Agreed, at least for some species like deer. I can’t think of too many others, though, especially with global warming. Most of the animals that thrive despite human encroachment, like coyotes, crows, and raccoons aren’t animals that we hunt.
Yes, there is that. I am personally against hunting because I figure wild animals are already under enough pressure from habitat destruction and climate change.
Hunting is largely cultural now and isn’t needed for sustenance except in very remote places. At the same time, I’m not sure if it is fair to classify a cultural practice as being for mere pleasure. It is a bit more complicated than that. Certainly, in Canada, indigenous peoples and the descendents of early settlers think so.
I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding your comment, but killing animals for pleasure alone is already largely illegal in Western countries. And that includes hunting. You aren’t allowed to just hunt an animal for fun and then leave it unharvested. It is hard to enforce, obviously. But you can definitely be charged for killing deer, moose, ducks, even fish, without a license and at least the intent to eat it. For example, you can’t kill a bear, cut off its paws or gall bladder, and then throw the carcass in the bush. You also can be charged for killing or treating an animal inhumanely or in a way that causes it distress. That theoretically applies to all animals, including pets, livestock, aquariums, wildlife, and even small animals like mice and bats.
I might quibble about the Catholic Church being the “original” church since Catholicism only came about after Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman state in 380. You could argue that Catholicism started a bit earlier under Constantine I at the First Ccouncil of Nicaea in 325, which is when the Roman state started to consolidate the various early Christian beliefs under an official “catholic” orthodoxy. The word “catholic” literally means “including a wide variety of things”. The point being that there was already a wide variety of Christian sects prior to the Council of Nicaea.
The Protestant argument against Catholicism boils down to the belief that the Catholic Church is a corrupted Christianity, not that it is non-Christian. And there is some truth to that. The pre-Nicaean churches were free-wheeling spiritualists with a wide variety of beliefs, but that all changed when the Roman state decided to create an orthodox, singular religion under its control. Protestants argue that this adaptation of religious belief to the needs of maintaining state power is the original corruption of the Catholic Church.
Now, two key facts influenced the early history of Roman Catholicism:
The Roman state recognized the descendants of Caesar, the Emperors, as the Pontifex Maximus, or head priest, of the Roman state. They also required that everyone adhere to the cult of the Emperor. This was purely ritualistic and was meant as a bulwark to the power of the state.
The vast majority of the Empire’s citizens were pagan.
Because of #1, the Roman Emperor became the head of the newly formed Catholic Church, which was a unification of Church and State. This is called Caesaropapism, and is also why the Catholic Church retains a hierarchical structure to this day and its seat is still located in the heart of the Western Roman Empire. The Pope is the spiritual successor of the Western Roman Emperor.
Because of #2, Catholicism is highly ritualistic, like paganism, and early Catholicism adopted the worship of saints, which are basically small gods. Saint worship was the bridge between paganism and Christianity.
During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, Luther and others made the point that the union of state power with Christianity was a corruption of “original” pre-Catholic Christianity, which was more spiritually-oriented and valued personal conviction over state orthodoxy. Interestingly, the split between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe also more or less follows the geographic outline of the Western Roman Empire, with southern Europe largely retaining Catholicism and northern Europe largely adopting Protestantism. This implies a political dimension to the schism, not just a religious one. England is the odd man out here because their response to the schism was to create the Church of England, which is basically Catholicism without the Pope, substituting the English monarch as the head of the Church and toning down the saint worship.
The great irony of any Protestant movement that craves Christo-fascist state power is that they are advocating to become the very evil they swore to destroy back in the 1500s.
Societal collapse wouldn’t be a return to a simpler life. There are too many of us and we are far too urbanized. Check out Haiti for an example of what societal collapse looks like.
No, just that one.
What’s got all y’all’s balls in a knot, youse folks?
folks, y’all, youse
The redneck trifecta!
But y’all makes you sound like an idiot.
Deoodorant is the gift you give to those around you. So, if someone needs deodorant so bad that they need to steal it…I’m thinking you should just let them have it.
The subject of the arguments is certainly politics (and war and religion), but the source of the arguments is strongly differing world views.
Despite what we’d like to believe about ourselves, humans are not well-adapted to being exposed to a wide variety of differing viewpoints. We evolved in small, racially and socially homogenous groups, for the most part. Up until the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of humanity lived and died within 30 miles of where they were born, and only had daily interaction with what was essentially an extended family.
Travel, mass immigration, and the Internet changed all that. Being exposed to such a diversity of opinion on a daily basis quite simply breaks our brains. It causes a tremendous amount of internal conflict and stress, for some more than others. That constant strain becomes more intense when there is war, such as in Gaza and Ukraine, or particularly divisive politics. There are obviously some extremely contentious elections coming up, including the US election, which has tremendous global implications. There are, no doubt, people on Lemmy right now for whom the result of the US election is a matter of life and death, and yet they aren’t US citizens and can’t vote.
We should all take a chill pill and try to be less confrontational and use less emotionally-charged language when it comes to hot button issues. The politics and news subs are an avalanche of charged words and phrases like genocide, fascist, apartheid, Nazi, racist, transphobic, anti-gay, religious zealot, and many others. Those are fighting words. Deserved or not, words like that not only reflect, but also create, a lot of emotional dissonance and stress, which lead to emotionally charged arguments.
You aren’t alone.
Probably true. And as soon as I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch, and MASH become the most popular downloads, you’ll have a great point.
Also, to be clear, I’m not against piracy. I subscribe to Gaben’s view that piracy is largely caused by poor service. Its one of the few ways that average consumers can fight back against corporate greed.
Online piracy is about getting free stuff while not having to face any consequences or look any “victim” in the eye. Getting free stuff is pretty rational at an individual level, even if it requires a certain level of willful moral blindness.
Same with vegetarianism. Meat is delicious and satisfying, even though we know eating a high-meat diet is bad for the Earth. It is perfectly rational for an individual to want to eat meat, but most of us don’t want to kill the cow or think about the environmental costs, so we put that part aside so we can continue to eat succulent steaks.
Few things in life are 100% free of any potentially negative consequence. The ability to compartmentalize and hold disparate views is a necessary evolutionary adaptation to having a large brain. Otherwise, you would be paralyzed by indecision over the short- and long-term consequences of our actions.
One reason why things are sometimes traced back to industry is social marketing. For example, in the fight to ban smoking in indoor public spaces, focus groups indicated that young adults were not put off by threats of death and disease, but were responsive to information about how the tobacco industry engaged in mass manipulation.
A lot of people are sensitive to animal cruelty, so videos of cruel treatment by the meat industry are useful to groups wishing to promote vegetarianism.
The entertainment industry has tried similar tactics, but it’s a hard sell. When Tom Cruise makes $50 million per film and Taylor Swift personally makes $10 milliion per night while on tour, it’s just hard to sell the idea that there is a lack of money in the entertainment industry.
Wow, thanks. They were following me too, and I had no idea. Blocked.
Same here. A lot of people (including myself until a week ago) are either oblivious or fooling themselves about what is happening to Reddit. Changes are being made with the sole purpose of boosting revenue ahead of their IPO. Reddit is no longer focused on improving the user experience, but has switched to full monetization mode. That will only get worse now. It is a slow-moving train wreck.
And, yeah, some Reddit subs are over-moderated and arbitrary. Looking at you /r/boardgames.
It was not easy to figure out Lemmy at first, and the sign up process a few months ago was difficult (for me). But now that I’m on board with a good app, Lemmy is just great. It feels like early-days Reddit before enshittification set in.
I certainly go through significant periods of time where I think about Rome virtually every day. I listen to a lot of history podcasts, play games involving ancient history, have read many books about Rome, am subscribed to reddit history meme subs… If you are into history, Rome comes up a lot, whether for its own history or as a comparator for other empires.
That dude is a mod now. He roams around news communities endlessly antagonizing any user who doesn’t toe his anti-Israel stance. That’s why he has a ridiculously high comment count.