SixSidedUrsine [comrade/them]

It has nothing to do with where I personally draw the line, asshole. It has everything to do with the scientifically established reality about who is capable of suffering. Rocks can’t. Cows, pigs, etc. can. Just because your sphere of empathy is arbitrarily drawn to reinforce what’s convenient for you doesn’t mean that by necessity everyone else is so shallow, cruel, and morally inconsistent.

Weird how often the loudest anti-vegans also turn out to be anti-human too.

Do you also need someone to explain to you why Patsoc’s don’t fall under the nonsectarian rule too? What about Va*shites? They’re real leftists, according to themselves, so not letting them run rampant here is just blatant sectarianism, you’re so right! The non-sectarianism rule should also extend to the Pro-Palestine gatekeeper users, always arrogantly telling Zionists that they’re not real leftists just because they support a racist apartheid state conducting genocide. This all makes perfect sense.

The train is a unique culinary tool. It’s just an innovative way to make track-crushed refries. You eat them the the same way you’d eat any refried beans.

Same vibes as supposed progressives who are sharing pro-Israel PragerU vids after criticizing PragerU on other topics.

Ideally every comrade is vegan, but if for whatever reason you cannot be or are working towards it then at the absolute least you can support those who are and accept that it is the morally correct position instead of all this hoop jumping

Sorry for the cliche response, but really. This.

I agree, non-vegans (or certainly at least anti-vegans, even in this thread) can only operate by avoiding facing their cognitive dissonance through child-like abstractions. But a puerile affection for a stuffed animal has zilch to do with the material basis behind veganism and the very real suffering on an unimaginable scale that carnists subject sentient life to for profit and treats.

“My leftism has nothing to do with empathy or recognizing the suffering of others, it has only to do with benefiting those that I deem enough “like me” to be worth my consideration! Leftism is all about making things better for me and my kind! No, that’s not reactionary! I’m not a chud! I’m a leftist, really!”

i think we mostly care about people, and place humans, sometimes other animals (usually pets), childrens’ toys, and occasionally some machines or fictional characters into the “person” or “not person” buckets depending on our personal attachment and a bunch of arbitrary social norms.

You think “we” do that? I don’t. I make it a point to carefully consider who should be given my empathy or condemnation based on material reality.

I’m not entirely sure what your point is to be honest. Yeah, unfortunately there are plenty of people who base their sphere of empathy not on a materialist examination of the world but on societal norms, and that’s the problem here (along many of the problems we rightly rail about as leftists). It’s what I mean when I talk about arbitrary lines differentiating the human animal from all others to justify the way some humans treat all others.

Are you equating pets to children’s toys? Hopefully you’re just pointing out how ridiculous that is? One of those things is a lifeform that has the capacity to experience their existence, the other is an inanimate object no different than a rock. These things are not comparable. Same thing with a machine. There is a material difference between an animal (homo sapien or pig) and a machine, just as there is between a human and an LLM. That some people might be so ignorant as to think an LLM and a human being deserve equal consideration and empathy is not a valid or coherant argument that sentient beings who happen not to be human are ok to torture and kill.

You can call it person-hood if you like, but that just obsfucates things because people tend to think of “person” as “human” and what we’re talking about here is the capacity to suffer and to experience, which is not exclusive to humanity. It’s just another example of using the bias that’s already built in to language as a means to prove a point through circular reasoning, something we should be familiar with and wary of as leftists.

A less circle-jerking version of this bait post might be a pig versus terry schaivo’s corpse being kept “alive” by a heap of medical devices.

How is that less circle-jerking? Why is this version “circle-jerking” at all? The difference in either version is a lever to choose between something that can experience and suffer and something that can’t.

Pigs could well be sapient too. It really depends on where you draw the line for “sapience.” If you mean “able to think” or even “self aware” then pigs almost certainly are sapient. If by sapient you mean “of or relating to the human species” then obviously they aren’t, but that latter definition has no bearing or point in this discussion. You bloodmouths (that’s your wording!) keep trying to find some line you can draw in the sand that makes the torture of non-humans acceptable, but every time that line is examined it turns out it doesn’t exist, or at best, it turns out to be such a fuzzy boundary that it consigns tonnes of humans to the same status that’s used to justify the treatment of the beings tortured and killed as treats for carnists.

All you’ve done is admit that you think the suffering of others is fine and “worth it” for the tasty results, so long as those who are suffering are sufficiently different than you.

The question is if animals should be emoathized with in the same way historical slaves are.

That’s a slimy phrasing the question in a way that immediately lets you off the hook for your choice to ignore and perpetuate suffering because it makes it seem like the question of non-human suffering hinges on non-humans being “the same as” human slaves. It’s the old “well, obviously pigs and cows aren’t quite as intellectually complex as humans therefore anything we do to them for the sake of humans enjoying treats is fine. What, do you think pigs and cows should be able to vote or learn to read?”

In other words, the answer to your question about whether we should empathize “in the same way” is no, not the “same way,” but we absolutely should and must empathize with them as fellow sentient beings capable of emotions, joy, suffering, pleasure, pain just like humans, and recognize that the way we torture and murder billions of them every year for profit (and “taste”) is one of the greatest crimes in the history of our species.

Your entire premise of who deserves your empathy is still based on how much someone is “like you” in whatever arbitrary ways that allow you to maintain the distinctions you’ve already made based on your comfort and convenience. And that part is the same as slave owners who would make similar arbitrary distinctions about how “different from themselves” their victims are.

Yes, sentient beings deserve your empathy. It’s not at all a difficult conclusion to reach if you have any interest in being honest with yourself.

You’re right, it does sound naive, but I don’t think that’s what it is. The old succdem Bernard is not naive. As disappointing as it may be, ultimately he is and has been for some time, just another Democrat ghoul who has proven over and over he will toe the party line when push comes to shove.

The “I’m happy about it” part might be mildly insensitive phrasing, but nothing more. Everything she said wouldn’t be out of place as a comment here, not deserving of the dunk tank.

I think it’s a fair assumption, considering it was announced that was the team the US was sending in (or at least it was announced that a teams from “Joint Special Operations Command” were being sent to support Israel, and Delta Force is one of the two main groups in that). Also, it was members of that delta death squad that the white house laughably put up images on instagram with their faces showing before realizing their mistake and deleting them.

Anyway, it could well be a false or incorrect report that they’re fighting right now, just saying that there’s good reason to say Delta, and that it’s not just some random generic thing.

A word spoken of only in the past tense.

Oh no, not this again. If that’s what you see, then you aren’t really looking.

Reposting something again, but putting it below a spoiler tag because it’s not relevant to what’s happening right now in Gaza - much more pressing atm.

But I am mostly interested in making sure we handle the revolution of the future as correctly as possible.

That is the important part. And if we’re talking defenseless kids (that is, they’re not aiming a gun at you, they don’t have the code to the bomb like on an episode of 24, they’re literally your prisoners) then it would take a truly tortured form of logic along with some insane scenario to find some utilitarian instance where killing them is wholly justified.

The main problem with that as well as the main problem with talking about the Romanovs of history is that the whole thing about how not killing them “would have ended up killing x-hundred/thousand/million/whatever more” is all just speculation. ImOnADiet correctly put the question as you being omniscient - yeah, if you’re omniscient (more to the point, prescient) then it’s an easy choice. If not executing the kid really truly did undeniably and unavoidably, as shown in the magic crystal ball, causes so much more death and misery, then killing them probably would be the deeply unfortunate but correct choice. The thing is, no one is omniscient or prescient. There are countless ways, countless likely ways it could well have gone where they survived and the revolution was better for it, not worse off. And so too is any future situation where you have children as your prisoners. The perpetrators of crimes against the people get the wall, zero qualms there. But the kids in your custody, at your mercy who were guilty of no such crimes except to have been born to ghouls deserve profound consideration before you put them against the wall next to fascists. You had better be fucking sure these children are beyond all doubt going to be responsible for future mass death, somehow, with your crystal ball.

For the record, I don’t think you’re being a debate pervert at all, and feeling strongly about this is not “a weak point,” it’s quite the opposite. I for one am grateful that you’re here and you’re asking these questions. I’m appalled by the few people here who think it’s like some kind of badge that makes them a serious~tm communist and that no one can accuse them of being a lib for proclaiming how righteous they think the execution of historic children is, or something. So actually seeing someone give a little pushback on that deserves gratitude and appreciation.

At least the “leftists” who still can’t shake the petty machismo brainworms and the “I’m tough, don’t you forget it” attitude always like to announce themselves. It’s cringe and a little nauseating, but especially if there are some in an organization with me, it’s important to me to know which ones they are. And when certain topics come up, they just have to shout it from the rooftops.

“If it were me there, I’d for sure decide to kill me some royal kids and not shed a single tear! In fact, I’d laugh! Communism has nothing to do with humanity and being humane, and anyone who disagrees with me is a lib! or an ultra!”

Ok. Yeah. Great. Go have fun larping yourself as the Soviet soldier who was oh so fortunate to be faced with the choice whether to kill completely defenseless, if potentially future-problematic children. But leave me the fuck out of your little violence fantasies. I’ll reserve mine for actual capitalists and fascists because there’s more than enough of those to go around without needing to proclaim how ready I am to off some 12 year old.

I’ll be curious to see in the coming weeks how many proclaimed leftists that passed the litmus on Ukraine end up failing this one and vice versa. Surely it would have to be a relatively small contingent, unless I’m totally forgetting something obvious. e: PatSoc’s don’t count.