I have to admit, I originally thought this was a new sift. I scrolled down after watching it and saw my previous comment before seeing your new one at the end here and was a little taken aback by how cruel it reads. I can be fairly certain my intended tone was meant to be playfully mocking, but with four years to forget in between, it seems downright venomous now.

Somewhere a few years back, I read that when sending an e-mail or whatever, it is best to read it back to yourself imagining it was written by the biggest asshole you know. Then based on the assumption that it will be received the same way by the actual recipient, edit it so it doesn't piss you off anymore. That was pretty good advice.

Naturally that doesn't apply here, of course, because I am anonymous and being a giant asshole is my god given right.

"There is plenty of scum to go around on both sides."

Ahh the classic false equivalency that Trump supporters often resort to.

First of all, every child should be taught at a young age that just because other children may act like little shits, that doesn't mean they can. The amount of functional adult Trump supporters who use "the Democrats are bad too!" as an excuse for Trump's behavior is just astounding. It's really just a pathetic diversionary tactic used to avoid discussing the issues at hand.

Second, your claim that Democrats are just as cruel is simply not true. Blaming Democrats for the very thing Trump is guilty of is a common smear tactic employed by extremist right wing propaganda.

Take Trump's zero tolerance policy which separated minors from their families for example. Right wing propaganda outlets like OAN love showing pictures of children housed alone in Obama era detention facilities and cry foul at the liberal media at the lack of coverage. The reality is that Obama faced a huge surge of thousand of unaccompanied minors from south america in 2014 who were detained. So yes, thousands of children were detained, but they were NOT separated from the families in the first place.

And while some families were separated during Obama's tenure, Obama's policies tried to limit this as much as possible. It is a far cry from what Trump's zero tolerance policy accomplished. The "liberal" media did not report this under Obama OR Bush simply because it was not an issue. If you believed that there was unfair media coverage for Trump on this issue, then you were lied to and manipulated. Its part of what we discussed earlier how Trump uses lies to discredit the media and further erode our democracy.

The point is that right wing propaganda and Trump himself routinely uses lies and deception to paint himself as the target of a "liberal media bias" that they themselves manufactured. And his gullible supporters like yourself love believing in his victim complex. If you don't believe me, then just refer to non partisan international sources like the BBC and you'll soon discover that Trump is just as shitty from an impartial view as the "biased liberal media" portrays him.

Both sides are not the same, no matter what lies Trump and Fox News et al. tries to tell you. And there are plenty of respectable media sources which are not CNN which also exposes Trump for the lying scum that he is.

It has nothing to do with what I personally like.
This is the issue here.
You despise Trump and so does the liberal dominated media so they gloss over shit the Left do and come down harder on Trump etc.
There is no excuse for the garbage reporting going on.
None.
I suppose you think Kavanaugh was treated fairly too.
The Fusion thing is all just a pack of lies concocted by Alex Jones etc too right?
Blatant showboating about how cruel Trump is when it has been proven time and time again the Democrats held the same views and would never let caravans in...
Funny how things are viewed when you are a religious fanatic as the left is becoming in their
rage against all things Trump and GOP.
Keep looking at things through rose colored glasses my friend.
There is plenty of scum to go around on both sides.

Cruel and unusual.

I understand how you've come to your conclusion, but let me clear it up:

The word 'vegan' in medicine is exchangeable with plant-based diet. If you look at the PCRM.org they recommend a whole-foods plant-based diet. They simply call it vegan, as that's what other organisations know it as, such as the British/American Dietetics Association. Clearly not recommending vegan icecream and hotdogs :-)

When it comes to prevention of cruelty to animals, the PCRM do it from a medical training/testing stand point. They're not saying don't eat animals because it's cruel, they're saying don't test drugs on animals when there are computer models and lab work that yield more accurate results (although animals costs less....). They're also against surgeons performing vivisection as part of their training. E.g. when my cousin did her training she had to put a perfectly healthy dog to sleep, chop of some of it's legs and re-attach them, as well as causing massive internal wounds to simulate gunshots.... it's messed up, but it's hard for young doctors to say anything because they've trained for a decade at that point, and they're not going to throw it away (and the next person will come along and do it anyway, since it's such a highly competitive industry). This where the PCRM come in, they lobby medical institutions to stop this kind of stuff.


If you're still thinking that they have some kind of vegan agenda / bias, the PCRM is an organisation of 12,000 doctors. If it was just one or two quacks preaching veganism, I'd be suspicious too, but that's clearly not the case here.

Everything they do is based on data. And they're also not the only medical organisation to do it. The Australian Medical Association is also urging hospitals to give patients plant-based diets because of how much faster they recover (and don't return). The President of the American College of Cardiology is 'vegan', and is know for his phrase "Meat kills, processed meat kills you quicker". The World Cancer Research Fund, recommends beans with every meal, no processed meat, and maximum of 350g of red meat a week. That's basically a plant-based diet.

There are now something like 400 studies being published every single year showing how bad animal products are for us. There's a nice graph here actually showing how much more evidence is coming out all the time: https://youtu.be/C5qRXPDNw1E?t=4190 (nevermind the tacky channel, the speakers at this conference are all legitimate medical professionals)

So yes, your doctors are right, eat your fruit and veg, but also whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds. Bean burrito is a perfect combination of these, followed by a banana and berry smoothie

You also have to consider the amount of financial loss various food and pharmacological industries would suffer if most people ate plant-based. So when you look for opinions about the PCRM people are very quick to make PCRM appear as a bunch of hippies in order to protect their earnings. America spends something like 50 billion dollars a year on statins, and 35 billion on stent surgeries, which would pretty much go away overnight if everyone ate plant-based diets. They're not going to let that money go without a fight, which is why there's a lot of opinions about PCRM around. Needless to say though, they don't have any good evidence to back their reasoning, which makes it quite easy to see which ones are likely opinions funded by certain industries.

at least it wasnt nickelback, that would have been cruel an unusual.

How cruel and unusual! PETA needs to intervene on this one.

First Seagulls. Now Moles. What's next, human fetuses!?

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Seems kinda cruel feeding them that shit just to make a video.

Inertia is a cruel mistress.

ABSOLUTE PROOF
Plants are living beings with character and intelligent.

Vegetarians need to stop killing and eating these amazing creatures. I can't believe how cruel minded they are that they don't care for these living beings. Vegetarians raise them from a seed just to kill them indiscriminately for food.

Sadly these amazing creatures may not live to see Day 30

#VegetariansAreKillers #StopTheSlaughter

It's the Malazan book of the Fallen, a series of books actually.

It's a fantasy series with magic and gods, but it gives a more accurate and unflinching look at human history than any history textbook ever has. It gives a very personal look at soldiers on all sides of wars being waged and the brutal choices forced upon them in very cruel world. Another quote from the series summarizes what sticks with me the most:
"The harder the world, the fiercer the honour."

It's the difference between heroic acts demonstrating actual sacrifices, versus hero's 'risking' dangers that we know will never harm them.

In a way Scahill is like a less educated\refined version of Noam Chomsky. He does good investigative work, and dedicates enormous energy into exposing and spotlighting the bad things that America does. That has a place, but without a similarly harsh and critical light being cast on America's targets/enemies it becomes propaganda.

Jeremy says he wouldn't work with Charles Manson to oppose trump, fair enough. What about kind of working with Stalin to defeat Hitler? Say, at least agreeing not to attack Stalin while you both deal with Hitler?

The world is incredibly complicated and the singular and lone focus on American mistakes paints a deceptive picture. Pointing out the problems with America's war in Iraq, like torture and Quantanamo and declaring these as so immoral we needn't even look at Saddam's past is propaganda. Saddam waged two campaigns of genocide against his own people. When America saw the abuses at Abu Ghraib, they shut it down and attempted to punish those responsible. When Saddam's brother used chemical weapons to exterminate Kurdish civilians Saddam commended him for it. Guantanamo is bad, but it doesn't mean we should fail to acknowledge the concentration camps that Saddam operated during his genocide of the Kurds. It doesn't mean it's unfair to observe that conditions in Saddam's prisons across the country were far more cruel during his entire reign.

There's a nuanced place here that Scahill and Chomsky and pundits like them just fail to acknowledge and encourages inaction at times were the lesser evil may well be for America to do something, even if aborting Gadafi's genocide doesn't make Libya a paradise after.

I 100% agree, but at some point it moves from acceptable to immoral, and that point varies. That's why I gave examples that I think many/most people would not consider rape (pretending you're rich), and what I suspect is its counterpart (pretending you're their partner).

Note that I'm not arguing whether or not this was rape, I'm just making the point that there's a valid argument to be made. I know that's cravenly copping out, but I'm not confident enough to make either case 100%.

I'm a follower of the George Carlin philosophy that says you can only take offense, you can't give it. i.e. offence is in the eye of the beholder, and so any judgement needs to take into account things like intention, and should err on the side of free speech. Any psychological attack - from being cut off when driving to being told you have cancer - will damage you only to the level that you let it (which is largely out of your own control), but that doesn't stop the source of the attack from being in the wrong.

This is why I looked at this case in cost-benefit terms. We can't know for sure how this affected those involved, but it's reasonable to suspect that the woman was psychologically scarred through little or no fault of her own, and sexual violation is one of the most cruel and personal. This is amplified by the public nature of it. Yes, maybe - hopefully - she chalked it down to a bad decision, but I think it would be completely understandable if she was significantly damaged by what was unarguably a malicious action against her (even if the malice wasn't directed towards her).