Sounds like an exercising in rearranging the furniture on the Titanic to me.

In a world where discrimination and separatism is qualitatively and quantitatively on the rise, people in charge must be ecstatic that they can appease people without having to do anything meaningful that might piss off the extremists on the right, or "shareholders". And people are so used to being told that change is only possible through incremental adjustments that they'll eat it up like candy and think this is progress.

"People people people, if you're going to call someone a filthy tranny and throw fast food at xem on public transport, at least use the proper pronoun when you verbally abuse xem."

When there's a hole in the boat and you're taking on water, the least of your concerns should be about what language you use to describe the in-rushing water or shape of the hole, nor arguing over the colour of the material you use to repair it.

I'm sure some people will see this as a victory. Until next time they apply for a job and not get hired due to transphobia. And the manager of the company, with a gleam in their eye, begins the rejection letter with 'Dear bun/bunself', then sniggers to themselves and says "fucking trannies."

What I'm trying to say was summed nicely in a tweet i saw the other day:
ALTRIGHT/NEO NAZI: your all going to the gas chambers!!!
NEOLIBERAL: you're*

If this is the extent of what activism is able to achieve, i should say that the establishment/elite have won by pacifying and declawing the protesters. It's no longer about breaking the shackles of oppression. We can't go around breaking shackles everywhere - think of the effect on the economy? And what about people getting hit by shrapnel? No, instead the LGBTQ community will be given multi coloured chains, the black community will be given slightly longer chains, and we'll pad the shackles with silk so that everyone is much more comfortable. Don't complain about the concept of being chained, instead complain that your chain is not as nice as the next guy's chain.

It's as though the great struggle of protest and civil disobedience has been taken over by the liberal intelligentsia, and the worst kind of discrimination faced by a 20 year old middle-class university student with rainbow coloured dreadlocks and a nose piercing is the letter they receive about their student loan that begins "dear sir/madam". So they go out and march about it and think they've made progress when they get their own pronoun. In their life, in their experiences, they are treated equally in other respects, so they think they ARE fighting inequality.

But for the working class male or female transsexual who gets filthy looks and a seat isolated by themselves on public transport, to travel to their entry level job where they've been skipped over for promotion for not looking the part, or getting the right level of respect from the trans-phobic staff, getting snide whispered comments from customers about the size of their hands, getting abuse yelled at them as they travel to have a night out at the ONLY trans-friendly bar within a 20 mile radius....... I get the feeling that receiving a letter with the correct pronoun isn't exactly going to change their fucking lives.

To remove a weed, you go for the roots. Some wanker calling you him/her when you prefer bun/bunself is not the root of this problem. The problem is that they are trans-phobic, not the language - which is just the tool they use to discriminate against you. To change the language and think that you've won is a bit like redefining room temperature and claiming you've warmed everybody by a few degrees.

If you march for equal rights, fair pay, fair treatment then people are going to see that and join your protest because they also want those things. Those things will solve the problems faced by the trans community, feminists, masculinists, minorities alike! And through common goals and by supporting each other en masse for simple, unified goals like EQUALITY, progress will be made, change will happen. It is a concept called solidarity and seems to be going out of fashion, but our grandparents knew.

The objective for the establishment is to drive a wedge between groups of people so that their demands are more manageable, and they can be turned on each other. Feminists, masculinists, LGBT, everyone... can't you see how better off you'd be marching together for common values that lie at the core of what every human wants?

Wall of text, sorry... and I know it looks like i'm being insensitive. So congratulations, genuinely, for getting someone to use your preferred pronoun if that makes you feel better. But whilst people have been fighting tooth and nail to get their own pronoun (in civilised settings only), we've suffered huge leaps backwards in freedom and tolerance behind their backs whilst they were bent over intently concentrating on the finer detail of what their ideal equality looks like.

Reminds my of my grandparents, who once managed to fight over the correct way to carry a cup to a table.

Chinese manufacturers poison children with lead paint on toys and melamine in formula. They build shoddy schools in earthquake zones, killing hundreds more children. The government is corrupt, the people, by and large, are on the verge of poverty, forced into making tough decisions like leaving their kids with the grandparents in the country while they work in the city and can barely scratch enough together to visit once or twice a year. At the same time, the wealthy class has ballooned at a staggering rate, government officials steal millions of dollars from taxpayers, or take the money in bribes, and offshore it so they can escape when the inevitable collapse comes. And all this is just barely scratching the surface of all the shit that goes on in China.

Yes, by all means, let's worry about one tree.

1. My family was considered to be a 'organized crime' family by the police in Tucson, AZ.
2. I've committed 2 crimes in my life. My first was when I was 13, I shoplifted a Gen 1 Transformer from Kmart and was banned from the store until 18. The second was helping a friend load an illegally poached deer into his truck.
3. My first car was a 1974 Dodge Challenger
4. When I was 19, I almost ran away from my future wife to go to Dallas and open one of the first ink cartridge refilling companies with a friend.
5. My mother never married and let my Grandparents raise me.
6. I started smoking at 14, rolling my own from my Grandfather's Bugler tobacco.
7. I smoked for many years, quitting twice. Once when my Grandfather died from Emphysema and then for good when my Grandmother died of lung cancer.
8. I worked for Texas Instruments, Dell, and Apple. Their stock allowed me to retire early.
9. I've had a mental breakdown that lead to me retiring early.
10. I still suffer from depression and anxiety.
11. Online I can interact with people much better than I can in real life. I find it very hard to deal with people in person.
12. My wife embarrasses me in public because she is very outgoing.
13. I hate doing dishes. I mean I really loathe doing them.
14. I have two dogs.
15. I don't like cats very much.
16. I sometimes have weird dreams that my best friend is still alive.
17. I prefer being indoors vs being outdoors.
18. Other than my mother, my family is all dead or estranged.
19. I am a video game enthusiast.
20. I don't want children.
21. I once had a 4-wheeler roll over on top of me and pin me under creek water.
22. I used to use twilight as my online handle until Stephenie Meyer ruined that for me forever.
23. My favorite animated cartoon was the 1990's Batman animated series.
24. I used to be a huge Stephen King fan until he was hit by that vehicle and his writing suddenly started sucking.
25. I have very poor eyesight without my glasses.

1. I *AM* an LGBTQ person, I don't speak for them, but I am one voice.
I tend to avoid harassing people.

2. No.

3. a) Both. They aren't mutually exclusive. I want women to be equal and I want legal protections in place to maintain this. This is not secret information.
b) They do.

4. Question 3b) suggests women should be responsible for their safety. Question 4 seems to criticize the notion of being responsible for your own safety. Glad to see unified thought in this. The answer is I expected random bouts of mockery, judgement, and violence. You know, the other 95% of my life.

5. Because shitting on a group that seeks to change culture to react similarly to loss of black life as it does for white lives, while pointing out where society fails to meet this standard is pretty charactersticly racist.
Also I don't say that "Kill all white people" is not racist.

6. Yes. Did you know that the permanence of objects, the transmission of ideas and culture and systems of law are based on events in the past? That by studying history we can understand how humans work in a unique way, that knowing that say, there was a WWI may help us understand the conditions under which WWII occurred and that this knowledge may help us decide what to do in the aftermath of WWII to avoid a recurrence?
That if a group has historically had problems, many of those problems have probably been inherited along with consequences of the problems (such as poverty, strongly inherited social trait). Yes. Linear time,human affairs, culture. They are all things that exist.

7. Yes, I have many examples of people doing this. Mostly this is due to short lifespan. But there are many manchildren in our culture, who seem to think that other people asserting boundaries is immature.

8. There are programs designed to help boost male education dropout rate. If you 'fight' for 'improvements in the fairness of social order ' to help achieve this, you are a Social Justice Warrior, and so you could just have asked yourself.
Also, American bias? Pretty sure this is not a global stat...

9. Because one focusses on correcting the inequalities between the sexes and was born at a time when women didn't have proper property rights, voting rights etc etc, and so it was primarily focussed on uplifting women and so the name 'feminism'. Egalitarianism on the other hand, is the general pursuit. Many feminists are egalitarian, but not all. Hence different words. English, motherfucker....

10. Nothing, as I am not.

11. No, my grandparents were being enslaved in eastern Europe by the far left and right (but more the right, let's be honest).

Seriously though, I don't remember the liberal protests of "Not all ISIS".

12. Ingroup outgroup hatred and distrust is a universal human trait. Race seems to provoke instinctive group psychology in humans, presumably from evolving in racially separate groups.

13. The phrase is intended to deflate 'Black Lives Matter' whose point is that society seems to disagree, in practice, with this. There's only one realistic motivation to undermining the attempts to equalize how the lives of different races are treated socially.
It's also designed to be perfectly innocuous outside of this context so that white people can totally believe they aren't being dicks by saying it.

14. My social justice fighting is almost always done in secret. I hate the limelight, and I hate endlessly seeking credit for doing the right thing. So I try to keep it to a minimum while also raising consciousness about issues where I can.
Hey wait, did you fall for the bias that the big public figures are representative in all ways of the group? HAHAHAHA! Noob.
Wait, did a man voicing a cartoon kangaroo wearing an Islamic headdress, superimposed on video footage of a woman in a gym grinding her hips tell me to stop trying show off how awesome I am and and to get real?

15. No, they are both not capable of giving consent. Sounds like you have had a bitter experience. Sorry to hear that.

16. I spent two decades trying to change myself. I tortured myself into a deep suicidal insanity. When I stopped that, and when society had changed in response to my and others plights being publicised sympathetically I felt happy and comfortable with myself.
You would prefer millions in silent minorities living through personal hells if the alternative means you have to learn better manners? What a dick.

17. Sure. It's also OK if you say 'nigga' in the context of asking this question. But I'm white and English. You should ask some black Americans if your usage causes unintended messages to be sent. I'd certainly avoid placing joyful emphasis, especially through increased volume, on the word.

18. Ah, you've confused a mixture of ideas and notions within a group as a contradiction of group idealogy. Whoops. I don't understand gender identity. I get gender, but I never felt membership in any group. That's how I feel, and have since the 1990s. The internet has allowed disparate and rare individuals to form groups, and some of these groups are people with different opinions about how they feel about gender and they are very excited to meet people other people with idiosyncratic views as they had previously been alone with their eccentric perspective.

19. If white men are too privileged then the society is not my notion of equal.

20. After rejecting the premise as nonsensical. In as much as I want rules to govern social interactions that take into consideration the diversity of humanity as best as possible, I recognize those same rules will govern my behaviour.

21. Women can choose how to present themselves. Video Game creators choose how to present women in their art. I can suggest that the art routinely portrays women as helpless sex devices, while supporting women who wish to do so for themselves.

22. You DO that? I've never even had the notion. I just sort of listen and digest and try to see if gaps can reasonably be filled with pre-existent knowledge or logical inferrences and then I compare and contrast that with my own differring opinion and I consider why someone might have come to their ideas. Assuming they aren't stupid I try to understand as best I can and present to them my perspective from their perspective. I don't sing, or plug in headphones or have an imaginary rock concert.

23. I have done no such thing. Look, here I am listening to you. You have all been asking questions that have easy answers to if you looked outside your bubble of fighting a handful of twitter and youtube users thinking these people represent the entirety of things and seeking only to destroy them with your arguments rather than understanding the ideas themselves.

24. Reverse Racism is where white guys are systematically (and often deliberately) disadvantaged - such as the complaints against Affirmative Action. I'm sure your buddies can fill you in on the details. The liberal SJWs you hate tend to roll their eyes when they hear it too. Strange you should ask.

25. No. I've never seen the list. I just use whatever pronouns people feel comfortable with. Typically I only need to know three to get by in life, same as most other English speakers.

26. I'm the audience motherfucker, and so are you. That's how it works.

27. I don't do those things, but yes, I have considered the notion of concept saturation in discourse. Have you considered the idea that people vary in their identification of problems, based on a number of factors. Some people are trigger happy and this may be a legitimate problem. Since you are aware of this, you also have a duty to try to overcome the saturation biases.
Similarly, if you keep using the word 'fucking', motherfucker, you'll find it loses its impact quite quickly. See this post motherfucker. Probably why you needed to add the crash zoom for impact. You could have achieved more impact with less sarcasm and and a more surprising fuck.

*quality Sam!
My grandparents moved to Suquamish, WA after grandpa retired from Sears. I still remember the Salmon Days festival every summer ... good times. Good people [though I was allegedly acquainted with a few of the bad boys of the tribe ... rebel that I was]

Holy crap. This reaction to *one* article could potentially be hyperbole.

But when that is the entire contents of an essentially random issue after the changeover... Yikes.

But most of all, this is just sad... My parents and grandparents both had Nat Geos dating back a LONG time when I was growing up, and I could pick random ones out of the stacks and read for hours. Incredible photos, and great articles on science, nature, sociology, etc. Essentially criminal to shit all over that tradition like this.

I hope you don't feel like that I'm pushing anything onto you. I'd like to just present the facts. I wasn't vegan until I turned 33, so I'm certainly not judging or trying to give out this information in order to put anyone down or elevate myself. I'm not trying to troll, I'm not trying to out-do you. I'm also typing this with limited time, so apologies if some of it sounds frank. (The videos below do a better job than me anyway).

1) A proper plant based diet makes it 8 times less likely for cancer cells to grow. There is a reason why 3rd world countries (that have largely plant based diets due to poverty) don't get cancers us westerners have. Also the #1 killer in the western world is cardiovascular disease, in the US alone one person dies every 8 seconds from it. Which is around 400, 000 people a year.

I know you're sceptical. I was too. So here's some actual science from actual doctors, who have come these conclusions on proper peer reviewed and non biased / industry funded research:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNY7xKyGCQ2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZtPGyLaiHE1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYTf0z_zVs03
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XVf36nwraw4


2)Vegans aren't anti-choice, they are pro life, pro planet. The actions of people eating animal products goes way further than a person choosing to eat something(sure they are typically ignorant of the consequences, as most of pre-vegans were too). When a large portion of the planet chooses to eat animal products it effects everyone, because it's destroying the planet through global warming, deforestation, dumping of animal agriculture waste and so on. It kills more animals than just ones being brutalised in cages. It will eventually kill us too. To me it seems like a bad idea to destroy the only place in the universe that we can currently live.
So by eating animal products you're really making a choice for you, for me, for my hypothetical grandchildren, and of course for the animal that almost certainly wants to keep being alive. So as a vegan I'd like you refrain for making choices that impact my life, and I'm standing up for the voiceless animals who would certainly object to your choice too.

3) As you (hopefully) saw in at least one of the videos above, there is nothing in meat which cannot be obtained from a plant source (and without all of the bad stuff that comes with meat).



Your idea of a farm with humanely raised animals is a good start, but it's just not practical, the earth isn't big enough to meet demand. It's also still highly unethical as you still kill the animals at an early age in order to harvest their flesh.

You have a picture of two dogs in your avatar. I'm sure if someone decided to schedule their lives to end early for any reason, let alone to eat them, you'd find that pretty immoral right? You no doubt treat your dogs very well, but that doesn't make it OK to kill when they reach adolescence. If I said I wanted to eat your dogs (I don't of course) then any reason you came up with applies still to any farm animals that you currently feel fine with eating.

The animals also aren't stupid and they're aware of what's going on. My grandparents owned a massive farm with cows/pigs/rabbits/chickens and crops as well. They were living very comfortable lives as far as farm animals go, but they did not like it when you approached them, they knew what was waiting for them.
When you see typical farm animals that are truly free this is what they look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIF3BYBXZWA
They behave like pets, even cows kick a ball around.

Also cows milk is only created for when the cow is pregnant. Even if the cow is living in cow utopia, if it is getting milked then that's milk that should have gone to a calf. It was most likely artificially impregnated, and also most likely bought from someone that breeds female cows, and kills the male cows (since you only need one bull to harvest the semen).
When you really think about it, even the best treated animals are being breed and used to make someone money as the primary goal. That is immoral.



So what it really comes down to is taste. The ethics, the environmentalism, the health don't play a role in the debate at all, and hopefully one of those things is important to you, perhaps all 3.

Being animal product free isn't as hard as you think, it's as simple as swapping out a few ingredients here and there. It's not all about eating broccoli and kale. You'll still be eating burritos, burgers, pizzas, pastas, curries etc. Just slightly different and before you know it, you'll barely know the difference, and eventually prefer them that way.

And this is probably the part I found the hardest to believe myself, but once I knew about it, veganism became the easiest thing in the world. Taste is completely influenced by the foods you eat, because of brain chemistry. I thought I could never stop eating two things: cheese and chocolate. After about a month of not eating them (and yes it takes a little bit of effort towards the 3 week mark) you will break the dopamine effect in your brain and you'll never want to eat them again. I can eat vegan cheese and dairy free chocolate, but it does absolutely nothing for me these days. This is coming from someone that wouldn't eat regular chocolate, I had to have the good stuff, everyday. The cravings get pretty intense at the 3 week mark, I won't lie, but then one day you realise you've not had the cravings for several days.
When it comes to meats, even if they are well done, all I can smell is oil and blood. Eggs all I smell is sulphur. I find all of that quite repugnant and I see them for what they really are, rather than what my dopamine recepters tell me.

Now of course you can be unhealthy vegan, and eat all of the oreos, chips, and dairy free chocolate you want. That's up to you, either way the planet and animals don't care which way you go about it

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Grandparents were southern Baptists. :-/ That says it all.

Capitalism is a guideline or system of how to organise aspects of society (trade, labour and services for example), nothing more. How you use it defines its effect on us. I could sell you my child explicitly for the purpose of you raping it and it would show how evil capitalism is. Or I sell you my children's book explicitly for the purpose of you entertaining your own children and that would be quite nice.
The problem starts if you think everything needs to be a for profit business as capitalism should be unlimited. Then you live in a country that makes prisons privately owned businesses and thinks it's ok to bankrupt sick people and their families with medical bills.
Capitalism is as evil as the people controling it. Who allows these people to be evil? Who cares? Apparently not the majority.
However, all that is not the problem of this ad. The capitalism works to nobodies disadvantege here. Edeka tries to brand itself as family-friendly and established part of homelife. That is quite normal and acceptable for a grocery store. It is not like as if VW would be putting out ads on how honest they are.
The version of the ad I described as being better is as manipulative as this one with the exception that it doesn't make everyone look like assholes upon closer inspection.
Nobody nailed grandpa's door shut, he's allowed to step into the world and make new friends and other aquaintances. His isolation is understandable but mostly his own fault. I witnessed stuff like that myself, I have grandparents too.
On the other hand you bemoan the smombies of today. Do you see the irony of complaining about the screen-fixed stare of todays youth (and society in general) on an internet forum?
We created a distraction-addicted, short-term attention-spanned and self-affirming society on our own by willingly swallowing all the crap the distraction industry throws at us.
I don't have a twitter account because nothing I can say in 140 characters without established context is worth saying. That gotta mean something coming from me of all people.
I'm not on Facebook because I know what the 'StaSi' was and see no reason to do their work on my own person for Mr. Zuckerberg and his shareholders.
I have no internet connection on my cellphone because I prefer to know stuff instead of just looking it up. I don't write text messages all the time because I prefer spoken words with their complexity that simplifies communication instead of emojis that emulate things my face did since before cellphones stopped being science-fiction.
I choose not to stare at the palm of my hand and what's lying in it every 5 minutes because I can. Most of our modern society chooses differently. They chose poorly, as the real oldtimers would say.
And here we are, yet again, ranting about the evils of enticing screens in our lives, live on the internet. You know, we would not be this absurd joke if we'd sat at a dinnertable right now. With food and drink from Edeka.

I'm starting to think he's creating a monster.

Anyway, Nintendo Headquarters! I got a tour of it in the early 90s. Fun story:

As a kid I used to take motor-home summer trips with my grandparents every year. At the beginning of the summer in 1992 (just prior to the SNES release of Street Fighter 2) my grandfather said that, through some contest via the Nintendo Power subscription they had been getting me for several years, I'd won a tour of the Nintendo Headquarters. So our trip that year became the drive up the coast of California, Oregon and Washington to visit them.
I hardly saw much, it was a pedestrian tour, but for me it was about as amazing as you'd expect for the time. I did however notice something odd about the experience, and through cousins and other family members I learned later that, most likely, my grandfather pulled a fast-one on everyone.
The likely reality that I was able to assemble myself over years later was that we just showed the fuck up! My grandfather went in and said "I just drove my grandson on a 4-day trip just to see you guys. You wouldn't deny us a tour after all that trouble, would you?"

So theoretically one can feel the need to be a Mormon, and in spite of that remain a good person (even though one is aware of the publicly available information about the church). Ok.

I wonder how far we can go in forgiveness for weird needs. Out of respect for all the many good people who are also Mormons I shall present no embarassing examples of weird needs. Especially not my own.

Like its understandable for grandparents (or most other relatives) to be mildly racist and smoke, its also fine if they are Mormons. If they are good people. Beyond that I am not so sure. Not all churches and religions are the same.

So you make up out of thin air the most depressing story of what this guy's life might eventually turn out to be, use words of divisiveness (look! he's scrounging off the taxpayer everyone!) and use that to justify pre-emptively killing mentally ill people who fit the definition of "dangerous" by your Dickensian outlook.

You want to talk about people scrounging off the taxpayer then let's talk about corporate welfare and dodgy tax havens, about how starbucks, google and amazon get away with paying no tax when we are taxed on our earnings. You call this ill man a scrounger, when george osbourne's family no less has a dodgy 6 million offshore tax deal to name but one of a million examples.

Or let's talk about this guy's parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters who paid into the social system, earning potentially millions for this country. In return they only ask that their son is cared for with respect and dignity in spite of the nature of his illness, and the social system would still have made a net surplus off their family.

How about we talk about the recovery he made as a counsellor for PTSD sufferers or other mentally ill people? Or how in ten years time he ends up as a lollipop man helping kids cross the street to school. What about all the tax he eventually paid on his subsequent and previous earnings, does that matter?

Your dim, dark prediction and understanding of mental illness AND socialism is fucking archaic. Were you frozen in Victorian Britain and thawed out last week or something? Go back to watching the idiot box, i'm sure the latest episode of benefits street will keep you distracted while cameron and his cronies swindle this country. I don't mean to make this overly political but this is EXACTLY what the politics of divide and rule is all about. The TV programs, the newspapers - with shows and stories about benefits and migrants - they all conspire to convince person A that they should blame person B, meanwhile person Z is laughing their way to the bank. And you lap it up and take it to the extreme of putting PEOPLE to sleep!?

In this country, we all contribute to the social system so that everyone can be looked after. It drives me potty hearing someone complain about taxpayer's money going to ill and unfortunate people when all it would take is one single bad day for that same person to suddenly need all that help and more.

This was also not the only man involved, and not the only concern that applied. This quote is his, not that of half a nation.

While I agree that the south had racist and white supremacist behaviors, I simply point out that the north was little better.

Both were plenty racist, and both cared a lot more about their money/power than they did about slaves. Rich white people in charge today don't give 2 shits about poor black people, I find it very unlikely that the rich white people in charge way back then cared any more.

Let me illustrate the 'champion of liberty' spin with an unrelated example :
Take the ww2 pacific theater for example. Japan teaches WW2 as a war to free Asia from western colonialism. U.S. teaches WW2 (pacific) as a war to free Asia from imperial expansion and oppression by Japan. Both are telling the truth, and both are full of crap. For neither was altruistic in their motivations, but both spin themselves as champions of liberty. For you will always have people on your side if you tell them you are standing up for liberty. (A concept well illustrated in The Prince - one of the earlier 'game theory' (from before it was called that) studies of governance.)

On a side note,

Keep in mind that slaves from Africa were usually purchased from black slavers.

And just a few generations ago, my own great grandparent's era, they and their peers were white peasant property of local white counts.

Things are not really all that 'black and white' (no pun intended).

-scheherazade

We have two in our house. Grandparents brought them back from Vietnam for the kids. They are fun the first say 100 times...