To be fair, my understanding of delegates is that they are basically a political “cookie” that the party hands out as a reward to certain people. Their job is just to cast the official elector votes for the presidential election, and their hands are usually tied into voting to reflect the popular state vote tallies (ignoring Trump’s recent fake electors scheme, of course). So their duties are really symbolic more than anything.

Accepting this position does insert himself into politics, though. No one can say “leave Baron out of it” after this

Jewish Federation Los Angeles meanwhile blamed the university’s chancellor for allowing “an environment to be created over many months that has made students feel unsafe”.

The group demanded that the encampment be cleared and that UCLA meet leaders of the Jewish community.

Fucking hell, this is such a callous response. In any other situation, the group representing the side that just had masked vigilantes attack peaceful demonstrators would make amends. “These people don’t represent our movement. We disavow them and what they stand for.” And so on.

I see they’re taking a page from Israel’s book: refuse to apologize, defend unprovoked violence, and blame the victims on top of everything else.

Less than half of that plastic litter had discernible branding that could be traced back to the company that produced the packaging; the rest could not be accounted for or taken responsibility for.

The branded half of the plastic was the responsibility of just 56 fast-moving consumer goods multinational companies, and a quarter of that was from just six companies.

This seems to me like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course the biggest companies with the most easily identifiable packaging are going to be the ones identified in this study. The majority of the plastic, however, is not, and it’s difficult to tell who produced it.

The article addresses this as well, mentioning that this is the reason we need traceability, so we can get the true metrics on who is creating and thus responsible for the bulk of plastic waste.

The big players like Coke and others are obviously very much responsible for a big part of the problem. I just didn’t see people mentioning this part of the study in the comments, so I wanted to bring it up.

Even the title of this article asserts that this latest “tragedy” is part of a larger systemic problem than just the incident itself.

“There seems to be a consistent pattern of utterly reckless behavior,” said Cobb-Smith, who helped investigate the Doctors Without Borders shelling.

The whole point of this is the lack of accountability for Israel’s repeated “mistakes,” which they have no intention of correcting. The indiscriminate violence is a feature for Israel, not a bug.

To try and excuse or deflect from Israel’s current missile strikes by bringing up the US’s own missile strikes is an odd choice here. Like, the same people who are calling for Israel to stop its indiscriminate bombardment are largely the same people who were calling for the same when the US was doing it.

Politifact | No, 100 corporations do not produce 70% of total greenhouse gas emissions

Politifact | No, 100 corporations do not produce 70% of total greenhouse gas emissions

Ok but remember when Republicans made up that Biden was going to “outlaw burgers” with the Green New Deal? And how even the made up idea that the govt would stop subsidizing meat caused half the nation to flip their shit, while the other half went “no don’t be silly, we would never ever touch your precious tendies.”

Appealing to individuals is important because without shifting the public’s perception of meat as it relates to climate change, the government will be too terrified to enact those kind of changes for fear of getting voted out by the angry, barbecue-loving mobs.

Until flexitarians, vegetarians, and vegans (I’m vegan btw, just need everyone to know that) become a sizable enough percentage of the voting population, these systemic changes are never going to even be considered by our leaders. So we should keep pressing the importance of these changes to collectively move ourselves closer to that tipping point.

It’s always crazy to come into threads like these and see people say “I would murder as many elites as possible” without batting an eye, and in the same comment say “I could never give up hamburgers.” It’s some kind of insane self-soothing to throw all of the responsibility for a global issue onto a few scapegoats. It also shows that people have no intention of doing fuck all about climate change beyond typing up snarky comments on the internet.

People can misquote all kinds of studies they half remember to pretend that they have no responsibility for making changes, but that doesn’t make it true. Just as one example, first world countries’ per-capita rate of meat consumption alone is enough to push the world over our 1.5C warming target. But because it’s an inconvenience to make any changes to my life, I’m going to pretend I would personally kill scores of people rather than make a new recipe for dinner. We’re fucked

Ok but remember this part?

We have a number of options – some fall on the shoulders of consumers; some on producers.

Maybe we can’t convince everyone to quit eating meat, but I would hope that we could appeal to self-described environmentalists, who have a stated interest in making sustainable changes.

That’s the OP’s point, after all. That the science unambiguously states that we need to stop eating meat if we care about meeting our climate goals. Any environmentalist who learns that this needs to happen and still chooses to eat meat is acting against their own ethics.

It has to be both. Our World in Data puts it one way:

We have a number of options – some fall on the shoulders of consumers; some on producers.

Or to cut through the flowery language - farms need to stop producing meat, and people need to stop eating it.

The biggest reduction would come from the adoption of plant-rich diets. Emissions would be halved compared to business-as-usual.

Man I had to rephrase this a dozen times and I still don’t have a good way to communicate what I’m trying to say.

The goal of this kind of callout is to make vegetarians, people who already value animal welfare, aware that they may still be contributing towards animal cruelty. For example, I was a vegetarian for years and then got rocked by the realization that, “oh wait, vegans aren’t just crazies that I can blow off, it was me who was ignorant the whole time.”

So I anecdotally assume that a huge percentage of vegans are vegetarians who went from thinking “vegetarians and vegans are basically the same, besides vegans taking the idea too far” to “oh wait there’s a huge important difference between the two.” On vegan spaces, people often joke that “bullying worked on me lol” because the gentle approaches are easily ignored, but the really blunt “your actions don’t align with your stated ethics” is really difficult to brush off.

TL;DR yeah I think you’re right. The original announcement from the Reddit admin comment didn’t give any details, so I filled in the gaps myself and assumed “heart” would imply compassion, especially since I’ve seen that “stay for the empathy” tagline for so long. After all, why would the change from “front page” be necessary if “heart” of the internet gives a the same sentiment that it’s the core or cutting edge?

The contracted marketing team’s writeup has some limited insight into the reasoning:

…Reddit’s updated brand materials would all point back to four traits: inherently eclectic, positively different, delightfully absurd, and genuinely candid. These traits, along with the uniquely empowering foundation of Reddit as the best place to discover and participate through real conversation, led the team to a new, strategic description of Reddit as “the heart of the internet.”

I’m not experienced enough in marketing jargon to understand if this is saying that “heart” only implies that there are lots of communities available on the platform, or if “genuine” and “real conversations” should be factored in to imply that these conversations and communities should be heartfelt.

But all in all, it seems like the focus is on “you can discuss with lots of communities.” And since “front page” doesn’t imply discussion as much as it implies reading a newspaper, the change was needed.

I find it odd that they changed their tagline from “the front page of the Internet” to “the heart of the Internet.” Reddit is certainly a massive hub for discussion, but “compassionate” is not the first association I have with Reddit conversations. Smug condescension, certainly. Frothing mob mentality, often. But compassion? Rare, at best.

I suppose that Reddit may be trying to simply manifest their hopes for the platform into a reality, but I don’t think it’s that easy. The Reddit welcome banner reads, “Come for the cats, stay for the empathy,” but most people probably know Reddit for the Boston Bombing debacle, r/theDonald trolls, and other nasty news items. It’s hard to believe the cushy corporate messaging when Reddit has so consistently allowed horrible shit on their site until the media fervor gets so intense that they can’t ignore it anymore