• 0 Posts
  • 70 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle

  • mathemachristian@lemm.eetovegan@lemmy.worldDo animals have emotions like us?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Look at all those people in that thread going “I dont know if animals have the same emotions or just similar ones” or “we can’t prove that plants dont feel pain too!” and then splitting hairs in the most asinine pseudophilisophical debates, just so they dont have to engage with the core of the issue, that what they’re doing is fucked up.

    They know it, deep down, as did I before I went vegan, but it’s eye-opening to see it “from the other side”.





  • Although the Israeli army’s Conscience Committee can decide to allow exemption from military service, this is usually granted only to those conscientious objectors who refuse to serve on religious grounds. However, according to the UN Human Rights Committee, no discrimination is permitted “among conscientious objectors on the basis of the nature of their particular beliefs” - i.e. whether they are religious or otherwise. Even though Israeli law does allow for exemption on grounds of pacifism, the army’s Conscience Committee frequently rejects pacifists’ cases. The authorities deny objectors the possibility of performing alternative civilian service. Conscientious objectors in Israel can be convicted of and imprisoned for the same “offence” repeatedly. In 2003, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that this practice flouts the rights of conscientious objectors under international human rights standards which prohibit “double jeopardy”.

    Your point was already refuted in the article from amnesty I linked.












  • That comes after very in-depth reading. What got me that far to even trust their judgement that this kind of research would be worth my time was the fact that they were consistently right about takes on the USSR that seemed ludicrous. Just that they seemed to really know their stuff about USSR history especially the Stalin era. So I started reading

    Michael Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds

    a rather short book about anticommunism in the west. I already had very left views but what stuck with me was that I required a revolution to be “perfect”, the outcome sure and everyone had to be happy, an unrealistic standard considering the kind of fundamental change I envisioned. Or in Parenti’s words:

    The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

    Once I had conceded my previous “anti-tankie” views and thought of the USSR not as a failed revolution that started of well-intentioned but was led astray by power hungry dictators, but as a successful revolution that had to endure a constant onslaught, physical as well as political, I was “through the looking glass” so to speak.

    Then the genocide in Gaza happened and I kind of looked at the countries we were allied with, who were consistently some of the worst offenders of human rights. The whole supporting violent dictatorships in former colonies wasn’t news to me, but when put into perspective I had a “Damn we really are the baddies aren’t we” moment.

    I realise that this doesn’t answer your question on Ukraine and the Uighurs but that’s because I don’t have the time right now to get into a debate on that, and the original question was on what changed my mind about it which was less the actual research I then put into, but the heavy-lifting on even questioning the western narrative was done before that.

    To answer your question in a nutshell however: The reason the situation in Ukraine deteriorated this far, to the point that the ethnic russians in Ukraine had to even put up “self-defense” forces was meddling of western capitalist forces. The article that I keep referencing on that is ( CW for pictures of dead bodies and gruesome descriptions of fascist violence):

    https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/07/29/what-the-u-s-government-and-the-new-york-times-have-quietly-agreed-not-to-tell-you-about-ukraine/

    The open fascism in the paramilitary groups that later got put under the umbrella of the Ukrainian army was an open question mark for me, this article gives a very detailed answer to that. The details in that report post 2014 are corroborated in the UN reports as well:

    https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents-listing?field_geolocation_target_id[1136]=1136&field_content_category_target_id[180]=180&field_content_category_target_id[182]=182&field_entity_target_id[1349]=1349&field_entity_target_id[1350]=1350&sort_bef_combine=field_published_date_value_DESC

    As for the so-called “genocide” of Uighurs in China, the “evidence” is very very circumstantial especially considering the scale alleged. Millions of people are alleged to be held in internment at some point, a scale that should be visible from space. I mean manhattan has a population of 1.7 million, where are all these people interned?? As an example of one of the oddities about the whole allegations. The only countries that seem to care are outspoken anti-communist countries, with the whole muslim world not considering the crackdown on religious extremism in Xinjiang a genocide. All the articles I kept getting linked were “oh how terrible the situation there is, what an evil evil government” with no one seemingly caring about the actual people. It’s all just treated as an abstract talking point. And the only references boiling down to two reports by Adrian Zenz

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02634937.2018.1507997

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02634937.2021.1946483

    a person with some questionable viewpoints

    https://books.google.de/books?id=lRtSQB3HHJcC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

    All the stuff around it seems to be pushed by Washington based anti-communist thinktanks trying to establish an “east turkestan”. The whole movement is heavily US-financed. See here for more info:

    https://hexbear.net/post/2361

    That’s what changed my mind about it all anyway, but like I said I probably will not be able to go into more depth about this, as I have spent too much time on this already.