virgildotcodes

> short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten

Ah yes, how silly of me to criticize this as a 2 dimensional statement utterly lacking in self-awareness.

Humans have always enjoyed objectively long lives, and mouse lives are objectively short. Relative to what? Let’s not think about that and while we're at it take the implication for granted that length of a life grants it weight.

This is why we have always honored the fact that tortoise lives are more valuable than those of humans after all.

Borderline starvation is definitely not something millions of humans face every day, or something most of humanity faced for most of history.

Being eaten is so horrible that you’re better off being tortured to death in a lab. Thankfully that has never happened to humans in the wild. Meanwhile, dying of war, famine, cancer or diarrhea is comparatively great, which is why using you in a lab would of course be unthinkable.

Mice struggling for food and survival in the wild are totally different from humans struggling for food and survival in the wild, because, see, uh...

That sentiment is a dismissive, incurious oversimplification of the entire existence of other species. It has so many blind spots, and is seemingly oblivious to the fact the same reasoning could be turned on us. If a hard, short, dangerous life justifies putting a creature in a lab, then a large share of humanity, past and present, would qualify for the same.

> You're trying too hard to find suffering

I don't know how you can say this, frankly, unless you do not see or experience any of this suffering yourself. If not, you should be extremely grateful for your luck.

You don't have to try hard, at all, to find it.

> Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.

How are you defining this, and again by which principle do you draw this line which isn't some ex post facto version of "well humans are here, so I'm going to say everything to the left of here"?

> I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim

We should be extremely skeptical of this claim because it's so convenient.

It absolves us of the guilt for the tremendous harms we're causing them by proposing something which we would see as obviously absurd if it were applied to us:

"A short, miserable life of having all sorts of horrifying experiments performed on you in a lab is better than being free to live your life and die in the world at large." - Person who benefits from performing experiments on you in a lab

> Hunter gatherers didn't suffer

Of course they did and still do. They have far higher rates of infant and child mortality, death from curable disease, starvation, and violent death.

It’s inconsistent to call the natural condition of wild animals, surviving and dying in nature, "no happy free life," then exempt humans living under that same fundamental condition.

How do we draw the line, from which principle that isn’t ex post facto? Do no wild animals have a happy free life? Do all humans? Most? A minority? Across all of human history?

Even in the most cherry-picked minority of cases, someone born into a wealthy developed country, people are frequently born with or develop agonizing diseases. They die of cancer and dementia despite their wealth. They live in grinding poverty, or barely cling to existence through depression, anxiety and alienation. Many suffer so greatly in fact that they commit suicide.

Suffering isn't a state of existence reserved for animals that humans are exempt from except in rare cases.

So if it is not, then is the fact that people suffer tremendously just as a normal fact of life justification for nonconsensual fatal human testing?

Should hunter gatherers be thankful if we kidnapped them and tortured them to death in our labs?

What about people from Gaza?

Is it acceptable to do human testing as long as you pull the humans out of say east Africa during a famine?

> recent work in animal communication

Worth noting that this is an invisibly small part of the sum total of our global efforts, especially versus the much more tangible effort we put into enslaving and slaughtering them, then mangling their carcasses for our own uses as we drive more and more of them to extinction.

We simply don't care about anything beyond ourselves and even there it breaks down on closer analysis when we see how many within our species don't truly value the collective whole beyond themselves.

It's just atoms all the way down.

Ah yes, everything Trump does is actually other people's fault.

Take the criticism and pressure off the abuser, and point it at their opponents.

This talking point keeps getting pushed around on social media and I can't help but think it's manufactured and promulgated by right wing entities.

I agree. It won’t stop us from othering the source of our demise as quickly as we are able.

There’s also the argument to be made that your child is their own person, and you only have so much responsibility/control over their actions.

Of course we have a good chunk of the world screaming that this child is obviously destined to be a homicidal psychopath, but what is a parent to do?

At least we’ll eventually have an entity other than ourselves to blame for our annihilation.

Does this mean a commensurate increase in subscription usage limits?

Hm, seems to be a bit of a contradiction between what you’re saying in terms of “insurers want to pay more” and the infamous tendency of insurers to deny claims as much as possible?

If you read up on the sequence of events posted above you’ll see that the admin exhausted every avenue available to them but was ultimately defeated in their efforts here.

Why are we even playing games about implications when we can see the empirical fact that the admin’s policies on Palestine over the last years have been to carpet bomb people?