Veganism without some kind of conceptual framework of speciesism is not veganism. Your assessment is backwards, not only is the concept of anti-speciesism not fascist; speciesism is foundational to racism, sexism, and ableism.

"When you are laying down the groundwork for what it means to be human, that is what it means to actually create human as a political identity because scientifically what we actually know is that human is just one of many species of animal on this planet, but we don’t actually think of ourselves as animals. I’ve talked to countless people who actually balk at the idea, who actually say to me well, I’ve never heard of that; of course humans are not animals. I’m like wow, you definitely did not pass seventh-grade biology. It’s like, you know, but this is just — this just illustrates to me how deeply entrenched these ideologies are. Because of course humans are animals but when we create human as a political identity, what we simultaneously do is create animal as a political identity and not just a species classification.

When we set up this binary, everyone who does not fall into the neat little perfect box of what’s considered human, they exist on the spectrum as an animal. You see the animalization of black people. You see the animalization of any marginalized group or any group that we desire to marginalize and that’s occurred several times throughout history. Yeah, you know, that’s one of the driving things that I want people to take away from these conversations or what I want people to understand. Human was actually never something that was meant to include — in particular — us as black people. Human was just a distinction that was meant to be — that was meant to include primarily people who were white, male, straight, land-owning, heterosexual, and had all of their abilities.

That’s really what we are — that’s really what we’re talking about and if you don’t meet these qualifications, if you don’t meet these criteria, then you are somehow considered to be less-than. That’s when the animalization starts to creep in. Yeah, this sort of aspirational humanity is something that I see people working toward over and over again in black liberation movements. We’re always talking about I am a human being. You know what? I deserve these rights as a human without ever critically interrogating what it means to be human or why human was considered someone — a person who is deserving of rights and not all of these other citizens that we share the planet with. That is one of our fundamental problems. Until we actually include other persons in our frame of reference of who is a marginalized community, I think that is going to continue to keep us back. Instead of actually embracing solidarity with other marginalized species, we instead continue to perpetuate the perceived exceptionalism of human and why that’s so good."

Windows never breaks? Uhhhhh, that’s definitely not true. When I have to use Windows, I brace myself every time I have to update.

So are you meaning to imply that it’s racist to be vegan? Certainly like any other movement, veganism has a need for more intersectionality. And that outright nazi vegans exist is shitty. But to imply that the anomalous existence of a fringe nazi vegan community means that antispeciesism is in itself racist is completely false, and even misses the point of that very article you posted:

“White nationalist veganism can sound somewhat absurd, but it also shows how complex and deeply rooted this ideology is, and how it can appeal to a variety of different audiences. To combat these racist movements, we must understand them, including how they can incorporate beliefs we usually associate with liberal or leftist politics. The diversity of this movement should not be underestimated.”

Emphasis added. It is important not to allow bigots to hijack otherwise important movements for justice. If that’s something that matters to you, then you have even more reason to go vegan, because animal consumption is not only intrinsically racist, but it is demonstrably materially supporting the fascist institutions who are the largest threats to democracy.

https://www.christophersebastian.info/post/2018/10/20/if-veganism-is-racist-and-classist-bad-news-for-nonveganism

https://www.christophersebastian.info/post/they-want-to-take-away-your-hamburgers-animal-exploitation-and-white-nationalism

https://www.christophersebastian.info/post/2018/07/29/sorry-conservative-vegans-animal-rights-is-political-e2-80-a6and-it-leans-left

I remember some years ago there was a “malware” going around that would flash OpenWRT onto people’s routers, and set them to have more secure default settings.

There should be another thing like that, but one that upgrades Windows into a Linux distro.

Vegan fascists? The people who are trying to put an end to the forced captivity, continuous torture, rape, exploitation, commodification, and perpetual holocaust-levels of slaughter of virtually every species of animal that is not human, are fascists?

Here’s the most commonly accepted definition of veganism:

“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”"

Emphasis added. The vast majority of vegans do not believe that killing a mosquito is exactly equivalent to killing a human, and even of the people who do, it’s intended to imply that all species lives are important, that the mosquito’s life is seen as equally valuable to the human’s. The only reason such a proposition seems abhorrent to you is because you’re looking at the mosquito through the lens of your carnist supremacist mindset, which is to see the mosquito as something worthless and thus conclude that a human’s life is considered by vegans to be equally worthless.

But again, like everyone else vegans take anti-speciesism only as far as is practical. We just do it better. The mosquito bite is easy. If you know mosquitos are around, it’s wise to wear repellent, and take other appropriate precautions depending on your circumstances. Maybe modify your environment if possible to be less of a breeding ground for them, if it’s bad enough. If you’re dealing with a particular mosquito, odds are they have already bitten you, so how is the lethal carnist reaction any more protective against a disease that may have already been transmitted, than simply blowing on the mosquito to get them to fly away?

Locust infestations happen because of shitty agricultural practices. If you’ve got a plot of land that’s full of nothing but copies of one tantalizing crop, then of course it’s going to be an obvious buffet for a vast amount of insects. Are veganic farming or veganic permaculture methods extreme? Or is it more extreme that our most common monocultural methods of farming are causing so much pollution that it’s bringing so many vital pollinators to the brink of extinction?

You make the same erroneous argument that many other carnists make, which is the idea that because vegan values can’t always be practiced perfectly, that somehow automatically means the entire ethical framework is without merit. But that’s obviously nonsensical. To the individual mosquito or mouse, it makes all the difference in their entire little lives, whether they incidentally pestered a vegan or carnist. It’s been estimated that a single vegan living their values results in about 200 fewer livestock animals being slaughtered every year. Is it extreme to live in a way that would end factory farms forever if we all embraced it, or what about the lifestyle that created them in the first place?

Nearly every half-baked gotcha that carnists try to catch vegans in has a common-sense practical answer. The example of predation in wild areas is a point of contention in vegan communities, whether we should intervene or not and ultimately make rather significant changes to the natural world, but presently it doesn’t really matter, because there are so many other obvious abuses that need to end.

Veganism only looks extreme from the deluded perspective of carnism. But in reality going vegan is like becoming sober, and recognizing how disturbing it was to live the way that so many continue to.

It’s because fundamentally you are still commodifying whole living, thinking beings who have their own wills and lives they want to live. We need to reckon with the fact that it is unjust for us humans to think we have any right to declare other species of animals as property.

How is it not cruel?

https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch

No, animal captivity, exploitation, rape, slaughter, and consumption are all things that are very much unnecessary, and are detrimental in many ways.

In vegan communities insects are very much extended the same moral considerations as other animals. What you’re advocating is a form of speciesism, which is something better avoided as much as possible.

Lookup veganic farming, and veganic permaculture. The idea that animal ag has any place in combating global warming is demonstrably false, and was nothing more than a greenwashed hijacking of the other various regenerative agricultural movements. There is no room in neither a just world, or a sustainable one, for the exploitation and consumption of animals.

https://www.surgeactivism.org/allansavory

Imagine thinking that telling people on the internet to not have kids is an effective strategy against climate change, while downplaying the importance of going vegan. Continuing to be an animal abuser is also more than a kick in the gut to all the animals who are born in extreme captivity, live a life of constant torture and rape, only to be slaughtered (usually in childhood) just so people can satiate their gluttony for a little sensory pleasure and delude themselves into thinking they need to do that because they’ve been trained by unscientific marketing teams into thinking it’s the only way they can get protein.

On the other hand there are a lot of antinatalists in the vegan communities. So if you went vegan, you’d be in good company.

As a basic end-user I have not been too happy with my experience with flatpaks. I do appreciate that I can easily setup and start using it regardless of what distro I’m using. But based on standard usage using whatever default gui “app store” frontends that usually come with distros, it tends to be significantly slower than apt, for instance, and there seems to be connection problems to the repos pretty often as well.

It’s why I put it in a separate comment. It’s been scientifically shown that people often feel threatened and angry at the mere presence of vegans. What it comes down to is that most people want to believe that they’re at least mostly pretty good, but veganism challenges those narratives and highlights that the vast majority of people are very much doing things every day that are very wrong, and that they’re not living by their own standards.

I’ve only been vegan for two years, and have been learning very quickly that I need thick skin for it, and that it means every statement I make on the topic will get scrutinized by the highest standards of skepticism while every carnist can just chime in with all the same tired lies about veganism that have already been thoroughly debunked for years now.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/without-prejudice/201910/why-vegans-make-some-people-so-uncomfortable-and-angry

What happened with Opera was very predictable. When it comes to companies and corporations, and when their software products are proprietary, the pattern is always the same. They make something that might be good, maybe very good. Good enough to get some level of popularity. That’s how they start. Over time though, the profit driven model inherent in corporations pressures them to implement questionable features - things that might generate more revenue, but are things people might tolerate at best. At some point they become more anti-features than questionable. And eventually both the company and their product devolve into garbage and we find out they’ve been basically an arm of the surveillance state the whole time.

Mozilla is not immune to corruption. The deal people are referring to here is that Mozilla sets the built in default search engine to whoever is the highest bidder. If I recall, there was a brief period where either Microsoft or Yahoo was going to be that company. But generally it’s Google. And not everything Mozilla does with Firefox is considered good for privacy. That’s why we have smaller projects like Mull - basically somebody takes Firefox, removes all the problematic parts, and adds extra security and privacy features.

But those projects have a tendency to come and go, because maintaining a complex piece of software like a browser is challenging and costly, and those projects do not generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining.

So Mozilla isn’t perfect, but they are a nonprofit organization, which does provide them with a revenue model that allows them to strike a decent balance, and on the whole Firefox is a net good, and has always been one of the most important bulwarks for the free and open web. And the fact that Firefox is entirely open-source forces them to stay good.

See my other comment here.

https://lemmy.world/comment/6902322

I made a rebuttal below, but instead of having an emotionally reactionary response, I want you to consider something else instead. Is it more important to win an argument with a stranger online, or would it be better to take a bit of effort to get more deeply informed on this subject matter for your own sake - something that may actually save your life and maybe the lives of others you care about someday? We could argue about covid origins for days - it’s something that even the experts in the field have admitted might never truly be pinned down with a full degree of certainty.

But that can of worms has already been opened. H5n1 may still be prevented, as unlikely as it is that the world will embrace plant-based and vegan ways of living, in time for that. Even so, the more you know, the more you can at least protect yourself. Because even now we are on borrowed time.

https://www.surgeactivism.org/notifbutwhenbirdflu

From a purely statistical point of view, do people get bitten by bats more frequently than they come into contact with contaminated animal flesh? Maybe you live in an area plagued by an intractable bat bite infestation, but that sounds far-fetched to me.

The origins of covid-19 aren’t entirely clear, but there’s a good chance the animal markets played a decisive role. Having a wide variety of animals confined in unsanitary conditions in one place is a very effective method of incubating diseases that can infect multiple species, including humans.

“In the outbreak of SARS-CoV-1, palm civets, raccoon dogs, ferret badgers, red foxes, domestic cats, and rice field rats were possible vectors.[7] Graham and Baric wrote that human and civet infections likely stemmed from an unknown common progenitor.[67] Patrick Berche wrote that the emergences of SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV appeared to be sequential processes involving intermediate hosts, co-infections, and recombination.[68] In contrast with the rapid identification of animal hosts for SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV, no direct animal source for SARS-CoV-2 has been found.[69] Holmes et al. wrote that the lack of intermediate host is likely because the right animal has not been tested so far.[19] Frutos et al. proposed that rather than a discrete spillover event, SARS-CoV-2 arose in accordance with a circulation model, involving repeated horizontal transfer among humans, bats, and other mammals without establishing significant reservoirs in any of them until the pandemic.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonotic_origins_of_COVID-19

However, the main problem is that you’re thinking too narrowly. If covid was caused by a bat bite, that would still be an example of something caused by animal consumption, because animal consumption is inextricably linked with animal domestication, wildlife habitat destruction, and climate change.

“Bats are a significant reservoir species for a diverse range of coronaviruses, and humans have been found with antibodies for them suggesting that direct infection by bats is common. The zoonotic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus to humans took place in the context of exacerbating factors that could make such spillovers more likely. Human contact with bats has increased as human population centers encroach on bat habitats. [4][33] Several social and environmental factors including climate change, natural ecosystem destruction and wildlife trade have also increased the likelihood for the emergences of zoonosis.[34][35] One study made with the support of the European Union found climate change increased the likelihood of the pandemic by influencing distribution of bat species.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19

Animal agriculture is the single largest driver of wild animal habitat loss, as well as being a significant driver of climate change. Both of these are significant factors in our increasing proximity to the bats who played a role in covid. Food is like cars. To know the environmental harm of cars you also have to take into account the damage caused by all the infrastructure needed to make the car. In the same way, the harms caused by what we eat also have to take into account everything that’s necessary to make the food we eat.

https://www.surgeactivism.org/aveganworld

Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Vampire Survivors.

And as more of a hot take, people need to reckon with the zoonotic origins of so many of these diseases. If it weren’t for humankind’s addictions to consuming animal flesh and their secretions - and the animal agriculture, loss of habitat for wildlife, and all the conditions these things create for the incubation of deadly diseases - we might never have had a covid pandemic. Likewise, an h5n1 pandemic may be a matter of when, not if, because the vast majority of people still refuse to let go of their gluttony for consuming animals.

If you think of all the hate there is for antivaccers, and the harms they caused in 2020 - and deservedly so - omnivores deserve every bit as much, if not more, for the roles they play in the outbreaks of these diseases.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52960876-how-to-survive-a-pandemic

I don’t know how much of a threat the original strain is at this point, but if anything I would be concerned about H5N1, what’s usually known as avian flu. The only thing currently holding it back from being a pandemic is that it’s not efficient at infecting humans yet. But it is extremely deadly, killing 50-60% of those who get infected.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1

Linux can do that too. ╰(▔∀▔)╯

https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms