I mean, the point of a mermaid isn’t that it’s a sexy looking fish, it’s that other than its tail, it looks like beautiful human women. In some stories, sailors don’t even realize they’re taking to mermaids because their tails are underwater. Also, mermaids were generally considered bad omens or malicious entities, and when they did seduce humans, it was usually to kill them, so it’s not like the folklore was very pro-mermaid sex.

1. Agreed, except when it’s being done to retroactively justify your actions.
2. I think it’s a very bad idea to feed a cat a Vegan diet, but there are vegan products being sold on the market, and if you want to feed your cat one of these products, you should discuss them with a vet or other qualified professional. Regular dry food contains way more carbohydrates than cats are meant to have in their diet, which can lead to obesity and diabetes in cats. Are people who feed their cats dry food animal abusers? Should the Lemmy admins start policing the use of dry food?
3. The mods of c/vegan were trying to assert their ability to moderate their own sub as they saw fit in the face of a massive overreach from the admin. I think they’re the most insufferable community I’ve seen on this instance, but they should have the right to moderate their own community.

And yes, I’m on .world, but very little of my identity is tired up in my lemmy instance, and I’m certainly not going to bat for the .world admins when they do something crazy.

Well, various vegan catfoods have been approved for use in not only the U.S. but also the E.U., but your point about regulatory capture is fair. Unfortunately, it’s undercut by your support for vaping, a nicotine product brought to market with an insane lack of oversight. Ironically, most of what you’re complaining about with the cat food is exactly what makes vaping so dangerous. We don’t have as much research or long-term studies on the effects of vaping to say it’s as dangerous as smoking, but we know that they contain propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, which are toxic to cells, aldehydes, which are associated with lung disease and heart disease, acrolein, which can cause COPD, asthma and lung cancer, as well as various heavy metals. I’m pretty sure that a lot more people will die of vaping than cats will die of veganism. That being said, I don’t think people who support vaping should be removed from lemmy for using a product that’s probably unsafe, and and it’s not the job of admins or moderators to stop people from taking bad health advice from strangers on the internet.

Maybe, but this seems like a problem that’s bigger than a single instance. A few months back someone came with some pretty good receipts showing .ml admins going after people for having some very fair and moderate criticisms of China. Seems like most instances either have power tripping mods or are too small to have much activity.

Yeah, to be clear, you should not feed your cat a Vegan diet. Cats are obligate carnivores. Synthetic Taurine has made vegan catfood somewhat more viable, but cats don’t just need Taurine from prey. They need several vitamins, amino acids, and fatty acids from animal protein to survive. Beyond that, their digestive tract isn’t very efficient at digesting plant matter, so even if these foods have the nutritional value they need, they might not be absorbing it. Also, a lot of these products seem to be made from grains and other carb heavy products, and cats need a very low carb, high protein diet. If you want to completely divest from the meat industry, you simply shouldn’t own a cat.

That being said, Vegan catfood products are on the market, so whether or not they are good for cats, they have been approved by several regulating bodies. You can claim that they’re unsafe (I certainly do), but having an admin nuke a comment section for claiming otherwise is a huge overreaction. It would be like going into a vape community and banning accounts that claimed vaping is safer than smoking; it probably isn’t, but I don’t need admins deciding who gets to have discourse about that.

Finally, I’m also not a fan of dead cats, but if you’re dumb enough to take veterinary advice from an internet vegan group, you’re probably too dumb to keep a cat alive anyway.

I mean, leaving .world is a pretty fair response. That community is full of insufferable idiots, but an admin overrode their moderating decisions, and then the admin team made up rules to retroactively justify their decision. That’s pretty egregious.

We feed out cat wet food every day, but not a lot. Wet food is much better for cats because dry food has a lot of carbs, which cats really shouldn’t have in their diet. Our cat is a pretty picky eater though, and we don’t want to put down wet food just to watch it dry out and get thrown away, so we give her a small amount of dry food in the morning, and a little more dry food at night with a tablespoon of wet food.

I don’t know where my Dad got them, but they were pretty much all Apogee games, so he might have order them directly. I was really young, 4 or 5, so I didn’t really ask for them. My Dad would just install them for us and create directory shortcuts so we could load them easily. Part of how I learned to type and read was spelling out, “keen4” and either getting the game to load or, “Bad command or file name.”

Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars. My Dad had an IBM machine that booted up in DOS, and he installed a bunch of games on it for us. I played every Commander Keen game (including Keen Dreams), Wacky Wheels, Oregon Trail. Sim City, and Sim Ant on that machine (although I think I needed to boot up Windows to run those last two).

Jesus, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize it was that bad. That’s insane.

Sure, no problem. Also, I think it would be disingenuous to pretend that at least some of this backlash isn’t from people who don’t like the idea that their beliefs may not be objective facts. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t struggle with that from time to time.

But the real problem I have with these bots is that they can never capture the kind of nuance vetting a source requires. The Raw Story ranks high on credibility because they don’t publish lies, but they don’t publish anything worthwhile either. Most of their, “stories,” are second hand accounts of something someone (who may or may not be credible) said on CNN, or how a politician or pundit got mocked on social media, and then given a title that implies the incident was more significant than it was. It’s difficult to judge something like that with an algorithm that simply looks for, “Credibility,” and, “Bias.”

The bot is crap. This is how it rates Raw Story, a clickbait factory that churns out shallow articles with dramatic, misleading headlines. It just produces slop for liberal Boomers to fill up their Facebook feed, but based on the bot’s reply, you’d think it was the Gaurdian.

How would I know if I can see all the…? Oh. Well played.

No, at least not most animals. There was a study a while back that showed that animals think by reducing the world to a series of binary choice that they react to in the moment. I imagine it’s a lot like when you’re playing a sport or video game and things get very intense and fast paced; your inner monologue isn’t telling you what your next move will be every second, you’re just reacting on instinct. That’s probably how animals see the world all the time.

That being said, “animals,” is a broad category, and some of them may be capable of creating an abstract narrative for themselves. It was recently discovered that whale songs have a phonetic alphabet, which means their language may be as complex as ours. If that’s the case, they may be capable of using that language to build an internal monologue.

It’s easier to tell them apart visually:

I know it’s not a fair comparison; Bruce actually stepped down and gave his title to someone younger.

My parents are in this condition; one is actually doing considerably worse.

And they tell Americans we don’t have a cuisine.

In my experience, the first time your child smiles at you, you’re overwhelmed with joy and wonder, which is undercut moments late by the realization that your child is not smiling because of you, but because they just took a massive shit.

God I miss my S10. It really was a perfect phone. I finally had to let it go when the screen cracked. Replacing it cost more than a refurbished S22 or S23, and I couldn’t justify purchasing another S10, since it will probably fall victim to planned obsolescence soon.