This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How’s that?

Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

Because most of us consider the idea that Hillary Clinton is a world-class assassin who never leaves a shred of evidence behind to be a hilarious and absurd concept.

A quick google search tells me that:

Veterinarians must prescribe certain therapeutic diets because, depending on the disease being addressed, these foods may contain levels of nutrients below what is legally allowed to be sold for a healthy pet without that medical condition.

and

While some are not appropriate for long-term use, as they’re not 100% nutritionally balanced (some low fat or low protein foods fall into this category), all are safe for pets in the short term.

and

veterinarians believe they might be misused by owners, or worse, implemented in lieu of veterinary care. Neither of these things are good for pets.

HOWEVER, I also found:

(Prescription Diet® is a registered trademark of Hills® Pet Nutrition, Inc.®)

and

In the dog food world, the term Prescription Diet® describes an effective marketing agreement between a hundred-million dollar pet food manufacturer and the veterinarian community. This agreement allows for the sale of their foods through licensed veterinarians only. Veterinarians benefit because they can achieve a much higher mark-up on these foods than they would by offering foods widely available without a “prescription.” The pet food manufacturer, in return, gains credibility as a manufacturer of veterinarian-recommended food and uses that as an endorsement, if you will, for the rest of their products.

Add to the data that I’ve heard (from a vet, but that’s not a source you can verify yourself, so take that how you will) Hills is often kind of like a D&D 5e warlock patron for veterinarians, in that they give out a lot of scholarships and grants to people going through vet school, and many vet schools’ only nutrition-based course is taught by people on Hills’s payroll.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

after around five generations or so God would have to appear and kill a bunch of people once again, because apperently your decendants don’t belive in him anymore.

Well, yeah. Dude vanishes for a thousand years, and I’m supposed to believe the stories of the people who did see his work (people who all died before my most distant tracable ancestor was even born) that were written down by obvious agenda-posters? Seriously?

The quickest way to get more believers is just to show up and do a party trick every once in a while, but for some reason, God hasn’t done anything public and indisputable since cameras were invented. Weird for a guy who wants the whole world to worship him. All he’d have to do is just have a booming voice, audible everywhere on the planet, say “By the way, I’m God, I exist, and [insert holy book] is the correct one, so ya’ll better get on that.” Only the hardcore contrarians would still be non-believers.

I’m starting to think you’re going well out of your way to intentionally miss my point, so I’m going to disengage now.

People finding work “miserable” is not an inherent property of work (which is doing something useful) or even of jobs (which is doing something supposedly useful for money). It’s an indication that something has gone wrong with our society.

I have a hard time believing this.

Sure, maybe some people love landscaping, or coding, or whatever. But who’s got a passion for forklift driving? Who loves fighting rush hour traffic in a dump truck that, when empty, weighs 13.25 tons, with the pressure of knowing that any small mistake could result in the loss of your CDL and your entire livelihood? Are there actually people out there who would pick boxes in a warehouse freezer even if they weren’t getting paid? Are there people who are just thrilled to go empty bedpans for dying old people? Is running a cash register a “calling” for anyone? Is there a subset of folks who just love it when somebody tries to haggle over a nickel, using a 3-year-expired competitor’s coupon for a different product as their negotiating leverage, while a line of angry people backs up behind them? Have you ever met anyone who’d go around pumping septic tanks as a hobby if they couldn’t make money at it?

I’d venture to guess that the majority of working-class jobs almost entirely comprise piles of misery and shit. Even if there are people who honestly enjoy doing things like 'nam-crawling through 2" of mud in a 12" crawlspace to fix a complicated bit of homeowner DIY plumbing dumbassery, there aren’t nearly enough of them to fill society’s need for those jobs. The number of people who get off doing cold-calls for a collection agency is nowhere near the number it takes to fill the call centers. Someone is always going to have to be doing a dangerous, awful, body/mind-breaking occupation that gives them only a slight spark of joy when the check comes on payday.

Why shouldn’t work be fun?

Of course work is miserable. If it was fun happy rainbow puppies all day, we wouldn’t call it “work”, we’d call it a “pastime” or a “hobby” Demand for that kind of “job” would be through the roof. There’d be waiting lists on applications and the wages would be near-nonexistent.

We get paid to do it because it sucks. Maybe not all of it sucks, but enough of it sucks that nobody wants to do it for free, for the love of the craft, for the personal betterment, or whatever.

Even people who work at the circus don’t say “Bye, honey, I’m off to spend the day at the circus!”, they say “Bye honey, I’m off to work.”

…or maybe “don’t work a job you don’t love!” is some white-collar thinking that I’m too blue-collar to understand.

Year 2030 is a global target for renovations in every aspects of societies and countries.

By what method? Is that when the secret computer chip in the vaccine will turn on and kill us? Thereby removing all the people who have shown they’ll do anything the government tells them to do, leaving behind all the staunch and distrustful individualists who are harder to control? Or is this some other global renovation?

I got into an argument with my ex, and I came out of it feeling totally defeated and completely worthless; like nothing I ever said mattered to anyone. I deleted my first Reddit account and all my internet forum accounts the same night, since I had nothing to add to any discussion anywhere.

When I finally climbed my way out of that despair pit (and that relationship), I made a new, half-ironic username on that theme. “ad acta” is Latin, and it literally translates to “from the archives”, but in common use it was a phrase meaning “irrelevant”. So Vox ad Acta is “Voice of the Irrelevant”.

Walking into an argument between two (or more) other people and saying something that feels totally measured and rational that ends up pissing off both sides and making them all come together in being pissed at me instead.

I market it as “I’m a uniter!”, but 85% of the time I have no idea how it happened and it’s completely on accident.

No, absolutely not. By Reddit standards, this was a tiff. Maybe a smaller tussle. Definitely not a kerfluffle.

Besides, part of this is a “me” problem. I’m still adjusting to not having to come out of the gate swinging the first time I sense hostility. Did I respond to an energy? Sure. Did I respond to an intentional energy? …eh, maybe, maybe not. Did I go from 0-100 too fast? Probably. What I’m saying is, I see how I could have handled that better. And the fact that you took the time to engage with me over it is a big positive for the platform.

To be clear I chose to state that because I want to acknowledge my own biases here and the fact that I’m often pressed for time

No, that’s totally fine, and I’m being completely serious. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that this community is much smaller and tighter than the ones I’m used to. It honestly never occurred to me that y’all would, like, actually know each other, which is my own bias.

This question should keep you up at night

I’m sorry. The question that keeps me up at night is “How are people able to just decide to believe something with no (or less than no) practical evidence?”. Just because a lot of people have managed it, even people who are very evidence-based in every other part of their life, doesn’t mean I can just do it. I’d literally have to think less about the implications of such a thing on the everyday world. I’d have to stop asking questions (like: “Does God help anyone? If so, how does he choose? If not, why pray?”, and no, “we just can’t understand him” is not an answer I can just choose to believe because I like it).

So yeah, this is obviously a “me” problem, since everyone else on this instance seems to intuitively grasp the idea that one can actually come to a valid, reality-based conclusion that God exists and I’m the “2010 New Atheist” for not being able to get on board.

. On a more practical level I am much more familiar with this mod and their judgement than I am with you, and I’m going to be generally siding with any moderator we have as they get vetted rather thoroughly

Well, I mean… ok, that’s fair. I can’t argue with that.

I apologize for being a little annoyed right now. I feel like I’m being moderated for defending myself against their escalation.

The top level comment from the mod was not aggressive or accusatory.

My response to that top level comment was measured and nuanced, with specific examples of real events and an analysis of the mindset behind those events.

Their reply to me included all caps, excessive punctuation, extremely bad-faith arguments (the actual religious views of every single one of the names they dropped are incredibly complicated, not just “was Christian”; again, one member of that esteemed list literally believed he could turn lead into gold with magic), and that’s assuming calling the question of critical thinking outdated and childish (“2010 New Atheist”) is not an aggressive escalation.

Furthermore, you told me to disengage, and then the mod continued to engage. I’d appreciate it if they received a similar request, because right now it feels like you’re holding my arms behind my back while they get to keep punching me.

you honestly believe EVERY SINGLE RELIGIOUS PERSON EVER has no critical thinking skills?

I honestly believe the ones that matter certainly don’t. The ones who are paying the church’s bills and showing up to their pep rallies every week are very clearly not spending any time thinking about it.

The LGBTQIA+ pastors that started a socialist christian church in Kentucky?

Who? Let me know when they start affecting actual government policy, or even just going on TV and saying “We condemn those other Christians who say gay people should be shot in the back of the head.” That’s what we’ve been demanding from Muslims since 2001, why are you special?

MLK? Malcom X? Johann Bernoulli, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,

Blah blah blah, fallacious appeal to authority, blah blah blah. Name-dropping is not “critical thinking”, and you really shouldn’t have included a literal, straight-up alchemist in that list if you were trying to use it to make a point.

all of whom are some of the most important mathematicians in history and were religious, all couldn’t think for themselves?

MLK and Malcom X were mathematicians? TIL.

Immanuel Kant, famous influential philosopher, no critical thinking.

So what I’m hearing you say here is: “If smart people believe in magic sky fairy, magic sky fairy must be logical to believe in,” which is about the level of discourse I’d expect from someone unfamiliar with the concept of critical thinking. Thanks for being an object lesson.

Can we please move beyond this 2010 New Atheism view that every religious leader/person is stupid and unable to critically think?

Why? They clearly choose not to apply that ability to a big part of their lives. In this specific case under discussion, their entire career requires not applying any critical thinking. Their paycheck depends on their ability to convince other people of things that are not and can never be supported by any actual evidence.

It’s the reason that crowd is so susceptible, as a trend, to con men, malicious misinformation, and developing entire belief systems off a Facebook meme that pairs one politician’s face with a fake quote or a quote from a totally different politician. They’re trained, often from birth, that evidence is not necessary in the process of deciding what you want to believe; in fact, that evidence is often the bad guy (in that it opposes “faith”).

So, no. We’ll drop the characterization if and only if it stops being relevant to our day-to-day lives in America. It’s not the atheists who are saying they think I should get the death penalty (DeSantis’s preacher), that I should be shot in the back of the head (Texas Baptist Church), that God should kill me slowly (Pure Words Baptist Church), and that I should be hunted with dogs (governor of SC).