lenz

lenz , 14 days ago

Idk why communists defend China’s every move. Communism can be defended without excusing China’s authoritarian practices. I have Chinese friends living in China who tell me all kinds of horrific stories that they’ve had to deal with because of China’s mass surveillance (and more). That isn’t western propaganda, that’s people’s lived experiences. There is literally a “Great Firewall of China” lmao. China IS bad when it comes to their mass surveillance and suppression of speech. USA IS bad when it comes to their letting giant corporations have such free rein that it makes us all into serfs. Why compare to China? Because China is a great comparison.

lenz , 1 month ago

Ouch 😅 …at least a (non junk food) vegan diet has been shown to improve people’s diabetes symptoms. If you ever go for it, I hope that ends up being the case with you!

lenz , 1 month ago

The dude who made this site believes in the “great replacement” and that the Covid vaccines were a psy-op to modify people’s dna and make the sheep slave people.

:/

Maybe due to his paranoia his privacy advice might be good lmao. But still. Wow.

lenz , 1 month ago

Ironically, cars are stopping me. Roads used to be for walking, and now they’re for cars. They gave us sidewalks and now some places don’t have them, and are unwalkable. The bike lanes either don’t exist or are too dangerous to use. It’s all roads and stroads now, with speed limits dangerous to pedestrians, and large SUVs meaning that car crashes with a pedestrian are more likely to end in death.

The amount of people in cars has also crippled public transportation. Buses aren’t quick, and there are so few of them in general. Not to mention the lack of high speed trains, and the inefficiency of our subways.

Giant parking lots with no cars took our parks. Took our public spaces. Took our nature. And they’re everywhere. Everywhere I look is dull, grey asphalt.

It’s depressing to be outside. And where would I walk to? Everything is too far away to walk to. It used to be a 5-15 minute walk away. Now it’s more like 40 minutes to hours...

I’m tired of human interests and public transportation being overlooked so that people can drive a couple minutes faster to their destination. When people in Europe, Japan, and China can just… get on a train.

Sorry for the rant but I hate this bs

lenz , 2 months ago

My most charitable interpretation of you bringing up that spiders have frog pets is that, because pet-ownership is a thing that other animals do, it’s okay/natural for humans to do them too. And if we argue that it’s not okay for humans to do it, it must be because we think humans are inherently superior or something. Hopefully it’s accurate because that’s how I understood you.

This leads me to say:

The difference between us and other species that develop ownership/shepherding/symbiotic/whatever relationships with other creatures, is that humans can conceptualize morality. (inb4 the “morality is subjective” line: yeah, it is. But if you agree that suffering, torture, etc is a bad thing then we’re on the same page here axiomatically.) Unlike spiders, or farmer ants, we understand that causing other creatures to suffer is wrong. Because we are smart enough to understand, we have the responsibility to act in accordance with that understanding.

Another point is: male lions kill the cubs of other lions. Dolphins rape each other. Rats eat their own babies sometimes. Cats play with the mice they catch before killing them. The natural world is full of animals doing horrific things to each other. If you are going to say that it’s okay for humans to keep pets (or whatever) because animals do it/it’s natural… why can’t humans kill and eat their own babies? It’s because we know causing others to suffer is wrong, and therefore hold ourselves to a higher standard. We ARE superior: in the sense that we’ve invented philosophy and morality. That’s not a weird take. And it’s not a take that’s incompatible with this argument.

Similarly, we don’t hold our own children accountable for their crimes to the same degree we hold adults. If a kid steals money, or beats someone up, our society doesn’t punish them the same way as an adult. Because we understand that their brains have not yet developed the capacity to fully understand empathy. To truly be responsible for the suffering they cause.

Animals are, a lot like human children in that sense.

Therefore, we totally can “exist in a category of responsibility distinct from all other organisms.” We literally already do when it comes to things like murder, rape, and torture. Why not add distressing and frightening animals to take photos with them, or keeping them in cages, or what have you; to the list of things we should take responsibility for?

I hope that helps clear up the confusion for you.

lenz , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I know you meant this as a funny reply, and I’m sure your cat is very well taken care of.

…but I want to point out that the argument against pet ownership is more about the millions of animals in puppy mills, or on the streets, or abused by breeders, or bred with genetic issues for the sake of purity of breed. Your cat was extremely lucky to be adopted by you. But so many other cats are not. So many other cats die in shelters, or on the streets, or from euthanization, or in breeding mills. We create and fund the system that brings the unlucky cats into existence, for our own benefit.

The argument is that all those millions of cats and dogs that suffer and die so we can choose a few of them to pamper as pets, is not worth it.

Your cat isn’t an abuse victim. But all the other cats who weren’t so lucky, are.

Plus animal abuse is incredibly hard to discover: because animals cannot go to the police and report their owners. Lol. They don’t have voices. That makes them incredibly easy victims to exploit. Humans as a whole are really a hard group of people to trust with such vulnerable creatures, ngl.

I’m very fun at parties, I know.

lenz , 3 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Ok doomer.

I say the above not as an insult, but because I want to make a point.

Look up doomism. It’s a tool of climate change deniers. We are not dead yet. Nothing going on now is truly impossible to fix. It’s certainly not easy. It’s hard af. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we should let ourselves give up. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into a doomer mindset. Because the very moment we do, the moment we accept the doom, then the doom becomes our fate.

Don’t give up. Don’t encourage other people to give up. Don’t say it’s over when we’re still fighting. It’s only over when it’s over.

I bet World War II must have been psychologically devastating to witness. It must have felt like the whole world was falling apart. Like it would never bring itself back together. Can you imagine? Watching Hitler take over country after country. Watching the bombs fall in London. And the Cold War. Where people were so sure it was the end of humanity, because we were going to kill ourselves dropping nukes on each other.

There are so many moments it was horrible. So horrible that we couldn’t even imagine there would be a way out. A good future.

But there was. Things got better. Countries rebuilt. The Cold War ended. No one dropped any nukes.

See, climate change, and companies taking our data, and AI, and the rich getting richer… all that? That’s our WWII. That’s our thing causing hopelessness and devastation and fear in everyone.

The doomism is a plague we’ve been dealing with since probably the dawn of humanity.

We can get through this. Maybe we won’t. But the chance we will isn’t even that small. As long as there’s a chance: fight for it.

lenz , 3 months ago

I just use this god-tier free, open-source app:
https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/index.html

It’s called Hydrus Network, and it’s like an organized database for managing your pics, videos, and more.

Features include: tagging images, adding notes to images, saving urls for images, searching your collection for duplicates and letting you compare them to keep the highest quality image, dark mode, meta tags, and more.

It’s literally one of my top 5 most essential apps to my life, and it’s so unknown. I feel like a cultist because I’m always harping on about how great Hydrus Network is and no one knows about it.