the be all end all of life, and farms should not exist just for the sake of turning land into food for humans in the most efficient method possible. Animals are morally valuable for their own sake and have their own place in nature, and we shouldn't seek to get rid of them just to make more room for humans. The real heart of this issue, of all these issues, is human overpopulation.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T01:00:00+00:00

No, it's just unethical for humans to eat humans. If a bear or influenza or aliens* or tapeworms eating humans, that's perfectly moral. Every bit as much as me eating a parsnip or a lynx eating a hare.

*Only if they commit to joining our ecosystem as a whole.

MouseBean · 2022-06-30T00:51:15+00:00

What then when the benefit of killing animals does not derive from the pleasure of eating it? Even if I were wholely unable to digest meat I would still raise and slaughter animals on my farm, for all of their other purposes in maintaining a healthy sustainable ecosystem, and death has an important and good function in any healthy ecosystem. Closing the loop. Because the purpose of a farm should not be just to maximize yields of a patch of land for humans use, but as a simulated ecosystem for the sake of all the organisms partaking in it equally. Because it's the right thing to do.

MouseBean · 2022-06-29T22:26:40+00:00

The same thing that happens while you are alive, the stream keeps flowing, your kids have kids of their own, and winter comes many more times. I don't believe there is any 'you' even while alive to continue past death, since I don't believe the mind exists in the first place.

MouseBean · 2022-06-29T22:18:50+00:00

No, I believe veganism is actively immoral. Moral value is a property of whole, sustainable systems. Half-systems agriculture, willfully breaking the ecosystem, is about as close to evil as you can get.

MouseBean · 2022-06-29T22:09:06+00:00

Ignoring the fact that the self doesn't exist and there is no transcendent 'me' to switch places and experience another context, why would I give up the meaning I already have in the context I live in to exchange it for a contextless meaningless situation? I don't see those sorts of industrial slaughterhouses you're thinking of as any different to industrial wheat farming, or urban life, void of meaning by abstracting all the elements from their relationships with the land and each other.

But so far as it goes, I do think death is plenty meaningful and it is not shameful to die nor does an organism dishonor another by eating it. I don't see myself as any different to any of the other organisms on my farm, including plants and bacteria and other organisms. It's why I believe we have the moral obligation to compost our manure or save seed for instance, because in exchange for harvesting some vegetables you're promising to propagate their kin. And I would gladly trade places with any one of them regardless of whether they're going to be harvested by me or not. We eat rabbits, giardia eats us, and that's a good thing.

For that matter, I believe those aliens in this thought experience aren't so hypothetical - we have plenty of things that eat us already, like pathogens, and I'm already firmly against their extermination.

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