Not just land use. Arable land (not “marginal”) can be considered as an input to production, a variable in the outcome. It is not the only variable. As we’re talking about industrial agriculture, the other inputs are machinery, seeds, agrochemicals, and fuels (and labor if you want to count it here).

The animal farming sector competes on all these in one way or another, raising demand and pricing out poorer farmers around the world. This isn’t necessarily a rule, but it’s common and it matters; not all inputs are near scarcity. The most important one is probably fertilizers: Savings in fertilizer requirements from plant-based diets - ScienceDirect

Ex. from 2021 Global farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut use, raising food security risks | Reuters

This is made worse by the fact that the rich “developed” countries dedicate a lot of resources to animal farming, including feed crops, and they bring in loads of ag. subsidies for that. Poorer countries can’t afford meaningful subsidies, so they can’t compete to buy the expensive inputs as easily. Effectively, subsidies for eating animals in rich countries translates, through the invisible hand of the global ag. inputs market, into food insecurity in poor countries. I’m not the first to point that out: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0a8bd248-025d-49fd-99e2-d8ae972fa124/content

And marginal land competes with forests, wetlands, biodiversity. “Marginal land” is a poisoned concept: https://tabledebates.org/blog/marginal-lands-sustainable-food-systems-panacea-or-bunk-concept

Fuck that channel.

Not really a challenge, the “climate friendly” idea is pseudoscience and creative accounting.

I like the False Knees version more.

https://store.falseknees.com/products/dtf

“modern pig production”

Chilean-born Marco Evaristti is courting controversy to make a point about the treatment of pigs in Denmark, where about 25,000 piglets die daily as a result of the conditions in which they are bred.

wait until Marco finds out that they are bred to be killed.

Farmers who grow feed can also switch to growing food.

Slaughterhouses… maybe they can switch to growing fungi.

“Pastured” and “factory” are not opposites, they’re the same thing with a different scale of intensity. There’s no meaningful ethical difference, but there are points to make about the environment and the climate, such as the basic fact that “grass fed” means more enteric CH4 emissions, making “factory farming” better for the environment due to efficiency. No amount of “regenerative grazing” is going change that, the methane is tied to the amount of fiber in the rumen, and grasses & forbs are full of fiber.

For a more detailed explanation see: Grazed and Confused

Economically speaking is when you see how this is scam on meat eaters. Most of the animal flesh comes from CAFOs. That’s not because grasslands are ugly and CAFOs are beautiful, it’s because that’s the most efficient way to exploit those animals, which means it’s the most efficient way to keep production costs low, which means that it’s the most efficient way to come to market with the lowest prices, which is how “the market” is expanded to a large part of the population (who expects cheap meat). The productive grasslands are already maxed out in most of the World and overgrazing is very common.

The US is plagued with ranchers going into natural parks and other places where they compete with wild herbivores (and call on state agencies to exterminate predators). Put simply, if CAFOs disappeared, then the average meat eater would find animal flesh to be very expensive - a food that is afforded a few times per month in “main dish” quantities, or even a few times per year (traditionally at Easter and Christmas holiday feasts). I would be glad to see that happen, but it wouldn’t be enough, and it fails to teach the ethical lesson, to do the moral work. It only makes animal-based meat a more obvious luxury (it has always been one), creating black markets and creating economic demand to deforest land and to occupy cropland and turn it into pasture – and that’s something that wars have been fought for, for thousands of years.

The only sensible option is to go vegan globally (don’t let animal farmers get away with exports). That frees up plenty of cropland to be reforested or used in more extensive ways.

In case this is deleted, mods are morally obligated to post it where it fits.

how are they paying for the hosting?

they’re free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.

This just translates to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean or “reversion to mediocrity”. Much like 🤬🤬🤬🤬it’s /all, every time that mainstream spills into a community it ruins it and brings it closer to the mainstream.

In biology, you may recognize some of these phenomena from biochemistry: osmosis and diffusion. The demand to disable the “semi-permeable membrane” ends the purpose of the compartment.

Either the invading posts/comments get removed or the influx of participants (including voting) has to be rationed somehow. Doing neither is not a discussion about narratives, it’s a mobbing. It’s the opposite of promoting discourse, as that setup heavily favors the “mainstream” narrative, the status quo.

I should mention that I’ve been a moderator of internet communities since before Web 2.0 and I find the moderation tools for Lemmy type platforms to be terrible. If the expectation is to not have practical moderation, but instead to separate into fedi-islands and block the problematic networks, well, that would be a very blunt way to get to the same goals. Instead of having moderators individually ban users, you have admins ban entire networks of users.

There is no getting away from the need for moderators. Musk proved that again since he took over Twitter. Zuckerberg is proving it again now. You’re not building a protopia by hampering moderation, you’re building a cyber-wasteland. Any success with that will be temporary, like a pump and dump: you get a period of growth and a honeymoon, and then the critical mass of assholes is achieved and they turn everything to shit, and then most users have to start searching for greener pastures food forests to migrate to. Another term for that is unsustainable, it can’t last.

The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so.

Rationality is much more complex than you think. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic should’ve taught you that already, first hand. The simple model of persuasion by presenting reasonable arguments and evidence is wrong. There’s an entire field looking into cognitive biases that show how irrational humans are. How exactly do you plan to argue with people who believe in “alternative facts” and “post-truth”?

All I see in the article you posted is a lack of experience in dealing with bullshit, a lack of understanding of the viral or memetic nature of bullshit.

It’s harder to just dismiss that comment if it’s interrupting your fictional story that’s pretending to be real. “The moon is upside down in Australia” does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than “Nobody has crossed the ice wall” does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.

It’s disheartening that you haven’t learned yet that flateartherism is a variant of creationism, another religiously inspired pseudoscience.

cabbage pasta https://heartfultable.com/cabbage-pasta/

Tack!

I would like to see more opinions from the Greenland locals, but I doubt that they want to exchange Denmark with the USA.

A portal site which lists search results. Each result contains a list of definitions/entries - each from different instances. Editors from different instances can decide to agree with others at multiple levels (granularity), right down to a definition. It would probably be difficult to agree on paragraphs, but not impossible. Search results with a lot of “agreement” are showed at the top of the result list, while those with with no agreement are shown at the bottom.

The agreement dynamics can already be seen in science between journals, articles, authors, even if it’s less structured and formal. There are now search engines that use AI to measure an agreement/disagreement scale between papers (connected by citations).

Obviously, there needs to be some way to validate, track, and mark the “bad faith” instances to push them down or out of the results entirely. And that way has to be based on a combination of expertise and reputation, not on universal vote counts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia going to war.

Manifest Destiny

Ceaușescu got that notification after his regime imposed a decade of intense austerity while demanding adulation and worship. Debts repaid or not, that was a bad way to go about it. In the current context, there’s a long way down to abject poverty from where any EU countries are now. In terms of his reward, I would point out that he was shuffled off the mortal coil before he could divulge information about his friends, his allies, his partners.

On the day of his 98th birthday, Roy Burdin, a resident of Longton Village in Lancastershire, credits his vegan diet for his long life and good health. Even as he nears 100-years-old, the elderly vegan, who lives independently, is now pushing for plant-based meals in assisted living facilities.

According to local news source Lancastershire Press, Burdin has been ahead of the curve for nearly a century. A lifelong vegetarian and a vegan of 30 years, the World War II veteran notes that his father also followed a meat-free diet. Burdin says that the rise of factory farming that pushed him to completely eschew all animal products.

“I was well into my 60s when I went vegan. It was still considered to be rather an advanced step and a lot of people who were vegetarian couldn’t see the point in giving up dairy produce and so on,” he said. “It wasn’t until factory farming came along and it was that aspect that convinced me that to be honest, you had to go vegan rather than just vegetarian.”

According to Burdin’s children, their father still maintains independence at 98. He still prepares all of his own vegetables and seems to favor a whole foods, plant-based diet over using vegan meats and cheeses. The vegan geriatric also has a soft spot for hummus in particular.“Hummus is very nice,” Burdin said. “I don’t agree with too much trying to imitate non-vegan foods like cheese and trying to make them substitutes. I think a good straightforward honest hummus made with chickpeas is as good as anything.”

Burdin, who acknowledged that he is lucky to live on his own, also wants to push for local assisted living facilities and retirement homes to offer vegan meal options to residents.“I think that’s a great step forward to try to alert the care homes and places that cater for older people so they don’t find they are being denied the foods that they like,” he said. Recent research has shown that a plant-based diet may prevent chronic disease in the elderly.

Vegetarian for Life, a UK-based charity that provides support for elderly vegans and vegetarians, provided Burdin with resources to achieve his goal.

Amanda Woodvine, Vegetarian for Life’s CEO, said: “Roy first got in touch with us to request some of our information packs which provide simple recipes. He also asked about how he could help encourage local care homes to offer vegan and vegetarians meals to residents.”

The health benefits of a vegan diet

Burdin provided a few insights into what has helped him live a long, healthful life: “I have always believed in getting out in plenty of fresh air, living in the country most of my life I expect to be classified as a country boy and apart from cutting out meat, and now going vegan, I say that you should eat straight forward, good healthy food which is plant orientated.”

Medical science backs Burdin’s claim. According to research released by Harvard University last April, a vegan diet can prevent as many as one-third of early deaths due to a reduced risk of cardivascular disease, type-2 diabetes, and certain forms of cancer. Recent research published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) showed that a poor diet is the leading cause of death in the U.S. Meanwhile, mounting evidence points to a plant-based diet as one of the healthiest diets there are.

According to Burdin, he’s a vegan for life, however long that lasts: “I am happy to press on being vegan and I will never change now,” he said, joking, “the only disadvantage to being vegan is that you live too long.”

People are indoctrinated into being vulnerable to authoritarianism very early, it’s a big part of the major religions. Now the vulnerability is being targeted with more and more serious exploits.