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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • Watts has always been a bit of a weird vector. While he doesnā€™t seem a far righter himself, he accidentally uses a lot of weird far right dogwhistles. (prob some cross contamination as some of these things are just scientific concepts (esp the r/K selection thing stood out very much to me in the rifters series, of course he has a phd in zoology, and the books predate the online hardcore racists discovering the idea by more than a decade, but still odd to me)).

    To be very clear, I donā€™t blame Watts for this, he is just a science fiction writer, a particularly gloomy one. The guy himself seems to be pretty ok (not a fan of trump for example).




  • Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like itā€™s crucial to the overall argument:

    ā€¦ if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ā€¦

    Does this proposition make sense? Itā€™s not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.

    It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe Iā€™m too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

    lol hahah.













  • holy fuck, Iā€™ve seen anti-trans accounts on mastodon spew this same shit and Iā€™m kind of surprised itā€™s a wider conservative conspiracy theory and not something local to mastodon

    I think Blanchard started with this one. If you needed more proof the guy is an absolute case of brain worms. (E: Here is the source)

    E: I wonder what caused the sudden public appearance of more trans people, anime? Or the change in laws about a decade ago where most of the western world stopped sterilizing and going after trans people. (it is nuts that the terfs never bring this up, so worried about trans healthcare perhaps causing some permanent changes while ignoring that very recently that sterilization was mandatory in most of the western world (A law in .nl between 1985 and 2014 for example). Fucking assholes.)