TL;DW:

“Even on this issue, donald trump and his rightwing friends are worse.”

Lmfao sure dude, whatever you need to believe. We’ll save a seat for you over here in reality whenever you feel like joining the rest of us.

Lmfao, what law is being followed here? Come on.

They keep bringing up how small the protests were and how they “ran out of steam” or w/e. It really shows how little they actually know about the US.

It seems pretty clear that the negative implication is putin’s regime abusing his authority for sexual favors (especially given all the mass rapes by russian forces in ukraine…) and not that said favors are bad because theyre gay. It’s telling that they assumed it was based in homophobia, though.

Very poor word choice on my part, I will freely admit that. The veg population of inda in is roughly larger than the entire US population, which is the much more useful statistic. I’m also aware that the vast majority of people who eat a vegan diet do so for economic reasons. Sorry about that.

Yeahhhh… I was drunk and I probably could have thought that example through better. My apologies.

I cherish you.

But probably from a distance. Chickeboos aren’t the best for, you know, close-up cherishing.
You know why.

This is a very common argument and it’s a little shortsighted, because the answer is broadly “yes”. Reducing the number of cows/chickens/etc in the world is a net positive, and would only require us to stop force breeding them like it’s some kind of degenerate poultry hentai. Allowing the species to reduce in population is only of benefit to the species (cough humans cough) and is overall desirable. Keeping some in zoos would be fine, maintaining the native wild populations is also a good plan, small scale farms (“family” or “hobby”) farms where they don’t brutalize the animals is also a feature of most vegan utopias. Take india, where most of the population is vegan: there are still cows on farms, cow-derived produce is still available, it’s just the cows aren’t kept in American-style stock farms.

YMMV, and like any ideology there are other opinions with equally valid outlooks, this is just what I see most often. (full disclosure, I am not a vegan (there’s plenty of evidence to that in my post history), I just sleep with a lot of vegans and quite like chana masala)

(There’s also a pretty… sane… subgroup that proposes ‘corrective breeding’; a process wherein we undo the destructive changes humans introduced to the species and return them to what would be found in their ‘natural’ state. “Contentious” is probably the best description.)

“It’s complicated”.

It’s the same category of dispute as the “eggs or milk can be vegan under certain circumstances” one. The argument is that rescued farm animals have been so warped by human intervention that it’s actively harmful for you to not use their produce - dairy cows can in rare cases die, and otherwise will just be miserable, if left unmilked. Chickens lay too many eggs, and leaving unf. chicken eggs in the coop can lead to the chickens learning to eat their own eggs, so you have to remove them. (I don’t hold a position on these claims, I’m just reporting what I see come up in the argument.) Bees fall into the same sort of category, they’ve been so selectively bred that they now produce far more honey than they can possibly use, so removing and eating some of it helps to mitigate the negative impact that humans have had on the creatures.

Regardless though: cows, chickens and bees are all still animals. I don’t think any vegans are gonna argue that one.

I’m glad we’ve been able to find this common ground.

You’re… not very good at this, are you.

Hush.

But neither Poland nor Lithuania… are doing that. And they totally could be doing that. And if we’re ignoring the political feasibility of deploying a THAAD, why wouldn’t we just put it in Ukraine? Or, hell, why not just send US forces into ukraine, since it’s pretty clear we could roflstomp russia in a couple days? A couple carrier groups in the black sea and this conflict would be over comically fast.

Look you make a point, but I’m not sure what you’re actually trying to say with it. Do the now years of financial, humanitarian, political and military aid the US has given Ukraine count for nothing? The fact that we’re getting our dicks stuck in the middle east again (and chugging so much Israeli Genocide Bathwater we’re at risk of succumbing to zionist water toxemia while we do it) has very little to do with the continuing support the US is giving Ukraine. It’s still a damn hard battle, but the US has been giving them tools that they are using incredibly effectively. A THAAD system being deployed to Ukraine would be: a serious escalation with russia (who will not be happy with US anti-ballistic missile systems on the border, a point they’ve made clear for years), an astounding investment of an incredibly expensive and very limited-scope platform that is vulnerable without the supporting military ecosystem, and minimally effective since the kinds of missiles THAAD was designed to counter (realistically just SBMs) are barely being used by russia in this conflict.

There are real, credible reasons why the US has not done this, and I sure was sarcastic at you about your suggestion. I’m sorry about that, I kinda assumed you were a troll. If you’re serious about this, you should stop and consider that a war can’t be separated from the political realities that surround it, not least because if we could do that wars would be rendered pointless and we’d never have them and raytheon would go out of business.
…
Hang on what am I saying that sounds great, I’m gonna start saying it too. Maybe if we convince enough people it’ll actually happen. I mean, it’s a better plan than being shitty at random well-meaning-but-off-the-mark-on-some-obscure-details internet commenters on a niche social media website like I’m doing right now.

“Alright, thank you for attending this meeting of the Member States of the NATO Alliance Countries Which Border Ukraine, which of you would like to be the first one to base an active combat emplacement (and 100% viable military target) on their soil? Did I mention it wasn’t going to be very effective, and costs $12 Million per missile?”
“…”
"Anyone? "

Look I’m clearly being sarcastic, but out of Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary or Poland, which one is your pick to throw themselves into a meatgrinder war of attrition all while the US is split 50/50 on electing someone who has actively called for the US to back out of NATO?

And they’re not a nuclear power. Like, pointedly not. We made real sure of that.

IDK, this seems like the DoD actually doing their jobs (for once).We’ve given tons of anti-missile systems to ukraine. Deploying THAAD to a conflict where we can’t actively deploy US troops alongside it is a serious intelligence risk, and it doesn’t fill a particular role thats missing in Ukraine. Russia hasn’t been using ballistic missiles of the size THAAD would even be effective against. Patriot, MANPAD, aerial launched and even hera systems have been extremely effective, and NATO continues to supply those systems for Ukraine.

Washington, D.C.

Thank fuck, I was worried there’d be even more of those weirdos out here in the PNW

I would pay so much money for one of these…

Mondoshawan key sticking out of its fingertip after its hand is crushed in a door, from the movie The Fifth Element