EDIT: since I don't want the top reply not to mention this, fuck IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan for the incalculable damage he's done to innocent trans people. He's a worthless, disgusting bigot.

Honestly, I always found that episode... Weirdly progressive? Even maybe by accident? Consider the following:

• The trans woman April is legitimately physically attractive and with a distinctly feminine voice to match.
• She's a legitimately very sweet, intelligent, and earnest person.
• She tells Douglas upfront in no uncertain terms that she's trans (she phrases this as "I used to be a man", but honestly, considering both 2008 and the fact it was used to setup a joke, I think this isn't too transphobic? A trans person in 2008 might've even said this because there was less of a support network to understand that you always were a woman.)
• Douglas gets upset because he thinks he's been tricked, but 1) he absolutely was not, and the episode makes this crystal clear that it's because April made every effort and he's just an absolute dumbass, and 2) Douglas has been portrayed in the show to this point as nothing but a juvenile, overdramatic, chauvanistic sack of shit, and we're clearly not supposed to be rooting for him.
• She's a fantastic girlfriend and becomes the love of his life. A big part of this is because she has a duality between traditional femininity and an interest in traditionally masculine activities, but I also don't think this is terrible representation? I have a trans woman friend who carries herself in a traditionally feminine way but hasn't dropped more traditionally masculine activities that she grew up enjoying.
• She throws the first hit at the end, but this is after Douglas dumps her on the spot after they've hit it off, had sex, and confessed their love for each other because he was too stupid to listen, he tells her to get lost, he basically calls her gross to her face by talking in a disgusted tone about "that operation you had", and flat-out denies her existence as a woman.
• It's made very evident that if Douglas weren't transphobic, he could've lived the rest of his life with a woman who's established to be literally perfect for him.

Toilet paper math becomes a lot easier with a bidet.

"You mess with Luigi, you mess with New York!"

"You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!"

Just doing my part. 🫡

• Misattributed to Socrates. Mis/disinformation spreads quickly over the Internet, so it's up to all of us not to be vectors for it.
• We have increasingly extensive bodies of scientific evidence indicating the harms of giving young kids the sort of near-unrestricted access to smart devices and social media that are common in society today.
• That one person said "something similar bad" but it wasn't actually that bad in the past (or even that this is a pattern) doesn't invalidate scientific evidence. If kids started smoking cigarettes en masse, you could pull up this exact same quote, and it would be just as strong an argument as it is here.

It makes complete sense if you work from the angle that Trump is a Russian plant working to destroy America from within.

This is a series where I make a meme out of every line of dialogue in The Room. It was running every day, but I got kind of burnt out on it for a bit and started having gaps of a day or two. I'm intending to get back to doing it daily now.

It's likely in your best interest to move away from Gmail, if not immediately then over some period of time (e.g. start new email signups with other address, gradually move over existing ones, etc.)

Nah, this was totally drawn by a human. I mean look at how the leftmost woman's four-fingered right hand is in a superposition of every angle at the same time. An AI could never.

but it’s not helpful

Seems pretty helpful to me to direct software requests or bug reports to the place where software or bug reports are taken.

The Lemmy github page — like any github page — is indecipherable for anyone who’s neither geek nor nerd.

Huh? How's it "indecipherable"? It has some code listed, then below that is a description of the project. If you just want to add a bug report or request a feature, you click on 'Issues', then you check to see if that feature request/bug report is already there yet, click 'New issue', select the kind that you want ("Bug Report"/"Feature request"/"? Question"). Then you fill it out in the template that they give you and click 'Create'.

I’m neither geek nor nerd.

Okay, but it's not "indecipherable for anyone who's neither a geek nor nerd"; it's actually extremely easy, and even if you don't find it that way at first blush, you could just ask "Hey, I'm kind of having trouble with this; can anyone help?"

Is there a community about Lemmy software on Lemmy somewhere?

The reason it's on GitHub is because that's where the developers are.

Same here with plant milk in coffee. It gives you a ton of really yummy variety. I've accidentally had dairy milk put in my coffee, and every time I recognize it by how noticeably worse the coffee tastes.

Another one for me was nutritional yeast on popcorn. I mixed it into my usual popcorn seasoning, and popcorn legitimately isn't as good to me now without nooch.

Did you know

EDIT: sorry, not citizen, but nonetheless a legal green card holder who's been determined to be here legally.

Garcia has never been convicted of criminal charges in the US or El Salvador

Also, you can't, you know, legally deport a US citizen to an El Salvadorian gulag even if they had committed a crime. Trump here is trying to shift the Overton window from a discussion of if they're a US citizen to if they've committed a crime (they haven't, of course), and it's fucking disgusting.

At this point, the only criminal I think who deserves to be sent to a deep, dark hole never to return is Mr. 34 Felonies himself.

EDIT: sorry, not citizen, but nonetheless a legal green card holder who's been determined to be here legally.

I can't believe I'm actually about to complain about this – that the Trump administration is so profoundly shitty that they can make such a giant step for animal rights into something to be concerned over.

Each year, over 110 million animals are horrifically killed in the US alone for experimentation. It's very obvious there are classes of product where animal testing requirements are bogus. Animal testing bans for cosmestics are present in the EU, India, and elsewhere, and it should be banned here too as it's working out just fine there (although as this admin and this Congress strictly do not care about animal welfare, this won't happen in the next four years).

Of course we're talking about drugs here, not cosmetics, and a lack of experimentation can be seriously dangerous to human health. I don't for a single second trust this admin to replace animal testing with robust requirements that ensure the same level of dilligence is still carried out (which we do know is possible). Given this entire administration has shown itself to be a naked grift, and given we know that anything not a grift is motivated strictly by far-right, whackjob ideology (and neither RFK Jr. nor Trump give a fuck about animal welfare ideologically), the express reason this is being done is to make drug testing requirements more lax to the financial benefit of big pharma companies and to the detriment of everyone else in the US.

Now you could say "but hang on, human safety doesn't deserve to take precedent over the intentional, gruesome murder of millions of sentient animals; it's still good even if it's more dangerous to humans." And I agree that it's a complex dilemma. But here's the thing: this admin presumably isn't forever. There will come a time in the future where the public and the politicians are doing what they can to mop up Trump's steaming diarrhea. At this point, it's highly plausible that Trump's loosening of requirements for drug testing will have real, measurable negative ramifications and that there will be a reactionary push therefore to bring back animal testing stronger than ever. If we want animal testing gone, we need to make sure robust alternatives are in place, or its removal today will be seen for the foreseeable future as a cautionary tale anytime someone proposes the well-reasoned, well-intentioned removal of animal testing requirements.

From your source:

I cited 1(c) because it's the one that actually makes any sense with what they were saying. I did read the entire thing, and yes, saying they were using sense 3 would very obviously be a bad-faith interpretation of what they were saying; that's why I pointed to 1(c).

In terms of “sentience” or “consciousness” these also cannot be applied black and white to animals or plants

True to an extent. The line is fuzzy. Plants aren't sentient; we're not doing this. Plants don't have a nervous sytem and aren't conscious. It's a bad-faith attempt at equivocation not accepted by science. If we're talking about animals, sure there's a fuzzy line somewhere, but that fuzziness keeps getting moved back year after year. What we can say with certainty though is that that line isn't around what a typical omnivorous diet eats such as cows, pigs, birds, etc. and hasn't been for a very long time. There's increasingly robust evidence for fish's abililty to feel pain. I draw the line at no animals because I don't know exactly where in the animal kingdom that line really is and so don't feel comfortable choosing (and I have no interest in eating sponges), but rational minds can disagree when we're talking about bivalves, about echnioderms, etc. However, yes, we can easily apply things like consciousness to animals like pigs and have been able to for well over a decade now.

There is [are*] animals which show a quite complex consciousness and there is [are] animals, where we couldn’t observe these (yet).

Correct. For example, humans have quite a complex consciousness among the consciousnesses we've found (maybe some advanced civilization out there totally dwarves us; who knows). Meanwhile, sponges likely aren't conscious, and we have zero evidence for their consciousness. Again, though, the most common land animals farmed for food are sentient, and it's increasingly evident that's also true of fish.

At the same time we see more and more examples of plants showing what could be called “pain” or “social life”.

Nope. Sorry, just nope. There is a wide scientific consensus that plants do not feel pain, let alone are conscious. The pseudoscientific discourse around antiveganism has begun turning away from health now that vegan diets are healthful and demonstrably confer substantial health benefits compared to omnivorous ones and away from the environment because climate change is demonstrably very real and caused in large part by animal ag and now toward "plant pain" because it's just enough to give scientifically illiterate laypeople another excuse to bury their heads in the sand.

OP could have just talked about “animals” instead of “beings”. Talking in terms of “beings” only muddies the water both between plants and animals but also animals and humans.

Humans are animals. Objectively. Objectively Homo sapiens are hominids, which are primates, which are mammals, which are chordates, which are animals. We are separated from the genus Pan by about 7–9 million years of evolution. This is like saying that talking about "vehicles" only muddies the water between cars and my 1987 Chevy Malibu. That you're expressing notions of plant pain and delineating humans biologically from animals really tells me you don't understand biology. They shouldn't change their language just because you don't understand basic taxonomy.

And the latter is highly problematic, which is why we must not be careless with these words.

Why is treating a basic biological fact as factual in a completely neutral way (which you're already weirdly extrapolating that they're comparing humans to other animals? when in reality they're just saying that non-human animals can be sentient?) problematic or careless?

Some Fascists work to infiltrate movements such as veganism or animal rights precisely with the goal to devalue human life through weakening the perception of value of human life over animal life.

Give me even the slightest shred of evidence that ecofascism is a serious problem that's so prevalent in veganism it warrants such a prominent mention here (let alone one at all) and that it's caused by treating other beings (I am going to use that word and use it proudly) as sentient/conscious or absolutely piss off with this fucking gutter trash. What the fuck are you fucking talking about trying to distract from the obvious ethical good of veganism through rhetorical whiplash to this nonsensical "um, actually, what about ecofascism?" Would you bring this up in a discussion about solar panels? "Um, just be careful not to talk about global warming or the spooky ecofascists might show up."

I don’t think this is the case for OP

NO SHIT.

or the majority of people in these movements

Okay?

but they need to be vigilant against it.

Vigilant against what? Basic scientific literacy? My dude, my guy, veganism is one of the most leftist movements you can imagine which has the express intent of reducing suffering and unjust hierarchies. We're constantly vigilant against fascism and refuse to let it infiltrate our spaces. I can think of few places other than an ancom protest rally that are more resilient to infiltration from fascists. I'm genuinely disgusted that your arguments were so flimsy that you felt the need to compare calling sentient animals "beings" to fascism.

They said "being", not "living being", so I think it can be safely assumed they're talking about conscious life here (see Merriam-Webster's definition 1(c)). Like I think we both know that they're not talking about plants, but in an age where being vegan (especially in the first world) is easier than it's ever been by a wide margin, where the overwhelming majority of people in the first world wouldn't have to eat sentient life if they didn't want to and live perfectly healthy (or often healthier) lives, and where it's only continuing to become easier, more popular, and more widely understood to be healthful and ethically more sound, it's a lot easier to quip "haha whaddabout plants dum-dum??" than to confront what they're very obviously saying about eating sentient animals.

The Boston Herald is tabloid trash.

Mark's lines are so criminally underappreciated I swear to god. lmfao

This one's top 10 for me.

Also because, you know, if those agencies don't have a need to know it, then you're just making the data needlessly more vulnerable. I give it a year before the sensitive data of every US citizen is not only leaked (if it hasn't happened already by a nation-state under the second Trump admin) but is leaked publicly.

I am overweight largely due to the time I overate at Olive Garden in 2006, my worryingly sedentary lifestyle, propensity to eat impulsively to fill a void, love of trash food, and lack of a schedule for meals.