Stupid discussion. It does not matter whether something is in the box “vegan”. Ask yourself why you would or would not eat something. If you don’t want to eat(/drink) dairy because of the way the animals that produce the dairy are treated, would you be ok when they are treated differently? Are bees treated in the same way? Does it matter if you treat them in this way? Those should be your questions, not “does it belong in this box?”.
Can you milk a bee? I didn’t think so!
Honey is a by-product of bees, the same way that all human made food is a by-products of humans.
Someone once told me “meat is murder, but fish is justifiable homicide”. I hope that helps.
Ever since a chicken killed my pet hamster, my name has been vengeance and Popeyes has been my hunting grounds.
Man, I have religious people in my family that say “you can’t eat meat on Fridays” during lent. But then fish is 100% okay to them. Makes no sense to me.
That rule might not come from English language and what was translated to “meat” doesn’t necessarily mean all animal flesh. Even English has words like “beef” and “pork” and “poultry”, “red meat” etc.
If you want to gotcha lawyer culture or religion, you’ll need the actual sources. I’d suggest avoiding that, since it will just make you behave like an asshole.
Why do you have contact with such …things? How could you take a human being somehow serious if it says things like that, especially due to being brainwashed in a fucking sect?! We don’t seem to have a collective tolerance to nazis or pedos, why do we have it for religious nutjubs?
A lot of religious people aren’t inherently dangerous, whereas an active nazi or pedo is likely going to end up hurting someone.
Not that I overly disagree, fuck religion.
Sure, not every nutjob is a danger in itself. But it’s still a cog in the machinery of a retrograde force. A +1 that helps normalizing what should be shunned. But yes, fuck religion. If people wanna believe stuff, great. The universe is a mystery. But the moment they gather and start having to believe what the cult-douche says, shit gets dangerous.
You’ve summed up my position as a pescatarian quite well
Does that mean that goddamn tomatoes are sea creatures??
I dunno but sea’s got cucumbers. 🤔
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Kinda tongue-in-cheek questions, but: Honey isn’t an animal body part, it isn’t produced by animal bodies, so if it is an animal product because bees process it, is wheat flour (for example) an animal product because humans process it? How about hand-kneaded bread? Does that make fruit an animal product because the bees pollinated the flowers while collecting the nectar?
it isn’t produced by animal bodies
Sure is, it’s concentrated bee spit with sugar. And spit is made of water and body cells.
Think about it as if its about consent. The bees don’t consent to their honey being taken. Cows don’t consent to be repeatedly impregnated and milked. Pigs don’t consent to their butts becoming bacon. Chickens don’t consent to their eggs being taken.
However, the miller and the baker both consented to milling/kneading, and later selling their wares.
Human breast milk can be vegan, though, if given freely. If you forcefully take human breast milk, then it is no longer vegan.
Can human meat be vegan?
Technically, yes.
Assuming the canabee is consenting freely, and likely has to be done in a way not violating other laws. Like some variety of a pain kink where people slice of small portions of each others meaty bits and eat them. That’s probably a thing, though likely not very popular among vegans.
if think so but once they get to the age of consent they are probably not very palatable.
Well basically yes, tho would need to get into the topic of exploitation and all that if we are talking about if something is viewed as acceptable to consume.
Beekeeping is exploitation, but don’t the bees benefit from it too vs. being in the wild?
What’s fair compensation to the honey bee? Humans aren’t allowed to speak on behalf of the honey bees. We don’t actually know if this is a fair trade on the side of the honey bee, we can only look at it from our very biased opinion.
Is it exploitation? I’d argue slave or prison labor is exploitation because the workers have no freedom of choice. Bees are free to leave, and the queen will in fact do so if not content with the conditions in the hive. If the queen leaves, all of the bees will swarm with her and you’d be left with an empty box.
Beekeeping strikes me more as symbiosis. The beekeeper provides ideal conditions, far better than the average location that would be found in the wild, and can help protect the hive against threats like mites. In exchange the beekeeper receives a share of the honey produced by the hive.
No beekeeper takes all of the honey from the hive. Only the top box (the “honey super”) of a typical hive stack is harvested. A grate below the top box (a “queen excluder”) prevents the queen from entering it so no larva are laid in the top box. The workers bee are smaller and can pass through the grate to build out comb and produce honey. The comb and honey in the bottom boxes are left to the hive to feed its workers and produce the next generation of bees, ensuring the survival of the hive.
A queen excluder cannot be used to prevent swarming long-term as the drones that gather the pollen also won’t for through the grate! An excluder might be used to delay swarming and buy time so the beekeeper can offer another solution, like adding more boxes to the hive or splitting it into two hives. Better beekeepers proactively manage their hives, e.g. by setting up an empty hive in advance to essentially offer a swarming hive a new ideal home whenever they’re ready for it.
it’s also important to differentiate between someone with a backyard hive, vs industrial scale beekeeping where they might do all kinds of terrible shit because $$$$$$$$$$$$
we live in an age where if you’re willing to spend some dosh on a fancy hive, you don’t even have to open it to drain honey, you can just turn a lever and it uncaps the back of the cells and the honey flows out through a pipe.
Bees make honey for their hive. Honey also does indeed contain bodily fluids from the bees.
The bread making human consents to you taking the bread (presumably). Breast milk and other human bodily fluids can be vegan for the same reason.
And insects pollinate plants not because they use the fruit, but for the nectar. They don’t care what happens after they leave the flower.
“and other bodily fluids”
I didn’t want to go into it in the original comment, but yes. It is a relevant debate whether it’s vegan to swallow another humans semen, or even saliva. And yes, it is, if the human consents. Consent is the more or less the basis of whether vegans find it moral to consume something. Humans can give consent to sharing their fluids. Other animals cannot.
I’ve always found it interesting that using animals is a bad thing, but using plants in similar ways is fine. I guess there has to be a line somewhere, otherwise such a person would simply starve to death.
One good argument for this: A vegan diet not only minimizes animal deaths but plant deaths as well, since livestock obviously has to be fed on many, many individual plants before they can get slaughtered. So even if we for some reason prioritized saving the lives of plants going vegan would still be the way to go.
I respect this argument. I would like to know how Humans fit into the ecosystem.
Humans tend to remove predators from population centers to prevent Humans from becoming prey. The culling of predators allow more prey animals to survive. Humans find themselves competing with prey animals for fruits and vegetables. Humans hunt prey animals to increase yields of fruits and vegetables.
How do we reconcile that our population centers are built on the culling of predator and prey species?
How do Humans balance protection and food production with the morality of minimizing animal and plant death?
What should Humans do with the bodies of culled predators and prey?
I think if you ask 10 people this questions you will get 11 opinions, at least.
I personally would prefer the reintroduction of predators into their native habitats because the human tendency to squeeze economic profit out of every square centimeter of the planet we inhabit reads absolutely bizarre to me. This kind of instrumental world view where everything has to have a purpose for us is in my opinion an epoch in the development of humans we should strive to leave behind, because although for a time it shaped our progression as a species like nothing else, it’s also about to destroy the world we live in and come crushing down on us if we find no better way forward. I believe that in the long term we will have to withdraw from at least some parts of the ecosystem and let the predators do their thing. Our population centers can be (and for a good part already are) so sealed off to them that it should very well be possible to do our thing without being mauled by wolves.
…All this does go a bit beyond the question of honey though. Sorry for the rant there.
Bees and other insects are pollinators allowing food to grow. Say humans succeed at sealing themselves off in such a way that we can grow the food we need without impacting outside ecosystems.
Would humans still need pollinators? Would human pollinator populations be separated from outside populations?
The idea could inspire some entertaining science fiction. The best writer would probably have a background in Entomology and Horticulture.
Being sealed off wouldn’t have to mean having zero contact with the surrounding nature. I think we can coexist with predators while still using some land for agriculture - just not all of it.
Animals aren’t just used, they are tortured on a industrial scale. That’s mainly why vegans oppose animal products.
Are bees tortured to get honey?
yea of course, never heard of the bee grinder?
They’re certainly exposed to a very different living situation than would be typical for them in most cases, to their detriment. For example, bees that make their combs in frames lose substantial heat from their hives, which usually helps protect against disease and even predation. They’re also often given a sugar water substitute to eat when their honey is drained off for human consumption, which is nowhere near as nutritious. They’re also moved around on the bee keeper’s schedule, which may be a substantial stressor compared with a hive that stays in one place. Never mind that they may be exposed to climates that substantially differ from where that particular variety of honey be evolved.
Given issues like colony collapse disorder, it’s pretty clear that many forms of bee keeping aren’t really great for bees. Does that constitute torture? That’s hard to tell, but it certainly does put pressures on them in multiple aspects of their lives and the lives of their hives as a whole that they wouldn’t be dealing with otherwise, and which probably aren’t pleasant.
Would you consider it torture, or at least cruel, to forcibly relocate the population of a city to an area that’s freezing cold, force them to live in poorly insulated homes, make them eat food that isn’t healthy for them, and steal the product of their labor in exchange for their efforts?
We’ve been keeping them improperly in the winter since the mid 20th century, leading to unnecessary bee mortality within hives. Whether that’s torture or not is up to you, but it’s definitely unnecessary harm.
This is suggesting that we should be using hive covers. What exactly changed in the mid 20th century?
We stopped using hive covers because they’re more expensive than the increased mortality. They naturally nest in tree hollows in winter, whose thicker walls (and living material) allow the hive to maintain a higher internal temperature than uncovered hives (or covered hives).
Well bees are definitely objectified and seen as industrialized honey producing machines. They’re starved of their own resources and are given mostly sugar water in return. Bee keepers are not concerned with their well-being other than for production yields. It is a form of factory farming. Isn’t this reason enough?
As a local beekeeper, I take offense to your sentiment.
your offense has been duly noted and taped to the refrigerator for all to see
Maybe time to think about life choices then?
Quite happy with my life, thank you. And the bees.
It is really tricky to genuinely discuss this topic. Many omnivores use this as a straw man argument to discredit vegans for not being fully consequential. On top of that, reasons for being vegan and where people draw the line also vary hugely.
Anyways, I would argue that eating plants and also fungi is very different to eating animal products. First of all, if you are vegan for ethical reasons (as I am) then usually the argument is that one can infer from one’s own feelings onto other animals. Sure, this isn’t always that easy and we will never know how other animals really feel. This includes fellow humans btw. But it is certainly very definitive that many animals feel pain, discomfort and many other emotions not unlike we feel them.
Plants and fungi on the other hand have completely different body plans. Plants are modular organisms and you simply cannot relate cutting your arm off with cutting a branch. We may deepen our understanding on plants and maybe we will find some form of conscience one day. But this is still far off and for now we can only speculate. Fungi are very different as well and we usually just eat their fruiting bodies anyways.
Secondly, as someone else pointed out, for ecological reasons and for the sheer quantity that is necessary to sustain humans, going vegan is always the better choice. Animals live on plants, too, and just use a lot of the plants’ energy on their own metabolism.
There are varieties of Jainism that won’t pluck fruits (will only eat what has naturally fallen) and many mainstream varieties of Jainism that won’t eat any root vegetables (because digging them up would harm insects), or seeded vegetables (eating it harms the plants ability to reproduce).
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Naturally fallen fruit has ground bugs enjoying them like slugs. If a slug is already enjoying the fruit, that would violate Jainism?
I’m not a Jain so take this with a grain of salt. Their philosophy of nonviolence believes in two sets of rules - one for ascetics and one for “householders”. The former renounce everything in service of nonviolence (they often wear masks to prevent breathing in any organisms, carry canes that they use to tap the ground when they walk, etc). The latter have more “reasonable” restrictions (but are still pure vegetarians, etc). So maybe for the former group?
I appeal to the Director of Veganism!
That shit went dumb REAL fast
Not as fast as an ape turning into a human being.
Jesse Lee Peterson always cracks me up. I feel like his whole thing has to just be an act, but he never cracks it’s amazing really
The fact that he thought he won this “debate” and uploaded it is so embarrassing…
That was rough.
Yeah, but, did you ever see an ape turn into a human being?
Bees are gubbermint drones, and honey is simply concentrated 5G chemtrail juice that gives you super autism.
excuse me I need to eat meat in front of vegans again.
Any that’s the hypocrisy of Vegans. Milk and honey are the only two animal-based food sources that don’t involve the killing of animals. And in the case of most cow breeds, milking is actually needed as they have been bred to produce far more milk than their calves drink. And with careful management of the hive, you can harvest a lot of honey from a mature hive without negatively affecting the hive itself - it just delays/defers new queen production and swarming, which is desirable anyhow - no beekeeper who has hives primarily for crop pollination wants to have hives swarming each and every year.
The whole “Vegans against Honey” thing is so stupid… like… brah, Bees are the one critter that has already unionized.
Not like there’s much sense to begin with in a diet where you need a thousand supplements in order to not go insane from a Vitamin B-12 Deficiency and start blaming Carnist Voodoo for your Anemia… Ya know instead of going “Oh wait, I was getting my iron from chicken…”
Edit: On that note, I actually do need to take Iron for a defiency, this post reminded me… Not a vegan though.
Bees, are vegetals.
It seems so silly to me. Do plants not feel pain?
They do. I learned it first hand… You can call it stress if you like, but plants most certainly experience suffering
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Uh, that’s not the definition that biologists use. Kingdom animalia includes humans. (along with fish, birds, reptiles, insects, etc.) We’re mammals.
Also, a vast majority of people use this definition of the word “animal” when referring to the animals themselves and only tend to use other definitions (which typically ends up referring to non-human mammals or sometimes humans the speaker find distasteful for whatever reason) specifically when contrasting them to so called “civilized” humans.
You can look up the word “animal” in a dictionary and I garuntee you the kingdom animalia style definition will be the first one you see under the noun form of the word with all other definitions (the ones that exclude humans or insects) coming later. Dictionaries typically order their definitions by usage when there are multiple definitions of the same word.
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I’ve had an unreasonable number of arguments against people who seemed to think animal was a synonym for mammal. Thankfully, we’re now in an era where you can look it up and show them now mobile data is cheap, so it’s become a winnable argument.
Except they still don’t care, and resent you for edumacating them. Whatever you say, they “win”. Welcome to the post -information age.
I rarely judge someone for ignorance unless it is wilful. I pretty harshly judge people who cannot assimilate new information. Over time I think I might be evolving from INTP->INTJ as I age. I used to have more patience and would try to encourage people to learn and adjust.
P->J completely inverts the orientations of the cognitive functions (Ti Ne Si Fe -> Ni Te Fi Se), it wouldn’t reflect a singular change but a wholesale shift in how you take in and act on information (also J doesn’t mean judgmental).
I was very on board with your comment until the Meyers-Briggs pseudoscience BS and then you lost me
I think it means that as people get older, they get crankier and thus more prone to rush to judgement, just to move things along quicker, rather than take the time necessary to figure out all the nuances and expend patience in trying to actually change things. Though I might be putting words into their mouth.
Although either way I definitely have noticed this trend within myself, especially when I was on Reddit, so it’s a real shift imho. And it needs to be fought against vigorously, bc talking rather than listening usually does not lead to the most ideal outcome. That’s what I got out of that anyway.
And there’s a MAJOR caveat: sometimes judgementalness should be embraced - e.g. patience to tolerate a tanky will never work out well… (The only thing we must never tolerate is intolerance). Young people tend to be too patient sometimes, even as old people trend towards being too judgemental. Young people need to learn more and realize what is known vs. not known yet, and old people need to aim to practice discipline to avoid their feefees from taking over logic as they are always wont to do if given half the chance. imho ofc, which is surely incomplete!:-P
I’m in the same camp, but wording it as “unable to assimilate new information” might actually help me have more sympathy for the willfully ignorant. That sounds awful to deal with.
I get you - and am the same. I hold little to nothing against someone unable to learn… but that’s not what I am talking about. Imagine someone with an IQ of 50, who decides to pass themselves off as a doctor - you go in for brain surgery and, whoopsie, you get your event taken care of “at a reduced price”. Nobody blames someone who is authentically stupid - and if that sounds bad, note that I include myself first among that category:-) - until and unless they step up and decide to become a LEADER. The latter carries with it a societal obligation to do better, than us mere peasants.
Put another way, if you are going to perform literal and actual and fully physical violence against an establishment such as the government of the United States of America (i.e. becoming one who acts rather than being acted upon), then you might want to start with actually reading the document that you are about to overthrow. It does no good to sleep with it under your pillow - you need to pull it out and actually READ it for it to do any good! Although many who were there have self-admitted that they have not in fact read it, even so much as once.
Likewise, more people died in the USA from the recent pandemic than all wars combined. Much of that was preventable, and quite frankly we don’t even (nor will ever) know precisely how many are directly attributable to that, b/c those stats were deliberately fudged and forbidden to be counted. The same with school shootings - we counted at one point that there were more “mass events” (involving 5+ people) than there were calendar years, but the government is specifically prohibited from collecting this data, so once again we’ll never truly know the extent, only lower-bound estimates (which are already shockingly high). Also people have already died from the ham-handed prevention of “abortion”, that somehow includes cancerous masses, dead fetuses (from natural miscarriages) with necrotic tissue rotting away (but can’t remove either b/c that could be considered an “abortion”), ectopic “pregnancies”, and other life-threatening situations, which are nowhere close to the medical definition of “abortion”, yet to the lawmakers (some of whom claim that babies cannot be produced from a rape - I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP - b/c “God has a way of shutting that whole thing down there in the case of rape”) are too unintelligent to understand anything at all about what is going on.
However, nobody is that stupid, as to e.g. see Trump wear a mask, then turn around and claim to others that he does not wear masks. We have long ago crossed that line, from “stupidity” to “obstinacy”. This is cognitive dissonance, yes likely imposed upon people from others (e.g. Putin), but also willfully held onto by many.
And here is proof: a video by Kurzegatcht that is only 11-minutes long that explains why people should take the vaccine. This is VERY understandable. Anyone who watches this would INSTANTLY understand the situation fully - and it’s only 11-minutes long, so for something that could save a life, and possibly that of every one of your family members - is not too much to ask. And yet… people did not do it.
Moreover, much of the subject matters involved in all of what I mentioned above don’t even need a video of even 1 minute to explain - e.g. to say that “kids getting shot in schools all across the nation” is… what is is again? good? no wait, bad, yeah, that’s it, that’s a bad thing!.. right?!
That’s not stupidity - that’s stubbornness.
Or they don’t care because they’re using it in a colloquial sense and 90+% of people they talk to would understand their intended usage, so they resent being lectured on semantics rather than responding to the meaning behind their words.
That’s a launching point for a really interesting discussion, which I doubt you wanted so I’ll cut it short. The gist is: do words have any meaning at all, and if so, is there such a thing as objective truth, and then shouldn’t the former be reflective of the latter?
“Mammal” means something, and all the Reddit-esque “acktwually” aside, it means something different from “animal”. But rather than say “thank you for the correction, yes that is what I meant, what you said”, the implication being that we all stand together side-by-side in front of Truth, with those closer to it being the ones considered “correct”, many instead would hold onto pride and say like “nuh-uh, I know you are but what am I?” One fosters a sense of community, while the other divides it into those who enjoy shitting onto others and those who (surely) enjoy being shat upon.
There is a saying that pride goes before a fall. And with planes having parts falling off of them inside the US, and literally falling from the sky into the ocean (that one off the coast of Africa, in at least one case), I’d say that we could definitely use more of the former where we consider 1+1=2 as a more worthwhile goal than “everyone is always correct, bc even if not, they surely meant to be and that’s enough”.
Of course if not, then surely you agree with me anyway, since I am responding to the meaning behind your words? ;-)
Or if still not, then you may want to block me, since I have a feeling you may not enjoy much of what I will have to say across the Fediverse.
Sure in some cases there can be an objective truth probably, although i doubt any of us is as close to it as some people seem to enjoy thinking they are. But i think what you’re missing (possibly intentionally) about my point is that if you know what someone meant then they achieved the objective of communicating, and by choosing to ignore what they meant and instead focus on what they incorrectly said then i feel like you’re consciously choosing to move the conversation away from ‘truth’ and toward ‘correctness’ out of some need to feel superior. There is a time and place to correct people, but lots of people (and you may or may not be one of them) seem incapable of distinguishing when it is not the right time or place.
I acknowledge that there is that as well:-). The hard part is that the OP is a joke, somewhat, so all answers seem to work within that context.
And Truth is such a very slender path between extremes - e.g. 1+1= neither 2.1 nor 1.9, but exactly 2 in-between.
So if I say that Truth matters, generally speaking, and you say that it depends on the context, then strictly speaking your argument must win. e.g. in a discussion between literally toddlers the facts would not matter, hence you are most definitely correct that there exists some scenarios where it does not.
I was bemoaning how society in general chooses for it not to matter, more often than the reverse - yes, definitely the road less traveled for sure. We all exist on that spectrum, with choices as to when and where and what and why and how.
And how ironic that we are nitpicking on these points to find the real Truth - that was supposed to be my schtick! But instead we will share it together:-). And here I am not joking: since I do value Truth, I enjoy both of our POVs here: sometimes Truth matters, sometimes it does not, but in general I wish people would value it more often than happens currently, even though sometimes indeed it can get in the way of other things too, like friendships.
Okay but words are not math. Language exists solely for the purpose of communicating ideas, and if you understand the idea that someone is trying to convey and that idea is not false, but their word choice is inaccurate then you most definitely are just nit-picking, and its not in search of some greater ‘truth’ because the actual truth of the conversation is what they were intending. I feel like you’re conflating truth with accuracy. Misusing the word animal when you mean mammal is not false in the same way as saying the sky is green or the covid vaccine gives you aids. Words can also have multiple meanings, which lends itself to more than one truth. Theres the scientific definition, and as i mentioned, the colloquial usage. So if a majority of the population understands a word to mean one thing in one context and another thing in a different context, and you willfully ignore that societal understanding in favor of ‘scientific validation’, then you are again ignoring a form of truth.
How do you make sure you understood the idea if the word choice is incorrect? You may assume from context what the idea was, but you may as well assume wrong. And the more such assumptions exist in one dialogue, the further it is from information exchange, and the closer it is to not listening at all because you already knew the context before the dialogue
I believe that’s a terribly slippery slope there: truth lies not only in the artist who made something but also the beholder who receives it. It’s both. If I sent you an unasked-for picture, say of my genitals, then my own preferences in the matter may be said to matter less than those of the recipient even!
Or I could say e.g.: that men and women are the same thing (I mean… 22 other chromosomes are so…), or that men and bears are the same - neither is particularly true, nor does me saying it help make it so. The burden is on me to communicate whatever I intended - men and women are similar, and indeed the same in so many aspects, though not precisely all; and similarly with men and bears.
I preemptively agree that the importance of saying that mammals is the same thing as animals is low. Unless, that is, someone has decided to really really really really really care about the answer, for whatever reason, and then to them it will matter. But how then will they find the answer in such case, when everywhere they look, people all agree that those words mean the same thing?
You seem to be arguing that mammals == animals is a matter of subjective opinion, like the sky is beautiful, rather than of fact, like the sky is green, or blue, or whatever the names of colors mean. It is not though?
Oh well, no biggie. But I do think that facts matter, and furthermore I think that the very existence of the USA is at stake upon this issue. Not that I have anything against you personally I hope you understand (my intent there only going partway to explaining that, and the burden to communicate such being partway on me to say whatever I mean), it’s just that I get triggered upon this matter, as I wonder how many of my family members will be among those who get killed as a result.
Anyway, far from ignoring that “truth”, I was in fact bemoaning (and also making fun of:-P) its existence. Not every popular trend is equally valid. Case in point, I was making fun of the existence of the former, which you took exception to, so apparently you agree that despite the fact that MANY people think that mammals==animals, that there should be other interpretations that are equally valid and my pointing out the opposite was something that you felt needed to be spoken out against. If only there was some way to arbitrate! Some way to find out which things were “true”, vs. “untrue”! Sadly, there is not it seems, so in your mind you will remain “correct” and in mine I will do the same. No /s - I truly bemoan that fact, but I know of no way to remedy it: in my worldview, facts, and only facts, are true, regardless of how many people believe otherwise.
lectured on semantics rather than responding to the meaning
this is ironic
First, let me agree that everything in the kingdom Animalia is, in fact, an animal.
But now let me point out that many of the people who say shit like this might not speak english as their first language. Many languages have different words for animal for different types of animals. I tried to find out what I’m half remembering but I can’t find it quickly and I have to get to work. But I vaguely remember that some word that’s usually translated as animal into english actually doesn’t include insects. Just like the english “deer” at one point in time refered to all wild beasts (but not fish or fowl) and now only refers to Cervidae.
I’m referring to arguments I’ve had in person against native English speakers. If they were online arguments, the ability to use mobile data to show someone a citation wouldn’t be a new development.
Historically I still “lose” these types of arguments as my willfully ignorant interlocutor spams potential strawman and ad hominem “arguments” until they feel sufficiently convinced that my pesky facts and I are safe to ignore.
In my experience there are very few people worth arguing with, as there are very few people willing to argue in good faith. Most people see arguing as a battle to be won or lost rather than a mechanism by which to vet assumptions. How can you expect to argue with a person who is unable to argue with themselves?
I feel like a lot of these posts are people just “poking the bear” and others end up taking them seriously. I understood this concept fairly early because of my family’s heavy use of sarcasm and seeing Calvin’s dad (of Calvin and Hobbes) explain things. Sometimes your best bet is to just not give the lesson and leave it alone so it doesn’t get unnecessary attention.
I’ve deleted so many half written comments thinking “If this is what they think, do I really want to deal with the absolute garbage response I’ll inevitably get back?”
But you can ignore the response if you decide to not deal with it
Sure, but remember that there’s sometimes a scientific term used incorrectly, but it’s so widespread it has non-scientific definition in dictionary. Although thinking that insects are not animals is indeed stupid.
