You can certainly harbor contempt for the American people who choose such a morally bankrupt coalition while also recognizing that the oppositional movement has repetitively failed to inspire its own voter base to turn out.

The fact remains that the Dems have thrice now run on a platform of unity and forsaken the will of the Left in an attempt to appeal to those who would happily annihilate the Left in pursuit of its own goals.

I did it. Now what?

And yet despite all the warning signs his hubris disrupted the democratic process and progressives were once again told to fall in line and back a candidate who campaigned on appealing to the center-right.

The Dems have let down the American people, again.

I loathe this runaway capitalist system we live in just as much as the next but this violent rhetoric is getting a bit too spicy. Let’s tax the owning class into oblivion. Take away their undeserved wealth and make them work for a living like the rest of us. Riot and rebel if our lives depend on it. But these calls for the outright slaughter of other human beings are going too far.

THE RAPTURE WILL HAPP^EN

For how much he lies, why the fuck would he say this? Why draw the line here and not just say he does like he did before? Genuinely baffled by this one.

You seem to assume I’m arguing in favor of vegan cats.

Whether or not a cat can thrive on a vegan diet is irrelevant to me as I don’t own a cat nor do I advise people on how to feed their cats. However, I do have a bias (as we all do) that tells me there is likely more nuance (which you did allude to in your original reply) than the general absolutist sentiment against the idea.

That bias is informed by half-a-lifetime of experience maintaining a loosely plant-based diet myself and witnessing first-hand the fierce compulsion people have to push their uneducated opinions at the mere mention of a plant-based diet. In my experience, there are few other things that can so reliably stir people into a vitriolic frenzy than the suggestion of a plant-based diet.

And to back up that bias, I now have my first negative comment after almost a year on Lemmy :⁠-⁠)

Frankly, you may as well be pulling all that out of your ass since the information you just provided is as good as useless without any reliable sources backing it up (and don’t bother providing any, I’m not here to educate myself on cat diet requirements. If I cared, I would ask a qualified professional not a Lemmy user).

I’m just calling out the hypocrisy in this whole controversy. People do a quick Google search, read “obligate carnivore” in the title of some document and act as if they’ve got a college degree on the subject.

Who knew that so many Lemmy users were experts in the science of dietary nutrition?

Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. Thank you for communicating as well as for your time and effort spent handling this in a careful and mature way.

There’s a fine line between misinformation and “subjectively offensive information”. To me, this seems like it was a pretty clear case of abuse of power regardless of where you stand on the original issue and retroactively changing the rules to excuse that abuse does not bode well for this community.

SED PORTTITOR

I think you run into the same problem with airports though. Regional airports in smaller cities are often prohibitively expensive to fly in and out of. When I fly home, I fly to the nearest major metropolitan area and then drive two and a half hours to my destination rather than pay hundreds more to fly to my hometown’s regional airport. That doesn’t sound much different from the problem you’re describing with a high speed rail network.

The cost of high speed rail travel will come down with increased utilization since the scale of cost for adding extra seats is a lot flatter than it is for air travel. Travel times by land are always going to be longer than by air but there’s plenty of room to optimize the systems we currently have.

Beyond that, convenience and sustainability are diametrically opposed and if we want to continue to live in symbiosis with our environment then we’re going to have to make some sacrifices to the convenience we now take for granted and that is directly harming our environment.

That’s fair, and please note that I mentioned air travel has its place in intercontinental travel in my previous comment. The whole point I’m trying to make is that domestic flights between areas that could support high speed land travel infrastructure are wasteful.

Also trains in the US suck. Much slower, and almost comparable in price to air travel.

It doesn’t have to be that way, many other countries have solved those issues. But because we’ve leaned so heavily on air travel to get us to places only a few hours away by land there hasn’t been any incentive to innovate or invest in other forms of long-distance mass transit.

Are you saying a high speed train to your destination wouldn’t also solve that problem? It would likely end up being cheaper to travel via rail considering the lower costs of maintenance and fuel, meaning further accessibility than we have today with our dependence on air travel.

I’m not so sure that is a positive. Airplanes are huge emission drivers and our dependence on the convenience of air travel has caused us to cease investment and innovation in other more efficient and environmentally friendly methods of travel.

No doubt there’d be a lot more support for high speed rails if airplanes weren’t as accessible. IMO airplanes should only really be used for intercontinental travel.

Airliner ticket prices used to be regulated. So when all airlines had to charge the same price, they had to find other ways to be competitive in order to bring in customers. Deregulation in the 70s brought ticket costs down but that means ticket cost is now the primary point of competition between airlines and amenities now come at a steep premium.

ED is a bitch

I think that’s an unfair assessment based on negative stereotypes and only really serves to legitimatize the behavior you’re referring to.