Clever marketing and being in the right place at the right time

You’re not wrong, but that doesn’t diminish the suffering they’ve endured (I’m not accusing you of saying anything like that, just pointing out that the consistency of a crime doesn’t mean they deserve less justice)

Fry?

One was a wild animal who only acted on their base impulses and managed to kill several people in the process… the other just got into some coke

Funny thing is, this happened during the First Punic War and the Romans actually had this exact thing happen to them like 3 or 4 different times. Each was extremely devastating for them (not to mention the battle of Cape Ecnomus which remains, even to this day, as one of the largest naval battles in all of world history) but they somehow managed to come from behind and win the war

Unironically you

Around the same time you stop using whataboutisms and goal-post-shifts to attempt to win all your arguments. So probably never in our lifetimes

The “early 19th century CE history nerd” trying to detract from the harmful consequences of the Industrial Revolution by trying to claim ‘we’ve always been like that’? I never could’ve seen this coming 🙄

You know all too well what I’m talking about. In fact, by your own admission, you should know it better than me. So the fact that you’re so eager to use one of the oldest (and weakest) rhetorical defenses in the book should speak volumes to anyone else listening/reading this

Capitalism wasn’t the cause of animal cruelty, no. You’re spot-on there. But OP is correct that there was a shift between ‘killing what was needed/could be stored’, to what we currently have which is ‘get as many animals through the process as quickly as possible for the sake of profit’. And now we have a problem of having so much food available for businesses and not enough available for individuals (or at least not for a comparable cost). Having worked in the food service industry for over a decade, being told to throw away pounds and pounds and pounds of perfectly good food every day, watching coworkers get punished for even ASKING if they could take any of it home, and constantly given some half-assed reasoning of “oh we wouldn’t want to be sued if someone claims they ate our food and got sick” (even though that would be the simplest court case possible, almost an automatic win for the business if it even got to that point) as the sole justification to why it was immediately trashed, I’m honestly just sick of all the bullshit.

Half a millennia ago was about the same time as early-modern capitalism was developed… It’s just a coincidence I’m sure, but still thought it was funny to point out. That being said, I agree with you that there wasn’t a time “before people were shitty”, but I must point out that we’ve developed tech to such a level that we’re actively destroying our own environment. Also, OP is correct when they said that we actively shifted from killing what was needed and saving the rest for later, to our current profit-driven method of breeding and butchering as many animals as physically possible just for the sake of selling more and keeping the machines running efficiently.

I’d be willing to forgive all of that if we were somehow able to eliminate hunger through these production methods (something well within our capability to accomplish), but having worked in the food service industry for over a decade, being told to throw away pounds and pounds and pounds of perfectly good food every day, watching coworkers get punished for even ASKING if they could take any of it home, and constantly given some bullshit reasoning of “oh we wouldn’t want to be sued if someone claims they ate our food and got sick” as the sole justification to why it was immediately trashed, I’m honestly just sick of all the bullshit. The fact that we have a hyper-efficient food industrial complex that produces more than we know what to do with AND a nation-wide food-affordability problem that seems to exclusively effect the most vulnerable, should not be two facts that coexist

They want more of their children. Elon Musk allegedly told an old girlfriend that he wanted his “own legion of offspring”. They sure as shit don’t want any more poor people having kids than absolutely necessary (and depending on who you ask, that could mean “none at all”). As for the Trumps and Charlie Kirks out there, they want more white births because something something Great Displacement Brain Rot

Hey buddy, it’s me from that other comment about population density. I’m not going to get too detailed in this comment cause you’ve got a whole other thing going with that Melvin guy, but I just wanted to say congrats on seeing some success against the AfD and Nazis and I envy your opinion that peaceful protesting can still bring great short- and long-term benefits.

Unfortunately, I still think America is too far(-right) gone for something like that to work. 7 of the 10 largest protests in American history can be directly linked back to protesting against Trump (4 of the top 5 occurred just within the last 12 months, with the last one being the Women’s March of 2017 aka right as Trump’s first term started) and all of these have accomplished… well, nothing. Not a single damn thing. That’s 33 million people (if you do like I did and assume the highest estimate was 100% correct and there were no overlaps, so a highly unrealistic skew in their favor), just under 10% of the entire country peacefully protesting Trump at some point aaaaand nothing happened. Hell, most people probably don’t even remember a single one of the three seperate No Kings protests.

On the other hand, the Maga cult managed to storm the Capitol building with only about 2,000 protesters on Jan 6th 2021 (something like 0.0005% of the population) and even though they technically failed in their goal at the time, it had (and continues to have) FAR reaching effects on American politics. Several people died, hundreds injured, and exactly 0 negative consequences for the man who started it; Hell, he even managed to get reelected afterwards and pardon almost all of them anyway so it was really a net-positive for him by far.

We could have a good, long discussion about the ethics/morals of protesting peacefully in a vacuum, but at the end of the day, in reality, force speaks volumes. I’m not advocating we do the same and go all-in on violence right off the bat, but rather “force” which I’m defining here as “the willingness to defend one’s self or ideals with violence if necessary,” should not be shied away from. If we go in ‘protesting’ by standing on sidewalks with cardboard signs, nothing gets accomplished except leaving the road open for them to roll over us later. It is no coincidence that many of the greatest changes brought through history began as “civil disobedience” that began peacefully only to end in violence when (surprise) the State wanted to maintain the status quo. We may be hesitant to use force, they will not be so kind-hearted

Trump has spent the previous decade proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he cares only for himself, his power, and his image. He will stop at nothing to gobble up as much as he can which is why we muat be prepared to stop him by any means necessary. In the words of one of our greatest Presidents, “Speak softly, but carry a big stick”

Mine doesn’t list a source (and it has very few pixels if you try to zoom in) so take it with a grain of salt, but they at least appear to be attempting to make it as close to a 1:1 comparison as possible. And I agree, we don’t need the whole country to mobilize as one, but let’s look at how the US has ~50 individual specks of purple separated by vast areas of white/tan/orange, even in the more well known states like New York, Texas, and California. Meanwhile, Europe is basically ALL purple and orange until you get to mountainous areas like the Scandinavian hinterland.

If I’m living in a small town in southern France and I want to protest, I could hop on the train and be in Paris in like, 6 hours at most. If I lived in a small town in let’s say, the (Eastern) Midwest and wanted to do the same in Washington DC, well public transport is already out of the question in the VAST majority of cases (trains here don’t visit small towns unless it’s for industrial reasons), so I’m gonna have to drive myself. 6 hour drive to DC puts my starting location somewhere around Columbus, Ohio (dead center of Ohio, but arguably not even in the Midwest depending on who you ask, or at least on the outer rim of it). Pretty much anything further west than that (2/3s of the country at least) and I’m looking at a multi-day investment just to GET to the protest, not to mention all the other shit that goes along with it. You could always try protesting at the State capitals, but those will automatically be lesser in size and effectiveness (no one cares if 1 out of 50 states is having problems, that’s literally happening all the time) and depending on my state, that might still be an all-day drive.

I like your idea of using the internet to help, but the reality of the situation is that without human bodies physically showing up, there’s no real incentive for DC to actually DO anything. There have been millions, possibly billions, of critical things said about Trump’s administration online, but that hasn’t changed anything for the better.

Lastly, like you said, we both agree that propoganda is one of the biggest obstacles here, but I don’t know how much we agree on us ‘having more power than we seem to know’. I’ve seen various estimates and each time the number seems to be increasing, but roughly HALF of all American households will be out of money if they go two or three months without a paycheck. Period. We have no social safety net. If you’re deemed ‘good enough to work’ then you better be working, otherwise you’re homeless which, in this country, might as well be a death sentence. Sure, there are a small handful of exceptions to this, but they put up so many roadblocks and hoops to jump through that trying to get on and stay on Welfare is basically a job in and of itself, and they will only provide you with the bare essentials; if you even think about one luxury good, that money disappears instantly.

As much as I hate to admit it, in America, the Capitalists have won for the time being and there’s really nothing to be done about it short of a complete overhaul of MOST of how this country operates

As much as I want to be on your side, I gotta mostly agree with the other guy here: Europeans have the advantage of a very high population density overall, especially compared to America. I don’t know where you’re from but taking the Fremch as an example because they live and breathe protesting and revolutions, they could (and have) gather a MASSIVE protest of millions of people from all over the country in the span of just a few hours when they set their minds to it. Meanwhile, in the US, outside the small handful of cities everyone is familiar with (New York, Los Angeles, etc) the vast majority of us are spread out over thousands of miles (1.61 x thousands) of kilometers in pockets too small to really have any effect at all.

After some admitedly-quick research, the EU has about 100 million more people and a little less than half the land that the US has. These two compounding factors alone make it MUCH easier to facilitate any kind of social change on your side of the pond, but that’s not even including factors like our complete lack of any REAL public infrastructure, harsher work-life balance by every metric, and (though I could be wrong here) a generally pro-union culture whereas our unions have been demonized to Hell and back (pun intended) for at least the previous 150 years

Obviously the main conclusion to draw is that you need more sleep

Thanks bro 🫂

In this heat? It’s not going well

Not necessarily? Idk man, language evolves, the word “nerd” doesn’t have the same meaning/connotations as it did 40 years ago, nor the same as it will have 40 years from now. Either way, my brain is fried from work so I’m just gonna sit this one out. Feel free to use my comment as a Strawman if you must

Yeah but that doesn’t fit the pun nearly as well

You do realize that drones (or any aircraft for that matter) don’t need to physically take off from Red Square in order to have originated from Russia, right? Hell, there’s a non-zero chance that they ordered it from Amazon and had it shipped to some warehouse only a mile or two from the airport and attached explosives to it from there